Pod Insights Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks The Legend of Gustave, The Killer Crocodile About this episode During one of the most violent stretches in it's country's history, Burundi was terrorized by a massive Nile crocodile that was said to be responsible for the deaths of 300 people. A small team came together and the hunt began.
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Transcript 15,946 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:12 Jeff Larson? Hello, everybody, and welcome back to a wonderful day inside of the wonderful podcast Tooth and Claw. And we have our wonderful wildlife biologist Wes Larson with us. How are you doing today, Wes?
0:27 Wes Larson? I'm good. I'm good. It's late June. Things are wonderful.
0:32 Jeff Larson? That's wonderful. And I'm Wes's little brother Jeff, and I've been doing good, too. And we got Mike Smith with us. I saw Disclosure Day yesterday.
0:44 Wes Larson? Oh, what'd you think?
0:46 Jeff Larson? They disclosed, spoiler, they disclosed some information at the end.
0:50 Wes Larson? Yeah, okay.
0:52 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
0:52 Wes Larson? Who did?
0:54 Jeff Larson? Several people.
0:56 Wes Larson? Okay. Yeah, don't spoil it, actually. Yeah, that was close. Mike, you saw Masters of the Universe?
1:04 Mike Smith? I sure did. I sure did.
1:06 Wes Larson? How was that?
1:07 Mike Smith? It was exactly what I thought it was gonna be.
1:10 Jeff Larson? Mike was saying it need to be a little longer.
1:13 Mike Smith? Holy cow. Why was that movie like three hours long? That didn't need to be the case.
1:18 Wes Larson? For that movie.
1:19 Mike Smith? Uh, the jokes landed at about a 5% rate.
1:23 Wes Larson? Yeah, that is about what I'd expect.
1:25 Mike Smith? Wasn't super great, but you know, at a certain point, you just have to realize that movie maybe isn't made for you.
1:32 Wes Larson? What was that movie a while ago where there's someone online that said like, there wasn't a single joke in the movie? And it was like a really serious movie? And that was their big complaint. I feel like it was like the Batman or something.
1:45 Mike Smith? List or something?
1:46 Wes Larson? Yeah. And they're like, oh, this movie sucked. There wasn't a single joke.
1:50 Jeff Larson? Schindler's List, like, if you put a joke in that movie, it could really hit, you know? You could put a good joke.
1:57 Wes Larson? That's a high risk, high reward kind of joke.
2:01 Jeff Larson? My main thing with Disclosure Day is like Steven Spielberg is maybe the best example of a director using visual effects to their benefit and just creating works of art with T-Rex, sharks, all that, you know?
2:17 Jeff Larson? It's like his AI animals suck.
2:20 Wes Larson? Yeah, that killed me. Just the trailer seeing the deer. I was like, I can't.
2:25 Jeff Larson? It's like every single hair is like perfect and it's like lit up all weird and I don't know. Like you're supposed to be good at this dude.
2:33 Wes Larson? Did he use AI or was it CG? He used AI.
2:37 Jeff Larson? Or I don't know what the difference of AI and CG is.
2:40 Wes Larson? AI is like an artist doesn't make it a computer makes it CG and like CG artist creates it.
2:48 Mike Smith? Spielberg's been using AI since forever ago. That Haley Joel Osment.
2:54 Wes Larson? He might be my goat. I've been thinking about it lately. I think it's either Spielberg or Ridley Scott, but I think it's Spielberg.
3:00 Mike Smith? Jeff is more of a Tony Scott than a Ridley guy.
3:03 Wes Larson? I was gonna ask you guys that actually, because I started watching Deja Vu the other night. And I was like, you know, Tony Scott has some movies that has some, they have some juice. Like he's got some good movies.
3:16 Mike Smith? True Romance, Crimson Tide.
3:18 Wes Larson? Top Gun. So my, my question for you was gonna be, and it sounds like Jeff, I don't even have to add the extra.
3:25 Jeff Larson? I don't know where Mike's, I don't know if Mike's serious about that or not.
3:29 Mike Smith? I'm not sure if I am either.
3:31 Wes Larson? I was gonna say, if you could take either all of Ridley Scott's movies or Tony Scott's movies and Quentin Tarantino's movies, who would you pick?
3:41 Mike Smith? Ridley by a mile.
3:43 Wes Larson? Me too.
3:44 Mike Smith? Very comfortably and easily for me. Yeah.
3:47 Wes Larson? Yeah.
3:47 Jeff Larson? I think I'd take Tony and Quentin.
3:50 Wes Larson? Quentin. Yeah. All right.
3:52 Mike Smith? Good question, Les.
3:53 Wes Larson? Thanks.
3:55 Mike Smith? When'd you come up with that one?
3:57 Wes Larson? Uh, because you know, they both did true romance together. And then
4:01 Mike Smith? Sure.
4:02 Wes Larson? It just made me think like, wow, Tony Scott and Ridley Scott are so different, but Tony Scott has some bangers.
4:09 Mike Smith? It's a fact.
4:09 Wes Larson? Unstoppable.
4:11 Mike Smith? Unstoppable is a good film.
4:12 Wes Larson? He's dead, right?
4:14 Mike Smith? He did. He jumped from off of a bridge due to, well, who, I don't want to psychoanalyze, but that's a really. Interesting medical sordid history, like mis-prescribed drugs and dosages.
4:29 Jeff Larson? I thought you were talking about jumping off the bridge.
4:33 Mike Smith? Not a complicated diagnosis there, but um, not to make light of it, but.
4:39 Jeff Larson? Right, yeah. But we did.
4:41 Mike Smith? We lost a legend, a living legend, you know?
4:44 Jeff Larson? Well, speaking of legends, Mike, you did our episode today?
4:49 Mike Smith? Yes, sir.
4:49 Wes Larson? Legend.
4:50 Mike Smith? And you, oh man, that was such an appropriate segue, Jeff, in so many ways. Because I as- I assumed that the legend you're referring to wasn't me. It was the subject of today's episode, right?
5:03 Jeff Larson? Uh, it's a lot of things. You were in there. You're a legend. You're becoming one.
5:08 Mike Smith? Thank you. I'm an aspiring legend, a legend in training. I'm like a padawan. With one of, I need one of those little rat tail braids that dangles over my shoulder.
5:21 Wes Larson? Watch out for Anakin.
5:23 Mike Smith? I wanted to start this episode in a way that would really get Wes going though.
5:27 Wes Larson? Ooh.
5:28 Mike Smith? And stop me when you know who this quote is attributed to, either one of you. Quote, "In some things that should not have been forgotten were lost."
5:38 Jeff Larson? Stop. Gandalf.
5:41 Mike Smith? Close. "History became legend. Legend became myth."
5:46 Jeff Larson? Oh.
5:46 Mike Smith? For two and a half thousand years.
5:48 Jeff Larson? Gadra. Gadra.
5:50 Wes Larson? Galadriel.
5:51 Mike Smith? Help him out, Wes. Gad, Gadra.
5:54 Wes Larson? Gadra.
5:56 Mike Smith? She's, she's got like a thick butt on Instagram.
5:59 Wes Larson? That was, that was one part.
6:07 Mike Smith? You know Galadriel had it going on though.
6:10 Wes Larson? Caked up. Jeff's answer was one part impressive, one part really disappointing.
6:19 Mike Smith? You did great. That was actually, I was expecting Wes to swoop in quick.
6:24 Wes Larson? He's, Jeff's better at quotes than I am. And he always has been like, he's good at remembering that kind of stuff.
6:29 Jeff Larson? I didn't know that.
6:31 Wes Larson? What do you mean?
6:32 Jeff Larson? I just, I wouldn't, I didn't think I was good at quotes.
6:36 Wes Larson? You are. You're better at like, at remembering sayings and quotes than I am.
6:40 Jeff Larson? Wes, what movie is this one from? But they will remember the Titans.
6:50 Wes Larson? Remember the Titans.
6:53 Mike Smith? Don't forget the Titans.
6:56 Wes Larson? Someone sent me this clip that was like, this guy being like, guess the movie? And then it's Richard Hammond or Dr. Hammond being like, welcome to Jurassic Park.
7:09 Mike Smith? Well, that could be any number of Jurassic Park movies. So, um, okay. So now that we got Wes all hot underneath the collar, I did actually think about you a lot while preparing this episode, Wes, because there was a time on this very podcast when you talked about, uh, all those bugs you used to eat, right? And you gave us a number that truly shocked me. You said up to hundreds per day you would eat bugs?
7:38 Wes Larson? Yeah.
7:38 Mike Smith? And that was like unbelievable, but not to the point where it was just like beyond belief, you know? I could see a world, a day in which that was possible for you. And I don't know. Maybe it was that many. Maybe you were eating hundreds of bugs per day and I just don't know ball like that.
7:55 Jeff Larson? Joey Chestnut of bugs over here.
7:58 Wes Larson? Yeah. Bugs are small. There, you can pack in a lot of bugs.
8:03 Mike Smith? Right.
8:03 Jeff Larson? They're hard to catch.
8:04 Wes Larson? Like an ant is a bug.
8:05 Mike Smith? You just put like a straw in an anthill.
8:07 Wes Larson? Yeah.
8:08 Jeff Larson? Yeah. That's what made you the goat is you could catch them so well.
8:11 Wes Larson? I could catch them and I could eat them.
8:13 Mike Smith? Well, like a lot of monster stories, it can be hard to figure out what's all the way true and what's maybe a little embellished with the subject of today's episode. But.
8:23 Mike Smith? Even if the very lowest estimates of how many people he killed are to be believed, there's one Nile crocodile that solidified himself as one of the deadliest individual animals ever.
8:36 Jeff Larson? Wow.
8:37 Mike Smith? But before we can get into his legend, we need to set the historical stage, since the state of the world for both when and where this crocodile lived made for a perfect storm that vaulted him into near mythological status to this day. And who knows, maybe everything that's been said about him actually is true. All these numbers people toss around could be accurate and we don't even need to try to explain the myth away, but maybe we can deliberate by the time we finish the episode. But first, let's talk about the Burundi Civil War.
9:09 Mike Smith? And I'm going to get through this part pretty quickly, so forgive me if I eschew any nuance that's due to what I'm sure is like a very complicated political situation. But on July 1st, 1962, Burundi, and if you want to know where Burundi is, it's East Africa, nestled between the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda up to the north, Kenya to the east.
9:33 Jeff Larson? Oh, well, what if I didn't want to know where it was?
9:35 Mike Smith? Spoiler alert. Hold on, put a spoiler alert in there, Bill.
9:39 Wes Larson? Isn't it, isn't it pretty close to like all the big lakes too? Like Lake Victoria and stuff?
9:43 Mike Smith? Very close to Victoria and right alongside, that's actually a good shout because we'll get to the name of the lake pretty soon here, Tanganyika, which is where a lot of the story will be taking place. But landlocked, central, eastern, central Africa. On July 1st, 1962, Burundi gained its independence from Belgium, thus ending decades of European colonial administration and beginning a long and tumultuous period of ethnic conflict. Thirty years later in 1993, Wes?
10:15 Wes Larson? What, what month? Are we pre JP or post JP?
10:19 Mike Smith? I, that's, I should have done a better job here.
10:22 Wes Larson? It's alright.
10:23 Mike Smith? The exact month.
10:23 Wes Larson? That's year one though. That's year one.
10:25 Mike Smith? In 1993, 30 years after its independ- gaining its independence, the leader of the Hutu-dominated Front for Democracy won the first democratic election for the country of Burundi. But after only three months in office, he was assassinated in a failed military coup. The country fell into an incredibly violent civil war that lasted until 2005 and claimed the lives of some 300,000 Burundi citizens. In those years, 1993 to 2005, that'll be important to keep in mind.
10:55 Wes Larson? Okay.
10:55 Mike Smith? In fact, Jeff, let's do a quick, was Jeff paying attention?
10:58 Jeff Larson? Shit.
11:01 Mike Smith? What years did the Burundi Civil War take place?
11:04 Jeff Larson? 1994 to 1995.
11:07 Mike Smith? So close.
11:08 Wes Larson? I can do it.
11:09 Mike Smith? You want me to?
11:10 Wes Larson? 93 to 2005.
11:12 Mike Smith? Perfect.
11:13 Wes Larson? Hmm. And that guy was in power for three months.
11:17 Mike Smith? Three months.
11:17 Wes Larson? He had a good, he had a good run.
11:19 Mike Smith? Good run there. Yeah. Who was our president? Was it Polk? Or no, Garfield was just like smoked, the US president after just like a couple of weeks or something?
11:28 Wes Larson? Was he killed?
11:29 Mike Smith? Yeah.
11:30 Jeff Larson? There's one president who won and then he didn't wear a jacket and it was like rained on him and he said, I'm, I don't need a jacket. And he was so excited to win president and then he like got sick from getting rained on and died.
11:46 Wes Larson? Really? One of our presidents?
11:48 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
11:49 Mike Smith? Huh. Speaking of presidents of the United States, did you know that Shadow the Hedgehog once tried to assassinate the president? I guess. That's something I learned recently.
12:01 Wes Larson? I didn't know that.
12:02 Jeff Larson? Who's Shadow the Hedgehog?
12:03 Wes Larson? Like a villain slash hero. He's like one of the ones that is bad, but then becomes good. He's in Sonic 3.
12:10 Mike Smith? Hmm, is that true?
12:11 Wes Larson? The movie, yeah.
12:13 Mike Smith? Oh, the movie, sure, okay.
12:14 Wes Larson? Movies are good.
12:15 Jeff Larson? The video game?
12:16 Mike Smith? The video game, that was Knuckles, Sonic and Knuckles.
12:19 Wes Larson? Yeah, have you guys seen those movies?
12:22 Mike Smith? I saw the first one.
12:23 Wes Larson? They're kind of fun.
12:24 Mike Smith? It's alright.
12:24 Jeff Larson? I like the original Sonic more.
12:27 Wes Larson? With the weird teeth?
12:29 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
12:29 Mike Smith? Yeah, me too. Uh, just to finish this little historical section off, real quick. As if nature were a reflection of the humans inhabiting it, this decade of turmoil and death lined up nearly perfectly with what some describe as one of the single most prolific, quote, "serial killers" that the animal kingdom has ever produced. So the sources I'm gonna cite pretty heavily from here on are, um, a PBS documentary called Capturing the Killer Croc, really good stuff. Uh, there is a really succinctly organized YouTube video from a channel called Dinzo that I found to be very useful, so check that out if you're looking to have like some visual aids to go along with the story, but I, I added a lot.
13:13 Mike Smith? I did a lot more than just that guy, trust me.
13:15 Wes Larson? Great.
13:16 Mike Smith? So, don't just like leave here and go there. Uh, and then also a really nice little podcast called, uh, Ghoulish Tendencies had an episode called Gustav the Killer Croc, and again, that was just like a very useful aid in, you know, laying out the framework for this episode, so shout out those women over at Ghoulish Tendencies.
13:35 Jeff Larson? But also, listen to us, do it.
13:38 Wes Larson? Don't listen to them.
13:39 Mike Smith? They're cool and all, but...
13:43 Jeff Larson? But also just listen to this.
13:46 Mike Smith? Right, the year was 1987, Wes?
13:50 Wes Larson? Yeah, six years pre-JP.
13:52 Mike Smith? That was the year when the first wanted posters went up in western Barundi villages lining the northern coast of Lake Tonganika. The word spread, disappearances increased, and it wasn't long until the whispers of a giant crocodile instilled fear in anyone who lived close to that stretch of the Rosizi River that it called home. Ten years later, 1997, that would be.
14:15 Wes Larson? That's when The Lost World came out.
14:17 Jeff Larson? You think you could say the word Tyrannosaurus Rex in 87, Wes?
14:22 Wes Larson? In 87?
14:23 Mike Smith? Yeah, for sure.
14:25 Wes Larson? I was four years old, so I was already like fully dinosaur pilled by that point.
14:32 Mike Smith? That'd be a big pill.
14:34 Wes Larson? Yeah.
14:35 Mike Smith? Hopefully not a suppository, right, Les?
14:37 Wes Larson? Yeah.
14:38 Mike Smith? Oh, boy. How come? Is that what we're talking when someone is like red pilled or blue pilled? That's like a oral pill, right?
14:45 Wes Larson? Or is it? I believe so. I don't think that it really matters too much.
14:50 Mike Smith? All right.
14:50 Wes Larson? Uh, Lost World has like the best dinosaur CG of any movie ever. Better than Jurassic Park even. It's so good. Lost World's underlooked. Like, that's a good movie.
15:02 Mike Smith? San Diego sequence at the end is real fun.
15:05 Wes Larson? The whole thing is great, in my opinion.
15:07 Mike Smith? Okay, so 10 years later, a French naturalist named Patrice Faill found himself investigating the scene, interviewing a fisherman about the crocodile that had killed his brother. Nothing about this interview struck Patrice as being all that unusual, though. Sure, the crocodile was huge, maybe up to 20 feet long, but that wasn't totally unheard of. It was probably just the exaggeration of a grieving and frightened brother. But as the interview was ending, the fisherman included one peculiar detail. You know how like sometimes when you like, someone says something and you cock your head to the side?
15:42 Wes Larson? Yeah, my dog does that all the time.
15:44 Mike Smith? That's probably what Patrice was doing. What way do you cock your head when you hear something interesting?
15:50 Wes Larson? To the right.
15:50 Mike Smith? To the right. I go left.
15:52 Wes Larson? I don't know, actually.
15:54 Mike Smith? I go left.
15:54 Jeff Larson? Oh, left is tough for me.
15:56 Wes Larson? I think I'm.
15:56 Jeff Larson? My neck doesn't like it.
15:58 Mike Smith? No, right's hard for me. That's weird.
15:59 Wes Larson? I think I'm, I buy cock. You can go either side.
16:05 Mike Smith? You don't have a dominant side of the neck.
16:08 Wes Larson? For cocking? No.
16:10 Mike Smith? Okay. So anyway, this strange detail that Patrice heard was that the crocodile had indeed killed his brother, but it hadn't eaten him. What the heck? Jeff?
16:24 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
16:24 Mike Smith? That's like buying a Costco cake and then throwing it away.
16:30 Mike Smith? Without eating.
16:31 Jeff Larson? It wasn't that good. It looked good.
16:35 Mike Smith? Bought a, it was like buying a whole.
16:37 Jeff Larson? Sugar.
16:40 Mike Smith? I'm proud of you for doing that. That was the right decision.
16:42 Jeff Larson? That shouldn't have been so wasteful, though. I feel bad about that.
16:45 Wes Larson? Sure. I did that recently. I did that last week.
16:49 Jeff Larson? I bought.
16:49 Wes Larson? Bought a Costco cheesecake.
16:51 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
16:51 Wes Larson? I had one piece and then I was like.
16:53 Jeff Larson? Pistachio Costco cheesecake.
16:57 Wes Larson? That's what I bought too.
16:58 Jeff Larson? Really?
16:59 Wes Larson? That's exactly what I did.
17:01 Jeff Larson? We could have had two slices.
17:03 Wes Larson? I gave the rest of mine to the pigs.
17:05 Mike Smith? That is bizarre. Okay.
17:08 Wes Larson? I did this a week ago.
17:09 Jeff Larson? I did it two weeks ago.
17:11 Wes Larson? Wow. No, you're right. It was two weeks ago because it was the day Jesse left. That's nuts.
17:16 Mike Smith? I can't. This is more unbelievable than the story I'm about to tell.
17:21 Wes Larson? The pigs ate the rest of mine.
17:22 Mike Smith? We should tell this story. Okay. Anyway. So Wes.
17:26 Wes Larson? Yeah.
17:27 Mike Smith? That doesn't really make a whole lot of biological sense, right? Usually a crocodile kills and then eats, right? Almost always.
17:34 Wes Larson? Generally, yes.
17:35 Mike Smith? Generally.
17:35 Wes Larson? Yeah.
17:36 Mike Smith? Simply killing without eating would be, especially for a crocodile of this size, kind of a waste of energy.
17:43 Wes Larson? Yes, especially if it's not like caching it somewhere.
17:46 Mike Smith? Right. So at first Patrice dismissed the story as maybe just an oddity or a misunderstanding and probably not even true. Until he interviewed the witness of another crocodile killing not long after, who told a similar story with the same ending. He had seen a huge crocodile kill a human but leave before eating them. And then he heard the same thing from another witness and then another and then another until Patrice was certain that at the very least, he had uncovered a mystery that was worth investigating.
18:15 Wes Larson? How do you say what the heck in French? Sacré bleu?
18:19 Mike Smith? Sacré bleu. Yeah, sure. That works. So with the help of National Geographic, Patrice began traveling the length of the Rusizi River and the coast of Lake Tanganyika, asking after anyone who had any information to share about these strange deaths or the so-called monster crocodile, who it sounded like at this point was just killing for sport. The story more or less is always the same. A massive crocodile with three bullet wounds along his back, a distinct bone feature protruding from the back of his head, and a scar on its shoulder from where a hunter had tried and failed to kill him with a spear, would slay its prey and then leave without eating it.
18:55 Jeff Larson? Wow, that's cool. See, that's what, if Spielberg did a crocodile in his movies, he wouldn't have any scars or any bullet holes. He'd just have it.
19:05 Mike Smith? Perfect.
19:06 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
19:06 Mike Smith? Perfectly lit.
19:07 Jeff Larson? Maybe part of why it's not eating these people is they, it's a crocodile, so they don't gator roll, right Wes?
19:16 Mike Smith? No, they, they do.
19:17 Jeff Larson? Why would it be a gator roll if they're a crocodile?
19:20 Mike Smith? We, like, we call it a gator roll, but like, they still spin and tear off chunks of meat.
19:26 Jeff Larson? They learned it from alligators?
19:28 Mike Smith? No, it's just something in their natural behavior. But they don't call it gator rolling. That's just something, we call it in the US. I'm glad you're theorizing, Jeff. That's very apropos for today's episode. Keep doing that, please. I distinctly remember when I first got a credit card and I started looking at my balances, not knowing what to think. Was I spending way too much, way too little? I was never good with spreadsheets or math, never good at setting myself a budget, so I was just completely lost. So when I was introduced to Rocket Money's app, I was so relieved to finally have a tool that reported my financial status in an easy to understand way. And the thing about it that helped me save the most money was how Rocket Money tracked all of the subscriptions that I had and had the ability to cancel all the ones that I didn't want
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21:12 Mike Smith? Eventually, they ran into a young man named Hatungimana Audifax, who at 13 years old had lost his leg to a crocodile whose physical description matched the crocodile that Patrice had at this point begun calling Gustav. And I tried so hard to figure out why he settled on the name Gustav, and I just couldn't find anything. So, here we are. Gustav.
21:35 Wes Larson? Okay, keep your secrets, Patrice.
21:38 Mike Smith? Hatungimana began to tell a strange story. One day, he and his friends went for a swim in the Rusizi River. He was later told that people on the shore were shouting "crocodile", but he didn't hear them, so when Gustav gently chomped down on his leg from behind, he thought it was just one of his friends messing with him. He whipped around, maybe smiling, ready to fight back, but instead of a friend, he saw what he described as something huge, something old. Quote, "It was like he was escorting me. He didn't attack, maybe because the fishermen were beating on the water. I turned to look at him and our eyes met. My leg was crushed and some of the calf muscle was torn off. I was almost losing my mind because of the pain." End quote.
22:21 Mike Smith? And then, for some reason, Gustav let him go and disappeared beneath the muddy waters of the river as Hatungimana pulled his way to safety. So that's odd.
22:30 Wes Larson? Yeah.
22:31 Mike Smith? You know, when you bite someone, Wes, you're, it's all or nothing, you know?
22:35 Wes Larson? When I do, or when Gustav does?
22:37 Jeff Larson? If you were a crocodile, you would have ate that kid. You would have.
22:42 Wes Larson? I, okay.
22:44 Mike Smith? Well, so maybe this is a good time to like go into crocodile behavior because usually what would happen if this was a prey item for Gustav probably would have taken him underwater to drown him.
22:55 Wes Larson? Yes. So what often happens with them is they they'll pull their prey underwater, drown it, and then they use the death roll to pull chunks off of it to feed. The death roll isn't generally like their, as far as I know, like their strategy for killing stuff necessarily. But um, yeah, drowning is the main way that they kill their prey.
23:16 Jeff Larson? I forgot with crocs, it's death roll. For gators, it's gator roll.
23:21 Wes Larson? Yeah, yeah.
23:22 Mike Smith? Still, I'm impressed, though. You're firing on all cylinders. It's early.
23:28 Jeff Larson? You wanted to do this at 3 a.m.
23:30 Mike Smith? I just, you guys never, I try so hard. I bend over backwards.
23:35 Wes Larson? Do an episode at 3 a.m.
23:36 Jeff Larson? I would have done it, but I needed Danielle to set this stuff up and I didn't want to make her do it at 5 a.m.
23:47 Mike Smith? Someday, we're gonna, I'm gonna make it happen.
23:48 Wes Larson? It would have been funny to explain to her.
23:51 Jeff Larson? I was trying. I was like, hey, I might need you to set this up at 5 a.m. And she's like, what?
24:01 Wes Larson? Was she like, suckle blue?
24:03 Jeff Larson? She would have done it, but I was just like, hey, boys, let's push it back a little.
24:11 Mike Smith? Okay. In another interview in a nearby village, a fisherman showed Patrice's huge stomach scars, claiming that he was nearly gutted by this crocodile, but that Gustav didn't seem particularly intent on killing him, or at least not on eating him. Having picked up on the trend of leaving his victims uneaten, Patrice was no longer surprised when he would receive a call about Gustav about another lifeless body left intact on the banks of the river.
24:35 Jeff Larson? Wow.
24:36 Mike Smith? What did surprise Patrice were the claims that eyewitnesses of Gustav would make. He was supposedly so large, violent, and frightening that he became something more mythological than real in the minds of the locals. Eyewitness accounts of him would exaggerate his size. Sometimes, they would claim he was over 40 feet long. He's pretty. Just spell that one right now. It's not true.
24:59 Wes Larson? That's not true.
25:00 Mike Smith? Yeah.
25:00 Jeff Larson? They don't use feet though, so that you can't blame them.
25:03 Mike Smith? Yeah, maybe they meant forty meters long.
25:07 Wes Larson? Much less true.
25:08 Mike Smith? Yeah. They would claim that he, his scales or his scoots, is that how you pronounce that?
25:15 Wes Larson? Yeah.
25:15 Mike Smith? They would claim that they were red and that he had long grassy patches sprouting from his skin. Also not true.
25:23 Wes Larson? Yeah.
25:23 Mike Smith? But it's kind of fun to imagine like a red crocodile forty meter long.
25:27 Wes Larson? Growing.
25:28 Mike Smith? Oh my gosh. Algae, sure. They would exaggerate his behavior, or maybe not. They would claim that he would charge fearlessly at large crowds of people or even attack motorized boats. And that's a claim that is not wholly without merit.
25:44 Wes Larson? Yeah.
25:44 Mike Smith? But most shocking of all was Gustav's supposed kill count, and we'll get to that one soon. But Patrice had known for a while that the next step had to be seeing Gustav for himself.
25:55 Jeff Larson? Is it more or less than Wes with bugs?
25:58 Mike Smith? That's so much less.
26:02 Mike Smith? It's insane.
26:03 Jeff Larson? What'd you think bugs used to call Wes?
26:07 Mike Smith? Gustav.
26:10 Wes Larson? There's little wanted posters everywhere. My face on them.
26:14 Jeff Larson? They're like he had grass grown out of his head.
26:19 Mike Smith? Patrice had known for a while that the next step had to be seeing Gustav for himself. But the fact that he hadn't yet was not for lack of trying. The Ressisi River is seventy-three miles long with tons and tons of crocodiles dotting its waters. It's incredibly muddy, littered with huge swathes of reeds and tall grass, and had an ever-changing shoreline that shifted with the season. It was like the proverbial needle in the haystack, you know, it's like. Even in a geographical range much smaller than this, it's really, really difficult to pinpoint and find one specific croc.
26:52 Jeff Larson? But he's been there for a few weeks.
26:55 Mike Smith? Much longer than that even at this point.
26:57 Jeff Larson? I mean, if I'm there for months, I'm finding a needle in a haystack.
27:01 Mike Smith? You think? I would give up pretty quick, I think.
27:04 Jeff Larson? I mean, I'm saying if you tried for months.
27:07 Wes Larson? If you didn't give up. Yeah, I think in months I could find a needle in a haystack.
27:11 Mike Smith? How big is a haystack?
27:14 Jeff Larson? Like those big wheels, circles?
27:17 Mike Smith? Is that what?
27:17 Wes Larson? Like a round bale? Yeah.
27:19 Mike Smith? Yeah, you probably could. I wonder how long, how long do you think it would take? Days?
27:24 Wes Larson? I mean, it could just take minutes if you got really lucky.
27:27 Jeff Larson? I think I'd get the needle in 24 hours. If I was motivated. Just saying, maybe it's even harder than a needle in a haystack is my point.
27:37 Wes Larson? Sure, like a needle in a thousand haystacks.
27:40 Mike Smith? In a hay.
27:40 Wes Larson? Yeah. Field.
27:42 Mike Smith? Field, yeah. Maybe it's like, you know how every planet in Star Wars is just like one ecosystem?
27:49 Wes Larson? Yeah.
27:50 Mike Smith? Like Coruscant's a city or Andor is just a one big forest?
27:54 Wes Larson? Yeah.
27:54 Mike Smith? Maybe the planet is like the hay planet.
27:58 Wes Larson? And there's one needle in there.
28:00 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
28:01 Wes Larson? They had the hay planet in Andor.
28:03 Mike Smith? Uh, where were we here?
28:04 Wes Larson? He hasn't seen Gustav.
28:06 Mike Smith? Here we go. Here's how long he's been searching, Jeff. Two years. After two years of constant searching and seemingly always being one step behind, Patrice began to think that maybe Gustav wasn't just like a legend, but was actually just the result of overactive imaginations. But then one day he saw something so large that at first his eyes almost passed right over it, since it didn't register in his brain that it could be a crocodile. At a glimpse, it looked more to him like a huge tree trunk that had floated down the river and settled on a sandbank. But he did a double take. What he was looking at was actually one of the largest Nile crocodiles he or anyone else would ever see. To confirm its identity, Patrice quickly scanned its body to see if it had the scars he had been told it would have.
28:49 Mike Smith? And sure enough, along the croc's back were the three bullet wounds and a deep discolored scar on his shoulder. Still shaking from the sight, Patrice eyeballed its size and estimated that Gustav measured somewhere around 20 feet long and weighed a staggering 2,000 pounds.
29:05 Wes Larson? It's a lot of pounds.
29:07 Mike Smith? Dude, if you were British, you'd be rich.
29:10 Wes Larson? Yeah, 2,000 pounds.
29:15 Mike Smith? Do they still use pounds? I don't, I've never.
29:17 Wes Larson? I think they use euros, right?
29:18 Mike Smith? No.
29:19 Wes Larson? Cause they brexited. No, they, cause they, that was Brexit. They, I think they use pounds.
29:24 Mike Smith? They're back on pounds?
29:25 Wes Larson? Yeah.
29:26 Mike Smith? Why not kilos? Are they stupid?
29:29 Jeff Larson? Twenty feet long is close to the length of a bus.
29:34 Mike Smith? Uh, which kind of bus?
29:36 Jeff Larson? I think it's about eighty percent of a bus. For length? Buses are about like twenty-five feet.
29:42 Mike Smith? Like forty feet, right?
29:45 Jeff Larson? I don't think so.
29:46 Mike Smith? I, you wanna check that?
29:47 Wes Larson? You need to know this.
29:49 Mike Smith? Look that up, Jeff. We'll keep going. That is important to know.
29:53 Jeff Larson? I'm not looking it up.
29:54 Wes Larson? I'll look it up.
29:56 Mike Smith? The next important observation to make would be Gustav's teeth, since size alone isn't always the most accurate way to determine a crocodile's age. Based on Patrice's past experience, a crocodile that size would have to be close to a hu- a hundred years old. But when he finally got close enough to get a good look inside Gustav's mouth, he saw that his teeth were in near-perfect condition.
30:19 Jeff Larson? Huh.
30:19 Mike Smith? Later in the PBS documentary that I referenced earlier called Capturing the Killer Croc, scientist Allison Leslie explained that throughout their life, crocodiles lose their teeth and then replace them, but at diminishing returns. So, older crocodiles, they'll have fewer teeth that are a little more weathered and worn down. So Gustav's teeth being in pristine condition was another curiosity add to add to the swiftly growing list of things that made him unusual. So he's huge enough to be a hundred years old, but his teeth are in perfect enough condition. Now, the new estimate for his age was closer to sixty years old, maybe, at oldest. Uh, most likely born sometime in the nineteen forties. While he acknowledged that the killings needed to be stopped by any means necessary,
31:02 Mike Smith? Patrice concluded that it would be a shame for such an exceptional specimen to be killed before he could be properly studied. So he approached the Baruni Minister of Environment with his reasoning and a plan.
31:14 Mike Smith? The minister agreed on the condition that he either make it happen in sixty days or the project to capture Gustav would need to be abandoned due to the escalating political tension.
31:23 Jeff Larson? That's pretty generous, honestly. If this crocodile's killing people that frequently, most leaders would be like, no, we're killing it.
31:34 Mike Smith? I think, well, part of the problem is that even though people had tried, nobody could at this point.
31:40 Jeff Larson? Sure.
31:42 Mike Smith? So like, even if they were to find him, they, killing him is easier said than done, I guess.
31:46 Jeff Larson? It feels to me like, what's, what more do you learn from it alive than dead?
31:52 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's a good point.
31:53 Mike Smith? Hmm.
31:54 Wes Larson? Yeah.
31:55 Mike Smith? Behavior.
31:55 Jeff Larson? You know.
31:56 Mike Smith? Patrice had, we're gonna get into some Patrice stuff later on, so maybe this isn't. I don't, we'll get there, but this guy, uh, yeah. In fact, I was hesitant to even like really get into this guy, but I feel like we need to by the end.
32:12 Wes Larson? Yeah. School bus is thirty-five to forty-five feet. So I said forty feet. That's right in the middle of that.
32:19 Wes Larson? Typical long school bus.
32:21 Mike Smith? Jeff was thinking of the buses he used to ride.
32:24 Wes Larson? That's yeah.
32:26 Mike Smith? Maybe. I always liked, those short buses are so aesthetically pleasing to me.
32:30 Wes Larson? I know.
32:31 Mike Smith? I like a squat little bus, you know?
32:33 Wes Larson? Yeah.
32:34 Mike Smith? Patrice immediately set to work trying to capture Gustav, designing a huge steel cage custom made to fit the croc. He then called in a team of specialists and, oh, man, this is, this is gonna get Jeff.
32:45 Jeff Larson? I love getting a team together.
32:47 Mike Smith? It's the best part of any movie is assembling the team, you know? Including the aforementioned South African scientist Alison Leslie and a Tunisian expert named Mark Gonswana, both of whom had invaluable years of experience with crocodiles. And this Mark guy, he ran a farm, or I don't know exactly what you would call it in Tunisia, but he just had hundreds of Nile crocodiles. It was just dealing with them day in, day out.
33:13 Wes Larson? Yeah, a farm. Yeah.
33:15 Mike Smith? Farm. But even with all their combined experience, this all-star team wasn't feeling all that confident on account of the fact that Gustav, unusual croc that he was, refused to stick to a single territory, instead opting to travel long stretches on his own. And also that he was huge and was now just killing people at unheard of rates. They're just like, this is, this is gonna be a tough task here.
33:39 Mike Smith? He had killed three people in a week, each victim miles from each other. He had eaten none of them. Three humans in a week, that's, I mean, we'll get into some facts really soon. Crocodiles, even if he was eating them, they're not needing to eat that frequently.
33:54 Wes Larson? No.
33:55 Mike Smith? In an interview with BBC in two thousand and two, Patrice reported that Gustav would regularly patrol the twenty-mile stretch of water between Ramongay and Minago, eating fishermen and sailors en route as he moved unpredictably up and down the coast of the muddy shorelines. Quote. He can eat 10, 15, or 20 people along the bank. One year, I followed the path he took for one of his forays and 17 people had been eaten between Kenyoshia and Minago and Kabezi and Magara. So one year, 17 people.
34:24 Mike Smith? He would appear wherever he felt like appearing, whenever he felt like it, with the team always showing up right when Gustav was said to have left an area. And so they started just pulling out all the stops in order to spot Gustav. And I was so delighted in this documentary to see that they got in a hot air balloon,
34:44 Mike Smith? which is just my favorite vehicle for anyone to get into for like practical purposes, you know?
34:51 Jeff Larson? They like see a log and turn the whole thing around to go like make sure and it's just a log still.
34:59 Mike Smith? Yeah, it takes like a half hour to turn it around.
35:03 Jeff Larson? Sandbags.
35:04 Mike Smith? Can you go that direction? Nope. This goes up and down. We can go up. We can go down.
35:12 Mike Smith? Okay.
35:15 Mike Smith? So the concern at this point, though, is that in the past Gustav would often disappear for months at a time after one of these killing sprees. And with the 60 day hard limit that they had, this was time that they no longer had to spare. Okay. We're going to get into some facts now. And since this is our first episode about Nile crocodiles, this is going to be your standard slate of the basics, what we need to know about them. So their size. And this is just like, I'm doing averages here so we can kind of compare and contrast just how special and unique Gustav was compared to it. But the average adult male Nile crocodile often reaches lengths between 12 and 15 feet long and will weigh anywhere from 500 to 1500 pounds.
35:59 Jeff Larson? That's how much a bus weighs.
36:02 Wes Larson? It's not true.
36:03 Mike Smith? So Gustav was 20 feet long and weighed
36:06 Wes Larson? Wow.
36:07 Mike Smith? around 2,000 pounds, pretty exceptionally larger than the average.
36:11 Wes Larson? And and Nile crocodiles, I believe, are the second largest crocodilians in the world after saltwater crocodiles.
36:20 Mike Smith? They're also sexually dimorphic. Surprise, Wes, surprise. Everything is.
36:25 Jeff Larson? But which ones are bigger, females or males?
36:28 Wes Larson? Males.
36:28 Mike Smith? Females are 30% smaller on average.
36:31 Jeff Larson? Whoa.
36:32 Mike Smith? Yeah. Okay. What do they look like? We're getting real standard, basic here, but they're spotted and striped with a dark bronze and olive colored back. And on their undercarriage, their underside is kind of like a dingy yellow color.
36:45 Wes Larson? Undercarriage.
36:46 Mike Smith? In case you're ever wondering if you're seeing Nile crocodiles undercarriage.
36:53 Mike Smith? Uh, nether regions.
36:54 Wes Larson? Yeah, their ventral side.
36:57 Mike Smith? Crocodiles, Wes.
36:58 Wes Larson? Yeah.
36:59 Mike Smith? Their bite, their teeth, how do they work?
37:02 Wes Larson? Uh, they're for grabbing, grabbing and tearing, uh, but they're not, they don't chew with their teeth. So like long, sharp conical teeth. So, you know, they grab and then they go back and forth to tear. But that's really all they're good for.
37:18 Jeff Larson? And they just swallow big chunks, right?
37:20 Wes Larson? Big old chunks. Yep. Is that what you're looking for?
37:24 Mike Smith? I, yeah, I am looking for that. Okay. I was just thinking of all the different possible food items for crocodiles to eat all of a sudden, like.
37:32 Jeff Larson? I was thinking of that too.
37:33 Mike Smith? Yeah. Like, you know how you take a fork and you like kind of do a death roll with spaghetti?
37:39 Wes Larson? Yeah.
37:40 Mike Smith? They, is that what they're doing?
37:42 Wes Larson? No, they're not twisting something.
37:44 Mike Smith? But they don't, like, have we ever seen one eat spaghetti? I guess is the first question.
37:49 Wes Larson? No, I don't think so.
37:51 Mike Smith? See, that's science right there. You ask a question, hypothesize.
37:54 Jeff Larson? What was the length of that one spaghetti noodle?
37:59 Mike Smith? Two miles.
38:00 Jeff Larson? Two miles. They could probably roll that thing up so fast.
38:04 Mike Smith? Yeah. Oh, that'd be, that'd be so fun. We need to, what are scientists even doing?
38:12 Mike Smith? Okay, uh, age. In the wild, Nile crocodiles live for about forty-five years on average, uh, but can live up to eighty years or longer while in captivity. So again, Gustav, probably around sixty years old, pretty exceptional. We don't have like a hard and fast, we don't know for sure, but like, maybe more fit or capable crocodiles are gonna prolong that lifespan a little longer than that average forty-five years. Where do they live? Their range? So they're native to freshwater habitats in Africa, widely distributed in sub-Saharan Africa. And I realized while preparing this episode, as many times as I've heard you say that, I didn't know what that meant, Wes. What does that mean exactly?
38:56 Wes Larson? South of the Sahara Desert.
38:58 Mike Smith? So basically, anywhere not northern Africa.
39:01 Wes Larson? Yeah, cuz nor- I mean, Africa obviously is a very diverse continent with so many different types of habitat and whatnot, but there is kind of this big division between the northern third of the continent and the rest, where that northern third is all mostly arid, extremely arid desert, and then the rest has a lot more variety.
39:24 Jeff Larson? Right. And we say that because one person wrote in and said, you shouldn't just say Africa.
39:29 Wes Larson? It's been more than one. We definitely have generalized Africa in the past, and it's something that we can't do better with.
39:36 Mike Smith? Yes. So, sub-Saharan Africa, and they are present in twenty-six countries. So, really is-
39:42 Jeff Larson? Okay.
39:43 Mike Smith? Basically, everything but that northern Sahara portion of Africa, as Wes just explained. I did it again, though. I explained it again.
39:51 Jeff Larson? Do they overlap with saltwater crocodiles at all?
39:55 Wes Larson? No.
39:57 Mike Smith? No. Any more questions?
40:00 Jeff Larson? No, keep talking. You-
40:03 Mike Smith? I just thought you'd have a follow-up. Like, what if they did, though? This would be my next question.
40:09 Jeff Larson? That's interesting, I guess.
40:12 Wes Larson? They, I, then they would probably compete with them at a pretty high level.
40:17 Mike Smith? So their diet? Adult Nile crocodiles are the apex predator for their range and are ambush hunters. And they'll eat pretty much anything they can overpower, including fish, birds, zebras, antelope, sometimes even the occasional buffalo, very occasionally, and humans, obviously, for the intents and purposes of this episode. Here's something that I found really interesting about Nile crocodile stomach biology, I guess, is how I'll put it, but they have an ectothermic metabolism and they don't really need to eat all that often, but when they do, they can eat up to half of their body weight at a time.
40:56 Jeff Larson? Wow.
40:56 Mike Smith? What's really interesting about that, though, is according to Hoosier Meyer, Hoosier Meyer's Crocodiles Biology and Husbandry, their stomachs aren't much larger than a basketball. So I don't.
41:09 Jeff Larson? Where's it all going?
41:10 Wes Larson? Does it expand?
41:12 Mike Smith? It has to just expand an insane amount.
41:14 Wes Larson? Yeah.
41:15 Mike Smith? Otherwise, like, I don't know, quite.
41:17 Jeff Larson? Or maybe it's one of those like giant basketballs, like a gimmick. Basketball.
41:22 Wes Larson? Like when they have in a parade.
41:24 Mike Smith? Maybe Hoosier Meyer didn't really understand basket, or maybe.
41:32 Mike Smith? Maybe he was really small.
41:34 Wes Larson? Just pointing to like houses and being like, that's about the size of a basketball, right?
41:40 Mike Smith? Yeah, you know how like, when you see a basketball really close up, it looks big, but when you see a stomachs from a crocodile, like really far away, it looks small.
41:49 Wes Larson? Maybe he just has no concept of perspective.
41:59 Jeff Larson? I think that's safe to assume.
42:02 Mike Smith? That's not funny. Okay. So they can swim up to 22 miles an hour and run up to nine miles an hour on land. So they're like pretty quick, a short little burst on land, enough to be dangerous, but water is really where they're, you know, causing some damage.
42:20 Wes Larson? Yeah, I think people hear that and they think like, oh, so I could outrun one. But it's like, if a crocodile suddenly bursts, you know, and is running after you on land, there's a very good chance you're gonna fall over. Because you're gonna be so scared.
42:34 Jeff Larson? And you gotta kind of run backwards at first, normally.
42:38 Wes Larson? Right.
42:39 Mike Smith? You're not like in starting blocks.
42:41 Wes Larson? No.
42:41 Mike Smith? And there's, yeah. So their social behavior, Nile crocodiles are relatively social amongst themselves and share basking spots and large food sources. The hierarchy is determined by size, so the largest male will have first access to the food and the best basking spots. Which is real, just like, alpha behavior, you know?
43:00 Jeff Larson? Sure.
43:01 Mike Smith? It's kind of fun, just to think of, like, a huge... Allison in the documentary, when she was looking at Gustav, she was just like, oh, he is fat. He is so fat. You can just, like, envision a fat crocodile, like, just lumbering up to the best basking spot and kicking everyone else out.
43:19 Jeff Larson? Right. As like a beefy boy, it'd be nice going to the pool and just being like, choose whatever spot someone's in and be like, hey, get out of here.
43:29 Mike Smith? Right.
43:32 Mike Smith? Another thing I found kind of fun about their parental behavior is both mother and father are known to guard their nests until the eggs hatch. And if their babies are having a hard time getting out of their shell, the, the mother, and maybe the father, I think it's just the mother, they'll put the eggs in their mouth and roll them gently around with their tongue and on the roof of their mouth to help crack the egg a little bit for the babies to emerge a little easier, which I thought was kind of fun.
43:58 Wes Larson? That's cool.
43:59 Jeff Larson? Be scary as a baby, it'd be like, oh no, she's eating me.
44:02 Wes Larson? Yeah, I'm about to get eaten.
44:04 Mike Smith? That is a danger. They eat each other a lot, it turns out. There's, there's... Cannibalism is rife in Nile crocodile culture. Human deaths caused by Nile crocs, so it's hard to know exactly because a lot of attacks go unreported. But it's estimated that they kill hundreds, possibly thousands of people each year. And that they're responsible for more human deaths than all other crocodilians combined. Which I think Wes has alluded to in the past.
44:32 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's, it's crazy the range that you read. You hear numbers like 500 to 20,000. Which is just unreal, but the thing is, is a lot of people in their range just go missing and we don't know if they drowned or if they were eaten by a crocodile. And a lot of them were probably eaten by crocodiles like these are, this is one of the few animals in the world that sees us as prey and is pretty good at like eating us. So I, I tend to believe that it is in the thousands.
45:03 Mike Smith? That's an important thing to keep in mind too, moving forward is what you just mentioned is these disappearances that are unexplained, possibly crocodile, possibly from other factors, but.
45:14 Wes Larson? If you were to say like, what's the most dangerous large animal in Africa? It is without a doubt Nile crocodiles.
45:21 Mike Smith? One last fact before we get back to our story, and this is just like a bonus amateur observation. So as all great science does, I began with a hypothesis and I was like, you know what? Most humans are right-handed. I bet most crocodiles death roll to the right, you know?
45:40 Wes Larson? Hmm.
45:41 Mike Smith? Uh, so I found six videos of crocodiles death rolling. Three of them, they rolled to the right, three of them, they rolled to the left.
45:48 Wes Larson? Ooh.
45:50 Mike Smith? So I don't.
45:50 Wes Larson? You disproved your hypothesis.
45:52 Mike Smith? I'm not jumping to any conclusions, but you know.
45:55 Wes Larson? Yeah. You need a bigger data set.
45:57 Mike Smith? Yeah. But it is an interesting question, you know, it seems like, I don't know what it seems like.
46:03 Wes Larson? Maybe it's depending on the hemisphere they're in.
46:05 Mike Smith? Right.
46:06 Wes Larson? Like the Coriolis effect, you know?
46:08 Mike Smith? Mm hmm. That's science.
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49:16 Jeff Larson? Yes.
49:18 Mike Smith? During their search, Patrice and the team heard something that really just dumbfounded them. As plans for building the cage were well underway, a park ranger claimed that he had seen Gustav killing a hippopotamus. And it's probably not what you're thinking. Like, probably just like a tiny baby hippo or something like that. No. This was a fully grown adult hippo.
49:40 Wes Larson? Not typically prey for them.
49:42 Mike Smith? Usually encounters with hippos and with crocodiles being pretty easily dispatched. These hippos just have size and strength and speed, every advantage over these crocodiles, usually, but not Gustav. He had attacked one, which was already heard something pretty unheard of, and then it actually won the fight. The team was left to ask what exactly had made him this way, and if their 30-foot-long steel cage would even be enough to contain him if they did find him at this point.
50:10 Mike Smith? A few theories to try and explain Gustav have since been offered up. Like most crocodiles in the region, he was probably born in the lower section of the Rosyze River, where the slow-water-moving waters spread out into marshlands and shallow banks. Anything that entered the water upstream would eventually wind its way down through to this stretch of the river. And as we covered at the beginning, the history of this part of Africa might help us understand what sort of interesting things might have been floating down towards these crocodiles. In 1972, when Gustav had been about, he would have been about 30 years old or so, a political uprising in the south triggered a violent retaliation from the government, and the army began removing anyone they deemed capable of organizing any further attempts at resistance.
50:52 Mike Smith? In just a few months' time, this genocide saw between 100,000 and 200,000 people killed. And as awful as it is to consider, the river offered an easy way to dispose of these bodies. So, they would be disposed of upstream. They would float down towards all of these crocodiles, living kind of in this delta area where the river, the Rosyze River, met Lake Tonganika. And many of these bodies ended up drifting right through Gustav's territory. And this is where one theory as to why he killed without eating was proffered up by Patrice.
51:26 Mike Smith? Years of feeding on human remains without having to really hunt might have dulled his instinct to kill in order to eat. But you're probably already poking holes in this theory, I imagine. Thousands of other crocodiles are also living right here alongside Gustav. So why weren't they all huge and killing wantonly as well? You know?
51:44 Wes Larson? Yes.
51:45 Mike Smith? Another thing to consider is that by the time Gustav started his thing of killing but not eating, he would have already been in at least his mid 40s. The late 1980s, he would have been about 40, maybe a little older. So why did he start killing and not eating so late in life? Some more theories popped up, and I'm gonna be pretty heavily quoting that Denso YouTube video I referenced earlier, just to keep things on track, keep it succinct. But the first theory as to why Gustav would kill but not eat his victims is called the herpetologist's view. Gustav eventually grew to be nearly 20 feet long and weighed around 2,000 pounds. But of course, he wasn't always that big. He didn't just come out of the womb. 20 feet long, right? You have to imagine.
52:28 Jeff Larson? I don't know with Gustav. It seems like he's not very typical crocodile.
52:33 Wes Larson? They also don't come out of the womb.
52:35 Mike Smith? That's true. Whatever, eggs and wombs. It's like, whatever, Wes. So, some important biology for Nile crocodiles we have to consider here is how they grow. In the first 10 years, a male crocodile, male Nile crocodile goes from one foot long to about eight feet long. Then between years 10 and 20, they grow another 50% or so until they're around 11 or 12 feet long. Between 20 and 30, growth slows down drastically, and the average male Nile croc will top out at around 15 feet long. After that, they'll grow maybe an inch or two per decade, if that, until they reach full skeletal maturity, is what they call it, much later in life. And for a long
53:19 Mike Smith? time, we actually thought that crocodiles, Nile crocodiles, I don't know why that's so freaking hard to say for me, Nile crocodile, it rhymes. It's like poetry. We thought that they were indeterminate growers, that they literally just never stopped growing, kind of like lobsters. That's since been disproven, but it does take a very long time until they reach that skeletal maturity.
53:42 Mike Smith? So for the first 30 or so years of his life, until around the time the human killings began, Gustav was probably still within that average size range for a Nile crocodile and could thus sustain himself the way any other of his species would. A diet of fish and other unfortunate animals drinking from the side of the river, or maybe the occasional other crocodile. The herpetologist theory goes, though, that by the late 1980s, he simply had grown too large, cumbersome and slow to hunt the same small and agile prey items as fellow crocodiles. So he's literally just like, he couldn't move his body efficiently enough, or quick enough to be capturing these same prey items, which I thought is kind of an interesting idea.
54:22 Wes Larson? Like an animal or fish or whatever, huh? That is interesting.
54:24 Mike Smith? And like these small fish, even if you were to catch them, they weren't calorically rewarding enough to even be worth it at that size, you know?
54:31 Wes Larson? Yeah.
54:32 Mike Smith? So maybe he learned that the relatively slow, predictable and soft humans made for a much more conducive source of food for a crocodile that could no longer afford those energetically costly chases. But that didn't answer the question as to why he would kill, but then leave so many bodies uneaten. Some herpetologists theorize that consuming large prey typically entails a crocodile to do that, we talked about it earlier, the death roll, to tear off chunks of flesh, because like Wes said, they don't chew, they roll, tear off a chunk and then swallow those chunks whole.
55:03 Jeff Larson? Oh, he's too fat to roll over.
55:05 Mike Smith? He's like, he weighs so much that it's just like a burden.
55:09 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
55:09 Mike Smith? Takes too much energy to get his giant body going.
55:13 Wes Larson? Well, I was gonna say, like, at that size, he's like, bigger than a lot of great white sharks. And for them, when they bite something and they realize like, oh, this isn't even worth it, they won't continue feeding. And so I wonder if that was kind of the same thing where he's like biting a leg and it's mostly bone and he's kind of like, oh, this isn't, you know, juice isn't worth the squeeze here.
55:34 Mike Smith? Yeah, so at 2,000 pounds, the death roll is probably just extremely exhausting. So instead Gustav would kill a prey item and then wait for decomposition to further soften the flesh while moving on to his next target later to return and, you know, nibble off easier.
55:51 Jeff Larson? He should start attacking things at the top of a hill and then just roll down the hill.
55:56 Wes Larson? Just roll down.
55:57 Mike Smith? Oh, that's such a good idea.
55:59 Wes Larson? They would have to be fixed.
56:03 Mike Smith? I don't, yeah. What's the closest hill to him? Hill in the Jaro, right?
56:09 Wes Larson? I think it's hilly country.
56:10 Jeff Larson? I think riverbeds normally have a hill, you know?
56:13 Mike Smith? That's true, like a little slope down into the water.
56:16 Jeff Larson? Most hills don't have names.
56:19 Mike Smith? Is that true? I don't know. It feels like everything has a name if you like zoom in close enough on Google Maps.
56:25 Wes Larson? Yeah, but who knows about Burundi?
56:27 Mike Smith? So that's theory one, the herpetologist view. So theory two, past trauma. The past trauma theory. As we've covered, Gustav is no stranger to being attacked by humans. It has since been learned that crocodiles have powerful, long-term associative memories, remembering specific threats from up to 40 years ago. Each time someone fired a gun at Gustav or stabbed him with a spear, his brain would store that information until he eventually associated humans with danger. With guns really starting to be a widespread item for the people of Burundi, as he was eventually growing into what hunters would see as a pretty sizable haul of food and leather. Maybe he became the frequent target of bullets and other weapons, and at some point, began to see humans as a threat to proactively neutralize before they could cause them any more pain.
57:12 Mike Smith? That's theory two. And you can, you can pass judgment on these if you think that holds water or not. Wes, you seem to think that it does not.
57:20 Wes Larson? I don't like that theory, yeah.
57:22 Mike Smith? Let's get on to theory three, since that, but theory two was a bust for Wes. Wes was not busting due to theory two. Theory three is simple surplus killing. In predators like crocodiles, the cycle of killing and eating has taken shape over millions of years of evolution. As far back as the early 1970s, political unrest saw seemingly endless procession of human bodies floating down the Rusizi River, meaning that for a long stretch of Gustav's life, he didn't need to hunt or even necessarily even be hungry in order to eat. He was just getting, basically just like the sushi conveyor belt, just coming right at him. He didn't even have to work for it. We have to pay for the sushi too. He wasn't, he didn't. That's crazy.
58:06 Jeff Larson? I bet you we could go to sushi conveyor belt, eat some sushi and leave.
58:11 Wes Larson? It's true.
58:12 Mike Smith? Without paying?
58:13 Wes Larson? You could.
58:13 Jeff Larson? You don't think we could?
58:15 Wes Larson? You don't have to pay.
58:17 Mike Smith? I'd feel bad.
58:18 Wes Larson? Yeah.
58:20 Wes Larson? I used to do that in Walmart, a lot.
58:23 Mike Smith? They have sushi conveyor belts in Walmart?
58:25 Wes Larson? No, but I would take what I want.
58:30 Mike Smith? It's a really funny way to put that.
58:32 Wes Larson? Yeah.
58:33 Mike Smith? Okay. Maybe during this period Gustav's brain created a new association that humans equaled effortless food. When the human massacres ended and the river returned to normal, the easy abundance was gone, but that pattern in his brain remained. When tensions rose again in the mid 1980s, more people started moving to the riverbanks again. Refugees from earlier conflicts or villagers displaced by political instability, whatever else was the case. And when humans started reappearing in greater numbers again, that old programming in Gustav's brain was reactivated. Instead of occasional opportunistic attacks, he shifted to systematic killing.
59:13 Mike Smith? Some researchers believe he may have been trying to stockpile more food than was necessary because he remembered that time when there was an abundance and then all of a sudden the abundance disappeared.
59:25 Wes Larson? That's the theory I like the most.
59:26 Mike Smith? That's theory three.
59:27 Wes Larson? That was what I thought of when you were, especially when you told the story, the boy that he bit. To me, it made me think of like, oh, he probably thought he was dead. And bit him and then realized he's alive and maybe not worth, you know.
59:41 Jeff Larson? Wasn't the boy walking when he got bit?
59:44 Wes Larson? No, he's in the water.
59:45 Mike Smith? He was swimming.
59:46 Wes Larson? And if he had seen just hundreds of bodies, you know, and, and they'd all been dead and then started biting people that were alive. You know, it might be hard for a crocodile to really tell the difference for a while at least. It, it made me think of the leopard of Rudraprayag because if you guys remember that story, there was a big like, I think it was, um, whatever that, that fever was in the early 1900s, they killed a bunch of people in like the end of World War One. A lot of people in India died and they think that leopard may have scavenged so much that it kind of started to see people as food. And I think that's very likely what happened with Gustav too.
1:00:25 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:00:26 Mike Smith? Maybe that's what happened in the, well, maybe not, actually. I was thinking of the Donner Party. But that didn't, they probably didn't like spend enough. I don't know. That's just another hypothesis. We're just doing science around here.
1:00:40 Jeff Larson? Yeah, if that, because they would have then ate a lot of people once they got to their location.
1:00:46 Mike Smith? Right.
1:00:46 Jeff Larson? I don't think they did that.
1:00:49 Mike Smith? Yeah. Maybe they did. I don't know.
1:00:52 Jeff Larson? It seems like we would know.
1:00:54 Mike Smith? So these three theories are compelling, but they all fail to answer one question. Why only Gustav? Thousands of other crocodiles that lived more or less the same life as him, but hadn't really developed these same tendencies.
1:01:10 Mike Smith? Another question to grapple with was whether all of these deaths were actually being caused by Gustav in the first place. To backtrack a little bit, the assassination of Baruny's president triggered a civil war that lasted from Jeff.
1:01:22 Jeff Larson? Oh, uh, the one you said before?
1:01:25 Mike Smith? Uh huh.
1:01:26 Jeff Larson? Yeah. 2005.
1:01:29 Mike Smith? Yeah, that's the end.
1:01:30 Jeff Larson? And 1980, or no, 19, uh, Jurassic Park, right? 1993.
1:01:40 Mike Smith? There we go, baby. Oh, A plus. I'm gonna buy you a Costco cake as a reward. One of those pistachio ones. So that civil war that lasted from 1993 until 2005 would see the deaths of approximately 300,000 people. Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally.
1:01:59 Jeff Larson? I'm kinda like Gustav.
1:02:00 Mike Smith? Yeah, surplus killing.
1:02:02 Jeff Larson? Because he just ate like one leg and would leave and stuff, you know?
1:02:06 Mike Smith? You're exactly the same as him. If Allison saw you, she'd be like, oh, I loved her.
1:02:13 Jeff Larson? They'd be like, why is this beefy boy not eating all of his cakes?
1:02:19 Mike Smith? Track you for years.
1:02:21 Wes Larson? The basketball would make more sense.
1:02:23 Mike Smith? They'd follow you around for years and just be like, what is going on here? What is wrong with this guy?
1:02:31 Jeff Larson? Maybe, maybe he has a vendetta against cakes.
1:02:35 Wes Larson? Oh, it's McRib season.
1:02:39 Wes Larson? Gustav's about to go crazy.
1:02:42 Mike Smith? So coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, the exact same stretch of time of this civil war coincides nearly perfectly with Gustav's highest concentration streak of kills. Maybe you're starting to do a little bit of like mental deductions here. Maybe if you're, you'd be a huge hit in ancient Greece if you're doing that whole Aristotle thing where you're like making deductions.
1:03:05 Wes Larson? Mike, you can't do a tangent on every single thing you say. We're gonna be here for eight hours.
1:03:13 Mike Smith? We're close to the end here.
1:03:17 Mike Smith? Over the 20 years when he was most actively preying on humans, Gustav's tally sits somewhere between the 60 confirmed victims and over 300 suspected, but the exact number is impossible to verify in a region with thousands of other crocodiles and a dozen other reasons why someone might disappear from the bank of the river. Again, other crocodiles, maybe hippos, maybe seasonal floodings or mudslides, many other things like, you know, as sad as it is to think about it, maybe they could have been politically or ethnically charged slaughterings or, and some truly evil men on the other side of these borders that Brundey shares with other countries. Sometimes people would be abducted and conscripted into military efforts for other countries.
1:04:02 Mike Smith? So like, a number of factors could be contributing to these disappearances and they were just being blamed on Gustav because it made for kind of like a fanciful tale of a monster.
1:04:14 Wes Larson? Yeah, on that, on that note too, you keep saying like, oh, how come all the other crocodiles weren't doing this? They very well could have been.
1:04:20 Mike Smith? Probably were.
1:04:21 Wes Larson? But it's just that Gustav was so big and recognizable that they were blamed on him. So it's very likely that a lot of these other crocodiles were also killing people because a lot of people die from crocodiles.
1:04:33 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:04:34 Jeff Larson? Mike, that military deduction, like that you just had, that was good deducting that they might be like kidnapping children for military purposes.
1:04:44 Mike Smith? It was Aristotelian of me to do that, right?
1:04:47 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:04:47 Mike Smith? Thank you. I just was born in the wrong decade.
1:04:52 Jeff Larson? I see how you tied that back in. It was very important earlier.
1:04:58 Mike Smith? Thank you. Honestly, though, again, even if it was just half of the confirmed 60 victims, like, it's no wonder that Gustav became a waking nightmare for many of the people living near the waters in Burundi. That 30 people over however many years, that's like, if you think about serial killers in the human world, that would cause mass hysteria if it was all happening in like this small geographic area over 20 years, you know? So, he had learned how to prey on humans and survive their retaliation. Let's go back to Patrice and his team, and we're gonna finish this up here. So, still under pressure from the 60-day deadline they were given, they quickly finished building the 30-foot steel cage and enlisted the help of 30 men to help lift and carry it the 4 and 1/2 miles
1:05:41 Mike Smith? from their village to the delta where they had most recently spotted Gustav. An infrared camera was mounted inside the cage to detect any form of life in the dark, and then they slid it into the water with a severed cow's head inside to serve as bait. But the legend loomed large over them, culminating when a Gattumba village medicine man ominously warned them that Gustav was under the spell of an evil person, and you would never enter that cage until that spell was broken. A week passed, and each morning, the team woke up to find an empty cage, and they grew more pessimistic by the day. Time was running out fast, so when Gustav was spotted on a high bank nearly a mile from where the cage had been set up, the team quickly assembled and set up a few smaller traps in a last-ditch
1:06:23 Mike Smith? hail mary effort to catch him. And that a bit of insult to the whole operation, as they were building one of these small, they call them "pitman" traps, and it shows this in the documentary, Gustav is in the water, watching them build this trap. His eye, head facing them, he's just sitting there watching them do it, as if to say, just like,
1:06:44 Wes Larson? This isn't gonna work.
1:06:45 Mike Smith? This is, yeah, like, that trap is gonna cap.
1:06:48 Wes Larson? They're trying to catch him alive?
1:06:50 Mike Smith? Capture him alive, still, yeah. Forty-eight hours later, one of the pit and traps was set off, but the crocodile inside of it was a young, small one. Even at its small size, though, the team had difficulty corralling and releasing it. So they knew that even if they were to miraculously catch Gustav in one of these tiny traps, it'd be virtually impossible to do anything anyway. So they were just like, we're at the end of it here. We gotta go back to the cage. The cage is really the only thing that's gonna work here. So they changed out the cow head at first to a live chicken. And when that didn't work, speaking of Jurassic Park, they tied up a live goat inside of it. And there's like some infrared night vision footage from the camera. It literally looks like Jurassic Park. Yeah, very much.
1:07:33 Wes Larson? Gustav doesn't want to be fed. He wants to hunt.
1:07:35 Jeff Larson? He wants to roll.
1:07:39 Mike Smith? Finally, they saw a glimmer of hope. During one of the following nights, a white spot began showing up on the camera when they checked the footage the next day. This white eye dot was so large that they knew it could only be Gustav. He had eyes on the goat and was at least considering going into the cage to get it. Fittingly, a huge storm was predicted to hit during the last night the operation was allowed to be run. When the team anxiously walked down to the cage the next morning, they found the cage partially submerged in the water, the camera destroyed, and the goat was nowhere to be seen. Was it the water level that suddenly rose during that stormy night? Did Gustav somehow enter without triggering the trap, eat the goat, and destroy the camera?
1:08:21 Mike Smith? Whatever happened, they had failed to catch the crocodile, and their time was finally up. At the time, crocodiles were seen as simple predators driven by basic instincts, and yet Gustav refused to touch it. We now know that crocodiles are far better at weighing risk against reward than anyone was thinking back then. Maybe Gustav's brain flagged the structure as a change in his environment shouldn't be there, and as a crocodile that was already playing by his own rules, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that a simple steel trap wouldn't be enough to stop him.
1:08:49 Wes Larson? You briefly mentioned this earlier, but because of their metabolism, they don't have to eat that often. So if a crocodile sees something as like a potential risk even, it's probably not gonna go for it because it doesn't have to, unless they're desperate, unless there hasn't been food or something. But for Gustav, where it seems like there's plenty of food, there's no reason for him to take a risk and go inside of a trap.
1:09:14 Mike Smith? So for over 20 years Gustav had been one of the most sought after targets in Burundi. And for 20 years, no one had any luck in catching or killing him. Charging at a crowd in broad daylight, as he was known to do, required an absence of fear. But the fact that he could switch from that sort of fearlessness to a caution that kept him from entering that steel cage left the team in awe of his intelligence. If it wasn't clear before, it was clear now that Gustav was not just any ordinary crocodile. The 60 day window closed and the scientists had to leave. Gustav had won again. For the next five years, he all but disappeared. He was spotted once in 2009, and that was the last time a credible source would ever see him again. If he's still alive, he would be around 80 years old today.
1:09:57 Mike Smith? Nobody has ever been found, so many people still look twice before approaching the river water's edge. As long as there's no proof of his death, the legend of Gustav lives on.
1:10:08 Wes Larson? I like that.
1:10:10 Mike Smith? Well, that's the story of Gustav. Any, any further questions, your honor?
1:10:16 Wes Larson? No, I'm glad we did it. This is one I've thought about for a long time, so I'm glad you took the reins.
1:10:22 Jeff Larson? Yeah, thanks, Mike.
1:10:23 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:10:23 Jeff Larson? Yeah. He got a, he seems like he killed some people, but how many? We don't know.
1:10:30 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:10:30 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:10:31 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:10:32 Jeff Larson? That's what I would say.
1:10:33 Mike Smith? 60 people, 60 confirmed is, I mean, come on now.
1:10:38 Wes Larson? Yeah, for a crocodile, that's a lot.
1:10:40 Mike Smith? That's a good amount.
1:10:41 Wes Larson? Yeah. Some of these big cats have killed a lot more people, but they also feed a lot more often, you know? And so for a crocodile, that's like, that's a good amount of people.
1:10:50 Jeff Larson? They should, the, the people in the Epstein list should just blame a crocodile, I think, for all the missing kids and stuff.
1:10:59 Mike Smith? It could work.
1:10:59 Wes Larson? They probably.
1:11:01 Mike Smith? Not that they really need to, they seem to be getting away with it.
1:11:04 Wes Larson? We're probably not far from that. Yeah, honestly.
1:11:08 Mike Smith? So we need to talk about Patrice, just real quick.
1:11:12 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:11:13 Mike Smith? Uh, we teased it and I'm gonna be delicate here because this is like a pretty touchy thing that happened in 2011, about six or seven years after he was the star of that PBS documentary and was kind of the central figure to this whole story outside of Gustav. In 2011, a court in Burundi found him guilty of sexually assaulting five young girls who attended the school that he had set up to help underprivileged children in the area.
1:11:40 Wes Larson? Geez, right after Jeff brings up Epstein.
1:11:43 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:11:43 Mike Smith? Tough timing, but he was ultimately sentenced to 25 years in jail in a closed-door trial.
1:11:50 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:11:51 Mike Smith? Of course, he denied the charges and said he would appeal, and the French Foreign Ministry stepped in and took exception to the proceedings. There's a lot of just like irregularities and inconsistencies with how this trial was actually run. And the main accuser in this trial, one of the young girls, actually did write in a letter of apology explaining that she had accused him out of some petty form of revenge. And another one of the accusers, one of the young girls, actually said that she had done it because she had been bribed by a competing German organization that was operating in the same time and space as Patrice down there, too. So like, again, maybe he does deserve to be like buried behind the
1:12:36 Mike Smith? prison, never to be heard from ever again.
1:12:38 Wes Larson? Bad to Gustave.
1:12:40 Mike Smith? Yeah, but maybe this was like a weird conspiracy, and I know that gets you going, Jeff. Like this weird, shadowy German organization that's like, we need to get Patrice out of the way.
1:12:51 Jeff Larson? On Gustave.
1:12:52 Mike Smith? I just, I just wanted to make a small note, and one detail I really need to include here is that, so he was in this really awful prison system. It was built for 800 people. There were 3,500 people in it at the time of Patrice's holding. And according to some of the former prisoners, they would regularly catch rats and cook and eat them. And Patrice, when they were interviewing him, as he was talking to maybe his defense team, I don't know exactly who he was talking to, but he, quote, "retained his sense of humor" and said, "From a crocodile hunter, I have become a bedbug hunter."
1:13:30 Mike Smith? So even in like the worst possible scenario, someone could be in, he's still cracking off jokes.
1:13:36 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:13:38 Wes Larson? Yeah. The Occam's razor thing makes me wonder about the shadowy German organization and stuff like, and, and again, we shouldn't pass judgment, but if I had to guess, like, I would guess that he probably is guilty.
1:13:55 Mike Smith? He, he was an interesting figure. If you watch the documentary, I mean, anyone who decides to spend thirty years of their life in a country that's not their own, chasing a huge crocodile, you know, maybe, I'm not saying like that's wrong, or anyone that decides to engage in that kind of behavior is a little off their rocker, but like, you can kind of sense that he's a man who maybe was never quite all the way acclimate, acclimated to, yeah, like, human.
1:14:24 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:14:24 Mike Smith? Civilization. But again.
1:14:26 Wes Larson? So possibly we talked about two monsters, one of them much worse than the other.
1:14:31 Jeff Larson? Which one's worse?
1:14:33 Wes Larson? Patrice.
1:14:34 Mike Smith? Patrice.
1:14:35 Jeff Larson? I don't know. Gustav killed a lot of kids.
1:14:37 Wes Larson? Yeah, but he's natural, he's just doing natural behavior. Like, yeah, I don't think he's a monster.
1:14:43 Jeff Larson? I think we would need more information on the case to.
1:14:47 Wes Larson? Sure.
1:14:48 Jeff Larson? Guess if he's guilty or not.
1:14:49 Wes Larson? I'm just saying, like, when I hear that, I tend to believe the victims, but like.
1:14:56 Mike Smith? I think that's the appropriate response, but I also don't want to spend the rest of my life.
1:15:02 Wes Larson? No, I don't want to spend the rest of the next five minutes thinking about it.
1:15:06 Mike Smith? Let's move on to categories then.
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1:17:57 Mike Smith? First category, your favorite team of three or an iconic trio. Jeff, please.
1:18:04 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I feel like my brain went to basketball because there's been a lot of like three players that win championships. And like the one that comes to mind would be Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, and Paul Pierce when they teamed up. But I didn't ever love any of the big threes.
1:18:24 Mike Smith? Rodman, Jordan, and Pippen.
1:18:26 Jeff Larson? Yeah, and for whatever reason, they almost don't get included in a big three.
1:18:31 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:18:32 Jeff Larson? But it does, it is. I mean, the biggest three was LeBron, Bosch, and Wade. But I'm gonna go with Homeward Bound. The two dogs and the cat.
1:18:44 Mike Smith? Iconic.
1:18:45 Jeff Larson? They fight it, mountain lion off. They jump in a river. They get out of that hole.
1:18:52 Mike Smith? One gets porcupined.
1:18:53 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:18:54 Wes Larson? Ouch. I'm gonna go with the two of you and Brent when you lived in the cube. That was like, maybe the most fun I've had hanging out with like a trio. Because you guys just had the weirdest things happening in that house all the time with your roommates and like just coming over and playing Smash Brothers on like this 20-foot TV that Jeff inherited that weighed like 10,000 pounds, like the size of Gustav.
1:19:25 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:19:25 Wes Larson? And all three of you were like semi-employed at the time. So it was just like a real iconic time in, in your, your all's friendship. And I'm glad that I got to kind of be a tangential figure in it.
1:19:40 Mike Smith? We should run that back, dude. Let's go back.
1:19:43 Jeff Larson? Back to the cube?
1:19:44 Mike Smith? Back to the cube. That TV has gotta still be there. There's no way anyone's moved that.
1:19:48 Wes Larson? No, that's there forever.
1:19:51 Mike Smith? Um, my favorite team of three is from the movie The Heroic Trio. It's an old martial arts movie with Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Chung, and Anita Muir. Uh, it's just the most fun martial arts movie I I've watched in a really long time. So.
1:20:05 Jeff Larson? Three ninjas. Shout out three ninja.
1:20:08 Mike Smith? God, I can't forget the three ninjas.
1:20:09 Wes Larson? Shout out Blink one eighty two for me, too. That was my second. Yeah.
1:20:13 Mike Smith? Hmm. Okay.
1:20:15 Wes Larson? Got me into like punk music when I was a kid, even though, you know, a lot of people don't like them. That was my gateway drug.
1:20:21 Mike Smith? Yeah, we all start our journey somewhere.
1:20:23 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:20:24 Mike Smith? What's something you've eaten too much of recently?
1:20:27 Wes Larson? Honestly, one slice of that pistachio cheesecake was too much. Uh, I, that same trip to Costco that I bought that I bought these peanut butter cups that I really like. They're called like skinny dipped and they're really good. They're like dark chocolate with peanut butter cup. And there are three grams of sugar apiece. And so in my mind, I'm like, oh, great. You know, this is like a healthy peanut butter cup. And then I'll eat like 10 of them in one sitting. And so I eat way too many of them to where I'm probably getting more sugar than I would if I just ate like a double pack of Reese's or something. So, um, there, that's something I've been eating too much of.
1:21:07 Jeff Larson? This one I think is the best for Mike, just because as much as anyone I know, he can eat a whole bag of just something he just bought and just down it in an hour.
1:21:21 Wes Larson? It's so bad.
1:21:23 Jeff Larson? But I, I'm currently on a business trip in Maine. So I've been eating too much lobster rolls and cups of chowder.
1:21:32 Wes Larson? Lobster. Yeah.
1:21:33 Jeff Larson? Everywhere I go, that's all I order. And it's like, Jeff, order some other stuff.
1:21:38 Wes Larson? Is that Danielle?
1:21:38 Jeff Larson? There's my favorite ever was I said, yeah, I'll take a cup of chowder. And she's like, oh, a cup of chowder?
1:21:49 Jeff Larson? Like corrected me.
1:21:50 Wes Larson? Yeah, that's great.
1:21:53 Mike Smith? I wish your business partner spoke with a really heavy Boston accent, northeastern accent.
1:21:58 Wes Larson? More like a, yeah, like a Maine accent, like the guy in Pet Sematary.
1:22:03 Jeff Larson? Our business partner.
1:22:05 Wes Larson? Yes.
1:22:05 Mike Smith? Our business. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Shout out our business partner. We love her around here.
1:22:10 Wes Larson? Yeah, I think we have a different business relationship with her than you do.
1:22:15 Mike Smith? Yeah. Uh, so my, I've been on this weird thing where I'm trying to, my whole life, you see that bottom row of snacks and treats at gas stations? And I've never in my whole life seen someone eating like a whatchamacallit or a zero bar. So I've been trying all of these different snacks that I've never had, and I recently tried, um, cow tails for the first time.
1:22:41 Wes Larson? Oh, yeah.
1:22:41 Mike Smith? You had a cow tail? Dude, what the heck?
1:22:44 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:22:44 Mike Smith? I had, should have been eating these a long time ago.
1:22:47 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:22:48 Mike Smith? They're so freaking good.
1:22:49 Wes Larson? Jesse's not a fan of candy or like sweets, but she loves a cow tail.
1:22:54 Mike Smith? Yeah, man.
1:22:55 Jeff Larson? So have you been eating too many cow tails or not enough?
1:22:59 Mike Smith? I've had 16 cow tails in the past 24 hours.
1:23:02 Wes Larson? Wow, that's a lot of cow tails.
1:23:05 Mike Smith? They come in packs of four, though. That's the problem with cow tails. It's like you can't ever just buy like a reasonable amount. Not that that would stop me anyway.
1:23:12 Wes Larson? They're very dense, though. It's like a very dense candy.
1:23:15 Mike Smith? I know.
1:23:15 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:23:16 Mike Smith? It's getting bad, so I gotta stop that. Um, something that ended up looking way bigger and more impressive than you expected it to.
1:23:24 Jeff Larson? Um, I can start, uh, going to the Titanic museum in Pigeon Forge where they just have a Titanic replica as part of the building. It was a lot bigger than I expected it to be. It's just like the Titanic that you walk inside pretty much.
1:23:43 Wes Larson? Huh.
1:23:44 Jeff Larson? Um, also Ben Affleck's penis in Gone Girl.
1:23:48 Wes Larson? You see his penis in, I just watched that.
1:23:50 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:23:51 Mike Smith? Uh huh.
1:23:52 Wes Larson? Huh.
1:23:52 Jeff Larson? He gets out of the shower and it's like, in the shower?
1:23:55 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:23:55 Jeff Larson? It normally shrinks a bit. I heard he tugged on it a bit.
1:24:00 Wes Larson? Yeah, a little fluffing. I would. If I was an actor and I was gonna have my penis on screen.
1:24:05 Mike Smith? That's the problem with viewing habits today is people are looking at their phone when they should be looking at Ben Affleck's penis, probably.
1:24:12 Jeff Larson? Yeah, Wes.
1:24:13 Wes Larson? I was pretty locked in.
1:24:14 Mike Smith? Second screening.
1:24:14 Wes Larson? Cause I just watched this documentary about Scott Peterson. I was like, oh, Gone Girl really is about Scott Peterson. And so I was watching it and yeah, I missed the dick. My answer was icebergs in Antarctica. I remember when we were planning on going to Antarctica, I knew the icebergs were gonna be there and I knew they would be cool. I didn't realize they would look. Like small countries, like I didn't realize just how big those tabular icebergs were. And they were insanely big and impressive. So icebergs really blew me away.
1:24:45 Mike Smith? That's one of those things like we were talking about earlier. They name all of those. Every iceberg is named.
1:24:51 Wes Larson? A lot of them.
1:24:52 Mike Smith? That's why I think every, a lot of hills are probably named too. Jim.
1:24:58 Mike Smith? Like probably not like, I don't know.
1:25:00 Wes Larson? Gary.
1:25:00 Mike Smith? I'm going with the Colosseum. I was pretty dumbfounded by the Colosseum when we went. Jeff and I were in Rome. I had kind of a mental breakdown. Just considering it, like I had to sit down and like kind of process and look at it and almost acknowledge out loud that it was real and that real people had built it. However, long ago, I just had a really hard time processing it for whatever reason, but that was a really impressive building.
1:25:27 Wes Larson? That's how I feel whenever I go to like New York and you're just surrounded by all these massive buildings and you think like, all of these buildings were built by people. It's crazy.
1:25:37 Mike Smith? It's really odd.
1:25:38 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:25:38 Mike Smith? To think about that, yeah.
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1:26:41 Mike Smith? Along a similar line, so I just got back from Nashville recently. Did you guys know that there's a one-to-one replica of the Parthenon in Nashville?
1:26:48 Wes Larson? No.
1:26:49 Mike Smith? There's just a Parthenon there. Yeah, what the heck? That's, that was so weird to me. Like, does Greece know about that? Speaking of Greece, Aristotle, Wes?
1:27:00 Wes Larson? Yeah. What about him?
1:27:02 Mike Smith? He deduced.
1:27:03 Jeff Larson? He was deducting.
1:27:05 Mike Smith? He was like Sherlock.
1:27:06 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:27:07 Mike Smith? He was the proto Sherlock. Okay. Uh, next category. What's your favorite set of teeth in pop culture?
1:27:13 Jeff Larson? I have a couple, but I really like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. I think they got good teeth. And then I like Bilbo when Frodo shows him the ring.
1:27:27 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:27:28 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:27:30 Mike Smith? It's such a good jump scare.
1:27:31 Wes Larson? Well, I was gonna say Hades from the animated Hercules, where he just has like a few sharp teeth that are just like, he has like five of them. And I always thought that was really interesting and I liked his teeth. But honestly, Jeff bringing up the early renders of Sonic in like the first trailer and how he had like weirdly human teeth and small eyes. Might be my favorite teeth from pop culture. Cause I don't think there's ever been such a swift rebuttal of a trailer where people were like, no, absolutely not. We're not seeing this movie. So bad that they had to change all the CG in the movie. It's pretty amazing.
1:28:10 Mike Smith? That is one conspiracy I wholeheartedly believe in is that they knew what they were doing and they had the real Sonic already in place.
1:28:17 Wes Larson? Oh, just to like drum up.
1:28:19 Mike Smith? Needed a little bit of like weird, crazy.
1:28:21 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:28:22 Mike Smith? Yeah. Um, I'm going with this old book called In a Dark, Dark Room. It's this old picture book. And there's this story where a kid keeps encountering men with progressively larger and grosser sets of teeth.
1:28:36 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:28:37 Mike Smith? And I remember just being pretty traumatized by those pictures when I was little, but I just, I would always flip to those pages. It's kind of captivating for some reason to me.
1:28:46 Wes Larson? Have either of you seen the horror movie Teeth? About vagina dentata?
1:28:50 Mike Smith? Yeah, Brent had me watch that one.
1:28:53 Wes Larson? I was gonna have you do it for the no pants, but I guess I won't.
1:28:56 Mike Smith? Ooh, that's a good one. We'll have Jeff do it.
1:28:58 Jeff Larson? I like Nami when she gets mad at Luffy.
1:29:02 Mike Smith? Shark teeth.
1:29:03 Wes Larson? Shark teeth already.
1:29:06 Mike Smith? That's such a good.
1:29:07 Wes Larson? That's a pretty common anime thing, isn't it?
1:29:10 Mike Smith? It's not unusual. Yeah, pretty trope, ubiquitous trope. I think that's it, right? Is that all the categories?
1:29:16 Jeff Larson? No.
1:29:17 Wes Larson? Uh, no.
1:29:18 Jeff Larson? That you had the wildest category in a while.
1:29:23 Mike Smith? Uh, which one?
1:29:25 Jeff Larson? Your top two sides in the American Civil War.
1:29:28 Mike Smith? Yeah. What are they?
1:29:32 Jeff Larson? I went with the Union and the Confederates.
1:29:37 Mike Smith? Okay.
1:29:38 Wes Larson? Yeah, I had that same order, actually.
1:29:41 Mike Smith? Oh, it doesn't have to be in any specific order. It's just your top two.
1:29:44 Wes Larson? Miami is in a specific order, though, actually.
1:29:46 Jeff Larson? The thing about the South is you get an iconic Jeff out of it. Jefferson Davis. So I, I gotta count him as Jeff's doing things, you know?
1:29:59 Wes Larson? Do you count Jefferson's as Jeff's?
1:30:01 Jeff Larson? Oh, yeah.
1:30:02 Wes Larson? Another part of the club, huh?
1:30:04 Jeff Larson? Mm hmm.
1:30:04 Wes Larson? Yeah, I'm pretty squarely like Union number one and then the Confederacy.
1:30:08 Mike Smith? Me too, but that wasn't the category is just your top two.
1:30:11 Jeff Larson? You also asked if you can think of one, an example of a weird or inappropriately timed joke.
1:30:19 Mike Smith? Oh, I forgot I'd asked that. Yeah, do you have an answer?
1:30:22 Jeff Larson? I had Danny Green at the Holocaust Museum where he said, I had to just once in a selfie.
1:30:30 Mike Smith? Why? What was he doing?
1:30:35 Jeff Larson? LOL.
1:30:36 Mike Smith? Hit him with LOL, had to do it.
1:30:39 Wes Larson? I didn't come up with one for that, but I did come up with one for the exaggeration category that you had.
1:30:44 Mike Smith? Oh, shoot, I sent all kinds of stuff I didn't ask.
1:30:47 Wes Larson? Yeah, the exaggeration one, you said like a crazy exaggeration that we could think of. And I thought of Kim Jong Un saying that he, he golfs an 18 every time he goes golfing. Like gets a hole in one on every single golf course.
1:31:02 Mike Smith? He's so good at golf.
1:31:03 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:31:04 Mike Smith? And bowling too, he's really good at bowling.
1:31:06 Wes Larson? Yeah, gets a 300.
1:31:07 Mike Smith? Mm hmm. Shout out Kim Jong Un.
1:31:10 Wes Larson? Yeah, the best that ever did it.
1:31:12 Mike Smith? Kind of like a Pillsbury. He's like the Pillsbury Doughboy a little bit.
1:31:16 Wes Larson? Kinda.
1:31:17 Mike Smith? I always, whenever I see him, I start wanting to eat croissants.
1:31:20 Wes Larson? Like poke his stomach and see if he giggles.
1:31:23 Mike Smith? Yeah. Do you think he, he probably giggles. He seems like a giggler. Like even the most evil people in the world, I think, are, from time to time, they, they are known to giggle, I'm sure.
1:31:32 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:31:33 Mike Smith? Alright, that's it. Unless there are any other categories I neglected to remember and ask about, I am done talking.
1:31:40 Wes Larson? Alright.
1:31:41 Mike Smith? Alright.
1:31:41 Wes Larson? Thanks, Mike.
1:31:41 Mike Smith? Great.
1:31:42 Wes Larson? Sure. Quick, just quick plug. Those of you who listened to our Roar episode with David Desmalchon, one of our favorite episodes ever, so fun having him on. We did do a Roar review on our Patreon and our Griz Club. It was really fun. We actually like dove into the movie itself. And had a pretty goofy time with it. I had a lot of fun recording that episode. And then we did a Roar watch party with our Discord audience, which if you join Patreon or Griz Club, you, you can get access to, to our Discord. And there's a really fun community on there. We had a really fun time talking with them while we watched that movie. So.
1:32:24 Wes Larson? Just one of the many perks to Patreon. We are, I mean, we've been running that now for like four years. There are hundreds. I mean, I, I would say there's probably a hundred to 200 hours of extra content on there now, if not more. There's more than that. So you get access to all of that for 10 bucks a month. That price has remained constant throughout our history and we're planning on keeping it the same. So. There you go. Alright, thanks, Mike.
1:32:52 Mike Smith? You're welcome.
1:32:53 Wes Larson? Alright, love you guys.
1:32:54 Mike Smith? Love ya.
1:32:55 Wes Larson? See ya.
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