#430 - "Eaten Alive" Shark Week Filmmaker on Footage They Can Never Release | Andy Casagrande

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Andy Casagrande is a two-time Emmy winning wildlife cinematographer, producer, on-camera presenter, and shark diver best known for his long-running work on Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. He has filmed and produced hundreds of wildlife projects for National Geographic, Discovery, BBC, and Animal Planet. @abc4explore SPONSORS http://kalshi.com/r/dannyjones - Download the Kalshi app and use code DANNYJONES to get $20 when you trade $20. https://butcherbox.com/danny - Get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, new york strip, or filet mignon in every box for a year. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS Andy's Channel: @abc4explore *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com Get paid to make clips from the show: https://discord.com/invite/dannyjones FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Andy Casagrande's path to shark filmmaking 02:41 - Childhood, schizophrenia, and studying psychology 09:37 - National Geographic vs. Shark Week 12:07 - Filming Mick Fanning after his shark encounter 17:58 - Shark encounters while surfing 21:16 - Mark Healey freediving with great white sharks 23:28 - Do sharks get used to humans? 26:52 - Drone footage of sharks near swimmers 33:50 - Michael Phelps' Shark Week swim 37:17 - Why some beaches have more shark attacks 43:10 - Tracking great whites off Naples 53:09 - The tiger shark that nearly killed Andy's wife 59:03 - Tiger sharks vs. great whites 01:02:20 - Putting cameras on sharks 01:04:38 - Jaws, Ocean Ramsey & shark stereotypes 01:09:30 - Why whale sharks have teeth on their eyes 01:12:30 - The fatal Tiger Beach dive 01:18:08 - The Cove & learning to freedive 01:21:41 - Danny ran out of air underwater 01:26:19 - Why don't wild orcas attack humans? 01:32:06 - Blackfish & keeping orcas in captivity 01:33:58 - Working on Dolphin Tale 01:42:06 - Behind the scenes of MrBeast's shark shoot 01:46:47 - The dark side of commercial fishing 01:53:15 - NOAA's shark research fishery 02:00:33 - The Cove & Japan's dolphin hunts 02:05:22 - The psychology of trophy hunting 02:08:10 - The crocodile attack that took a diver's legs 02:17:23 - What happened to Steve Irwin 02:20:39 - Stranded in polar bear territory 02:29:20 - Greenland sharks that live over 400 years 02:36:08 - Why anxiety disappears in the wild 02:38:26 - Filming great white sharks mating 02:43:31 - John Lilly's dolphin experiments 02:48:00 - Do sharks make sounds? 02:52:45 - A great white that consumed a spearfisherman 02:55:45 - The real odds of a shark attack 03:00:37 - Surviving a great white attack in New Zealand Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:07Danny Jones?

  How did you become the top shark cinematographer in the world? Your stuff on your Instagram and online is like some of the most insanely incredible cinematography I've ever seen. Especially, you know, not to say, not to even mention the fact that you're like face to face with some of the deadliest predators on earth.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  Humans, right?

• 1:31Danny Jones?

  No, the other one.

• 1:33Speaker 04

  I mean, it all actually happened completely by accident. I never planned to become a filmmaker at all. It was a childhood fascination with sharks. First time I saw them was on television. I remember seeing them for the first time and thinking, holy, holy shit, look at these monsters. But I also remember my parents telling me not to believe everything you see on TV. If Superman can fly, jump off a bridge, don't do the same thing because not everything is real on TV. It's make believe. So it took me a while after like reading books and this was way before the internet. I was born in 77. Jaws came out in like 75, two years before I was born.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  So sharks were kind of getting amped up in the media. The only good shark was a dead shark kind of thing. But for me as a kid, I saw that and I was just like utterly fascinated. And basically that basically led to a, just a lifelong obsession with wanting to get close to sharks, learn about them. But my dad, he was like, dude, if you, if you want to get close to sharks, instead of becoming like a marine biologist and ending up working at SeaWorld or struggling for, for money, become a businessman, you know, make a ton of money and then play with sharks nine, 10 months out of the year and work for two months out of the year.

• 2:57Speaker 04

  But I never was into business. I never liked, it just wasn't something I wanted to do. But anyway, long story short, I went to college, four different universities, Florida Tech over in Melbourne. I started in marine bio, but after the first year, I like peeked into the graduate students in the window. And they're in like white lab coats, looking through microscopes and, you know, writing papers. And I thought, no way, I'm not doing four years of university and then another two years of undergrad or go for my PhD just so I can get close to sharks. So I quit that major, went into photojournalism because I always loved cameras. I always loved, just like, I never thought about doing it professionally, but I always loved just capturing, capturing things.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  So anyway, my mom was a paranoid schizophrenic. This is all over the place. But bottom line is I changed my major again to psychology. I don't know why, but I just, I wanted to learn more about crazy people. When I was 11 years old, I walked into my house and my mom threatened to kill me with a butcher knife. And it was unsettling as like an 11 year old kid walking into the kitchen. Hey mom, and you could tell she was frightened and she grabbed a butcher knife, backed away and said, who the fuck are you and what are you doing in my house? My older brother Danny walked in directly after me and said, mom, it's Andy and Danny. My brother's name is Danny. My dad's name is Danny as well. And my mom like snapped out of it.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  And I always knew my mom like was a little bit off as a kid because she would hear things. She would see things. I would hear her swearing and like, and threatening or just, it was weird. She would literally have visual and auditory hallucinations. But as a kid, my dad kind of like sheltered us from it. Didn't really tell us a whole lot about it, but just living with her day to day, I started to realize, okay, my mom. And it kind of became a thing with my friends, your mom's crazy dude. She would also buy us beer and she was a cool mom. But my friends were afraid of her because she did have these episodes, right? So anyway, back to the long story short, I studied abnormal psychology.

• 5:11Danny Jones?

  And this is in Florida?

• 5:12Speaker 04

  No, so I, I should have, yeah, I bounced around too much. Florida Tech was my first year. Then I went to University of Pittsburgh. I was born in New York City, but I grew up in Pittsburgh, so I had a lot of friends there. Went back to Pitt and there I jumped into this photojournalism psychology degree. I went on a semester at sea around the world. It's like a trip or a program that the University of Pittsburgh used to run. Now I think it's through like University of Colorado, but you circumnavigate the world on a floating university. Basically a cruise liner that was converted into a college. And we went from like Vancouver to Japan to Hong Kong, Vietnam, India, Cyprus, Greece, Israel.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  When we were in Egypt, there was a terrorist attack that killed 73 people. It was targeted at our ship because it was Americans. This is when George Bush Jr. was president. It was when, this is in 97, when like terrorism was starting to hype up. Anyway, after, after that semester at sea, I was like, I was completely changed. I had traveled around the world as like a 19 year old. And then I was sick of the East Coast. The only school still accepting applications was Long Beach State, California. I love Sublime. I loved California girls. I was never good at surfing, but I skateboarded a lot as a kid. And I got accepted there and I finished out my last two years there.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  But it was like this crazy Renaissance degree where I had a major in psychology with a minor in biology. Anyway, right out of school, my brother gets me a job at a software company in San Francisco during the dot com bubble. Making like 70 grand a year out of school as a, as a psych major in the year 2000 was pretty good money. I had a little Motorola flip phone. I learned a lot about networking and ghosting computers. And I got my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineering Certificate. But it was probably the most mindless, boring ass job. I mean, it wasn't that bad, but the whole time I was Googling and learning about sharks. Plus I was out by San Francisco, the Farallon Islands, Enyana Wavo.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  It's like the red triangle, great white shark territory. So one of the dudes I worked with, software engineer, said, dude, if you love sharks so much, because that's all I did was talk about sharks. He's like, you gotta get scuba certified. And I'm like, oh yeah, obviously. So in 2000, I got my scuba certification in Monterey. And on my very first open ocean scuba dive, while I'm with my, my dive buddy, he's learning his skills and I'm supposed to be paying attention. My mind drifted and I started thinking about great whites because it's great white shark territory. Visibility was horrible. I'm looking around and like thinking I might see a great white. And then I turn around, I lost my dive master. I lost my dive buddy on my first open ocean dive.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  So it was kind of embarrassing. I had the surface. They were there like, what the fuck, bro? Where'd you go? Oh, I was just, I just got, you know, dazed. I just, you know, lost my train of thought. I was thinking about sharks. They're like, dude, don't talk about sharks. We're here. So anyway, I don't even know what the question was. Oh, filmmaker. After two years working in software, I had Googled all the great white shark research teams around the world. The Farillons had a research team, South Australia had a research team, South Africa. And I reached out to all of them. I said, hey guys, I'm a software engineer guy, but I love sharks and I know a lot about them through the internet. Plus I have a song about them. I wrote a song back in 2000 called The Great White Shark Song. And it's about if I was a great white, I wouldn't bite you, but I'd swim right next to you.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  And it's about surfers, about spear fishermen, about like mistaken identity. It's supposed to be funny, but it's also supposed to be like real. And this research team in Cape Town, they're like, dude, this is the funniest song we ever heard. Like you're welcome to come here. Like if you want to come, we can't pay you. So I moved to Cape Town when I was, I think 22. And working as an unpaid research cameraman, taking photo IDs. They were doing like a population study on great whites. Because every great, great white has a unique dorsal fin. It's like a fingerprint, but a fin print. The trailing edge is unique on every single one. So and visibility in Cape Town is horrible often, but the dorsals break the surface.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  So you can get great ID shots, like fin ID shots. Anyway, while I was there, National Geographic came down to make a documentary about the research that was going on. And the director's like, hey, I heard you have this song about great white sharks. This great white shark song, play it for me. So I played it for her. She's like, this is amazing, man. Why don't you join us on the rest of this documentary? Up the coast of Africa to Durban and all the way back down to Cape Town. And at the end of that shoot, she's like, do you want a job working for National Geographic? And I was like, hell, yeah, it sounds amazing. So it was just right place, right time, you know, creating your own luck by being being there. But I never thought about becoming

• 10:16Speaker 04

  a filmmaker. I just wanted to be a great white shark researcher.

• 10:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  But not like in a traditional academic scientist way, more like swimming with them, diving with them, learning about them. And that's kind of how I got my job at Nat Geo, which then I eventually went to the dark side to Discovery Channel Shark Week. It's pretty hyped up.

• 10:37Danny Jones?

  Why is that the dark side?

• 10:38Speaker 04

  I mean, Nat Geo always had this like, yellow border club, like this refined, like, we're better than everyone else because we're these explorers. And 1888 was when it started. So they kind of had this, this upper echelon, like, and I can't, I'm not talking, I love National Geographic. I think they do amazing stuff. But now their television network chases ratings just like anybody else. They have Shark Fest, like Discovery has Shark Week. Well, when I say dark side, Shark Week was always kind of seen as like jaws and claws, hyping things up for ratings, scaring the hell out of people, blood and guts, so that people would watch. And as you know, like in media.

• 11:21Danny Jones?

  Fear works, fear sells.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  Fear wells. If it bleeds, it leads kind of thing. So, but I also realized, like, Discovery Channel was doing 20 to 30 hours of shark programming every single year. And as a filmmaker, I mean, there's no other animal on the planet. Grizzly bears, maybe one or two documentaries a year, if they're lucky.

• 11:39Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  Lions, the same thing. Crocodiles, king cobras. I've worked on all those films. But sharks, between Nat Geo and Discovery, 40 plus hours every single year. I mean, you're a filmmaker. You started out as a filmmaker, right?

• 11:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Surf films, I mean, there's not a lot of money in it, and there's not a ton of them made. But it was like your passion, right?

• 12:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, 100%.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  And do you still, you still make films?

• 12:06Danny Jones?

  No, not at all.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  No?

• 12:07Danny Jones?

  I haven't touched a camera. I haven't pulled focus on a lens in probably 10 years.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  But you worked with Zuccarini, and you worked on Dolphin Tale?

• 12:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, well, that's how I got into doing this podcast, for sure. Well, it's funny enough, I actually, I got into using cameras, like, just filming me and my friend surfing and skateboarding. And that led to, and I had an underwater housing to film surfing.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 12:34Danny Jones?

  So, and that led to, I had a bunch of friends with wealthy parents who loved sport fishing.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 12:41Danny Jones?

  And I eventually got invited out on a, on a fishing tournament trip to Puerto Rico, where I was jumping off the back of these sport fish boats to watch them pull up Blue Marlin.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 12:54Danny Jones?

  And with my, with my underwater housing. And that led me to actually getting a job shooting a competitive fishing TV show with ESPN. And then that's kind of like how my whole thing spiraled.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 13:05Danny Jones?

  And then I met Pete on Dolphin Tale, yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 13:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  ESPN, I got a funny story. I was in Australia, working on a great white shark documentary, and I get a call from ESPN, hey, Andy, we hear you're in Australia. Yeah, yeah. Hey, listen, would you be up for shooting a sequence with Mick Fanning?

• 13:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, no shit.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  I'm like, well, I'll be straight up with you. I don't, I've never filmed surfing, and I don't surf. Like, I don't, oh, it's not that hard, you can do it. So I think for a second, I'm like, well, I'm telling you right now, I've never filmed surfing. You want me to film one of the greatest surfers on the planet? They're like, it's easy, he's gonna, he's gonna be surfing at Snapper Rocks, like, out by his house.

• 13:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Like, everyone gives him the right of way, like, it's gonna be fine. So I was like, all right, well, I wrapped this shoot on this date. I was in Western Australia over in Perth. And they're like, yeah, you just need to get to Coolangatta, and that's where he's based. So I'm like, sweet. But I had to get a different housing, because I had a big gates housing, super heavy, 50 pound thing. And I needed to get like an Aqua Tech, like a surf housing. So I organized a surf housing through Aqua Tech. And then it started to dawn on me, like, I still, I got the camera and the gear, but I still don't know how to get into the right position. And when you see these shots of these dudes in the barrels, I'm like, how the hell do I get the shot without getting barreled as well? So I call, I call one of my best Australian friends, a director, Matty, he lives in Sydney.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  And I said, bro, I just got a job to shoot Mick Fanning, and I'm nervous. I don't know, I mean, I can't do this. I need your help. He's like, bro, I'll fly up there tomorrow. We'll go out the day before, and we'll, we'll, we'll do a test run. So we're out there on the beach, looking at the waves, and he's pointing to where like, people, where they drop in and all this. And as we're pointing, who runs right in front of us? Mick Fanning. He's, he doesn't see us, but he runs straight past to go into the lineup to surf. I'm like, holy shit. He's like, dude, this is perfect. Let's get out there and like, see if you can get close to him and see like, you know, he doesn't know who you are yet, or if you're on the, you know, shooting him the next day. Anyway, man, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I went to the little surf shop to buy the little, little bodyboarder

• 15:12Speaker 04

  fins. I had the leash on the camera, just trying to get out, past the whitewater, the breaks, the waves. I was half dead by the time I got out there, let alone the 100 surfers all in the lineup, trying to find Mick. I'm shooting on a fisheye, like, 8 to 15 lens, where as you know, you got to be super close.

• 15:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Man, it was embarrassing. I couldn't get anywhere near him or anywhere. It was useless. So the next day, when I met him, I told him, I said, hey, man, listen, just so you know, I've never filmed surfing before. And he kind of looked, oh, it's all, it's all good, mate. Don't worry, it'll be, it's easy. Just like, stick close to me, and I'll cruise past you and get out there. He sees that I'm struggling. He went by a few times, but it was like, it was embarrassing. And I didn't get anything. And he's like, listen, bro, we'll go back to my house after this, and I'll surf right in front of my, right in front of my house. I actually have a picture of it.

• 16:04Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  A picture that my buddy Matt took, when I was trying to get close to him in the lineup. You can see my little head here. See if I can make this bigger. But Mick's surfing in front of his house on this tiny little wave. I'm like, half drowning, shooting him. This was in front of, right in front of his house. No one was out there but us. But

• 16:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  The most fascinating part about this to me was, he had just had that scare in South Africa at Jeffries Bay, where the great white shark basically rolled up on him, got tangled in his leash. And then he got sort of, not ragdolled, but he got, you know, thrashed around.

• 16:44Danny Jones?

  This was right after that?

• 16:45Speaker 04

  This was maybe, a few months after that.

• 16:49Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  Within the same year. And I remember floating out there with him in front of his house. And he, he asked me, finally, he's like, hey, what, why did they fly an American all the way over here, who doesn't shoot surf photography?

• 17:01Danny Jones?

  Who shot, who filmed, who shipped you out there?

• 17:03Speaker 04

  So I was there for Discovery Channel.

• 17:05Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  But ESPN somehow knew.

• 17:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Mark Healy. You know Mark Healy?

• 17:11Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, I know who Mark Healy is.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  He's a big wave surfer, and I worked on a shark project with him. And I guess he mentioned that I was there. So his ESPN buddy called me.

• 17:19Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  Hey, can you shoot this? You're already here. And like I said, I should have said no. But I said, sure, but just so you know, never did. But when I was floating out there with Mick, I said, hey, bro. But he's like, why are you even here? Like, why would they fly you already here? And you're not, you don't even film surf. He's like, oh, I'm working on a, I'm working on a great white shark documentary. He's like, oh. And then I'm like, hey, man, I, I saw what happened to you. Would you ever consider doing like a shark documentary for Nat Geo or Discovery? He's like, nah, mate, I'm, I'm sweet. He's like, I made, I made it out of that situation unscathed. It didn't hurt me, it didn't get me. I'd much rather just leave it alone. Like, not think about it. You could tell he was still kind of messed up by it.

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• 18:58Speaker 04

  Have you ever had any crazy shark encounters as a surfer? Have you ever had any scares or any friends that have been investigated or bit or attacked or anything like that?

• 19:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I mean, surfing like, over on the, on the East Coast, in the New Smyrna area, there's sharks everywhere. And I've surfed through like, infested waters with like sharks hydroplaning all around me and stuff. But I've never been bit or anything. I've had them like, run into my leg and graze me. But like, those are little, you know, three foot black tips and spinner sharks.

• 19:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:25Danny Jones?

  I've luckily never had any encounter with like, a deadly shark.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  A legit.

• 19:29Danny Jones?

  Surfing, a legit like, thing that could kill me, you know?

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:32Danny Jones?

  I mean, obviously, a three foot shark could kill you if he bit you in the right spot.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 19:35Danny Jones?

  But, but no, I've never, I mean, what happened to Mick, I think that was in Jeffries Bay in South Africa when that happened, live, streamed. I remember watching that streamed live.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Bro, scary.

• 19:46Danny Jones?

  And it was just like, this boil came up. And I think it got caught, what happened was the thing was like sniffing him or checking him out, maybe swam right into his leash.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  100%.

• 19:54Danny Jones?

  And then pulled his leash down.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  100%.

• 19:56Danny Jones?

  And then he was just.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  The scariest part about that footage, though, was, you see, like, a shark fin thrashing, and then, then a wave, a wave starts, raises up, the swell rolls up.

• 20:09Danny Jones?

  And you don't see him anymore.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  And you see nothing. And I'm fully expecting to see blood and whitewater and just like a bloodbath. But then, you know, it subsides, the wave, you know, reveals him again. And I think he's sort of, you know, punching it or struggling. But that, that was the way I interpreted the shark. You know, unless they just like, bite first, ask questions later, which sometimes they do, they just rocket up and they, this thing, I'm pretty sure it had seen him. It got closer, it got closer. It was getting close enough to the point where it might have investigated or bit him. But the leash made contact. And then sharks don't really like when stuff touch them, you know? So it basically felt the leash freaked out, but then was entangled in that. I mean, it was probably his leash that potentially prevented him from actually getting bit.

• 20:57Danny Jones?

  That's insane luck.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  That's crazy dude. And years later, I ran into Mick in the Bahamas and he was doing that show. He finally came to terms.

• 21:06Danny Jones?

  Oh, did he?

• 21:07Speaker 04

  He wanted to do a show about sharks. Uh, one of his, one of his buddies, uh, director buddy, uh, they did it for National Geographic.

• 21:13Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, man, sharks and surfing. It's like, I just-

• 21:17Danny Jones?

  It's one of those things that's always in the back. It's kind of always in the back of your mind. When you're, especially a new spot you've never been to.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  I would imagine. I feel way more comfortable under the water with sharks and obviously being able to see them uh, than ever floating at the surface.

• 21:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  This year I did a sequence for Shark Week out off the coast of California where I'm going next week to Santa Barbara. Ton of sharks out there and I'm floating around in a kayak. And there's 16 plus foot great whites out there and there've been reports of them hitting kayaks and knocking fishermen out. They're not trying to eat the fishermen, but they're very visual predators and, and they hunt elephant seals off the California coast. And um, I'm sitting there like more nervous sweating it that I can't see the shark. I'm dry at the surface on a kayak than I am like underwater because I would imagine, I've only surfed a handful of times, um, very badly. Um, in like, like Hawaii, a few places, just really like easy Haleiwa.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm buddies with Mark Healy and the first time I met Healy was out in California, no, sorry. Guadalupe, Mexico, which was a hotspot for great whites. They've shut it down now, the Mexican government for some reason.

• 22:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think the cartels are involved. It's like a weird sort of situation where they've shut it down. Um, but anyway, I'm down in Mexico. I actually have some footage. Uh, where I was swimming around on my rebreather outside of the cage. And I look up, let me see where I can find this. I look up and I see this, this, this crazy, crazy ass dude swimming with a great white shark and he had, he was freediving like breath hold.

• 22:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  And he's um, swimming with the great white out of the cage and I was out of the cage. I did a lot of stuff on my rebreather where they'd come and check you out. But there's one thing when you're completely submerged, you're on life support, you can breathe. You're not like at the surface having to pop up and, and go down. So right at this shot, this is a big shark called Bruce. And I'm swimming out and I get this shot and then I look up and I see this random spear fisherman dude swimming with this great white and it's Mark Healy. And I, I didn't-

• 23:28Danny Jones?

  With a spear gun?

• 23:28Speaker 04

  With a spear gun.

• 23:29Danny Jones?

  He's shooting like something, fish that are like on top of it or something?

• 23:32Speaker 04

  We were doing a show for National Geographic and Healy had been flown in on a plane to the top of Guadalupe. Took a ponga around and he arrived without me knowing. I know he was showing up, but I didn't know it was that day. Anyway, I pop up, I'm like, hey, bro. Uh, I'm trying to shoot some natural history here. I'm trying to shoot like a sequence with the sharks. And he's like, natural history? What's that? And uh, he's one of the smartest dudes I know. I think he was messing with me. And later I said, bro, just give me like 20 minutes. I'll be done. And uh, I finished the sequence, got to the surface. I met him officially and I said, bro. You, had, have you ever seen great white sharks before? He's like, no. I'm like, so your very first great white shark you ever saw, you just jumped in and swam with it?

• 24:16Speaker 04

  He's like, yeah. So I'm sure you know, he's, he's quite a charger. He said, gnarly dude.

• 24:21Danny Jones?

  Oh my God, bro.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  But yeah, man, I mean sharks are, are my life.

• 24:26Danny Jones?

  So you said this is Guadalupe?

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:28Danny Jones?

  Now, is there an argument to be made that these guys are accustomed to seeing humans?

• 24:33Speaker 04

  Totally, totally. Anywhere where you get sharks that are being uh, fed, whether it's uh, chummed for fishing, chum for diving. Um, they, they do, they become habituated. They're not stupid. They know if they can get a free meal, um, and they don't get their heads chopped off or shot by, you know, by fishermen or, or abused. They're likely to come back. Um, so there's, there is an argument that, hey, shark diving, you're habituating sharks to boats and they're, they're gonna go to boat and, and eat people. I can't say one way or, or the other. All I know is anytime I get in the water, in the ocean, whether it's uh, along the coast, in the deep blue, I'm always prepared and, and ready if I encounter a shark.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Cause it's better to, better to expect it than it to happen upon you. Um, and I actually have a video of the only time I've ever encountered a great white where I wasn't expecting it. This is, uh, I got one fleeting shot of it. I had-

• 25:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  The situation was, I was off the coast of South Africa. One of my best friends owns a shark diving business and they dive at Aliwell Shoal. And he had a, a boat that was a husband and wife couple. They chartered the whole boat. And he said, hey, you can go out with him and you can dive. Uh, so I went out to dive alone. I jumped in first, swam down and the visibility, as you can see-

• 25:50Danny Jones?

  How deep is this?

• 25:51Speaker 04

  It's about 60 feet. So I'm diving down and as I dive down, I notice it's like pea soup. It's green water. And already, there weren't baiting. This was just gonna be a reef dive for fun.

• 26:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  So I swam down-

• 26:04Danny Jones?

  For people that are, that are listening to this on audio, I highly suggest you pull up the visual on Spotify or YouTube. Cause this is gonna be a very visual episode.

• 26:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, man. So I swam down through this pea soup and I'm thinking, wow, this visibility is horrible. And, and one of the number one rules when, when you're interacting with any predator, if you have low visibility, if you're walking around in the Serengeti at nighttime, you gotta expect lions and leopards can see you very well. If you're swimming around in murky water with sharks, you have to assume they can see you better than you can see and they can sense you. And they got all these other ways to detect what you're doing, where you are. Anyway, as I swam down on a descend, I'm like, damn, this visibility is horrible. And, but it opened up on the bottom. As you can see, there's a bit of like, uh, somewhat visibility on the bottom. But then I turn and I look and I see the husband and wife couple, they're descending down. And this is before I saw the shark. They're descending down and they start pointing at me.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  And I'm like, what? They're pointing frantically. And right then is when I turned around and that, that shot here, the, I rolled immediately as soon as I saw it. It was swimming up close to me. But as soon as I turned, it turned off and then I instinctively swam towards it. Cause they don't like, some of them don't care, but the majority of white sharks and sharks in general, they like to be stealthy. If you call them out and you make eye contact and you swim towards them and you alpha the shark, so to speak. It doesn't always work, but usually they're like, whoa, everything in the ocean swims away from me. Everything's afraid of me. Aside from orcas, obviously, but-

• 27:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  Anyway, long story short, uh, I turned around, I got that shot and I look back. The husband and wife couple, they're gone.

• 27:38Danny Jones?

  They're gone.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  They went, they went straight back to the boat and they left. Uh, but yeah, man, um, sharks underwater make me way less nervous than like surfers, like Australia. Australia has a pretty heavy shark.

• 27:52Danny Jones?

  My algorithm on social media has, as long as I can remember, has been, I would say 80% shark shit.

• 28:02Danny Jones?

  Cause I'm, I'm fascinated with it as well. I mean, not to the point where I'm, you know, diving with them like you, but-

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Right. Uh, we gotta change that, bro.

• 28:10Danny Jones?

  I don't know. I don't know, bro.

• 28:13Danny Jones?

  Um, one of the things that I've been seeing a lot of lately is these, these drones that they have in Australia now. Where they have these shark spotters that are with drones and there's so many crazy videos of giant like 16 foot white sharks swimming right up to surfers, like sniffing them. And then it's like circling them once or twice and then just hauling ass. And no, they have no clue.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:34Danny Jones?

  Bodyboarders, surfers, like everywhere. You're about to see like, if you feel like you're about to see, you know, the worst disaster of your life in 4K from a drone, but nothing seems to happen.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  That's what's fascinating. And there's footage-

• 28:47Danny Jones?

  See if you can find some of that footage, Steve. It's crazy.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, all over California, um, they have uh, amazing footage of surfers and sharks. And there's never been, from what I understand, no one's ever captured a bite or an attack or any real, there, there's a lot of, even on Rogan, he, he posted a shot of my buddy, um, uh, Scott, he, he had a shot of a swimmer, swimming and a white shark was swimming right up to him and got within like a body's length.

• 29:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, I saw this. I saw this like last week, I think.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  Turned off, turned away.

• 29:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  But um, you know-

• 29:21Danny Jones?

  Find the footage of that swimmer. It was very recent, this old guy. I think it was in-

• 29:25Speaker 04

  Santa Barbara?

• 29:26Danny Jones?

  Okay, Santa Barbara. Yeah, it was an older gentleman swimming in Santa Barbara and you can, it's the drone shot of this giant shark swimming right up underneath him.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  It could be uh, from my buddy Carlos, another guy out in California, but they're documenting this like every single day. And there's never really been, there have been attacks in California for sure. Um, like triathlete got attacked and killed. There's been a few attacks out near the Fairlawn's, spear fishermen, abalone divers. It's usually people that are, you know, they're doing something that's, yeah, attracting the shark's behavior. Or they're in an area where there's seals, that the body, or sorry, the um, triathlete was swimming with a seal.

• 30:05Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, not a great idea.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  Another, a random friend of mine through the internet was foiling, I don't know if you saw the footage of these foilers. They're off the coast of also like Ventura and they're foiling and this shark chases this foiler for like-

• 30:19Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  It's chasing this foiler. And then just recently, one of them got knocked off their board by a, a large great white. Like knocked off the foil. And the shark came back and attacked the foil and, and basically like ragdolled it. Attacked the board in front of him. Uh, I'm gonna be meeting up with them next week to do like an interview for a YouTube episode about, um-

• 30:45Danny Jones?

  God.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  But I mean, they're like super visual. They're, they're highly attuned to like vibrations and um, but the thing is like, every year there's usually single digit fatalities, uh, sharks and humans. I'm not saying it's, it's like a, it's something you wanna like, you know, just sweep under the rug. But this guy right there, that pink, um, oh, this, this might be what you're talking about.

• 31:08Danny Jones?

  Is that him?

• 31:08Speaker 04

  This is three days ago.

• 31:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, this is the one I'm thinking of.

• 31:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah, here, you can hear the audio if you throw, you can throw these on.

• 31:15Speaker 05

  He's doing a leisurely dip in the ocean, but what is lurking right under his body? It's an 11 foot great white shark. The swimmer has no idea about the danger below. Watch as he just keeps swimming as the shark circles him. The unbelievable sight was captured by drone off the coast of Santa Barbara. The drone operator tries to alert the swimmer of the impending danger by lowering the drone. The swimmer flips and floats on his back. Then he adjusts his goggles before swimming back to shore-

• 31:44Danny Jones?

  His interview afterwards was amazing.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  The drone operator Carlos Gounas scrambled to find the swimmer when he swam on shore.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  He just felt giving me a heart attack.

• 31:53Speaker 05

  Needless to say, the swimmer was shocked to hear how close he came to disaster.

• 31:58Danny Jones?

  Let's know what he says.

• 31:59Speaker 06

  links away from you.

• 32:00Speaker 05

  We spoke to Gouna and the swimmer, veterinarian Dr. Noel Dusselay Mueller.

• 32:05Speaker 06

  I've been around these sharks quite a bit myself, um, and they can change on a dime.

• 32:10Danny Jones?

  The interview I saw was the guy on the old guy on the beach and he's like, you know, I was thinking, if this is my time to go, at least I'm going to be in my element, doing what I love.

• 32:21Speaker 04

  That's cool. I mean, I think about, think about it the same way because a couple of producer buddies of mine equate, equate me sometimes to the grizzly man. You know, the guy who got eaten by the grizzlies. They're like, hey, man, um, do you ever think about you might become one day the shark man? As in, you're going to get consumed and killed by, you know, you, you live by the sword, die by the sword or whatever. And I'm like, how cool would that be?

• 32:44Danny Jones?

  Be the coolest way.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Heart attacks, car crashes, that's mundane bullshit. Like same time, I don't want to make the sharks look bad. But if I make a mistake and put myself into a situation where I give the shark the opportunity to make a mistake, or sometimes like, sometimes they don't make mistakes. They know what they're doing. They know that you're not their normal prey item. Very, very rare, but there have been consumptive attacks on humans.

• 33:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Where sharks have eaten people.

• 33:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 33:11Speaker 04

  And it's not always mistaken identity. Sometimes it's just predators and protein. Like they gotta eat. Sometimes they realize, hey, I know this isn't a seal. That's not a dolphin. It's not a tuna. That says like Speedo or O'Neil or.

• 33:23Danny Jones?

  Carnivores are opportunistic animals.

• 33:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:25Danny Jones?

  All of them.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you know, for the most part, they would rather eat something that they normally eat. Just like we're, we'd eat pasta or pizza or chicken. And we find some random looking thing on the side of the street and it looks organic. If you're super hungry and you're homeless, you might try to eat it, but usually you want to eat something that you're, you're normally accustomed to.

• 33:48Danny Jones?

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• 34:32Danny Jones?

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• 34:50Speaker 04

  Actually, I had a crazy situation in Cape Town on a Shark Week shoot where we were having Michael Phelps. It was about him racing a great white. We were never going to have him race the shark, but we needed him to swim 100, 100 meters along the South African coast. And the weather was continually, was really bad weather. It was, um, the weather was really bad and it was like constantly a game of, they were shifting locations because there was big swell along the, the beach. We needed him to swim in an area that was considered safe, right? Because he's like the world's greatest Olympian and we don't want to actually feed him to sharks. Anyway, one thing led to another. The, the weather was so bad that the

• 35:33Speaker 04

  production team in South Africa decided, you know what? We're going to have Michael swim at this beach called Fish Hook. And when I heard that, I was like, is this a fucking joke? This is a beach where two humans have been consumed by great whites in public. Like people filmed the video of their intestines getting picked up by seagulls. An old lady named Tina Webb was killed. She was like 77 years old. She swam every morning along the stretch of Fish Hook, this beach. She was consumed by a great white in broad daylight. People witnessed it.

• 36:03Danny Jones?

  Like he ate everything.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  Ate everything. The only thing they found was her like red swim cap.

• 36:07Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  Couple of years later, this Zimbabwean dude, uh, Floyd Skinner. He was consumed in the same exact location, same beach in front of a bunch of people. And it was horrific. Like people, like I said, they filmed like bits of his body getting picked up by seagulls. This is the same beach that Shark Week decided, we're going to have Michael Phelps swim. So Mike and I became buddies during this film shoot and I had, when I heard that, I'm like, bro, I, I need to talk to you tonight.

• 36:36Danny Jones?

  You just sold me on that episode of Shark Week, so I'm going to go.

• 36:40Danny Jones?

  They were doing their job.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  Bro, I told him, I said, we have to have a meeting. I gotta tell you, there, the, where they want you to swim is the last place you want to swim. So I had this secret meeting with him. I went to his like, his hotel. It was in Cape Town. He had two armed guards outside. His agent was there, his wife was there. I go, I didn't tell anyone from Discovery this. I just said, bro, I gotta tell you, the place they want you to swim. Read this, the International Shark Tech File, check it out. Two people were consumed. It's a difference between like just getting investigated, bit, you know, maybe lose a limb. But to be completely consumed by a great white, this beach has some freaky stuff going on. Another person lost their leg there, but there is like, I do believe in this theory. I don't want to say.

• 37:21Danny Jones?

  Fish Hook?

• 37:22Speaker 04

  Fish Hook.

• 37:23Danny Jones?

  Steve, find a, find this on a map so we can look at it.

• 37:25Speaker 04

  And it's spelled, uh, H O E K, fish, H O E K. South African or Afrikaans version. But I lived in that town for six months when I was working with a research team in False Bay, which is the air jaws territory where they breach out of the water and they're, they, uh, this whole Polaris like amazing jumping behavior. But yeah, it's pretty freaky. Uh, Fish Hook. Yeah.

• 37:48Danny Jones?

  That's it, huh?

• 37:48Speaker 04

  So people witnessed, you know, from the rocks.

• 37:51Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 37:52Speaker 04

  Right there.

• 37:53Danny Jones?

  Okay, punch back in. It's like. Crazy little bay, right?

• 37:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, that little bay. So now they, it's funny to have that, that red, um, thing. They, they've set up fishing, uh, sorry, not fishing, shark nets. Um, and now that it's protected, but right along that like where it says fishermen's watch, there's like rocks. And people were witnessing the shark, uh, consume these people from these rocks and from the beach.

• 38:17Danny Jones?

  Why do you think there of all places this happened so many times?

• 38:20Speaker 04

  That's what's weird, man. There are certain beaches around the world, like in Australia as well. There's certain places that there have been more fatal attacks and more negative encounters than other areas. I've actually been wanting to do a film about it for the networks that I would go to these locations, dive in these places where people have been fatally killed. To say, oh, wow, there's this massive channel. There's a gutter down here. There's this perfect confluence of like, the perfect storm of deep water, food and a hideout. Like great whites love to hunt, you know, and sneak up on things. If it's a flat sandy beach, often where you see this footage of the people swimming and they're, they're cruising, it's, it can be relatively shallow.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  But if there's deep drop offs and they can hide and they have enough, you know, basically trajectory and momentum to come up and breach on something to ambush attack, they're more successful. They're hidden. It's stealthy. So I've always wanted to do a film about the sharkiest, bloodiest beaches in the world. It sounds all hyped up, but if we could learn like what makes a place more dangerous than another place? Even use AI to predict like shark attack, uh, what's the word? Predict like negative shark encounter probability. Like if you factor in bad visibility, temperature, um, the presence of bait, uh, wind, current, moon phase, all these things play into effect when it comes to predators and their hunting abilities and their

• 39:44Speaker 04

  success rates. So I think it'd be amazing to use AI. And you go to the beach, it's like, wow, it's kind of like a red day as in like, this is more likely to encounter a shark hunting today than it would be. But we don't want to scare people. I mean, that's one of my favorite things about the, the planet is that humans, we're these apex alpha predators, but we can also get eaten by prehistoric dinosaurs, you know, any day of the week. Highly unlikely, but totally possible.

• 40:11Danny Jones?

  Well, also there was that beach in Egypt where that guy got eaten alive a couple of years ago.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  And that was heavy.

• 40:17Danny Jones?

  A couple of days before that, someone else got bit or attacked. I don't know if they died or lived, but apparently there was like a string of people who had life-threatening shark attacks on them in that same little stretch of beach. And apparently there was like, like sheep carcasses being dumped offshore right there. They found out later.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  I've heard about that.

• 40:35Danny Jones?

  And there was footage of that same pregnant tiger shark circling around that little fishing pier earlier in that day.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 40:41Danny Jones?

  So she was pregnant. They were dumping dead animals right off the coast there. So, I mean, you have kind of like the perfect alignment to have something like that happen.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  It's, it's true. If you like dig into the details, like even in Australia, they had three attacks. Uh, none of them were fatal or, no, I'm pretty sure none were fatal, but three attacks that happened within like 24 hour period. It could have been a 48 hour. I think it was three attacks in 24 hours. But when they did the, when they dug deeper, there were these torrential rains that pushed all of the, like the junk and all of the, when, when things wash into the ocean near a river mouth, like it, it drives like predator prey activity. There's more bait fish. There's murky water. There's lots of things. So the last thing you want to do is swim near a river mouth right after it's rained.

• 41:27Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Uh, and you see bait fish jumping because where you get small fish, it brings in bigger fish, which brings in the biggest fish. So sometimes common sense will prevail, will keep you safe, but then sometimes it's just like wrong place, wrong time. But you know, like you were saying, you've, you've, you've surfed amongst a bunch of sharks, but they're not of the species that are really targeting human-sized prey.

• 41:51Danny Jones?

  That I've seen at least. Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  Well, exactly.

• 41:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. Cause Florida's getting more and more great whites.

• 41:56Danny Jones?

  Florida's getting, it seems like just from, I don't free dive anymore. I haven't freed up, freed up. I haven't dived or freedived in years.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 42:04Danny Jones?

  But I have lots of friends who do it every day.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:07Danny Jones?

  And it's, this seems to be the consensus that there's just more and more sharks, more and more shark activity, more and more sharks being seen and caught. In Florida and, and this is not just like watching videos on Instagram. This is like hearing it firsthand from people I know who are out there.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:24Danny Jones?

  And you know, and I know for a fact spearfishing probably has a lot to do with it because I've been told that they can just go offshore now and just start popping their bands and sharks will start coming around, you know? Cause they're, they're accustomed to the sound of those spear, the spear guns going off and.

• 42:42Danny Jones?

  I'm sure it's a confluence of things. I heard, I don't know for sure, Steve, maybe you can like chat GPT this or something, but um ever since I think long line fishing for shark, like the shark, commercial shark fishing was like really pulled back in Florida.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:59Danny Jones?

  The population has started to come back a lot.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:01Danny Jones?

  And now it's like now that it's, you know, maybe reaching a homeostasis, people think that that's too much.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:08Danny Jones?

  And, you know, that combined with everyone spearfishing all the time and, you know, trying to, you know, they target these sharks, like the, you see the videos of these guys swimming down on giant bull sharks.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Shooting.

• 43:20Danny Jones?

  Shooting cobia off these bull sharks. It's just like, what is wrong with people, dude?

• 43:25Speaker 04

  I've had, I've seen people out of Catalina, I was with them, shooting giant kingfish, yellowtail off of great whites. And, you know, I like taking risks. I've done some stupid stuff, but like, I mean, at some point, like Darwin, right? He loves, he loves, what's the word? He's got a big appetite for dumb people, right? And um if you continue to do like sketchy stuff, like you, you may pay the price.

• 43:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  But at the same time, it makes life interesting. And it also shows that sometimes these sharks, they can definitely distinguish that you're not something they normally eat. You're not something they wanna eat. But if you test an animal enough, um you might, you know, end up on, on the wrong end of the bite, but back to the great whites in Florida, I run my own research project uh off of Naples. And this is some footage, uh it's at this place, uh I don't actually really wanna say the specific place, but it's thirty miles offshore at one of these Navy towers. And I run, I have these ultrasonic listening stations. Uh and this thing can detect sharks uh that are tagged, that will transmit their serial IDs to this uh device

• 44:37Speaker 04

  in perfect conditions, like Lake Tahoe conditions, it can transmit up to two kilometers. A lot of scientists aren't gonna believe that, but you can ask the manufacturer and they said that in perfect, like crystal clear, perfect clear water, they can transmit up to two K, but on average, you're getting about a kilometer or less. And if it's bad visibility, murky water, there's turbidity and weird like different things in the water, you get less, but something fascinating that I discovered at this location, I detected two great white sharks. One that was tagged in Cape Cod, another one that was tagged in South Carolina. Both like a thousand miles apart or whatever that distance is, pretty damn far. Cape Cod, South Carolina, and over two years apart, but the craziest thing is

• 45:21Speaker 04

  both of these great white sharks showed up at the exact same day, on the exact same night, within an hour of each other at ten o'clock at night on this offshore like rig system, this Navy tower. And people were like.

• 45:36Danny Jones?

  Where was this thing again?

• 45:38Speaker 04

  Thirty miles off of Naples.

• 45:39Danny Jones?

  Oh my.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:40Danny Jones?

  What?

• 45:41Speaker 04

  Two great white sharks tagged two years apart, thousand miles apart, and they showed up at the exact same night, within an hour of each other in the dark. But if you've ever dived out at these locations, you know what's out there? Massive eight hundred pound goliath grouper. Huge goliath grouper. They're protected. You can't shoot them. You can't kill them. You can't fish them. They're super ballsy. They, nothing, nothing messes with them because they're protected and they're the biggest thing out there on the reef. So if I was a great white shark and I knew that there was eight hundred pounds of protein, that was cocky, slow, hanging out in a, in a predictable environment, in a predictable place,

• 46:21Speaker 04

  I would go there and I would hunt them at nighttime because white sharks have, uh you know, they're really good at hunting and low light levels. And if you have a prey item that can feed you for a month and it's easy to catch and goliath, yeah, they can suction in fish and split their spines in half and they're very powerful, like suction feeders, but they don't have big sharp teeth. Like they're the perfect meal for a great white shark. I can't prove it, but.

• 46:46Danny Jones?

  Have you ever, is there any evidence that a great whites ever eaten or preyed on, on goliath grouper? Is that normal for them to hunt a bottom fish like that?

• 46:52Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 46:53Speaker 04

  Sharks, uh great whites in particular, they start out eating fish and other small sharks and stingrays. And as they get bigger, their like teeth calcify, they broaden, they get more serrated and they, they need more calories. That's when they start hunting mammals and that's when they get elephant seals and tuna and um.

• 47:11Danny Jones?

  I don't think I've ever seen footage of them actually like eating in the wild. I've only seen footage of them like eating from a chum slick or like eating.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  I'll show you, bro. Here's footage from uh.

• 47:21Danny Jones?

  I mean, like, um when they're trolling the stuff behind, you know what I mean?

• 47:24Speaker 04

  Seal decoys, yeah.

• 47:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, I take that back. I've seen them eat seals, like, like launch on seals, but.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  Like this was a, a sequence I shot out at Guadalupe with the great whites feeding on these elephant seals. And once they, and elephant seals, they're hunting subsurface, because elephant seals can hold their breath for like, geez, something like two hours. They're one of the longest, uh the deepest diving, longest breath holding. This is a female elephant seal and I actually had planned to get in the water. Healy was out there with us when we were capturing this.

• 47:56Danny Jones?

  Geez, look at that thing.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  I then decided it was reckless. It would have been stupid to get in the water. When you, when you mess with an animal that's in full feeding mode.

• 48:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  And they're hangry, so to speak, um the last thing you wanna do is like interfere with that and then end up.

• 48:10Danny Jones?

  Especially when you're downstream of the slick, right? You wanna be, you wanna be out of the blood slick.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Totally, totally. But, you know.

• 48:18Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  They seem scary, but in reality, like all these TV shows, they play, you know, scary music when sharks are feeding. Think, and it's always in slow motion. I mean, it's a pretty small percentage of their life where they're actually, you know, hunting and killing. They gotta do it to survive.

• 48:36Danny Jones?

  How long can they go without eating?

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Nobody really knows for sure, but there, there have been reports of like over a month, up to three months. They've tried to put a great white shark in a flume, which is like an underwater treadmill. Uh it, they use it to like, uh what's the word? Analyze or uh um speculate on its um metabolism, like how much it needs to eat and how often. So it's like an underwater treadmill, like with currents. And they'll, they'll keep animals in there and they'll feed it a certain amount and then they'll measure its weight. And they try to determine how much it metabolizes food and how often it needs to eat. But no one's been able to do it with a big shark like a great white.

• 49:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  And, you know, a lot of science is, is, you know, speculative. They don't really.

• 49:20Danny Jones?

  It's so hard to, to measure these things.

• 49:23Speaker 04

  Especially animals that like travel between continents and um.

• 49:27Danny Jones?

  Right. It is so strange that those two white sharks that were caught in Cape Cod and South Carolina, within the years of each other, ended up in the same spot, in the same day, same time.

• 49:37Speaker 04

  Same hour. At nighttime. And I dive at that location. That's, that footage with the receiver. This is the receiver that detected those great whites.

• 49:45Danny Jones?

  Right. That's so bizarre, dude.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  And it's funny though, when I'm out there, I'm often thinking like, um, you know, what would happen if one rolled up on me, but you know, really, if there's food for them to feed on, they're usually going for things they normally eat and they wanna go with the pass, path of least resistance. Like humans can, with a spear gun or like, you know, just, they can inflict damage on a shark if they really wanted to, if they see it coming. But um, man, like there, this is from Australia. This was swimming with these two great whites that I believe are brothers. We went back fourteen months later and these two sharks were still swimming side by side.

• 50:23Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  And they have like this weird like formation where they, and if you look close, like their lower cuttle lobe, their tail fins have like these matching birthmarks.

• 50:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. Look at that.

• 50:33Speaker 04

  And what's crazy is like in the scientific world, there's really no like, they don't really believe that sharks have like family units or that they live within a family unit or cooperate. I mean, they're starting to be, be evidence of it, but like orcas, everyone knows orcas hunt in a pod.

• 50:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  And whales have family units, but.

• 50:52Danny Jones?

  And they also communicate. We know how they communicate.

• 50:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Whereas sharks, they're pretty mysterious. Nobody knows for sure. But like, I'm convinced uh that sharks, like if you think about it, great whites can have up to fourteen pups at a time, like one of the

• 51:07Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  This one, and if you look up, you'll see the boat, uh about seventy-five feet up there, and I'm not even wearing fins. When I got out this day, it was a day I decided that the viz was perfect, the sharks were calm. I saw these two brothers swimming around and my friend's in the cage filming me. Um and he refused to wear a full face mask, so he couldn't talk to me. Usually I have someone saying, okay, on your left, there's a shark coming behind you. So I just had to be like constantly looking behind me, looking at him and just sort of keeping my head on a swivel. This one was getting close enough where I pet it just to let it know like, hey, sometimes it'll lull you into this sense of like false security. Will they get closer and closer and act like they're not aggressive and then occasionally they'll lash out. But these guys were, were curious more so than aggressive.

• 51:52Danny Jones?

  What, what does that do when you reach out and touch them like that?

• 51:56Speaker 04

  It just reminds them like, oh, whoa, that thing just touched me. Nothing touches me. I mean, everything in the ocean swims away from me, aside from orcas. And um these guys, I just kinda wanted to remind it that, hey, like, I know you're getting closer. I know that like you could eat me if you wanted to. But I'm, I'm trying to get back to this place soon. It's off the coast of uh Western Australia. It's actually, if you looked at a map of Australia and you, you cut it in half, right down the center of the Great Australian Bite, there's these amazing group of islands where um, you know, we think it's a pupping ground. It's a feeding ground. It's potentially a mating ground. It's, it's out in the middle of nowhere, so it's a lot of privacy. Like if you think about it, if you wanna get it on with your girlfriend, you don't usually wanna do it publicly. You wanna find a place with some privacy, so.

• 52:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  Uh it's a special spot.

• 52:44Danny Jones?

  Do we have any ideas on on how they communicate with each other?

• 52:49Speaker 04

  I mean, they definitely use body language like basic like when they're pissed off, they'll show their teeth and they'll gape and open and close their jaws. Sometimes they'll drop their pectoral fins and hunch their back like smaller sharks will show like a agitated swimming posture.

• 53:03Danny Jones?

  Like bull sharks?

• 53:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, and great whites, they often just like open and close their mouth and show their teeth. And then they just start acting more twitchy. Bull sharks especially, they'll like, you know when they're pissed off. They like start to like twitch and you're like, okay, you're the boss. And there have been reports of bull sharks like retaliating. They get pissed off. People, if they pull their tail or they they mess with them, there's a cameraman that was actually filming a nacho sequence. They caught this bull shark, they put a camera on its fin. And right when they released it, the shark was so pissed off, it swam straight down to the cameraman and bit him in the ribs.

• 53:39Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  He survived, but it was like the shark retaliated. He's like, bro.

• 53:44Danny Jones?

  How big of a shark was this?

• 53:45Speaker 04

  I think it was like a solid eight foot bull.

• 53:48Danny Jones?

  Bit him in the ribs?

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Bit him in the ribs.

• 53:49Danny Jones?

  And he lived?

• 53:50Speaker 04

  And he lived, yeah.

• 53:52Danny Jones?

  How bad were the wounds?

• 53:53Speaker 04

  Um, I wasn't there, but this guy, his name was Nick Calionis and he um, I'm not, I'm sure he he continued to film, you know, after he recovered. But it was a pretty, pretty hefty bite. I've never been bit. I've never had my, I've had my cameras bit. I've had my fins bit. My wife, who's uh, he- here in the other room.

• 54:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 04

  People always ask like, what's the scariest thing that's ever happened to you? The scariest thing that ever happened to me happened to her, right in front of me. She almost got decapitated by a tiger shark in the Bahamas. It was a feeding situation, meaning we were baiting the sharks. It was her very first time with tigers. I screwed up. And funny thing was, this was like when the GoPro released the Hero 2. So this is like ten plus years ago, maybe fifteen. It was a long time ago. And I remember telling her, like, she wanted to shoot stills and some behind the scenes. And this was before YouTubers are like the shit, you know, I was like, babe, don't film like a YouTuber, like shaky and all over the place. I said, just hold your shots, let the shark enter frame, exit frame, don't just constantly follow it.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Try to tell a story, like reveal it and like make it mysterious, like it should look on television. So that's exactly what she was doing. This shark was uh, swam up over her head. She was letting it leave frame, but I forgot to say like, never take your eyes off of the shark's head, like never stop looking at its mouth because like you can hold the frame, but still like follow the shark's face. Anyway, I forgot to tell her that. It swam over her head, turned its whole body and put its entire mouth. Our bottom jaw here and its top jaw here over her little blonde head. And all I could do is, I wasn't, she was probably about as far as the screen there. All I could do was scream, what the fuck? Like how?

• 55:41Speaker 04

  I couldn't believe she didn't realize was happening. And when she heard what the fuck, she actually thought she was in the shot. Mark Healy was there, actually. Mark Healy swam down. He's got the best shot of it. I don't, I wish I had the shot. When GoPro saw the shot that evening, because it was for GoPro official, a corporate shoot to release their dive housing. They watched the shot because they weren't in the water with us. It was Healy, myself, my wife, this Italian supermodel that base jumps topless. It was, it was a crazy shoot. Healy got the craziest shot of this shark trying to bite my, decapitate my wife. And as she heard me say, what the fuck, she pushed it away just like reactively. And Healy swam down and uh, he was freediving, so he was much more agile. I couldn't get to her in time.

• 56:24Speaker 04

  And he grabbed onto the shark's dorsal fin and like double, double fisted, riding its dorsal like aggressively to scare it off and it swam out of the area.

• 56:33Danny Jones?

  What?

• 56:33Speaker 04

  And we all got back up to the surface and Healy said himself, he's like, dude, that's the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life. And he's done some pretty sketchy stuff. So.

• 56:44Danny Jones?

  This is on video?

• 56:45Speaker 04

  This is on video. I, so GoPro, when they saw the shot, they said, we have to delete this. If, if our bosses, if Nick Woodman, if anyone ever sees this footage, they'll never let us do anything fun ever again.

• 56:58Danny Jones?

  But you kept it, right?

• 56:59Speaker 04

  I kept it, but the craziest thing is I can't find it.

• 57:03Danny Jones?

  No.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  This is years ago, right? And I wanted to, I always said that I would never release it because it does kind of make the shark look bad. It makes us look bad. It may, but now that I'm sort of getting into YouTube, I thought this would be a great way to uh, deconstruct the behavior, teach people how to

• 57:19Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  How to not lose your head, so to speak. So when I do find it.

• 57:22Danny Jones?

  It's a good educational piece.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  I will let you know. But it's funny, this was like, I had it on a iMac.

• 57:27Danny Jones?

  That's crazy that it put its head or its mouth around her head and didn't bite.

• 57:33Speaker 04

  Completely. Well, it was about to bite. So they have these.

• 57:36Danny Jones?

  But that's a quick reaction to be able to like.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  She had a 5D camera, so she's filming it and it was going, going, and she was waiting for the tail to leave frame. And the craziest thing, her last like shot is like the shark's tail all crinkled up. It looks like a billion years old because it was completely contorting his body to bite down on her head. The other thing was, we were using mahi mahi as bait and we had one bait, a bait wrangler, like getting the sharks to come close so we can get cool shots of them, but he kept pulling the bait away from them. And this bait was like a big white piece, big fillet, a big white fillet. And my wife had a long blonde ponytail. So when it swam over her, she was also like, you know, kind of in the mix of all the chum and all, you know, there was, the current was shifting like we were talking earlier.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  You don't really want to be in the mix of the chum and the scent and everything. You either up current or far, not down current, but up current to stay out of them. You don't want to smell like they're prey. But she kind of got in the mix of everything. The shark tried to bite her. It's whole nicotine membrane, they have these eyelids that uh, you know, great whites roll their eyes back so they don't have that. But tigers have this nicotine membrane. It was basically like a zombie shark. Both of its eyes were completely white. Its mouth was open. My wife's little head was there. So for like months, I had, I had nightmares. And she had no idea how bad it was until that night she saw the footage. And like, she's already super white and blonde.

• 59:00Danny Jones?

  So you had your camera on her?

• 59:01Speaker 04

  Well, that was the funny thing. I had a camera that literally had like every GoPro format. It was like 12 different cameras.

• 59:08Danny Jones?

  Oh my.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  But the thing is, when I saw it happening, um, the shot starts on her, but then I was like, babe, what the? So the sharp shot, shot pans off of her. I didn't get the shot of her almost getting bit, but Healy got it perfectly. Because he was wearing a GoPro head cam, swimming down on the whole situation and it was getting closer and closer and closer. But you see her save herself, like bump the shark away. You see then Healy um, grab the shark by the dorsal and like really aggressively pull on it, yank on it. So it swims out of frame. But uh, man, for, for months I had nightmares because I thought, man, I had just met uh, my wife. I'm not even sure we were married yet. Um, but I just like read the headlines like dickhead cameraman feeds his wife to tiger sharks.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  Because didn't tell her like, you know, how to interact with the sharks properly. I was more focused on the film work than the safety uh, of my wife. But um, she forgave, she forgave me.

• 1:00:03Danny Jones?

  I think tiger sharks scare me the most.

• 1:00:05Speaker 04

  They, they.

• 1:00:06Danny Jones?

  I think I'm a much more terrified of tiger sharks than I am of even great whites, I think.

• 1:00:11Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:00:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, even though I've never been in the water with either of them.

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:14Danny Jones?

  Just from.

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  Well, you have.

• 1:00:16Danny Jones?

  Well, I have. I just not wittingly, right?

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Danny Jones?

  I, I think just from all the footage I've seen, I would be, it seems like the great whites are more chill.

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  It can be, it can be.

• 1:00:27Danny Jones?

  And the tiger sharks are more just like, I mean, other than, you know, there's people that do like all kinds of dives and swimming with tiger sharks and stuff, but those are very well fed tiger sharks, right? And they're very accustomed to humans.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Danny Jones?

  And.

• 1:00:40Speaker 04

  Ocean Ramsey off of Hawaii. She's a good friend of mine and

• 1:00:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  The thing is, those sharks she's interacting with, she has for decades, right? For years and years and years. And they are used to people and, but a completely wild tiger shark is a completely different animal.

• 1:00:56Danny Jones?

  Totally.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  Um, and, and when they want to, and they're like the ultimate generalists. They're like the Swiss army knives to the sea. They'll eat anything that they

• 1:01:02Danny Jones?

  Anything.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  Want to. And they even did studies to determine like, great whites will hunt at a seal colony in the early, early morning. Because they, like, if you think about it, the sun rising on the horizon, it's like a flashlight. It's illuminating the surface really well and air breathing mammals are perfectly lit up. As this flashlight or the sun moves up, it starts to penetrate, the light levels start to penetrate deeper into the water. And you could, the seals can start to see the sharks. The whole water column gets more bright and everything becomes less stealthy. But tiger, so great whites will use like the light levels and they'll be early morning hunters, late afternoon at seal colonies. But. Tiger sharks have known to be, what do we got there? Give me one of those.

• 1:01:43Danny Jones?

  You want one?

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Danny Jones?

  They're alp nicotine pouches.

• 1:01:46Speaker 04

  I like them.

• 1:01:47Danny Jones?

  You ever do those for?

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  So recently, a company called like Ultra, they reached out to let me try these like.

• 1:01:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, I do Ultra. I have Ultras too.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  But I didn't get quite the same buzz as a.

• 1:01:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, the Ultra ones aren't nicotine.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  They're in like nootropics or whatever.

• 1:02:00Danny Jones?

  They do nootropic stuff. Yeah, they're great. They're awesome. They're just as good as those. They're just like, sometimes I switch them up.

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  Okay. But um, what was I saying? So great whites are pretty predictable in their hunting.

• 1:02:09Danny Jones?

  You're saying when the sun is low on the horizon?

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:12Danny Jones?

  That's when they like to breach surface?

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:02:15Speaker 04

  Because the seals breathe and porpoise at the surface, they're cruising. And as like the sun gets higher in the sky, the gig is up. Seals are hyper vigilant. They know that there's sharks out there trying to kill them.

• 1:02:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  But if they can't see in, in the low light levels.

• 1:02:32Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:32Speaker 04

  But they're being illuminated perfectly by like a sharp angle of the sun. It's the perfect advantage the sharks have to see it, but not be seen. As the sun gets higher, they can be seen by the seals and they, they evade the situation. I'll show you a shot. One of my best predation shots that I got, it is, what do you call it? Sixteen bar, I, I had to crop it to vertical for whatever reason, but. This was a, um, I'm gonna keep the music off too. This was a shot of a great white catching a seal early morning.

• 1:03:03Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  Right, like dead center, nailed it. And um, it's basically, you know, game over for the seal, but that shark came up from like fifty feet below or even deeper. And as the sun gets higher though, they lose that advantage. But um, yeah, it was, I'll pull up the wide shot at some point.

• 1:03:20Danny Jones?

  Has anyone ever tried to strap a camera to a great white to see it go down and then come up on? We have this, we have the POV from the seal. I want to see the POV from the shark.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  So I put cameras on sharks all the time and I have put them on multiple great whites. Uh, I didn't, I didn't load up anything on this one, but I never got a kill. I did get footage of great whites. Following big schools of tuna, great whites when the camera fell off and floated the surface, they, they went up and chewed on the camera. But I never got a kill. For a Nat Geo show, we did put cameras, these things called cats cams on great whites. But the thing was they were put on so tightly that sometimes the shark were, sharks were just breaching to, to take them off.

• 1:04:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  To shake them off. But this is footage from like the Bahamas on a great hammerhead. This was just like last year. And um, I love this thing called cinema science where you're using like cinematography to help illustrate science.

• 1:04:13Danny Jones?

  Whoa, that's, whoa, dude.

• 1:04:16Speaker 04

  360 camera.

• 1:04:17Danny Jones?

  That's incredible.

• 1:04:19Speaker 04

  An Insta 360, um, with a great hammerhead in the Bahamas. And uh, I've been doing this.

• 1:04:25Danny Jones?

  This is the coolest thing I've ever fucking seen, dude.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  Man, thank you. But it really, uh, it gives you that like secret life of sharks. You can see it here trying to like shake it off at first. It's totally non-evasive. It doesn't hurt them. But um, look at that little fish hanging on at the tip of the dorsal. It's like hanging on for dear life. But what's interesting and what's proved, what's proven is like they're not, like the shark comes back to us. It comes back again multiple times.

• 1:04:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:53Speaker 04

  If it was like detrimental to the shark or wasn't, it was in pain or not interested.

• 1:04:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:57Speaker 04

  It would flee and it would go and find a way to shake this thing off, but. Comes right back to us and then starts playing with the, you know, the divers again. Obviously, we're giving it an incentive to hang out.

• 1:05:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  We're giving it tuna or snap or whatever. And I know it's controversial, but to be honest, people that fish sharks, right? They're baiting, they're chumming, but. I would much rather people bait sharks and take their picture and bait sharks and chop their heads off and sell their fins or. I'm not against fishing. I think fishing's cool. If it's sustainable and you like fishing, I grew up fishing. Uh, but sometimes there's malice towards sharks and they hate sharks. The only good shark's a dead shark.

• 1:05:34Danny Jones?

  Well, everyone's got their own agenda, right, with sharks.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 1:05:38Danny Jones?

  And you know, of obviously, the Jaws movies were like a huge part in shaping culture. Uh, and people's perception of sharks and how people perceive sharks, right?

• 1:05:48Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:48Danny Jones?

  Paying them as this boogeyman.

• 1:05:50Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:50Danny Jones?

  And then you have, you know, the complete, it's just like, my thing is, I don't know if the, the equal opposite is the right answer either. Like obviously.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:58Danny Jones?

  That wasn't a, a fair depiction of, of sharks as being this evil boogeyman that are just out to kill every human, right?

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:06:06Danny Jones?

  And it instilled this, this, you know, unbelievable fear in people who really didn't have any person. Any interaction or any experience with sharks in real life. But like, then you have the Ocean Ramsey girl who is just like, these beautiful teddy bears, they're so gorgeous, I love them. Like, it's like, that's the, that's an extreme. They're, they're not that.

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:06:31Danny Jones?

  These things are killers.

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:06:33Danny Jones?

  These things are predatory killing machines.

• 1:06:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:06:36Danny Jones?

  So like, if you come across a tiger shark and you're swimming, you know, in Hawaii.

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Danny Jones?

  Don't treat them like that, right? You're gonna not, it's not gonna end well.

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  I mean, she, she does say herself that they're, they're not puppy dogs and they can be dangerous, but she's developed like this relationship with her. I'm sure you saw the, or the Shark Whisperer, the documentary on Netflix, they did a, did a whole sequence on her about.

• 1:06:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  It was kinda like My Octopus Teacher, where that guy went diving with his octopus for years and years and like developed a relationship with it.

• 1:07:05Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

  Ocean's kinda, Ocean kinda has that with the tiger sharks there, but she will admit that not everyone should do this.

• 1:07:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  People give her a hard time because they're saying, oh, well, you're inspiring people to go out and pet sharks and this. It's like, listen. If you're dumb enough to see someone jump out of an airplane, some Red Bull diver and, and base jump off a mountain and then you go out and try it. Cause you saw it on TV, Darwin has a massive appetite for morons and he like never forgets to eat, right? So if you're gonna do something that you saw someone else do and you have no experience doing it. Go for it. That's called evolution. It's like, we need dumb people to die to prove to the rest of the world that like you shouldn't do certain things.

• 1:07:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:07:44Speaker 04

  I'm not saying that like it's good to set a bad example. I don't think that she is. I think that she passionately loves sharks. They kinda need, um, they need humans on their team or we would decimate them if we, if that Jaws mentality, the only good shark's a dead shark. Kept uh, the momentum that it had because right after Jaws, you were a hero. If you went out and killed a shark and strung it up at the local dock.

• 1:08:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  You were, you're a hero. You're making the beaches safer. But it got to the point where people started to realize, okay, they're really, they're not malicious monsters. They can kill you and they, there have been, obviously there's fatal attacks. But for the level of fatalities and the reputation they have, it's like they have the best marketing team on the planet. They kill less than uh, single digits every year, yet they're the biggest, baddest motherfuckers, monsters ever to have lived. Whereas you, you look at mosquitoes or any other thing that kill way more people.

• 1:08:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  They don't have a good marketing team. They don't have Shark Week and Shark Fest and all this other.

• 1:08:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  Um, at the same time, it's way more scary to die from a great white shark, you know, biting your leg off than a mosquito bite. So.

• 1:08:50Danny Jones?

  Right, totally.

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  It makes sense, but um, people do give a, you know, certain, like, I'm not a scientist, but I've been published twice in Nature, which is like. Considered along with science, like the highest journal of scientific publication ever to exist. All because of my fin camera work. It's been published uh, for a tiger shark.

• 1:09:09Danny Jones?

  This is the sickest thing ever, dude.

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  It was so much fun.

• 1:09:13Danny Jones?

  You did this to a tiger shark, you said?

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  I put him on tigers, great whites, uh, obviously hammerheads, uh, nurse sharks, uh, Mako, but Mako's are really hard because they're so fast.

• 1:09:23Danny Jones?

  Mako's are wild, dude.

• 1:09:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're badass.

• 1:09:25Danny Jones?

  You see Manny Pwig hand catching Mako sharks?

• 1:09:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've seen him getting bit by, bit by, I think, a Mako on.

• 1:09:31Danny Jones?

  He's been bit by a Mako, uh, a, uh, lemon shark, Caribbean reef shark and.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  You know him pretty well.

• 1:09:40Danny Jones?

  And a nurse shark.

• 1:09:41Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:09:42Danny Jones?

  And he said the worst one was the nurse shark.

• 1:09:44Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 1:09:44Danny Jones?

  Out of all of them.

• 1:09:45Speaker 04

  Cause it just wouldn't let go?

• 1:09:46Danny Jones?

  It wouldn't let go. And he, he ripped it off and it took the skin with it. And he said it was like they had to get a skin graft on his leg and stuff. He also told me that, I don't know if this is true. He told me that a six foot, uh, nurse shark has the same jaw pressure as a thousand pound great white.

• 1:10:04Speaker 04

  It, it's possible. The thing about nurse sharks is they feed on like crustaceans and they crack like crab shells and they're focused, they don't really have sharp teeth. They have like grounded, rounded teeth that are like meant to crush and like pulverize. So.

• 1:10:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:10:17Speaker 04

  They need a lot more crushing power than like a Mako or great white, which has a bunch of like.

• 1:10:22Danny Jones?

  Teeth do a lot of the work for them.

• 1:10:23Speaker 04

  Avalanche of razor blades that like, they can just cut through anything like butter. Yeah, look at these things.

• 1:10:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:10:30Speaker 04

  You know, what's also crazy is that whale sharks, if you Google whale shark eyeballs, whale sharks have teeth, these dermal denticles. Over their eyeballs because they're big, slow moving and they have huge eyes. Um, and they really can't protect themselves from.

• 1:10:45Danny Jones?

  They eat with their eyeballs?

• 1:10:46Speaker 04

  No, they don't eat with their eyeballs, but their eyes have these dermal denticles that protect their eyes from getting bit by um, by any sort of fish predator. Um, whale sharks have dermal denticles, tiny teeth like scales on their eyes to protect them.

• 1:11:00Danny Jones?

  Can you find a better photo, Steve? Or do they have like, maybe like a?

• 1:11:05Danny Jones?

  Like, so this is like actually on, this is on like the eyelid or like?

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  On the actual eye, that upper left, the very top left, keep going. Uh, right there, that shows like dermal denticles, like the um, tiny like little, yeah, right there, the tiny little like teeth, it's basically like an armored eye.

• 1:11:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:11:25Speaker 04

  And I don't believe any other sharks have that um, that setup.

• 1:11:28Danny Jones?

  Because they're so slow and they're not agile, like little fish could nib, nib, nib away their eyes.

• 1:11:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they don't really, they, they have similar teeth, uh, like pulverizing teeth and their filter feeders. So they don't have like any sharp arsenal to like scare, you know, predators away.

• 1:11:42Danny Jones?

  Evolution is so fucking crazy, dude.

• 1:11:44Speaker 04

  It is crazy, man.

• 1:11:47Danny Jones?

  It's like, it's like an alien dude. Like, for real, like, it's, it's insane to think that there's been, we've explored more of the moon than, and Mars, than we have of the, our own oceans.

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  It's nuts.

• 1:11:58Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 1:11:59Speaker 04

  And, you know, we got guys like Elon looking to like go to Mars and, and build, uh, and, and send people there, but like, I kinda wish they would spend a bit more money on the ocean.

• 1:12:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  And exploring like the deep, uh, like the Marianas Trench, and you got James Cameron doing a lot of work in that, but um, I kinda feel like there's a lot more to discover on planet Earth. Kinda feel like some people are writing it off and we need to find a bailout plan, but, I mean, the ocean, like, they say like up to seventy percent of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean, so, often when people ask me like, why are sharks important? Why would I care about this monster that can kill me and bites people and kills children and, like, that's the, the funny thing, people think that sharks are man eaters, but they also eat women and children, so, um, that's supposed to be a joke, but, uh, the reality is like, sharks, they're balanced in the oceans, right? And without the oceans being healthy, we have less air to breathe.

• 1:12:51Speaker 04

  Um, whether you live on the mountains or in the deserts, like, you're breathing oxygen that's supplied the majority of it from our oceans.

• 1:12:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:12:58Speaker 04

  So like, I always try to get people to care about sharks in that respect.

• 1:13:01Danny Jones?

  They're a super important piece of the puzzle, right? Like, they eat fish that destroy the reefs and like they keep everything in balance so that they think the, the whole entire ocean can sustain itself and,

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:13:11Danny Jones?

  They've been here way longer than we have.

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, before the dinosaurs. And when you talk about the, the fish, like, um, one of, uh, some of this footage from my tiger shark fin cams, I'm not sure if I have the tiger shark stuff here. But um, they, we discovered in the Bahamas that like tigers, like this is a big ass tiger in the Bahamas.

• 1:13:31Danny Jones?

  Dude, some of the Bahamas tiger shark attacks freak me the fuck out.

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  Which ones?

• 1:13:36Danny Jones?

  Uh, I, I saw one, that there, I've heard of a few where basically like people have jumped in the water in the Bahamas and the tiger shark like literally like bit them in half.

• 1:13:45Speaker 04

  There have, there was like a, a recent attack, when I say recent, within the past like two years, that never really made the news, never really made the public. It happened on a, a Bahamian boat that was registered in fucking Mongolia.

• 1:13:59Danny Jones?

  I heard it was like near the, one of the pig beaches where they have the pigs running around?

• 1:14:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, I'm not, I, I was pretty sure it happened out at Tiger Beach.

• 1:14:06Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  Um, where this photo is taken and um, from what I understand, uh, there was an Austrian diver, she was a pro, she had like a fancy camera, she had dived there multiple times. Uh, the current shifted and their boat, uh, instead of just swimming straight to the swim step and going, you know, uh, ascending twenty, twenty, twenty-five feet or whatever, they had to swim like a hundred and fifty feet back to the boat against the current.

• 1:14:30Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  With multiple tiger sharks in tow because they had been baiting them the whole time. And one of these tigers grabbed the girl by the arm and it started trying to ragdoll her. The dive masters, people swam over to help her, but they couldn't get the tiger to release. So the story is they just fucking left her and she was basically dismantled by the tiger, she made it to the surface, started screaming for help, and then the reef sharks got involved, like whenever, whenever it's like, there's a frenzy. Uh, again, they're not like targeting humans, but they're predators, we're protein when, when we are to them. Um, and basically, they tried to deploy a tender to go save her, like a small boat, and they never, they never got to her. They found like her BCD, her tank,

• 1:15:14Speaker 04

  but essentially it was like a consumptive attack that was started by the tigers and then finished, uh, by the reefs. Um, again, like, I'll never sugarcoat sharks, uh, they're definitely-

• 1:15:25Danny Jones?

  Is this, Steve, is this thing connected? Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:29Speaker 04

  They're definitely, um, you know, formidable predators, they're not malicious, but they're certainly capable of, you know, whatever they want to, really. And I wa, I was saying earlier about the tigers, an interesting tactic that they've used and has been documented is that they're super crafty, they know that if they show up every morning on a reef, the turtles will start to habituate to their presence and they, turtles are very anti predatory, they don't wanna get eaten.

• 1:15:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:57Speaker 04

  So instead of showing up at the same time and being predictable, tigers are using this, this pattern of complete unpredictability. They'll show up at the reef at two in the afternoon, three in the morning, twelve o'clock, five o'clock, they show up, whenever they want so that their prey can never develop a sense of like, okay, we're safe right now, let's feed. Whereas like great whites and seals, the seals know like early mornings, very dangerous for us, late afternoon. But I mean, it just shows the intelligence of tigers where they're just like, I'm gonna keep you guessing, you're never gonna know when I show up, and when I do, I'm gonna eat whatever I want, whenever I want. Um, that's why when you said tigers scare you the most.

• 1:16:37Danny Jones?

  They do.

• 1:16:38Speaker 04

  They certainly can be, they certainly can be scary.

• 1:16:42Danny Jones?

  What is that one in the back with that huge dorsal fin?

• 1:16:44Speaker 04

  So that's a great hammerhead, actually.

• 1:16:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay, that makes sense.

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  And that's what's cool to me, you'll often get like multiple shark species out at this location, Tiger Beach, you get tigers, lemons, reefs, great hammerheads, nurse sharks, and they're all like kinda just hanging out with each other. I mean, obviously, we're their humans, uh, and we're, we're incentivizing them with bait, um, but this has been going on for decades. And again, I know it's like a controversial thing to like be, uh, provisioning wild animals, but I just kinda feel like, I don't know, I mean, people provision and they bait them to kill them, so,

• 1:17:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  What's wrong with baiting them to take their photo?

• 1:17:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:17:24Speaker 04

  And nobody is going out to Tiger Beach to go for a swim.

• 1:17:27Danny Jones?

  You just don't wanna mix the two.

• 1:17:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:17:30Danny Jones?

  You don't wanna have people that are fishing for them or like chumming them up in the same spot that you're trying to get photos and take tourists down there.

• 1:17:36Speaker 04

  Right. And then if you do, like, people are expecting to interact with the sharks, it's one thing, and that's the other argument, it's like, well, what if you have a family that just happens to go out there and they don't know that this is a shark feeding zone or a place where people are, have been habituating sharks? Um, yeah, I mean, the, I, I'm never, I'm always kinda like trying to see both sides.

• 1:17:57Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  But at the same time, like, again, uh, whether you catch them and kill them or, or bait them to take their picture, I would always, like, sharks are way more valuable alive than dead. That one tiger shark, this shark Emma, has been diving with people for twenty years. And people, the, the economy in the Bahamas, like, the billions of dollars generated by keeping sharks alive as opposed to a finite, let's kill the shark, take its fins, sell its meat, it's dead forever, it's never coming back.

• 1:18:25Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:18:25Speaker 04

  Where like if money rules the world and people realize it's a sustainable resource, and there are sharks that can be fished and commercially harvested for, you know, food. Um, but in the US, not a lot of people eat sharks.

• 1:18:38Danny Jones?

  No, not that we're aware of at least.

• 1:18:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, their Mako are on the menu or whatnot, but the thing is like, they're top predators and they're eating other fish that have, uh, contaminants, like, Makos eat a lot of tuna and they eat other top predator, predatory fish that accumulate mercury.

• 1:18:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Speaker 04

  So if you eat a lot of shark or a lot of tuna, you're eating a lot of like heavy metal contaminants which can make you sterile. So like, I think, like anything, there's a balance, um.

• 1:19:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it has a big neurological effect, too.

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:19:08Danny Jones?

  Have you seen the, uh, have you seen the documentary, The Cove?

• 1:19:11Speaker 04

  I have.

• 1:19:11Danny Jones?

  By Rick O'Barry?

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  I have, I got trained to freedive by, um, Kirk Crack, uh, who was part of that documentary, he was helping-

• 1:19:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:19:19Speaker 04

  Train those guys on rebreathers. And, uh, yeah, I actually learned, uh, like we were talking about Zoo Greenie, he's a big freediver.

• 1:19:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:26Speaker 04

  I just, I wanted to up my game as a filmmaker, so I took a, uh, freediving course with Performance Freediving International over in Miami. And it was funny, on like the first day, they teach you these breathe up exercises, and on the first day, I already increased my breath hold, like doubled it, it went from like a minute and ten to like two and a half minutes, and then by the end of the class, I was doing five minutes of static apnea where you're just in the pool holding your breath.

• 1:19:49Danny Jones?

  Just like relaxed.

• 1:19:50Speaker 04

  Relaxed?

• 1:19:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Speaker 04

  I hit like five minutes and one second, and then you start like doing the samba, like you're, you're basically passing out, like you, um, you do jiu-jitsu, right?

• 1:19:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, like when you're getting choked out and you're fighting and then suddenly you just, you start to go, start to go limp.

• 1:20:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  Um, but anyway, the funniest, funniest thing was, I was so fascinated by this breathe up technique like a dumbass, on the first, second or third day of the class, I was driving back to my hotel on like Collins Avenue in a rental car. And I thought, hey, man, I'm so impressed with my breath hold. I'm gonna hold my breath while driving the car. I go through the first, I hold my breath at one red light, the next red light, the next, I wake up, I, I wake up, I had my, I passed out. My foot had slipped off the brake. I hit the car in front of me, which just so happened to be a smart car. But I just like rolled into it because my foot rolled off the brake.

• 1:20:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:20:41Speaker 04

  But as I came to, I went to hit the brake and I hit the gas and I pushed this smart car like two car lengths. Like into like an intersection that had just stopped luckily. And I, I came to and I'm like, holy shit. I jump out of the car. I had my like performance freediving manual on the front seat. So I ran up to this lady like, I'm so sorry. I was holding my breath. And like she just puts the fucking window up, takes off. And luckily.

• 1:21:04Danny Jones?

  She took off?

• 1:21:05Speaker 04

  Luckily, there was no damage to her. Uh, like it was literally like I was right behind her and I rolled into her and then pushed her. And I think she had her foot on the brake. Anyway, the next day I went in and told Kirk who worked on the Cove. I said, bro, I got something embarrassing to tell you. I was driving home yesterday and I decided to do the breathe ups and hold my breath in the car. He's like, what? And I'm like, yeah. And I kinda got into a car accident. He's like, what the fuck is wrong with you? I'm like, well, you never told us to not, you know, practice in the car. So now apparently in all his classes, he's, he tells people like, don't be an idiot. I had this student that helped. He apparently doesn't name me by name, but uh, it was me. But um, yeah, man, have you, have you trained freediving?

• 1:21:44Danny Jones?

  Not like officially. I never took like an official class, but I've done a lot more freediving than I have done scuba diving.

• 1:21:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:21:49Danny Jones?

  Like I was, I was, I was certified to be, uh, I got certified in scuba diving. And uh, I've done quite a bit of it, but I prefer freediving. I'm just not good at paying attention to all the little thing, all the little like equipment. O-rings and gauges and like, there's so much more that can go wrong. Scuba diving.

• 1:22:10Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:11Danny Jones?

  Free diving is like, you know, when you're in danger, right? You know how much breath hold you have. You know how much you can handle.

• 1:22:17Speaker 04

  Until you don't, until you have a shallow water blackout.

• 1:22:19Danny Jones?

  Right, right. So like eventually when I was young, I did a lot of scuba diving. Then I eventually just started doing mainly freediving. Cause like, you know, I, I had a better handle on my own limits that way.

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:22:29Danny Jones?

  And um, all the scuba diving is just, you know, it's like being down there for an extended period of time is like nothing else. You know, that's a very unique experience, being able to do something like that.

• 1:22:40Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 1:22:41Danny Jones?

  And like, I've had a lot of close calls, scuba diving.

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:22:45Danny Jones?

  I like, well, like, one of the most recent ones were, was like one of the last times I actually scuba dove. Was I was actually shooting some stuff in the Cayman Islands on like the big, there's a big wall there that drops off to like thousands of feet from the reef.

• 1:23:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:23:00Danny Jones?

  So like the, the top of the reef is like maybe 90 to a hundred. And then it like just goes off into like a vertical drop to like, I think a thousand feet. There's a big trench right there off Grand Cayman.

• 1:23:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I've heard of it.

• 1:23:10Danny Jones?

  And um, we were shooting that. And then we were coming back like probably a hundred and ninety feet, maybe like a hundred to ninety feet, maybe like ninety-five feet, something like that. Going through this like tunnel inside this reef or whatever. And I was just focused on my camera, just getting the shot the whole time. And I wasn't paying attention to any of my gauges. And we're like ninety, eighty-five feet, I'm inside this cave. And all of a sudden I sucked it dry.

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:23:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Speaker 04

  Dude.

• 1:23:39Danny Jones?

  And I found, I found this, I looked up this hole. I just started hauling ass to the surface.

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  You were alone?

• 1:23:45Danny Jones?

  No, I was with a bunch of people.

• 1:23:46Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:23:46Danny Jones?

  And I started hauling ass and then as I started shooting up, my buddy grabbed me by my fin. And like stopped me. Yeah, he saved me. And then he, he, he gave me his octopus and I was fine. We had, we obviously had to do a safety stop because it's deep as fuck.

• 1:24:00Speaker 04

  So you were gonna go straight up from eighty-five feet?

• 1:24:02Danny Jones?

  I was gonna go straight, I wasn't thinking. I wasn't thinking, I wasn't thinking at all.

• 1:24:06Speaker 04

  Damn. How long ago was that?

• 1:24:07Danny Jones?

  That was probably, fuck dude, that was probably like two thousand and eight, nine, around there.

• 1:24:14Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 1:24:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15Speaker 04

  I've had a few out of breath.

• 1:24:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you know, I mean, you know what it's like more than anyone, just to get lost in getting the shot, right? And when you have to worry about also staying alive simultaneously with all these gauges and stuff, it's, it's a lot.

• 1:24:26Speaker 04

  It is a lot. It becomes like second nature, but that's the thing. I rarely will look at my gauges, but I'll start to feel like, okay, it's getting, it's getting harder to breathe. I'll pay way more attention when I'm deep, deep, like deep water. But if I'm shallow, I know that if it starts feeling harder to breathe, I've got like about a minute. Till I gotta get up. But it's a stupid way to think about it. It's better to like look at your gauges.

• 1:24:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:49Speaker 04

  But you can get caught up in um, in not like, uh, I got actually a shot here where I got out of the cage. And I was focused on um, just focused on the, the action. My buddy was in the cage. And I didn't see, this is a selfie camera, but this great white was biting the top of the cage. My buddy's there. And then it, it was coming up behind me and you can see it really briefly where it's like head was, it just swam over top. But here you could see it like coming down, coming down on me, like turning off. But I saw it at that last second and looking up at that, it was um.

• 1:25:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God, bro. Oh, my God, dude.

• 1:25:29Speaker 04

  It was funny, man. I mean, cause my, I wasn't paying attention to the, anything but what was in front of me. My buddy was filming it and then it was like a little duck. I don't think it was really going for me, but if I didn't turn around um, in time. It, it may have. And as a cinematographer, you're like this, this was in New Zealand.

• 1:25:48Danny Jones?

  This is an insane shot, bro.

• 1:25:51Speaker 04

  This was in New Zealand.

• 1:25:52Danny Jones?

  I said this to Steve last night.

• 1:25:53Speaker 04

  In New Zealand, off the back of the boat, uh, with the Phantom, that Flex 4K. And the shark was just kinda creeping up to the back of the swim step and dropped it in the water. But it was like, just kinda just hovering there.

• 1:26:06Danny Jones?

  Did you know he was there when he dropped the camera?

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  I saw it, but I wasn't expecting this, like this cool reveal of the shark to kinda like show up in that little perfect uh, perfect little reveal there. But New Zealand is a place where they, you don't mess around. I was there, I've been there, uh, going every year since two thousand and thirteen. And just this past year I got out of the cage and I lasted less than sixty seconds to where I just, and I was also alone, meaning again, a guy was in the cage watching me and I got out. And I.

• 1:26:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, you were freediving?

• 1:26:38Speaker 04

  No, I was on scuba.

• 1:26:39Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:26:39Speaker 04

  But I just.

• 1:26:40Danny Jones?

  But you weren't in a cage or anything?

• 1:26:41Speaker 04

  I was, but I climbed out the front of it and I used the, the back of the cage. It's kinda like a soccer goal. Like you can kinda not have to worry too much about behind you. Except for that shot I just showed you where the shark's biting the cage and like swam over, like you can never let your guard down. I think you always just have to be hyper vigilant if you're gonna be swimming with apex predators that like specialize in killing shit.

• 1:27:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Speaker 04

  Uh, I don't think that they're like out to get me, but they're definitely um, you know, definitely no joke when they, when they wanna be.

• 1:27:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  And then this too, man, just, just to go into the um, like these guys obviously eat great white sharks for breakfast. I never wanted to admit it, the killer whales.

• 1:27:20Danny Jones?

  Orcas never, is it true? No, no documented attacks on humans in the wild?

• 1:27:26Speaker 04

  In the wild, no.

• 1:27:27Danny Jones?

  Only in captivity?

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  Sea world all day long, obviously, but in the wild, there's never been, they, they have had orcas swim up to like spear fishermen and crayfish or like lobster divers in New Zealand. And yeah, grab on their little catch bags, like pull on their catch bags, but there's never been a reported like attack.

• 1:27:45Danny Jones?

  Isn't that interesting?

• 1:27:46Speaker 04

  It is. It is fascinating. Like they're, it's almost like this weird mutual respect uh, that they have for us or something. Or they're just, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Like if I was a killer whale, I would, I would sample a human just to see what they taste like. Or play with it. Like they're so intelligent. They, you know, bat their, bat their prey around and like even just swimming with these in New Zealand, it was intimidating. But knowing that they've never attacked someone in the wild was like, uh, what do you call it? Just reassuring that they, you know, weren't gonna eat you. Until, you know, you become that first guy.

• 1:28:22Danny Jones?

  There's also a bunch of different types of species of orcas, right?

• 1:28:24Speaker 04

  There are, yeah.

• 1:28:25Danny Jones?

  That prey on different types of foods. Like there's some that prey on rays.

• 1:28:27Speaker 04

  Exactly. And they're like cultural. That's what I never knew until I worked with this scientist in New Zealand, uh, Ingrid Visser. She's a badass. She's like the orca lady. And um, like in New Zealand, they are.

• 1:28:40Danny Jones?

  What's her last name?

• 1:28:41Speaker 04

  Uh, Visser, V I S S E R. Um, she is crazy, like in a good way, but she, she's nuts. But she taught me that orcas are very cultural and that the ones in New Zealand, they focus on eating sharks and stingrays, but they won't eat seals. Whereas you go off the coast of California or Patagonia, they love eating seals and whales. I'm actually going to Norway next month to dive with the killer whales off of the fjords there where they're hunting uh, herring. And uh, there, they're, they're fish eaters. Whereas in California, they're whale and mammal eaters. And then South Africa and in um, New Zealand, they're focused on sharks and stingrays. It's weird because you think like, why not eat a seal if it's there?

• 1:29:23Speaker 04

  And they're just like, it's a cultural thing where they're like, they're taught and they're raised in a certain way where they, like this guy swam up to me like he was giving me um, trying to offer me uh, part of the fish that it was hunting. But yeah, man, I think um orcas are impressive.

• 1:29:38Danny Jones?

  Isn't it also true that some orcas uh like migrate long distances and they don't stay there like they're they're transient transient orcas?

• 1:29:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:47Danny Jones?

  And some of them like to stay in a

• 1:29:49Speaker 04

  Some of them are resident and they'll show up at the same place year after year. Whereas other ones like yeah, they're they're transient and they're offshore type. Uh there's the ones in Antarctica that focus on, you know, hunting uh the seals and the crab eater seals and

• 1:30:03Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, you've been to Antarctica, huh?

• 1:30:05Speaker 04

  I haven't been to Antarctica.

• 1:30:06Danny Jones?

  Oh, you haven't been to Antarctica?

• 1:30:07Speaker 04

  I've just seen that footage, but I have not been there. I was invited a few times through National Geographic, but it was always over Christmas. I'm a family man. I got kids. I don't want to miss Christmas like

• 1:30:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I'm with you.

• 1:30:16Speaker 04

  I mean, I love my job, but I, you know, TV is always gonna be there or you can always get another job.

• 1:30:22Danny Jones?

  I gotta miss Christmas and I gotta swim in like ten degree water.

• 1:30:25Speaker 04

  Freeze in that water. Exactly. But yeah, have you ever encountered orcas?

• 1:30:30Danny Jones?

  Never. I've heard lots of stories. Like I've heard Manny talk about some with them, another guy Forrest Galante. He said he jumped in a pod, jumped in front of a pod and they circled him, the little, you know, there was like, he explained there was like a big bull in front with the big giant tail. Or the big giant dorsal rather.

• 1:30:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Danny Jones?

  And then a bunch of the little baby cows or whatever like were circling around him, checking him out. He got like, he said he got within like ten feet of them. They were like

• 1:30:54Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:54Danny Jones?

  Big eyeballs looking at them and then they eventually just like got bored of him like this guy's fucking boring. I'm out of here.

• 1:30:59Speaker 04

  Well, that was a funny thing that Ingrid taught me. She said if the orcas get bored with you, which they will. She said, just act weird, act erratic, act like you're injured, start swimming with one fin and swim in a circle. So all this footage I captured off the north coast of uh North Island in New Zealand.

• 1:31:15Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:16Speaker 04

  And when I first jumped in, they swam right up to me and checked me out and they were like swimming around and checking. I was pretty nervous. And then after about like forty minutes of getting cool shots, I was struggling to get them to come close. So then I did what she told me. I started swimming with one fin and acting like I was injured and instantly they're like, what's wrong with him? What's wrong? And they swam over again and she was checking me out. And I I was like, why do they do that? They're like, they're just smart and they, when when things change, they notice.

• 1:31:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:31:42Speaker 04

  So she told me to like bang on my housing and swim in circles and act weird and then I started realizing, wow, they're getting a little too close. I'm gonna start acting more confident and relaxed again.

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• 1:32:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it is fascinating that never never attacked anyone.

• 1:32:55Danny Jones?

  It is fascinating. Did you see the stuff that came out? I don't know when this, when this was reported on, but there was apparently like some fishing boats where these orcas were like attacking it like systematically.

• 1:33:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, they just did a show this year on Shark Week about that where they are

• 1:33:10Danny Jones?

  What was that about?

• 1:33:11Speaker 04

  They, the rumor is, or the reports are that one of the baby orcas uh had a negative encounter with these boats out there. Like they harassed it or they they ran into it or they it got entangled with some of the lines or something. And the the patriarch, like the mother and and dad orcas, the the adults witnessed this and they're like vengeance. They're like, fuck these boats. They almost killed our our little, our our baby. And so they go out there and they ram boats, they disable the rudders. And it's like a thing, like they have become like um vengeance, like they they they don't like boats out there.

• 1:33:50Speaker 04

  Um but Ingrid would know best, but um yeah, they definitely don't like boats and they're they're trying, they've sunk a few sailboats out there.

• 1:33:57Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:58Speaker 04

  But I don't think they've ever

• 1:33:59Danny Jones?

  But they never like killed the people or

• 1:34:00Speaker 04

  Never injured the people. They're just taking the boats out, which is weird.

• 1:34:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:05Danny Jones?

  That's super weird, man. And it's, you know, the whole, the whole SeaWorld thing, what was the documentary that came out about the orcas?

• 1:34:11Speaker 04

  Blackfish.

• 1:34:11Danny Jones?

  Blackfish, yeah. Like, it's crazy to me that people still go to SeaWorld after that, you know?

• 1:34:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:17Danny Jones?

  People would still go and like witness this. I feel like in, you know, a couple of decades from now, people are gonna look back at that, like same way we look back at like slavery. You know, like how the fuck did we do, like you're driving these animals mentally insane that have like incredibly high intelligence that have brain, you know, their cerebral cortex or part of their cortex is like four times the size of ours and they're like they're they're measurably very intelligent.

• 1:34:43Speaker 04

  And their their whole, their their home is the entire ocean. They swim thousands and thousands and thousands of miles. Uh where there are some species that can withstand being in an aquarium. Uh they're like, you know, reef fish and fish that like don't travel between continents and don't need that exercise, so to speak. I'm not a huge fan of aquariums, but at the same time, there are certain, you know, what's the word? Um benefits where certain people can see something that they never would any other way.

• 1:35:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:35:14Speaker 04

  Uh kids that don't have the opportunity to go to the ocean.

• 1:35:16Danny Jones?

  For sure.

• 1:35:17Speaker 04

  Uh but again, orcas, the one of the most telling things I ever saw was like a shot of SeaWorld from uh from the Google Maps shot of it. And it showed the fucking parking lot, which was five acres to for humans to park their cars to see the the king of the ocean, the orca. And then they showed the orcas quarters, the swimming, the the little tiny bathtub that they kept the orca in. There was five acres of parking parking lot and uh a fucking two hundred yards for an orca to live. It's like, why don't you give the orca five acres to swim in? And build another parking lot somewhere else. I mean, it just shows it like yeah, like it's it's basically a circus.

• 1:35:59Danny Jones?

  That's what this aquarium down the street from here used to be, the Clearwater Marine Aquarium where they shot the Dolphin Tail movie.

• 1:36:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:36:05Danny Jones?

  They found that uh, well, they originally found that dolphin caught in a crab trap with a crab trap rope wrapped around his tail.

• 1:36:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:36:13Danny Jones?

  And they amputated the tail and they tried to build a prosthetic tail, whatever. The movie goes, Morgan Freeman was like a prosthetic guy and he built the dolphin the tail or whatever.

• 1:36:21Speaker 04

  Winter, right?

• 1:36:22Danny Jones?

  Winter the dolphin, yeah.

• 1:36:23Speaker 04

  So did you actually see? Did you, you worked on that, right?

• 1:36:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I worked on it with, that's how I met Pete Zuccarini on that movie and um it was cra, it was the most fun working with him because he did everything in the water, right? Like they're in the, they're like he's, he was working in his own little world, apart from the other camera departments, right, who are doing all the stuff on land. He was just like doing all his underwater stuff, building his he had this housing he built that was like the size of a Volkswagen.

• 1:36:46Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:36:47Danny Jones?

  Because they shot it in three D.

• 1:36:48Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:36:49Danny Jones?

  So like they had these red camera rigs where they had two cameras uh pointing at this crazy mirror thing.

• 1:36:55Speaker 04

  Beam splitter.

• 1:36:56Danny Jones?

  The beam splitter and they line up the two camera angles to make it three D.

• 1:37:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:37:00Danny Jones?

  It was a bomb, the experience was insane. That was like my film school doing that.

• 1:37:05Speaker 04

  Why did you uh, why didn't you continue with that? Why didn't, why'd you get out of filmmaking or are you still into it?

• 1:37:11Danny Jones?

  So I was very, that's all I ever wanted to do was be in like filmmaking and make movies and that kind of stuff. And then uh I didn't, I wasn't, I never got into film school because I got shitty grades in high school because I was always skipping school to go surf.

• 1:37:23Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:37:24Danny Jones?

  So I barely escaped graduating high school, like barely graduated.

• 1:37:27Speaker 04

  Barely, okay.

• 1:37:28Danny Jones?

  And uh didn't get accepted to any film schools. And then I got the opportunity to work on that movie because I knew uh I have a friend who like has connections in Clearwater or whatever and he's got me, he's like, hey, you could be a production assistant or whatever. And then I weaseled my way into being like an actual like camera department person.

• 1:37:44Speaker 04

  That's cool.

• 1:37:45Danny Jones?

  Um and then that whole experience made me realize I don't want to have anything to do with the movie business.

• 1:37:49Speaker 04

  Because of the Hollywood act like

• 1:37:51Danny Jones?

  It was a, to to me, like I worked construction when I was really young. That was the closest thing I'd ever done to work in construction. There was zero creativity

• 1:37:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:59Danny Jones?

  in any of it.

• 1:38:00Speaker 04

  Every different department.

• 1:38:01Danny Jones?

  Every different department, all these stupid rules.

• 1:38:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Danny Jones?

  Follow this, you know, schedule, so many moving parts.

• 1:38:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:08Danny Jones?

  You know, like my my favorite part about that was like getting to like learn from Pete and talk to Pete about like all the stuff that he's done. See how he's building these camera rigs.

• 1:38:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:38:18Danny Jones?

  Explaining how, he's teaching me all about like the light shafts and how like you shoot into the light shaft to get these crazy cool shots and stuff like that. Uh but all the dudes that I met that were working on that, like all the camera assistants there.

• 1:38:31Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:32Danny Jones?

  Uh they came from, you know, the the what is it? The um the unions, like the camera unions that are in Hollywood. And uh all these guys come from shooting one movie and go straight into shooting another movie. Like the guy, one of the guys I remember that I was working with closely in the camera department there, one of the camera assistants. He came straight from shooting The Dark Knight.

• 1:38:55Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:38:55Danny Jones?

  To shooting this.

• 1:38:56Speaker 04

  Is this uh Neil? Um geez, what was his name?

• 1:39:00Danny Jones?

  Uh this guy's name was Mickey.

• 1:39:01Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:39:02Danny Jones?

  He was actually like one of the other coolest guys that I met there. Like there was a lot of really cool guys like Mickey and Nick, but there was a lot of other guys that were just miserable.

• 1:39:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:12Danny Jones?

  Just hated their jobs.

• 1:39:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:14Danny Jones?

  They had the coolest job that any kid would dream of having.

• 1:39:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Danny Jones?

  But like these older dudes who've been doing this for so long. Were just not happy. They, you know, were on their third wives and they never saw their kids.

• 1:39:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:30Danny Jones?

  They're FaceTiming their kids every day. Like, that was like, that was the highlight of their day. The 10 minute FaceTime they had with their kids that they never saw. Just like, and after that, I was just like, I don't want to do this. Like, I want nothing to do with this. That's when I started doing everything online.

• 1:39:42Speaker 04

  And did you have a family at that point?

• 1:39:44Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:39:44Speaker 04

  No, but you knew that you didn't want to become that.

• 1:39:47Danny Jones?

  I knew I didn't want to become that.

• 1:39:48Speaker 04

  I only worked on a very, very few features. And the one that I did, it was with, it was a Terrence Malick film called Mud, with Matthew McConaughey. And I was a, I had a Red Epic camera and I got a housing and my buddy Paul Atkins, he's like a multi Emmy award winning amazing dude. He shoots a lot of stuff with Terrence Malick and these Hollywood stars and he said, hey, man, I want to use your camera and I'll, I'll hire you as a camera assistant. And like, all you gotta do is build the camera and I'm gonna do everything else. I got a focus puller and all this. But I remember being on set in Austin and like, I had to plug something in to charge batteries. And I went to go plug something in. He's like, whoa, whoa, bro. You, you can't move that fucking extension cord. That's electric.

• 1:40:32Speaker 04

  Your camera department. I'm like, well, I gotta charge these batteries. Like, whoa, well, the electric's on lunch break and it's a meal penalty and this and that. I'm like, what is all this shit? And there were so many people there that weren't really doing anything.

• 1:40:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:40:44Speaker 04

  But they're all following these rules that I thought the same thing. I'm like, screw this. I never want to work in this business. I love wildlife because a lot of people, it's a very small group of people. It's a team that wears multiple hats. You're shooting, producing, hosting, presenting, you're doing all this stuff and you have the freedom to like, plug in your own batteries and do your own thing. And you're not held to these like crazy union rules and schedules. I remember hitting up Pete, saying, hey, man, I want to get into shooting like some Hollywood stuff. He's like, no, you don't. He's like, kinda told me like, you got the perfect job. You're doing like the wildlife stuff, National Geographic Shark Week.

• 1:41:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20Speaker 04

  You get to have the fun and you don't have all these bullshit rules you gotta follow.

• 1:41:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:41:24Speaker 04

  You don't get the health insurance and all these benefits you get from the union, but who cares? Like, I'd rather be, I, I think Pete's got the-

• 1:41:32Danny Jones?

  The job security is like their big, biggest thing. They're so insecure about everything. I remember I won, there's one day where Pete was in like this little pool and he was shooting, he was shooting like a close up of the dolphin. It was an animatronic dolphin that they were using, like the stand in dolphin for some close up shots or whatever. And I took a photo with my cell phone and the set photographer threw a fit.

• 1:42:01Speaker 04

  Serious?

• 1:42:01Danny Jones?

  Reported me. Did they got, I had this write up on me. This guy was crying to everyone that I took a photo. And that's like threatening his job as the set photographer and all this stuff. And I was just like,

• 1:42:12Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:42:13Danny Jones?

  Fucking bitches. Like, yeah, that, it just put a bad taste in my mouth. But like Pete's in it, he's, he's different though, because he gets to basically do whatever the fuck he wants, you know, like, being the, the, there's so few water cinematographers.

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:42:29Danny Jones?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:42:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Danny Jones?

  Who really have like the creds that he has. He kinda gets a lot more freedom. He gets to do, he gets to call the shots, right? Because he's, you know, he shot all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. He did fucking Avatar.

• 1:42:42Speaker 04

  I've seen that picture with Johnny Depp. He's like with Johnny Depp, his camera's right here, Jack Sparrow, and he's like two inches from his face.

• 1:42:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, bro.

• 1:42:50Speaker 04

  There are those, those cool, you know, the cool moments that sort of maybe make it worth it. But like, when you asked me initially, like, how did I become one of the top, you know, shark cinematographers? Like, again, it was by accident. It was because of my passion for sharks. I never, never even dreamed of working for National Geographic or becoming a cinematographer. I wanted to learn about the sharks and the tagging and genetics and their migration routes.

• 1:43:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:15Speaker 04

  And it was just luck of the draw that Nat Geo came. And then they sent me around the world to do King Cobras and polar bears. I met my wife in the Serengeti, shooting a lion film. So it was like, it, and then I went to shoot, I've shot over 250 wildlife documentaries for Discovery, National Geographic, BBC. And it's been the greatest career, greatest life, life accident that ever happened to me.

• 1:43:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:40Speaker 04

  Cause it helped me meet my dream girl and create a family. But there were many times where I had to say no to jobs because I didn't want to miss my son's birthday or my daughter's birthday or, you know, you have to kind of like, because I didn't get into it as a filmmaker or wanting to be a filmmaker, I just wanted to do it for the sharks and for the passion of wildlife. It allowed me to say, no, I don't care about this film. Like, you hire the next guy. I mean, if you say no too much, then you definitely get phased out. But like, even now, like YouTube, I got to work with Mr. Beast off of Jupiter once and he was doing, doing this shoot. They hired me just to be like a shark logistics guy where I brought like these chain mail suits,

• 1:44:22Speaker 04

  underwater communications, full face masks, and like gave them like the basics on shark safety. And I'm like, so you sure I can film? I'd love to. I even offered, my son wanted to meet Mr. Beast, of course. I said, dude, I'll do, they were gonna pay me like 50 grand to show up for one day and bring gear and do nothing but sit there. I said, I will do this for free if my son can meet Mr. Beast. They're like, oh, man, we get this all the time, but like, we can't have minors on the set. Like, if he's 18, maybe. So they, anyway, long story short, Mr. Beast comes out, we go out off the coast of Jupiter. He's got this little Steve McQueen backpack with like a hundred thousand dollars in it. He's like, hey,

• 1:45:01Speaker 04

  you know, I'm off the coast of Calif, or I'm off here off the coast of Florida. This is a hundred thousand dollars. Those are sharks. And he throws it in the water. And they did this like paper rock scissors on who had to get it. And like, one of his subscribers was there. And the idea was like, the subscriber was gonna win the hundred thousand dollars, but the catch was he had to go swim and get it amongst a bunch of bull sharks.

• 1:45:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, geez.

• 1:45:21Speaker 04

  They were never gonna make him do it. They had one of Jimmy's like sidekick buddies do it, Chandler or something. But it was funny, Mr. Beast was on set for like literally 15 minutes. He got seasick. He did his like one line. He's like, this is a hundred thousand dollars. Those are sharks. He threw it in and he's like, get me out of here. He was really nice, really cool. He left his hat on the boat, so I stole his hat and I gave it to my, I mean, he's got plenty of hats, but I gave it to my son. So it worked out good. But I think YouTube is the way, like, is the way forward, man.

• 1:45:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah, totally, man. I mean, it's, TV is definitely not gonna be the future of this stuff. I mean, obviously, there's gonna be like a certain niche for like very high level wildlife documentaries, like what you're doing.

• 1:46:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:46:05Danny Jones?

  But like, I feel like most of the stuff's going independent, you know, with people self-publishing their own, doing their own stuff.

• 1:46:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:12Danny Jones?

  Posting it online. And, you know, especially like with the emergence of podcasting and all that stuff, people can go out, get the word out.

• 1:46:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Danny Jones?

  And, you know, I think that's good.

• 1:46:22Speaker 04

  I mean, how did you get into the podcast world? Like, to go from like, working, you know, potentially to become a filmmaker where you're working on Hollywood, Hollywood films to, to say, I'm not doing that because I don't like this lifestyle and all these rules. And then like surfing and everything else. Like, what, what brought you to, to this point where you, you thought podcasting is like a great way to?

• 1:46:43Danny Jones?

  Well, I was doing, I went from doing like the traditional stuff, like being a camera guy for TV shows, getting hired to do that kind of, that was like, this happened for me like in the middle of like the reality boom. Remember like Duck Dynasty was a thing?

• 1:46:56Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:56Danny Jones?

  And all those kind of shows. There was lots of those things. Those shows were like little camera operator jobs were popping up all around Florida and I would get those and I would do as much underwater stuff as I possibly could. And eventually I got into like, like producing and like funding and like pitching TV pilots where I like come up with my own idea.

• 1:47:16Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:47:16Danny Jones?

  And, or like, me and my friends would like come up with an idea and we would like all work together to try to like, shoot something that we thought was cool. And then use our connections in Hollywood to try to like pitch it to TV network, or not TV, the production companies that had the relationships with the TV networks.

• 1:47:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:47:32Danny Jones?

  And then we spent, I spent, I remember I spent so much time working on a couple of different projects. I got one project like all the way to a green light meeting with, with, I think, A and E.

• 1:47:45Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:47:45Danny Jones?

  Was like looking at doing it. And it was like, it got killed at the green light meeting. And I remember just being like so fed up with the emotional roller coaster of like, oh my God, this is, something's gonna happen. Finally, this is all gonna pay off to like, no, nothing's gonna happen. This was all for nothing.

• 1:48:01Speaker 04

  One random exec doesn't like your idea and it's like, nope, not happening.

• 1:48:05Danny Jones?

  Like, how is this, you know, show that you've put all this blood, sweat and tears into for the last five years gonna fit our advertiser? Uh, our, our, our list of advertisers that are currently paying us. So like, such a backwards way of fucking doing it. It's so frustrating.

• 1:48:18Speaker 04

  They're not even looking at the show. They're just looking at the advertising revenue.

• 1:48:21Danny Jones?

  Exactly. And then, you know, once, they're not really buying your reel. They're just buying like the audience that could potentially be interested in that, you know? So I was like, at one point, I was like so fed up. I took a bunch of the footage that we had been working on for five years and I, I like re-edited it into 10 minute episode chunks and posted on YouTube.

• 1:48:39Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:48:39Danny Jones?

  And that's when my YouTube started to take off, doing that stuff. And then I started to branch out, do more, kind of like weird little subculture, vicey style documentaries and stuff like that. And one I did was actually in Madeira Beach, not too far away from here. John's Pass, which is at one point the grouper capital of the world.

• 1:48:59Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:48:59Danny Jones?

  Like, more grouper was caught and brought in through John's Pass, which is like 20 minutes south of here.

• 1:49:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:49:04Danny Jones?

  And we would always see these sort of like alcoholic dude, junkie fisherman dudes hanging out at this one bar at the 7, by the 7-Eleven all, all the time. And one day, me and my buddy were like, well, we decided to go interview this guy. And we started talking to him and whatever. He's like, he brought us back to his houseboat he lived on. And we went on his houseboat and he had these like laser lights and he was blasting like Metallica and Rob Zombie. He was like this little kid in a grown man's body who like, and he started explaining to us like what the whole fishing industry was like for him. I was like, how are you like this like homeless, drug addict, alcoholic, but also a fisherman? Like, how does, how does this work?

• 1:49:49Danny Jones?

  And yeah, this is the, this is one of the episodes of the documentary. This is, this is his houseboat right here. So he had laser lights and fog machines and posters. He had a stack of porno DVDs like three feet tall. And like, living this crazy lifestyle.

• 1:50:05Speaker 04

  And this is a random dude you like met outside of a 7-Eleven?

• 1:50:07Danny Jones?

  We met in front of a 7-Eleven, yeah. So we went, we went to 7-Eleven, we bought a 12 pack of Bush. And we sat there and drank with him and just like hung out with him and watched him do his thing.

• 1:50:19Danny Jones?

  And it led us down this crazy rabbit hole, the commercial fishing industry around here.

• 1:50:23Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:50:24Danny Jones?

  And it, and basically like the way it works is, uh, guys like this, they're like the lowest rung of, of the fishing industry. So there's like the people who own the quota, the people who own the fish houses. Then there's like the boat owners. Sometimes the boat owners are also the ones who owned the, the fish houses. They own a bunch of boats.

• 1:50:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:45Danny Jones?

  And then there's like these guys who are like the lowest level grunt workers who are like

• 1:50:48Speaker 04

  Doing all the hard work.

• 1:50:49Danny Jones?

  Doing all the hard work, like, like baiting the hooks and like putting out the, reeling in the long lines and all that stuff.

• 1:50:54Speaker 04

  Getting paid the least.

• 1:50:55Danny Jones?

  Getting paid the very, very least.

• 1:50:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:50:58Danny Jones?

  And they, so when they're going out longlining, they're, they're gone for like seven to 10 days at a time offshore.

• 1:51:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:05Danny Jones?

  These guys, they finally come in, they hand these dudes a couple of grand, like five grand at most probably. And then they're on shore for a week, right? Maybe two weeks.

• 1:51:14Speaker 04

  Blowing all their money on.

• 1:51:15Danny Jones?

  They blow it all on prostitutes, crack, booze, cocaine, everything, right?

• 1:51:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:51:21Danny Jones?

  And there's most, some of them are just living out of hotels. And no one gives a shit about them. They're just continuing to do this and be degenerates.

• 1:51:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:29Danny Jones?

  And then, then if they run out of money and they're all fucked up on pills and whatever it is. And then they're like, they run out of money, they have to go out fishing again. So they go knocking on all the fish houses. They try to get a job going out in a boat to catch more fish so they can get more money to get fucked up.

• 1:51:42Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:51:42Danny Jones?

  And when they go out to sea for 10 days, they like rehab at sea. They call it sea hab.

• 1:51:47Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:51:47Danny Jones?

  So they're literally like detoxing at sea.

• 1:51:49Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:51:50Danny Jones?

  While they're fishing to get more money.

• 1:51:51Speaker 04

  That should be a thing, actually.

• 1:51:52Danny Jones?

  To rinse and repeat, right? For real.

• 1:51:53Speaker 04

  It's really good, man.

• 1:51:55Danny Jones?

  And like it, it basically like we, we learned about this whole quota system on the golf, uh, with like the fishing industry here to where like it's monopolized to where now like to own the, the certain quota. The way, the way it worked is like back in the day in like the eighties or the seventies, it was just open fishing, derby fishing.

• 1:52:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:52:14Danny Jones?

  Like people could go out, catch as much fish as they wanted. They'd come in, they'd weigh it. And like it would be documented on how mu- many pounds of red snapper or grouper that you caught that year.

• 1:52:24Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:52:25Danny Jones?

  And, uh, there was an allotment, right? So they, they were only allowed to catch, just say, let's say a million pounds a year. So if they caught all of that million pounds by November, they had to stop fishing for the rest of the year.

• 1:52:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:52:38Danny Jones?

  So they changed it into this quota system to where the federal government came in and allocated a certain amount of quota to certain boats. Based on their previous catch history.

• 1:52:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:52:48Danny Jones?

  So there was guys that got handed like a hundred, 200,000 pounds of quota every year by the federal government.

• 1:52:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:52:57Danny Jones?

  Right? And this was like the best retirement plan known to man.

• 1:53:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:00Danny Jones?

  And then other guys got a little bit less quota, other guys got more quota. So a lot of these guys, since they got handed this like gift of, from the federal government of this allotment every year that no one else can get.

• 1:53:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:13Danny Jones?

  They started leasing that quota out to other fishermen.

• 1:53:16Speaker 04

  Right. And they can do that.

• 1:53:18Danny Jones?

  And then they can do that. Yeah. And then, and then what happened is you started, they, they were able to sell the quota. So like dudes on Wall Street were buying fishing quota and then leasing it out to people in the fishing community.

• 1:53:30Speaker 04

  For even bigger prices.

• 1:53:31Danny Jones?

  For even bigger, yeah. So like the money got less and less and less because people started trading the quota like fucking stock. Where like they're, they don't do that in other communities, like in the, in the Northeast, like in Maine and stuff like that where I think it's a law to where the boat owner actually, or the, the owner of the quota has to be on the boat. Like at the helm, catching the fish. And it's more of like a

• 1:53:50Speaker 04

  They can't trade it like a commodity.

• 1:53:51Danny Jones?

  They can't trade it like a commodity. It's more of like a cultural family thing that they actually like, you know, they, they treat it more seriously in certain parts of the country. But yeah, anyways, we did this crazy documentary and it pissed off a lot of people.

• 1:54:04Speaker 04

  Right now?

• 1:54:04Danny Jones?

  I believe so.

• 1:54:05Speaker 04

  And they still sell the quotas and they, and you said it pissed off a lot of people?

• 1:54:09Danny Jones?

  It pissed off a lot of the, uh, owners of the fish houses.

• 1:54:12Speaker 04

  Cause it made them look bad.

• 1:54:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it made them look terrible.

• 1:54:15Speaker 04

  Did you, I've, I've had some run in with fishermen where, who've threatened to kill my family because I've been outspoken about the shark fishing tournaments where they're like

• 1:54:23Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:54:23Speaker 04

  Killed tournaments in Alabama or off, off of Florida. And you know, I'm pretty outspoken about like, hey, it's fine for sport fisheries, if you're going to eat the shark, but just to like murder something for a trophy. I often like, I'm pretty outspoken, but I've had multiple fishermen say, hey, I know where you live. Like you can look up anybody's address in America through like the, you know, tax websites and anything else. And when they started threatening my family, I realized like, is it really worth to speak out about like trying to save sharks when I got people saying, I know where you live and I'm gonna kill your kids kind of thing? I would screenshot and save it and report it to like Instagram, whatever. But like, I never went to the cops about it because it was just kind of like

• 1:55:02Speaker 04

  you just like degenerate fishermen. I, I got nothing against fishermen. I think they work hard. There are some bad apples out there, just like anything else where they're just malicious. They hate sharks. They hate people that love sharks and they want to make an example of it.

• 1:55:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Speaker 04

  Um, and you were talking about these quotas. It's funny, um, NOAA has this thing called the Shark Research Fishery. It's been going on since 2008 and it started with sandbar sharks, which they admitted were overfished and on the decline. So since 2008, NOAA's been issuing these quotas to up to 200,000 pounds of sandbar shark that can be caught and sampled every year, um, to basically do a study on the size, the sex and the abundance of sandbar sharks.

• 1:55:49Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:55:50Speaker 04

  They've been doing it for 18 years now. How many years did they need to catch 200, 200,000 pounds of sharks? To, to tell how old they get and what size and sex they are. The craziest thing is these fishermen that get these quotas are allowed to sell the sharks. And the other bizarre and extremely, um, what's the word suspicious thing about it is sandbar sharks have some of the largest dorsal fins of any shark species.

• 1:56:17Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:56:17Speaker 04

  Hammerheads have like the biggest dorsal fins with regards to their body ratio. But sandbars, which they admitted are on the decline and overfished, have been getting these 200,000 pound quotas every year to fishermen that are allowed to catch them legally, kill them, and then sell the entire bodies, which in turn, uh, contain the fins. Um, like I'm, I, I strongly believe it's like subsidized federal shark fin trade. Fishermen hate to hear that because like, they're like, oh bullshit, we have a permit, this is for research, but how many years you gotta murder sharks to prove that they get to this size, this sex? And they, they travel in these areas. Like it doesn't make sense to me.

• 1:56:59Speaker 04

  There's also another quota of 100,000, uh, pounds of large coastal sharks that can be caught and sampled.

• 1:57:05Danny Jones?

  And this is NOAA?

• 1:57:07Speaker 04

  This is NOAA.

• 1:57:08Danny Jones?

  Can you look that up, Steve? What was it called again? The NOAA what?

• 1:57:10Speaker 04

  It's called the NOAA Shark, uh, NOAA Shark Research Fishery. Shark Research Fishery, where they're allowed to have a, um, allowed to catch and kill these sharks for research purposes. Uh, on a species that's already considered on the decline and overfished. It doesn't make sense to me, but if you think about it, the fisheries around the world are a billion, multi-billion dollar industry.

• 1:57:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, totally.

• 1:57:34Speaker 04

  Even in Mexico, now the cartels are heavily involved in the tuna fishery. It's basically like the drug trade, but it's somewhat sustainable where they can go and harvest all these tuna and everything else. Uh, the Shark Research Fishery. Yeah. It's like, so some of these are the fishermen that threatened to kill my wife and kids because I'm like, wow, this is messed up. Since 2008, you've been getting quotas of up to 200,000 pounds of, uh, dressed like the entire shark.

• 1:58:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:00Speaker 04

  For research purposes and they'll flaunt it. They'll, they'll post pictures of them sitting on like hundreds of dead sharks and saying doing shark research. Um, but what's crazy is like they, um, it's, it's approved. It's federal. It's subsidized. It's subsidized and they're allowed to sell the sharks after. So if I had a permit to catch and kill a bunch of sharks and sell their whole bodies, including their fins. Um, I would be pretty stoked about it.

• 1:58:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's very similar to, you know, what's, how they do the, the quotas here where it's like subsidized by the government. And you know, the problem is when you get the government involved and you create this monopoly on top of it, like again, I have nothing, I have no problems with fishing. I've been fishing my entire life and, but the problem is when you start to give people like this, this blank check.

• 1:58:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:51Danny Jones?

  To, to basically harvest this one pot of gold. And they start making that, that money starts to blind you, right? And then people start questioning that, like they're threatening your livelihood. So it's like

• 1:59:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It, it, it becomes bastardized to a degree where like you're no longer, you know, looking out for the, the local community or like the, the lifestyle of fishing and like what that, what that entails with everyone that comes there and like

• 1:59:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:59:21Danny Jones?

  It, it's just, you found this one niche where you can make a ton of profit. And you don't want people questioning that. And that's just human nature.

• 1:59:33Speaker 04

  And that's what started basically your, your YouTube kickoff where you, did you, did you foresee any of that? Or were you just like, well, man, look at these crazy coke meth head fishermen. They're, they're entertaining. People will find them funny. And then you stumbled upon the quota system and then stumbled upon the Wall Street.

• 1:59:48Danny Jones?

  I had no idea that existed.

• 1:59:49Speaker 04

  And, but that's what people took notice of, right? That's what they were most fascinated by, this dark underworld of quotas and

• 1:59:56Danny Jones?

  I think so, yeah. I think that as well as like, you know, these were some pretty wild fucking characters that we were interviewing and hanging out with. Like it was entertaining as well.

• 2:00:06Speaker 04

  And you think it's still going on today?

• 2:00:07Danny Jones?

  I don't know. I don't know. I haven't really looked into it. I'm, I'm pretty sure that quota system is still happening.

• 2:00:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:00:14Danny Jones?

  But like every single dude, every single, there was a lady as well, that were like, we made subjects of that documentary. They're all dead. They were all dead within like six years of us publishing that thing.

• 2:00:24Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 2:00:24Danny Jones?

  Cause they were all super strung out on drugs, you know?

• 2:00:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:27Danny Jones?

  Um,

• 2:00:27Speaker 04

  It's not an easy lifestyle.

• 2:00:29Danny Jones?

  No. But then I, so I was doing a lot of those documentaries like that and like other things on YouTube and you know, you know what it's like to make films and documentaries. It's not like a quick thing. It takes a lot of time, a lot of editing, a lot of going out and shooting more stuff and that's when podcasts was, that's when I started to notice podcasts becoming a thing. This was like 2015, maybe, 2014, 2015.

• 2:00:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:53Danny Jones?

  And so we started doing just like me and my friends would do.

• 2:00:57Danny Jones?

  One podcast a month, two a month, maybe just like to fill the gaps so we have more shit, more content on our YouTube channel.

• 2:01:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:01:04Danny Jones?

  And then eventually the podcast just started getting more attention than the actual documentaries that I was spending so much goddamn time creating.

• 2:01:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:01:11Danny Jones?

  And so I went, so like my whole idea with the podcast was like, I'm just gonna treat this like the documentaries with no editing or B-roll.

• 2:01:18Speaker 04

  Oh, that's cool.

• 2:01:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, so it worked out. Yeah, it's way easier. I can do way more.

• 2:01:22Speaker 04

  That's cool, man.

• 2:01:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So yes, the commercial individual fishing quota IFQ program

• 2:01:30Danny Jones?

  remains fully in effect.

• 2:01:32Speaker 04

  All right, and allocations can be bought, sold, traded, often referred to as leasing. I mean,

• 2:01:38Danny Jones?

  It's crazy, dude.

• 2:01:39Speaker 04

  The government does what they want, man. And like, when you speak out against it, like, I have a lot of good friends that are, you know, bona fide amazing shark scientists and marine researchers, and they collaborate with Noah, and they, you know, I think Noah does some good things, but I just, I'm pretty outspoken about some of their support of like, this like sustained killing of sharks when they're supposed to be like protecting fisheries and studying them. But for 18 years, they've been killing 200,000 pounds of sandbar sharks every year, which just so happened to have massive dorsal fins.

• 2:02:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:12Speaker 04

  Um, which are very valuable on the, on the, you know, the black market and whatnot. But it's basically legalized. So, I mean, even saying this, people are gonna get pissed, like, oh, you don't know what you're talking about. We're doing research. It's important that we murder sharks for 18 years in a row.

• 2:02:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:26Speaker 04

  To know how old they get and their sex and size and where they hang out. But I don't know.

• 2:02:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:30Speaker 04

  It is what it is. The government's done way weirder shit, you know?

• 2:02:33Danny Jones?

  Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, even like that cove documentary, where those guys were going out and slaughtering all those dolphins in that cove. And like, they were feeding that to all the public schools.

• 2:02:43Speaker 04

  To the kids.

• 2:02:44Danny Jones?

  All the public schools and the kids were getting this dolphin meat,

• 2:02:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:02:47Danny Jones?

  which is super high in mercury.

• 2:02:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:02:49Danny Jones?

  And it was creating all these health issues with people there.

• 2:02:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:02:53Danny Jones?

  And like the Yakuza cartel or the Yakuza gang, whatever, in Japan. They were like somehow in on it and threatening Rick O'Barry and like, dude, that was a crazy clandestine mission that they did for that film. Like, and I don't know if that's still going on today or not.

• 2:03:10Speaker 04

  I think that the Tajee dolphins, they're still killing them. I'm not sure if they're, if they're still feeding them to school kids. And, you know, I know, you know, they still eat whales and this and that. And again, like, I can see both sides of everything. If something's sustainable and well managed, then sure. And it's not corrupt and monopolized and like just shady business going on behind the scenes, then sure. Like, I'm not a total tree hugger, shark hugger. Like, if it's, you can always see both sides of a situation. But when it becomes like run by the underworld and the government's backing it, and they're threatening to kill people if they expose it any further, then like, it's, it's pretty shady.

• 2:03:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:03:48Danny Jones?

  For sure. I think, I think it was, um, what was the name of the dude that we talked to, Steve, on the, we did the Patreon episode with him?

• 2:03:58Speaker 04

  It was Captain, um,

• 2:04:00Danny Jones?

  He's the guy that's banned from the US.

• 2:04:02Speaker 04

  Oh, Paul Watson?

• 2:04:03Danny Jones?

  Yes, Paul Watson.

• 2:04:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:05Danny Jones?

  He was telling us about this one specific like pirate ship that catches like a huge percentage of the illegal fish around the world every year.

• 2:04:14Speaker 04

  I'm sure.

• 2:04:15Danny Jones?

  And he was explaining to us of like, the entire seafood industry, like illegal fishing caught from pirates like this is like, a vast majority of it, like more than 50%.

• 2:04:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Which blew my fucking mind, dude.

• 2:04:30Speaker 04

  Like the piracy on the high seas and the illegal fishing and like, all over the planet. Like, um, I mean, I'm not gonna point fingers, but there's certain countries that will fish just on the border of like the, you know, the maritime zones where they're allowed to, and they'll sneak in at nighttime and sneak out, like, and there's people being paid behind the scenes to let it happen. I mean, it's like, uh, it's, yeah, the gold of the ocean. And when there's a lot of money involved, people will do whatever they need to, to get it.

• 2:04:58Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:04:59Speaker 04

  It's pretty freaky.

• 2:04:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And then like, also that, that, when it comes to the shark fin stuff, where they're just slaughtering all of those sharks and bringing them in and just chopping their fins off and letting their bodies just like fall down to the bottom of the ocean.

• 2:05:12Speaker 04

  It's brutal.

• 2:05:13Danny Jones?

  That's in, that's mainly in Japan?

• 2:05:15Speaker 04

  It's all over. I mean, uh, Asia, like China, Japan, a lot of the, you know, far east, they're, they're big into shark fins. It used to be like where it was only for rich people, you'd have shark fin soup at your wedding. But then like the Chinese middle class exploded with, with money. Um, and then they were able to afford shark fin. And then it was like at everybody's wedding. Um, and it's like, if you're gonna catch and kill sharks, like, you can use the entire carcass, the entire body for other things, even like dog food and weird things and makeup and all this stuff like, but having a boat full of dead sharks as opposed to just a boat full of fins, you can harvest way more fins and store way more fins than you can having to land the entire carcass.

• 2:05:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:58Speaker 04

  So it just doesn't make financial sense.

• 2:06:00Danny Jones?

  I wonder why they, you know, you would think that they would be able to make tons of money off the rest of the body, right? Like, why would they just discard it like

• 2:06:06Speaker 04

  But nowhere near what they can make on the fins, you know, it's exponentially more valuable. And it's weird because it's like eating somebody's ear. It's like cartilage, it's just like a weird tasteless. They put like chicken broth on it to make it taste good. Uh, it's just like rhino horn and like tiger penis and all the weird stuff.

• 2:06:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:24Speaker 04

  Um, a friend of mine has asked me, he's like, hey, man, you should develop something where it's like synthetic shark fin or some kind of shark fin that's made, like, that gives you the same effect, which is basically nothing. But, um, I don't know. I, I never really wanted to get into like, trying to sell even synthetic animal body parts.

• 2:06:42Danny Jones?

  No, that's a weird thing. That's a weird thing that happens to you when, uh, I don't know, maybe when you like acquire enormous amounts of wealth, you just want weird shit.

• 2:06:51Speaker 04

  Weird shit.

• 2:06:51Danny Jones?

  You know, like rhino horn to make your dick hard or fucking shark fin soup or whatever.

• 2:06:56Speaker 04

  Or like that.

• 2:06:57Danny Jones?

  They have weird beliefs that these things do shit for them, you know?

• 2:06:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. That's where it all stems from. But like, when you, when you do the math or the science on it, there's like no nutritional value. There's nothing really it does. And when they introduce Viagra and all this other shit, they can get you hard and like, the aphrodisiac effect that they think it has. Um, but yeah, there's some weird, there's some weird shit out there. I mean, I'm sure they can point fingers at us too.

• 2:07:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I just, I don't know. I don't get, I don't understand psychologically, the people that are like the trophy hunters, you know, that like want to, like, what sort of like hit, dopamine hit, or what sort of like gap in their psyche are they filling or like lack thereof?

• 2:07:42Speaker 04

  It's weird.

• 2:07:43Danny Jones?

  By just killing this thing and posing with it for nothing, to do nothing with it.

• 2:07:47Speaker 04

  It's weird.

• 2:07:48Danny Jones?

  And they spend hundreds of, the one thing I will say is, I've heard the argument against it, is that the, the locals in those African countries, they charge like hundreds of thousands of dollars to those trophy hunters for the tags.

• 2:08:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:08:03Danny Jones?

  And a lot of that money goes to like helping the local communities and stuff like that.

• 2:08:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:08:07Danny Jones?

  So like, maybe if there's like an older elephant or like an older rhino, like, go ahead, sell the tag for 500 grand, let this rich fuck come kill it.

• 2:08:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:08:15Danny Jones?

  It'll help the community.

• 2:08:16Speaker 04

  No, I've heard that too. And I mean, still, I just can't understand the mentality when they like murder a giraffe or a lion and pose with them. I mean, there are some funny stories where like, trophy hunters have like tried to kill like bull elephant and it's, you know, tramples and kills them and they like instant karma kind of thing.

• 2:08:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:34Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, I never really, never really understood that. I mean, I think if you get a chance to see some of these predators in the wild or these amazing animals, like in their natural habitat, living and thriving, like you develop like a love for them as opposed to like just wanting to,

• 2:08:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:50Speaker 04

  you know, put them up on your wall.

• 2:08:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:52Speaker 04

  Um, it's weird.

• 2:08:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And I, just for me, like one in the back of my head, it's always just been like, I don't, I don't not necessarily want to kill a shark because of

• 2:09:05Danny Jones?

  the shark. Like, I don't, like, I don't really, it's, it's kind of like a selfish thing for me where it's like karma. I spend so much time in the water.

• 2:09:13Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:09:13Danny Jones?

  Just, I don't want to kill a shark because I don't want that to somehow come bite me in the ass later. You know what I mean?

• 2:09:19Speaker 04

  Literally, yeah. Oh, I, I believe in karma like in full, full, on every level.

• 2:09:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:25Speaker 04

  Like,

• 2:09:26Danny Jones?

  Especially, I mean, how could you not when you're surrounding yourself with fucking wild animals all the time?

• 2:09:31Speaker 04

  And I hear a lot of fishermen say that, the reason they don't get in the water because like, yeah, my, my shark karma is not, not good.

• 2:09:38Danny Jones?

  Too far gone.

• 2:09:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, but yeah, I mean, back to, it's amazing to me that like, I've been doing it for like 20 years, swimming with like more great white sharks in more locations than anyone on the planet. Not to like brag, it's just like for credibility. And time and time again, um, they could have, at any point in time swimming with these animals, they could have killed me if they wanted to. But like, they're some of the most polite predators on the planet. They're not puppy dogs, but they're intelligent, they're, they're polite, and they like, they let you interact with them, which is crazy. Like, you can't really do that with crocodiles. Like, uh,

• 2:10:14Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:10:14Speaker 04

  I know you had Chris, uh, one of the,

• 2:10:16Danny Jones?

  Gillette?

• 2:10:16Speaker 04

  Gillette, right? But, uh, he was part of the Gator Boys, right? And then, I don't know if he told you the story or you know about the other Gator Boy that had both of his legs ripped off by a Nile crocodile with, um, one of Manny's buddies, Mark Rackley. Do you know Rackley?

• 2:10:31Danny Jones?

  Mm-mm.

• 2:10:31Speaker 04

  He's a crazy cameraman that filmed a lot of the stuff with Manny and the Wild Boys. And he's one of the most cavalier, craziest, craziest cameraman on the planet. Like, he was recently up in, uh, Cape Cod. That's actually not him, which is funny. He is the one on the far right though, where it says Mark Rackley.

• 2:10:49Danny Jones?

  Older dude?

• 2:10:50Speaker 04

  Uh, far right, yeah.

• 2:10:51Danny Jones?

  Oh, that guy.

• 2:10:52Speaker 04

  Right there. Uh, he's a total badass, but he, um, he actually jumped in the water with a feeding great white shark off of Cape Cod recently. Um, and he's just nuts. Like, he's fearless.

• 2:11:04Danny Jones?

  But he has no legs?

• 2:11:06Speaker 04

  Sorry, no. So Mark Rackley filmed, uh, Chris Gillette's co-host buddy, uh, in Botswana, getting, uh, attacked by a Nile crocodile that ripped off both of his legs.

• 2:11:18Danny Jones?

  Shh.

• 2:11:18Speaker 04

  And Rackley filmed it, was there, and Rackley actually saved his life by, uh, swimming up and like pushing the croc off or just like getting him to disengage.

• 2:11:29Danny Jones?

  Good lord.

• 2:11:30Speaker 04

  And Rackley actually posted it on, um,

• 2:11:32Danny Jones?

  The video?

• 2:11:32Speaker 04

  X. Yeah, it was on Twitter. I don't know if it got taken down, but, um,

• 2:11:36Danny Jones?

  See if you can find, I bet you it didn't. There's lots of crazy stuff on X.

• 2:11:39Speaker 04

  If you type in like crocodile rips off legs.

• 2:11:43Danny Jones?

  Nile crocodile attack Mark Rackley?

• 2:11:48Speaker 04

  Attack the other. Yeah, it might, but it might be linked directly.

• 2:11:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's the one who posted it.

• 2:11:53Speaker 04

  Crocodile attack rips legs off. And then type in Gator Boy because he was one of the Gator Boys. Boy.

• 2:12:01Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:12:02Speaker 04

  Florida man survives a horrific 12 foot. Injured cameraman severed eight.

• 2:12:08Danny Jones?

  So copy and paste that into an X search.

• 2:12:12Danny Jones?

  Cause it probably won't be on the internet.

• 2:12:13Speaker 04

  Oh, there's Rackley. He got bit by.

• 2:12:15Danny Jones?

  Oh geez.

• 2:12:15Speaker 04

  A shark in a canal in the Keys. He lives in the Keys.

• 2:12:19Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 2:12:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:12:20Danny Jones?

  What kind of shark? A blue shark?

• 2:12:22Speaker 04

  Blue shark. Yeah. I was like, bro, are you high? Like, there's no way it was a blue. He said it was a, it was a blue shark.

• 2:12:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, is this it?

• 2:12:29Speaker 04

  No, this, I haven't seen this one.

• 2:12:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, this guy looks dead.

• 2:12:33Speaker 04

  This guy does not.

• 2:12:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, no, he's alive, but the alligator is right there. It's like AI.

• 2:12:38Speaker 04

  Holding him? That might be AI. Yeah.

• 2:12:40Danny Jones?

  Might be.

• 2:12:40Speaker 04

  This was like really murky water, um, Okavango crocodile attack. It's like shot silhouette like from underneath. Free diving. Like, I feel like maybe they pulled it, but we've seen all this crazy stuff.

• 2:12:55Danny Jones?

  So it was from, it was from Rackley's account?

• 2:12:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, it was Rackley shot. I'm not sure if it was his account. But, um, crocodile rips leg off Gator Boy. Weird.

• 2:13:06Danny Jones?

  One of the things I heard about, uh, Crocs and Gators, even if you get bit like a minor bite, you gotta dump bleach on it because the things have like crazy bacteria from all the dead animals they eat and stuff.

• 2:13:16Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 2:13:16Danny Jones?

  Manny was said he got bit on the back by an, like a, a canal gator. Where it was like just a couple scratches. He had like a loose wet suit on and the thing was behind him, like grabbed his wet suit, but it actually like punctured his skin a little bit.

• 2:13:30Speaker 04

  Scratched.

• 2:13:30Danny Jones?

  And he said like the, like the backwood medicine they teach you to do is like just dump bleach on. The doctors tell you not to do that, but all the guys that are back there dealing with the gators, they say just dump bleach.

• 2:13:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:13:40Danny Jones?

  Cause it'll kill.

• 2:13:41Speaker 04

  I would do that. I mean.

• 2:13:42Danny Jones?

  I would trust those guys before I trust the, the doctor, the hospital.

• 2:13:45Speaker 04

  I would probably go to the doctor after, but I would still do that in the meantime. And that's the thing, like I've been on a few shoots where people have been bit by sharks. It's mostly on the hand. I was on a shoot with Shaquille O'Neal and my safety diver was behind me. It was in the Bahamas with reef sharks. So they're like pretty chill, but one of the reef sharks got in this, in the cage with Shaq, which was pretty funny. And, um, but I turned around and I looked, my, my safety diver was gone. I was like, that's weird, but whatever. The reef sharks. I wasn't worried. Turned out like he got bit by a reef badly on the hand, but he was embarrassed. He didn't want to pop up in the middle of like the shack shoot and make a scene. So he swam underwater to one of the safety boats. Told the safety boat to take him back to land. He took himself to the hospital.

• 2:14:29Speaker 04

  But it ripped open, like you could see all of his tendons and all of this, uh, uh, cause like it bit him and he ripped his hand out, like a knee jerk reaction to pull it out. Whereas like.

• 2:14:39Danny Jones?

  Right. Don't do that.

• 2:14:40Speaker 04

  If you can think and it's not trying to remove your hand and you can open it, but.

• 2:14:43Danny Jones?

  So those things could spin real quick and just completely detach your hand.

• 2:14:46Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:14:47Danny Jones?

  When you go out on your, on your dives, do you always bring like tourniquets and shit with you?

• 2:14:51Speaker 04

  I always have a tourniquet. I even have one in my backpack here. I always travel in the car or in a backpack when I travel anywhere. Um, but always on my BCD, I have one strapped and then I usually give one to my safety diver in case like it happens to me or him or something like that. But yeah, it's good to be prepared. I've never had to, never had to use one. I've had a few close calls, but, um. Yeah, it's good to, good to stop the bleed when you can.

• 2:15:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I can't, I mean.

• 2:15:18Speaker 04

  Have you ever had any, uh, super close calls with filming or any kind of?

• 2:15:22Danny Jones?

  No, not other than what I told you.

• 2:15:24Speaker 04

  Seven eleven?

• 2:15:25Danny Jones?

  No, nothing like, nothing luckily with animals. I've been, I've been in the water with like lots of sharks and stuff and, but never had any close calls with animals. Thank God.

• 2:15:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 2:15:35Danny Jones?

  I had, uh, like that, that scuba diving accident or where almost, it was almost an accident where I ran out of air. And then, um. There was another time in the Cayman Islands where you're free diving. We were just like swimming through caves.

• 2:15:48Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:15:48Danny Jones?

  Where we would just like swim down, free diving, like swim through like a hole in the reef and then like swim through it and then swim out the other hole.

• 2:15:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:15:54Danny Jones?

  You know, just like.

• 2:15:55Speaker 04

  Caught in there?

• 2:15:56Danny Jones?

  Like a, like a thrill. You know what I mean? Cause it's really cool and beautiful. So clear.

• 2:16:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:16:00Danny Jones?

  And, uh, I did, we were doing it one day and, um, I followed my buddy in through this little tiny hole in the reef and we were swimming along the sand. We're probably thirty, twenty five, thirty feet deep. And, uh, he was exiting through a little hole, like the only exit that I was aware of. He was exiting and he was like taking a sweet time. So I was like, I'm kind of running out of breath. I'm not gonna wait. I'm gonna keep going.

• 2:16:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. To another hole.

• 2:16:24Danny Jones?

  To another hole. And I, I couldn't find another hole. And this was like, I think this is probably the closest I ever got to death because I actually saw my life flashing before my eyes. Like my whole life was playing in reverse.

• 2:16:34Speaker 04

  For real?

• 2:16:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Like in my vision.

• 2:16:37Speaker 04

  You always hear about that, but I've.

• 2:16:38Danny Jones?

  In my vision, like everything, all like the, the, the most like important moments of my life were sort of like playing back in my, in my mind. Cause I thought like this could be it. Cause I couldn't find an exit and then finally like, when I was barely had any air left, I saw one little light shaft coming through and I saw the hole. I came up through it and I could barely fit. I fit like my head and my shoulders came through it, but it was so tight. The reef was like scraping my torso. Cause the hole was so small. And I like barely made it through. Dude, that was, yeah. Two minutes. Yeah. Those, those two close calls were like enough for me to like dial it back.

• 2:17:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, man. I've never had my life flash before my eyes. I've, I've heard about that. I've had some scary encounters, but never were I. Never were, um. I was in a, like a self propelled cage in that same place where I showed you the footage of the two great whites swimming over in my head. We were doing a night dive. And, um, we were in this self propelled cage where you, we had thrusters and, uh, little like DPVs, dive propulsion vehicles and you could. Put air into these ballasts, into this system to bring yourself up a little, but.

• 2:17:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:45Speaker 04

  It was never like exact and it was like, I was like. Yeah.

• 2:17:50Danny Jones?

  So it goes up and down with no cables?

• 2:17:52Speaker 04

  No cables. And we were doing it at nighttime and it was time to come up and we were down at like, um, I don't know, almost thirty meters. It was like nearly a hundred feet deep. And it was time to come up and we were putting air in this thing and it wasn't, we didn't feel like we were lifting and we were getting low on air and it was night and we're like, so me and my buddy, the guy that was filming that. We put too much air into it. So we went from like a hundred feet to the surface in like, I don't know, five seconds or something. So I was exhaling the whole time thinking like, fuck, this is the only time, not even shark related. I'm gonna die from an embolism from the bends, from like aneurysm.

• 2:18:30Speaker 04

  Uh, but luckily we exhaled the whole way up. We had a paramedic on the boat. We immediately got on oxygen, felt kind of dizzy and weird, but, um. Just like the little things, like the human, like you, you're swimming in these little holes. Like it was, I don't wanna say your fault, but like.

• 2:18:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:18:44Speaker 04

  You made the decision to go down there and swim around and try to come up through like, uh, and your buddy that was taking too long.

• 2:18:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:18:51Speaker 04

  Didn't help, but, um, I always feel like it's the human error that's the most dangerous.

• 2:18:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:56Speaker 04

  It's like the sharks can decide to kill you if they want, but they're usually give you the benefit of the doubt, or if you're playing by their rules for the most part, but it's just like stupid human error that gets people killed.

• 2:19:08Danny Jones?

  And often also things you never would expect.

• 2:19:11Speaker 04

  Oh, exactly.

• 2:19:11Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 2:19:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. Or you go into that little like Seagate. What was that little submarine that they went into and they imploded?

• 2:19:17Danny Jones?

  To explore the Titanic?

• 2:19:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was Ocean Gate or something?

• 2:19:21Danny Jones?

  Something like that. Yeah.

• 2:19:21Speaker 04

  That's pretty, pretty creepy.

• 2:19:23Danny Jones?

  Insane. Yeah. I was just watching something the other day. Um, this video interview with the guy who was with Steve Irwin.

• 2:19:31Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. I watched that too. His cameraman.

• 2:19:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. Talking about how it all went down. Cause I was actually out at Bat Reef, the place where he died.

• 2:19:38Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:19:39Speaker 04

  Heard, uh, this was a few years after and, um, it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere. Uh, we were doing a tiger shark film. And, um, yeah, I mean, it was just a freak accident for him to get like hit. But apparently there, the footage, um, I didn't hear this guy talk about that, but apparently the footage. You could hear the stingray. They'll make like, like a shuddering, like a low frequency, like warning, like almost like a growling sound.

• 2:20:03Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:20:04Speaker 04

  And, uh, apparently like, you know, the stingray was giving them like the warnings, like, hey, man, don't get any closer. And, but the way that the cameraman described it was like, let Steve. He wanted to get, keep the stingray in the foreground and then have Steve swim up. Behind it. And then he swam up behind it and the stingray got a fright thinking it was a shark or a predator. And then just like stuck him in the heart. And then he said.

• 2:20:27Danny Jones?

  It was a fifty foot wide bull ray or something?

• 2:20:30Speaker 04

  It was.

• 2:20:30Danny Jones?

  Is that possible?

• 2:20:31Speaker 04

  Fifty?

• 2:20:32Danny Jones?

  I, that's what I thought I read.

• 2:20:33Speaker 04

  I mean, that would be massive.

• 2:20:35Danny Jones?

  Find out about like, well, about this stingray that, that killed him. I thought it was huge, maybe thirty feet. But yeah, like of all things to kill Steve Irwin, fucking stingray.

• 2:20:46Speaker 04

  I know.

• 2:20:47Danny Jones?

  If it hit you in the heart and the, I think it punctured both lungs too.

• 2:20:50Speaker 04

  Eight feet across.

• 2:20:51Danny Jones?

  Oh, only eight feet. What the fuck am I talking about?

• 2:20:53Speaker 04

  Still, that's like, like the length of this table here, right?

• 2:20:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:20:59Danny Jones?

  And he, he died from blood loss? Is that correct?

• 2:21:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like I think that they pulled it out. They pulled like the barb out or something.

• 2:21:07Danny Jones?

  Eight, eight inch long bar, serrated.

• 2:21:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, brutal. I remember I was in South Africa, working on a lion film, uh, for National Geographic and all of our phones, the producers, the camera crew, everyone, all of our phones just started blowing up. When he died, like everyone was texting, like, did you hear what happened to Steve? And everyone kind of thought, oh, a croc got him or this. And then when they found out it was a stingray. I mean, it's just a testament to the fact like, I don't know, man, if you, you, you live by the sword, die by the sword kind of thing. Like he, he still like inspired millions and millions of people. He was definitely. Way different than like Jackass. Like he was, he generally loved those animals. I think he did a lot for wildlife conservation by like showing people like the different sides of different predators and.

• 2:21:53Speaker 04

  He was so enthusiastic. Like, I don't think he was being disrespectful. He just got caught, caught out at the wrong time, you know?

• 2:22:00Danny Jones?

  That footage has never been released, right?

• 2:22:02Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:22:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:03Speaker 04

  He talked about it, how he said it just went like Steve came over top.

• 2:22:06Danny Jones?

  He watched it after?

• 2:22:08Speaker 04

  Bubbled it. I assume they watched it. I'm assuming like, uh, Discovery or Animal Planet had to like, kind of. You know, for insurance purposes to document what really happened.

• 2:22:18Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:22:18Speaker 04

  But, um, but I had heard about like a growling, like a low frequency sound that this animal was making to like, kind of give him a warning. And they were, they said they had done it like hundreds of times, you know?

• 2:22:31Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:22:31Speaker 04

  And that's the thing. I mean, not on that specific one, but they died with stingrays a bunch. Um, but yeah, nuts, man. Nuts.

• 2:22:40Danny Jones?

  Have you ever dealt with any like polar bears or anything crazy? Like any?

• 2:22:43Speaker 04

  Dude, I have a crazy polar bear story. Actually, I was, uh, doing a show for National Geographic.

• 2:22:48Speaker 07

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• 2:23:08Speaker 04

  may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. It was a three-part series called Killer Shots about being a cameraman and getting like killer shots. That was a stupid name, but um, uh, they let me, it was a lion episode, a great white episode and a polar bear episode. And they let me produce and, and host the lion and the great white episode because I had tons of experience already in Africa with the Cape Town great whites. And I had done multiple lion films for Nat Geo in the Serengeti and in Kenya and it was, uh, they let me produce those and you know, producing, you find out where you're going to go, you're going to use the same fixture, you're going to go to the same locations, same Land Rovers.

• 2:23:52Speaker 04

  It was all dialed in. The polar bear episode though, I had no experience with polar bears, so they let the series producer handle that. But after like two attempts at getting polar bears in Canada, uh, we, we struck out twice. Uh, and we, we didn't, they had pretty minimal budget, so we were going to James Bay and like their southernmost range. And it was like kind of a, uh, really hard place to film polar bears, but cheaper, like budget wise. But after the second, uh, shoot, they're like, okay, well, we're out of money. We've, we've not, we didn't get polar bears. You know what? We'll talk about global warming and how they're really hard to find. I'm like, fuck that. Let's just talk about shitty producing. Like we, we killed it on the great white episode, the lion episode. Now you're gonna, you're gonna lie and say the, you're gonna, we didn't see the polar bears because of global warming?

• 2:24:36Speaker 04

  We didn't see them because we went to the wrong fucking place. So I called out a bunch of favors. I was friends with the Nat Geo equipment room manager and I said, bro, I'm hosting the show. I'm not going to say we, we struck out because of global warming. It's a lie. We didn't get it because we went to the wrong place. I said, can you lend me, I need an F 900, I need a long lens, I need tripods, I need all that. I called the, the Arctic outfitter dude that was helping us in the first two shoots. I said, bro, can I borrow the bunny boots and the Arctic goose jacket? Can I borrow that? I'm coming back. I'm going to do it on my own dime. So for less than like 5,000 bucks, I launched my own polar bear expedition. I, I reached out to this guy, Paul Nicklin. He's like National Geographic's poster boy for, uh, polar bears.

• 2:25:20Speaker 04

  And he's like the most famous National Geographic photographer of all time, Paul Nicklin. And I said, hey, Paul, man, I ran into the situation. I gotta get polar bears. He's like, oh, you gotta go to this place, go to, fly to Churchill, take the polar bear express. There's a place called Waachi. They always get polar bears, mother and, and calf, uh, mother and cubs, uh, coming out of their, uh, dens. Like they're not hunting, but you'll get polar bears and you'll, so I did it. I, and I called the Canadian Airlines and they hooked me up with like cheap tickets. So anyway, I went out there for like under five grand and in the first two days I get polar bears. But prior to this, while we were on those first shoots, um, we were out on the sea ice.

• 2:26:00Speaker 04

  And the producer's like, all right, man, we've got this cool thing. We're gonna, we got you the most high-powered LEDs that Nat Geo makes. They were dropping them in the Marianas Trench, like these super high-powered LEDs. He's like, I did some research and you're like Inuit and Eskimos or whatever, lack of a better word, First Nation people. They will purposely not, uh, start fires out on the sea ice because it attracts polar bears. If you're out on the night sea ice, fires are like a telltale giveaway. A polar bear can see it miles away and they'll come to see if there's food or something to eat. So our theory was I was going to camp out on the sea ice and use these high-powered LEDs to emulate like, not a fire, but to, to draw attention.

• 2:26:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 2:26:41Speaker 04

  The funny thing was, we were waiting, waiting and the producers were there. I set up an ice camp and the Aurora was happening. It was super cool. And then the producer's like, hey, man, we're going to go back to the main camp. Are you cool with staying here tonight? I'm like, yeah. And he's like, you know, we brought the bear fence. They gave me a, a, like a little, like, like a, it looks like dental floss. But the fucked up thing was this bear fence was supposed to be electrified by a car battery. They forgot the car battery, so there was no electrified fence. It was just this, but I was so desperate. I'm like, all right, I'll stay like, I'm sure. And they, my guide gave me a, a gun, like a shotgun. But little did I know, the snowmobile I was driving that day, the shotgun case that they gave me was slightly open and all the snow got packed into there.

• 2:27:26Speaker 04

  So after they left, I'm blasting these things out on the sea ice and I started getting nervous. I'm like, this is like Darwin Award winning shit. I got, I don't know anything about polar bears. I'm trying to attract them. I'm alone. I better go check this gun to make sure it works. So I go out to the sled, get the gun out and then it's ice frozen solid. Then I realized like, man, this is really dumb. I'm going to leave. So I try to start the, the, it was like a ghetto pull start snowmobile. I'm trying to start it and every time I try to start it, it makes vrrr like a sound. And the light, I had already turned off the LEDs at this point because I'm like, I do not want to see polar bears alone with a gun that doesn't work. And I'm pulling this snowmobile, trying to start it and, uh, it won't start.

• 2:28:09Speaker 04

  I go back into my, um, my tent and I had this propane heater. And I'm like now doing a piece to camera like, okay, I'm out here alone. I'm trying to attract polar bears. I realized this is pretty stupid actually. And then suddenly I smell something and my coat catches on fire. Cause I'm standing, I'm sitting next to this propane heater and my coat catches on fire. I'm like, Jesus. And all I had were, was this thermos that was full of hot chocolate for some reason. I pour this hot chocolate all over me. Now I'm soaking wet. I smell like hot chocolate. I'm trying to fucking attract polar bears. I got a gun that doesn't work. The, the snowmobile won't start. So I'm, I like, I was, I never panicked this much in my life. I was like, like hyperventilating panic.

• 2:28:49Speaker 04

  And I was like, dude, calm down, calm down. So I laid down on like the sea ice and I started thinking, what am I going to do? I'm trying to call them on the sat phone. They won't answer. And then I'm like, I'm going to try to start this again. And finally I started the, uh, the snowmobile I started and I, because it started, I hit the gas to make sure it would not like, uh, flood or it would go. And when I hit it, it flipped over and it smashed all my camera gear. And I like laid there on the ground and I just started laughing. I'm like, dude, you're going to kill yourself out of sheer panic and freaking out. Like you're, and I thought about the human element, like it's not the animals that are going to kill you. It's stupid mistakes and overreacting and panicking. So then I just lied there. I relaxed a bit. I pushed the snowmobile over. I eventually like calmly got it started.

• 2:29:33Speaker 04

  I rode back to the main camp that night, which is about like two miles away in a snowmobile. And all the people were sleeping, all my, my, it was like two other crew members, a South African cameraman and American producer guy. I went to bed that night and when I woke up, they saw me in the morning like, bro, what are you doing here? I'm like, bro, fuck this shit, this polar bear stuff. And anyway, long story short, I eventually got them on my own, but it was a point in time where I, I realized it was sheer panic. I was freaked out. I was worried about getting eaten by a polar bear, but it was all like in my head. We never did see polar bears on that shoot, but the next time I went out, I got them, but it just kind of dawned on me like people, you can die if you make the wrong decisions and you panic. And if I was calm the whole time and relaxed, the same result would have happened, but, um, yeah.

• 2:30:17Speaker 04

  Catching myself on fire, hot chocolate, gun that didn't work.

• 2:30:21Danny Jones?

  That is fucking bonkers.

• 2:30:25Speaker 04

  I actually have the, I don't think I have it here, but I, I, uh, I shot a, um, uh, Aurora, uh, let's see if, uh, what is it called? Northern Lights or Aurora? I don't know if it would be on here. Aurora, how do you spell it?

• 2:30:41Danny Jones?

  A U R O R A. Yeah, I think that's right.

• 2:30:43Speaker 04

  Let's see if it's in any of these, um, things here. Oh no, it's not going to be there. I'll have to.

• 2:30:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, is that, no, maybe not.

• 2:30:51Speaker 04

  Um, Arctic, I think I called it polar bear camp.

• 2:30:56Danny Jones?

  So when you got the show, when you finally did get shots of polar bears, was it at night?

• 2:31:00Speaker 04

  It was during the daytime.

• 2:31:01Danny Jones?

  During the daytime. Okay.

• 2:31:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. So it worked out where, and the BBC was there actually, and they let me hang out in their mat tracks to be cool. It worked out so much better. Um, it was just the story like I, but even in the show, like I did a thing to piece to camera. I'm like, the network gave up, you know, we ran out of money, but I'm not giving up on polar bears and I, um, I eventually got them, which is fun. But it, it didn't come easy, but it was like a, um, I don't think I have the.

• 2:31:26Danny Jones?

  They're the scariest bear for sure. I heard they can swim like.

• 2:31:31Speaker 04

  Oh, they can.

• 2:31:32Danny Jones?

  Like hundreds of miles.

• 2:31:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:31:35Danny Jones?

  Across, I heard once they swam from Greenland to Iceland or something like that.

• 2:31:39Speaker 04

  Sounds about right. I mean.

• 2:31:41Danny Jones?

  Which is nuts.

• 2:31:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, they're considered a marine mammal, which is crazy. I mean, they, uh, because they spend so much time at sea and swimming and, and, uh, you know, in the ocean. Um, I was working recently on a project about Greenland sharks where they, Greenland sharks are like the la- longest living vertebrate on earth. They're like over 400 years old and they found polar bear remains in their stomachs.

• 2:32:05Danny Jones?

  In the shark stomachs?

• 2:32:06Speaker 04

  Shark stomach. And they don't know if it, it was scavenged on like there was a dead polar bear. Or if they saw a polar bear swimming and came up and fed on it, because they also found seal remains. Cause Greenland sharks are thought to be super slow moving, like often they're blind because they have parasites on their eyes. Um, but you know, any animal that's been around for 400 years and is still alive. Um, I'm not even good at math, but like, isn't that, how, how old's America? 250 years old? Like this was like.

• 2:32:35Danny Jones?

  Almost twice the age of America.

• 2:32:37Speaker 04

  And it's still swimming around like alive.

• 2:32:39Danny Jones?

  Do we know that can live to that age?

• 2:32:42Speaker 04

  Uh, there was a, the study in science that proved that they got to 400 plus years old through like carbon dating in their vertebrae and stuff like that.

• 2:32:51Danny Jones?

  Jesus.

• 2:32:52Speaker 04

  It's, uh, it's pretty incredible. Yeah.

• 2:32:55Danny Jones?

  You know, that's another thing that's insane to me is how you can have people that are. Either biologists or, you know, studying these animals from like, from like an academic perspective and like studying like the dead bodies and, you know, doing autopsies on them or like, you know, cutting them apart and expect, and they can be like, you know, world renowned experts on these specific species of like marine animals.

• 2:33:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:33:23Danny Jones?

  But they've never seen them in the wild.

• 2:33:25Speaker 04

  Dude, it's funny you say that because I worked on a project for Nat Geo a couple of years ago when you, we talked about seeing a great white shark breach from its perspective with a camera. These guys are putting the cameras on and they were putting them on so tight and I was telling them like, guys, like, let's, um, you know, loosen the springs a bit or whatever. Like, oh, they don't, they don't care. I'm like, well, they do. And then we had visibility that was incredible in Cape Town, uh, which is very unheard of. And I said, why don't we go down on the bottom and deploy these cameras on the free swimming sharks because we were baiting them up to the boat and they were swimming by and we were like leaning over to put them on. And I said, this would be an incredible sequence to do it out of the cage on the bottom. And the director's like, I love this idea. This would be amazing. But the scientists.

• 2:34:07Danny Jones?

  Of course, you ain't doing it.

• 2:34:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Well, that's funny because the series was called Die Trying. It was about like explorers and people that could potentially die trying to like discover things and explore and find new, um, amazing things in science. Anyway, I remember telling these Stanford great white shark PhD experts, hey, let's go on the bottom. This is gonna be incredible. Like, no, that's empirically, that's, it's gonna do nothing for us. I'm like, oh, but it'd be so incredible to see them on the, like, nope. I said, okay, we can use a cage. Nope. And then it dawned on me, I'm like, wait a second. Have you ever seen a great white shark underwater? Have you ever gone underwater and, and seen a great white? The first guy, nope. Second guy, these two PhD.

• 2:34:46Danny Jones?

  I can't even swim.

• 2:34:48Speaker 04

  I was like, you are a PhD great white shark expert and you've never seen the animal that you're a PhD in underwater, like in its own environment? They're like, there's no empirical reason to do that. It was just such a cold mentality of like, um, and that's why like going back to people like Ocean Ramsey, they give us, give her such a hard time. She's not a scientist. She's not, she's an influencer. They're, these people know nothing. They're bad for sharks. Fucking Jane Goodall, one of the most renowned incredible conservationist researchers on the planet, when she moved to Africa to study the chimps for the first time, she had zero academic training or scientific methodology training, no university degree, yet she went

• 2:35:31Speaker 04

  on to become one of the greatest naturalists of all time, like changing how we think about how humans interact with wildlife. She eventually went on to get her honor, like a PhD. She skipped her bachelor's degree. They, they knew she was so smart and so observant and so good at science, yet she had zero academic training and zero degrees.

• 2:35:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:51Speaker 04

  Um, so I just, I hate it when like, there's this mentality that you need to have a degree. You need to have a PhD. You need to go to eight years of school to actually contribute to conservation and research and.

• 2:36:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:36:03Speaker 04

  To inspire people. If you have passion and hard work and you truly care about something, you can, you could change the world without having all the fancy degrees and all the, again, I love scientists, so some of my best friends are scientists, but I kind of feel like there's this, even, even as filmmakers, like.

• 2:36:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:20Speaker 04

  You don't have to go to film school. You don't have to, you just gotta be passionate. Uh, like again, I never planned to become a filmmaker. I've won a bunch of awards. I've made a bunch of films. I've made my whole life out of it by accident because I love sharks.

• 2:36:31Danny Jones?

  Right. And it doesn't have to be one or the other too, you know?

• 2:36:34Speaker 04

  No, exactly.

• 2:36:35Danny Jones?

  It can be, I can understand, like, to me, it would be super frustrating to be dealing with those kinds of people when I'm the one who spends my life swimming with the sharks. But like, can those people actually be super helpful and beneficial to studying all the dead species in a lab somewhere?

• 2:36:49Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 2:36:50Danny Jones?

  Of course, right? Like, there's definitely a benefit to that and they, I'm sure they've come up with discoveries that, you know, the people who are actually interacting with them in the wild and documenting their behavior and all that stuff. There's like two pieces of the puzzle that, you know, you need to be able to fit together.

• 2:37:04Speaker 04

  Hundred percent. And they, when they, when you could like marry the two and work together.

• 2:37:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:09Speaker 04

  Uh, and you have that hybrid of like passion and, you know, empirical science. Um, yeah, I mean, that's what, that's what, you know, runs the world, so to speak. That's what makes all of this impossible, all of this possible. And like I have thousands of people over the years, their parents and kids saying, oh man, my son loves sharks because we've seen you on Shark Week or your Nat Geo show, or my, my, my daughter has fallen in love with sharks because of this. And then there's the other side where people are like, oh, you're a shark pornographer. You're, it's all jaws and claws and you're scaring people. Like after Jaws, it was cool to go out and murder sharks. The only good shark's a dead shark.

• 2:37:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:37:47Speaker 04

  But through Shark Week and these, these like cult following of like TV series and programs, like people have grown to like learn more about sharks, love sharks. You could write the most valid and incredible scientific paper on the planet and thousands and thousands of people will read it, or you can make a 15 second YouTube short and billions of people will see it. Billions of people have been inspired. So again, I agree. You need both of them, but one shouldn't like shit talk on the other and say discredit, oh, you don't have a PhD. You don't know what you're talking about. Oh, you've never seen a shark in the real world. Like both together, it's like, it works, you know? That's what makes life fascinating. Like some people take the road of academics, some people are meth heads outside of 7-Eleven

• 2:38:31Speaker 04

  and they're, you know, you know, they, they become like incredible people or they die like six years later.

• 2:38:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Right. Exactly. So, and you know, also another interesting thing is I've heard lots, lots of people like you described, lots of people who like spend a lot of time out there in the environment, whether it be like in the ocean or like in the Amazon rainforest or in the jungle, how they explain how like all of the anxieties and like clinical psychological bullshit that sets in when you're in like civilized society or in a city or in a town sort of like melts away. And then people kind of get, they get hooked on that where it's like, they're almost like, for lack of a better word, addicted to being away from civilization and like they feel

• 2:39:19Danny Jones?

  more in tune when they're in nature or in that different environment away from people. And like they connect more with the environment and the animals and it becomes just like a part of them.

• 2:39:30Speaker 04

  Hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to explain sometimes, but like, yeah, I certainly feel most alive when I'm like underwater, interacting with sharks and like knowing that, okay, they, they could kill me. I mean, every time I get in the water, I, I, I am hyper vigilant. I am fully expecting that something could go wrong. I'm not like head in the clouds like, oh, sharks are amazing, beautiful puppy dogs.

• 2:39:52Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:39:53Speaker 04

  I know that if I make a mistake, it could be my last. I don't want to dramatize it, but I also don't want to downplay it. Um, and I love seeing people get inspired through media and through things they see on the internet and it like sparks this whole like empowerment of people feeling like, hey man, I can make a difference. I can like, a single person can change the world if you're passionate enough and it catches on and you inspire other people. It's just like, I don't know. It's like, it's, I get a lot of people telling me now, oh man, you should be a coach. You should do these mentors and a masterclass in this, but also like ADHD, like can't sit still, I can't build that platform. And that's why like, I'm starting to get into YouTube more where I want to like teach people about cameras and I love that you can capture some of the greatest shots on a $300

• 2:40:38Speaker 04

  GoPro and you don't need a Phantom Flex or a beam splitter with this custom rig. I mean, that helps if you're shooting for Hollywood, but.

• 2:40:46Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:40:47Speaker 04

  I think like the internet has leveled the playing field now for anyone that wants to get into media, filmmaking, um, podcasts, um, any of this stuff and it's, it's awesome.

• 2:40:57Danny Jones?

  Is there like one thing, like cinematography wise, that you've always wanted to capture that you haven't been able to get, that you like hope one day you'll be able to get that's maybe limited you with technology or something else?

• 2:41:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. Great white sharks mating.

• 2:41:12Danny Jones?

  Oh shit.

• 2:41:13Speaker 04

  And I believe the way we're going to capture it is through like fin cameras, putting the cameras on, on the sharks. Like I was showing you before a couple of these hammerhead shots. I wish I had, uh, the great white stuffs, but this is a really cool perspective of the great hammerhead.

• 2:41:28Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:41:29Speaker 04

  Cruising around. Um, there's no divers around. I mean, there's the one in the background there, but they're interacting with each other. And I think to capture, uh, sharks, you know, procreating specifically great whites, the only way to do it is, you know, with remote imaging where people aren't around because I think it's highly unlikely that they're gonna.

• 2:41:48Danny Jones?

  With the people around?

• 2:41:49Speaker 04

  You know, get it on right in front of you.

• 2:41:51Danny Jones?

  How do they do it? They go like belly to belly or what?

• 2:41:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, basically the males will grab onto the pectoral fins of the females and that's why they have two penises as well, right? They got two claspers. Uh, I think it's through, for evolutionary advantage, if you get your dick bitten off, it's good to have a backup kind of thing.

• 2:42:07Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 2:42:08Speaker 04

  So they have two penises, but the male will grab onto the female and then roll and then they have these two claspers where they'll, you know, inseminate the female. And the only reported great white shark mating event that was ever sort of somewhat verified was off the coast of New Zealand, this place called Nugget Point, which is on the South Island in New Zealand. A Department of Conservation worker said she was up there on a bluff and saw a massive great white shark swimming in the shallows in like, uh, kind of the shallow surf zone. And another big ass great white shark came up to it and she reported that it looked like at first they were fighting, like they encountered each other and there was a tussle and they were fighting.

• 2:42:49Speaker 04

  And then she said they went on to basically mate, like rolling and just kind of, not super gently, but it went from like a violent encounter to them intertwined and basically having sex.

• 2:43:02Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 2:43:03Speaker 04

  But it was just a, a visual, uh, you know, like eyewitness report. This is before iPhones and drones and all that. But, um, I've always wanted to, there's been a few films talking about great whites mating. And I've filmed, uh, nurse sharks mating in the Bahamas and there's plenty of reports of, uh, other species mating, reef sharks and whatnot, but no one has ever documented great whites, uh, getting it on. And I think it would be.

• 2:43:27Danny Jones?

  Are these nurse sharks?

• 2:43:28Speaker 04

  This is, uh, these look like.

• 2:43:30Danny Jones?

  Oh, they literally bite on, oh, is that looking?

• 2:43:32Speaker 04

  Gray nurse, uh, gray reef sharks, sorry, gray nurse, which are called sand tigers here. But yeah, you could see how it was biting on.

• 2:43:39Danny Jones?

  So is that why they have all those giant scars all over them?

• 2:43:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, the females have those big bite, bite marks and wounds, which are, so what's also interesting is the female sharks often have skin that is twice as thick as male sharks. And that's like an evolutionary, you know?

• 2:43:55Danny Jones?

  Cause the male grabs onto the female.

• 2:43:57Speaker 04

  Male grabs on. They don't have hands, obviously. So the only way they can really gain purchase and intertwine to, to, you know, mate is to grab, but obviously if that shark wanted to, it could bite that fin clearly off.

• 2:44:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:44:10Speaker 04

  So they're, you know, it knows that it's, it's got her there, but it doesn't bite down too hard. But yeah, it's pretty, um, it's pretty violent.

• 2:44:19Danny Jones?

  That I didn't know about the two dicks on is that only white sharks or is that all sharks?

• 2:44:24Speaker 04

  All sharks have two penises. Yeah.

• 2:44:26Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:44:27Speaker 04

  They're called claspers. That's the whole point of the shirt is don't be a dick. Don't be a clasper.

• 2:44:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's what that means. That's hilarious.

• 2:44:38Speaker 04

  But yeah, it's pretty fascinating that and when you there, there is footage of white sharks that are, what's the word like sexually charged where they their claspers are hard. Where they like, um, there, there are two like appendages at the bottom of the shark, but when they mate, they cross over. It's like a weird thing. They, um, if you type in white shark claspers.

• 2:45:00Danny Jones?

  You might want to go incognito, Steve. Dick fix.

• 2:45:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. So there's some of them. See, some of them are pretty, pretty big.

• 2:45:07Danny Jones?

  Wow, dude.

• 2:45:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then other ones.

• 2:45:11Danny Jones?

  It's packing.

• 2:45:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they're just like, just like guys.

• 2:45:15Danny Jones?

  And it goes backwards.

• 2:45:17Speaker 04

  It goes backwards. Yeah. And when they mate, they're supposedly cross over so that they can mate from kind of either side.

• 2:45:23Danny Jones?

  That's nuts, dude.

• 2:45:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the females have nothing, just like a slit, like cloaca.

• 2:45:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:45:34Speaker 04

  But yeah, imagine having two penises. Can come in handy, I guess.

• 2:45:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right. You get a lot done.

• 2:45:44Speaker 04

  But yeah, I think it's really like if they lose one, uh, because of mating can be pretty violent. And I'm sure there's some females that aren't in the mood kind of thing.

• 2:45:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:45:53Speaker 04

  Get away from me. And if you get one bitten off, then you still have a chance of, you know, procreating, or you can approach the female from either side, I think.

• 2:46:02Danny Jones?

  Dude, have you seen the documentary about the dolphin, the lady who was studying the dolphin?

• 2:46:07Speaker 04

  I can only imagine.

• 2:46:09Danny Jones?

  So there was this, this was like in the John Lilly days and John Lilly is the guy who invented this, the sensory deprivation tank and he was, uh, he was given money by NASA to study dolphin intelligent or commute. He was trying to discover and find, study communication with dolphins.

• 2:46:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:46:25Danny Jones?

  And, uh, they put her in this like house and they filled it with like four feet of water. And she was studying him or whatever. And he was swimming around or whatever. And then.

• 2:46:35Speaker 04

  In the house?

• 2:46:36Danny Jones?

  In the house. You can find photos of this. It's nuts. And, uh, basically like you, she couldn't get him to communicate on command. So she, she was whacking the dolphin off.

• 2:46:47Speaker 04

  I heard about.

• 2:46:47Danny Jones?

  So like the dolphin would like wait for her to whack him off for him to like make sounds and communicate. So she could record the sounds and study him and stuff.

• 2:46:56Speaker 04

  Creepy.

• 2:46:56Danny Jones?

  Freaking insane, dude.

• 2:46:58Speaker 04

  I've heard, uh, a friend of mine was like hired to film women having sex with dolphins.

• 2:47:04Danny Jones?

  To film it?

• 2:47:04Speaker 04

  To film it. Yeah. Famous cameraman, Bob Cranston. He's passed away now, but, uh, Zuccarelli knows him. I'm sure they were buddies. But, um, yeah, dolphins and people, um.

• 2:47:14Danny Jones?

  Look at this, bro.

• 2:47:15Speaker 04

  Weird stuff.

• 2:47:15Danny Jones?

  Dolphin who love me, the NASA funded project that went wrong.

• 2:47:20Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 2:47:21Danny Jones?

  So I guess it wasn't a house. I guess it was like maybe sort of a warehouse with, with like, uh, like a half filled tub in it or something. I don't know, but from the photos that I remember seeing, it was like laid out where it looked like a house, but it was full of water.

• 2:47:36Speaker 04

  Nuts.

• 2:47:36Danny Jones?

  And she had, would she would have this like elevated platform she would sleep on.

• 2:47:40Speaker 04

  Wow. NASA funded it because they were trying to use dolphins as like, um, messengers or delivery, like, uh, you know, bombs and.

• 2:47:50Danny Jones?

  Well, yeah, they were doing that as well, but I guess they were trying to.

• 2:47:54Speaker 04

  Communicate and develop a language.

• 2:47:56Danny Jones?

  Trying to figure out like non-human commute, intelligence and communication, like figure out if there was a way to communicate with dolphins. How would they do it? And like John Lilly famously like cut open the heads of dolphins to like stick probes in their brains and stuff. Like very inhumane shit that he was doing.

• 2:48:11Speaker 04

  Well, it's funny you say that because back in the day, uh, the Bemini Shark Lab, which is just over there in the Bahamas. They used to sew, uh, sharks eyes closed to see if they could navigate in, in total darkness. Um, and if you.

• 2:48:26Danny Jones?

  Oh, with using just the sensory?

• 2:48:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, just their sensory, uh, systems with no vision to see how well they could navigate by sewing their eyes shut. So that was some pretty heavy, pretty heavy action there.

• 2:48:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:40Speaker 04

  What else did they do?

• 2:48:41Danny Jones?

  Some of the, some of the experiments that the military has done on and, and people is disturbing.

• 2:48:47Speaker 04

  I don't know a lot about the people stuff, but, um.

• 2:48:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, there's, there's like, there's stories of, I forget like the names of these things, but there was one that Bill Clinton actually uncovered or like declassified when he was president, where there was a program where we were testing,

• 2:49:06Danny Jones?

  injecting, I believe uranium or plutonium into disabled kids.

• 2:49:14Speaker 04

  Why disabled kids? Cause they were already damaged, so to speak.

• 2:49:18Danny Jones?

  Maybe, but there was like, there was like an institution on the, I believe it was in Massachusetts. Steve, try to fact check me and find this. Um, there was an institution for like disabled children in Massachusetts. And they were injecting these kids with either, I think it was plutonium to try to study what effect that would have on them. And like on, obviously all of them died.

• 2:49:44Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 2:49:44Danny Jones?

  And, uh, they were, this was like during the Cold War when they were trying to figure out, you know, different ways to kill people. What the effects would be of like dropping a nuke on somebody.

• 2:49:53Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 2:49:54Danny Jones?

  Yes, this is true dark piece of history between 1946 and 1953. Researchers, researchers, uh, easy for you to say, researchers from the Massachusetts Institution of Technology, MIT and Harvard, conducted nutrition and radiation experiments on children in Massachusetts. The experiment primarily targeting young boys who are residents of the Walter E., uh, State School in Massachusetts. At the time, this was a state run institution for children with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

• 2:50:23Speaker 04

  Nuts, man.

• 2:50:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:25Speaker 04

  Nuts. Yeah. The, the research that goes on.

• 2:50:28Danny Jones?

  Imagine what they're going to do to like experiment with animals. There's no limit.

• 2:50:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. Back to the dolphin, uh, communicating with dolphins. You asked me before about how sharks communicate and I forgot.

• 2:50:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:38Speaker 04

  Uh, see if you can pull up anything about sharks, shark sounds. Cause I think very recently there was a study that showed that sharks actually make sounds. When you watch Shark Week and you see a shark, you always hear like a, a scary sound or a pterodactyl or the Jaws theme, but.

• 2:50:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Sharks aren't known for making sounds.

• 2:50:55Speaker 04

  But here, researchers captured the first recorded active.

• 2:50:59Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 2:51:00Speaker 04

  Let's see here.

• 2:51:01Danny Jones?

  Go back to that, that description on AI.

• 2:51:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. Researchers captured the first recorded active sound from a shark species in a study published in the Royal Society of Open Science.

• 2:51:11Danny Jones?

  The rig shark?

• 2:51:13Speaker 04

  The rig shark. That's, that's funny. You hear like, I don't even, I never even heard of the rig, the rig shark study.

• 2:51:19Danny Jones?

  In New Zealand, rapid, high frequency clicking noises when handled or startled underwater.

• 2:51:25Speaker 04

  Clicks lasted about 48 milliseconds with a broad frequency range.

• 2:51:30Danny Jones?

  Interesting. Have you ever seen that? Have you ever heard anything like this on a, with a shark?

• 2:51:34Speaker 04

  Only recently when I, when I heard about this, about sharks. I mean, I'm the same. My, my Insta algorithm and all my internet algorithms are always everything shark related.

• 2:51:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:44Speaker 04

  And I found it fascinating because I, people would often ask me like sharks do have ears. They have inner ears where they have these little. So they, you know, obviously they can hear sounds, but do they make sounds to communicate? No one ever really knew that sharks are maybe not as silent as we thought. Um.

• 2:52:02Danny Jones?

  Dude, there's gotta be, uh, bro, I was thinking about this when you were talking about those great whites who ended up at that one spot off Naples.

• 2:52:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:52:08Danny Jones?

  Like, you know how like mushrooms, some, they, they say mushrooms can communicate through like the mycelium network under the ground.

• 2:52:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:52:16Danny Jones?

  Maybe there's this like completely separate sense that these sharks have that we just don't have the, the technology to detect.

• 2:52:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like a secret shark language.

• 2:52:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That we just have no idea about. Yeah. That maybe we'll discover in 10, 10 years that like somehow they can.

• 2:52:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:52:34Danny Jones?

  Coordinate on things or communicate in a way.

• 2:52:36Speaker 04

  They have to be able to, because how would they show up at the same place at the same time? I mean, obviously one could follow the other. Are they bumping into each other? Hey, where are you going? Let's.

• 2:52:44Danny Jones?

  Right. Like maybe they're fucking telepathic. Who knows, dude? Like.

• 2:52:48Speaker 04

  I mean, that's secret shark society, the SSSS. But, um, you know, what's interesting as well that I've, it's been a theory and it's been brought up a few times. I'm sure you've heard about how the killer whales have been targeting great whites in South Africa. And then other areas, they, they catch and kill great whites and they only eat the liver. As a shark, they don't really get fat. They store all of their energy in their liver. And the liver can be up to like 25% of its body weight. So if you have a four thousand. Yeah. If you have a 4,000 pound shark, they have a thousand pound liver. I'm not great at math, but that should, that should work out, right?

• 2:53:21Danny Jones?

  Can you find a photo of a great white liver?

• 2:53:23Speaker 04

  But what's interesting is like these orcas, um, they're targeting great whites. They're, they're killing them. They're eating their livers. But now there's a theory that tagged animals, great whites that have tags. They have these ultrasonic tags which transmit like a frequency of usually like 69 kilohertz. They're thinking, yeah, look at the size of the liver on that thing. It's, so that's where all their nutrients, all their energy stores, all their like nutritional value. Cause otherwise trying to eat a shark, it's like eating cardboard with like, um, a super muscly cardboard. Whereas if you can like be like, what's the dude Hannibal? And just eat the liver and farther beans or whatever.

• 2:54:02Danny Jones?

  Oh my God, dude.

• 2:54:04Speaker 04

  But there's theories now that orcas are potentially targeting sharks with tags because they can hear the tag. So what, I mean, they obviously can echolocate and find a shark that's in, that's in vicinity of echolocation. But if they can listen for like a kilometer away and hear tic, tic, hear the tag transmit like, hey, we know that things that wear these tags are usually nutritional and they have massive livers. Um, so there is now a theory that orcas are potentially targeting sharks that are tagged, uh, because they can track them down easier, which is interesting. It's like, we are helping orcas, you know, hunt and kill great whites again.

• 2:54:42Danny Jones?

  That's great. What a crazy like incidental side effect.

• 2:54:47Speaker 04

  We're trying to save the sharks by tagging them.

• 2:54:49Danny Jones?

  Of us just trying to meddle with shit and learn more shit.

• 2:54:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's nuts.

• 2:54:54Danny Jones?

  Dude, that liver is insane.

• 2:54:57Speaker 04

  They they got really, they're really good at drinking.

• 2:55:00Danny Jones?

  So delicious and nutritious.

• 2:55:04Speaker 04

  They're then they can drink like a fish, obviously. Uh, but no, they're pretty incredible, man. All ever since I was a kid, they were just always fascinating. And on top of the fact that they occasionally uh eat people. I actually was in South Australia once picking up tanks at a scuba shop. And this this Australian guy was there and he had this big tattoo, this fresh tattoo on his arm. And it said R I P in somebody's name. And it had like a shark, a great white, a white pointer on there. I was like, hey, man, what's up with your tattoo? He's like, oh, it's in honor of my mate, Jono, or whatever his name was. I'm like, what happened? He's like, oh, he was eaten by a fucking five meter great white shark. I'm like, eaten? He's like, no, he was consumed in front of his friends.

• 2:55:48Speaker 04

  It was off of South Australia. They were spear fishermen and apparently uh there was a spear fishing tournament coming up. And I guess there's a a rule where you're allowed to go out the day before to scout and look where the fish are and and find the spots that you wanna go shooting the next day for the tournament.

• 2:56:05Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:56:06Speaker 04

  So five guys swim out from the beach offshore a bit. I don't know how far off they went, but they were all scouting and freediving, you know, like uh

• 2:56:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:14Speaker 04

  With their big spear guns, their super long uh blades, their fins. And apparently they were, you know, kind of finished for the day and they were all swimming back in. And the kid telling me this story in the in the dive shop, he's like, I was probably like 10 feet from my mate. We're all swimming back in formation, five of us, all about 10 feet apart, you know, just heading back to shore. And he just said he heard his friend scream and he turned over to see his friend, his entire lower torso from the long blades and everything, like a five meter great white shark had come up from behind and swallowed him up to his fucking chest.

• 2:56:54Speaker 04

  And I said, he's like, I knew it was five meters because I looked down and I saw the shark's tail kicking up sand on the bottom, cuz they were in about um maybe five, six meters deep of water. He said the shark's head was out of the water with his mate's chest, uh his entire body up to his chest and its mouth. And all they could do was scream and basically, you know, they were freaked out. So they all, the guy was, they said they watched the shark consume him. And as they were like swimming away, there was nothing they could do.

• 2:57:26Danny Jones?

  Oh, my.

• 2:57:27Speaker 04

  And I was like, I was there to make a shark film. So I wasn't about to tell the guy, man, we're heading out to, you know, uh off of Port Lincoln. I mean, he must have known. He that dive shop there in Port Lincoln is where everyone goes to go cage diving at the Neptunes. But um it was a pretty heavy story because, you know, it's rare for sharks to consume people.

• 2:57:46Danny Jones?

  Did he finish the rest of him after that?

• 2:57:48Speaker 04

  It ate, he said it ate, it completely consumed him. And he got the the tattoo in memory of his mate. And while he was telling it to me, it was like really matter of fact, it seemed like he had come to terms with it. But um, you know, there's the occasional where sharks eat people and it always kind of like, it's not good for their P R when you're like, oh, sharks are amazing, they're polite predators. And occasionally they'll completely consume people. But again, it's it's so rare, but when it happens, it's it's pretty horrific to think about.

• 2:58:16Danny Jones?

  So rare. But like, I wonder sometimes, like, is that math skewed? Because you people like to compare shark attacks, fatal or not, to like lightning strikes or car accidents.

• 2:58:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:58:30Danny Jones?

  But like, you gotta like adjust those numbers to how many people are actually in the water.

• 2:58:34Speaker 04

  In the water.

• 2:58:35Danny Jones?

  They don't do that cuz there's only like, what percent of the population spends that much time in the water?

• 2:58:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, there's definitely way less than than are on like dry land, walking around and getting struck by lightning.

• 2:58:46Danny Jones?

  Like, I wonder what the real probability is of like, I don't know how you would adjust the the study of that, right? Like, if you're, if you if you could basically adjust it for like how much time you spend in the water in a year.

• 2:59:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:59:00Danny Jones?

  And like, average that out to how many people actually get bitten or killed by sharks? I wonder what that number would be.

• 2:59:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:59:08Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 2:59:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, because people aren't spending more than a few hours a day in the water as opposed to, you know, most of their time on dry land.

• 2:59:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:59:16Speaker 04

  I don't know. I mean, I still think it's relatively rare based on like the number of fatalities is generally in the single digits.

• 2:59:22Danny Jones?

  And the world's getting more connected. People are more, people are sharing this shit more than ever on social media, so it's.

• 2:59:28Speaker 04

  And it's possible there were more attacks in the past that we didn't know about because of the lack of reporting or the lack of evidence or the lack of, but yeah, man, sometimes they just eat what they want, predators and protein, and you're in the wrong place, wrong time, like.

• 2:59:43Danny Jones?

  Do you think it's ever possible that they, and I don't know how long this would take evolutionarily? I'm not a scientist, but like, that they would ever become like adapted? Or do you think it's ever possible that humans would actually go on the menu?

• 2:59:56Speaker 04

  I think about that every once in a while, and I think it clearly there were not on the menu because if we were and sharks realized that humans were a viable prey item, there would be attacks every single day. They would just be waiting for, you know, you to go out for a surf cuz you're easy to catch. You're not expecting it. Um, but to to ever get on the menu, I think we'd have to overfish the oceans pretty heavily and to really put them in dire straits to decide like, all right, we're gonna, with that said, I think there are certain sharks out there that, I know there's this theory about rogue sharks and no one likes to talk about it or think it's real, but I know there's a handful of great whites that I've interacted with over the years that every time I see them, they will try to bite me.

• 3:00:39Speaker 04

  There are, there are certain sharks that just have bad fucking attitudes. Yes, and we give them nicknames nicknames like psycho or bite face or or scar face. Like, they often, like, when you see a shark that's all bruised up, scarred up, torn up, like, that's the kind of shark that doesn't give a shit. It it will throw down. It wants to, not wanna fight, but it's not afraid to get its hands dirty, so to speak, or get its fins bloody, whatever. Um, it's just like people that you run into on the street. If you see some dude with like bloody knuckles, a black eye and scars all over and he just looks angry.

• 3:01:10Danny Jones?

  Cauliflower ears.

• 3:01:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, yeah, but usually like.

• 3:01:14Danny Jones?

  I wanna do that, we make it a sport.

• 3:01:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, usually like with the cauliflower, I feel like the more people understand violence and the more that they like they train, the less they wanna use it. There are people that are just angry and they like to fight and compete and all that.

• 3:01:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:01:28Speaker 04

  Uh, one of my best friends, he's just like has a violent energy, follows him around everywhere.

• 3:01:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:33Speaker 04

  He just went to Brazil to pick up his black belt for his son at De La Hiva, like this famous uh Brazilian uh academy. And apparently like he was there just recently and he was just training and he submitted some guy like five times in two minutes. And the guy got so pissed that he like hammer fisted my buddy and my buddy submitted him again. And then the the professor at De La Hiva, he he kicked my friend out of the academy. He's like, you're not welcome back here, you're too competitive, you're too competitive, Chris, so.

• 3:02:01Danny Jones?

  And he's the one that got attacked after he submitted the guy?

• 3:02:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, but but I don't know why it went down like that. I mean, this is the story he told me, but my friend Chris is definitely, he enjoys the violence. He doesn't like to hurt people, but he's super competitive. But yeah, cauliflower ear and all that, but I find like the more people train, the more they wanna avoid violence because they know what they're capable of or what they can do, depending on who you are, I guess.

• 3:02:23Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 3:02:25Speaker 04

  But um, yeah, sharks that look gnarly and they're all scarred up, those are the ones that I don't mess with. There's one called Fred in uh New Zealand, P H R E D. And I remember when I first met it, I was telling my buddy, um, one of my best friends in New Zealand, there he is, Fred. One of my best friends in New Zealand.

• 3:02:43Danny Jones?

  The one with his jaw pulled out of his face?

• 3:02:46Speaker 04

  No, he's pretty messed up, but there, that one was a uh a Mako, the Mako with its jaw all messed up, but.

• 3:02:52Danny Jones?

  Fred is a massive male, what's the deal with him?

• 3:02:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's just got a bad attitude, like he he will always try to bite you if he gets a chance, which is weird. I don't know if it's um, that's another good buddy of mine, Chris Fallos. He takes all the amazing like breaching great white shark shots. Um, but a friend of mine, Kina, uh, he's actually right now working on uh Gullum. You know, that new Lord of the Rings uh Gullum, the crazy, my precious creature?

• 3:03:18Danny Jones?

  New movie being made?

• 3:03:19Speaker 04

  Ooh, maybe I shouldn't have said that.

• 3:03:22Speaker 04

  I'm pretty sure it's.

• 3:03:22Danny Jones?

  Google it, see if it's public.

• 3:03:24Speaker 04

  Public knowledge, uh Gullum or the story of Gullum.

• 3:03:27Danny Jones?

  I'm not a big Lord of the Rings follower, so I wouldn't know anyways.

• 3:03:30Speaker 04

  But uh he's down there shooting it right now, but it's funny.

• 3:03:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, so it's public. The hunt for Gullum.

• 3:03:36Speaker 04

  If uh type in this guy, Kina Scolay, K I N A, which means sea urchin and Scolay, C, or sorry, S C, oh, yeah. Um, he's got dreadlocks, that's him there, you crazy dude. One of my best friends in New Zealand, right?

• 3:03:52Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 3:03:52Speaker 04

  Uh, he looks like a feral, you know, crazy feral dude, but um he was attacked by a great white shark when he was like 21 years old off the, there's there's me and him uh standing by that shark cage.

• 3:04:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, shit.

• 3:04:05Speaker 04

  Off of the Farallon Islands, or sorry, the Chatham Islands, yeah. And one of my best friends, one of the gnarliest dudes, he shot the Meg with Jason Statham and he shoots.

• 3:04:14Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 3:04:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was the main underwater D P with Statham. He says Statham's a naughty guy. I don't know what that means, but uh he says he he likes to party or whatever. But so Kina was a uh abalone diver slash Kina diver. Kina is a sea urchin. And they were down at this place called the Chatham Islands where he was harvesting sea urchins. And they were not allowed to uh be, they had to free dive. And he had amazing breath hold, he was really good. And him and his mates are really competitive on who could hold their breath the longest, who could get the most sea urchins. And anyway, it's near the end of the end of the day. They've already got their quota for the number of sea urchins they could get. And um while Kina was down there, he saw all these big uh lobster or crayfish. And he said, I'm gonna come back and get these when we're done.

• 3:04:59Speaker 04

  They're not allowed to take anything recreationally when they're working. But when they were finished diving for the day, he he there, all the, they have these little like skiffs that they put their Kina into and their sea urchins. And anyway, they're all packed up, they're off this crazy uh rocky islands, the Chatham Islands. And he's like, I'm gonna go down and get these crayfish for dinner, boys. And so he dives down and it's breath hold, goes down. And his his mates are there like, oh, wow, Kina's been down there quite a while. And Kina says he swims down and he starts looking and and he looks and all these crayfish that he saw earlier, these lobster, they're gone, all the fish are gone. He said, everything's gone and they're all tucked way up under this ledge. And he just thought, wow, this is fucking weird.

• 3:05:42Speaker 04

  Like, I was just down here 20 minutes ago and these things, this reef is full of life. Now everything's hiding. And he didn't really think much of it until he's, his friends on the boat are thinking, wow, like Kina's been down there a long time. This uh uh this guy's, you know, got a great breath hold. So they start looking over the side of the boat, thinking, is he okay? He says, sorry, his friends look down and suddenly they see Kina.

• 3:06:11Speaker 04

  Instead of surfacing, they see his body moving at full speed sideways horizontally. Kenna says as he was coming up, he could see the boat. And he's like, okay, I'm getting back to the boat and the visibility is there can be hit or miss. And he said, suddenly he just got smashed. He said, fuck, I've been hit by a whale. He said he got hit so hard. And when, when this, it was a great white, basically a great white shark, a massive great white. It hit him from behind. And when it hit him, it flicked, it flicked its tail out in front of him. And a great white has a very cyclical tail, like a very, uh, very, um, almost symmetrical giant like sickle fin tail.

• 3:06:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:06:51Speaker 04

  And when Kenna said he saw this, he got hit with such force. He saw this giant tail and he's like, fuck, I've been hit by a whale. Like a whale's just run into me. But it wasn't a whale. It was a fucking, like a five plus meter great white. That had him and Kenna was wearing like a nine on nine wetsuit, like an 18 millimeter like Farmer John. Cause it's super cold down there. Like next stop Antarctica. It's like the, near the sub Antarctic islands, Chatham Islands is like 800 kilometers off the coast of New Zealand. So it's, there's no cell phones there and they're even to this day, they don't have like cell phone service. We went there to make a film there. Anyway, so he gets smashed by this great white, but because he's wearing like double weight belts, he's wearing a shitload of weight to keep himself, to be able to submerge with such

• 3:07:35Danny Jones?

  That big wetsuit.

• 3:07:36Speaker 04

  A bunch of neoprene. The shark hit him and grabbed the, the, his bottom jaw had grabbed the weight belt and its top jaw like came around his thigh. But because of his weight belt, the shark kind of like tried to chew into him, but it, it hit all the lead and spit him out for a second. Kenna surfaced and his friends again had seen him moving sideways and then noticed, wow, there's a fucking giant great white shark attached to him. And anyway, Kenna surfaces, they've already packed up the boat. They have their little tenders on the deck of the big boat. They're trying to throw the boat back in so that they could push it to Kenna. So, cause he's trying to swim back to the boat now. The shark comes back again for him, but he gets to the little skiff and to the boat just in time and like clambers on it. They drag him onto the boat.

• 3:08:21Speaker 04

  He hits the deck and he said his three mates, they're all like 21, they're smoking weed, drinking beer, like, you know, young, young punk kids that

• 3:08:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:28Speaker 04

  are making a lot of money because they're commercial divers. And he says, he lands on the boat. He looks up, all three of his friends are there and then they all run away. They all just leave. And he's like, what the fuck? And he says, he looks over, he looks at the sky and the first thing he thinks is like, wow, those clouds are beautiful. Look how beautiful the sky is. Like he was in complete shock. Then he said, he, his head turned to the deck of the boat. And the deck of the boat, which was white, was now completely red, all covered in his blood. His friends had run into the cabin to bring out belts and flannels because the nurse on the island was always worried about them and shark attacks.

• 3:09:09Speaker 04

  And she told them, if anything ever happens, stuff your flannel into the wound. So that his mates are stuffing their flannels into his leg, which is flayed open. And the one starts tying a belt around his leg and Kenna's like, what the fuck are you doing, mate? I'll lose my leg. He's like, you'll lose your fucking life if I don't put this on you. And they, they tied it on to him. Anyway, they brought him, they got him back to the mainland. He got medevaced out back to mainland New Zealand and he survived. But it's funny for, I was friends with this guy for like a decade and I, I knew that he had got attacked by a great white. I'm like, Kenna, why don't you ever tell the story about getting attacked by a great white? If I got hit by a great white, I'd be telling it at every bar, every time.

• 3:09:48Speaker 04

  He's like, mate, when you think you're gonna fucking die for real, like you think you're taking your last breath and you are dying and you're shitting yourself and you think this is the end. It's the last thing you want to relive. It's the last thing I want to relive. And he had finally told me the story, that whole story I just told you. And then it dawned on me, he's like, yeah, it's not a nice feeling. I don't even like to think about it now. You know, we're Americans, so we're always talking about all the stuff we do and this, like New Zealanders are a bit more subdued and a bit less. But it dawned on me, I'm like, wow. I never really thought about it that way. Like if you think you're really gonna die and you gotta relive that each time you tell the story. So now I tell it for him, you know?

• 3:10:28Danny Jones?

  What a crazy fucking story dude. My god.

• 3:10:33Speaker 04

  And he still has the, uh,

• 3:10:35Danny Jones?

  Did he keep his leg or no?

• 3:10:36Speaker 04

  He kept his leg, the weight belt. He was wearing like a double weight belt of really thick like lead, like really heavy lead. I don't know, 40 plus pounds or something.

• 3:10:45Danny Jones?

  But it's crazy, the shark even after that came back, tried to get him again.

• 3:10:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's the thing, there are certain sharks, um, and it was funny because when I told him, hey, Kenna, I want to get out of the cage down here in New Zealand. He's like, no, you don't mate. Cause I guess he relives it a lot where he, he thinks about it. Cause he said, he's pissed at himself that when he went down there and saw all the fish gone, all the crayfish tucked away, hidden. He said, it should have dawned on him, fuck, and there's a shark around. I should have, he's, he kind of beats himself up for not really knowing or remember. That was the vibe I got. Cause he just said, when it all like came together and he was surfacing, it wasn't till after he got hit by this whale and then realized it was just shark that he's like, I could have maybe saw it coming or something, but at the same time, you know?

• 3:11:31Danny Jones?

  Holy shit.

• 3:11:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh yeah. I was there. I was there when this happened, this massive great white.

• 3:11:36Danny Jones?

  What is this?

• 3:11:37Speaker 04

  We had, uh, Dicky, this crazy, uh, South African dude in this self-prep, or, uh, this toe, toe cage. I filmed the drone shot of this actually. Uh, but we had him in this thing called the Hornet and we were towing a decoy and this massive shark that we called Air Jaws, um, came out, breached on the seal decoy. Um, they're incredible, man. They,

• 3:12:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's nuts.

• 3:12:03Danny Jones?

  These people are never going to the beach again after that.

• 3:12:08Danny Jones?

  But it's funny. How long ago was this one?

• 3:12:10Speaker 04

  It says 2018.

• 3:12:11Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:12:12Speaker 04

  But I distinctly remember the first time I saw a great white shark's breaching on TV because it was in 2001 in August. And on that same, I saw a great white launch out of the water. It was Air Jaws one. And I was like, I had already loved sharks. I was working at that software company and I was like just about to quit to move to Cape Town. And I saw these great white sharks breaching out of the water and I was like dumbfounded like that guy. And then the very next month on that same TV, the twin towers burning down because it was, uh, 2001 was the first Air Jaws. And then 2001, that next month, September 11th, which is my son's birthday, which is coming up.

• 3:12:48Danny Jones?

  September 11th, no way.

• 3:12:49Speaker 04

  Friday, right? Yeah.

• 3:12:50Danny Jones?

  Dude, we're almost, dude, this Friday, two days.

• 3:12:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, uh, I was actually supposed to go away on a shoot, but again, like for the longest time, I just hated missing my kids' birthdays or I never really missed them. When they were super young, I don't even know if I missed them then. I just always prided myself on being there. That's why I'm hearing your stories about the film industry and these people that are miserable. Like you see these Hollywood films and you think, oh, that's the greatest job in the world. And then behind the scenes, it's just like a rat race, you know, not for everyone. So I feel so lucky to have found like a passion that keeps me busy and, uh, but even now like Shark Week's starting to like kind of die down. So I'm like, I think YouTube is the future, bro. I appreciate, I appreciate you having me on here, man. Cause it's, uh, I, I've been watching, uh, some of your episodes, GSP and, uh,

• 3:13:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:13:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, man. What a legend dude. What a legend.

• 3:13:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, man.

• 3:13:40Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm pumped.

• 3:13:41Danny Jones?

  It's a dream job to be able to kind of like do what you want creatively and not have to like deal with gatekeepers.

• 3:13:49Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 3:13:50Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 3:13:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:13:50Danny Jones?

  This is coming from somebody who was never able to get past the gate. So it's easy for me to say that.

• 3:13:55Speaker 04

  That was probably, probably the best thing that could happen.

• 3:13:58Danny Jones?

  You won Emmys. So like you, you've done it all, bro.

• 3:14:01Speaker 04

  Just by luck, man. That's the greatest mistake that I ever made or the greatest accident was just like stumbling upon filmmaking. And my kids now, like I, I kind of find, I want to know, I, I ask them often what they want to be when they grow up. And when they were kids, they loved sharks. And now I probably pushed it so much that they're like, dad, I love dolphins now.

• 3:14:22Speaker 04

  Not really, but, um, yeah, man, I think it's, uh,

• 3:14:24Danny Jones?

  Little people hate being told what to do.

• 3:14:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, they do. They do.

• 3:14:28Danny Jones?

  I learned that with my kids.

• 3:14:30Speaker 04

  How many kids you got?

• 3:14:30Danny Jones?

  Three.

• 3:14:31Speaker 04

  Three?

• 3:14:31Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:14:32Speaker 04

  And are they surfers? Are they watermen?

• 3:14:34Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah. I'm pushing them to be surfers. I, I, I, uh, every chance I get, I get them in the water. But like I hear, I have friends who are the same way, who like really pushed their kids like really hard to like skate or surf, whatever. They end up not wanting anything to do with it. Cause like dad pushed it too much, you know?

• 3:14:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:14:51Danny Jones?

  But.

• 3:14:51Speaker 04

  That's true. You kind of need to let them figure it out yourself.

• 3:14:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah. The same way you did, man.

• 3:14:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, man.

• 3:14:58Danny Jones?

  Well, listen, bro, this has been incredible. Uh, some of those stories are the most batshit crazy shit I've ever heard in my life.

• 3:15:05Speaker 04

  I hope it didn't scare you away from surfing.

• 3:15:07Danny Jones?

  You have made me terrified. You restored my fear of great white sharks.

• 3:15:13Speaker 04

  As long as they're, they're higher than tiger sharks. That's good.

• 3:15:16Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes. Thanks again, bro. I really appreciate it.

• 3:15:18Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:15:19Danny Jones?

  Tell everyone listening and watching where they can find more of your stuff.

• 3:15:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm on YouTube now. Um, just Andy Casa Grande or ABC4Explorer is my handle for everything. And, uh, I think you inspired me to start my podcast. So I'm going to be giving you a call sometime.

• 3:15:34Danny Jones?

  Anytime, brother. You're not that far.

• 3:15:36Speaker 04

  If you ever want to go shark diving or, uh, take me surfing, I'm down to do it.

• 3:15:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Let's do it, bro. We're, we're, we're, we're close enough. We're on the same coast.

• 3:15:45Speaker 04

  Right on, brother.

• 3:15:46Danny Jones?

  I appreciate your time.

• 3:15:47Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 3:15:47Danny Jones?

  We have Patreon questions?

• 3:15:48Speaker 04

  We do.

• 3:15:49Danny Jones?

  All right. We'll go do that and, uh, we'll wrap up the podcast now.

• 3:15:52Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 3:15:53Danny Jones?

  Good night, folks.

• 3:15:55Speaker 00

  Hello, I'm Chris Richards, general manager at Safford Volkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend, Happy.

• 3:16:04Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Happy Harry Turner, special finance manager at SaffordCredit.com. If you're in an open chapter 13 bankruptcy, recently filed a chapter seven, or you've been turned down because of credit challenges, don't give up. For nearly 30 years, I've helped people get reliable transportation when others said no. Visit SaffordCredit.com. Remember, I'm not happy unless you are.