#2536 - Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride

Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride are filmmakers whose work includes "Tiger King," "Chimp Crazy," and "Monsters of God," now available on HBO and HBO Max.https://www.hbomax.com/shows/monsters-of-god/d779bf7e-5bfb-47d9-be21-9795ef6d19ce Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. onX Offroad: Try onX Offroad for 50% off- go to https://onXmaps.com/joerogan Switch today at https://www. Visible.com for just 25/mo. Or Save $10 on your first month of Visible+ Pro with code ROGAN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  Good, bro. Gentlemen, good to see you again. You've back into the world of crazy people and animals. I watched episode one today, like, oh, God. First of all, where the fuck do you find these people? You live in that world. Like, you're in the world of reptiles. We should just explain. It's a docu-series. It's on HBO. It's called Monsters of God, and it's all about the reptile trade, which may or may not be responsible for Florida having 500,000 pythons.

• 0:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  It's debatable, right? Like, it seems like it was partially pet owners who let them go, and partially there was some sort of a reptile research facility or something like that?

• 0:52Speaker 04

  Well, there's different theories. There was a hurricane theory. It was the people let it go. I think the more reasonable one, because I had a Burmese python in the 70s when I was a teenager. I have a photo of it around my neck.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  What happened to it?

• 1:05Speaker 04

  People buy them when they're this big, and then when they're 15 feet, they let them go, because, you know, and they're...

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Is that what you did?

• 1:11Speaker 04

  I did not let it go, but I...

• 1:13Speaker 02

  What did you do?

• 1:14Speaker 04

  I have no idea what happened to it, to be honest.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  That's weird.

• 1:17Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  You had a monster, and you don't know what happened to your monster?

• 1:21Speaker 04

  I think when I went to college briefly, I gave it to someone, and then I don't know what happened to it. But I gave my whole menagerie away to people when I went to college. I had reptiles in my room.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Is there an extra level of responsibility when you're giving away monsters? You know what I mean? Like, if you have a chihuahua, and your friend's like, "I'll take her, I love her," that's, you know, you don't really have to worry about your... You have a fucking python? You're giving away a python?

• 1:44Speaker 04

  You gotta worry about your chihuahua, because the pythons in the Everglades are gonna eat your chihuahua when it gets away.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Well, certainly, you worry about that. But, I mean, you don't worry about your chihuahua being a monster.

• 1:54Speaker 04

  I'm kidding. Yeah.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  I mean, if you have a 15-foot python, that can eat a lot of things, and it kinda needs to eat a lot of things.

• 2:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, Burmese pythons did really well in South Florida. Iguanas did really well in Florida. You know, they weren't there in the beginning.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  That's a good way to put it, "did really well." Another way to put it is invasive species destroying the ecosystem.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  Well, they're like us, Joe. They're like us. We came here, and we took over.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess, in a lot of ways. So, why did you choose this particular subject for this new docu-series?

• 2:28Speaker 04

  I'm not gonna let Jeremy talk, no, he'll talk, but I'll just... A lot of it starts with me, so you can blame me, and then Jeremy, you can blame later.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Well, you guys did Chimp Crazy, which is one of my favorites. It's so fucking insane. That world is so insane.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  Well, episode one is kinda setting the table. It gets better, Joe. It gets more off the, you know, charts when you watch two and three and four, and five. Yeah, it all started... First of all, I'm a reptile guy. I've been keeping reptiles and studying reptiles for over... You know, I'm an old guy, I'm older than you are, so, you know, I've kept them for, I don't know, 60 years, you know, plus. I've kept reptiles since my parents gave me a tortoise when I was six, and I was catching rattlesnakes in my lunchbox, and horned lizards, and you got horned lizards in Texas here that are really cool, and rattlesnakes. I've been bit by rattlesnakes, it's not fun.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  You got bit by a rattlesnake?

• 3:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that's another story.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  More times than one?

• 3:29Speaker 04

  No, I got bit once, because I learned my lesson after the first one.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  What happened?

• 3:33Speaker 04

  It wasn't good. Don't get bit by a rattlesnake.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Where'd you get bit?

• 3:37Speaker 04

  On my foot.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Did you experience necrosis? Necrosis, rather?

• 3:41Speaker 04

  You know, so normally, you would get necrosis, where your finger would rot, and then this guy, that, you know, the doctor that I went to at a hospital, you know...

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Pull up the microphone a little.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  The doctor, you know, in the emergency room, said, "The last guy in here that got bit by a rattlesnake, lost his toe or something, or lost his digits." And he said, "Good thing you didn't get bit on a finger, because the necrosis can rot away your finger." And he said, "Good thing you got bit on the middle of the foot, you're gonna be okay." But this type of rattlesnake I got bit by, the most venomous rattlesnake in the country is called a tiger rattlesnake, but it's not the most dangerous. Most dangerous is probably a Mojave rattlesnake or an eastern diamondback rattlesnake, but you have western diamondbacks here. But I got bit by a rattlesnake that had both hemotoxin and neurotoxin, so the necrosis was less evident with me, and it was more like a cobra was starting to stop breathing, and I felt like someone had put sandbags on my chest an hour into it.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  But the first thing you sense is, obviously, the... It feels like someone jabbed me with an X-acto knife. I looked down, and the rattlesnake was retracting into a burrow. I looked at my foot, but then you taste, a metallic taste, in about 15, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and you realize, uh-oh, this wasn't a dry bite. But it's not fun. I got a lot of antivenom. They make a different antivenom today. I got bit 25 years ago.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  And how long does it take you to recover from something like that?

• 5:06Speaker 04

  You know, the most painful part was the serum sickness from the antivenom. The lose, stop breathing thing. I remember I was on a gurney, and I just felt like I was gonna stop breathing, but weirdly not that painful, but like, but yet, you feel like you're gonna die and stop breathing. But the serum sickness is just unbelievably intense for weeks, and you just have the most insane fever, and you get these red blotches all over you. But they make a different serum now. That one was made out of horse antibodies that they put into you, and my body didn't like those horse antibodies.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Also, maybe don't wear Birkenstocks when you hike. That's probably the...

• 5:44Speaker 04

  River sandals, yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Okay, all right.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, because I got bit... Most people get bit fucking around with a rattlesnake. I wasn't.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  What is this, Jeremy?

• 5:52Speaker 05

  They used all of the antivenom at the hospital, and had to go get more from another hospital.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Ran out of antivenom after using a whopping 36 vials. Holy fuck, man.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  Yikes.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  They're fucking scary, man. I've had dogs bit. I had this one dog, he got bit twice.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  It was a real problem. His face would swell up. I had to bring him to the vet, but luckily, they have antivenom for dogs, it works pretty well.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  He was kinda out of it for a few days, then he came back.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  How fast the response?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Not bad.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Not bad. It was funny, because he got bit once. He was a crazy dog. He was always killing lizards, like, that was his thing. Like, anything in the backyard, he would kill. And he got bit by the rattlesnake, and I knew it, because I was out there, I heard him, I heard the commotion, I saw the snake, I knew what it was, so I got him to the veterinarian immediately. They got him, and his face swelled up, but they got him the antivenom, and he was good. And then he got bit again, like, maybe a year later, and I brought him to the vet, because I said I saw him get bit by a rattlesnake. And the vet was like, "Well, I don't see any swelling, and I don't see a hole," but he had developed a resistance to it, because he had gotten bit once. And so then I got him home, and all of a sudden, his face started swelling up. I'm like, "Ah, fuck."

• 7:06Speaker 02

  And I bring him back to the vet, then he had to get the antivenom.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  But a good-sized dog.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was about a 90-pound dog.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And that was a western diamondback rattlesnake, I gather?

• 7:15Speaker 02

  California, I don't know.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  Oh, it was in California?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  It was in California. It wasn't out here.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Oh, it was what did me then, probably. Southern Pacific rattlesnake, yeah, okay.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had a problem in my California house. One of the houses that I used to live in, it was, there was a lot of... It was very canyon-y. There was a lot of stuff back there, bobcats.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  That's the same snake that bit me.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Spooky, man. We were running once, we were running the trail, and in mid-stride, I realized that the log that I thought was across the road was a giant rattlesnake. It was fucking big, man. Like, the biggest one I'd ever seen out in the wild, and the dogs didn't notice it. They ran right over it, and then I ran over it. I was like, "Oh, fuck, man." And then I'm trying to figure out what to do, because I know we're gonna have to come back this way when we go back up the hill, so I'm throwing rocks at it, trying to get it to run away.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Now, I've handled a lot of rattlesnakes in my life, and cobras and other snakes, and to get bit that way is very unusual. Usually, people are being jerks and idiots and drunk and handling a snake, and it bites them.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. We all have little things we do to save ourselves time, like shopping online, or paying kids from the neighborhood to rake up all those leaves sitting in the front yard. Or, if you're hiring, you rely on ZipRecruiter. They match you with qualified candidates as soon as you post your job. Now, that's how you save time. Try it yourself for free at ziprecruiter.com/Rogan. It's rated the number-one hiring site, based on G2, for a reason. Because on top of the qualified candidates, it also shows you the most interested ones first. Save time and meet great candidates sooner with ZipRecruiter.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/Rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/Rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. The football season is heating up, and every week feels bigger with DraftKings Sportsbook, the number-one sportsbook for live betting. Plus, get extra protection with early exit. Opt in, and if your player leaves the game with an eligible injury in the first half, your bet is protected. No matter which game you're watching, you're always connected and in on the action with one app.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  New DraftKings customers, sign up with code ROGEN, spend $5 to get $150 in total bonuses within 14 days. That's code ROGEN. In partnership with DraftKings, the crown is yours.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  If you or somebody you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-MYRESSET. 21 and over, Virginia only. Eligibility restrictions apply. $50 in non-withdrawable bonus bets issued every seven days via click to claim for 14 days. Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see sportsbook.draftkings.com/promos. Limited time offer.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know, because I use it. That's right, joe Rogan dot com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website, like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace dot com slash Rogan for a free trial, and when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Where were you? Were you just walking?

• 10:50Speaker 04

  I was hiking in the mountains, north of LA, just a bit, and I was actually looking for snakes, because I mean, and I didn't see the snakes, the snakes saw me first. And I was bushwhacking, I wasn't on a trail, I didn't see it, and it bit me on my foot.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  So, you have this lifetime experience with reptiles and snakes, and so you just decide... You must have interacted with a lot of these really crazy people, and just decided this is the next...

• 11:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, it takes one to know one.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  Be careful.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Next point of focus?

• 11:20Speaker 03

  It's sort of where it all started, really.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, no, listen, I was...

• 11:26Speaker 04

  You know, a closeted reptile guy living in New York City, hanging out with, you know, Madonna, cool people in the eighties and nineties. I had a nightclub and I had friends with lots of artists, Andy Warhol, and I never really talked about reptiles. Actually, Andy asked me, what am I gonna do with my money? He interviewed me one time for Andy Warhol TV and I said, I'm gonna buy reptiles. I actually said, I'm gonna buy tortoises. He was like, tortoises? But I was pretty closeted, but I still kept them in New York. And, you know, fast forward, when I decided to try to do a film about it, I'd been traveling all over the world to Madagascar and Sulawesi and different parts of South America, trying to study reptiles and especially turtles and tortoises that were very rare. I started

• 12:11Speaker 04

  photograph, filming people, like, you know, kind of notable people, Christopher Walken and, you know, Slash and, yeah, I don't know, all kinds of people that I knew in New York City. And I would just ask them to hold a turtle or tortoise and say some words, like PSAs. And I was doing that with these two guys named the Safdie Brothers. And fast forward, they now, Josh has just had a film called Marty Supri with Timothy Chalamet that was up for an Oscar. Little did I know that I was working with these kids that were gonna be these new filmmakers and we were making these films. And then we made a short film about reptiles, it's crazy, called Trophy Hunter. It's very short. And we did that together. And then I said to them, hey, man, you guys read this new book called

• 12:53Speaker 04

  The Lizard King? It's about the reptile world. Let's do a doc about the reptile world. And I'd already told Fisher Stevens, a friend of mine, hey, let's do a doc about this, you know, book, The Lizard King. And he said to me, how are you gonna do that doc without getting killed, Eric? And, you know, he won an Oscar for The Cove. And I thought, you know, I'm gonna get these good guys and do a doc about reptiles. So anyway, we started in 2000.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Why did you think, why do you think you're gonna get killed?

• 13:17Speaker 04

  He read The Lizard King and he said, you know, you're gonna do a story about this guy that went to prison for a hundred years and this other guy that, you know, is the Pablo Escobar reptiles. And he just said, it's a dark world. I don't know how you're gonna do this without getting killed.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  So what is about the lizard world or the reptile world that makes it so dark? Like, why are those people, do you think, attracted to it?

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Well, not all of them are scary people. And I would say, a lot of them may be misunderstood a little bit. But there's, in the case of Mario, there was a crossover with drugs, smuggling drugs and animals into the country.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  But for background, you know, what, what is different than these other films that we've done? You know, this was an industry story that kind of looks back at the, you know, past half century. You know, what most people don't know is illegal wildlife trafficking represents about a $20 billion a year industry. It's kind of underreported, actually, only after guns, drugs, and human trafficking. And what's really interesting about that is it's, there's, there's a convergence of all of it. You know, wildlife trafficking also involves drugs and trafficking of guns. There's, there's a lot of mix, mixture of it.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Whenever people are bringing in things illegally, they tend to be a risk-taking type.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  Of course. But, you know, in the, in the kind of pre, you know, customs TSA days, where as intense it is now, it's very easy to, you know, carry animals and carry wildlife.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was something I didn't even think about until I was watching. I was like, oh, God, I remember those days where they didn't check your bags and they didn't even check your ID. You just had a ticket. And you'd just get on the plane. So you would just get on the plane with lizards.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, most cases, yeah, strapped to your body, right? The thing with, about what was so interesting about reptiles in this case, within the trade, is they're portable. They're nature with handles. You go, you see in the early episode of episode one, people traveling around the world, you know, finding rare endangered animals, putting them in their suitcase and bringing them back, putting them on a price list and selling them to a consumer. And that was the kind of early days. I mean, the, the story, The Lizard King, but many much, you know, in our series, it's handful of guys, mainly guys, you know, start a multi-billion dollar industry. And you see this kind of innovation happen over the course of the series as, you know, as the years go on.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. But when we say multi-billion, I have to kind of contextualize that. It's, when you, when people say that the wildlife trade is multi-billion dollar industry, you gotta remember, it's, a lot of it's consumption. You know, the Asian population eats a lot of turtles, a lot of snakes. A lot of it's traditional medicine, a lot of it's skins, you know.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, plant material.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Alligator skin bags, crocodile skin bags, lizard skin bags, snake skin bags. So it's, it's a lot more than just the exotic pet industry. But that's gotten enormous in Asia. They picked, they took a page out of our playbook about 25 years ago. You know, China is now a huge consumer of not just eating these reptiles, but keeping them as exotic pets. That didn't happen before 25, 30 years ago.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  Asia, Asia.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Why, why does California have a ban on python skin? Python's are not endangered, right?

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Well, it depends on the type of python. But yeah, the python skinning business actually is where all the Burmese pythons came from in the seventies that I had as a kid. They would skin the pythons, take the eggs, incubate the eggs, sell the baby pythons to the United States and other consumer countries that wanted baby pythons. Most of the pythons that are skinned in Southeast Asia, and I've been to python skinning places in Sumatra, blood pythons, reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons, but mostly blood pythons, reticulated pythons. Pythons are wild-caught and most of them are not endangered. But they're, it's, but you know, there are less and less pythons out there, but they're not endangered, those pythons.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Well, there's a shit ton in Florida. That's what I don't understand. I mean, there's this giant problem in Florida where they're overrun with pythons. And yet, California, you can't sell python skins. It seems like there's a solution there. You know, people want python skins. Oh, look, a place that's overrun with pythons. Maybe we should get your python skin there.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, the cooler python skins are not Burmese pythons, the ones in Florida. The cooler ones people like, like Nick Cage in, what was that film where he's wearing that python skin jacket? It's a reticulated python.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Wild at Heart.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  That's, yeah, Wild at Heart, that's gold and black. The cooler python skins just happen not to be Burmese pythons, which are the ones running rampant in Florida. Although they should make those trendy and use Burmese pythons. But they're not usually, you don't really, you rarely see.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  There it is, yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  That's, that's a reticulated python. That's not a Burmese. That, that's the one people want. And that's from Southeast Asia. That's not the one running wild in Florida.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Is that, that's illegal in California right now, then, that jacket?

• 18:07Speaker 04

  Is that right?

• 18:08Speaker 02

  I believe so. I don't believe you can get it imported.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's try.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  I had read something about python being one of the things that they made illegal. Why California bans python skin? Band dates to 1970. Oh. Aimed at protecting endangered and vulnerable species, particularly the Indian python, which was on the endangered species list. California chose to prohibit all python products rather than distinguished by species, created an extraordinarily broad statute banning all python imports. Oh, that's interesting. I thought it was fairly recent.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Well, that's where the laws, I think, are really screwed up. When they basically say all pythons are bad to sell when the Indian rock python is endangered. And there are a few endangered pythons. But to say all pythons cannot be used for the skin trade and sold in California because of one python out of many pythons.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Welcome to California.

• 19:03Speaker 04

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

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Austin rules. But California's just so overregulated with everything.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  So.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Particularly wildlife.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  And same thing in Florida, though, with, with the green iguana, Eric, right? I mean, at the same time.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Same thing, household?

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Regulation wise.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  And then again, there's forty.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  But people eat those.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  There's 45 types of iguanas in the world.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Did you not know that?

• 19:29Speaker 03

  No.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. There's a whole YouTube community of people who hunt iguanas and cook them in exotic ways. They make iguana stir fry.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  In South Florida.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  And it looks good. I mean, I don't know anything about what it tastes like, but this guy made like a stir fry over rice and they were eating it and they're like, oh, my God, this is sensational, like teriyaki. It looked very good.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Everyone always says croc, alligator, iguana, rattlesnake, tastes like chicken. But yeah, they eat the tail.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, I have to, you can imagine, I have a really messed up algorithm from being involved in this for so long. But that I never came across. But the, you know, the frozen, they.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, here's a guy.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  There we go. They use the legs. They cook the legs.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, the back of the tail.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  There's the tail. So he's got it marinating, ziplocked it. Then it looks like he's gonna, oh, look, he's got the whole thing.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. Usually it's the back of the tail, like, like crocodiles, you eat the back of the tail.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  But it's far out. I mean, there's a, there's a.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  Wow, look at that. He's eating the whole thing.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  In Mexico, I always see them make, you know, iguana tamales out of the back part of the iguana.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  So you put it in a kamado.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. Damn.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  And he's got a little sauce he's making here with some butter and spices. Basting it. I mean, why not? If it tastes good, and apparently it does taste good, according to all these guys that I've seen on YouTube channels. Like, they're pretty honest about it. Like, they bring it to their family, they let their family try it. I think, uh, you know, that might be the only way out, because they're everywhere in Florida. Like, they, when it gets cold out, they fall out of trees.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, they fall out of trees. I love their news reports.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  They're fucking big, too, man.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're massive.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  There's some, some channels where these guys hunt them, and some of them are like four and a half, five feet long. This episode is brought to you by OnX Offroad. Ever wonder how to reach these epic mountain lakes that are tucked away, dispersed campsites? With OnX Offroad, you'll find legal open trails around you, and even better, guided trails mapped by real off-roaders. Each one includes photos, terrain descriptions, and difficulty ratings, so you'll know if your vehicle's capable before you go. Unlike other apps, OnX gives you turn-by-turn directions on the trail, and their new dispersed camping layer shows where you can legally set up camp.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  You'll also get private land boundaries, public land overlays, and the ability to download maps for offline use, so that you're never guessing, even when you're off the grid. It's a powerful tool built for serious off-roaders. Try OnX Offroad for 50% off. Go to onxmaps.com/jorogan. It's crazy.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  The males get crazy, and they get very orange and really big, the male iguanas.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  They're so beautiful. They're such a cool-looking lizard, man.

• 22:21Speaker 04

  There's a lot of really cool iguanas, and in our show, we feature what's called a Fiji Island Iguana, a very endangered iguana, that unfortunately, people in the private sector in this country cannot own. Zoos can own them. I don't know why. Private people can't own them, but the San Diego Zoo, and this zoo, and that zoo can have Fiji Island iguanas. But they, in our show, they literally, this one guy says, it's reptile magic. It's like reptile art. A Fiji Island iguana, you might want to put it up there. It's really beautiful.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Just the beauty of it?

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Just the sheer beauty. The sheer beauty, it's like-

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Yellow lemon highlights.

• 22:52Speaker 04

  Turquoise and green, and it's, it's a very endangered iguana.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  So the Florida Iguana problem, was that all people's pets that got released?

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Probably.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  All of it?

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Well, listen, also, what's, again, going back to the show, but, you know, we, the central figure of the book is this guy named Mike Van Oostrem, and his dad, Ray Van Oostrem. They run an enterprise called Strictly Reptiles in Hollywood, right? It's in Hollywood?

• 23:19Speaker 04

  Hollywood, Florida.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  Hollywood, Florida, yeah. And they're sort of this, like, you know, I would call it like more of a fulfillment center for wildlife all across America. They are. I mean, in many ways, they're this-

• 23:33Speaker 02

  So like, it's an Amazon, well, you can just like, click, I want a tortoise?

• 23:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, they were selling 5,000 iguanas a week.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Well-

• 23:40Speaker 04

  Green baby iguanas.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  It got to that point. So, so the story goes, dad moves to Florida, starts a business, evolves.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Jurassic Park comes out. Jurassic Park comes out, everyone wanted a pet dinosaur. The, the, the green iguana market went on fire. He was selling 5,000 a week. And, you know, I was a 90s kid. I had a, I had an iguana in my, you know, my bedroom.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Jeremy's a virgin, but he did have a-

• 24:06Speaker 03

  I did, I had a pet iguana.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  To reptiles.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  That unfortunately passed away, the rock thing, you know, the heated rocks, you know, that happens, but, but yeah, no, there's sort of, so, so the story's-

• 24:15Speaker 02

  The heated rock thing?

• 24:16Speaker 03

  No, they have this like rock thing where it sits on, and it's-

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Keeps it warm?

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Keeps it warm, and then I think it kept on too long, I think he-

• 24:22Speaker 04

  He cooked his iguana.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  My iguana, yeah, sadly.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Yikes.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  But I've learned, I've learned a lot.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  But-

• 24:29Speaker 03

  But, but, but filled with these unintended consequences. You know, I think this idea of a big movie coming out, the correlation to, you know, driving, you know, demand for pet sales.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Thank God people can't buy a fucking velociraptor. Because people would have them. They'd have fences set up in their yard.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Joe, you've had the Colossus people on this show, I think.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  They want to bring back one of those, and a woolly mammoth.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Well, there's no chance that they can bring, with current technology.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  I know, I know.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  They don't have dinosaur DNA. It's too old.

• 24:57Speaker 04

  I'm joking.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  But they're, I mean, I've met the dire wolves.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  I know.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  It's wild. They brought back the dire wolf.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  It's not really a dire wolf.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  What does that mean?

• 25:04Speaker 03

  I mean-

• 25:05Speaker 02

  If you talk to geneticists, what is, it is a bunch of different traits.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  Don't go down that rabbit hole. It's close to a dire wolf.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know what that means, because like, we decide what a dire wolf is, what a dire wolf isn't. But if you take literal dire wolf DNA, that's 7,000 years old, and you add it to these gray wolves, and this is what they did, and they created essentially a dire wolf. It's like, people are arguing over semantics, whatever it is, that's not a wolf. It's, it's very different. It looks different than a regular wolf, like a gray wolf. The stature is different, it has a mane, it's really crazy looking. They're white, they're stockier, they, they, they're built differently. Like, you, you see, you're like, oh, that's different.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, like, what, like, mane wolves in Argentina look very different than our wolves. So they're very different types of canines, you know. Wild dogs in Africa look very different.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  You know, than our, you know, so, yeah. But, um, yeah, I mean, one thing I'd just say about iguanas, just since we're on it, is that, because I'm on an organization called the International Iguana Foundation, and we protect iguanas around the world, and people get confused, they think, oh, iguana, that's so common, they're falling out of trees in Florida. But there are a lot of really rare, cool iguanas. There's about 45 species, and there's pink iguanas in the Galapagos Islands, land iguanas, there's marine iguanas. There's a very rare, high-elevation pink iguana, there's another land iguana in the Galapagos, there's a, you know-

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  A marine iguana, but that lizard was fairly recently discovered. And there's some iguanas that were thought to be extinct, Joe, like the, like the Jamaican Iguana. And that was thought to be extinct forever, the Jamaican Iguana, but they found a tiny population recently. So there's a lot of iguanas that are in trouble, and, you know, we should care about iguanas, and they're not just green iguanas. Yeah, that, the pink iguana, that's a marine iguana, and a regular Galapagos land iguana, and then you, you see some of the pink form.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Jamie, see if you can find a video on Florida people hunting iguanas. So Florida people hunting giant iguanas, because some of them are so big. You just, you see them, you're like, oh my God. Are those bad to eat, though, the big giant ones? Would you eat one, being like a pet, a reptile pet guy?

• 27:17Speaker 04

  I've never-

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Look at the size of that one.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a male. That's a male.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  When they get orange like that, yeah, that's a big male.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  I mean, these things are gigantic, man.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, that's a common green iguana, and the males lose their green and get that incredible yellow-orange. Those are males, yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Isn't it crazy how many of them there are, though? I mean, it is just overrun with iguanas. I guess they have no natural predators, right? There's nothing that eats them there.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  Not once they get big like that. When they're little, like, some birds are prey, and some snakes can eat baby iguanas, but not once they're like that.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  But they're pretty chill. I mean, they don't really do much harm.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Well, don't they do to people's crops and people's houses?

• 27:55Speaker 04

  No, they do, they do do damage. They, they, they, they're not supposed to be in Florida, let's put it that way. I mean, iguanas like water typically. They like to be around water, the green iguanas. But, you know, reptiles have a bad PR problem, and that's why we're here, Joe. We're trying to elevate the publicity of people loving reptiles and not killing them.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  This dude is out there killing them. Who's this, who's this dude? Top Shelf Anglers on Instagram.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Oh, you can do an expedition.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Oh, so he's just a Florida guy that's enjoying the great outdoors, and also-

• 28:28Speaker 04

  No, that now is a different, that's a, called a tenusaurus, that's a type of Central American Mexican rock iguana.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  That lizard, that's not a green iguana.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  So Florida has a variety?

• 28:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, they have those as well, and they have taygoos in Florida that come from South America, a different type of lizard that's invasive in Florida.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  And all of it is pets?

• 28:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, people that-

• 28:49Speaker 02

  I had no idea that many people had iguanas, that it could be this big of a problem.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  Pet iguanas were everywhere at one time, yeah.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  And is this really-

• 28:58Speaker 04

  That's the taygo, that's also invasive in Florida.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  That's crazy looking.

• 29:03Speaker 04

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

• 29:05Speaker 03

  That looks like a snake with legs.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  It does. Look at that face, right?

• 29:10Speaker 04

  And that lizard really loves to eat eggs. I used to feed mine eggs, and I've seen them in the wild eating eggs, bird eggs, duck eggs.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  When I lived in the valley, um, there was a reptile store, and it was a place where I used to go buy goldfish, because I used to have piranhas. And I used to have turtles, too.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  And the turtles were way more vicious than the piranhas. Those aquatic, when you put goldfish in with the turtles, turtles-

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  It's, they're crazy, man, and they grab a hold of them, and they're, they're biting them, and it's like very Jurassic Park, like you're watching a little dinosaur.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Alligator snapping turtle.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, these are just little, you know, little green-

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Sliders.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Sliders, is that what they're called? Um, but they had a crocodile monitor in that place.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I briefly thought, like, ooh, maybe I could figure out an enclosure, put a crocodile monitor, feed it rabbits and shit.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Don't get bit by a crocodile monitor. That is close to like a Komodo dragon bite. They have scalpel teeth. They're serious, getting bit by a crocodile monitor.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  It looked pretty vicious. It did, I mean, they just look like dinosaurs. It's like a forgotten thing of the past. There it is.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  There's a crocodile monitor. Look at that face, man. It totally looks like a dinosaur.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Well, there's Tommy, who's, who's-

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the guy in the first episode. Feeding it, you know, chicken.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Oh, Tommy. They're the weirdest fucking people, because I kind of understand the chimp people more. Because the chimp people, like, a chimp is interacting with you, it's, it's a mammal, it's a primate, it's intelligent. There's a lot going on. There's emotions and jealousy, and chimps, they're, they're connecting with you. These things, they're just, you're just looking into the abyss.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  Until the chimp rips your head off.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I'm not advocating for people to have chimps as pets. I just say, I understand the appeal of a pet chimp. I think it's a crazy idea and a terrible idea.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  Especially a baby chimp.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  I think if anybody's even remotely thinking about it, they should watch Chimp Crazy.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  But, yeah, especially the babies, they're so cute, and then they eventually get to the point where they kill your neighbor. But it's just, you don't want, you know, I get, I just get the appeal of it. The appeal of the reptile thing, to me, is just very strange. Like, these people love them.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  Well, I loved, you know, I used to keep snakes and lizards, but I ultimately, they were my gateway drug. And then I ultimately got into tortoises, because I like the tortoises coexisting in the garden. I like plants, I like gardens.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 31:29Speaker 04

  And so it didn't feel like they were in a cage, and they kind of, you know, maybe I'm anthropomorphizing my tortoises, but I kind of felt like they were having a pretty good life in my garden.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 31:39Speaker 04

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

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Also freak show.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  And freak show, of course.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  You guys are really good at freak shows.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  As I said, it takes one to know one.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  But it's not, but what's different, what's different, though, is that this isn't some like, side hustle for animal love gone wrong. You know, it's, it's, there's these people, there's this, the animal, the reptile people, the herb people are incredibly obsessive about, you know, living art, about these living things. They like the, it's like a baseball card, like the scarcity. What was that word you used, the herb people? Herb, herb, yeah, I call them herb, herb.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  Herpetology, herb people, herpetology, amphibians and reptiles.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sorry, well, you know, coded, a little coded.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  The herpy people.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Herpy, the herpy people, no, but, but it's, you know, it's, it's really a trade formed around scarcity. And, you know, this sort of desire and adventure people have going out to find the rarest of the rare, you know, and bringing it back, and selling it, trading it, keeping it.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  I'm in that category.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  You are in that category.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  I'm in that category. I'm not the guy that just wants the little pet bearded dragon. I want the Rolls Royce of reptiles.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  But it's different than like, you know, an individual person that has an attachment to a chimpanzee, that she saw with, you know, watching Tarzan when she was growing up, and she wanted to have that in her life.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  So in other words, freaky people, like you just said.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Freaky people, extreme, extreme obsessions. But it's about kind of, you know, psychology of people, in this, in this particular, very niche way. Well, anytime you're dealing with extreme animal people, it's about the psychology of the human being that's really invested in it, right?

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, best in show, yeah, for sure.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  And these are, these are very unusual people, because it's a very unusual thing to be connected to, something that really doesn't give a fuck about you. Like, we're really concerned about this pink iguana. That pink iguana doesn't give a fuck about people. If all the people on earth died, it would just keep going about its business and not shed a tear.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Especially things that can kill you, in this way, you know, like a typan, or whatever, someone playing with that.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  An inland typan is a venomous snake from Australia that may be the most venomous snake in the world. But it's all relative, because a black mamba, you know, yeah, Australia has a lot of venomous stuff.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  Spiders, box jellyfish, a lot of snakes that are very dangerous, Australian tiger snake, brown snake, inland typan, they're all things that equally can kill you. So to say one's more dangerous than the other, they'll all kill you.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Is there antivenom for all of them?

• 34:43Speaker 04

  No, actually, so, it's a good question. So, some snakes, like, you know, Texas has a coral snake, for example, a very venomous, elapid type of snake, like a cobra, not like a rattlesnake. And I think they have less and less antivenom for snakes that rarely bite people, because, like, sea snakes, the coral snake, which is the red, black, and yellow one, that you have in East Texas, you know, when the dog gets bit by them, you were talking about your dog getting bit by rattlesnakes, a lot of time the vet doesn't know, because you can't even see the bite, the snake bite is so tiny. So some snakes do not have antivenom, some really dangerous snakes.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  The coral snakes, they don't have antivenom for them?

• 35:24Speaker 04

  I, I think I heard that maybe not anymore, I'm sure it's faded.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  So what happens if you get bit?

• 35:29Speaker 04

  Well, there may be some antivenom, but there's not a lot of it. Antivenom has gotten very expensive, and it's very sophisticated now, and it's mostly for, you know, in the US, for vipers, you know, for rattlesnakes, you know. But I don't know, good question, that would be something, someone smarter than me would know about coral snake antivenom. But it's an elapid, like a cobra.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  A friend of mine had two of them in her carport.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  They, they took pictures of it and sent it to people, and everyone's like, yeah, that's, keep away from that. Just chilling in her carport.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  But they're generally not aggressive, is that the deal?

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a saying, and it doesn't fit all, because there's coral snakes that don't have this, but yellow against black is a friend of Jack. Uh, yellow, and black against red is, uh, anyway, I can't even say it right now.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  You wind up dead or something?

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, you wind up dead, but it's, I'm getting it wrong. But there's a saying, and it doesn't hold true for all coral snakes, because there's some coral snakes outside of the US that don't have that same pattern.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  So if there's no antivenom, and they take you to the hospital, what do they do? They stop making the coral.

• 36:33Speaker 04

  I mean, there's some.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  They stop making it. It was cost.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  Is that what it says?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Ineffective.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  I think that's what I heard.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Cost ineffective. No longer cost effective. Let people die. Cost effective is a crazy thing to say when it comes to fucking keeping people alive.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  Wow, I was, I was ripe for a change.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Capitalist cunts, maybe the socialists are right. That was made by. Cost effective is crazy, so what do they do?

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Uh, you know, I heard every rattlesnake joke after I got bit, and there's one that's, is, these three guys are out hiking, and someone gets bit here, and they go to the doctor, and the guy says, you gotta go back and suck it out of him, and the guy just says to him, you're gonna die. So maybe you die with a coral snake.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Just leave you die.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  The, the thing I was, we were, recently, we're looking at this, the way of treating rattlesnake mites, not too long ago, by the way, you sell these, Johnson and Johnson sell these kits, where you, you used to have one, right? You'd, you'd actually literally slice out, and you'd suck out the, suck out the venom out of your, out of your bite. Does it actually work?

• 37:30Speaker 04

  No.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  That was what's incredible about it.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  When you, when we were young, they had these little rattlesnake kits, you know, I'm a little older than you, but it was insane what they told people to do back then. They told you to cut yourself, and then put a tourniquet, and then suck the venom out, which is completely insane, because when a rattlesnake strikes, you know, they never hold on, a rattlesnake, they strike and let go immediately, and then they track their prey. And it's literally like a hypodermic needle going into your body, and the, you know, the venom is already, just like when they inject you with something, it's already in you, you can't suck the, whatever a doctor.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  So what should you do if you get bit by a rattlesnake?

• 38:07Speaker 04

  Be mellow. In my case, I walked to my car, luckily I wasn't too far away from my car, and I was up in the mountains about an hour away from a hospital. I drove, well, I drove like a bat out of hell to the hospital, actually. But you're supposed to be calm, and get to a hospital.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  That's the kit? Incredible, yeah. Jeez, and it was just bullshit, huh? This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And with World Mental Health Day on the 10th, now's the perfect time to give it a try. In fact, don't even wait until the 10th, because all that stress you feel, it's not waiting around. So instead of letting it build up, sign up for a therapy session and unload at any time, not just on World Mental Health Day. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more

• 39:01Speaker 02

  than 125 health plan networks, and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance, or live outside of the United States, you can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com to explore your payment options. That's better, H E L P, dot com. This episode is brought to you by Traeger. Food cooked over real wood is just on another level, and that's why Traeger is such a game changer. Their grills run on real hardwood pellets, so everything gets that legit wood-fired flavor. Whether you're grilling steaks, smoking

• 39:41Speaker 02

  ribs, cooking chicken, or even baking a pizza, you just set your temperature, put your food in, and let Traeger handle the rest. It's simple. If you like food that tastes like it came off a real fire, without all the work, check out Traeger grills.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Well, everything.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Imagine taking it out in the woods, like, we're fine.

• 39:59Speaker 04

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

• 40:03Speaker 02

  And so you just stay mellow, and get to the hospital, and if they don't have any antivenom, you just die?

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Well, in my case, they didn't have it in the hospital. They had to get, see, Highway Patrol to bring it from another, from Ventura, and it took about 45 minutes, and I thought I was gonna die on the gurney. But yeah, you get to a hospital, and you get antivenom if it's a bad bite.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  And if they don't have antivenom, you die?

• 40:25Speaker 04

  Well, it depends on the kind of snake. Like, water moccasins usually aren't lethal, but certain rattlesnakes can kill you.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  And how much time do you have, from the time you get bit, where you must get the antivenom in you?

• 40:37Speaker 04

  I mean, in my case, I swear to God, I thought I was gonna stop breathing about two hours into it. It just slowly feels like this pressure on your chest.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Like you can't breathe.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, like you're, like you, it felt like someone had put sandbags all over me, and like, you have this pressure, and you feel like you're gonna stop breathing, yeah. It's kind of bizarre.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Who's that guy, Ross, Ross Allen? He has the world record for the most, is it cobra bites?

• 41:03Speaker 04

  No, I think you're talking about serpentarium.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  That same guy?

• 41:06Speaker 04

  Bill Haas.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Bill Haas, yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  He lived to like 100, but, and I know people that inject themselves with venom. I was in Myanmar and Burma one time, and this guy had snake tattoos all over him, and he was a snake wrangler at this zoo in central Burma, and every tattoo he had, he had put on his body, he had put some venom in it, so he could handle these really dangerous crates, which are like cobras. And he was this guy with all these snake tattoos, but he had envenomated himself, so he would have antibodies, so he could handle these snakes, and if he got bit, he wouldn't die.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  But early roadside attractions in South, I mean, that's the part about Florida, it goes back, it's in the 50s and 60s, it had, you know, Miami Serpentarium was an amazing looking place, had this giant cobra, you know, with sculpture, basically. Here's a question, if they do that with allergies, where they give you like, a little bit of the allergen, you develop a resistance to it, could they do that with snakes?

• 41:57Speaker 04

  That's the idea.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Like, if you live in a snake-prone area, should you do that?

• 42:00Speaker 04

  No, but that's the idea.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Why wouldn't you do that?

• 42:04Speaker 04

  There's, there's a guy right now in the US that's doing it, I think they're doing a film upon, about him injecting all these venomous snake venoms into him, like a pincushion, but, no, I don't think people should do it, but people do do it, not, not a lot of people, but this guy, this guy did it.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  But if it does build up your antibodies, and you know that you're gonna come in contact with snakes, wouldn't that be, is it bad for you to do?

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Look, the country that I think has the most deadly snake bites is probably India, the country where there's the most deaths in, invenamation. The snake, they- Probably kills more people in the world as a puff adder in Africa, but it's many countries. But I think India has the highest. US, it's pretty low chance you're gonna get killed by a snake. You're gonna get killed driving your car or shooting someone with your gun. You know, it's highly unlikely, the, the, the odds are very low that you're gonna die from a snake bite. No matter where you live in the country.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  I understand that.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  You understand that.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  It's all well and good, but that doesn't comfort you if you get bit by a snake. Like, oh, what are the odds?

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Seek medical assistance here, Dr. Hammond. Or buy one of those kits.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  I think most people live, Joe. I think.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Most people, yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  I mean, there's a few people that die this year in California, um, but typically it's like only a few people a year die in the country from snake bites.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  And is it generally because they just don't get to medical treatment in time?

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Or they're older, or, you know, or they get bit three times.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  Like, not just once by the rattlesnake. You know, you get more venom in them.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Is it true that the young ones give you more venom than the old ones?

• 43:33Speaker 04

  No, young, young, young ones have a more condensed, more dangerous venom. But big snakes will, are much more dangerous because they can put far more venom into you. The little ones have, have a more potent venom, but they can't inject as much into you. So it's, it's kinda, people misunderstand that stat.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. Not that I'm a snake expert, I'm more of a turtle expert and I, I'm more of a freak expert. So I'm good at finding these crazy people to cover.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Do you get uncomfortable being around these people?

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Ah, that's a good question. Um.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Cause there's, there's a psychological aspect to, particularly like chimp crazy. There's, there's something about those people that makes me uneasy watching it on TV. Like, you're so far gone. Like, some of these people are so far gone in terms of like, just being a normal, present, rational person.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  There, there's a courtship, and sometimes that courtship takes years to get someone willing to be interviewed. It's generally, the reptile world can be very guarded. People that have them don't want the feds coming and taking their rare reptiles. They don't want animal rights groups, PETA coming and.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  Busting them. They don't want people coming because they're very valuable. Some reptiles are worth a lot of money. So they're very guarded and to get access to a lot of these people took a lot of time at times. And sometimes that relationship would go up and down. And there were times when people that I was interviewing really did not like me. There was something that happened and then I'd have to go there and I'd be nervous because that person may have been someone who did a lot of time in prison and did some heavy things in his life. So, yeah, there's times when you're just kinda like, you know, is, is this the time I'm gonna go there and he's gonna really fuck me up?

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Why didn't they like you?

• 45:23Speaker 04

  Ah, you know, man, you know, like, listen, I like this guy. He's done a, he's done what he's done in the past. He was sentenced to a hundred years in prison. He got out for whatever reason, but that guy.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Wait a minute, why did he go to jail for a hundred years?

• 45:39Speaker 04

  Well, Mario Tabrawi was sentenced to a hundred plus years in prison. He got out early because he must've had some serious information.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  What was the crime?

• 45:49Speaker 04

  Murder and drugs.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  And he got out early because he, he said he had information?

• 45:55Speaker 04

  He must've. He did 12 years and no one knows, no one knows why.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  What? He only did 12 years for murder and drugs?

• 46:00Speaker 04

  But I like him.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Oh, great.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  I, I wasn't the one murdered. I wasn't in his life back then, but he's kind of a, like, he really actually does love animals. I mean, in his way, and I was nervous sometimes going to his place a few times.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  But why was he mad at you?

• 46:17Speaker 04

  Ah, fuck, do you remember all the times he was mad at me? He's mad, he's probably mad at me right now as I'm speaking.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  He definitely will be after the show, probably.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, that's, this, this is the next episode. There's an entire episode that talks about kind of the eighties in Miami and the sort of overlap between the drug trade and the illegal wildlife trade and the reptile trade. And he's a central character in it.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  The eighties in Miami.

• 46:38Speaker 03

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

• 47:08Speaker 04

  There's that expression, honor among thieves, and he weirdly has this kinda honorable side.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Unredemable, yeah.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  And, and certain things I would say to him would make him really upset. But I have to say, the only time I was ever shot at in my life was in fucking Miami. I was shot at, you know, going to a payphone in the early nineties in a van, trying to go to a nightclub with a bunch of people. And these guys were walking towards me and they started just blowing out the windows of the van. I remember, I didn't go to the nightclub, I went back to my hotel. And I woke up in the morning with that chopped, you know, carved glass all in my hair. I had long hair back then, I had hair back then. But Miami was, you know, it was pretty wild in the eighties and early nineties.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  I have a good friend of mine, my friend Steve did his residency, he's an ophthalmologist, his residency in Miami in the eighties. And worked in emergency rooms. And he said, it was fucking insane. It's just like so many gunshot wounds, so many drug deals gone bad, so many heists. He said it was like an insane place to work.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  It's funny you say that, because I said to all my characters, I said, what's it like, you know, having been in and out of prison so many times? And he goes, bro, everyone in Florida's been in prison. You know, and I was kinda like, well, what's it like, you know? Everyone in Florida's been in prison.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Sunny place with shady people, right?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Have you seen Cocaine Cowboys?

• 48:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Phenomenal, right? And that story where you find out that the entire graduating class of the police academy either wound up murdered or in jail for corruption.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Have you seen Bad Lieutenant?

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  I'm friends with Harvey.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 48:44Speaker 04

  He's good in it, man.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no, it's a great movie.

• 48:46Speaker 04

  But it's, there's parts of this story that are a little like Bad Lieutenant. You'll see in the end, you know.

• 48:50Speaker 03

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

• 49:22Speaker 04

  This guy sleeps with a gun every night and gets literally orgasmic with the thought of this guy coming to his house.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  It's like a hideaway house.

• 49:29Speaker 04

  The guy, the guy that he put in prison for a hundred years that got out. He literally waits and you'll see a line in the show that is kind of unbelievable what he says about that.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, but just, you know, he lives in this kind of, we went to go see him, he lives in this kind of very, kind of, you know, country part of West Virginia and, um.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  And he's good with guns.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Good with guns. And he would just, you know, he would brag about all the gunshot, you know, the bullets you can find from this, you know, leftover from the civil war in his backyard. And, you know, he was very, very good with a gun. We did a lot of shooting verite with him and, um, he was just a really, at the, at the time, very generous with his, with his time, wanting to tell his story. But, you know, clearly killed a lot of people and would make some very soft references to, to that that would be very unnerving, you know? Like, yeah, you're really great with, I've never shot a gun. He's, I don't have anything against it, but I've never shot a gun and I would talk to him about it. I'm interested in it. And he'd be like, yeah, I've had to use it a lot, you know, more than I'd like to admit.

• 50:33Speaker 03

  So, you know, you're in these, these places, it's, it's, it's.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  But what's so peculiar about this guy, his name's Larry Lovelace. He was a DEA agent in Florida back in those days. He put this guy in prison, you know, you know, bringing, this guy was bringing a lot of drugs from, you know, he was Cuban and you'll see it in episode two. But, um, he really just doesn't understand how the guy got out of prison. And the fact that the very guy that put him in prison wouldn't know that, that they, like, whoever the powers that be that put, got him out of prison after 12 years, you would think he would know, you know? But he, he's still to this day worried, worried about retaliation.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Well, to be, so this was, what's, what's cool is that his dad was actually the person, he was like an HR person for, um, kind of the Cuban, it was at the time of the Cuban Bay of Pigs, you know, invasion, that kind of era. And he was responsible for taking care of all these kind of Cuban exiles during that time. And he would, he was being the one that was going to go into house to house and giving people checks. So he had this kind of very interesting network of people and had this incredible access. And so what would the, what was being insinuated is that, you know, his dad had these relationships and knew where everyone was and knew all these people and had information that was useful to the government at the time. That's the idea. Gave information, no surprise.

• 51:54Speaker 04

  Or he helped bring down the real Pablo Escobar, or he knew a big drug lord that the government wanted and they made a deal. Who knows? But it could've been, there's lots of theories.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  Quite an injustice, though. Like even this guy, you know, some, you know, we filmed 200 people over, how long? 15 years, really the last six was, was more intense.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  More than 200 people.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  And you, you never get everybody in.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  And I remember meeting this guy, Tony Biscaro, remember him?

• 52:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  He was the, this guy was part of, he, he flew planes for drugs. You know, he got busted with like, I think, 600,000, you know, pounds of weed at the time. He served the single largest sentence for marijuana smuggling crime, 40 years, 40 years. Got out maybe five years ago. And could you imagine coming out of prison for the longest sentence and then going to Miami and you see weed stores everywhere?

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Your fucking life's over and you see these weed stores. It's like insane to me.

• 52:52Speaker 04

  That's fucked up.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  But, but that was at a time, look Pablo Escobar, like there were people around Pablo Escobar that got indicted that was, that were trafficking ivory horns and stuff. Like it was very, you know, the one degree of separation for like wildlife crime and drugs in that era.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Why do you think there's that connection?

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Easy, concealment.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Concealment.

• 53:09Speaker 04

  I mean, look, I don't want to exaggerate. I think it, there's been connections, you know, like you can put cocaine inside of a boa constrictor. Who's going to open a box at customs or, you know, fish and wildlife service and look inside the boa constrictor. So there's some pretty ingenious ways to.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Meaning you put it in their stomach?

• 53:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, like you either like force feed the boa constrictor, like, you know, like you put them in those balloons, you put cocaine in, or you even.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  And then you have to cut them open to get your cocaine?

• 53:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, you cut them open and get your cocaine.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  But even, but even more.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  I remember in New York when the fish markets used to put drugs.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  You speak so casually about that, by the way.

• 53:41Speaker 04

  But fish, fish markets used to put the drugs in fish and the, and the, you know, in the fish markets in New York.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, liquid cocaine, yeah.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, cause no one wants to handle the fish and open up the fish and they'd shove all the drugs into the fish. So, you know, like smelly, dangerous animals are good cover for drugs.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Or, or even more simply, you know, trafficking wildlife, there was a legal version of that. So what they would do is take the crates and they'd pack them and they'd put the drugs at the bottom and they'd put, you know, another layer of animals. And they put some, they'd mix in some, you know, look alike animals that are really rare, but look like the common animal. So they'd mix them together and then they put something like, you know, spitting cobras up the top. And no one was reaching into the crate when there was these like very dangerous animals.

• 54:23Speaker 04

  Many.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  So that's how they kind of got, they, they were able to, to prey on the lack of resources at these kind of major ports of entry. And realized that fish and wildlife didn't really have any resources at the time. They had limited wildlife inspectors. They had to go through these, you know, volumes, volumes of crates and they, they played these games.

• 54:42Speaker 04

  Many Komodo dragons that made it into this country came in illegally in a crate. And they would just put a little Komodo dragon in with some other monitor lizards and the inspectors couldn't tell the difference. And they'd go through and the Komodo dragon that bit Sharon Stone's husband, Sharon Stone's husband at the Los Angeles Zoo was one of those Komodo dragons.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  So it was somebody's private collection and then they got released to the zoo?

• 55:05Speaker 04

  No, it was in a sting that's in our show where they were bringing in illegal animals coming from a guy in Malaysia. Who's sort of the Pablo Escobar, the kingpin globally of all the reptile animal trade. A guy that we finally accessed after COVID, who, his name is Anson Wong. And he was sort of the, you know, bad guy number one in the world for reptile and animal smuggling. And so he was sending.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  By Interpol and all, you know.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  Well, he did the longest, longest sentence in the US for wildlife crime ever at the time in the nineties. He was busted in Mexico, but, and then brought extradited into the US. But he was bringing in Komodo dragons and really rare reptiles. And the zoos were the beneficiary of those reptiles. Once they were confiscated. So the LA Zoo, San Diego Zoo, Bronx Zoo, a lot of these animals came from reptile smugglers.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Very much at origins of collections.

• 55:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  For zoos.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  And I would also imagine the kind of people that are really into reptiles probably also do drugs. So they probably know a lot of people in that world.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like a cross section of.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  You're into death metal, you got a python.

• 56:10Speaker 04

  There's a lot of inked guys. There's a lot of like goth guys into.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 04

  Hot snakes, which are the venomous, a lot of bikers.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Hot snakes.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  Hot snakes.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  That's what they call them?

• 56:22Speaker 04

  Hot, hot snakes.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Means they're the kind that can kill you.

• 56:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're called hot snakes.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  But yeah, a lot of badass guys and there was definitely drugs. Listen, I did drugs in my life.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  No way.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Come on. I'll go on.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  I've done everything. I had nightclubs in New York City for many years, Joe. Yeah, I'm, I'm like, you know, embalmed. It's made me live longer.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Maybe that's what saved you when you got bit by the rattlesnake. But you gotta think that the type of people that are going to be even interested in having a snake as a pet, that's a very unusual person.

• 56:58Speaker 04

  I like snakes.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't.

• 57:00Speaker 04

  Come on, you know, people that have snakes. Kids have ball pythons. You've got kids, they like a baby, a ball python, they're clean. You don't have to feed it every day like a rabbit or a dog. You can go on vacation, leave your ball python, they're, they're, they're a good pet. A lot of snakes.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  I don't think of them as a pet. I think of it as a monster that you feed that allows you, you know, it's not big enough to eat you. So it allows you to feed it. And then you have to keep it in this box, which is kind of weird.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, that's, that's why I like tortoises. You don't have to keep them in a cage or a box.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Cause there's a, does a snake, do they experience discomfort because they're in a terrarium?

• 57:37Speaker 04

  Listen, there's a lot of myth out there that, oh, snakes can live in a little teeny like sweater box or shoebox. And you can put them in rocks like you see in snake stores and snake breeders.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  Like a rack of hews.

• 57:48Speaker 04

  The truth is, real snakes in the wild do not live in little boxes. They may go in the underground at a certain time of year and hibernate, they may, but they come out and they hang out like us and they move around. And most snakes do not live in a little teeny box. But yes, they can survive in a box, but there's all different kinds of snakes. There's racer snakes and indigo snakes and snakes that need to move fast and go places. And then there's some snakes like a ball python that can be in a more confined space, but you can't generalize.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  But generally, like when people keep them as pets, they keep them in some kind of an aquarium, right?

• 58:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they should, they should give them more space. They should absolutely give them more space. I mean, part of what we're trying to do in this show is try to tell people, be responsible. Don't treat reptiles like disposable pets, like a toy that you break one week and then you buy another one and you break it and the parents buy another one. You know, they're living creatures. The death toll when you import these animals is amazing. I mean, so much mortality. And we don't talk about mortality, whether it's zoos or people bringing in these reptiles. Or even myself over the years, you asked me what happened to that snake, probably died. Probably was flushed down the toilet by someone's mom. You know, you know, like baby green turtles that you had as a kid, like what happened to most of those?

• 59:00Speaker 02

  How long do snakes look? Like how long does a python live? This episode is brought to you by Visible. It's officially summer, folks, and boy, what a summer we are having. It feels like one of those good old fashioned summers where you just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action. Your best companion this summer, Visible Wireless. Visible gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. So you can make this the summer of fun and savings. Visible is more than just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to always keep you connected with no contract to tie you down. Switch today at visible.com. Plans start at $25 a month.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Or get our premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  So the longest lived animal, terrestrial animal on the planet is a giant tortoise. They can live almost 200 years. I have tortoises that are over a hundred years old.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  What about snakes?

• 1:00:08Speaker 04

  Snakes generally, most snakes don't live more than 30 to 40 years, but there are a few that might, lizards can live 70 years. Some of the big land iguanas can live a long time.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Those like ones in Florida? They can live 70 years?

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  I don't know about green iguanas, but there are some that can live 50 to 70 years, some of the big lizards. Tortoises live the longest. Some crocodilians can live a really long time. Snakes live the least, the lesser time compared to most of the other reptiles.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  That was another thing that they, they found in Florida, in the Everglades. They found Nile crocodiles. And they think that they might have a breeding population. There's some suspicion, but it's basically from people having them as pets.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're gnarly.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  I swam with Nile crocodiles. That's no joke.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  Why'd you do that?

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  I was in Madagascar. They have a form of Nile crocodile in Madagascar. They don't get quite as big as the mainland crocs. And I was looking for turtles and then I saw the croc. Nile crocodiles, and as you know, saltwater crocodiles are the two crocs that really kill the most people. You know, people come and wash their clothing next to the shore, you know, the croc comes up and grabs them. You know, you really got to watch it with Nile crocodiles. So if they're in Florida, they're much bigger than American crocodiles.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have a shoot on sight order for them, or they did at least in this article that I was reading. It's from a while back.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  I didn't know that. Wow.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, they found a couple of them.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know they've captured at least two of them.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Well, the biggest reptile in the world in terms of weight, back to our size conversation, is a saltwater crocodile. And it's neck and neck with a leatherback sea turtle. They're both over 2,000 pounds. So you imagine a 2,000.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Leatherback sea turtle is that big?

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  I had no idea. That's crazy. I would have never imagined that a sea turtle would have the same body weight as a saltwater crocodile.

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  They're neck and neck, two, over 2,000 pounds, both of them. That's a big, big turtle.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Well, I know that there, there's legend, right, about Congo crocodiles. And that there's crocodiles that people had supposedly seen, you know, back in the early 1900s and the 1800s. That they thought were 40 feet long. And the thing about crocodiles is I don't think they die of old age. I think they just stay alive until they die.

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  I want to be a crocodile.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  And they keep getting bigger. That's the other thing, like depending upon their food source and how much, yeah, one, I think in captivity they wind up dying. But I think there's some, there's, there's some thoughts as to why that happens, you know, how they're actually eating. Whether they're getting fed, what's the difference between the way they live in the wild? But there's some accounts from back in the day where these guys were on a boat and the, the crocodile was bigger than the boat they were on.

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, the thing about crocodilians, and I think there's about 27 different types, but once they get to a certain size, you know, they're vulnerable when they're little, right? Like birds and fish and things can kill them and eat them. But once they get a certain size, you know, like you're saying, they're pretty much invincible. Nothing can kill them, you know?

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  And some of them develop a taste for people.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, just movement in the water and and just they're because they're an ambush predator.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, they hunt people.

• 1:03:20Speaker 04

  And they probably hunt people.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  My friend Jim Shockey, he got hired to go to Africa. I forget what country it was, but he got hired to kill these crocodiles. Because they were preying on people and while he was there, someone got snatched up. While he was in camp. He said everybody there had like missing a leg, bite, taken out their calf, everybody was all fucked up.

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  I was good friends with Peter Beard and he would go to Kenya and Ethiopia and call crocodiles. And there's a really incredible photo of him inside a crocodile that they killed. And he's like writing in his, you know, journal, but he's half his body is in a huge Nile crocodile. But he would go and call them for probably similar reasons as you just said.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  Once they start targeting villagers, once they find that there's a place that they can hunt and get regular food, they're there all the time. They they're so sneaky that, you know, what they developed was they these people had put posts into the ground in the water. So into the the the area where they would wash their clothes and gather food. They essentially built like some sort of containment area where the crocs couldn't get through these poles. So what the crocs did was go around the poles and into the water. So they had figured it out.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  Smart.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  That's creepy. That's creepy where they they they realize like, oh, the people go like they must have been watching and realizing, oh, the people go into this area. So I gotta go on the ground at night and then I'll go back in the water and then I'll catch these fuckers slipping.

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  And they're patient, they can wait years.

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  Intelligent.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  They can wait a long time before they eat anything, you know.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, they don't have to eat for a year, right?

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  A big croc, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  Are they intelligent?

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

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

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  What a dinosaur, man.

• 1:05:19Speaker 04

  What is that, a saltwater or Nile?

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  It says saltwater croc.

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  Is this in Australia?

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  In Australia.

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  Wow, though, wow.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Those things ran the whole world at one point in time.

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  Mm hmm, yeah.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  It's just weird, there's still creatures like that roaming around, you know, like that's a throwback.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  And there's some really endangered crocodiles and you'll see in our show, I think even episode one, there's the zoo curator that says, oh, we bought a few Philippine crocodiles from this dealer, I think it's in the first episode. And Philippine crocodiles today are super endangered, you know, like there's still some really, really rare ones, not saltwater crocs and not Nile crocs. But there's some really endangered.

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Is that a thrill for these guys that they get something that they're not supposed to have as a part of it?

• 1:06:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure, yeah.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  It's like a rare baseball card.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  No, it's like rare art, it's like having a, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then there's a.

• 1:06:11Speaker 04

  I I get excited by seeing something I never saw before, like a kid in a candy store. No, but when I see a cool like pink landing one, I've never seen one in the in the wild or anywhere. And I've been to the Galapagos, so yeah, it's a thrill. It's a high.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  But to put in your backpack and take it home is probably not encouraged.

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  I'd stuff it down my pants, no, I I'd be too scared.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:36Speaker 04

  Well, ever since.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Be in its natural habitat.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  No, I wouldn't want, you know, my mother gave me a good moral compass with that. She used to say to me when I was a kid, don't play God, Eric, you know, I keep my, I was keeping things and she'd tell me, you gotta let it go at the end of the summer. So I was lucky to have that because a lot of people didn't have that mother and I did. So I I kinda, against my better judgment, when I was a kid, I did bad things that my mother didn't like, but later in life she was right, keep it in the wild.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  You know.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  Well, they're fascinating in the wild, I just like I do appreciate them in the wild. I just I'm perplexed as to why people would, they would have their life revolve around taking care of reptiles. It just seems really odd.

• 1:07:17Speaker 04

  Well, people get into it and they get addicted and they buy more and more and more and then they get divorced and they get rid of them all or they get burnt out on it. Because after a while, it's a lot of work taking care of a lot of reptiles. So it's kind of like, you know, people get really into it and sometimes it's hard to sustain it, you know.

• 1:07:33Speaker 03

  But more trade than the other collectible culture.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Trade?

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  It's more more trade, more, you know.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  Like I'll give you a crocodile.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Buy, sell, trade, yeah.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  What's going on here, Jamie?

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Bare, bare gold bladder for.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  I've never seen this footage.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  That's a shark.

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  So it's stealing a shark that a guy caught?

• 1:07:50Speaker 04

  Wow, wow, yeah.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  That must be American crocodile, right?

• 1:07:58Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  It's Australia, okay, a lot of sharks in Australia, that makes sense.

• 1:08:01Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Wow, so it just stole this guy's fish. Okay.

• 1:08:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  What's been your interest in wildlife?

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  You know, I went to this thing called Safari Club International in Vegas, it's the biggest trophy hunting, you know, convention. And I was filming undercover and I started out, you know, asking, yeah, can you taxidermy this and that? And then I kind of, you know, raised the bar and I said, you know, can you taxidermy a chimp for me? And they're like, yeah, we can do a chimp. So what about an orangutan? Yeah, we could do an orangutan. Anyway, I was going around to different taxidermists in this giant convention, they had elephants and lions and all kinds of stuff. Eventually I asked someone if you could taxidermy a human, you know, and and then suddenly I noticed all these guys starting to follow me, you know.

• 1:09:26Speaker 04

  And there was a big NRA booth and a lot of people with guns and eventually they surrounded me and I was trying to get rid of my, you know, camera gear and throw it in the garbage and stuff. But it was interesting where the line is and what you're allowed to.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Well, it sounds like you're a fucking psychopath, you're asking if you could taxidermy a human. You don't think that's, they probably thought for sure you're a fed or someone.

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  Or a joke.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  Undercover, I mean, obviously.

• 1:09:52Speaker 04

  It was kind of, it was kind of a joke, but they literally started putting eyeballs on me and saying, who the fuck is this guy?

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, wouldn't you?

• 1:10:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  Hey, how do you take a fucking human and turn it into a statue?

• 1:10:04Speaker 04

  People have shrunken heads, I know people with shrunken heads, actually, you know, they collect them, but no, it's pretty macabre. But the fact that they would taxidermy a chimp and an orangutan and a gorilla.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  So who are these people that said they would do that, they're just?

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  Just taxidermists that are in this convention that taxidermied your big game.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  So someone would have to smuggle it back?

• 1:10:27Speaker 04

  A lot of what happens is, and a lot of the, you know, when zoo animals die, sometimes they send it to people that taxidermied. So I know people that get a lot of zoo carcasses and they, you know, taxidermied a chimp, I've seen it, but yeah.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  So when a zoo, a zoo has the option to sell the dead body and then someone turns it into a taxidermy statue?

• 1:10:48Speaker 04

  It it it's gone on for a long time, I nothing against zoos, but that was one way to get really unusual animals. Like I have a friend, I mean, a guy I know that's taxidermied a number of Komodo dragons that came from zoos. Because people don't have Komodo dragons in the private, in the private sector.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  Well, I guess no harm, no foul, if it's already dead.

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  But but I guess I make, the point you're making, I'm just sort of saying, it's interesting how fish, even though certain fish can live over a hundred years, certain rockfish and longevity, that's incredible. We don't think of them in the same way as we think of these higher.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  Right, we don't care at all.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  We don't care at all, yeah.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, we don't seem to, but you know, going fishing is much more common than going hunting.

• 1:11:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, now that I said what I just said, you know, maybe that's a little twisted.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 1:11:33Speaker 04

  About taxidermy a person.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Well, it is twisted, yeah, you ask them.

• 1:11:37Speaker 04

  I think I said that out of context.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  Whoa, you could buy this?

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 05

  It says it's real, I was trying to look and see if it was fake, but it's real.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  How is that legal?

• 1:11:47Speaker 05

  It's a document.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:11:49Speaker 05

  I'm not sure on the screen, I mean, it wasn't hard to find.

• 1:11:51Speaker 04

  There's our friend that.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  It's only three grand?

• 1:11:53Speaker 05

  I mean.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  No, the guy, the guy.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  Riverside.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, the guy that has the taxidermy.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  He's got a funny name for his museum.

• 1:12:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's got the Komodo dragon, but now that I think about it, he had a number of taxidermied gorillas.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Speaker 04

  Now that I think about it.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Now, do they say where they got this from? Does it say how they acquired this body?

• 1:12:11Speaker 05

  That document might, you probably have to pay for the document.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  That's fucking weird, man.

• 1:12:18Speaker 03

  But to your point about, you know, this kind of societal reaction to, you know, wildlife issues. I think, yeah, that's what we're super curious about. What drives people's obsessions around certain things? In this case, this happens to be part sport, part industry, part obsession with, you know, scarcity. But that is all, in this case, leading more to destructive extinction problems, you know? Very few animal, more and more animals are threatened with extinction than ever before, particularly reptiles. Now, one out of every five are threatened with extinction, and it's growing at an accelerated rate, mainly because of things that we explore in our show.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  Pet trade, exotic, you know, smuggling, all of that. But, you know, to get people to care about things that can harm you, you know, believe it or not, you know, we have challenges with, you know, subject matter in the show that, you know, we'll get notes back, and it's, it's, it's, it might be too hardcore for people to see, because it's a brutal, volume-based industry, and there's a lot of spoilers.

• 1:13:26Speaker 04

  We try not to show the bludgeoning and the cruelty of the animals. We try to avoid that with Tiger King and Shyam Crazy in the show, because people turn the channel. So, we try, if we wanted to, we could do that.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  Well, I think we're just, but we're talking more about the point of like, what, how do people respond to something through an interest? And, you know, what turns them on, what turns them off? And what is it about us that has this connection to certain? Why are there turtle people? Why do you like turtles?

• 1:13:53Speaker 04

  Why do you like iguanas? Why do you think people vilify reptiles? You like mammals, you said. Why do you think people aren't so keen on reptiles?

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Well, they're not like us, right? They're a different sort of predatory lizard thing, and I think in our mind, they hearken back to the days where these things were a real problem for human beings. You know, I think, you know, crocodiles and alligators, like, they, they, they enact, like, there's a visceral reaction that people have to them that I think is warranted. It's genetic, probably.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  But you don't think, because we like to talk about the warm, cuddly, you know, charismatic animals, like a panda bear, or a koala bear, or a, you know?

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  Well, that, I think, is anthropomorphism that's done by Disney movies.

• 1:14:35Speaker 03

  Of course it is.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. That, because people in the pioneer days, they didn't think of bears that way.

• 1:14:40Speaker 04

  Right. But I would argue that a bear, you know, a Kodiak bear, a polar bear, a lion, is a lot more concerning than most reptiles.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:52Speaker 04

  You know? So, why we vilify reptiles and have that, you know, feeling about them is, I think, maybe more as to what you said about the anthropomorphism. You can't, a snake has no legs like us. They don't breastfeed their babies like a bear, or like, like a mammal. They have a forked tongue, they have no ears. A snake is weird, they're nothing like us, so maybe we feel so removed from them, and they're scary.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  Even though they're really not that scary.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  Traditional banks are making it harder than ever to secure a small business loan. That's why thousands of business owners trust Cardiff for same-day funding. With over two decades of expertise, business owners keep voting Cardiff America's favorite small business lender. Apply now for up to $500,000 in same-day business funding at cardiff.co/rogan. Again, that's cardiff.co/rogan. Cardiff, borrow better.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It may be hard to believe, but identity theft is the number-one crime in America. Right now, millions of people are dealing with stolen accounts, fraudulent loans, and the exhausting process of proving who they are to banks, creditors, and credit bureaus. LifeLock helps you fight back. They monitor your personal and financial information, alerting you when something looks suspicious, and if identity theft does happen, LifeLock has live, US-based experts who step in and fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Don't fight that battle alone. Get LifeLock identity theft protection.

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  Visit lifelock.com and save up to 30% your first year with promo code JRE. That's promo code JRE, or go to lifelock.com/jre for 30% off. Terms apply.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  We talked to this guy, we were, the Disney thing's so interesting to me, because that, that was actually something I was kind of deep on. This guy, Carl Safina, he's more, is he more of an anthropologist, or is he more of a behavioral?

• 1:16:59Speaker 04

  He's like a animal behaviorist, and sort of more in the groove of like, you know, animal welfare and animal behavior.

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, but this sort of creation of anthropomorphic characters through Disney, I mean, they, they were, you know, if you track this sort of correlation to, you know, entry points into, you know, mainstream culture, you know, it's, you know, it's, they're easy, they're great devices for human emotion, but then there's this more perverse side of, you know, it creates these demands for pets. You know, Zootopia, we would snakes, like, Zootopia had a snake as a central character, and it's going crazy in China, you know?

• 1:17:35Speaker 04

  Well, that's a pop culture thing, like, you know?

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  But that's the, you know, so these well-intentioned things, and these ways which we portray animals.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  Finding Nemo, everyone wanted a clownfish. Harry Potter, Harry Potter, everyone wanted a baby owl. I was in Asia after Harry Potter, and they, I was like, why are there like 50 baby owls in this market? And they were Harry Potter birds. That's a byproduct of pop culture, right? You know, Jurassic Park, everyone wants their little bearded dragon, because they want a miniature dinosaur. So, who knows what's gonna happen after Monsters of God? They're all gonna want snakes again.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  Hopefully, you have some reverence.

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  Did Tiger King open up the door for that, you think? Do people, like, look at that and find it appealing? Like, that's Robin Misha.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  Well, I think, I think.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  I've been looking for my niche.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  I think it gave the opposite of people, like, maybe questioning, questioning.

• 1:18:23Speaker 04

  It's like Deliverance.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  It's a little Deliverance.

• 1:18:25Speaker 04

  Tiger King, the way you're talking.

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  Maybe question when you take a photo with a baby tiger at a roadside zoo. I think that was more, more, you know, because it was so big in pop culture.

• 1:18:35Speaker 04

  I wanna get me a tiger after Tiger King. I wanna get me a little baby tiger.

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  Okay, if you're gonna play into this lane, it's like, look, everyone was shocked that you could buy, you could basically get one for free.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  Well, we've talked about it before on the podcast, but there's more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the wild in the world.

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  In people's private collections.

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think religion also has, is, plays a big role in the vilification of reptiles, particularly snakes, you know, like, you know, something about that, the amoeb complex, and, you know, the snake is bad.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  Serpent.

• 1:19:05Speaker 04

  The serpent, yeah.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  More, I was, we were, more people dream of snakes in this country than any other thing combined, especially negative dreams, which are scary.

• 1:19:14Speaker 04

  Not sharks?

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  No, snakes. There's a, you Googled it.

• 1:19:17Speaker 04

  Like nightmare snake dreams?

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  Google did this sort of like, you know, infographic by country, and, you know, what is the most common dream that people have? And it's usually around snakes, which is remarkable.

• 1:19:27Speaker 04

  I have like someone chasing me, or panic dreams. I never have a nightmare about a snake.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  Well, you never hear of like, a phobia directly attached to sharks. You know, you have afidophobia, which is the fear of snakes, but you don't hear of a sharkophobia.

• 1:19:40Speaker 04

  Or arachnophobia.

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  Right. Spiders. Yeah.

• 1:19:44Speaker 04

  People are freaked out by spiders.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I think that's a genetic thing. I think there's a memory.

• 1:19:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  I think someone either was bit, or knows someone that was bit, and that information got transferred down to their offspring. I'm pretty sure of that. Because hosting Fear Factor, I got to see people with legitimate arachnophobia and legitimate afidophobia, where it is like nothing else. Like, they see it, and they fucking freak out, like it's irrational. It's like everything in their body's saying, you gotta get out of here right now.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  And it's not like everybody else. Everybody else who looked at it was like, ooh, yikes. And then a few people, they have that genetic memory, I think. That's just a theory.

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  I agree. And, and it's cultural.

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  It's cultural.

• 1:20:26Speaker 04

  It's cultural. Like, like, we have a lot of Mexican guys that work with us, and every year, we do a snake course, when the snakes start coming out in the spring, and I show them how to put a rattlesnake in there.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  It's the only staff meeting he ever does.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's the only thing I care about, but I don't want people killing snakes that work for me, and I'm like, hey, you don't have to kill the snake. And they're so used to taking the machete and cutting the snake's head off, and we don't do that. We move the rattlesnake, and we put it somewhere else. We move the gopher snake, the king snake. But they just have this, you know, some of them, as you were just saying, just can't wrap their head around even touching the snake, because they just, it's instilled in them, you know, from their parents, or from whatever, their childhood, that they're scared of snakes. And it's hard to change that.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  But with kids, like, I'm sure with your kids and your daughters, like, I see with little boys, you know, six and three, how their reaction, and they're not fearful, like, and it's partially because of the influence of the work that I'm doing, but, you know, I watch them interact, I see their friends, I see their cousins that are fearful, they have an adverse reaction. I also think it's like... You know, your exposure to it.

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  You know, a lot. And you're right, probably some genetic kind of.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Speaker 04

  Did your parents like animals? Did they?

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  Dogs. We had dogs and cats. Normal stuff.

• 1:21:51Speaker 04

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

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:21:58Speaker 04

  And liked salamanders.

• 1:21:59Speaker 02

  Oh, that explains a lot.

• 1:22:00Speaker 04

  And she would, she would take me to pet stores and actually steal the snakes and salamanders and steal them and put them in her purse.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  And then take me out into the woods and we'd let them go. So that's the kind of mother.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:22:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. She didn't like seeing them in cages.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  But she didn't mind kleptomania. So I got good at stealing for a while.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  It's, it's an odd mom who's like really into snakes. It's an odd mom.

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  No, she just wanted to free them. She didn't like seeing them in cages.

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  Oh, I understand.

• 1:22:24Speaker 04

  In aquariums.

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't grow up around any of that. I didn't know anybody who had a snake as a pet. Not that I can remember.

• 1:22:32Speaker 04

  Really? In New Jersey?

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  Well, I was born in New Jersey, but I grew up all over the place. I lived in San Francisco until I was 11. Then I lived in Florida from 11 to 13. I actually was around a lot of alligators during that time.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  There it is.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were, we were in Gainesville and there was a place called Lake Alice there that had a lot of alligators. You'd see it all the time. When I was there, one lady

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  At a clearly impressionable age.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was around them a lot. But they were, they were weird. Like, they didn't do anything. They just laid on the shore. You could see them and you could be fairly close, even though like they could have clearly chased me and caught me because they can run like 30 miles an hour, right? They could have caught me if they wanted to. They didn't. They weren't really interested in people. Apparently, they had plenty of food. And they were, at that time, they were actually endangered. So alligators, like they were telling people not to feed them marshmallows because people would throw marshmallows on the lake because you could watch the alligator come up and eat the marshmallow. They like marshmallows. And they said, hey, these are not good for alligators. They're super worried about alligator diabetes or something. Whatever. But they were concerned about like giving

• 1:23:38Speaker 04

  Alligator, alligator sugar rush.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were concerned about giving the alligator non nutritious food, which I thought was funny because they were saying that they were endangered.

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  And it's amazing that in the 50s and 60s, they were really endangered. It was hard to find an alligator. And when you think about that now and how.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  It's hard to believe.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's hard to believe and how the Endangered Species Act did help bald eagles, birds of prey.

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  It actually worked.

• 1:24:00Speaker 04

  Because of DDT. But it brought back alligators and now alligators, like you can't even imagine they were endangered. They're like ubiquitous in Florida.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  Oh, they're everywhere. They literally say every pond has the potential to have an alligator.

• 1:24:12Speaker 04

  They're everywhere.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  Everywhere you look. They move around. There's, they're very overpopulated. Yeah.

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  What's interesting about this work in the show that spans so much time, you know, we had, which, you know, you, you shared in this, you know, curiosity, but we had great access to all of these great people in different industry. So you have heads of the zoo, you have, you know, DOJ, DEA, US Fish and Wildlife Service, the collectors, you know, the, the bigger suppliers. And you have all aspects of this sort of industry. And what the show became, you know, as we were working through the edit, is this kind of, you know, this real clear story of unintended consequences, which is the more you enforce,

• 1:24:59Speaker 03

  you have great laws that happen, but it triggers something else and that triggers something else. And you see this kind of time after time after time again. And in some cases, it leads to some positive things like ESA or the Dangerous Species Act, or you have a pop culture event that drives sales of a, you know, animal that's, you know, going to be poached out of extinction. So it, it's a really interesting way of looking at this and analyzing it in a way.

• 1:25:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. What you realize and you'll see, Joe, if you continue watching, that the pathology behind everyone, the law enforcement, they're going after their prize, right? They're going, they're going after, their, their big trophy is the bad guy. The bad guy, you know, the dealer, the smuggler is going after the rarest reptile. The zoos got very competitive with reptile houses in the 70s and 80s because they started realizing they were very popular. Some, one of the most popular things in zoos are reptile houses. They wanted the Komodo dragon and the rare reptiles. So, and the collector, like guys like me that really dig reptiles wanted like the pink, you know, Galapagos landiguan that no one has or the

• 1:26:07Speaker 04

  this, the, the unattainable. So everyone kind of is going after each other. The reptile, the, the, you know, the, the feds are going after the bad guys. And it's a similar pathology. And what you find out in the end of the series is there's a scene where law enforcement has something that you can't believe. And it's a little like doing a film about, you know, cocaine cowboys and the law enforcement has a garage full of heroin and cocaine that they're selling. So it's, it's like, it gets very gray and the psychology is similar

• 1:26:41Speaker 03

  The only difference between the prisoner and the guard are the bars. That's the sort of kind of idea.

• 1:26:45Speaker 04

  And you'll see there's no clear right and wrong. And sometimes the laws don't work. So it's messy. And sometimes there should be laws where there aren't laws, you know, back to the marijuana.

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, python skin in California.

• 1:26:56Speaker 04

  Back to the marijuana analogy, like fucking, it, how twisted is it that someone goes to prison for 40 years of a pot and now you can go to a weed shop every corner in Oklahoma, right? But it's a very messy, complex story that was hard to weave together. And I think it was the most challenging for us, certainly more challenging than Tiger

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  King. The most proud. I think it's really, it's really deep and it's, it's a, it's a good one.

• 1:27:21Speaker 04

  And we lived.

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  And we lived for now.

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  You guys spend a lot of time on these.

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  This, this is one of the things that I found shocking while you were just discussing this. You were saying it was like six years.

• 1:27:31Speaker 04

  More.

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  More. How many, when, so when did you plant the seed?

• 1:27:36Speaker 04

  Well, the seed was planted really in my head when I read this book, The Lizard King in 2008. And I tried to buy the rights from this author, Brian Christie, who wrote this incredible book, The Lizard King in 2008. So that's almost 20 years ago. I didn't start filming until 2014 with Josh Safdie. And that was the beginning. But Tiger King and other things got in the way. So yeah, maybe six years if it was, if you were to condense that time.

• 1:28:00Speaker 03

  But when we saw you a couple of years ago, we were, you know, we were making many projects along this because, you know, you can't do them all, you know, it's a, it's a very unstructured way of working. You know, we don't have a certain amount of shoot days. It's, it's kind of a flow. We like these longitudinal.

• 1:28:16Speaker 04

  We shoot multiple projects at the same time.

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  You know, and we're, we're lucky because a lot of our, our worlds are in certain places. So, you know, it's one stop shopping. In Florida, there's a lot of interesting people, a lot of colorful people that are, you know, are hitting some of these themes that we're exploring in different works. So I think, so we're able to kind of do that. But the duration, the duration's great because like, you know, sometimes constraints are, no, I think it's great in some ways because if you're able to kind of balance other, other work because, you know, holding out for access to a really important person might not happen in the first go around, but you know, a year later or two years later.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  What is the common factor that you guys, is it fucked up people? Like that you guys are looking for when you decide what kind of documentaries you're making?

• 1:29:05Speaker 04

  Not just, like, that would be too superficial. Like, there's too many fucked up people out there, Joe.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  But fucked up people in connection with wildlife is the, the theme of the big three that you've got.

• 1:29:16Speaker 04

  And people that have a story that's somewhere hidden in there. So we cast a wide fucking net. Like, we filmed shark people and taxidermists and the guy that reads the most long-tell macabre monkeys for medical research where we got COVID from. We're filming so many different subcultures of animal people and other people. And then you sort of hone in on something. And so the monkey mom thing became chimp crazy, you know, and we started seeing a story there. So it's not like we just go out and just lock into something and there's a story. We have to kind of find it. And I would say this is not a good recipe for people that want to make documentaries. Like, anyone starting out in life to try to make docs, don't do what we do because it's not a good way to get rich and it takes forever and you may never have a story. And so it's like.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  That's what I'm getting at. It's like.

• 1:30:02Speaker 04

  It's like, we got lucky that Joe Exotic tried to kill Calabaskin while we were filming. We got lucky in a sense that, and we got lucky he didn't kill her. We got lucky in a sense that Tanya kidnapped a chimpanzee. This is not a recipe for success. You know, we, we film, film, film. We do a lot of shit that no one ever sees.

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  Joe Exotic DMs me all the time on Instagram.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  Oh, still? Yeah.

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  He wants to get out.

• 1:30:24Speaker 04

  You know, there's a way, maybe we can get him out, by the way. I'll tell you after the show.

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:30:29Speaker 04

  I'll tell you after the show.

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  Do you want him to get out?

• 1:30:32Speaker 04

  You know, the, the government made a deal with him before the trial. They said, we'll give you, you can do six years or you're going to have a trial. Six years. He's been in jail now for nine years or whatever it's been.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:30:43Speaker 04

  He would be out right now if he made that deal. He thought he was going to get off. And I was like, Joe, I was on the phone with him every day at the time from prison. I said, take the deal. I don't know. I'm not into throwing people in prison and throwing away the key forever.

• 1:30:57Speaker 03

  Tanya's in jail, too, you know.

• 1:30:59Speaker 04

  We're good at that.

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  For perjury. I think she doesn't deserve to be in there for four years, you know, for perjury.

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  Well, she didn't need to kidnap another chimp.

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Speaker 04

  You know, we tried, we tried to help her, but she didn't. She was their own worst enemy. Anyway.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  Well, these people are obsessed.

• 1:31:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  I think also what attracts the crime element is the sentencing is low for wildlife trafficking, wildlife crimes.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  But did they really consider that when they're getting involved? Like, oh, no big deal, only do four years? They really think about it?

• 1:31:26Speaker 03

  They keep going back to it. They keep doing it.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think that's because they're obsessed. They're trying not to get caught. Then I don't think they're looking at it and balancing out the low sentence rate and going, ah, this is a good thing to get involved with.

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  I think that it has a role.

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  Get involved in heroin, it's a pretty stiff crime, you know?

• 1:31:42Speaker 03

  I think it's a risk factor that's considered, and especially in the sense of like, how much risk people look at it.

• 1:31:47Speaker 04

  Jeremy, I think most of them think they're gonna get away with it, or they're smarter than the feds.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  But they have this sort of, you know, worst case thinking about if there was something to happen, it's, you know, eight months at a camp.

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  You know, they're not going with that.

• 1:32:00Speaker 04

  A lot of them go to prison multiple times. While we were filming this show, during the filming, we were shocked that one of the lead guys in our film was under investigation, being indicted. He didn't tell us. And then finally, he said, guys, I'm going to prison. And we don't cover it in the show because it was just too much, but we were like, what? You've been filming with us for two years and you're going to prison now? And then he finally got out of prison, we filmed him more, and he's got an ankle bracelet. And he'd been in prison five years before that, or I don't know, eight years before that. So there's a lot of.

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  What was he going to prison for?

• 1:32:36Speaker 04

  This time for smuggling turtles that were going out to Asia. Three striped mud turtles.

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, we're no longer bringing wildlife in to buy and collect. It's actually coming out of our country into China.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  What, what stuff are we exporting to China?

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  Well, there, a lot of it's, Eric, the one recently that happened.

• 1:32:56Speaker 04

  I just took, I just took, I just took in a confiscation three weeks ago of 300 three-toed box turtles that come out of the central part of the US, Oklahoma, Missouri. And two weeks later, a guy was busted coming into Mexico with turtles, and I took those turtles from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So animals are coming into the country, out of Mexico, you know, different countries, and then we're exporting now, which is new in the last 10 years, a lot of native turtles and reptiles and other wildlife to Southeast Asia and Europe.

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  And how are they getting there?

• 1:33:31Speaker 04

  Mostly, it's mostly air cargo, carry on. This particular confiscation, three weeks ago, they busted the guys with more box turtles in their, in their luggage once they got to Hong Kong in China. Like I said, China, Taiwan.

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  A lot of socks, wrap socks.

• 1:33:51Speaker 04

  Malaysia, Jakarta. The reptile industry is enormous for now, keeping them as exotic pets, enormous. I mean, it's, you know, you know, in Asia, like the bird world, the, the birds are called the cut flowers of the wildlife trade in Asia because like we, we might have a bouquet or a plant in our house, they have a birdcage in Southeast Asia, and there's something like, some insane statistic about how many people have a bird in their house. And when you go to the bird markets in Jakarta, it's just surreal. Or in Thailand, there's, there's one in Bangkok called Chata Chat Market, these huge, you know, animal markets, you know? We talk about where COVID came from, but the scale of these animal markets, you know, bushmeat, wildlife, it's, it's on a scale that's beyond your imagination.

• 1:34:34Speaker 02

  What kind of, what are they selling? This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra-processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist, and trust me, I know. I buy one, The Farmer's Dog. I use it for both my dogs. They love it. They eat it up quick. It smells good to them. It smells good to me. It's human-grade food. The Farmer's Dog makes fresh food for dogs,

• 1:35:15Speaker 02

  and my dogs love it. Their recipes are made with real meat and fresh vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients. They also portion out the meals to your dog's nutritional needs, which helps avoid overfeeding and makes weight management easier. And isn't getting more time with our four-legged best friends something every dog owner wants? The answer to that is yes, obviously. So try The Farmer's Dog today and get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change? Your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill, and pocketing some savings for yourself. All the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Switch today at visible.com.

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  The Visible plan starts at just $25 a month, or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.

• 1:36:53Speaker 04

  They're selling reptiles, they're selling birds.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  For meat?

• 1:36:56Speaker 04

  No, no, these are for pets.

• 1:36:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:36:58Speaker 04

  The birds are ornamental in your house. You, you have a songbird, you have an owl, you have a whatever. You can't believe, there are people that are.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  So they just have like a wildlife mall?

• 1:37:07Speaker 04

  It's effectively like an enormous wildlife mall.

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  An outdoor mall?

• 1:37:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:37:11Speaker 04

  And in that, within that mall, there's also seafood, and then there's the reptiles, and then there's the birds. It's like messy. No wonder maybe COVID came from that.

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  COVID didn't come from that?

• 1:37:21Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it came from a fucking lab.

• 1:37:23Speaker 04

  I think you may be right. I have a friend, bless his heart, he's a good friend of mine, he said it was a zoonotic disease. It didn't come from a lab, but now I'm beginning to think it might have come from a lab.

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  I think a lot of people were influenced to say that it was a natural spillover. Because they didn't want to admit that we were fucking around with gain-of-function research.

• 1:37:40Speaker 04

  I think the evidence now shows that it may have come from.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  Pretty clearly. But also, it seems like if you see these kind of lab, or excuse me, these markets, you would say, what is this right here, Jeremy?

• 1:37:50Speaker 04

  Chata Chat.

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  Kind of market.

• 1:37:51Speaker 04

  Which one is this?

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  Oh, this is one of those markets? Yeah, Jakarta.

• 1:37:54Speaker 04

  Oh, this, I've been to these markets in Jakarta, yeah.

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  And it's just a wildlife market, and so it's all pets? So what is it about Asia that has such a desire for animals like this?

• 1:38:06Speaker 04

  Those are the Harry Potter, those are the Harry Potter elves. That footage is when, yeah.

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  Like, what is? Status, wealth, same, same things in the US that were driving the US, but also more cultural.

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  More common in Asia?

• 1:38:17Speaker 04

  Well, there's, in China alone, there's over a billion people, so there's just more people. And, and the, the, just the scale and the size of Asia and China is much bigger than the US and Europe combined, so they have a bigger market. And the climate's pretty good to keep exotic animals like Florida, so it's just, it's like, you know, on steroids, the, the collectors in Asia.

• 1:38:40Speaker 03

  And why I think that, I think that the industry, the trafficking number is so underreported is, you know, you have this, there's like one person, one person that is responsible for coordinating in the US, one person, she's in Delaware, who's responsible for coordinating with the US Fish and Wildlife to, to, to deal with, you know, these, these placements of confiscated wildlife. If they're able to even detect them. I think with something like 10,000 animals in the last few years were coming through, is it LAX? Basically the torrents, the border, and LAX?

• 1:39:13Speaker 04

  It's, it's very.

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  One little sample market.

• 1:39:16Speaker 04

  It's very understaffed, undermanned, to be able to manage all the wildlife coming in and out of the country. There's not enough.

• 1:39:22Speaker 03

  Even with dogs and detection advancement, they're finding ways to get, get animals out. And then, and then the sad truth is that they've, they've been starved and dehydrated, you know, recovering them is impossible. You know, you've gotten lucky with rewilding animals back into New Jersey and stuff like that through its organization, but, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a harmful reality that it's actually still happening. You know, we thought ours was the past.

• 1:39:45Speaker 04

  The percentage of wildlife that leaves the country, leaves the country, native wildlife to this US, it's like 50% is kind of marine stuff, like coral and invertebrates that are in the ocean. And the rest is mostly reptiles, mostly turtles. Mammals are very small these days, birds are very small, so for whatever reason, you know, turtles, and the US has the most.

• 1:40:09Speaker 04

  Out of any country in the world, we have more species of turtles and tortoises than any country in the world. We have fifty-one species in the US. Mexico's second. You know, India, I think, is maybe third. But so Asia now really wants these turtles. Where you grew up, you know, in New Jersey and other places where we have these really cool turtles, spotted turtles, bog turtles, wood turtles, really beautiful colored eastern box turtles. Once they get to Asia, they're in the many thousands of dollars. The shipment that just went out that we received the confiscation from, it was about half a million dollars, just those turtles.

• 1:40:41Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  Once they get to China. So it's big money and they use mules and the people they got arrested or busted usually aren't the real ones that are, you know, organizing the whole thing. It's like drugs.

• 1:40:52Speaker 02

  Well, that's a good thing about this docu-series is that you guys are exposing this to people because I think most people would be completely unaware.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  No idea.

• 1:41:01Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, no idea. No idea where, you know, zoo, you know, animals in the zoos came from.

• 1:41:07Speaker 02

  Is there an issue with people stealing eagles and trying to import them as pets?

• 1:41:12Speaker 04

  So raptors are really interesting. So that sector of the bird world, I mean, the bird world is so vast. There's the songbird people, there's the parrot people, really high-end, you know, hyacinth macaws that are so expensive. One hyacinth macaw is like, you know, sixty thousand dollars today, or fifty thousand, or whatever it is, forty thousand. But raptors are increasingly popular in the Middle East, you know, golden eagles and all these really far out birds of prey. And in the US, we have really strict laws when it comes to birds of prey and owning them and falconry. Bobby Kennedy is a falconry guy. He loves falconry. But it's gotten more popular again around the world, having, you know, big birds of prey.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  Because it's interesting, you know, I have friends that live in Alaska and in Alaska eagles are really common.

• 1:42:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Like, they're all over the place up there. Like, they don't even think anything of them.

• 1:42:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  You know, especially the guys who go salmon fishing. When they come back from salmon fishing, you literally have like thirty, forty eagles just waiting on the lawn for these boats to arrive because they know that they're gonna throw the carcasses out.

• 1:42:14Speaker 04

  Bald eagles.

• 1:42:15Speaker 02

  Yes, bald eagles, yeah. I would imagine some people would want those as a pet, especially in other countries.

• 1:42:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:42:23Speaker 04

  In the US, only Native Americans can have, like, eagle parts unless you have a permit. Like, it's pretty-

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  Eagle parts?

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  Well, you know, like feathers for their headdresses. Like, Native Americans can still do things with birds of-

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  Also, do you have a stuffed eagle in your house that's illegal?

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  I think it's illegal unless-

• 1:42:38Speaker 02

  Did you ask those guys? They could stuff you an eagle?

• 1:42:41Speaker 04

  Well, the-

• 1:42:42Speaker 02

  That would be interesting. Well, that's where we draw the line.

• 1:42:44Speaker 03

  By the way, I don't know if they actually have them, but we have this footage. I mean, imagine going in the confiscations room at LAX. It's incredible.

• 1:42:52Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:42:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's incredible. You have, like, you know, tiger, you know, just all this rare animal and transformed into so many objects at home. A table, a rug, a pool cues.

• 1:43:03Speaker 02

  I was reading about this, that there was a place in China where people could go to eat endangered species. And they would have an endangered species menu. And they would have, like, a dinner every now and then, you know, like, rarely. But it was by invitation only. And these, like, super weird wealthy people would go out there and they would, you know, eat a lion.

• 1:43:24Speaker 03

  If you're listening, invite us. We'd love to explore.

• 1:43:25Speaker 04

  You know, it's funny, it's fucked up you say that, but it's-

• 1:43:28Speaker 03

  I'd make it back.

• 1:43:29Speaker 04

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

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  Well-

• 1:44:03Speaker 04

  China's a whole, China's a whole different thing.

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  I think it's this visibility paradox thing. You have this, you know, charismatic, you know, symbolic thing. There's very, very few. A lot of protection around them. People want it.

• 1:44:13Speaker 04

  What, you're talking about eagles?

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  Just talking about what people want, what they don't, they can't have. That's the through line in this work.

• 1:44:19Speaker 04

  But eagles-

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  Especially for rare stuff.

• 1:44:21Speaker 04

  Eagles are like American alligators. They've bounced back since DDT and, you know, the book that, what's her name, did in this, in the late sixty, seventies, Silent Spring. That was the book that really changed everything for eagles and birds of prey.

• 1:44:38Speaker 03

  You know, it's America.

• 1:44:39Speaker 04

  Her book, what was her name? Silent Spring, the author. She changed everything because no one listened to her about DDT and pesticides, which were making the eggs of birds of prey not viable. And it really took-

• 1:44:52Speaker 03

  There you go. Rachel Carson.

• 1:44:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, Rachel Carson. It really took a toll. Rachel Carson was an unsung hero. People should know her name. And I forgot it for a minute. But she really is why you have bald eagles, you know, making that-

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  Were they on the verge of extinction?

• 1:45:04Speaker 04

  Because of pesticides we were using, because of DDT was doing this thing to the eggs where pelicans, birds of prey, were disappearing at alarming rates because of spraying of DDT for agriculture, for pesticides.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:45:18Speaker 04

  And then we banned it and eagles and birds of prey came back. Yeah. Peregrine falcons, all of it. Bald eagles, golden eagles. Yeah. So anyway, yeah.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  So it's strange. Heartless raptor.

• 1:45:36Speaker 04

  It's a fishing eagle. There are fishing eagles all over the world that are similar to bald eagles. It's a fishing eagle. That's what it is.

• 1:45:43Speaker 02

  It's just such a cool one.

• 1:45:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  And there's something about watching them swim away with a salmon, their talons.

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:50Speaker 03

  Well, and also photography's gotten so much better over the years, right? You can, I know there's probably that video you're referencing, it's so beautiful.

• 1:45:56Speaker 04

  I mean, where we live, where we live, there was that eagle cam, and there was a sick eagle, bald eagle, and it was taking, it became national-

• 1:46:03Speaker 02

  In California?

• 1:46:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, where we live. And it became national news two weeks ago.

• 1:46:07Speaker 02

  Golden?

• 1:46:08Speaker 04

  A bald, bald eagle.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:46:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And they, if you Google bald eagle California, it's in the town we live in where they took it and they're bringing it back to help. But the amount of money that poured in to help that eagle was unbelievable.

• 1:46:20Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:46:21Speaker 04

  For this little place.

• 1:46:22Speaker 03

  Going back to how people care, it's remarkable.

• 1:46:24Speaker 04

  But people care more about eagles than had that been a turtle or a snake that was rescued.

• 1:46:28Speaker 02

  Well, that's, the eagle's America's bird.

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's America.

• 1:46:31Speaker 04

  It's America's bird.

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  I mean, people have it tattooed on their back.

• 1:46:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  There's something about an eagle. It's just-

• 1:46:35Speaker 03

  It's iconic.

• 1:46:36Speaker 04

  There's a lot of snake tattoos these days, but you're-

• 1:46:38Speaker 02

  I'm sure.

• 1:46:39Speaker 04

  You know, you're right.

• 1:46:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's something about the eagle tattoos different. It's like, America!

• 1:46:42Speaker 03

  But then the grizzly bear.

• 1:46:44Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:45Speaker 03

  You know, such an adverse reaction, so controversial.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  They eat a lot of people.

• 1:46:50Speaker 04

  They've been in the news a lot lately.

• 1:46:54Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a reason why the California state flag has a grizzly bear on it and there's no grizzly bears in California.

• 1:47:01Speaker 03

  We have a friend that's actually trying to bring them back.

• 1:47:03Speaker 02

  Good luck.

• 1:47:04Speaker 04

  We mentioned this to you last time and you were like, why or something?

• 1:47:07Speaker 02

  Let them naturally return. Reintroduction is always a disaster. Reintroduction of wolves in Colorado right now is a fucking disaster.

• 1:47:14Speaker 04

  Well, they're back, they've now migrated into California and there's been some wolf sightings even down in Southern-

• 1:47:19Speaker 02

  Oh, quite a few. A friend of mine filmed one. We showed it on the podcast. He filmed one near Bakersfield.

• 1:47:23Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:47:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. A black wolf that was out in the field near Bakersfield. Yeah, they, they can go incredibly long distances.

• 1:47:30Speaker 04

  Reintroduction works in some places. It's getting better. I have a good friend that's reintroducing jaguars back to northern Argentina. They're doing a pretty good job. But yeah, it's tricky. Like condors, California condors.

• 1:47:41Speaker 02

  But it's a difference in reintroducing animals to where there's agriculture and where there's a bunch of animals that are in pens and then they start eating them.

• 1:47:49Speaker 04

  No, no, don't do that.

• 1:47:50Speaker 02

  That's what Colorado's experiencing now.

• 1:47:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. But I've worked with Ted Turner's group for many years in New Mexico on reintroduction programs. And the guy that did the wolf rewilding of gray wolves is this guy named Mike Phillips, who works for Turner. And yeah, they have a real PR problem, you know, and grizzlies are gonna be a bigger PR problem.

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:09Speaker 04

  To get people to wrap their arms around the idea of bringing grizzlies back to California.

• 1:48:13Speaker 02

  Well, there's certain states where they're overpopulated. And there's a lot of argument they should be relisted. And that people should be able to hunt them again, like they do in Alaska.

• 1:48:21Speaker 04

  But the Native Americans in California do, by and large, want grizzlies back. And they have this new technology that might be able to keep them kind of in certain areas. It hasn't, they haven't figured it out fully yet, but hopefully they keep them in a certain area because, you know, grizzlies migrating into LA like the wolves right now might not be a good idea.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  Well, you already have the mountain lions. There was a great video the other day, I don't know if you guys saw it, of a mountain lion in a guy's backyard in Santa Monica.

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I saw it.

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  Big cat.

• 1:48:50Speaker 04

  I have him in my backyard all the time.

• 1:48:51Speaker 03

  I think that's motivated by displacement from fires, right?

• 1:48:54Speaker 02

  It's also pets. They like to eat people's pets.

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:59Speaker 04

  We have these cameras-

• 1:49:00Speaker 03

  They're not there, though. It's too close.

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  What are you talking about? They eat them all the time.

• 1:49:02Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 1:49:03Speaker 02

  Pets get snatched up all the time.

• 1:49:05Speaker 04

  Jeremy, this woman down the street from me was walking her dog at three in the afternoon. The mountain lion grabbed her dog. She's literally on Ladera, she's walking her dog, a little dog, and the mountain lion just jumped and grabbed her dog. She's looking at the dog, holding a leash, and goes, I better let go of this leash. And she did. And she never saw a dog again.

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  I'm sort of saying this little particular suburban pocket of Santa Monica, it's not very common.

• 1:49:28Speaker 04

  Where I live, they eat people's dogs.

• 1:49:29Speaker 02

  It's not common because you don't see them.

• 1:49:30Speaker 04

  Where I live-

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  They eat dogs.

• 1:49:32Speaker 04

  Where I live, the mountain lions are eating people's dogs from time to time.

• 1:49:35Speaker 02

  They do it all the time. We were talking about Marin County. I think it's, well, it's Bay Area, wherever it is, where they have these depredation tags, where they have to shoot problem mountain lions because they're eating pets. And they find out that that's half their diet. Half their diet is pets.

• 1:49:48Speaker 04

  Well, I see them on my cameras. We have these motion detector cameras and we see them at three in the morning, right in front of my house.

• 1:49:55Speaker 02

  Look at that fucker.

• 1:49:56Speaker 04

  I rarely see them with a naked eye.

• 1:49:58Speaker 02

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:49:59Speaker 04

  Well, you got one, you got one out?

• 1:50:01Speaker 03

  But then one gets hit by a car and they build a bridge across the road, you know? It's kind of amazing.

• 1:50:05Speaker 04

  Well, you got a nice mountain lion in the lobby out there.

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  That was from my friend Adam. He hunted that in Colorado. That was a depredation mountain lion. That mountain lion had picked a ranch and it was killing all the calves. And they actually got to it right after it had, it didn't even kill it, it was eating it while it was alive. And then it ran, they ran it off, the dogs had ran it off the carcass. They had to shoot this calf. It was just torn apart and still suffering alive. And then they, they killed it.

• 1:50:33Speaker 04

  Luckily, where I am, we have a lot of deer. And we find a deer carcass from time to time. That's a mountain lion kill.

• 1:50:39Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. Yeah.

• 1:50:40Speaker 04

  But, you know, back to our show, I want to just say one other thing about sort of the ending, which was really fortuitous. I just want to bring it up, even though you're not there yet, but-

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  Spoiler alert.

• 1:50:52Speaker 04

  Well, it's not really the spoiler alert, but I'll say this. I spent about 20 years working in Madagascar with some rare Madagascan tortoises. And I eventually, I was trying to save this tortoise in Madagascar, and I did a 16 Minutes piece with Leslie Stahl, took her to Madagascar, a New Yorker piece on this tortoise. I failed. Everyone failed. The tortoise functionally went extinct in Madagascar. The poaching was so intense, and the tortoise had a very high-

• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  What is it? What is a Placer tortoise?

• 1:51:19Speaker 04

  Well, it's a reptile that arguably has the most value in the pet trade over almost any other reptile in the world. There may be something close, like a fijial, an iguana, or maybe a Komodo dragon. But it's, you know, some of them can be worth as much as a hundred grand. And people in Madagascar are so poor, especially in the area where this animal comes from. And it only existed in a tiny part of northern Madagascar. That's it.

• 1:51:43Speaker 03

  There it is.

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  So where are they going?

• 1:51:45Speaker 04

  Mostly to Asia. There's a direct flight out of Madagascar to Bangkok. And so-

• 1:51:50Speaker 02

  And they're pets?

• 1:51:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, and some of those photos, I mean-

• 1:51:53Speaker 02

  So is it possible to buy them in Asia and bring them back to Madagascar?

• 1:51:56Speaker 04

  Well, so this is where I'm going. Very hard to do that because of health screening. I took that photo over there, that little guy. I took the, you know, some of these photos I even took, actually. Oh, that's the guy that works for us. Anyway, I've been working with this species of tortoise for almost 20 years, and we were able to get some confiscated Placer tortoises out of China and Taiwan. And we waited patiently for 15 years to try to breed them. And right when we finished this show, and this is a tortoise that's never been bred successfully in the Western world. No zoo institutions have tried to breed them and failed. We were lucky enough to get our first hatchling of this really

• 1:52:38Speaker 04

  endangered tortoise right when we finished the show. And so we filmed it, and it made it into the end of the show. But it's a story about the reptile trade, and this was the story in the end of the show, about a confiscated group of animals that came from the reptile trade, the rarest and most valuable tortoise in the world. And today, we're trying to bring it back to Madagascar, which we're working on, which is happening, as we talked-

• 1:53:00Speaker 02

  And is the problem that if you bring them back to Madagascar, people are gonna go to Madagascar and steal them again, and then use them in the pet trade?

• 1:53:05Speaker 04

  So, yes, to be blunt. And so it's somewhat symbolic. It's somewhat about showing Madagascar that we're not trying to profit and take their natural, you know, heritage and, you know, what they rightfully should have. So part of it is showing that we can go full circle. Confiscate an animal that was in the illegal exotic reptile trade, breed it, and then return it to Madagascar. But the part that no one wants to talk about that's really controversial is, in this particular case, and it's not like one thing fits all, I said this to the folks that are working with this tortoise in Madagascar to try to save it, you know, hey, the only way you're gonna take pressure off of this tortoise,

• 1:53:46Speaker 04

  it's like drugs, is if you either legalize drugs, or, you know, in the case of drugs, or make this tortoise available for people around the world so they can have it. Because it breeds quite easily. Breed them, try to have them in the private sector, in institutions, in zoos. They turn out not to be that difficult to breed, even though no one's ever bred them in the Western world, in Europe or the US.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  Well, it takes a long time to reach maturity, right?

• 1:54:10Speaker 04

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

• 1:54:40Speaker 02

  Wow. That is wild.

• 1:54:42Speaker 03

  So the dremeling is a way to deter poaching, deter value?

• 1:54:48Speaker 04

  Our organization is the group with Durrell that did this dremeling, to try to deface them, like cutting off a rhino horn so poachers wouldn't take them. So we were dremeling those tortoise's shell to basically deface the tortoise so poachers would not take the tortoises. It ultimately didn't work.

• 1:55:05Speaker 02

  So they're just taking them because they're beautiful?

• 1:55:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  And if you fuck up their shells-

• 1:55:09Speaker 04

  They have the most, they have the highest dome shell of any tortoise in relation to the size.

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  So wild looking.

• 1:55:16Speaker 04

  They have an incredible longevity, well over 100 years they live, and they're gold.

• 1:55:21Speaker 02

  And so that dremeling that you did, that's indicate, that's the top of it right there?

• 1:55:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:26Speaker 02

  And that didn't help?

• 1:55:28Speaker 04

  We did that. You can see it over there, the center, that's called the vertebral scoots of the tortoise. And we dremmled them, and we put MG for Madagascar and a number. And we were hoping that defacing the tortoise would make collectors not want to have them. But it didn't work in the end.

• 1:55:43Speaker 02

  Somebody told me, this is a good time to bring this up, that turtle shells, when you look at a turtle shell, it's almost representative of a calendar. And that there is, around the outside edge of the turtle, there's like 28 different little squares, and then in the center, there's 13. So it's basically like a 13-day, a 13-month, 28-day lunar calendar. Yeah, this is it. How weird is that?

• 1:56:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's really interesting.

• 1:56:15Speaker 02

  A lunar calendar on a turtle's back.

• 1:56:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:19Speaker 03

  You know a lot of turtle facts.

• 1:56:20Speaker 04

  I did not know that one, actually. I know-

• 1:56:22Speaker 02

  You didn't know that one?

• 1:56:23Speaker 04

  I know a lot of cultures, like Asia and American Indians, believe that the Earth sits on a turtle.

• 1:56:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's turtles all the way down. It's a Turtle Simpson song.

• 1:56:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I didn't know about that. That's interesting. Wow.

• 1:56:35Speaker 02

  Isn't that weird?

• 1:56:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:56:37Speaker 02

  Like, why? What is that all about? Like, that's very strange that it coinci- it's like, exact to what a lunar calendar is. Very strange.

• 1:56:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. That's super interesting. I mean, turtles have been on planet Earth longer than dinosaurs. They've been here for over 200 million years. So they've been around a long time. So it's been, people have been playing with turtles forever. So maybe they came up with a lot of things that relate to turtles.

• 1:56:59Speaker 02

  But it's odd that it syncs up with a 28-day lunar calendar.

• 1:57:03Speaker 04

  I know sports stadiums are, in the beginning, or things that were shaped like that, like a geodesic dome, came somewhat from the, how turtles are designed. Like, there was some architectural thing that came-

• 1:57:15Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 1:57:16Speaker 04

  From turtles, yeah.

• 1:57:17Speaker 02

  The geodesic, like, the structure of it to keep rigidity?

• 1:57:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:22Speaker 04

  And I know turtles, the first writing, the earliest writing was on the plaster on the bottom of a turtle shell in China, maybe some of the earliest writing-

• 1:57:31Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:57:32Speaker 04

  Going back some, really, I don't know, a couple thousand years. So turtles have been used for all kinds of things, for writing, for medicinal medicine, especially in Asia. It's gone back thousands of years, using turtles for qi and for, you know, vitality and all these kinds of things. If you get sick, you make some turtle soup.

• 1:57:53Speaker 02

  There's a lot of weird stuff with that.

• 1:57:54Speaker 04

  There's a lot of stuff that has to do with turtles.

• 1:57:55Speaker 02

  Rhino horn things for boners, like, hey, guys.

• 1:57:58Speaker 04

  Well, they really, like, they really, they really put some Viagra.

• 1:58:02Speaker 02

  Orchard bone script on the bottom of a turtle shell. Look how cool that looks. Go back to that?

• 1:58:06Speaker 04

  Beautiful, right? Beautiful.

• 1:58:08Speaker 02

  6,200 B.C.

• 1:58:12Speaker 03

  More than 6,000.

• 1:58:12Speaker 02

  6,600 to 6,200 B.C. Can you go to the images again of the writing on it? Look how cool that writing is.

• 1:58:19Speaker 04

  I mean, this one's beautiful on the right. That one's beautiful.

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  That's wild.

• 1:58:23Speaker 04

  But I think it was some of the earliest writing was on turtle shells like this.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  Well, it sounds like it, if it's 6,000 B.C. 6,000 B.C., I mean, that's, that predates ancient Babylonia.

• 1:58:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:35Speaker 02

  Or at least what we know about it.

• 1:58:37Speaker 04

  So turtles have been used in-

• 1:58:38Speaker 02

  Wild.

• 1:58:39Speaker 04

  Native American culture forever. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:41Speaker 03

  Survive a lot of extinction events. That's a oxcapula. And turtle shell.

• 1:58:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:46Speaker 02

  Oxcapula.

• 1:58:48Speaker 04

  I mean, there are turtle farms in China that you cannot believe. They're breeding these turtles, mostly Asian box turtles, Chinese box turtles. And these people are multi, multimillionaires. And they sell one turtle for as much as like $20,000. One turtle. And the wild-caught turtles are more valuable than the farm turtles. But there's turtle farms that are breeding, they're called golden coin turtles. It's a Chinese Asian turtle that can fetch huge amounts of money.

• 1:59:20Speaker 02

  Why is the wild one worth more?

• 1:59:21Speaker 04

  It's like wild rhino horn is worth more, because they think the wild rhino eats things that are medicinal versus just a captive rhino that's eating hay. And it's the stuff they eat that goes into the horn, which makes sense, like your fingernail, it's keratin. So the wild rhino horn's gonna have more good stuff for you. And of course, they'll probably grate some Viagra in it to make you really believe that it gives you, like, an erection. You know, they'll cheat. But no-

• 1:59:45Speaker 02

  Unless it does. I mean, I don't know if it actually works.

• 1:59:47Speaker 04

  Well, they do grate the Viagra in the rhino horn sometimes. But the wild turtle is just eating things and has more qi than the farm turtle. But they have these enormous turtle farms, like, you know, 15-story buildings that are all turtles.

• 2:00:01Speaker 02

  Jamie, I gotta see this. So, wild turtle farms in-

• 2:00:05Speaker 04

  China.

• 2:00:05Speaker 02

  China.

• 2:00:06Speaker 04

  Turtle farms in China.

• 2:00:07Speaker 02

  And this is all just for pets?

• 2:00:09Speaker 04

  No, this is for consumption. This is, you'll pay 20 grand. Now, there's turtles-

• 2:00:13Speaker 02

  Wait a minute, 20 grand for consumption?

• 2:00:15Speaker 04

  For consumption, for like a golden coin turtle, if it's a wild one, like, big money.

• 2:00:19Speaker 02

  They wanna eat it?

• 2:00:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, but then, in China, you can also pay $100,000 for a Yunnan box turtle. A Yunnan box turtle can be $100,000.

• 2:00:27Speaker 02

  So these are these turtle farms?

• 2:00:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I'm not-

• 2:00:30Speaker 02

  And this is all for, like, turtle soup?

• 2:00:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, but these are soft-shelled turtles in this image that you're looking at. I'm talking about things like golden coin turtles, much more valuable turtles for consumption than these soft-shelled turtles.

• 2:00:40Speaker 02

  Why are they worth more? Is it just because it's rare?

• 2:00:45Speaker 04

  Oh, this guy. I know this guy. Garden State Turtle. I know that guy in New Jersey. He's a good guy, Chris Leon. Yeah, that's a golden coin turtle. So, we breed these in where we are, where we work with turtles, and we send these back to China from time to time.

• 2:00:59Speaker 02

  Okay, but why? Explain the, why is it worth $20,000?

• 2:01:01Speaker 04

  For whatever reason, this turtle is called a golden coin turtle. Cora trifaciata is the scientific name. And it is very coveted, and apparently it has certain properties. It can cure cancer and other diseases. And so, this turtle is high on the list for consumption for medicinal reasons.

• 2:01:19Speaker 02

  But, but rare. Allegedly can cure cancer, right? Is there any false beliefs?

• 2:01:24Speaker 04

  But you can see, 20 grand, 40 grand.

• 2:01:27Speaker 02

  20 grand is high as 40 grand for a fucking turtle?

• 2:01:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:31Speaker 02

  And to eat it?

• 2:01:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, but then there's turtles, it can be 100,000 or 200,000.

• 2:01:35Speaker 02

  So, is it just because it's difficult to acquire, that it's like a status thing? That it's worth 20,000 or 40,000 dollars?

• 2:01:42Speaker 04

  Well, they're, they're very rare in the wild now, but they farm them. But they're very endangered. It's a critically endangered turtle. We breed them, you know, at my facility, but you know, there's a lot of people in China. And if you want to save someone's life, you'll pay whatever it takes to save someone's life.

• 2:01:58Speaker 02

  So, when they're buying it for 20,000 dollars, they're buying it to try to save someone's life?

• 2:02:01Speaker 04

  Or someone's sick, or they really want good health and they're wealthy.

• 2:02:05Speaker 02

  Okay, so you could just get it just as like a prophylactic turtle? You eat it for medicine to make sure you don't get sick?

• 2:02:12Speaker 04

  Something like that.

• 2:02:13Speaker 02

  It sounds insane, though, that it's 20,000 dollars for a turtle.

• 2:02:16Speaker 04

  But if you, if you look up Yunnan box turtle, it was thought to be extinct for 50 years, and they rediscovered it. And a Yunnan box turtle today, if you could even get one, would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Another turtle similar to that.

• 2:02:29Speaker 02

  And are they eating those too?

• 2:02:31Speaker 04

  No, that one's so rare, there's so few of them, that one is, is, people buy it as an exotic pet that's really rare.

• 2:02:38Speaker 02

  So, this is kind of a, it's a tricky situation because, and on one hand, if they're extinct in the wild, and these people have them as pets, maybe you can recover them somehow or another.

• 2:02:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that's, that's not, that's an American box turtle. That's not a Yunnan.

• 2:02:50Speaker 02

  Or they're in a zoo, for example, by the way.

• 2:02:52Speaker 04

  So, that's why, that's a turtle that's being shipped to, that's a US turtle from the east coast that's being sold and smuggled to China and other parts of Asia. Because look how beautiful our turtles are in the US.

• 2:03:05Speaker 02

  God, that is a pretty turtle.

• 2:03:06Speaker 04

  Oh, you do have a photo of a Yunnan box turtle. It's just not the one there. That bland thing is a Yunnan box turtle.

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

  The one above it?

• 2:03:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, the one that's kind of gray.

• 2:03:13Speaker 02

  Right there?

• 2:03:13Speaker 04

  No, no, that's a three-toed box turtle. No, that one.

• 2:03:16Speaker 02

  That one?

• 2:03:16Speaker 04

  That one. That one can be worth, that can be worth 200,000 dollars.

• 2:03:20Speaker 02

  Jamie, get him right. What?

• 2:03:21Speaker 04

  That turtle, that turtle was thought to be extinct for over half a century.

• 2:03:24Speaker 02

  That's a boring ass turtle. That other one, that's way cooler. You're turning him on now.

• 2:03:28Speaker 04

  Well, don't get me down the turtle rabbit hole.

• 2:03:31Speaker 02

  But that one where your cursor was just over, the one that was, yeah, that guy. No, the one to the left. Yeah, the other one. To the right of it, right. That one, yeah. That one's cool as shit.

• 2:03:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a, that's a male eastern box turtle. They always have red eyes.

• 2:03:41Speaker 02

  God, it's so beautiful.

• 2:03:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's beautiful.

• 2:03:43Speaker 02

  But solutions to the scarcity problem.

• 2:03:45Speaker 04

  That's a male eastern box turtle.

• 2:03:47Speaker 02

  You know, pet, pet trade can, you know, commercializing aspects of it can reduce issues.

• 2:03:52Speaker 04

  What's important about this conversation, actually, is people think of ivory, rhino horn, you know, whales, and they have no idea that a turtle, pound for pound, could be more valuable than a rhino horn possibly. You know, a turtle.

• 2:04:06Speaker 02

  I had no idea.

• 2:04:06Speaker 04

  No, nobody knows this, but it's crazy what the money involved in these, back to the, you know, confiscations we're getting, and the trade in turtles going out of this country is in the millions and millions and millions and millions. And there are people in China and other parts of Asia that are getting very rich in the turtle trade. And we always think, hear about pangolin scales, rhino horn, you know, ivory. And those things are important, but the turtle trade is really massive, and the reptile trade is massive. And there's a lot of money in it, and they're easy to transport because a turtle doesn't eat, need to eat or drink. Just wrap them in socks, put them in a box, shove them all in there, put them in diapers, tape them up, ship them.

• 2:04:45Speaker 02

  They don't even need much air.

• 2:04:47Speaker 04

  They need a little air, but they have a very low blood pressure, not like, we have a higher blood pressure than reptiles. And they can live without water or food, as you know, for a very long time. So, they're, you know, like wildlife, nature with handles. You can just take them.

• 2:05:01Speaker 02

  Transport them anywhere. And if they're really worth 20,000 dollars to 40,000 dollars. You're putting that in your bag. Yeah.

• 2:05:07Speaker 04

  And they really are. They really are worth that.

• 2:05:09Speaker 02

  That is crazy. I would have never guessed. And I would never guess that it's for consumption. That's, that's even more weird.

• 2:05:14Speaker 04

  Well, no, the turtles that are leaving this country, going to China, are for exotic, for exotic pets.

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  But the ones that they're eating.

• 2:05:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, the ones that are.

• 2:05:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. That, that it's worth 20,000 dollars. That's insane.

• 2:05:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, at least.

• 2:05:27Speaker 02

  Is there a market for snake meat?

• 2:05:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, so in, if you've been to Taiwan or China, there's these snake bars where you can literally have a snake bleed out while it's alive, a cobra, and put it in your drink. There's snakes, there's a snake.

• 2:05:42Speaker 02

  You want to talk about diarrhea? What kind of diarrhea you get from snake blood?

• 2:05:46Speaker 04

  I was, many years ago.

• 2:05:47Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 2:05:48Speaker 04

  I was in Myanmar, Burma, at a snake place, and they were just loading snakes up in these trucks, like, you know, big trucks. Just stacking snakes, and they were heading into China. So, the snake meat, the snake.

• 2:06:01Speaker 02

  Snake meat is big in China.

• 2:06:02Speaker 04

  You know, look, tiger penis, tiger this, tiger bones, tiger, tiger parts.

• 2:06:09Speaker 02

  Back it up. Tiger penis?

• 2:06:10Speaker 04

  Tiger penis.

• 2:06:12Speaker 02

  Tiger penis is a big delicacy over there?

• 2:06:14Speaker 04

  I, I think they're, you know, they're more creative than we are. They eat a lot of stuff.

• 2:06:19Speaker 02

  That's a fact, but the tiger penis thing I was not aware of. That's a delicacy?

• 2:06:24Speaker 04

  I, I don't know what that does for you. Maybe that's another Viagra kind of thing, but all, you know, there's tiger farms, and they part them out, and they sell them to China.

• 2:06:36Speaker 02

  So, there's tiger farms that are just for consumption?

• 2:06:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, tiger bone wine, tiger this, tiger that.

• 2:06:42Speaker 02

  Tiger bone wine? Sounds like it's part of that, like, you know.

• 2:06:46Speaker 04

  No, but tigers.

• 2:06:47Speaker 02

  What, Jamie? It's like a rhino horn type deal, I think. I think that's giving them. Right. It's believed to increase virility and enhance male sexual performance. Dun, dun, dun. Tiger phallus soup. Ooh, one tiger penis.

• 2:07:00Speaker 04

  But a turtle is worth more than a tiger, guys.

• 2:07:03Speaker 02

  That's crazy. And, but I didn't know that there was a market for tiger meat.

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  And is it the, all the meat of the tiger, or just dicks? Just so. Chop away the.

• 2:07:13Speaker 04

  Joe, I've been to the turtle farms. I've been to the snake bars. I haven't gotten into the tiger.

• 2:07:20Speaker 02

  Tiger penis, the future of Chinese medicine. Hey, this guy's doing a workshop. We should go to this workshop, yeah. What is, what is this guy teaching? A couple of years ago. Yeah, he's on the run right now.

• 2:07:34Speaker 04

  Don't get, don't get me started to talk about animal penises. My favorite movie as a kid was a movie called Birds Do It, Bees Do It. I don't even know if it still exists. But all it was, was animals having sex, from a praying mantis, like, eating the head off of the male, to a rhino. And it was a great movie. Just sex.

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  I did not know that there was a market for the meat. What is that? Tiger dick? Yep. Nice. Not what I would have thought it would look like. Crazy looking.

• 2:07:58Speaker 04

  That looks like a nudibranch, a sea slope.

• 2:08:00Speaker 02

  It looks like a piece of sushi.

• 2:08:03Speaker 04

  No, it looks like a piece of sushi. It looks like what I had for dinner last night.

• 2:08:07Speaker 02

  Looks like something you get at sushi by scratch. So, when they're having these tiger farms, or they're farming the meat, like, what, how are they cooking tiger meat? Like, what does that go into? This episode is brought to you by Quince. Putting together a good wardrobe isn't actually that hard. You just need the right pieces, and that's where Quince comes in. Quince is all about creating quality, versatile clothing with premium materials, like 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters from just 60 dollars, and organic cotton tees that are soft and breathable. Personally, I got a bunch of their stuff, and I love it. I really love the fleece pullover hoodie and the flowknit breeze performance tees. They're, they have really simple, smooth designs,

• 2:08:52Speaker 02

  perfect for recording sessions or my workouts. I, I like wearing them on stage. It's just great quality clothing, and it's cool how Quince still gives you luxury quality, but without the insane markup. Find your new fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to quince.com/rogan. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com/rogan. This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different, and it's worth paying attention to.

• 2:09:36Speaker 02

  In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee-free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee-free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate, crazy high. It's nine times the national average. They're calling it the most rewarding way to bank. Go to chime.com/rogan. Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners.

• 2:10:20Speaker 02

  Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details.

• 2:10:27Speaker 04

  Listen, I'm not-

• 2:10:28Speaker 02

  Is that really common over there?

• 2:10:30Speaker 04

  Even though I did Tiger King, I'm not an expert on tigers. I do know a little bit more about reptiles, but I have a friend that did a movie called, I think it's called, what's it called? Carl Amman did a movie about the tiger industry in Vietnam and farm, in Cambodia and farming tigers. And I think it's called, oh god, I can't remember. But anyway, there's a whole tiger industry and people breeding tigers in parts of Asia for tiger parts.

• 2:10:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's still illegal, but they definitely still do it.

• 2:11:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:00Speaker 05

  It's not like-

• 2:11:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:11:01Speaker 02

  Interesting. Consumption tiger meat is highly illegal, though an illicit black market persists, primarily fueled by commercial tiger farms. Despite strict domestic bans, thousands of tigers are bred in captivity across the country, creating a complex web of illegal luxury, luxury consumption is a crazy word. That's a crazy phrase, luxury consumption of tiger meat. Traditional beliefs and international conservation concerns.

• 2:11:27Speaker 04

  Well, it's what you just said earlier that started this conversation, that people go to restaurants and eat exotic animals.

• 2:11:34Speaker 05

  And bear gallbladder.

• 2:11:36Speaker 04

  Bear gallbladder, but another thing, that way, back to Monsters of God. Look up Chinese giant salamander farms. Those are unbelievable. That's a salamander this big that can eat, you know, like a rat or a rabbit. It's a salamander that they eat and farm in China.

• 2:11:53Speaker 02

  I've seen that online, I've seen them cook it in TikTok videos.

• 2:11:57Speaker 04

  And that's a really rare animal. That, those, those guys are really rare, so-

• 2:12:02Speaker 02

  Oh, really? And that, yet they're still cooking them and eating them?

• 2:12:04Speaker 04

  There's two types of giant salamanders. There's a Japanese giant salamander and a Chinese one. The Chinese one is massive.

• 2:12:11Speaker 02

  Can I see that?

• 2:12:11Speaker 04

  Is massive, and they're just-

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  What, Jamie?

• 2:12:14Speaker 05

  It said, the one I stumbled down, it says it's AI, so I was-

• 2:12:16Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:12:17Speaker 04

  It's an, it's an incredible animal, but they farm a lot of things that you would never think of. Yeah, turtles, salamanders.

• 2:12:24Speaker 02

  I just, the luxury consumption market, just seeing that phrase, it's like, what a weird culture. Where you have luxury consumption of highly illegal endangered species.

• 2:12:37Speaker 02

  And it's, that, well, that was what a friend of mine who had been to China said that was what the whole rhino horn thing was. It wasn't even as much as they believed that it would do it, it was just that this guy had rhino horn.

• 2:12:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, status, status symbol.

• 2:12:50Speaker 02

  Very wealthy people.

• 2:12:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:12:52Speaker 02

  Guy's got a ri, you want some rhino horn tea? Let's have a seat, like gentlemen.

• 2:12:56Speaker 04

  Come to my wine cellar, and in it, I got some rhino horn, I got a couple turtles that are worth a couple-

• 2:13:01Speaker 05

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

• 2:13:04Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, that, an animal doesn't die, it's just wine. Yeah, you don't have tiger dick in your wine. What is the tiger bone wine? What is that about?

• 2:13:12Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 2:13:13Speaker 02

  Is it wine they soak in bones of tigers?

• 2:13:16Speaker 05

  I'm sure, it's a barrel.

• 2:13:17Speaker 02

  Is that what it is?

• 2:13:18Speaker 04

  I mean, they have sake with vipers in them. There's a snake in Japan called a habu, and I remember getting sake and this really incredible snake was in my sake. But, you know, like, look, we're hypocrites in this country. We eat tuna and they're endangered, and in Asia, they eat other things that are endangered.

• 2:13:36Speaker 02

  Are they endangered, tuna?

• 2:13:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, tuna, I'm certain-

• 2:13:37Speaker 02

  Endangered?

• 2:13:38Speaker 04

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

• 2:13:42Speaker 02

  They certainly don't, not the same numbers that they used to be at the turn of the century.

• 2:13:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So I think it's, it's easy to point fingers at other parts of the world when we've done a lot of things here. You know, we had passenger pigeons that, you know, made the skies dark and we shot every one of them. We had Carolina parakeet, we almost got rid of our condors and bison. We've done a lot of damage, but there's a lot of damage still-

• 2:14:03Speaker 02

  Not you and me. We shouldn't say we, people.

• 2:14:06Speaker 04

  People.

• 2:14:06Speaker 02

  People that lived here, it's not us.

• 2:14:08Speaker 04

  Well, why is our show called Monsters of God? We're the monsters, not the reptiles. We did a lot of damage, in, in the past, I'm just saying. Some of us, yeah.

• 2:14:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's a very small percentage of people that are out there eating turtles.

• 2:14:20Speaker 04

  Well, you're a good guy, and I know that, actually. Somehow, you, you didn't have the, maybe the mother I had, but you must have had something good.

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  What with Aunt My Love of Animals?

• 2:14:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, you got, you got a good moral compass. I've watched you, you, you, when you, you know what's right and wrong.

• 2:14:34Speaker 02

  Well, certainly, eating tiger dick.

• 2:14:38Speaker 02

  I think there's better ways to go about your life.

• 2:14:40Speaker 05

  But the recovery stuff is real. You know, there's a lot of cool stuff happening with species recovery, and in this case, the Plowshare tortoise is on its way back. I mean, you have to kind of still protect it for a while, that's expensive, that's expensive. You know, anti-poaching and security, it's a lot of work.

• 2:14:58Speaker 02

  I agree that it's important, but I, I am also fascinated by our desire to sort of manage nature. Because 90 whatever percent of any animal that's ever been alive, ever is done. They're all extinct, everything goes extinct.

• 2:15:10Speaker 04

  And a lot of our good intentions managing nature doesn't work oftentimes.

• 2:15:14Speaker 02

  Oh, no, you do a terrible job.

• 2:15:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:15:18Speaker 02

  Well, especially when we bring in animal, we were talking about this yesterday with Hawaii. They brought in mongooses to eat the rats, but mongooses are diurnal, rats are nocturnal. They never saw each other.

• 2:15:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, Hawaii, it's funny you say Hawaii, because Hawaii is kind of the poster child of all the states in the country of extinction. Second is California, but Hawaii really fucked up, Hawaii with cats. Mongoses were more in the Caribbean, but also Hawaii. And mongooses is why, back to the Jamaican iguana. The Jamaican iguana was extinct, we thought it was extinct because of mongooses. We've just recently found a small population, but it's a very rare iguana.

• 2:15:58Speaker 05

  Reading a very similar thing happened with the salamanders in China. They were not originally thought of as anything special until the mid 20th century, when famine forced people to find new stuff to eat, they started eating them and liked it. So they made a lot of places to do that.

• 2:16:14Speaker 02

  Oh, and that's what led them to almost get wiped out?

• 2:16:17Speaker 05

  And back into the wild, because there were too many of them, which created a new problem, it says.

• 2:16:22Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:16:22Speaker 05

  They created a new species. So now you have hybrid salamanders, which is also like what we have that here in Austin.

• 2:16:28Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:16:29Speaker 05

  It's the same story over and over again.

• 2:16:31Speaker 02

  What do these fuckers look like?

• 2:16:32Speaker 04

  Look at, look at that thing.

• 2:16:33Speaker 02

  Whoa! Can I send photos of a giant salamander?

• 2:16:37Speaker 04

  They are so massive, they're so massive.

• 2:16:39Speaker 02

  What is the size of that thing? There's a bunch of videos of guys cooking them in walks outdoors.

• 2:16:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:16:45Speaker 02

  And so is that another thing where it's like one of those exotic things that you're not supposed to have, and that's why they're cooking it? Because I mean, it looks, there's a funny one where a dude's singing, he's like rapping over it, the guy's cooking it, about a guy cooking a dragon, is how you cook a dragon?

• 2:17:01Speaker 04

  Ah, yeah. Yeah, they're pretty impressive.

• 2:17:05Speaker 02

  But it is a weird desire that people have to eat something like incredibly exotic and rare.

• 2:17:13Speaker 02

  Whoa, look at that sucker.

• 2:17:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a real one, yeah.

• 2:17:15Speaker 02

  Giant salamander cooked eight ways.

• 2:17:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:17:18Speaker 02

  In the, I don't know what that word is, jaimen, jaimen seafood, China?

• 2:17:23Speaker 04

  You know, that was one creature we wanted to film, and I never got to film for Monsters of God, because that also is a monster of God.

• 2:17:31Speaker 02

  So these guys are taking them, they're alive, and they're gonna bring them over and kill them and cook them. So this is an endangered animal?

• 2:17:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:17:38Speaker 02

  That this guy's killing and cooking?

• 2:17:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it is.

• 2:17:40Speaker 02

  Wow, that's crazy.

• 2:17:42Speaker 04

  But they breed them-

• 2:17:43Speaker 05

  But they sort of know it, it's not by necessity.

• 2:17:45Speaker 02

  They know it's endangered, and he's still boiling it up. So it's a, this, the fact that this luxury item, that you get to eat this luxury item. What does it look like? Let's see what it looks like at the end. Kind of crazy, a lot of meat.

• 2:17:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:01Speaker 02

  Looks delicious.

• 2:18:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:02Speaker 02

  Would you eat it if you were there, or would you feel bad?

• 2:18:04Speaker 04

  I, I don't, I wouldn't eat it, but I've been-

• 2:18:07Speaker 02

  It's already there, though, it's already dead.

• 2:18:08Speaker 04

  I've been in Southeast Asia with friends that ate dog, you know, and I just couldn't eat it, but I'm not very adventuresome.

• 2:18:15Speaker 02

  I can't, I, I would only have, the only way I'd eat a dog is if it tried to bite one of my kids.

• 2:18:21Speaker 02

  You know, but if it's like, do, dogs is different.

• 2:18:25Speaker 04

  But you know, we eat cattle, and in India, they don't eat cows, and then other places eat horses, and then they eat dogs.

• 2:18:30Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:18:31Speaker 04

  We have our own-

• 2:18:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:18:32Speaker 04

  You know, sort of cultural norms about certain animals that we just can't wrap our head around eating.

• 2:18:37Speaker 05

  And ways we justify.

• 2:18:38Speaker 04

  But I've seen dogs being killed in Sulawesi by, in huge numbers in Indonesia, just the way they kill them, and then they take these blowtorches and burn the hair off of them. And people buy them, just like you're in a regular grocery store.

• 2:18:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:51Speaker 04

  The way they, you know, and it's just, what's normal in one culture, those are snapping turtles, American snapping turtles. What's normal in one culture-

• 2:18:59Speaker 02

  So have these been imported into Asia?

• 2:19:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, they're big, and we still eat those, by the way, in New Orleans, in the Southeast, we eat snapping turtles.

• 2:19:06Speaker 05

  It's also been-

• 2:19:07Speaker 04

  We eat, we eat them in gumbo, but in Asia, they really love our American turtles.

• 2:19:12Speaker 02

  And snapping turtles are not endangered in America?

• 2:19:15Speaker 04

  No, but alligator snapping turtles are.

• 2:19:17Speaker 02

  Oh, those things are crazy looking.

• 2:19:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, which is a-

• 2:19:19Speaker 05

  They have this, um-

• 2:19:20Speaker 04

  Which you have in Texas, by the way.

• 2:19:22Speaker 05

  It's incre, it's a-

• 2:19:22Speaker 02

  They have what?

• 2:19:23Speaker 05

  That's, this little, it's a bait.

• 2:19:25Speaker 04

  They're an ambush predator, they have a little, a appendage on their tongue, the fish is attracted to them.

• 2:19:30Speaker 05

  The video of them feeding is, is incredible.

• 2:19:32Speaker 02

  They got alligators, they're serving up alligators too?

• 2:19:35Speaker 04

  Crocodiles, crocodiles, yeah, crocs.

• 2:19:37Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:19:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, wild.

• 2:19:39Speaker 02

  Imagine just hanging out there, watch his buddies get butchered?

• 2:19:41Speaker 04

  You're good at finding gruesome stuff over there.

• 2:19:44Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a lot out there.

• 2:19:45Speaker 04

  You're, you're gonna really gross out, gross out a lot of people.

• 2:19:49Speaker 02

  So, you know, you say you guys have a bunch of projects always kind of in the works. Like, how do you go about choosing? You just like find these very bizarre people and these very bizarre niche groups and?

• 2:20:02Speaker 04

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

• 2:20:44Speaker 04

  but I did that to keep them relevant, and I had a crazy family, a gay father and a crazy mother who was into animals. And so, you know, everyone has a crazy family. But we did a story that we're working on about New York, and we're also doing some other animal stories. So not everything gets, sees the light of day.

• 2:21:03Speaker 02

  Right, but these last three big ones that you guys did are all about people and their bizarre relationship with strange animals.

• 2:21:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:21:12Speaker 02

  What else, what's next?

• 2:21:15Speaker 04

  I mean, we're doing a really interesting project right now that should come out next year that I think you'll like, Joe. I have to say, there are big carnivores in it again, and some really far out people that you know, and you may have known personally. I don't think I can tell you who they are, but they were very famous.

• 2:21:35Speaker 03

  All right.

• 2:21:36Speaker 04

  Anyway, but we're doing a project about that, and we're doing-

• 2:21:39Speaker 02

  What a tease you are.

• 2:21:40Speaker 03

  I know, that was a-

• 2:21:41Speaker 04

  No, I-

• 2:21:42Speaker 03

  It's feeding into the tease, too.

• 2:21:43Speaker 04

  I had too much coffee, sorry.

• 2:21:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:46Speaker 04

  And then, we're really interested in a few other topics that people don't really talk about. We always talk about the charismatic megafauna, and we're interested in some of the groups of animals that we don't even think about.

• 2:21:57Speaker 03

  It's also, I mean, this time we live in, in media, you know, there's so much stuff that gets made that no one sees, and it's a shame, especially, you know, some of this independent work, especially some of this documentary work, it takes many, many, many years, and many people are only really able to show it to the people that know about the issues, and nothing happens, especially if there's an impact aspect to it.

• 2:22:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:22:21Speaker 03

  So, I think our formula's great. It happens to be, you know, these subcultures that are, have a higher propensity of finding crazy people, or people with far out beliefs, more than anything, it's more beliefs that are more interesting, that make us curious. So, I think, I think that's the sort of mixture of conservation storytelling, plus far out beliefs, you know, in a niche that are able to zoom out and talk about themes of extinction, or attachment, or ego, or crime, you know?

• 2:22:51Speaker 02

  Maybe there's something to the overfishing thing to do, because-

• 2:22:54Speaker 04

  There's been a lot done on it.

• 2:22:55Speaker 02

  It's a giant issue.

• 2:22:56Speaker 04

  It's a huge issue, there's been a lot done on it, but I think there hasn't been a doc on overfishing-

• 2:23:04Speaker 03

  I like "Seespiracy."

• 2:23:05Speaker 04

  The problem with, yeah, but the problem with a lot of those traditional documentaries, they tend to preach to-

• 2:23:11Speaker 03

  The town is boring.

• 2:23:12Speaker 04

  Well, they tend to preach to the converted, not the unconverted, and you want to reach a bigger audience by somehow telling that story about overfishing in a way where you can get more people seeing it that don't know the issue. And the other thing I would just say, yeah, overfishing's a big deal. Invertebrates, insects, butterflies, and what's happening with insects is a big deal. We're losing a lot of really weird insects, and they haven't even been described yet. Marine fish, and even tropical fish is really interesting to us. Where do all the saltwater tropical fish come from? How do you get them? They dynamite the reefs in the Philippines, they, you know, they don't breed easily, saltwater tropical fish. Freshwater ones typically do. There's a lot of different groups of animals that we don't really think about and talk

• 2:23:53Speaker 04

  about, that we kind of take for granted, and we think of them as disposable, you know, we'll just put more tropical fish in our aquarium in a Vegas hotel.

• 2:24:01Speaker 03

  And imagining the extinction businesses are going to solve our problems. I think that's also interesting to us.

• 2:24:07Speaker 04

  And there's just not a consciousness for smaller vertebrates and invertebrates. But I would just say one other thing that I think we do, that you probably are aware of, that, you know, people think you have to be in a city to get the, you know, the weird shit going on, New York City, LA, you know, whatever, big cities. And what I've found is oftentimes, it's the places that you least expect it, you know, some weird, you know, suburban landscape where you start turning over, turning over the rocks, and you find and see that there's weirdness happening everywhere. And that is a theme in our stories. It's not gravitating to the big cities to find it, it's places where, you know, the guy next door to you, next door where you live, has a garage full of hot snakes, and

• 2:24:50Speaker 04

  the cobra escapes one day, and it's in your yard, or whatever the fuck the story is, but it often is in places that you wouldn't expect it to be.

• 2:24:57Speaker 03

  Your friend's a carport.

• 2:24:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know.

• 2:24:59Speaker 02

  Well, listen, guys, thank you again for being here, I really appreciate it, and thanks for all the work you guys put in, you've really entertained the shit out of me over the years.

• 2:25:09Speaker 03

  Good.

• 2:25:10Speaker 02

  And disturbed me, as well. So, it's available, Monsters of God, on, when does it come out?

• 2:25:15Speaker 04

  Tomorrow.

• 2:25:16Speaker 02

  Tomorrow, so, when this comes out?

• 2:25:17Speaker 04

  August 6th.

• 2:25:18Speaker 02

  August 6th. All right. Beautiful.

• 2:25:21Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:25:22Speaker 02

  Thank you for being here, thank you. Bye, boys.