Transcript of #2536 - Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day! Good, bro.

Gentlemen, good to see you again. You're back in the world of crazy people and animals. I watched episode 1 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 docuseries, 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.

Yeah.

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

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

What happened to it?

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

Is that what you did?

I did not let it go, but I—

What did you do?

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

That's weird.

I know.

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

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

Is there an extra level of responsibility when you're giving away monsters? You know what I mean? Like, if you have a chihuahua and you say— 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 know, you have a fucking python. You're giving away a python.

You got to worry about your chihuahua because your— the pythons in the Everglades are going to eat your chihuahua when it gets away.

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

I'm kidding.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, episode 1 is kind of setting the table. It gets better, Joe. It gets more off the, you know, charts when you watch 2 and 3 and 4, but, um, and 5. Um, yeah, it all started, um, 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, uh, 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 6, 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.

You got bit by a rattlesnake?

Yeah, but that's another story.

More times than one?

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

What happened?

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

Where'd you get bit?

On my foot.

Did you experience necrosis? Necrosis, rather?

You know, so normally you would get necrosis where you would—

Dead tissue.

Your finger would rot.

And then this—

the guy that, you know, the doctor that I went to at a hospital, you know, pull up the microphone. 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 going to be okay. But this type of rattlesnake I got bit by, there's the most venomous rattlesnake in the country is called a tiger rattlesnake, but it's not the most dangerous. Most dangerous is probably a 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. It was more like a cobra where I was starting to stop breathing and I felt like someone had put sandbags on my chest an hour into it. 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.

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

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 felt like I was going to stop breathing, but weirdly not that painful. But like you, 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 got 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. Oh God.

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

River sandals, yeah. Okay, all right. Yeah, 'cause I got bit, most people get bit fucking around with a rattlesnake. I wasn't.

What is this, Jeremy? They used all of the antivenom at the hospital and had to go get more from another hospital. Ran out of antivenom after using a whopping 36 vials. Holy fuck, man. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Yikes. They're fucking scary, man. I've had dogs bit. I had this one dog, he got bit twice. Yeah. 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.

Yeah.

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

How fast the response?

Not bad. Yeah, not bad. It was funny because he got bit once. He was, 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, 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 in, 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 'cause 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 then all of a sudden, brrr, his face starts swelling up. I'm like, "Ah, fuck." And I bring him back to the vet, then he had to get the anti-venom.

But a good-sized dog.

Yeah, he was about a 90-pound dog.

Yeah, yeah. And that was a Western Diamondback rattlesnake, I gather.

California, I don't know.

Oh, it was in California?

It was in California. Oh, so it was— It wasn't out here.

Oh, it was what bit me then. Probably Southern Pacific rattlesnake. Yeah, okay.

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

That's the same snake that bit me.

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 going to have to come back this way when we go back up the hill. So I'm throwing rocks at it, trying to get it to run away.

Yeah, now I've handled a lot of 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. Where were you?

Were you just walking?

I was hiking in the mountains north of LA just a bit, and I was actually looking for snakes because I'm into snakes. And I didn't see the snake, the snake 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.

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

Yeah, it takes one to know one.

Yeah.

Be careful.

Next point of focus.

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

No, no, listen, I was, you know, a closeted reptile guy living in New York City, hanging out with, you know, Madonna, cool people in the '80s and '90s. 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 going to do with my money? He interviewed me one time for Andy Warhol TV, and I said, I'm going to buy reptiles. I actually said I'm going to buy tortoises. I 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 had 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 filming people like, you know, kind of notable people, Christopher Walken and, you know, Slash and, 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 for 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 Supreme with Timothée Chalamet that was up for an Oscar. Little did I know that I was working with these kids that were going to be these new filmmakers, and we were making these films. And then we made a short film about reptiles that's crazy called Trophy Hunter. It's very short. And we did that together. And then I said to them, hey, man, you guys read this new book called 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 book, The Lizard King. And he said to me, how are you gonna do that doc without getting killed, Eric? And you know, he'd won an Oscar for The COVID and I thought, you know, I'm gonna get these good guys and do a doc about reptiles. So anyway, we started in 2000.

Why did you think you were gonna get killed?

He read The Lizard King and he said, you know, you're gonna do a story about this guy that went to prison for 100 years and this other guy that, you know, is the Pablo Escobar of reptiles. And he just said, it's a dark world.

I don't know how you're gonna do this without getting killed.

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

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.

But for background, you know, 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 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 there's a convergence of all of it. You know, wildlife trafficking also involves drugs. And trafficking of guns. At times. There's a lot of mix— mixture of it.

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

Of course.

But, you know, in the kind of pre, you know, customs TSA days, when it was as intense as it is now, it was very easy to, you know, carry animals and carry wildlife.

Yeah, that was something I didn't even think about until I was watching. I was like, oh God, I remember those days where they didn't check your bags and they didn't even check your ID.

Yeah.

You just had a ticket.

Yeah.

And you just get on the plane. So you just get on the plane with lizards.

Yeah. Now, most cases— Yeah. Strapped to your body, right?

Sure.

The thing 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 1, 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 story, The Lizard King, but many much, you know, in our series, it's a handful of guys, mainly guys, you know, start a multibillion-dollar industry. And you see this kind of innovation happen over the course of the series, as, you know, as the years go on. Yeah.

But when we say multibillion, I have to kind of contextualize that. When people say that the wildlife trade is a multi-billion-dollar industry, you got to remember 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.

Yeah, plant material.

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

Asia.

Asia.

Why, why does California have a ban on python skin? Isn't— uh, pythons are not endangered, right?

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 '70s that I had as a kid. They would skin the pythons, take the eggs, incubate the eggs, sell the baby pythons to the United States and other consumer countries that wanted baby pythons. Most of the pythons that are skinned in Southeast Asia, and I've been to python skinning places in Sumatra, blood pythons, reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons, but mostly blood pythons, reticulated 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.

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, like people want python skins. Oh look, a place that's overrun with pythons, maybe you should get your python skin there.

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

Wild at Heart.

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 usual. You don't really— you rarely see— there it is, there it is. That's, that's a reticulated python. That's not a Burmese. That, that's the one people want. That's from Southeast Asia. That's not the one running wild in Florida.

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

Is that right?

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

let's try.

I had read something about python being one of the things that they made illegal. Why California bans python skin. Ban 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 distinguish by species, created an extraordinarily broad statute banning all python imports. Oh, that's interesting. I thought it was fairly recent.

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.

Welcome to California.

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

Austin rules. But California is just so overregulated with everything, so particularly wildlife.

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

How so regulation?

And then again, there's 4 people eat those. There's 45 types of iguanas in the world.

Do you not know that? No. Oh yeah, there's a whole YouTube community of people who hunt iguanas and cook them in exotic ways. They make iguana stir-fry in South Florida. Yeah, yeah, 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, it's sensational, like teriyaki. It looked very good.

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

I mean, I mean, I have a— 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, with the packages. Yeah, here's a guy.

Yeah, there we go. They use the legs, they cook the legs.

Yeah, and the back of the tail.

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

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

But it's far out, I mean, there's a—

Wow, look at that, he's eating the whole thing. In Mexico, I always see them make iguana tamales out of the, back part of the iguana.

So you put it in a camado. Oh wow. Yeah, 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 are pretty honest about it. Like, they bring it to their family, they let the family try it. I think, 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.

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

They're fucking big too, man.

They're massive.

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

They're so beautiful.

Yeah, they are.

They're such a cool looking lizard, man.

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 just the beauty of it, just the sheer beauty, the sheer beauty.

It's like yellow lemon highlights, turquoise and green, and It's a very endangered iguana.

So the Florida iguana problem, was that all people's pets that got released? Probably. All of it?

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 Nostrand and his dad Ray Van Nostrand. They run an enterprise called Strictly Reptiles in Hollywood, right? It's in Hollywood?

Hollywood, Florida.

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

Fulfillment center.

They are. I mean, in many ways they're this—

So like it's an Amazon, what you use for warehouse. Amazon, click, I want a tortoise.

Yeah.

They were selling 5,000 iguanas a week. Well, they got to that point. Green baby iguanas.

So the story goes, dad moves to Florida, starts a business, evolves. Jurassic Park comes out. Jurassic Park comes out, everyone wanted a pet dinosaur. The green iguana market went on fire. He was selling 5,000 a week. And, you know, I was a '90s kid. I had an iguana in my bedroom.

Jeremy's a virgin, but he did have an iguana.

I did, I had a pet iguana.

To reptiles.

That unfortunately passed away. The rock thing, you know, the heated rock, you know, that happens. But yeah, no, there's sort of— so the story is filled—

He did the rock thing?

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

Keeps it warm?

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

He cooked his iguana.

Cooked my iguana, yeah, sadly.

Cooked his iguana. Yikes.

But I've learned a lot.

But just—

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

Thank God people can't buy a fucking velociraptor.

Well, you know— Because people would have them.

Them. They'd have fences set up in their yard.

Joe, you've had the Colossus people on this show, I think. Oh yeah, they want to bring back one of those and a wooly mammoth.

Well, there's no chance that they can bring— with current technology, they don't have dinosaur DNA.

It's too old.

I'm joking.

But they're— I mean, I've met the dire wolves. I know, it's wild. They brought back the dire wolf. What does that mean? I mean, if you talk to geneticists, what is it? It is a bunch of different traits.

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

I mean, I don't know what that means because like we decide what a dire wolf is, a direwolf isn't. But if you take literal direwolf 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 direwolf. It's like people are arguing over semantics, whatever it is. That's not a wolf. It's very different. It looks different than a regular wolf, like a gray wolf. The stature is different. It has a mane. It's really crazy looking. They're white, they're stockier, they're built differently. Like, you see, like, oh, that's different.

Yeah.

Well, like, what, like, maned wolves in Argentina look very different than our wolves. So there are very different types of canines, you know. Wild dogs in Africa look very different.

Oh yeah.

You know, than our, you know, so yeah. But yeah, I mean, one thing I just say about iguanas, just since we were 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 Galápagos Islands, land iguanas, there's marine iguanas. There's a very rare high-elevation pink iguana. There's another land iguana in the Galápagos. There's a, you know, marine iguana. But that lizard was fairly recently discovered. And there's some iguanas that were thought to be extinct, Joe, like the Jamaican iguana. And that was thought to be extinct forever. The Jamaican iguana, but they found a tiny population recently. So there's a lot of iguanas that are in trouble, and, you know, we should care about iguanas. And they're not just green iguanas. Yeah, that— the pink iguana, that's a marine iguana and a regular Galápagos land iguana. And then you see some of the pink form.

Jamie, see if you can find a video on Florida people hunting iguanas. Florida people hunting giant iguanas. 'Cause some of them are so big. You just, you see 'em, 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? Look at the size of that one.

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

That's crazy.

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

I mean, these things are gigantic, man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This dude is all out there killing them. Who's this? This dude, Top Shelf Anglers on Instagram, and he's—

oh, you can do an expedition.

So he's just a Florida guy that's enjoying the green iguanas.

Also, yeah, no, that now is a different— that's called a Tinosaurus. That's a type of Central American Mexican rock iguana. That lizard, that's not a green iguana.

So Florida has a variety.

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

And all of it is pets.

Yeah, people letting them go.

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

Pet iguanas were everywhere at one time, yeah.

And is this really—

That's the tegu. That's also invasive in Florida.

That's crazy looking.

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

That looks like a snake with legs. It does. Yeah, look at the other face, right?

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

When I lived in the Valley, there was a reptile store, and it was a place where I used to go buy goldfish, 'cause I used to have piranhas, and I used to have turtles too. And the turtles were way more vicious than the piranhas. Those aquatic, when you put goldfish in with the turtles, turtles, They're crazy, man. And they grab ahold of them and they're, ah, they're biting them. It's like very Jurassic Park. Like you're watching a little dinosaur.

Alligator snapping turtles.

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

Sliders.

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

Ooh.

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

Don't get bit by a crocodile monitor. They're close to like a Komodo dragon bite. They have scalpel teeth. They are serious. Getting bit by a crocodile.

It looked pretty vicious. I mean, they just look like dinosaurs. It's like a forgotten thing of the past. There it is. Yeah, there's a crocodile monitor. Look at that face, man. It totally looks like a dinosaur.

Well, there's Tommy, who's— who's—

yeah, that's the guy who's feeding it, you know, chicken. Yeah.

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 an— 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 connecting with you. These things, they're just— you're just looking into the abyss.

Until the chimp rips your head off.

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

Well, especially a baby chimp.

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

Yes.

But 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.

Well, I loved what, 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. 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.

For sure.

So I like keeping tortoises. They don't want to eat a rabbit particularly. They want to eat some lettuce or some greens. So turtles and tortoises is what I gravitated to. And then I found out one day they're the most endangered group of animals on the planet, along with primates, 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, 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.

And also freak show.

And freak show, of course.

I'm really good at freak shows.

As I said, it takes one to know one. But of course, but what's different—

what's different though is that this isn't 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 herp people are incredibly obsessive about, you know, living art, about these living things. They like the— it's like a baseball card.

Like, what was that word you use? The herp people?

Herp— yeah, I call her herpetology.

Herp people, herpetology. Amphibians and reptiles.

Yeah. Um, sorry.

—little coded.

The herpy people. Herpy people jokes.

No, but it's really a trade formed around scarcity. And this sort of desire and adventure people have going out to find the rarest of the rare, and bringing it back, and selling it, trading it, keeping it. I'm in that category. You are in that category.

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

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

So in other words, freaky people.

Freaky people. Extreme obsessions. But it's about kind of, you know, psychology of people in this particular very niche way.

Well, any time you're dealing with extreme animal people, it's about the psychology of the human being that's really invested in it, right?

Yeah, best in show. Yeah, for sure.

And these are, 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.

Yeah, especially things that can kill you in this way, like a Taipan or whatever, someone playing with that. What is that?

An inland taipan is a venomous snake from Australia that may be the most venomous snake in the world. But it's all relative because a black mamba— Of course, it's in Australia. Yeah, Australia has a lot of venomous stuff. Spiders, box jellyfish, a lot of snakes that are very dangerous. Australian tiger snake, brown snake, inland taipan, they're all things that equally can kill you. So to say one's more dangerous than the other, they all kill you.

Is there antivenom for all of them?

No, actually. So it's a good question. So some snakes, like, you know, Texas has a coral snake, for example, a very venomous elapid type of snake, like a cobra, not like a rattlesnake. And I think they have less 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. The coral snakes, they don't have antivenom for them? I think I heard that maybe not anymore. I'm sure it's faded.

So what happens if you get bit?

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

A friend of mine had two of them in her carport. Yeah, they took pictures of it and sent it to people, and everyone's like, yeah, that's— keep away from that. Just chilling in her carport. Yeah, but they're generally not aggressive, is that the deal?

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

You wind up dead or something.

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

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

It was cost ineffective. Is that what it says?

I think that's what I heard. Cost ineffective. No longer cost-effective. Just let people die. Cost-effective is a crazy thing to say when it comes to fucking keeping people alive.

Wow, I was right for a change.

Capitalist cunts. Maybe the socialists are right. That was made by— Cost-effective is crazy. So what did they do?

You know, I heard every rattlesnake joke after I got bit, and there's one that's— these 3 guys are out hiking and someone gets bit here, and they go to the doctor and the guy says, you got to go back and suck it out of him, and the guy just says to him, you're going to die. So maybe you die with a coral snake.

Yeah. Just leave you dying.

The thing I always— we recently were looking at this, the way of treating rattlesnake bites. Not too long ago, by the way, they sell these Johnson Johnson, you sell these kits where you used to have one, right? You'd actually literally slice out and you'd suck out the venom out of your bite. Does it actually work? No. No. That was what's incredible about it.

When we were young, they had these little rattlesnake kits. I'm a little older than you, but it was insane what they told people to do back then. They told you to cut yourself and then put a tourniquet and then suck the venom out, which is completely insane because when a rattlesnake strikes, 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 venom is already— just like when they inject you with something, it's already in you. You can't suck the whatever. So what should you do if you get bit by a rattlesnake? 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.

Incredible. Yeah. Geez. And it was just bullshit, huh?

Well, everything—

imagine taking that in the woods, you're like, we're fine.

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

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

Well, in my case, they didn't have it in the hospital. They had to get— see Highway Patrol to bring it 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.

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

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

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

I mean, in my case, I swear to God, I thought I was gonna stop breathing about 2 hours into it. It just slowly feels like this pressure on your chest.

Like you can't breathe?

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

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

No, I think you're talking about Serpentarium. That same guy?

Bill Haas. Bill Haas.

He lived to like 100. And I know people that inject themselves with venom. I was in Myanmar, in Burma one time, 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 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.

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, um, 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? That's like if If you live in a snake-prone area, should you do that?

No, but that's the idea. Why wouldn't you do that? There's a guy right now in the US that's doing it. I think they're doing a film upon— about him injecting all these venomous snake venoms into him like a pin cushion. But no, I don't think people should do it, but people do do it. Not a lot of people, but this guy does it.

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

Look, the country that I think has the most deadly snake bites is probably India, the country where there's the most deaths and envenomation. The snake that probably kills more people in the world is a puff adder in Africa, but it's many countries. But I think India has the highest. U.S., it's pretty low chance you're going to get killed by a snake. You're going to get killed driving your car. Or shooting someone with your gun. You know, it's highly unlikely— the odds are very low that you're gonna die from a snakebite, no matter where you live.

I understand that. It's all well and good, but that doesn't comfort you if you get bit by a snake. Like, oh, what are the odds? Seek medical attention. You have to deal with it, or buy one of those kits.

I think most people live, Joe. I think most people— yeah, I mean, there's a few people that died this year in California, but typically it's like only a few people a year die in the country from snakebites.

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

Or they're older, or they get bit 3 times, like not just once by the rattlesnake. You know, you get more venom in them.

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

No, young ones have a more condensed, more dangerous venom, but big snakes are much more dangerous because they can put far more venom into you. The little ones have a more potent venom, but they can't inject as much into you. So that's kind of— people misunderstand that stat. Mm. Not that I'm a snake expert. I'm more of a turtle expert, and I'm more of a freak expert, so I'm good at finding these crazy people to cover.

Do you get uncomfortable being around these people? Ah, that's a good question. Um, eee. Because there's a psychological aspect to all— particularly like chimp crazy. There's something about those people that makes me uneasy watching it on TV. Like, you are so far gone. Like, some of these people are so far gone in terms of, like, just being a normal, present, rational person. Yeah.

There's a courtship, and sometimes that courtship takes years to get someone willing to be interviewed. It's generally— the reptile world can be very guarded. People that have them don't want the feds coming and taking their— rare reptiles. They don't want animal rights groups, PETA, coming and busting them. They don't want people coming because they're very valuable. Some reptiles are worth a lot of money. So they're very guarded. And to get access to a lot of these people took a lot of time at times. 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 are times when you're just kind of like, you know, "Is this the time I'm gonna go there and he's gonna really fuck me up?" Why didn't they like you? You know, man. You know, like, listen, I like this guy. He's done what he's done in the past.

He was sentenced to 100 years in prison. He got out for whatever reason. But that guy? That guy— Wait a minute. Why did he go to jail for 100 years? Well, Mario Tabraoui was sentenced to 100 years. 100-plus years in prison. He got out early because he must have had some serious information. What was the crime? Murder and drugs.

And he got out early because he said he had information? He must have.

He did 12 years, and no one knows— no one knows why. What?

He only did 12 years for murder and drugs?

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

But why was he mad at you? Oh, fuck.

Do you remember all the times he was mad at me? He's mad at— he's probably mad at me right now as I'm speaking.

Yeah, I definitely will be after the show, probably.

Yeah, well, that's— this is the next episode. There's an entire episode that talks about kind of the '80s in Miami and the sort of overlap between the drug trade and the illegal wildlife trade and the reptile trade. And he's a central character in it. Now he's It's kind of more tangential because it's really about this guy, Ray Van Nostrand, a guy from New Jersey, moved down to Florida, started a business that became Strictly Reptiles, as I was referencing. But yeah, I mean, I don't think there was anything 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 that he cared about the most, and he would categorize you to be this person that is, you know—

There's an expression, "Honor among thieves," and he weirdly has this kind of honorable side. Unredeemable, yeah. And certain things I would say to him would make him really upset. But I have to say, the only time I was ever shot at in my life was in fucking Miami. I was shot at, you know, going to a payphone in the early '90s in a van trying to go to a nightclub with a bunch of people. And these guys were walking towards me, and they started just blowing out the windows of the van. I remember I didn't go to the nightclub. I went back to my hotel. And I woke up in the morning with that chopped, you know, car glass all in my hair. I had long hair back then. I had hair back then. But Miami was, you know, it was pretty wild in the '80s and early '90s.

I have a good friend of mine, my friend Steve, did his residency. He's an ophthalmologist. Did his residency in Miami in the '80s. In the '80s and worked in emergency rooms. And he said it was fucking insane. It's just like so many gunshot wounds, so many drug deals gone bad, so many heists. He said it was like an insane place to work.

It's funny you say that, 'cause I said to all my characters, I said, "What's it like, you know, having been in and out of prison so many times?" He goes, "Bro, everyone in Florida's been in prison." You know? And I was kind of like, "Well, what's it like?" You know?

"Everyone in Florida's been in prison." Sunny place with shady people, right?

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

Yeah. Have you seen Bad Lieutenant? Yes. I'm friends with Harvey. Oh, really? He's good in it, man. Oh, yeah.

No, it's a great movie.

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

Well, what you'll like about this second episode about this period. It's from the point of view of this young, at the time, you know, coming right out of college, young DEA agent, DEA agent, on the beat, chasing bad guys. And he was assigned this guy Mario Tabraue, 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 the subjects in this animal world, you know, law enforcement, This guy sleeps with a gun every night and gets literally orgasmic with the thought of this guy coming to his house. There's like a hideaway. The guy that he put in prison for 100 years that got out. He literally waits. And you'll see a line in the show that it's kind of unbelievable what he says about that.

Yeah, but just, you know, 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— And he's good with guns. Good with guns. And he would just, you know, he would brag about all the gunshots, 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, vérité, with him, and he was just a really, at the time, very generous with his time, wanting to tell his story, but, you know, clearly killed a lot of people, and would make some very soft references to, to that that would be very unnerving, you know? Like, "Yeah, you're really great with it." I've never shot a gun. I don't have anything against it, but I've never shot a gun, and I would talk to him about it. I'm interested in it. And he'd be like, "Yeah, I've had to use it a lot, you know? More than I'd like to admit." So, you know, you're in these places, it's—

But what's so peculiar about this guy, his name's Larry Lovelace, he was a DEA agent in Florida back in those days. Put this guy in prison, you know, bringing— this guy was bringing a lot of drugs from, you know, he was Cuban, and you'll see it in episode 2. But he really just doesn't understand how the guy got out of prison. And the fact that the very guy that put him in prison wouldn't know that, that they, like, whoever the powers that be that got him out of prison after 12 years, you would think he would know, you know, but he's still to this day worried about retaliation.

Well, to be— so this And this was, what's cool is that his dad was actually the person, he was like an HR person for kind of the Cuban, it was at the time of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, that kind of era. And he was responsible for taking care of all these kind of Cuban exiles during that time. And he was being the one that was going 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 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.

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

And this guy, you know, we filmed 200 people over how long? 15 years, really the last 6 was more intense. More than 200 people. And you never get everybody in. And I remember meeting this guy, Tony Biscaro, remember him? Yeah. He was the— this guy was part of— he flew planes for drugs. You know, he got busted with like, I think, £600,000 of weed at the time. He served the single largest sentence for marijuana smuggling crime, 40 years. 40 years. Got out maybe 5 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? Your fucking life's over and you see these weed stores everywhere. It's like insane to me. That's fucked up. But that was at a time, look, Pablo Escobar, like there were people around Pablo Escobar that got indicted that were trafficking ivory horns. Horns and stuff. Like, it was very, you know, one degree of separation for like wildlife crime and drugs in that era.

Why do you think there's that connection? Easy. Concealment.

Concealment. I mean, look, I don't want to exaggerate. I think 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—

meaning you put it in their stomach?

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

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

Yeah, you cut them open and get your cocaine. But even more— I remember in New York when the fish markets used to put drugs—

He's so casual about that, by the way.

But fish markets used to put the drugs in fish in the fish markets in New York.

Yeah, liquid cocaine.

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

Or even more usefully, you know, trafficking wildlife, there was a legal version of that. So what they would do is take the crates, and they'd pack them, and they'd put the drugs at the bottom, and they'd put, you know, another layer of animals, and they'd put some— they'd mix in some, you know, lookalike animals that were really rare but looked like the common animal, so they'd mix them together. And then they'd put something like, you know, spitting cobras up the top, No one was reaching into the crate when there was these, like, very dangerous animals inside. So that's how they kind of got— they were able to prey on the lack of resources at these kind of major ports of entry and realize that Fish and Wildlife didn't really have any resources at the time. They had limited wildlife inspectors. They had to go through these, you know, volumes, volumes of crates, and they'd play these games.

Many Komodo dragons that made it into this country came in illegally in a crate and they would just put a little Komodo dragon in with some other monitor lizards, and the inspectors couldn't tell the difference. 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.

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

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

I'll talk to my Interpol and I'll, you know—

Well, he did the longest sentence in the US for wildlife crime ever at the time in the '90s. He was busted in Mexico 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. Rescued. So the LA Zoo, San Diego Zoo, Bronx Zoo, a lot of these animals came from reptile smugglers.

Wow, very much the origins of collections.

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

Yeah, it's like a cross-section of—

you're into metal, you got a python.

There's a lot of inked guys, there's a lot of like goth guys into— oh yeah, hot snakes, which are the venomous. A lot of bikers, a Hot snakes. Hot snakes means— That's what they call them?

Hot snakes. The kind that can kill you.

Yeah, they're called hot snakes. Interesting. But yeah, a lot of badass guys, and there was definitely drugs. Listen, I did drugs in my life. No way. Yes. Come on. I'll go on. I've done everything. I had nightclubs in New York City for many years, Joe. Yeah, I'm like, you know, embalmed. It's made me live longer.

Maybe that's what saved you when you got bit by the rattlesnake. Um, but you gotta think that the type of people that are gonna be even interested in having a snake as a pet, that's a very unusual person. Oh, yeah, yeah, I don't know.

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

I don't think of them as a pet. I think of 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.

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

Because there's a— does a snake, they experience discomfort because they're in a terrarium?

Listen, there's a lot of myth out there that, oh, snakes can live in a little teeny like sweater box or shoe box, and you can put them in racks like you see in snake stores and snake breeders. The truth is, real snakes Most snakes in the wild do not live in little boxes. They may go underground at a certain time of year and hibernate, but they come out and they hang out like us and they move around, and most snakes do not live in a little teeny box. 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.

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

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

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So the longest-lived animal, terrestrial animal, on the planet is a giant tortoise. They can live almost 200 years. I have tortoises that are over 100 years old. What about snakes? 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. Those are the ones in Florida? They can live 70 years? I don't know about green iguanas, but there are some that can live 50 to 70 years, some of the big lizards. Tortoises live the longest. Some crocodilians can live a really long time. Snakes live the least, the lesser time compared to most of the other reptiles.

That was another thing they did. 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. Those are gnarly.

I've swam with Nile crocodiles. That's no joke. Why'd you do that? I was in Madagascar. They have a form of Nile crocodile in Madagascar. They don't 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. Them, you know, you really got to watch it with Nile crocodiles. So if they're in Florida, they're much bigger than American crocodiles.

Yeah, they have a shoot-on-site order for them, or they did at least in this article that I was reading. It's from a while back. I didn't know that. Wow.

Yeah, they found a couple of them.

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

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

Oh, leatherback sea turtle is that big? Yeah, yeah. I had no idea. That's great. I would have never imagined that a sea turtle would have the same body weight as a saltwater crocodile.

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

Well, I know that there's legend, right, about Congo crocodiles, and that there's crocodiles that people people had supposedly seen, you know, back in the early 1900s and the 1800s that they thought were 40 feet long. And the thing about crocodiles is I don't think they die of old age. I think they just stay alive until they die. I want to be a crocodile. And they keep getting bigger. That's the other thing. 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 thoughts as to why that happens, you know, how they're actually eating, whether they're getting fed, what's the difference between the way they live in the wild. But there's some accounts from back in the day where these guys were on a boat and the crocodile was bigger than the boat they were on.

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?

And some of them develop a taste for people.

Yeah, just movement in the water and just— because they're an ambush predator, right? Yeah, well, they hunt people. And they probably hunt people.

My friend Jim Shockey, he got hired to go to Africa Africa. Um, 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. There's a— he said everybody there had like missing a leg, bite taken out of their calf. Everybody was all fucked up.

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

Once they start targeting villagers, once they find that there's a place that they can hunt and get regular food, they're there all the time. They're so sneaky that, you know, what they developed was these people had put posts poles into the ground in the water. So into 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. Smart. That's creepy. That's creepy. Well, they realized like, oh, the people go— like they must have been watching. And realizing, oh, the people go into this area, so I got to go on the ground at night, and then I'll go back under the water, and then I'll catch these fuckers slipping. And they're patient.

They can wait years. They're intelligent.

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

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

Well, they, they're one of the few reptiles that actually really does defend their babies. Like, you know, like a snake. Snake doesn't do that. Yeah. Yeah, wow, yeah, wow, wow, that's amazing. What a dinosaur, man. What is that, a saltwater or a Nile?

It says saltwater crocodile.

Yeah, in Australia. Wow, though, wow, those things ran the whole world at one point in time. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's just weird there's still creatures like that roaming around, you know.

There's— that's a throwback. And there's some really endangered crocodiles, and you'll see in our show, I think even episode 1, there's the zoo curator that said He 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 crocs.

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

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. It's like a rare baseball card.

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

Yeah. And then there's a—

I get excited by seeing something I never saw before. I'm like a kid in a candy store. Yeah, but when I see a cool, like, pink land iguana, I've never seen one in the wild or anywhere, and I've been to the Galápagos, so yeah, it's a thrill. It's a highlight.

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

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

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

Well, ever since that—

You'd want to be in its natural habitat.

No, I wouldn't want to. You know, my mother, My mother gave me a good moral compass for that. She used to say to me when I was a kid, "Don't play God, Eric." I was keeping things, and she'd tell me, "You 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 kind of, against my better judgment when I was a kid, I did bad things that my mother didn't like, but later in life she was right.

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

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

You know, but more trade than the other collectible culture. Trade's more— more trade, more, you know, like, I'll give you a crocodile, I'll sell trade. Yeah, what's going on here, Jamie? Bear— bear gallbladder.

I've never seen this footage. That's a shark.

Yeah, so it's stealing a shark that a guy caught. Wow. Yeah, that must be, um, American crocodile, right? It's Australia. Okay, a lot of sharks in Australia. That makes Sense. I don't know. Wow. So it just stole this guy's fish. Okay. Yeah.

What's been your interest in wildlife?

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 found them fascinating, but they're not as compelling to me for whatever reason. And I always wondered what that is. Like, you know, I did this thing on social media once, the social media hierarchy of dead animals. Animals. And I said, like, fish, fillets of fish, no one cares. Dead fish, people care a little more, but not much. Dead turkey, not that big a deal. Dead deer, okay, now we're getting weird. You know, dead bear, now people get mad at you. It's interesting.

You know, I went to this thing called Safari Club International in Vegas. It's the biggest trophy hunt taxidermy 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, yeah, we can do a chimp." I said, "What about an orangutan?" "Yeah, we could do an orangutan." Anyway, and 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 then suddenly I noticed all these guys starting to follow me, you know, and there was a big NRA booth and a lot of people with guns, and eventually they surrounded me, and I was trying to get rid of my camera gear and throw it in the garbage and stuff. But it was interesting where the line is and what you're allowed to—

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

I mean, obviously it was kind of a joke, but they literally started putting eyeballs on me and saying, "Who the fuck is this guy?" Yeah. Would they— Would they do you? Yeah, but they would—

Hey, how do you take a fucking human and turn it into a statue? People have shrunken heads.

I know people with shrunken heads, actually. Right. 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.

So who are these people that said they would do that? They're just— They're just taxidermists that are in this convention that taxidermy is a big game. So someone would have to smuggle it back.

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

I've seen it. But yeah. So when a zoo has the option to sell the dead body and then someone turns it into a taxidermy statue. It's gone on for a long time.

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 sector.

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

But I guess the point you're making, I'm just sort of saying, it's interesting how fish, even though certain fish can live over 100 years, certain rockfish, longevity, that's incredible. We don't think of them in the same way as we think of these higher countries.

Right, we don't care at all. We don't care at all. Yeah, we don't seem to, you know, going fishing is much more common than going hunting for sheep.

Yeah, now that I said what I just said, you know, maybe that's a little twisted. What do you mean? About taxidermy a person and then just—

Well, it is twisted. Yeah, you ask them a few years ago.

I think I said that out of context.

Whoa, you could buy them? This? Yeah, yeah, it says it's real.

I was trying to look to see if it was fake, but what?

Real? How is that legal? It's a document. Oh, I'm not sure on the screen. I mean, it wasn't hard to find either. There's our friend. It's only 3 grand.

I mean, no, the guy, the guy Riverside. Yeah, the guy that has the taxidermy, uh, he's got a funny name for his museum.

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

Now, do they say where they got this from? Does it say how they acquired this body? That document might.

Yeah, I have to pay for the document.

Oh, this— that's fucking weird, man.

But to your point about, you know, this kind of societal reaction to, you know, different wildlife issues, I think, yeah, that's what we're super curious about. What drives people's obsession 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 you know, 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 might be too hardcore for people to see because it is a brutal volume-based industry and there's a lot of spoilers.

We try not to show the bludgeoning and the cruelty of the animals. We try to avoid that with Tiger King. And Jim crazy in this show because people turn the channel. So we try— if we wanted to, we could do that. Well, I think we're just—

but I'm more talking more about the point of like, what— how do people respond to something through an interest? And, you know, what turns them on? What turns them off? And what is it about us that has this connection to certain— why are there turtle people?

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

Well, they're not like us, right? They're a different sort of predatory lizard thing, and I think in our mind, they 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 enact like— there's a visceral reaction that people have to them that I think is warranted. It's genetic, probably.

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

Well, that I think is anthropomorphism that's done by Disney movies. Of course it is. Okay. Yeah. Because people in the pioneer days, they didn't think of bears that way.

But I would argue that a bear, you know, a Kodiak bear, a polar bear, a lion, It's a lot more concerning than most reptiles. Yes. 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 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. Scary. Yeah. Even though they're really not that scary.

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, um, he's more of— is he more of an anthropologist or— but he's more of a behavioral—

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

Yeah. But this sort of creation of anthropomorphic characters through Disney. I mean, they were, you know, that could be tracked, this sort of correlation to, you know, entry points into, you know, mainstream culture. You know, it's, you know, it's— 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, even snakes, like Zootopia had a snake as a central character, and it's going crazy in you know, that's a pop culture thing. Like, but that's the, you know, that— so these well-intentioned things in these ways which we portray animals.

Finding Nemo, everyone wanted a clownfish. 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? Yeah. You know, you know, Jurassic Park, everyone wants their little bearded dragon because they want a miniature dinosaur. So who knows what's going to happen after Monsters of God? They're all going to want snakes again. Hopefully you have some—

did Tiger King open up the door for that, you think? Did people like look at that and find it appealing? Like, that's what I've been missing. Well, I think, I think I've been looking for my niche.

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

It's like Deliverance. It's a little Deliverance.

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

I want to get me a tiger after Tiger King. I want to get me a little baby tiger.

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.

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

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

The serpent, yeah. More people dream of snakes in this country than any other thing combined. It's mostly negative dreams. Not sharks? No, snakes.

There's a— you Googled it.

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

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

But you never hear of like a phobia directly attached to sharks. You know, you have ophidiophobia, which is the fear of snakes, but you don't hear of a sharkophobia or arachnophobia, right? Spiders.

Yeah, people are freaked out by spiders.

Oh yeah, I think that's a genetic thing. I think there's a 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 ophidiophobia, 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 saying, you got to get out of here right now. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's not like everybody else. Everybody else who looked at it was like, oh, yikes. And then a few people, they have that genetic memory, I think. Yeah, that's just— I agree.

And, and it's cultural. It's cultural. Yeah. 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—

it's the only staff meeting he ever does. 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 cut it 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.

But with kids, like, I'm sure with your kids and your daughters, like, I see with little boys, you know, 6 and 3, how their reaction, and they're not fearful, like, and it's partially because of the influence of the work that I'm doing, but, you know, I watch them interact, I see their friends, I see their cousins that are fearful, they have adverse reaction. I also think it's like, you know, your exposure to it. Yeah. You know, a lot. And you're right, probably some genetic kind of— Definitely exposure too.

I mean, if you grow up and you're used to being around different kinds of animals and the wildlife and different things, you'd probably be more comfortable around unique animals. If you're a person who grows up entirely in the city— Yeah.

Did your parents like animals? Did they?

Dogs. We had dogs and cats. Normal stuff.

I had a weird mom. I had a weird mom that liked snakes. And so that played a role in it. And liked salamanders. Oh, that explains a lot. She would take me to pet stores and actually steal the snakes and salamanders and steal them and put them in her purse and then take me out into the woods and we'd let them go. So that's the kind of mother— yeah, she didn't like seeing them in cages. Wow. But she didn't mind kleptomania, so I got good at stealing for a while.

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

She just wanted to free them. She didn't like seeing them in cages. Oh, I understand. Aquariums.

Yeah, 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.

Really? In New Jersey?

You're Well, I was born in New Jersey, but I grew up all over the place. I lived in San Francisco until I was 11, then I lived in Florida from 11 to 13. I actually was around a lot of alligators during that time. There it is. Yeah, we were in Gainesville, and there was a place called Lake Alice there that had a lot of alligators. You'd see it all the time. When I was there, one lady got attacked.

At a clearly impressionable age.

Yeah, yeah, I was around them a lot. But 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. Yeah, yeah.

But they were concerned. Alligator sugar rush.

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

And it's amazing that in the '50s and '60s they were really endangered and it was hard to find an alligator. And when you think about that now, it's hard to believe. It's hard to believe. And how the Endangered Species Act did help bald eagles, birds of prey, because it actually worked because of DDT. But it brought back alligators. And now alligators, like, you can't even imagine they were endangered. They're ubiquitous in Florida.

Oh, they're everywhere. They literally say every pond has the potential to have an alligator. Everywhere you look. They move around. They're very overpopulated. Yeah.

What's interesting about this work in the show that spans so much time, you know, we had, which, you know, you share in this, you know, curiosity, but we had great access to all of these great people in different industries. So you you have heads of the zoo, you have, you know, DOJ, DEA, US Fish and Wildlife Service, the collectors, you know, the bigger suppliers, and you have all aspects of this sort of industry. And what the show became, you know, as we were working through the edit, is this kind of, you know, this real clear story of unintended consequences, which is the more you enforce, you have great laws that happen, but it triggers something else, and that triggers something else. And you see this kind of time after time after time again. And in some cases, it leads to some positive things like ESA, uh, or the Endangered 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's a really interesting way of looking at this and humanizing in a way.

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 after their big trophy, is the bad guy. The bad guy, you know, the dealer, the smuggler, is going after the rarest reptile. The zoos got very competitive with reptile houses in the '70s and '80s because they started realizing they were very popular. Some— one of the most popular things in zoos reptile houses. They wanted the Komodo dragon, the rare reptile. And the collector, like guys like me that really dig reptiles, wanted the pink, you know, Galápagos land iguana that no one has, or the this, the unattainable. So everyone kind of is going after each other. The reptile, 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 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 like— it gets very gray, and the psychology is similar between both.

The only difference between the prisoner and the guard are the bars.

That's the sort of kind of idea. And you'll see there's no clear right and wrong in some of these 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— Yeah, Thailand's getting out of it. —back to the marijuana analogy. Like, fucking— How twisted is it that someone goes to prison for 40 years over pot, and now you can go to a weed shop every corner in Oklahoma, right? But it's a very messy, complex story that was hard to weave together. And I think it was the most challenging for us, certainly more challenging than Tiger King.

But the most proud. I think it's really deep. And it's a good one. And we lived. And we lived. For now.

You guys spend a lot of time on these. Yeah. This is one of the things that I found shocking while you were just discussing this. You were saying it was like 6 years. More. More. How many— so when did you plant the seed?

Well, the seed was planted really in my head when I read this book, The Lizard King, in 2008. And I tried to buy the rights from this author, Brian Christie, who wrote this incredible book, The Lizard King, in 2008. So that's almost 20 years ago. I didn't start filming until 2014 with Josh Safdie, and that was the beginning. But Tiger King and other things got in the way. So yeah, maybe 6 years if it was— if you were to condense that time.

But when we saw you a couple 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— there's— 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—

we shoot multiple projects at the same time, you know.

And we're lucky because a lot of our of our worlds are in certain places. So, you know, it's one-stop shopping. In Florida, there's a lot of interesting people, a lot of colorful people that are, you know, are hitting some of these themes that we're exploring in different works. 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 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 2 years later.

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

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

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

And people that have a story that's somewhere hidden in there. So we cast a wide fucking net. Like, we filmed shark people and taxidermists and the guy that breeds the most long-tailed macaque 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, 'cause it's not a good way to get rich, and it takes forever, and you may never have a story.

And so, it's like— That's what I'm getting at.

It's like—

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

Joe Exotic DMs me all the time on Instagram. Oh, still? Yeah, he wants to get out.

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

You want him to get out?

You know, the The government made a deal with him before the trial. They said, "You can do 6 years or you're gonna have a trial." 6 years. He's been in jail now for 9 years or whatever it's been. He would be out right now if he made that deal. He thought he was gonna get off, and I was like, "Joe—" I was on the phone with him every day at the time from prison. I said, "Take the deal." I don't know. I'm not into throwing people in prison and throwing away the key forever.

Tanya's in jail too. Too, you know. We're good at that. Perjury. I think she doesn't deserve to be there for 4 years, you know, for perjury.

Well, she didn't need to kidnap another chimp. Yeah, you know, we tried, we tried to help her, but she didn't. She was her own worst enemy.

Anyway, all these people are obsessed.

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

But did they really consider that when they're getting involved? Like, oh, no big deal, only do 4 years.

They really think of that going back to it. They keep doing it.

Yeah, but I think that's because they're obsessed. They, 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, oh, this is a good thing to get involved in.

I think that involved heroin, it's pretty stiff crime.

I think it's a risk factor that's considered, and especially in the sense of like, I think most of them, Jeremy, I think most of them think they're going to get away with it, or they're smarter than on the feds.

But they have this sort of worst-case thinking about if there was something to happen, it's, you know, 8 months in a camp. Right. You know, they're not going to—

And 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 2 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 5 years before that or I don't know, 8 years before that. So, there's a lot of—

What was he going to prison for?

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

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

Really? Yeah. What, what stuff are we exporting to China?

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

I just took, I just took in a confiscation 3 weeks ago of 300 3-toed box turtles that come out of the central part of the U.S., Oklahoma, Missouri. And 2 weeks later, a guy was busted coming into Mexico with turtles. And I took those turtles from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service So animals are coming into the country out of Mexico, you know, different countries, and then we're exporting now, which is new in the last 10 years, a lot of native turtles and reptiles and other wildlife to Southeast Asia and Europe.

And how are they getting there?

Mostly— it's mostly air cargo carry-on. This particular confiscation 3 weeks ago, they busted the guy with more box turtles in their luggage once they got to Hong Kong and China. Like I said, China, Taiwan— A lot of socks, reptiles. Malaysia, Jakarta, the reptile industry is enormous for now keeping them as exotic pets, enormous. I mean, it's, you know, in Asia, like the bird world, the birds are called the cut flowers of the wildlife trade in Asia, 'cause like 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 one in Bangkok called Chatuchak Market, these huge animal markets, you know. We talk about where COVID came from, but the scale of these animal markets, you know, bush meat, wildlife, it's on a scale that's beyond your imagination. So what kind of, what do they sell? Selling? They're selling reptiles, they're selling birds. For meat? No, no, these are for pets. Okay. The birds are ornamental in your house.

You have a songbird, you have an owl, you have a whatever. You can't believe there are people that are—

So they just have like a wildlife mall?

It's effectively like an enormous wildlife mall.

An outdoor mall.

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

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

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

Yeah, pretty clearly. But also, it seems like if you see these kind of lab, or excuse me, shows me these markets, you would say— what is this right here, Jamie?

Chatuchak. Kind of market. Which one is this? This is one of those markets. Yeah, Jakarta. Oh, this— I've been to these markets in Jakarta. Yeah.

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

Those are the Harry Potter— those are the Harry Potter owls. That footage is where—

yeah, like, what is wealth, same things in the US that were driving the US, but also more cultural.

But it's more common in Asia?

Well, there's, in China alone, there's over a billion people, so there's just more people. And the scale and the size of Asia and China is much bigger than the US 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.

Collectors in Asia. And why I think that— I think that the industry, the trafficking number, 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 US Fish and Wildlife 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 animals, um, in the last few years were coming through LAX, basically the Torrance, um, the border and LAX. It's, it's very— one little sample market.

It's very understaffed, undermanned to be able to manage all the wildlife coming in and out of the country.

There's not enough. 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 into they're so 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 his organization, but, you know, it's a harmful reality that it's actually still happening. You know, we thought our stuff was gone.

The percentage of wildlife that leaves the country, leaves the country, native wildlife to the US, it's like 50% is kind of marine stuff like coral and invertebrates that are in the ocean. And the rest is mostly reptiles, mostly turtles. Mammals are very small these days, birds are very small. So for whatever reason, you know, turtles, and the US has the most, out of any country in the world, we have more species of turtles and tortoises than any country in the world. We have 51 species in the US. Mexico's second, you know, India I think is maybe third. But so Asia now really wants these turtles Turtles where you grow 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 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 that are, you know, organizing the whole thing.

It's like drugs.

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

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

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

So raptors are really interesting. So that sector of the bird world, I mean, the bird world is so vast. There's the songbird people, there's the parrot people, really high-end, you know, Hyacinth macaws that are so expensive. One Hyacinth macaw is like, you know, $60,000 today or $50,000 or whatever it is, $40,000. But raptors are increasingly popular in the Middle East, you know, golden eagles and all these really far-out birds of prey. And in the 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.

Because it's interesting, you know, I have friends that live in Alaska, and in Alaska, eagles are really common. Yeah, like they're all over the place up there. Like they don't even think anything of them. Yeah. You know, especially the guys who go salmon fishing. When they come back from salmon fishing, you literally have like 30, 40 eagles eagles just waiting on the lawn for these boats to arrive because they know that they're going to throw the carcasses out. Bald eagles. Yes, bald eagles. Yeah, I would imagine some people would want those as a pet, especially in other countries. Yeah, you know, in the U.S.

only Native Americans can have like eagle parts unless you have a permit. Like, it's pretty parts. Well, you know, like feathers for their headdresses. Like, Native Americans can still do things with birds.

Do you have a stuffed eagle in your house? That's illegal?

I think it's illegal. Did you ask those guys?

Stuff you an eagle? Well, that would be interesting though. That's where we draw the line.

By the way, I don't know if they actually have them, but we have this footage. I mean, imagine going in the confiscations room at LAX. It's incredible. Oh really? Yeah, it's incredible. You have like, you know, tiger, you know, just all this rare animal and, and transformed into so many objects at home. A table, a a pool cues.

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

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

You know, it's funny, it's fucked up you say that, but it's They never make it back. 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 round 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 and we have lots of reptile shows in the US, and now at lunchtime you're eating reptiles. China's a whole different thing.

I think it's this visibility paradox thing. You have this charismatic, symbolic thing. There's very, very few, a lot of protection around them. People want it. What are you talking about, eagles? Just talking about what people want, what they can't have. That's the through line in this world, especially for rare stuff.

Eagles are like American alligators. They've bounced back DDT and, you know, the book that what's her name did in this late '60s, '70s, Silent Spring. That was the book that really changed everything for eagles and birds of prey. Yeah, that's what I know, it's America, right? Her book, what was her name? Silent Spring, the author. She changed everything 'cause no one listened to her about DDT and pesticides which were making the eggs of birds of prey not viable. And it really— Rachel Carson. Yeah, Rachel Carson really took a toll. Rachel Carson was an unsung hero. People should know her name, and I forgot it for a minute, but she really is why you have bald eagles, you know, making that— were they on the verge of extinction? Because of pesticides we were using, because of DDT was doing this thing to the eggs where pelicans, birds of prey, were disappearing at alarming rates because of spraying of DDT for agriculture. Agriculture for pesticides. Wow. And then we banned it and eagles and birds of prey came back. Yeah, peregrine falcons, all of it. Bald eagles, golden eagles. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, yeah, it's, uh, that's a—

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

It's heartless raptor. 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.

It's just such a cool one. Yeah. And there's something about watching them swim away with a salmon in their talons.

Yeah. 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.

I mean, where we live, where we live, there was that eagle cam and there was a sick eagle, bald eagle, and it became national— In California? Yeah, where we live. And it became national news 2 weeks ago. Golden? Bald. Bald eagle. Really? Yeah, yeah. And if you Google bald eagle California, it's in the town we live in where they took it and they're bringing it back to health. But the amount of money that poured in to help that eagle was unbelievable for this little place.

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

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

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

Yeah, it's America's bird.

I mean, people have it tattooed on their back. Yeah.

There's something about an eagle that's just— It's iconic.

There's a lot of snake tattoos these days, but yeah.

I'm sure. You know, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's something about the eagle tattoos. Different.

It's like, 'Murica!' But then the grizzly bear, you know, such an adverse reaction, so controversial.

They eat a lot of people. Yeah, they've been in the news.

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

Yeah, we have a friend that's actually trying to bring them back.

Good luck. We mentioned this to you last time and you were like, 'Why?' or something.

Let them naturally turn. Reintroduction is always a disaster. Reintroduction of wolves in Colorado right now is a fucking disaster. Well, they're back.

They've now migrated into California, and they've been— some wolf sightings even down in—

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

Yeah, they can go incredibly long distances. Reintroduction works in some places. It's getting better. I have a good friend that's reintroducing jaguars back to northern Argentina. They're doing a pretty good job, but yeah, it's tricky. Like condors, California condors.

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

No, no, don't do that.

That's what Colorado's experiencing now.

But I've worked with Ted Turner's group for many years in New Mexico on reintroduction programs, 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. Yeah. To get people to wrap their arms around the idea of bringing grizzlies back to California.

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

But the Native Americans in California do, by and large, want grizzlies back and they have this new technology that might be able to keep them kind of in certain areas. Like, 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.

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

Yeah, yeah, big cat.

I have them in my backyard all the time.

It's motivated by displacement from fires, right? It's also pets.

They like to eat people's pets.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have these cameras though.

It's Who are you talking about? They eat them all the time. No, no. Pets get snatched up all the time.

Jeremy, this woman down the street from me was walking her dog at 3 in the afternoon. The mountain lion grabbed her dog. She's literally on Ladera. She's walking her dog, a little dog, and the mountain lion just jumped and grabbed her dog. She's looking at the dog, holding a leash, and goes, "I better let go of this leash," and she did, and she never saw a dog again.

I'm sort of saying this little particular suburban pocket of Santa Monica like a— it's not very common. Where I live, they eat people.

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

Where I live, they eat dogs.

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

They do it all the time. We were talking about Marin County, I think it's Marin, 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.

Well, I see them on my cameras. We have these motion detector cameras and we see them at 3 in the morning right in front of my —I rarely see them with the naked eye.

Isn't that crazy?

Well, you got one. You got one.

One gets hit by a car and they build a bridge across the road, you know? It was kind of amazing.

You got a nice mountain lion in the lobby out there.

That was from my friend Adam. He hunted that in Colorado. That was a depredation mountain lion. That mountain lion had picked a ranch and it was killing all the calves, and they actually got to it right after it had— it didn't even kill it. It was eating it while it was alive. 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 killed it.

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. Oh, for sure. Yeah. But, you know, back to our show, I want to just say one other thing about sort of the ending, which it was really fortuitous. I just want to bring it up, even though you're not there but— Spoiler alert. Well, it's not really the spoiler alert, but I'll say this. I spent about 20 years working in Madagascar with some rare Madagascan tortoises. And I eventually— I was trying to save this tortoise in Madagascar, and I did a 60 Minutes piece with Leslie Stahl, took her to Madagascar, a New Yorker piece on this tortoise. I failed. Everyone failed. The tortoise functionally went extinct in Madagascar. The poaching was so intense. And the tortoise had a very high—

What is it? What is a plowshare tortoise?

Well, it's a reptile that arguably has the most value in the pet trade over almost any other reptile in the world. There may be something close, like a fijian iguana or maybe a Komodo dragon, but it's, you know, some of them can be worth as much as 100 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.

There it is. So where are they going?

Mostly to Asia. There's a direct flight out of Madagascar to Bangkok, and so— And their pets. Yeah, and some of those photos I made—

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

Well, so this is where I'm going. Very hard to do that because of health screening. I took that photo over there, that little guy. I took the, you know, some of these photos I even took actually. Oh, that's the guy that works for us. So, anyway, I've been working with this species of tortoise for almost 20 years, and we were able to get some confiscated plastric 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 fortunate enough to get our first hatchling of this really endangered tortoise right when we finished the show. And so we filmed it, and it made it into the end of the show. But it's a story about the reptile trade, and this was 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 talk.

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

So, yes, to be blunt. And so it's somewhat symbolic. It's somewhat about showing Madagascar that we're not trying to profit and take their natural, 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 going to take pressure off of this tortoise, it's like drugs, is if you either legalize drugs or, you know, in the case of drugs, or make this tortoise available for people around the world so they can have it because it breeds quite easily, breed them, try to have them in the private sector, in institutions, 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.

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

Well, it's an animal that takes longer, twice as long as a human, or 3 times. They don't reach sexual maturity until they're about 30 years old, 40 years old. They can do it, you can raise them faster in captivity than in the wild, so they are very slow to reproduce. They're not like rabbits, they're the opposite. And there's so few of them, and so they're very, very rare, very valuable. The only way ultimately I think you can really take the pressure off of the poaching is to allow people to start to have them. That's a radiated tortoise, which we also bring. Wow, that is wild. So the Dremeline is a way to deter poaching, deter value. Our organization is 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 tortoises' shell to basically deface the tortoise so poachers would not take the tortoises. It ultimately didn't work.

So they're just taking them because they're beautiful, and if you fuck up their shells— they have the most—

they have the highest dome shell of any tortoise in relation to the size. So wild. They have an incredible longevity, well over 100 years. They they live, and they're gold.

And so that Dremeling that you did, that's— that's indicate— that's the top of it right there. Yeah, yeah. And that didn't help.

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

Somebody told me this is a good time to bring this up, that turtle shells— when you look at a turtle shell, it's almost representative of a calendar. And that there is around the outside edge of the turtle, there's like 28 different little squares, and then 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? Yeah, that's really interesting. The lunar calendar on a turtle's back.

Yeah. You know a lot of turtle facts.

I did not know that one, actually. You didn't know that one? I know a lot of cultures like Asia and American Indians believe that the Earth sits on a turtle.

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

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

Isn't that weird? Yeah, that's interesting. What is that all about? Like, that's very strange that it coincides. It's like exact to what a lunar calendar is. Yeah, very strange. Yeah, that's super interesting.

I mean, turtles have been on planet Earth longer than dinosaurs. They've been here for over 200 million years, so they've been around a long time. So there's been— people have been playing with turtles forever.

So maybe they came up with a lot of things that relate to turtles, but it's odd that it syncs up with a 28-day lunar calendar.

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

Yeah, the geodesic, like the structure of it to keep rigidity.

Yeah. And I know turtles, the first writing, the earliest writing was on the plastron, the bottom of a turtle shell in China, maybe some of the earliest writing going going back some really, I don't know, a couple thousand years. So turtles have been used for all kinds of things, for writing, for medicinal medicine, especially in Asia. It's gone back thousands of years using turtles for chi and for vitality and all these kinds of things. If you get sick, you make some turtle soup. There's a lot of weird stuff with that. There's a lot of stuff that has to do with turtles.

Like the rhino horn things for boners.

Hey guys, well, they really like— they really, they really put some vibes.

Yeah, Oracle Bone Script on the bottom of a turtle shell. Look how cool that looks. Go back to that. Beautiful, right? Beautiful. 6200 BC, more than 6600 to 6200 BC. You're gonna go into the images again of the writing on it. Look how cool that writing is.

I mean, this one's beautiful on the right. That one's beautiful. That's wild. But I think it was some of the earliest writing was on turtle shells like this.

Well, it sounds like it if it's 6000 BC. 6,000 BC. I mean, that predates ancient Babylonia. Yeah. Or at least what we know about it.

So turtles have been used in Native American culture forever. Yeah. Yeah. Survived a lot of extinction events.

That's an ox scapula and turtle shell.

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

Why is the wild one worth more.

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

I don't know if it actually works.

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

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

Turtle farms in China.

And this is all just for pets?

No, this is for consumption. You'll pay $20,000. Now, there's turtles—

Wait a minute, $20,000? $100,000 for consumption?

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

They wanna eat it.

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

So these are these turtle farms. Yeah, but I'm not— And this is all for like turtle soup?

Yeah, but these are softshell 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 softshell turtles.

More? Is it just because it's rare? Oh, this guy, I know this guy.

Garden State Turtle, I know that guy in New Jersey. He's a good guy, Chris Leone. Well, 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. Okay, but why?

Explain the— why is it worth $20,000?

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

But where? Allegedly can cure cancer, right? Is there any false beliefs?

But you can see, $20 grand, $40 grand.

$20 grand, as high as $40 grand for a fucking turtle. Yeah. And to eat it.

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

So is it just because it's difficult to acquire that it's like a status thing? Thing? I— that it's worth $20,000 or $40,000?

Well, they're, they're very rare in the wild now, but they farm them. But they're very endangered. Uh, it's a critically endangered turtle. Um, 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. So when they're buying it for $20,000, they're buying it to try to save someone's life, or someone's sick, or they really want good health and their well- healthy.

Okay, so you could just get it just as like, yeah, a prophylactic turtle. You eat it for medicine to make sure you don't get sick. Something like that. Sounds insane though that it's $20,000 for a turtle. Yeah, but if you go—

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

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

Yeah, no, that's not— that's an American box turtle. That's not a— Or they're in a zoo, for example. So that's why— that's a turtle that's being shipped to— that's a US turtle from the East Coast coast that's being sold and, and smuggled to China and other parts of Asia. Because look how beautiful our turtles are in the US. God, that is a pretty turtle. Oh, you do have a photo of a Yunnan box turtle. It's just not the one there. That bland thing is a Yunnan box turtle.

That one above it? Yeah, that one that's kind of gray right there.

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

No, that one. That one. That one. That one could be worth—

that can be worth $200,000. Get him right. What? That turtle. That turtle was thought to be extinct for over half a century. That's a boring-ass turtle.

That other one that you're training him on now—

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

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

Yeah, that's a— that's a male Eastern box turtle. They always have red eyes. Yeah, it's so beautiful. Yeah, it's beautiful.

But solutions to the scarcity problem—

that's a male Eastern box turtle—

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

But what's important about this conversation actually is people think of ivory, rhino horn, you know, whales, and they have no idea that a turtle, pound for pound, could be more valuable than a rhino horn possibly. I had no idea. Nobody knows this, but it's crazy what the money involved in these, back to the confiscations we're getting, and the trade in turtles going out of this country, is in the millions and millions and millions and millions And there are people in China and other parts of Asia that are getting very rich in the turtle trade. And we always hear about pangolin scales, rhino horn, 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 'cause a turtle doesn't need to eat or drink. Just wrap them in socks, put them in a box, shove them all in there, put them in diapers, tape them up, ship them.

They don't even need much air.

They 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 transport them, transport them.

And if they're really worth $20,000 to $40,000, putting that in your bag.

Yeah. And they really are—

they really are worth it.

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

Well, no, the turtles that are leaving this country going to China are for exotic pets. But the ones that they're eating. Yeah, the ones that are eating.

Yeah. That it's worth $20,000. That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. At least. Is there a market for snake meat? Yeah.

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

You wanna talk about diarrhea. What kind of diarrhea you get from snake blood?

I was, many years ago— Oh my God. I was in Myanmar, in Burma, at a snake place, and they were just loading snakes up in these trucks, like, you know, big trucks, just stacking snakes, and they were heading into China. So the snake meat, the snake—

Snake meat is big in China.

You know, look, tiger penis, tiger this, tiger bones. Hold on, back it up. Tiger parts.

Look it up. Tiger penis? Tiger penis. Tiger penis is a big delicacy over there?

I think they're more creative than we are.

They eat a lot of stuff. That's a fact. Okay. But the tiger penis thing, I was not aware of. That's a delicacy?

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

So there's tiger farms that are just for consumption? Yeah, tiger bone wine, tiger this, tiger that. Tiger bone wine sounds like it's, uh, you know, no, but tigers—

what, Jamie?

It's like a rhino horn type deal, I think. I think that's giving them— yeah, it's believed to increase virility and enhance male sexual performance. Tiger phallus soup. One tiger penis.

But a turtle is worth more than a tiger, guys. That's crazy. Yeah, yeah.

And but I didn't know that there was a market for tiger meat. Yeah. And is it the all the meat of the tiger or just dicks?

There's just some chop away the right— Joe, I've been to the turtle farms, I've been to the snake bars, I haven't gotten into the 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 years ago. Yeah, he's on the run right —now.

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.

I did not know that there was a market for the meat. What is that, tiger dick? Yep. Nice. Not what I I thought it looked like. Crazy looking.

That looks like a nudibranch, a sea slug.

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

That's what it is. No, it looks like a piece of sushi.

Yeah, it 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? Listen, is that really common over there?

Even though I did Tiger King, I'm not an expert on tigers. Tigers. I do know a little bit more about reptiles, but I have a friend that did a movie called, uh, I think it's called— what's it called? Carl Amon did a movie about the tiger industry in Vietnam and far 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.

It's still illegal, but they're definitely still do it. Yeah, yeah, it's not like— yeah, interesting. Consumption of tiger meat is highly illegal, though an illicit black market persists, primarily fueled by commercial tiger farms. Despite strict domestic bans, thousands of tigers are bred in captivity across the country, creating a complex web of illegal luxury— luxury consumption is a crazy word. That's a crazy phrase. Luxury consumption of tiger meat. Traditional beliefs and international conservation concerns.

Well, it's, it's what you just said earlier that started this conversation, that people go to restaurants and eat exotic animals. And bear gallbladder. Bear gallbladder. But another thing that— wait, back to Monsters of God. Look up Chinese giant salamander farms. Those are unbelievable. That's a salamander this big that can eat, you know, like a rat or a rabbit. It's a salamander that they eat and farm in China.

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

And that's a really rare animal. That— those, those guys are really are very rare. Oh, really?

And yet they're still cooking them and eating them?

There's two types of giant salamanders. There's a Japanese giant salamander and a Chinese one. The Chinese one is massive. Can I see that? Is massive. And they're just—

What, Jamie? The one I stumbled down, it says it's AI, so I was—

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

the luxury consumption market, just seeing that phrase, It's like, what a weird culture. You have luxury consumption of highly illegal endangered species. And it's— 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 horns. Status symbol. Very wealthy people. Guy's got a rhino— you want some rhino horn tea? Let's have a sip.

You see, you got a gentleman come to my wine cellar, and in it I got some rhino horn, I got a couple turtles that were—

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

Well, first of all, an animal doesn't die, it's just wine. Yeah, you don't have tiger dick in your wine. What is the tiger bone wine? What is that about? I don't know. Is it wine they soak in bones of tigers? Sure, it's a barrel.

Is that what it is?

I mean, they have sake with vipers in them. There's a snake in Japan called a habu, and I remember getting sake and this really incredible snake was in my sake. 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.

Are they endangered? Tuna? Yeah, endangered.

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

not the same numbers that they used to be at the turn of the century.

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— not you and me.

We shouldn't say we— people, people, people that lived here. It's not us.

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

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

Yeah, well, you're a good guy, and I know that actually. You somehow— you didn't have that— maybe the mother I had, but you must have had something good.

What, with my love of animals?

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

Well, certainly eating tiger dick. I think there's better ways to go about your life, but the recovery stuff is real, you know.

There's a lot of cool stuff happening with species recovery. 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— for a long while. That's expensive. That's expensive. You know, anti-poaching and security.

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

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

Work oftentimes. Oh no, you do a terrible job.

Yeah, I mean, especially when we bring in—

we were talking about this yesterday with Hawaii, how they brought in mongoose to eat the rats, but mongoose are diurnal, rats are nocturnal.

We never saw each other. Yeah, Hawaii, it's funny you say Hawaii because Hawaii is kind of the poster child of all the states in the country of extinction. Second is California, but Hawaii, it really We really fucked up Hawaii with cats. Mongoose 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.

Reading, a very similar thing happened with the salamanders in China. They were not originally thought of as anything special until the mid-20th century when famine forced people to find new stuff to eat, they started eating them and liked it, so they made a lot of places to do that. Oh, and that's what led them to— well, so then they reintroduced them back into the wild because there was too many of them, which created a new problem. It says there you go, they created a new species. So now you have hybrid salamanders, which is also like what we have that here in Austin.

Oh yeah, it's the same story over and over again.

What do these fuckers look like? Look at that thing. Whoa, can I see photos of a giant salamander? They are so massive.

They're so massive. Look at the size of that thing.

There's a bunch of videos of guys cooking them in woks outdoors. Yeah. And so is that another thing where it's like one of those exotic things you're not supposed to have and that's why they're cooking it? Yeah. Because I mean, it looks— there's a funny one where a dude's singing. He's like rapping over it. The guy's cooking about a guy cooking a dragon. This is how you cook a dragon. Ah, yeah.

Yeah, they're pretty impressive.

But it is a weird desire that people have to eat something like incredibly exotic and rare. Whoa, look at that sucker. Yeah, that's a real one. Yeah, giant salamander cooked 8 ways. Yeah, in the— I don't know what that word is— Xiamen. Xiamen Seafood, China.

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

So these guys are taking them, they're alive, alive, and they're gonna bring them over and kill them and cook them. So this is an endangered animal? Yeah. That this guy's killing and cooking? Yeah. Yeah, it is. Wow, that's crazy.

But they breed them. But they sort of know it.

It's not by necessity.

They know it's endangered. Yeah. And he's still boiling it up. Yeah, yeah. So it's a— this— the fact that this luxury item that you get to eat, this luxury item. Yeah. Damn. What does it look like? Let's see what it looks like at the end. Kind of crazy. A lot of meat. Looks delicious. Yeah. Would you eat it if you were there, or would you feel bad?

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

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

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

I would only have— the only way I'd eat a dog is if it tried to bite one of my kids, you know. But if it's like dogs, it's different.

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. Sure, we have our own— yep, you know, sort of cultural norms about certain animals that we just can't wrap our head around, the ways we justify. 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 grocery store. Yeah, the way they, you know, and it's just what's normal in one culture. Those are snapping turtles, American snapping turtles.

What's normal. So have these been imported into Asia?

Yeah, they're big, and we still eat those, by the way. New Orleans and the Southeast, we eat snapping turtles. We eat them in gumbo. But in Asia, they really love our American turtles.

And snapping turtles are not endangered in America?

No, but alligator ping turtles are. Oh, those things are crazy looking.

Yeah, which is— they have this, um, which you have in Texas. They have what?

That's a little bait. They're an ambush predator. They have a little appendage on their tongue. Oh, fish is attractive. Video of them feeding is incredible. They got alligators. They're serving up alligators.

Crocodiles. Yeah, crocs. Jesus Christ, that wild. Imagine just hanging out there, watch his buddies get butchered.

You're good at finding gruesome stuff over there. I mean, there's a lot out there. You're gonna really gross out a lot of people.

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

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

Right.

But these last 3 big ones that you guys did are all about people and their bizarre relationship with strange animals. Yeah. What else? What's next?

I mean, we're doing a really interesting project right now that should come out next year that I think you'll like, Joe. I have to say, there are big carnivores in it again and some really far-out people that you know and you may have known personally.

Personally.

I don't think I can tell you who they are, but they were very famous. Anyway, but we're doing a project about that. And we're doing—

What a tease you are.

I know. That was a— No, it's coming. You're feeding into the tease too.

I had too much coffee. Sorry. Yeah. And then we're really interested in a few other topics that people don't really talk about. We always talk about the charismatic megafauna. And we're interested in some of the groups of animals that we don't even think think about.

But it's also, I mean, this, 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, it's a shame, especially, you know, some of this independent work, especially some of this documentary work. Um, 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, right? So I think our formula is great. It happens 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 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 prime, you know.

Maybe there's something to the overfishing thing to do, because there's been a lot of—

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

I like Seaspiracy.

The problem with a lot of those traditional documentaries, they tend to preach to— the tone is boring. Well, they tend to preach to the converted, not the unconverted, and you want to reach a bigger audience by somehow telling that story about overfishing in a where you can get more people seeing it that don't know the issue. And the other thing I would just say, 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 don't breed. Saltwater tropical fish. Freshwater ones typically do. There's a lot of different groups of animals that we don't really think about and talk about that we kind of take for granted, and we think of them as disposable. You know, we'll just put more tropical fish in our aquarium in a Vegas hotel.

And imagining de-extinction businesses are gonna solve our problems. I think that's also interesting to us.

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

Your friend's carport. Yeah, you know. 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. And disturbed me as well. Um, so it's available, Monsters of God, on— when, when does it come out? Tomorrow. Tomorrow. So when this comes out?

Uh, August 6th. August 6th.

All right, beautiful. Thank you for having us again. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Bye, everybody.