#2203 - Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride

[0] Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

[1] The Joe Rogan Experience.

[2] Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[3] Gentlemen, thank you for being here.

[4] Please introduce yourselves.

[5] Eric, good.

[6] Jeremy McBride.

[7] And you got, did you guys both do Tiger King as well?

[8] Yeah, I mean, I kind of came in towards a tail end.

[9] I remember meeting you about this.

[10] Keep this close to your face.

[11] Okay.

[12] Yeah.

[13] You can scoot your, it moves and stuff.

[14] Yeah, I met Eric kind of towards a tail end of filming Tiger King.

[15] Yeah, that was kind of the first experience I had with you.

[16] You guys, like, struck lightning with that because it came right at the pandemic, where everyone's locked at home, and everyone was like, what the fuck is going on with these guys?

[17] Yeah, captive cats and captive audience.

[18] And just crazy people.

[19] And then your new show, Chimp Crazy, is like.

[20] basically all in the same vein.

[21] And it is so odd how nutty these animal people are, these people that have captive animals at their home.

[22] It's such a bizarre.

[23] I would like to see like a psychologist, like a clinical psychologist do an examination of what type of personality wants to have these enormous wild animals captive in their homes.

[24] Yeah.

[25] No, for sure.

[26] It's incredible.

[27] And of course, that's what interests us because, you know, I'm an animal guy, but, you know, you have to have interesting people to tell a good story.

[28] Well, we are animals.

[29] That's the weird part about it.

[30] We're this bizarre animal that likes to keep animals in cages.

[31] And some people think we should have been in the same genus as eight.

[32] Yeah.

[33] You know, but of course there's something called religion and dominion.

[34] And of course, you know, we're not animals.

[35] We're not apes.

[36] Well, we certainly are.

[37] I mean, those people, they still believe in religion, but, you know, the reality of observable science is also there.

[38] So unfortunately, you know, we're just a weird animal.

[39] We're the fucking weirdest ones.

[40] But the show Chimp Crazy, I just finished episode three last night and we got to number four.

[41] and my daughter wanted to watch number four.

[42] I'm like, I don't think I could do it.

[43] I was so bummed out after episode three.

[44] I was like, oh, my God.

[45] I mean, I want to give away anything for people who haven't watched the series yet.

[46] I highly recommend it.

[47] It's really fucking good.

[48] But episode three, man, it's like, it's like there's something about, first of all, this is one of the rare times when I'm fully with PETA.

[49] When you're, you know, it's like, when you side with pita on things it's like you know like this is this has got to be an egregious example of something absolutely horrific and um you know the one situation where the woman who was a drunk kept the chimp and then it attacked her daughter and the whole thing it was like at the end of the show it's like oh my god i don't know if i could keep doing this yeah no it's interesting you mentioned pita because i'm not fully aligned with pita on a number of things but in this case I am aligned with PETA, but just a touch on PETA, you know, I work with reptiles and I try to save turtles and tortoises, which actually are the most endangered group of animals along with primates.

[50] Turtles and tortoises, really?

[51] If you think about the percentage that are on the brink of extinction, over half of primates are on the brink of extinction and over half of turtles and tortoises.

[52] I have no idea.

[53] But where I am not aligned with PETA is when you have to.

[54] to make a choice between, you know, eradicating a rat that's killing off the last colopagus tortoises or eradicate a mongoose that was introduced that's killing off, you know, an iguana in the Caribbean.

[55] I will make that choice.

[56] PETA basically views it as the rat has rights just as much as the tortoise.

[57] And I'd like to have the tortoise around for future generations.

[58] So I'm not always aligned with PETA, but in this case, yes.

[59] Well, they have a background with the Animal Liberation Organization, which essentially doesn't think that any animals should be captive.

[60] And I do understand their point.

[61] But then you have Carl.

[62] How is Carl going to not have an owner?

[63] How's little Carl over there not going to be fed?

[64] Do you want French bulldogs to go extinct?

[65] Because they will.

[66] They can't even breed.

[67] If you did a poll and asked how many people at...

[68] Pete that keep dogs, it's like 95%.

[69] Which is crazy.

[70] So it's a little hypocritical if they don't want people to have pets.

[71] Well, you know, it's one of those things.

[72] It's like the, how it starts and how it's going.

[73] You know, like where did it start from?

[74] You know, it start.

[75] And I see their, look, all dogs are a horrible misjustice that's been done to wolves.

[76] Like we somehow or another, we have become friends with wolves and turned them.

[77] into these strange things.

[78] But the reality of life in 2024 is we have dogs, you know, and dogs need owners and they love you and they, it's a great relationship.

[79] But it's in their genetics, right?

[80] They've been...

[81] Thousands of thousands of years.

[82] Right.

[83] It's like saying that we should be going back to chimps.

[84] We should live in the jungle.

[85] We should live in trees.

[86] Which is also crazy.

[87] What is it, Erica?

[88] Chimps are more like chimps and we are human.

[89] Chimps are closer to us than they are gorillas because we are the sub -family of chimpanzees which are called hominems and yes chimpanzees are closer closely related to us more than any other ape yeah yeah but it's you know back to what you said a minute ago about making these movies I just want to touch on you know why we do this because a lot of people miss the point of Tiger King even um there's a point yeah there's a point I think I missed it well we We were really trying to get Joe Exotic Elected President.

[90] That was the point.

[91] No, but the point was that a lot of docs, man, are great, and they are really informative, but they preach to the converted.

[92] People that already know the issue, you know, like the Cove, and they're great.

[93] Right.

[94] And, you know, what we wanted to do is preach to people that don't know about the issues.

[95] So you had to cast, you had to get a lot of eyeballs on it to make a difference, right?

[96] Right.

[97] So that was sort of the goal of both Tiger King and Jim.

[98] crazy in the end.

[99] Well, I think you definitely did that.

[100] I mean, I had a joke in one of my earlier comedy specials about Texas and tigers.

[101] And I don't know the statistics, but there's more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the wild of the world in private collections.

[102] We were just talking about that.

[103] In people's yards.

[104] Yeah.

[105] There's these wacky people that have fucking tigers in their backyards.

[106] Yeah.

[107] And there's a lot of, there's thousands of tigers in Texas that are in people's yards.

[108] yards.

[109] Yeah.

[110] Yeah, that's statistic.

[111] It's been going around for a long time.

[112] That may change.

[113] But yes, they used to say there's more than 3 ,000 tigers in Texas, and there's less than 3 ,000 tigers in the wild.

[114] Yeah.

[115] They think there's 5 ,000 in Texas.

[116] Wow.

[117] Believe it.

[118] Well, you know, there's also other animals that are in Texas that are exotics like scimitar oryx, which is very rare in the wild and is in danger in the wild but is so common in Texas that you can hunt them.

[119] And they have them on these enormous ranches, you know, 30 ,000, 50 ,000 acres and they're wild, but they live wild.

[120] I don't have a problem with that.

[121] If they could figure out a way to actually ensure that tigers could be kept in a 60 ,000 acre preserve and, you know, you had adequate funding to where the fences were completely monitored every day to make sure that they don't get out and kill people.

[122] You're talking about a different thing.

[123] But what you're mostly getting is small enclosures of tortured animals who are fed cold meat.

[124] And that is not what they want.

[125] It's not what nature intended them.

[126] They're the cleanup crew.

[127] They're everything that has a limp, anything that's slow.

[128] They keep populations down.

[129] They make sure there's not an overpopulation problem of undulates.

[130] That's what tigers do.

[131] That's what they do in the wild.

[132] And so all of their instincts, everything, their essence of their being is all stifled by being captive.

[133] You know, we were talking about giraffes.

[134] They're the only animal that I don't have a problem with at the zoo.

[135] Because they're so chill.

[136] They're so chill.

[137] Babies feed them.

[138] When my daughters were young, we'd take them to the zoo.

[139] And you could hold a piece of lettuce.

[140] And the giraffe with his giant fucking head that's like as big as this table would come over and gently take the lettuce with their tongue and we're so confident that they have no aggression towards people that we allow little babies to feed giraffes.

[141] Drafts don't seem to have a problem at the zoo.

[142] They seem to be totally relaxed with it.

[143] But there's a lot of animals where it's nothing but torture.

[144] Yeah, yeah.

[145] For sure.

[146] And I think it's incredible that in the day that we live in, in 2024, that in the consciousness of the, you know, the culture, that we still keep certain animals in zoos that really are miserable.

[147] You know, those are things like, you know, the whales and cetaceans and elephants are not happy in zoos and monkeys.

[148] And most primates are not happy in zoos.

[149] And yes, and I think there are animals that lend themselves more, I'd like to say, to being in captivity.

[150] Yeah, like giraffes.

[151] I think giraffes is the only example.

[152] Yeah, or a giant tortoise maybe.

[153] Yeah, that's a good example too.

[154] Solitary animals.

[155] Solitary animals.

[156] Well, even just animals that just don't, they're just happy that there's no predators.

[157] Sure.

[158] And then they're relaxed.

[159] Yeah.

[160] But the last time I went to a zoo, my daughters were, they were younger, but not like babies.

[161] And we were in Denver.

[162] And I was there for a gig, and we went to the zoo.

[163] and oh man to this day it haunts me there's this primate enclosure and this one monkey was just screaming just screaming like in agony like being tortured just just holding out to the bars and screaming because he was by himself and just the this tiny little cage and there was nowhere to go and people just staring at him all day and he was just losing his fucking mind.

[164] I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore.

[165] I can't.

[166] Because I felt super hypocritical because I've always had like an issue, because it's animal prison.

[167] It's animal prison for animals that did nothing wrong.

[168] You know, I was at the Singapore Zoo once, which is a good zoo for zoos in Asia.

[169] It's one of the best zoes, maybe the best zoo, along with the Taipei Zoo.

[170] But there was a polar bear at the Singapore zoo, you know, this is like 95 % humidity, 90 degrees.

[171] and it was green because it was covered in a film of algae.

[172] Oh.

[173] So the polar bear was literally a green.

[174] And you just say to yourself, like, there's just, you know, if you have a zoo in Alaska, you can maybe have a polar bear, but Phoenix, Arizona, Singapore.

[175] But even if you have a zoo in Alaska, polar bears are the one bear that does need anything but animals.

[176] So polar bears are extraordinarily predatory and they have hunting instincts.

[177] So all day, they just want to roam and hunt.

[178] And I was, when I used to, I drove limos for a while, and I had this gig once in New Hampshire, and I was on my way home, and I stopped just because I had to do this job where I dropped somebody off.

[179] It was a few hours away.

[180] And on the way back, I got lunch, and I saw this zoo.

[181] So let me just check this zoo out.

[182] And I went to the zoo.

[183] There was this little shitty zoo in, like, somewhere in, I think it was in Massachusetts.

[184] and there was this polar bear in this tiny little enclosure just going in circles like he was fucking crazy just going in circles tiny little enclosure and I was like what is that why is this okay like what is what what is this this is not a life this is terrible it's terrible we um with this current there's another project we've been working on for equal time to chimp crazy and you've been spending more time in over 10 years, which loosely covers the exotic animal wildlife trade, international wildlife trade.

[185] And through that interest, we've had this incredible opportunity to explore all of these, you know, moral truths about American zoos.

[186] For us, one thing that was so deeply fascinating, and there's something like 242 accredited zoos in this country, 750 million people visit zoos annually, which is more than the five major sporting events combined.

[187] Wow.

[188] The way in which zoos function, it's like the 80 -20 rule, there's five or ten that contribute the majority of the income that cover most of the zoos.

[189] And they run like entertainment complexes, like amusement parks.

[190] And very little money goes back into conservation.

[191] And now, there's a lot of zoos that are doing great stuff.

[192] And I think the things that we're learning about is the educational value of zoos for kids is no longer as what they intended it to be.

[193] I think there's great things that they do.

[194] But there's nothing proven around, you know, zoos are educational facilities for.

[195] Well, what really rocked zoos was the film Blackfish.

[196] And they suddenly went, wait a minute, the public doesn't like us.

[197] And they started putting into effect all these kind of new programs for animal welfare.

[198] and particularly for bears, like polar bears, like what you just mentioned, and they have a new word, it's not so new anymore, called enrichment, which means that you give a bear something to do.

[199] So it doesn't do what you were just saying.

[200] You put their food in ice, so they have to work to get it out.

[201] You put their food in a ball.

[202] You make them have to do things.

[203] But, you know, that was the big shake -up for zoos in terms of animal welfare.

[204] And now, you know, of course, it's still evolving.

[205] and zoos are scared when they see Tiger King and even Chimp Crazy.

[206] But Joe's daughters, grandkids, we'll still see orcas at SeaWorld.

[207] Do you think so?

[208] Yeah, I mean, because the...

[209] Well, they live a long time.

[210] They live a long time.

[211] And the Sea world, you know, maybe not granddaughters, but...

[212] Okay, but I say it more, I'm, you know, I have little boys of a four -year -old and a one -year -old.

[213] And I think it's particularly interesting to kind of go through this experience because they're obsessed with animals.

[214] and you're kind of educating them on these kind of moral issues surrounding animals, the anthropomorphic characters that are created to describe the feelings and where they should live and how they should feel.

[215] And kids relate with them in some form of a bridge to humanity, I believe.

[216] And we, you know, you ask this fundamental question when you go to the zoo, hey, where did all the animals come from?

[217] No one really begs to think that question.

[218] Well, where he's going right now is sort of a big part of our, our next documentary, which is about, you know, the illegal animal trade, but also zoos were complicit in that for a very long time, maybe still.

[219] So, anyway, sort of going.

[220] Yeah, no, sorry.

[221] But the zoo thing, I mean, you're into, you get emotional on this.

[222] And I, what's really cool about this kind of medium that we're in, you know, we have access to all these, all this information and all these people over large decades of work in conservation and zoos and PETA.

[223] and legislation, laws, it's really encourage, I just love the idea of synthesizing this information to a point in today's context, which is, yeah, it's, when you go to a zoo, no one seems to ask where the animals comes from.

[224] You know, it is a very, you know, simple idea that many people miss the point of when they go there.

[225] Now, I'm not anti -Zoo totally either, you know, and I have no real position or credibility to also suggest that, but I do think I'm interested in asking those questions of what we can do to make these institutions better.

[226] Yeah.

[227] I mean, for sure they should be bigger.

[228] I mean, there should be a size requirement.

[229] There should be, you should have to have a certain amount of acres for each individual species so that they don't, like we were talking about the chimp enclosure at the LA Zoo, they bite each other's fingers off.

[230] And they need space.

[231] You know, they need space and they need activities.

[232] And ideally, what we should do is emulate their wild existence.

[233] But then you have this moral question of are we are we going to let goats in into the tiger cage and just let them sort it out because that's really what they want.

[234] Yeah.

[235] You know, what lions want to do is chase down a will to beast and eat it.

[236] And instead what we do is we slide a tray underneath their cage and that's torture for them.

[237] It really is.

[238] It's torture for them to have an enclosed space where it's small.

[239] It's torture for them to not be able to express their natural instincts.

[240] I mean, there's It's one thing if you're talking about something like the thylacine, right, where they kept them in captivity and the last known survivors and you had this thing and like, wow, now we have video of this thing and now it doesn't exist anymore.

[241] So the zoos were like the last hope to try to keep this thing from going extinct.

[242] And it may not be extinct.

[243] There's a lot of hope.

[244] Yeah, Seed banks.

[245] Yeah, the Tasmanian tiger.

[246] It was an eerie footage of the last ones.

[247] Yeah, they think there might actually be living specimens that are alive.

[248] And, you know, there's, well, in this state, they're bringing them.

[249] I know, you know, Forrest Galant.

[250] Yeah, I was just about to bring up forest.

[251] I also have colleagues that have gone looking for thylacines in the highlands in New Guinea.

[252] So far, yeah, people anecdotically say, yes, there might be a thylosine.

[253] But it's unlikely, but there might be.

[254] Well, they're very hard to find.

[255] I mean, like, try finding a wolverine.

[256] You know, there's, wolverine populations are pretty healthy, but good luck finding one.

[257] They're very, very, very difficult to find.

[258] unless you spend an enormous amount of time alone in the bush.

[259] Yeah, good point.

[260] So, and then you're dealing with thylosines.

[261] You're dealing with a very unpopulated area that's extremely hostile to people.

[262] But there are anecdotal sightings, and hopefully that thing does exist.

[263] And I would love for Forrest to be the guy who finds it because he spent so much time looking for it.

[264] But other than a dying species, I can't see a good argument for keeping these things.

[265] It used to be that a zoo existed before there was videos, right?

[266] So if you wanted to find out about a lion, you know, the only way a child could see a lion was to go to the zoo and go, oh, my God, that's a lion.

[267] Look at that.

[268] Look at that lion.

[269] And the kids are, and it is educational for children.

[270] Yeah.

[271] But at what cost and are there better resources now?

[272] And I think video is a much better resource.

[273] It's much better to see lions in the wild.

[274] Yeah.

[275] No, no, I mean, of course, zoos were originally created just, it was like good civic planning, you know, 150, 200 years ago, like, you know, to have a park, a zoo, a library when you were building a city.

[276] So they were really just built as, you know, a good city needs to have a zoo, it's entertainment, and they weren't really designed to be, you know, have anything to do with conservation or anything to do with animal welfare.

[277] But yeah, today, like you mentioned, the oryx here in Texas, you know, there are species that have either gone what we call biologically extinct, which means that one animal can't find another, they're virtually extinct, or they are extinct in the wild, and zoos may offer some hope for those animals where they can put them into what's called assurance colonies and try to maintain genetically diverse groups in a zoo for the day that one day.

[278] day you can return it to the wild.

[279] You know, there's maybe a reason to have animals in captivity.

[280] How much success has there been in returning animals to the wild, though?

[281] Well, you know, where we live in California.

[282] But you just sit it with the eastern box turtle in the Jersey?

[283] No, no, no, back to, like, the example he's talking about is like California condors.

[284] California condors or blackfooted ferrets or animals that, you know, I mean, the, whatever it's called, there's an endemic horse that they've, done some work with.

[285] But yeah, it's, you know, much less than it should be, putting animals back into the wild that went extinct or when it virtually extinct, much less than it should be.

[286] Yeah, it should, I mean, it should be a priority.

[287] With certain animals specifically.

[288] Yeah.

[289] I'm trying to think of a really good success story of an animal that went back into the wild and it was really successful.

[290] California Condors, the problem is they've reintroduced them into the Great Grand Canyon.

[291] In Arizona, there was, when I was young in the 70s, there was maybe 28 of them left in the wild.

[292] They brought them into captivity.

[293] Today, there's probably hundreds in the wild, but at a very expensive price tag, because what made them go extinct in that case was the lead, bullets that, you know, kill a deer.

[294] The condor would eat the deer and then die from the lead.

[295] To use that example, there's just a lot of, management to keep them alive in the wild.

[296] I think there's some dispute about that.

[297] About whether or not it's the lead from the bullets that was killing them.

[298] I mean, that's what they say, but maybe...

[299] Yeah, I was reading something recently about that.

[300] It just doesn't make sense.

[301] It doesn't attribute to the...

[302] If you think about the number of animals that are shot with a bullet that aren't recovered, it's so small.

[303] Interesting, yeah.

[304] You know, that it doesn't make sense that it would be enough to kill off these animals, and there's probably some other factors that we are not considering.

[305] I believe that because a condor in a day, not to go off the charge on a condor in a day can travel 400 miles in the thermals looking for, you know, a carcass.

[306] Right.

[307] And I would suspect that, you know, the fact that there's just less carcasses out there might be part of it.

[308] I think that's the argument.

[309] I think the argument is there's less predators and there's less prey, right?

[310] So you have a decrease, you know, so like California, for example, like the, you have a fairly small deer population because you have so many animals that kill deer, right?

[311] So you have, California has a lot of coyotes and California has a lot of mountain lines.

[312] And there's a lot of people where I used to live in the hills that did not like coyotes.

[313] I'm like, do you like rats?

[314] Okay.

[315] Well, if you don't like rats, you should like coyotes.

[316] Yeah, don't leave your dog outside because your dog's going to get, you know, and my daughter's puppy got killed by a coyote, and I've had chickens killed by coyotes.

[317] But ranchers hate coyotes more than anything.

[318] And they kill fauns.

[319] They hate them.

[320] Yeah, they kill baby cows.

[321] They kill baby everything.

[322] That's just what they do, and that's their job.

[323] You know, but there's an ecosystem, and that's a part of the ecosystem.

[324] And what's really unnatural is ranching.

[325] But they're forever, forever.

[326] However, there was a bounty on coyotes where if you brought in two ears, you got like a buck.

[327] And people would bring in 100 sets of ears and get $100.

[328] I mean, they were vilified.

[329] When I grew up in California, the ranchers next to us, which are sheep ranchers because sheep are dumb and coyotes can get sheep easier than, you know, calves.

[330] They would trap the coyote with those, you know, those horrible traps.

[331] They'd pour gasoline on them.

[332] They'd light them on fire and let them run off burning.

[333] I mean, they hate coyotes, which is really unfair.

[334] Well, they're cool.

[335] You know, they're just not cool if they eat your cat.

[336] Yeah.

[337] But they're a fascinating animal.

[338] I mean, I remember when I first saw them, I moved to California in 94, and I was staying at a, do you know what the Oakwood Gardens are?

[339] It's like those pre -theirnished apartments that you just rent, like, people that are sort of transient just moving in.

[340] They allow you to, like, have a place before you get a place.

[341] And I was driving, so it was in Burbank.

[342] And I was driving down the street and I was like, who are these fucking dogs?

[343] Like, what are these dogs running around?

[344] And then I drove up like, I had never seen a coyote before.

[345] Oh, wow.

[346] I was like, that's a coyote?

[347] Oh, my God, there's coyotes on the streets.

[348] And that was pretty rare then.

[349] But 30 years later, it became insanely common.

[350] I would rarely go, I lived in a fairly rural area where I lived in California.

[351] I lived about an hour outside the city and I had a lot of acres.

[352] And it was cool to live out there.

[353] You experience a lot of wildlife, and I saw coyotes almost every day, almost every day.

[354] Yeah, they look like a mangy, motley, skinny dog.

[355] Yeah, but they're cool.

[356] There's something cool about coyotes.

[357] But the reality of coyotes, I don't know if you know why they're so successful, but one of the reasons why is because they're the only, so red wolves can interbreed with coyotes and that you get the coy wolf.

[358] But gray wolves do not breed with coyotes.

[359] They just killed them.

[360] And so because the gray wolf, which lived in California and lived all over the West Coast, was the predominant predator.

[361] The coyotes had to develop a way of surviving.

[362] And the adaptation was when they call out, when they yell out in the night and they're trying to do roll call and figure out how many guys are around, when one is missing, the female will have a change to a reproductive system where she will develop more pups.

[363] and then they will expand their territory.

[364] So because they were persecuted by wolves, they expanded their territory.

[365] So now when people came in and started killing off the wolves, which they did successfully, but they were never able to kill off coyotes because of this trait.

[366] So coyotes are now in every single city in the United States.

[367] This was not the case just 30 years ago.

[368] They're what we call, there's a word for that, it's called subsidized predators.

[369] And these are animals that do better.

[370] around man and crows are one of those animals raccoons are one of them coyotes and they're weirdly can do thrive and do better around you know human activity yeah than a lot of other animals and so coyotes are one of those because of garbage yeah because of garbage because of water we bring in water in arid areas and so they're highly adaptable um creature yeah and just for the gate party behind my house they're cool they're cool they're they make the eerieous noise together they they caught something yeah but you know I'm sure you've seen that video from Woodland Hills where this man was unloading his car and a coyote came and snatched his toddler like right in front of them it's hard they're fucking predators right and you have to be careful little things and little people and animals will get eaten by them and that is what they do like dingoes in Australia do that right right right dingo ain't my body Yeah.

[371] There's, you know, there's no doubt that we live in complex ecosystems and we do not like the idea of them.

[372] We've developed these bizarre establishments called cities.

[373] And in these cities, we have removed ourselves from nature.

[374] And, you know, if you go to the mountains of Colorado, people are well aware of mountain lions.

[375] They're well aware of bears.

[376] They have to lock their garbage up.

[377] They have to, they have like a neighborhood email list where they talk about like bears broken this guy's car.

[378] Everybody's on the look, but they understand they're living in this system.

[379] They're living in this ecosystem.

[380] Most people in the United States that live in urban areas have no idea that they're in an ecosystem because we've essentially done some very bizarre stuff and isolated ourselves from nature, which is one of the reasons why we have this strange idea that we are not animals and that we are not a part of nature.

[381] Yeah.

[382] You know, it's it's just weird.

[383] It's weird.

[384] We're fucking weird.

[385] We're weird in our justifications.

[386] We're weird in what we allow ourselves to do.

[387] Yeah, that's back to the chimpanzees.

[388] That was one of the things that I just couldn't ever, you know, I couldn't ever connect with this woman, Tanya, that kept this chimp and tried to explain to her, you know, that we are chimps, you know, effectively.

[389] And, you know, and she just, you know, took the page.

[390] out of, you know, Genesis, where she just said, you know, I'm not, you know, we're not animals.

[391] This is an animal and I can own it, like property.

[392] Anyway, that was just one of the things, she just never really fully understood.

[393] Well, to be kind, she's not bright.

[394] You know, she's not a bright woman, not a well -read woman, you know, unfortunately.

[395] And this seems to be part of the theme of all these folks, which is weird, you know.

[396] And then you've got the one guy in Tiger King that's essentially running like a little sex cult, right?

[397] That guy.

[398] Doc Antle.

[399] Yeah.

[400] And then you've got the Tiger King himself.

[401] You got Joe Exotic, who is also kind of running estranged little sex cult.

[402] But, you know, he's just got all this personality.

[403] And he's so interesting and fascinating.

[404] And if he wasn't in jail, it's really unfortunate, you know, because if he wasn't in jail, he'd be a very popular person.

[405] seen the show.

[406] Can you imagine if he was?

[407] Well, he's trying to get Donald Trump to exonerate him and pardon him.

[408] I mean, he was constantly, after I had talked about Tiger King, I get messages from that guy.

[409] I don't know how he's giving me messages.

[410] I'm assuming it's someone who works for him.

[411] Yeah.

[412] But I get messages all the time.

[413] Like, you've got to help get him out, put him on your podcast, do this, do that.

[414] Well, he also has communication in jail.

[415] He gets a, some how he's able to get his phone.

[416] He's doing video calls and stuff.

[417] Well, you know how it goes.

[418] But there was a moment.

[419] There was a moment when we were filming this kind of like second installment of Tiger King where we covered this pardon, the presidential pardon.

[420] There's a real shot where Joe was actually on a list, supposedly, that Trump was going to like a kind of.

[421] It's hilarious.

[422] So I don't remember exactly what the specifics of.

[423] his accusation so was he caught trying to hire someone to whack that lady yeah what so he was twice yeah you know and that lady is there any truth to this idea that she whacked her husband carol baskin um there's a lot of circumstantial i wouldn't say maybe evidence but there's sort of who else it's not clean who else and and it was either It feels as if it was her or members of her family, and they were the only ones to gain.

[424] And so, yeah.

[425] And what a great way to dispose of a body.

[426] Uh -huh.

[427] I mean, I don't know how she disposed of the body.

[428] It's nice to...

[429] Well, you have meat grinders on premises, and you have enormous predators.

[430] You know, but...

[431] On premises, and you feed them a tiger.

[432] Don't you think the only thing I would say, Eric, is the circumstances surrounding the change in the will.

[433] I mean, who alters it to...

[434] account for disappearance.

[435] Upon my disappearance.

[436] Yeah, it's a very, very strange.

[437] No one says that, yeah.

[438] And it's really like a disparity in the handwriting as well?

[439] Yeah, we did handwriting experts.

[440] We did the entire thing to prove otherwise.

[441] It's also just when she talks about it.

[442] You know, but Joe, back to Joe Exotic, you know, I was on the phone with him a lot up until he was convicted, you know, from prison.

[443] And he just was convinced he was going to be exonerated and, you know, not convinced.

[444] convicted.

[445] And they offered him.

[446] The feds offered him a deal, which was something like six or seven years.

[447] You know, you can plea or you can go to court.

[448] He'd probably be out by now.

[449] Yeah.

[450] I was just going to say he'd be out now.

[451] And so he was so convinced that he was going to win, which is so delusional.

[452] But, yeah, poor Joe would be out right now had he made that deal.

[453] By the way, how crazy is that that you could plot to kill somebody and let you out in four years?

[454] Like, I know you've been locked up with a bunch of murderers and thieves, but I'm sure you're a better person now.

[455] Yeah, yeah.

[456] Well, it's plot and then intent, you know, paying someone to go do something.

[457] Right, right.

[458] There's quite a few steps involved.

[459] But yes, Joe's now pro -Trump again.

[460] He was pro -Biden when Trump didn't.

[461] Because he was trying to get Biden to pardon him?

[462] They wouldn't touch that with a 10 -foot pole, but Trump might, especially this time around, just for fun.

[463] Well, let's hope Tanya doesn't go to prison.

[464] I don't wish that on Tanya.

[465] I haven't seen episode four, so I don't know.

[466] But when you guys were, filming again spoiler or please if you're watching the series stop right now and scoot ahead by a few minutes when they found that Tonka was in the basement and when I saw their film when you guys are filming it I was like Jesus Christ this lady is so crazy she's showing everybody I know she's she has I know with all due respect she just does not seem like a smart person And she's almost like, if you gave her an IQ test, and then gave a chimp an IQ test, it'd be a toss -up.

[467] You know, I mean, I think that's part of the problem.

[468] I don't think this lady understands the consequences of what she's doing, just like she doesn't understand how crazy her eyelashes look.

[469] You know, like all of it is just there's some fuses that are missing, some wires that aren't connected.

[470] And then because of the fact that at one point in time, at least, it was illegal for her to do what she was doing.

[471] And they become accustomed to being able to have.

[472] And then their identity revolves around they're the person that has all the monkeys and all the chimpanzees.

[473] It's just fucking weird.

[474] Well, it's still legal.

[475] It is still?

[476] It's still legal.

[477] I thought they changed it.

[478] No, there's no federal law preventing ownership of chimpanzees.

[479] You can own a fucking chimps still?

[480] There's 20 or so states legally you can do it.

[481] Oh, my God.

[482] Missouri is one of them.

[483] Oh, my God.

[484] But, you know, background, we spent about five.

[485] four years making this documentary series.

[486] First of all, how'd you start?

[487] How do you find out about these people?

[488] Yeah, go ahead.

[489] After Tiger King, how do you get anybody to talk to you on camera?

[490] I've done a lot of animal people, Joe, but I did not know about monkey moms.

[491] And along the course of making Tiger King, I started filming some monkey moms.

[492] I mean, like, as you see in Jim Crazy, you just can't make them up.

[493] And so after Tiger King, I just thought, you know, let's scratch the surface.

[494] Let's check into these monkey moms again.

[495] Yeah.

[496] And so, you know, it's these women that dress up their monkeys like dolls, like Jombay Ramsey, like a little pageant doll.

[497] And they want them to be kids.

[498] And they seem to have the same pathology over and over and over.

[499] There's a lot of monkey moms out there that we did not film.

[500] And they have annually something called a monkey ball where they all come to together with their monkeys.

[501] Anyway, we discovered them in the course of making Tiger King, and...

[502] Yeah, well, my grandmother had a monkey.

[503] Yeah, we hear the story a lot.

[504] She kept in the attic.

[505] Really?

[506] Yeah, monkey's name was Chi -Chi, and Chi -Chi used to eat gum.

[507] So you'd give Chi -Chi a piece of gum.

[508] Chi -Ci would unwrap the gum and put the gum in his mouth or her mouth.

[509] I don't remember as a boy or girl.

[510] Do you know what kind of monkey?

[511] I do not.

[512] I was very small.

[513] I was very young at the time, and I remember she had to get rid of it because it bit my cousin.

[514] Well, that's what happens.

[515] Yeah.

[516] But Chi -Chi couldn't be around anybody other than my grandmother.

[517] My grandmother was very eccentric.

[518] Yeah, and they're territorial and they're protective of their owner.

[519] So, you know, when I was young in the 70s, 60s, 70s, 80s, you could buy a monkey in virtually any pet store across the United States.

[520] Oh, my God.

[521] And thank God, people realize, like your grandmother, they're not good pets.

[522] They could buy them in the newspaper.

[523] Yeah, and they're not good pets.

[524] I think my grandmother, after her kids were grown, she just decided she wanted a kid forever, you know, if I had a guess.

[525] Wow.

[526] Yeah, if I had a guess.

[527] Yeah, that's our kind of consensus on a lot of it.

[528] Also, a kid that doesn't talk back.

[529] Yeah.

[530] It's a great book you'd love.

[531] It's by this guy who had a store in New York, Henry Treflik.

[532] It's called They Don't Talk Back.

[533] And it's these kind of chronicles of his experiences, you know, through the last, you know, it was a basic 40 -7.

[534] Exotic animal dealership that existed up until the 70s in New York City, but they had everything.

[535] Chimps, gorillas, elephants, and they sold stuff to the private sector and zoos.

[536] I mean, you could walk into a wolverth, right, and buy monkeys.

[537] They still, to this day, catch people with large animals in their apartments in New York City.

[538] Like, wasn't there one real recently where a guy had a large reptile?

[539] Venomous snakes, yeah.

[540] Was it snakes?

[541] The venomous snake bite, Eric?

[542] some guy well there's one that one guy I think it was in Harlem who had a tiger in that's crazy yeah yeah yeah and that there's a crazy image of the cops going up the fire escape and the tiger's in the window yeah and you see the tiger bearing its fangs and the ningo that glass is that fucking thin man that it's so crazy this thing is trapped in this like regular apartment with regular glass yeah like at any moment the only thing keeping that thing out is it doesn't know that they could just smash that and get on that fire escape and just go run through the streets.

[543] Yeah.

[544] Yeah, yeah, crazy.

[545] Yeah, it's crazy.

[546] Yeah.

[547] But the bizarre thing is that there's humans that want those.

[548] They want those.

[549] Yeah.

[550] Yeah.

[551] I mean, the tiger thing is more of like kind of a macho thing, I think.

[552] Well, what about Carol then?

[553] She's a woman.

[554] Yeah, she's kind of an anomaly.

[555] You know, it's funny.

[556] But she liked the lesser known I interviewed Tippy Hendren, you know, in the course of doing all of this.

[557] And her, you know, Zanadu, it's called Shambala with all of her cats, you know, and I know you've talked about this about Melanie Griffith growing up with lions.

[558] And that crazy movie Roar?

[559] Yeah.

[560] Oh, and that movie Roar.

[561] Oh, my God, that movie Roar.

[562] But, yeah, when I interviewed Tipi Hendren, literally on her property in California, she lives with all these tigers and lions, she built a museum for herself.

[563] So she's got her own museum, the Tippy Hendrenner Museum, where I interviewed her.

[564] But, yeah, there are some women, Tippy Hendron, Carol Baskin, but generally, generally speaking, I think it's more men, yeah.

[565] Well, I guarantee, if you go through the Texas private collections, it's a bunch of good old boys.

[566] Yeah, exactly.

[567] Believe that.

[568] Probably.

[569] Yeah, yeah.

[570] You know, got some oil money.

[571] You've got canned ranches in Texas.

[572] There's a lot of those.

[573] Yeah.

[574] There's a lot of canned ranches, which is very odd.

[575] And some of them are fairly small, like a couple hundred acres.

[576] Yeah.

[577] And they keep animals there.

[578] In my mind, what that is, is agriculture.

[579] Okay.

[580] It's just you're doing a different form of deer agriculture.

[581] You're not really hunting.

[582] You know, hunting to me is you go into the wild, you go into the woods, and you experience real nature.

[583] And it's fascinating.

[584] It's enthralling.

[585] There's something about, it's also so lonely.

[586] There's something about being in those mountains just puts you in check.

[587] None of that exists in a canned ranch.

[588] Yeah, canned ranch, you can go shoot, like in South Africa, a lion.

[589] Right.

[590] And the lion was raised in a kind of domestic situation.

[591] And recently released.

[592] Yeah, so it just sits there.

[593] Yeah.

[594] You know, there's no sport in it.

[595] Hunting in the United States, you know, for elk or deer, you know, there's a lot of things people don't know about hunting, which is, you know, one just obviously, obvious statistic is that, More wild lands are protected because of hunting.

[596] So, yeah, you're killing a deer, but you're protecting all the other stuff.

[597] Well, the amount of money, because of the Pittman -Robertson Act, the amount of money that gets, I think it's 10 % of all sales of outdoor activities gets donated towards wildlife preservation.

[598] This is the reason why we can have these enormous national forests where you have wildlife biologists establish what the healthy numbers of these animals are.

[599] and how many people can go hunt them.

[600] And they also know because you have to, say if you shoot a deer, you have to register that you shot the deer.

[601] You have a tag.

[602] They make sure that your tag is right.

[603] You got the right species.

[604] You got the right sex, the whole deal.

[605] And so they have a very accurate number of how many animals in there, and they spend a lot of money doing this.

[606] And these wildlife biologists do an absolutely incredible job.

[607] There's more white -tailed deer in this country right now than they were when Columbus landed.

[608] Wow.

[609] Part of that is because of agriculture.

[610] That's where it gets weird.

[611] So agriculture, particularly, I have a good buddy of mine who is, he's an archer, a professional archer, and he lives in Iowa, Iowa, rather.

[612] I always get those confused.

[613] In Iowa, it's all farmlands, right?

[614] And they have enormous deer, and they set these ranches up.

[615] He has a place that's like 600 acres.

[616] There's no fences, animals come and go.

[617] But they establish these food plots and they put these things in to make it a good place for deer to be so they can hunt them.

[618] So it's this weird sort of planned community.

[619] Sort of ethical bastardization of the wild, right?

[620] It's like dealing with the reality of what you have.

[621] You have untold thousands and thousands of monocrop agriculture acres.

[622] So thousands and thousands of acres of Monsanto corn.

[623] And they're all these deer thrive there.

[624] Because when they chop down the corn, they don't chop it all down.

[625] And, you know, these deer, they go in there after fresh feedings.

[626] They go there.

[627] You see them eating corn and they eat grass.

[628] There's grass everywhere.

[629] There's plenty and plenty of food.

[630] And a very low number of predators.

[631] Like, Iowa does not have a lot of, they don't have wolves.

[632] They don't have a lot of animals that would sort of balance out the population of these animals.

[633] And so you have insane amounts of car accidents.

[634] Like, when I was in, I went to visit my buddy there and just drive in.

[635] from the airport to his house, we saw like 50 fucking deer.

[636] And if you're going there around November, which is the rut, the men lose their mind.

[637] So the male deer, they're horny as hell, they're crazy, and the female are breeding.

[638] The female are running from the males and they're running right in the traffic, and the males are running after them, and they're running right into traffic.

[639] It's kind of nuts.

[640] It's a really nutty situation because it only exists because there's no predators.

[641] Wow.

[642] So if, like, California has this bizarre model, And what California would like, I mean, California is, I think, the only state that doesn't have a fish -in -game department.

[643] They have fish in wildlife.

[644] And so they treat it very differently.

[645] Instead of treating it as a renewable resource where people can go and get their own food and hunt animals in the wild, they treat it like we should have the animals take care of themselves.

[646] And so that's why it's illegal to kill a mountain lion in California, and they have a large number of mountain lions.

[647] It's probably underreported.

[648] I have mountain lions on my property all the time.

[649] They're dangerous.

[650] They're underreported.

[651] And they are a predator and they will kill people.

[652] And they have killed people.

[653] It's not often, but, you know, if you're on a bike, the problem with being on a bike is you're moving a little too quick and their instincts take over.

[654] They think you're trying to run from them and they can't even help themselves.

[655] It's like a kitten with a ball yarn and their instincts to clip in and they just go chasing after it.

[656] But I've seen mount lines in the wild.

[657] And it is a sobering, sobering moment.

[658] When you stare into the eyes at one of those things, you're like, whoa.

[659] What are you supposed to do?

[660] Well, you can't do much, man. Make a lot of noise.

[661] You're not supposed to run.

[662] You don't run.

[663] If you have a weapon, you should really have that weapon ready because they will jump you.

[664] Every now and then, they jump people.

[665] There's a crazy video.

[666] Yeah, well, I believe two people were killed last year in the Pacific Northwest.

[667] Of all the big cats, I think Jaguars kill the least people.

[668] Which is crazy.

[669] Which for some reason.

[670] But, well, they also live in the least populated areas.

[671] For the most part, yeah.

[672] At Mount Lions, yeah, of course they will kill someone, but, you know, typically they're not looking for people.

[673] Right.

[674] They're not looking for people.

[675] It's not like a tiger that, you know, has all its prey, you know, get trapped by, you know, the local people in India.

[676] They have to go out and try to find prey, and it's people oftentimes.

[677] And Jaguars have to, at this point in time, have realized that people have bows and arrows and beers and every now and then if you go after a person you can get jumped and you know so they probably like grizzly bears behave very differently in places where grizzly bears are hunted so in the lower 48 it's illegal to hunt grizzly bears so if they see you you know if you run into them in the wrong they're not going to run away they might run towards you especially if you surprise them it's very dangerous and that's why and they will treat you as food if they're really hungry you know you know But in the course of making Tiger King, I would interview people about tigers and what it's like keeping 100 tigers.

[678] And people would always say to me, I'd rather have 100 tigers than one chimp.

[679] And that's because chimps, you know, and everyone thinks, oh, a tiger is so dangerous.

[680] But chimps can figure shit out.

[681] And one of the chronic problems keeping chimps is that they can figure out how to escape.

[682] And so you can never use a combination lock because they'll sit there all day and figure it out.

[683] out.

[684] Oh, my God.

[685] And you've got to use, oftentimes, like, three layers of locks.

[686] And I'm just bringing it back to chips because, you know, people think, oh, it's a chimp.

[687] It's so cute.

[688] It's in the circus.

[689] Trust me, it's a lot easier to have a tiger act than a chimp act.

[690] Oh, I could imagine.

[691] And also, when I was watching this lady's enclosure, I was looking at the steel that's drilled into wood.

[692] And I'm like, I could get out of that.

[693] I could get out of the 100%.

[694] The way, the way that thing is bolted in.

[695] into the woods, all you have to do is kick that door enough.

[696] You kick that door hard enough, and that wood will give out.

[697] It's the wood that you're...

[698] It looks like you're encased in steel bars, but the steel bars are connected by wood.

[699] Wood's easy for a chimp to break.

[700] There's so much fucking stronger than us.

[701] If that thing knew that it could just grab those bars and slam and slam and slam...

[702] It would have worked on that all day.

[703] 100 % it would have got through.

[704] You would have had to figure out a way, way, way better cage, especially the one that she put in her home.

[705] You know, I'll tell you a really weird story that I'll...

[706] I just never would have thought in a million years about a chimps.

[707] I was interviewing a guy in Kenya that had a chimpanzee, and the keeper was this blonde woman.

[708] And all the chimp ever saw was this blonde woman.

[709] So he started, the guy gave the chimp playboy, and then it graduated to porn.

[710] And the chimp, because he'd never seen other chumps, he was raised in isolation, started thinking it was human and started sexually identifying with this woman that was keeping it.

[711] and started becoming sort of addicted to pornography.

[712] So just to give you a weird, sorry, I'm segue.

[713] But how crazy.

[714] And, you know, like these chimps, they'll have a favorite show.

[715] Like, I remember a group of them in South Africa, all they watched was Avatar.

[716] But anyway, just back to sort of how weird it is to keep a chimpanzee.

[717] You don't have a tiger getting addicted to human pornography.

[718] Right, right, right.

[719] We're watching Avatar all day long.

[720] So anyway.

[721] too intelligent.

[722] They're just way too intelligent, especially as they get five, six, and seven years old.

[723] They get really fucking dangerous.

[724] That lady in Connecticut, I had heard that she was, she slept in the bed with that chimpanzee.

[725] Well, that's where I was going.

[726] One of the things we did not cover, which I always wanted to know more about is what really is going on in that bed with that woman.

[727] I mean, I don't want to talk about it in too much detail here.

[728] But you have to ask yourself.

[729] asking a question.

[730] You have to ask yourself, like, how weird does it get?

[731] Right.

[732] I mean, how weird does it get?

[733] Wasn't she giving it Xanax and wine?

[734] Get that alone.

[735] And Viagra?

[736] You haven't seen the...

[737] She was giving it Viagra?

[738] No, I'm joking.

[739] Oh.

[740] I think, but who knows?

[741] You can't joke about that.

[742] You're going to get sued.

[743] Yeah, you cannot joke.

[744] But speaking of that, though, we were, you saw the second episode.

[745] We obviously...

[746] How big gyps need Viagra?

[747] No, they're very active You know, it's funny, I heard I heard that a chimp can fuck 50 times a day In the wild So maybe they don't need Viagra Well, primates are very promiscuous And chimpanzees in particular If you notice that chimpanzees have The largest balls Of any primate And there's a reason for that The more promiscuous, the female chimpanzees are The more sexually active the males become And the bigger their testicles are So it's like a direct correlation between the size of the male's testicles, and they think that exists with human beings as well, but it's more problematic to examine.

[748] Oh, so that's my problem.

[749] Yeah, if you're around a bunch of ladies that are a bunch of sluts, you might get fired up.

[750] No wonder I never got married.

[751] I think that with chimpanzees, you're dealing with these incredibly complex social structures.

[752] I'm sure you guys have seen Chimp Nation, which is fans.

[753] Fantastic.

[754] It's so good.

[755] It's so good because it is a rare documentary that had this established element in that these scientists had been embedded in this group of chimpanzees for 20 years.

[756] And so these scientists had very specific rules.

[757] You don't look them in the eye.

[758] You don't get any closer than 20 yards.

[759] If they come towards you, just move away.

[760] Don't ever have food.

[761] There's like a bunch of rules.

[762] And as long as you have those rules, they behave completely normally.

[763] and they just, you're just a thing.

[764] You're like a tree or a bird or something they're not interested in, which is really interesting, right?

[765] Yeah, yeah, amazing.

[766] Because they got incredible footage of the social interactions.

[767] They got a detailed analysis of how they establish dominance and who's in control.

[768] And we used to think it's always the biggest, strongest chimp, but no, it's not.

[769] It's ones that form unions and bonds and communities.

[770] Very interesting.

[771] It's so much like us.

[772] Well, I think also it's just so amazing about that film is, and I give them, an incredible, a ton of credit.

[773] Most people that go out to do a documentary don't have the capacity to film that many days.

[774] Like, they covered that.

[775] Yes.

[776] I don't know.

[777] It was like hundreds of days or something.

[778] Yeah, years.

[779] And years.

[780] And I think, you know, they really invested the time and they deserve the credit because they put in that amount of time.

[781] I mean, for us to do even, you know, Trim crazy, we filmed, how many days?

[782] It's probably close to 250 days.

[783] I mean, most people can't do that.

[784] Right, right, right.

[785] And so, I mean, it's incredible.

[786] Resource suck.

[787] Like, how much did it cost?

[788] That's where I'm going.

[789] Yeah, my God.

[790] It's not a really.

[791] But in order to make a documentary this way, you have to catch it while it's happening, you know, contemporaneously.

[792] So you have to be there.

[793] If you snooze, you lose.

[794] If you're not there, you're not going to make chimp crazy.

[795] Right, right.

[796] Or chimp, what's it called, Jim Nation?

[797] Yeah, Chimp Empire.

[798] Empire.

[799] Empire.

[800] Empire.

[801] Yeah, well, see, there's two, right?

[802] Chimp Empire, right?

[803] It's Chimp Empire, is Chimp Nation another one?

[804] Oh, Chimp Empire.

[805] Yeah, this is the Netflix one, yeah, yeah.

[806] The way that, see, the thing about the difference in your show is you need someone who's compelling, and so you have to find someone and like, and what's her name again?

[807] Tanya.

[808] Crazy Tanya, you know, and Joe Exotic.

[809] You're like, you need someone who's like the figurehead, like with the photo that you guys have on the.

[810] the promo of her laying down in the chimp behind her it's perfect yeah it's perfect i mean you need that nutty person to compel you because there's part of all of us that recognizes that that thought would come into our minds but then rational thought would go into play like you can't do this they're dangerous they're big they get older you can't control them what happens to them it's not fair for them to be and then you go i don't want to chimp but if you're dull -minded if you got a nine -volt brain and you look at this like I am gonna take they're more important to me than my own babies like when she says stuff like that you're like oh well you shouldn't even have a dog like you definitely shouldn't be allowed to vote no but it's interesting you say you have to find those characters but you also have to find a story I mean you can talk about this is how wide a net we cast because after Tiger King it wasn't like we just jumped into this chimp mom world we were filming you know mark the shark and you know we Yeah, we were, we were interested in the, in the animal human relationship and variety of forms.

[811] I think we, we, and you see in episode one, one of the first things we shot years before we even met Tanya was this woman, this part of the circus family, Pam Roseaire, you know, watching 2001 Space Odyssey with her chimpanzee chance.

[812] Yeah, yeah.

[813] It's a, I mean, talk about sobering experience.

[814] I'm, you know, me and Carl distance with Chance the chimpanzee.

[815] Pansy, 15 years old, pounding a, basically a modified trailer home, the floor echoing.

[816] The loudness was, of that sound on the floor was so loud I had to take my headset off.

[817] Yeah, it was a lot scarier, and you were there, it was a lot scarier to film chimps than tigers.

[818] The crew didn't have a problem going into a tiger enclosure, because the thing about tigers is as long as they're about under the age four even though it looks like a full grown tiger they haven't gone through puberty yet they haven't gotten the tiger mentality of killing you but a chimp anyway the chimp filming was a much more difficult.

[819] Well they're also like human characters and wiery and you don't know what's going to happen they're on these kind of leashes.

[820] Well it's also how they evolved I mean that's what kept them if you watch chimp nations like Those sort of instincts is what keeps them alive.

[821] Oh, sure.

[822] Very murderous.

[823] Well, we didn't really know how murderous they were until Attenborough.

[824] When David Attenborough did that series, I think it was in the 90s, when he captured the chimps eating monkeys.

[825] Yeah, ripped him.

[826] And this is one of the things that when I had the guy from Chimp Nation on, I discussed it with him.

[827] He's like, how often they eat monkeys?

[828] We couldn't even show it all.

[829] It would just be like the whole show would be chimps eating monkeys.

[830] Because that's what they want to do.

[831] They want to eat monkeys.

[832] That's their primary source of protein.

[833] They like fruit.

[834] Fruit's great, but they also like monkeys.

[835] They call it us monkeys.

[836] Yeah, and they eat, you know, I'm a reptile guy.

[837] And in the range of those chimps in the wild, there's a tortoise.

[838] And this tortoise, it's like our box turtles, but it's much bigger, but it's called a hingeback tortoise.

[839] And it literally closes up like a rock.

[840] Like you can't see it any flesh.

[841] The chimps will grab that tortoise and they'll just bang it against the tree and just crack it up.

[842] a cantaloupe.

[843] Wow.

[844] And they're, they're just saying that because, yes, they're really hardcore when it comes to the way they predate on other animals.

[845] And they're about as strong as a 500 -pound man. That's about right.

[846] Yeah.

[847] Yeah.

[848] It's so insane for us.

[849] We had a chimp on the set of news radio, like 96 or something like that.

[850] There was a baby chimp.

[851] It was a baby in a diaper.

[852] And this chimp climbed on my back and whacked me a couple of times in the back, just playing was just having fun and I remember first of all the feeling of holding it is like it was made out of steel wires it wasn't made at like a baby you know you pick up a baby babies are like soft little you pick up a three -year -old little soft little things and you hold on to them and they're weak these things were strong as fuck like in a bizarre way we like to look at something that's close to our size and think oh uh I could probably overpower that You know, oh, I know how to fight.

[853] I'll fight that fucking chimp off.

[854] No, you have zero chance.

[855] It's a different thing.

[856] Everything about it is different.

[857] The muscle structure is completely different.

[858] The tendon structure is completely different.

[859] And the amount of force it can generate is - Yeah, the arm leverage is pretty incredible.

[860] But they also want to fuck with you.

[861] They also want to - I was just going to say, like, pull your eyeballs.

[862] We'll always talk about, like, will a bear kill the lion or with a, you know, the bear killed the tiger.

[863] I think chimpanzees, you know, to obviously fighting and, you know, I think they are the most diabolical fighters because, you know, I don't know what a chimp would do to a grizzly, but a chimp, you know, goes after your janitals, your fingers, your face.

[864] They know how to fuck you up like nothing else.

[865] Yeah, they know how to debilitate you and take away what makes you a human.

[866] Yeah.

[867] Yeah, and they also have zero remorse.

[868] So they're like a human and that they can think, but they have zero empathy.

[869] And they're fucking dangerous.

[870] I'm writing this.

[871] You know, what was so fascinating, you'd think, knowing all this about chimps later, and remember this, Eric, we were talking about, well, there must be, like, reported human deaths in the United States with chimp attacks, and we couldn't find any.

[872] It's only memes.

[873] It's only little...

[874] I mean, there are globally, but somehow...

[875] Globally, a lot of them in Africa, little kids get snatched and stuff.

[876] Well, kids get eaten.

[877] Kids get eaten.

[878] Yeah.

[879] But in the U .S., there has been no really human death caused by chimpanzee.

[880] Now, what was fascinating, and you haven't watched this yet, but in episode four, we kind of go, it comes like from delusion to reality and it's heavy.

[881] We filmed our first chimpanzee funeral.

[882] And what we didn't show, which I remember being, I just remember this now, everyone that would come up to say their peace would share a story where they were attacked by that animal.

[883] Oh, God.

[884] It was, it was so, so the kind of juxtaposition of this celebration of life and these attacks in this context of a situation, they shouldn't have ever been.

[885] And animal attacks in general across the board in roadside zoos and private sector are completely underreported because people don't want their animals taken away.

[886] So if a tiger attack someone and they have a huge laceration, they'll go to the hospital saying it was a chainsaw.

[887] Because the second they say it was my tiger or my chimp, they run the risk of losing that animal.

[888] You also have the problem with less than extraordinary people being addicted to.

[889] to extraordinary circumstances.

[890] So if you have a boring -ass fucking life in some middle of nowhere town, but you also have a lion.

[891] You're cool.

[892] Life's pretty interesting.

[893] You know?

[894] I mean, and that's Joe Exotic, right?

[895] Well, Joe Exotic, I think, is pretty smart.

[896] He's odd, for sure, but intelligent.

[897] But in Tanya's case, like, what would that lady be like if she didn't have chimps?

[898] Like, it is the focal point of her life, to the point where she neglected her own biological children.

[899] Yeah, it gives her an identity.

[900] Yeah, in a weird way, in a weird way, in a very compelling way.

[901] And when people live boring -ass lives, things like that seem like something that that's who I am.

[902] Like, that's me. Because it's extraordinary experiences from persons that are, you know...

[903] Where does that come from, though?

[904] Is it influence?

[905] I think we like experiences, first of all.

[906] There's a part of evolution where human beings, part of our lustful, for innovation and for constant improvement of our environment and circumstances, we like extraordinary experiences.

[907] I think it's what made people successful.

[908] I think the more daring and the more addicted you were to extraordinary experiences, the more likely you were to find new hunting grounds, the more likely you were to conquer neighboring tribes, the more likely you to survive a an attack.

[909] I think human beings like extraordinary experiences.

[910] We like comfort, but not as much as we like extraordinary experiences.

[911] But having some of these animals is like chickbait.

[912] You know, it's like a little pooch gets you a lot of cooch, like a guy that's walking a dog.

[913] Joe had tigers to get boys.

[914] Which is so wild they were.

[915] You got straight guys.

[916] I mean, that guy had some fucking game.

[917] Exactly.

[918] Yeah, I guess I see your point.

[919] Come on, if you have a chimp, a baby chimp, you're walking around Austin, Texas.

[920] Sure.

[921] People come up to you and go, oh, Joe.

[922] I will love your little chimp.

[923] That's interesting.

[924] I want to go out with you.

[925] What a weird way to try to attract.

[926] Well, they always say that about puppies.

[927] Like, guys bring a puppy to the park.

[928] I mean, I'm more interested in Carl now, you know.

[929] What's your motivation over there with that baby dog?

[930] Isn't it interesting when you see Carl interact with Marshall?

[931] Because Marshall's like, I don't want to hurt you.

[932] I don't want nothing to do us to stop biting me. What are you doing?

[933] Yeah, you can see it.

[934] Yeah.

[935] But you've got two different kinds of things, you know?

[936] Like one of them is like a little bulldog.

[937] It's a little psychopath.

[938] And the other one is a golden retriever is like a love sponge.

[939] Like all he wants to do is be your friend.

[940] Yeah.

[941] He wants to be your friend unless you're a squirrel.

[942] And that's really interesting.

[943] You watch his reaction to squirrels, like his intensity when it comes to like squirrels and birds.

[944] It's a movement, right?

[945] It's the movement?

[946] Is that what's attractive?

[947] It's just instincts.

[948] It just fires up that part in their DNA that knows that that's what they do.

[949] But the bizarre thing with retrievers is it's not to eat it.

[950] It's to bring it to you.

[951] It's always to bring it to you Like one time I I got home And I let the dog out I opened up the back door And I just had to take a leak So I took a leak And then as I flushed Washed my hands Open the door He's standing there with a squirrel on his mouth Like he got a squirrel that quick Wow And he wanted me to know He was so happy Yeah And I was like dude What did you do And he was like Who?

[952] What did I do?

[953] I'm like, what did you do man?

[954] And so I got rid of squirrel But whenever he sees one It's just nobody had to teach him that he's locked in like that's what he wants to do He wants to go get squirrels and he wants to bring them back to you It's it's a weird thing because it's like you you understand predatory instincts like cats have them They're the worst cats are they've killed so many fucking birds it's something like a bill It's multiple billions of Mammals and Birds are killed every year by outside cats The first thing that kills you know songbirds Birds is glass windows skyscrapers a glass window Second is domestic cats, and they are killing machines, and they really do take a toll on wild birds.

[955] I went, because I'm getting ready for this podcast, I went down a dirty road last night, a wormhole of cats, predatory cats.

[956] And there's compilations of cats just jacking pigeons, jacking squirrels, jacking everything, everything they can get their hands on.

[957] Now, cats are bad unless they're indoors, domestic cats.

[958] They've, you know, in Hawaii, cats are the reason why so many species in Hawaii went extinct.

[959] Yep, yeah.

[960] You know, they're just...

[961] In Australia.

[962] Australia.

[963] Australia.

[964] They brought them in Australia to deal with certain animals, and then they got out of control, and now in Australia, they hunt them.

[965] Dodo birds went extinct because of domestic cats that were introduced into Mauritius and, you know, 200, 300, years ago, whenever Dodo birds won extinct.

[966] But, no, they're killing machines.

[967] They're machines.

[968] Sorry to interrupt you on your eyes.

[969] No, no, no, no worries.

[970] But, like, so, like, their predatory.

[971] instincts are more reasonable.

[972] Like, I understand that they're cats, and that's what cats do.

[973] But the weird thing about a retriever is he's not doing it to eat it.

[974] He's doing it to bring it to me. Like, I didn't even have to teach him to bring a ball back.

[975] Like, he learned within, like, the first two or three throws.

[976] If I throw the ball, he brings it back to me. It's just brought into them, whereas every other dog that I've had, I had to teach him.

[977] And you throw the ball, you're like, come on, bring it back.

[978] Come on, bring it back.

[979] And you bring it back, give him a treat.

[980] and they understand you know praise them they and then eventually they understand commands and they have this like pathway that you've carved into their system of chasing the ball bringing it back we're going to have fun chase the ball bring it back marshal it was in there it was already in there programming right i mean which is crazy which is which is so much of what the what we found so interesting about the the justification for this love that a lot of the subjects we've covered had for these chimpanzees was that they love me you know they do these things with me. I've trained them to believe that they have feelings for me and I have feelings for them.

[981] We have this understanding.

[982] And I feel what we've realized is this kind of imbalance of this mutuality of caregiving that I think exists with a lot of our subjects that we cover, but also some of the chimpanzees.

[983] It's very incredibly selfish around the symmetry of needs.

[984] But it's so disturbing.

[985] You know, you have a beautiful lab, a dog.

[986] that, you know, Tanya says, you know, constantly how much she loves this chimp Tonka, but the chimp is like incarcerated in, you know, this cage.

[987] It's like, Tanya, if you really love this chimp and Tanka loves you back, why the cage?

[988] Right.

[989] You know, you don't have a cage for your dog.

[990] Right.

[991] And it just seems so obvious.

[992] Like, Tanya, this chimp does not love you the way you love it.

[993] Well, I think it does, but it also doesn't have a choice, right?

[994] So if Tanya lived in the jungle, if she had a shack, in the jungle and the chimp lived in the jungle wild and free.

[995] How much were the chimp visitor?

[996] First of all, it wouldn't be eating chicken nuggets and drinking Coca -Cola, which is weird, too, that she's feeding this thing, and she said it has congestive heart failure.

[997] Spoiler alert, again.

[998] It's still good.

[999] You still got to watch it, folks.

[1000] But if you give a person that, they fucking get sick.

[1001] Like, nothing you're doing to that chimp is natural.

[1002] The cage is not natural.

[1003] The food's not natural.

[1004] nothing's natural.

[1005] You know, one of the saddest things for me was when she was showing at Instagram reels and just scrolling through reels and the chimps just staring at the screen.

[1006] That was the weirdest one.

[1007] That's really disturbing.

[1008] That moment, but meanwhile, I do that.

[1009] I know that that's a lot of the sentiment we see from people as a reaction to that.

[1010] We are basically doing that ourselves.

[1011] Oh, yeah, yeah, we're doing it to ourselves.

[1012] You're not looking at your son.

[1013] You can make a choice.

[1014] Yeah, sure.

[1015] I'm going to put this down.

[1016] Sure.

[1017] I'm going to go out of real world and have fun with human beings and have a good time with my friends.

[1018] You can make those choices.

[1019] The chimp doesn't have a choice.

[1020] It's essentially a prisoner for no reason, and it likes the guard.

[1021] And that chimp, you know, Tonka was looking at its kids in that footage, you know, whether Tonka knew it or not.

[1022] And Instagram was looking at a bunch of things, but just staring at the screens.

[1023] But I don't think it probably understood that those were his kids, but it probably did remember what it was like to have babies, you know.

[1024] And to be outside.

[1025] Yeah.

[1026] It's sitting there in that cage in the basement, looking at these chimps, washing a Mercedes that's outside.

[1027] You know, we both still talk to Tanya almost daily or communicate with Tanya.

[1028] Oh, my God.

[1029] And it's the most bizarre communication because, you know, we don't, everyone thinks I lied to Tanya about this film.

[1030] She would have talked to me anyway.

[1031] I'm convinced of that.

[1032] And when I did come into the picture, she didn't skip a beat.

[1033] And she was like, oh, it's you.

[1034] Let's keep filming for another year and a half.

[1035] But she continues to talk with us.

[1036] And we continue to tell her, Tanya, you know, maybe this is.

[1037] is an opportunity for you to rethink and reinvent yourself, you know?

[1038] Like, it's, anyway, it's really interesting.

[1039] Well, it doesn't seem like she has a lot of self -reflection with all due respect, which, you know.

[1040] It's hard not to be compassionate with a lot of these people, to be honest.

[1041] Right.

[1042] It's really hard because they're humans.

[1043] They're humans.

[1044] Well, especially Tanya, because she led us into her life in such an intimate way that, you know, it was, you know, She was really generous that way.

[1045] So it isn't black and white.

[1046] There's a lot of gray.

[1047] I understand an audience reaction, though.

[1048] And you can have those kind of conflicting views on it.

[1049] But being part of making it as, you know, we're partially complicit to it too as well.

[1050] I mean, in a way of sharing that story in a way.

[1051] Well, you know, there's the age old term with great power comes great responsibility.

[1052] It is a great responsibility to hold a large chimpanzee.

[1053] in your house.

[1054] That is a great power.

[1055] It is an enormous responsibility.

[1056] And she should not have the option to have that responsibility.

[1057] She's not capable of managing that situation.

[1058] It's, I don't think anybody's capable of it.

[1059] I think the same way, I just think dolphins, we're lucky that they're nice.

[1060] That's what I think.

[1061] We're lucky that they're nice.

[1062] Because they shouldn't, they should be killing us every chance they can too.

[1063] They are.

[1064] They're not just that, but infanticide.

[1065] You know, the reason why female dolphins are so promiscuous.

[1066] Well, male dolphins, when they find a female, if the female has babies, she will not breed for, I think it's a long period of time.

[1067] I think it's around six years.

[1068] Oh, wow.

[1069] See if that's true.

[1070] Wow.

[1071] But so the way the male will do will kill the babies.

[1072] The males will kill the babies to force her into estrus, so she will start breeding again.

[1073] So what the females do to counteract that is to have sex with as many male dolphins as they can.

[1074] So they have sex with all the male dolphins.

[1075] They're not monogamous in any way stretch or form.

[1076] They just go and fuck as many guys as they can.

[1077] So those guys will protect their babies because they don't know if that's their baby or not because they know they've had sex with her.

[1078] But if they have not had sex with her and then she has babies, they will kill that baby.

[1079] Are any animals monogamous?

[1080] Yeah, penguins.

[1081] Penguins are.

[1082] But they only do it for like a year.

[1083] They're monogamous for like a year.

[1084] But they also look exactly the same, which is a trap.

[1085] They used to think macaw, parrots were monogamous and swans.

[1086] And then they started doing the genetics and they realized they cheat like hell.

[1087] Yeah, I'm sure they do.

[1088] It doesn't seem to serve any purpose evolutionarily for them to be monogamous.

[1089] It seems contrary to the idea of natural selection.

[1090] You should be wanting to, if you have potent genes, you should want to spread those genes as much as possible.

[1091] So that means we shouldn't be monogamous.

[1092] Well, human beings, we've fallen into this weird thing where we're more than an animal in that we are an animal, but we're an animal that expresses our thoughts and feelings to each other.

[1093] And we are evolving.

[1094] We are clearly different in that we are animals, but we can manipulate our environment, like no animal that's ever existed.

[1095] We can travel to any place in the world, which no animal could ever do on its own.

[1096] We can do all kinds of things that other animals can't do, but more importantly, we would communicate.

[1097] Yeah.

[1098] And we communicate.

[1099] No stories.

[1100] Yes, and we empathize with each other.

[1101] And we recognize things in other people, even heinous people, even people that you don't like, like, whether it's Joe Exotic or Tanya.

[1102] You recognize, like, I see.

[1103] She's not, I get it, you know.

[1104] She's just a person who's all fucked up.

[1105] Even that crazy drunk lady who had the one that attacked her daughter.

[1106] Like, what happened to her?

[1107] You know, like what was her childhood like?

[1108] You know, it couldn't have been good.

[1109] And she's the one person out there who's still alive, who I really don't want to hear from.

[1110] Because I really wonder right now, what is she thinking?

[1111] Well, the calmness while her daughter was being attacked on the phone.

[1112] The calmness of that phone call was just shocking.

[1113] Suspicious.

[1114] Um, I think, you know, when that lady from the liquor store was talking about how much that lady drinks, like, who knows what she's even responsible for anymore?

[1115] Like, she's, she's got to be out of her fucking mind all the time if she's drinking that much booze.

[1116] So I think she wanted out with the chimp.

[1117] I think she was as caged, as depressed as the chimp possibly in that house after 15 years living with this chimp that she thought, you know, was her son and then later was dressing.

[1118] you know, the chimp up with the same clothing as her deceased husband.

[1119] I think she wanted out, and somehow she figured it out.

[1120] Well, the life choice is really remarkable.

[1121] They're also basically in cages.

[1122] The humans taking care of the chimpanzee.

[1123] Right, right, right, right.

[1124] You really think about it.

[1125] And the same goes for Sandy, Sandy Harold.

[1126] You know, this what was so great about revisiting that story in Connecticut, you know, we basically, we were set to come out with this show in March.

[1127] this year.

[1128] And we were basically wrapped in November and we were going through finishing and we suddenly got access to the entire Travis story.

[1129] We work with this guy who wrote this incredible article, a New York Magazine article named Dan Lee.

[1130] It's one of the best written articles about Travis.

[1131] It's called Travis the Menace.

[1132] He has no attribution of sources.

[1133] You don't know who is talking.

[1134] So it's the kind of foundational piece for the Travis story.

[1135] We tracked him down.

[1136] He says I have everyone that was part of that story.

[1137] and they have archive.

[1138] Do you want to do it?

[1139] And so we basically said, you know, is this going to make our story better, meaning that we're going to have to extend for at least four or five months to do this right and postpone our entire delivery schedule?

[1140] And once we got into it, it was so worth it because we got this total intimate view of what it was like to be in Sandy's world.

[1141] We had this archive, the video that you see has never been seen before, this portrait of a family, this kind of very complicated, complex family life that's been inhabited by Travis, which was a descendant of Connie Casey's place in Missouri.

[1142] If you think about that where our starting point was for this whole project was always around, how do we understand where captive primates came from in America?

[1143] Connie Casey was this place, this kind of breeding ground for all of these animals that were kind of cycled through Hollywood.

[1144] And what I found very interesting is this kind of this lineage that led to Travis.

[1145] Travis was sold to Sandy and then you see the...

[1146] It's so incestuous.

[1147] It's so incestuous that they're all connected and you'll see a little bit in episode four.

[1148] There it is.

[1149] Travis the Menace.

[1150] And it's a remarkable story.

[1151] This is Sandy who bought Travis from Connie.

[1152] Connie, you know, it was a...

[1153] Susie was the mother.

[1154] How much does that photograph freak you out?

[1155] Yeah.

[1156] When you see that chimp holding that baby at any minute and just decide to pull that baby's head off and when chimps smile it's actually a sign of aggression it's not like us we we you know smile because we're happy that's not a happy chimp doing that so he's trained he's trained but he's trained to smile he's not necessarily aggressive right here yeah he's trained to show his teeth because it's cute right it's more of a grimace is more of a more of a happy smile i guess if you want to call it right right right so it was fascinating to us to get access of the story we get we go into it and um he's drinking soda that's disturbing yeah he got too big well you're giving them the standard american diet but look at the canines compared to ours look how yeah they're daggers oh well the bite force everything i mean everything about them we are so watered down by the evolutionary process and i was real aware of that when i was touching that two -year -old chimp with diapers like real aware yeah sure it's a different thing and when you're taking this thing and you're, you know, it's a time bomb.

[1157] You have like four years where you can control it, maybe five, right?

[1158] And then they say after five, it's just like you're basically rolling the dice anytime someone comes over your house.

[1159] Yeah, exactly.

[1160] That's basically it.

[1161] Just so crazy.

[1162] But he was, you know, this classic story.

[1163] It was this kind of gothic fairy tale in Stanford, Connecticut, which was so unusual because it's a suburb of Manhattan.

[1164] You know, everyone thought this was in the South or wherever.

[1165] It was happening in Stanford, Connecticut.

[1166] And Sandy, had this kind of void in her life she buys Travis and raises her part of the family and you see the story the same arc as every other Chimp's story in a family setting they get too mature and they have to you know the thing that I thought you'd appreciate in terms of our kind of this idea that we show in this story really well I think is this this chimp is happy and connected to the community because he's free he's socializing he's a town celebrity he's at he's at work with Sandy in the tow shop, you know, answering phones, you know, filling out paperwork.

[1167] The mascot of the tow shop, Desire Me Motors.

[1168] Right.

[1169] Yeah, he's airbrushed everywhere on trucks.

[1170] And he lives a cool life.

[1171] He lives a cool life.

[1172] And then one day.

[1173] Everyone gets to see the chimp, right?

[1174] And then until one day, he gets too aggressive.

[1175] And he, this incredible story, which we don't cover in the dock, but he's in this intersection, very busy intersection in Connecticut, a little boy throws a can of coke over to the car with the chimp.

[1176] The chimp gets out.

[1177] you know, stops traffic, you know, and it's covered in the news and it's a joke.

[1178] Everyone's like, oh, my God, it's planted at the apes again.

[1179] But the Chimms is trying to get a hold of the kid.

[1180] Tim's trying to, like, he's irritated.

[1181] Why would you bother the chimpanzee?

[1182] He threw Kenne Coke at him.

[1183] He runs out of the car trying to figure out what's going on.

[1184] Meanwhile, Sandy gets an ice cream cone, brings back in the car, and everything's cool.

[1185] Two hours later.

[1186] Two hours later, right?

[1187] So the state of Connecticut says, no way.

[1188] You can't have this chimp anymore out in public.

[1189] You've got to put him in home.

[1190] So this, this chimp is out in space for a majority of his life.

[1191] and then built a confinement for the majority of his life.

[1192] And so fast forward, and I'll spare you kind of the other stuff that we learned.

[1193] But, you know, what everyone kind of talks about in revisiting media at the time is he, it was annexed.

[1194] It was the wine glasses.

[1195] He was drunk.

[1196] It was, you know, Almo.

[1197] Maybe the relationship went wrong.

[1198] But he grabbed car keys.

[1199] He wanted to go for a ride.

[1200] He could drive a car.

[1201] He wanted to get the fuck out of there.

[1202] Yeah.

[1203] That's what happened.

[1204] Right.

[1205] And the person who he runs into first, Sharla, represents confinement.

[1206] He was a nanny.

[1207] Right, right, right.

[1208] So what do you think is going to happen?

[1209] It was also reported he was fucking or he left already.

[1210] He was like cruising around and he was in the graveyard fucking with the guy who was digging graves.

[1211] That's what we heard.

[1212] He's probably insanely bored, just like a person that's stuck in a cage.

[1213] Yeah.

[1214] And Chips, when they're bored and you always see it, they rock.

[1215] And so you see, if you're watching that section of Chimp Crazy, Travis is just sitting there rocking.

[1216] which is like a tick, you know, big cats do a figure eight over and over and over, you know, chimps do this rocking.

[1217] And when you see that, you know that's a really desperately depressed chimp.

[1218] But we love this, you know, I'm sorry, love, but we're interested in this tension because we think we can control things.

[1219] I mean, that's what have you seen in the movie, Nope, this great footage with this Chimp Gordy, which he covers and is a throughline in the show.

[1220] It's inspired based on this whole idea of spectacle and humans that can control things.

[1221] Nope, and that scene with Gordy, the chimp, is probably one of the most beautiful displays cinematically that I've seen of...

[1222] It's horrible.

[1223] It's very tragic, but...

[1224] The one person that has the 15 -year -old chimp in their house, how have they been able to avoid all that?

[1225] She's careful.

[1226] I mean, she's 77 years old, Pam Roseair.

[1227] when she was seven years old she was asked what she wants to do with her life in this circus animal family and she says I want to train chimps I want to do something hard I want to do something difficult the rest of her family trained horses and elephants and that was culturally but that's a really good question how is it that Pam has an okay you're thinking about more different measures but like I'm thinking about attacks yeah that's what I'm thinking it's a really good question because I always wondered about Pam Rose there how come she's the one person that has have been immune to it, or has she?

[1228] I think she's got some, you know, look, I think she's lucky.

[1229] I think it's the best way.

[1230] I don't know what happens behind the scenes, to be honest.

[1231] I think, you know, to be fair, I think, I don't know.

[1232] But I do know that when I watched her interaction, you know, there's a real, like, understanding.

[1233] And it's, and she has a leash on them.

[1234] I mean, she also, they are neutered.

[1235] Castrated.

[1236] I'm sure they're, I'm sure the last.

[1237] They do, you know, they remove their canines oftentimes.

[1238] they do have to alter them to be able to continue to work with them.

[1239] They're modified.

[1240] I mean, I should say there's a lot of dark parts of our story that we didn't go into.

[1241] Like one of the things we learned was that so many of the monkeys that are being sold, you know, by Tanya and others are coming across the border from Mexico, just, you know, along with probably drugs.

[1242] And more recently, in recent time, we've seen a lot of central American and Mexican species coming into the U .S. So there's a pipeline.

[1243] You know, I'm sort of segue.

[1244] Well, what we look, so, yes, it is, we didn't realize also how dark this was coming out of it because we were so close to it and the reaction by people, it's very heavy.

[1245] So we're all desensitized from seeing this.

[1246] There's some really interesting stuff that happens in Forgeo.

[1247] I hope you finish it, including another attack.

[1248] But this time with a person that we all know.

[1249] and um oh you're teasing me i'm teasing you a little bit i'm sorry it's it's pretty good it's pretty good it's pretty good it's pretty good it's it's a part of her body gets bitten off well come on man i'm not kidding similar to trump in a yeah you know how you giving away way way too much you fucked it up fucked up the whole show i'm gonna look at her ear the whole show now um so is that lady and with the 15 year old champ is that the only one that you know of that keeps a full -grown adult and has it just wander around with everybody?

[1250] We've learned it more.

[1251] It's also castrated.

[1252] To be clear, Pam doesn't live in, the chimp doesn't live in her house.

[1253] It's in there sometimes?

[1254] Yeah, sometimes.

[1255] And how much of castrating it changes its behavior?

[1256] I think significantly.

[1257] Because Buck in Oregon was castrated and then it, you know.

[1258] The Connecticut Chimpanzee, was that castrated?

[1259] Probably, but Buck was castrated and started wearing a. a shock collar.

[1260] In order to manage a chimp, as you say, after four or five years old, they typically alter them, remove their canines, castrate them, shock collars.

[1261] It's so crazy.

[1262] Like fixing a dog is so commonplace.

[1263] People don't even think twice.

[1264] Oh, is your dog neutered?

[1265] Oh, you're a good pet owner.

[1266] You know, that way your dog's not going to have unwanted puppies.

[1267] Yeah.

[1268] But fixing a chimpanzee, like, what are you doing?

[1269] Like, what did you do to them?

[1270] It's like fixing your...

[1271] But also, by the way, it's like fixing a human.

[1272] Think about where the medical care they get, you know, the guy who's a horse vet is the guy working at a chimpanzee?

[1273] If you're lucky.

[1274] If you're lucky.

[1275] If you're lucky.

[1276] So if you think about the carrots, it's really horrible.

[1277] But I was going to add to what you were saying, Eric, one thing that we learned through the process about kind of what is this about?

[1278] Mainly, you know, we're talking about this very niche subject matter of captive chimpanzees in America, which we learned.

[1279] There really only is about 1 ,300 remaining in captivity, which includes those who are already in sanctuaries in the U .S. about half of that 1300.

[1280] And big zoos.

[1281] And big zoos.

[1282] Big zoos have about 250 of them still.

[1283] So in terms of the kind of roadside zoo private home environment, it's between, you know, less than 100 chimpanzees that remain in captivity.

[1284] So to answer a question, there might be more, but it's hard to hide to chimp.

[1285] But globally, there's still many chimps in Thailand and, you know, all over the world that are, you know, so the U .S., at least there's less and less in this.

[1286] There's less and less.

[1287] The primates in general in terms of.

[1288] you know, monkeys as pets.

[1289] It's, you know, it's reported somewhere around 15 ,000 people in America have primates as chimpanzees as pets.

[1290] 15 ,000 people.

[1291] 15 ,000 according to the American welfare animal welfare institute.

[1292] So that's what we're finding.

[1293] But, you know, through that, we had to zoom out.

[1294] And I think that what we've learned, what I've learned personally about organizations that are doing something to protect wild lands and protect wild populations of chimpanzees, there's a lot of great ones out there.

[1295] So we've been supporting a program that's doing 12 project sites in Africa, $10 million, $10 ,000 chimpanzees.

[1296] And that's what we're hopeful for.

[1297] I mean, Africa is basically going to be China one day.

[1298] What do you do, though, with animals that have been kept in captivity their whole life?

[1299] You can't really introduce them to the wild, can you?

[1300] It depends on the species.

[1301] Certainly not.

[1302] I mean, chimpanzees.

[1303] Certainly not after the castrated.

[1304] Not chimpanzees.

[1305] They've done all these projects.

[1306] Chimpanzees definitely not.

[1307] I don't know if you like any of these other movies that were done about these scientific experiments people have in their homes in the 70s and 80s bringing chimps and reintroducing them into the wild.

[1308] It doesn't work.

[1309] It ends horribly.

[1310] Well, there's a place in Africa.

[1311] There's a sort of an island in a, you know, it's like a freshwater river where they have released chimps, but, you know, chimps that are just placed in Africa.

[1312] But, yeah, to release them actually back into a population of wild chimps hasn't been done successfully for sure, not with chimps.

[1313] Have they done it with cats?

[1314] That's a good, you know, there's that famous, you know, image of Putin releasing a tiger in Russia that was captive.

[1315] They have done it with cats, actually.

[1316] I work with an organization that's been releasing Jaguars back into Northern Argentina, where Jaguars have now disappeared.

[1317] But the Jaguar program is very, they do it very carefully, and they put the Jaguar in this enormous.

[1318] enormous enclosures and let them capture a wild prey before they release them.

[1319] It takes a lot of time.

[1320] Well, I mean, we were talking about house cats earlier.

[1321] Oh, house cats.

[1322] No, no, no. I wasn't saying this.

[1323] I just meant cats a job, but I'm saying that house cats, which are really completely domesticated, you can come to and pet them, if you let them lose, they survive fine.

[1324] Yeah.

[1325] It's feral cats.

[1326] They all have instincts to kill and eat things.

[1327] So I would imagine cats would probably be one of the easiest ones to reintroduce to the wild.

[1328] But then you have things that are accustomed, like bears.

[1329] One of the problems with people that live in rural communities is when bears start attacking your dumpsters and your garbage cans, they know food is there and you can't get rid of them.

[1330] They will come back to that.

[1331] No matter what, you can't scare them off.

[1332] You scare them off.

[1333] You're only scaring them for an hour.

[1334] They'll be back.

[1335] They know there's food there.

[1336] Where we live in California, we have bears, black bears, not grizzly bears, and we have mountain lions.

[1337] And almost every night you'll see on our streets when there's a certain night of the week when the garbage comes out, All the garbage cans are tipped over because of the bears.

[1338] And you're right, you're right.

[1339] Once they learn that, then they have a pattern, and they go after those dumpsters.

[1340] Well, you know, California used to have big, big brown bears.

[1341] California's state flag is a grizzly bear.

[1342] Which is crazy.

[1343] And we work with an organization that's trying to bring them back to California.

[1344] Shuttle down, folks.

[1345] Settle down.

[1346] We should keep them alive where they are.

[1347] Don't get nutty.

[1348] All these people that want to reintroduce animals, like, okay, it's just you have to understand.

[1349] You're playing God.

[1350] You're throwing.

[1351] And there's a reason it when it stinks because the last grizzly bear in California was shot about 100 years ago, and it's because they eat people.

[1352] Levec, California is named after the last guy who died from a grizzly bear attack.

[1353] Yeah.

[1354] I think his name is Stephen Levec.

[1355] And he got fucked up.

[1356] They were big, you know, big brown bears, and we killed them all because they were killing people.

[1357] And I'm not saying you should kill them all.

[1358] I'm not saying what we did was good.

[1359] but once you've established an ecosystem that if you make the, I believe I like humans more than I like other animals.

[1360] This is my thought.

[1361] I believe that we're more important to each other than animals are to us.

[1362] It doesn't mean that I don't care about animals.

[1363] But if you start bringing in things that are going to eat people, I'm like, hey, this is not good for us.

[1364] It's not good for us.

[1365] We don't have to reintroduce them to places.

[1366] You know, I think a better solution would be, let's make sure that wherever they live, naturally, their populations are fine.

[1367] I think that's probably the better solution.

[1368] There's been some success of reintroducing wolves into Montana, you know, the Yellowstone reintroduction in 1990s.

[1369] Really interesting.

[1370] Like, they did have an overpopulation problem of ungulates because bears can only eat so many of them and wolves are much more clever and they act together.

[1371] And it's kind of balanced things out for now.

[1372] We work with Turner Endangered Species, Ted Turner, and we work very closely with this guy, Mike Phillips, in Montana, who's been probably the key guy to bring back gray wolves into the western part of the United States.

[1373] But, yeah, it's been without, I mean, I know because we do this, that even gray wolves, there's a lot of controversy from ranchers.

[1374] Imagine bringing back big grizzlies, brown bears to California.

[1375] Yeah, it's going to be a problem.

[1376] But people that live in urban areas don't understand what that problem is.

[1377] Like, this is the problem that Vancouver has.

[1378] So British Columbia outlawed brown bear hunting.

[1379] You can hunt black bears because people eat black bears.

[1380] And you can eat brown bears as well, but most people don't.

[1381] And so they have in their mind hunting grizzly bears is in line with what they want to call trophy hunting, which is gross.

[1382] You're just killing an animal so you can stuff it.

[1383] It's gross.

[1384] We all agree it's gross.

[1385] but the reality of grizzly bears in rural areas I have a good friend who lives in northern BC he lives in like a very rural area he's like they're fucking dangerous he had a shoot one that was trying to break into his cabin from three feet away he shot a large grizzly bear trying to get into his cabin and eat him from three feet away he said they're really bold now because they haven't hunted them for a few years so if you're running into a four or five year old male they don't know what it's like to be hunted There's not, no one has any feelings of being nervous around human beings.

[1386] And you remember the movie The Grizzly Man, right?

[1387] Yes.

[1388] Yeah.

[1389] Timothy Treadwell.

[1390] That's a fascinating.

[1391] He was lunch.

[1392] That's my favorite unintentional comedy.

[1393] Yeah.

[1394] Because it's, Werner Herzog, I think, made that movie funny on purpose.

[1395] Of course.

[1396] That was, that's like our, you know, source of inspiration.

[1397] It's a good movie.

[1398] But I, well, I never forget watching it in New York City.

[1399] I was watching it at a theater.

[1400] The whole time, I was just saying, like, oh, my God.

[1401] Like, I just was being, I was angry with this guy.

[1402] Right.

[1403] You know, the deck, he was, like, worried about his bandana or his, you know, his, whatever, whatever he was worried about it.

[1404] I was so pissed watching it, but it was a good movie.

[1405] But it's the same thing.

[1406] It's a less than extraordinary person who gets attached and addicted to extraordinary experiences.

[1407] You're constantly around these, I mean, he got some incredible footage.

[1408] That guy got some amazing footage.

[1409] He did some fucking hard camping.

[1410] Okay, that guy was out there roughing it for a long -ass time.

[1411] in a tent surrounded by monsters living in the grizzly maze.

[1412] He's a maniac.

[1413] Yeah, talking baby talk to the bears.

[1414] He pulled it off, pulled it off for a long time.

[1415] But you knew what was going to happen.

[1416] If you watched that, like, eventually something's going to decide to eat him.

[1417] And then that's exactly what happened.

[1418] It's like these chips with these women.

[1419] Similar, but at least that guy's going to where they live.

[1420] Yeah, of course.

[1421] You know, I don't have any problem with someone deciding to do that.

[1422] If you cure that fucking crazy and you want to throw yourself, into the system and maybe live with them for as long as it lasts.

[1423] I mean, and maybe it also was suicide by bear, right?

[1424] Because that guy seemed really depressed and didn't seem like he was having a good time.

[1425] Yeah, but he had the bear eat his girlfriend, too.

[1426] That was heavy.

[1427] Well, the bear ate his girlfriend after it ate him.

[1428] Right.

[1429] It killed him.

[1430] She was trying to defend him.

[1431] She was hitting it with a frying pan.

[1432] Yeah, but she was like, you know, collateral damage.

[1433] It was, I feel bad for the girlfriend.

[1434] I do too, but again, like, what kind of choices are we making in this life?

[1435] But think about, you asked a question about reintroduction or these attacks that occur.

[1436] There was a story we didn't include, it was just too tangential, tangential, but there was a neighbor of the Missouri Primate Foundation, the chimp party place where all the animals were bred.

[1437] At a time in the 90s, she had 42 chimps living in the house in a single property.

[1438] One escapes.

[1439] A 19 -year -old boy recognizes his dog in the backyards being attacked by a chimp.

[1440] He grabs a gun, shoots a chimpanzee.

[1441] He gets charged with destruction of property.

[1442] He gets a felony.

[1443] Oh, my God.

[1444] He went to prison.

[1445] Oh, my God.

[1446] For six months.

[1447] He missed the birth of his daughter.

[1448] That's insane.

[1449] And his name is Jason Coates.

[1450] It's a really interesting story.

[1451] Who the fuck tried that?

[1452] And then guess what?

[1453] Here's what happened.

[1454] Two years ago, I think, he gets his record expunged finally at 40 years old.

[1455] And now he can't get work.

[1456] You know, the guy's like a, you know, contractor, and he couldn't get work.

[1457] That's so crazy.

[1458] Defending his property.

[1459] He shouldn't have been in that situation in the first place.

[1460] Also defending his life.

[1461] Yeah.

[1462] Like, the reality, if you understand chimpanzees, the person who had that chimpanzee is responsible.

[1463] It's not this man who's defending his life.

[1464] You are so vulnerable to a chimpanzee.

[1465] If they decide to get after you, there's not a lot you can do.

[1466] You could survive for a little bit, but it's going to tear you apart.

[1467] That's just how it is.

[1468] And if that guy is not armed and you can't protect himself, then what do you have?

[1469] You have a person that gets torn apart by a chimpanzee.

[1470] The idea that you can't protect yourself from someone's crazy fucking idea of harboring an animal, an enormous animal that's insanely strong and hyper -aggressive and intelligent and uncontrollable.

[1471] Yeah, that was a tragic story.

[1472] Terrible.

[1473] It's really hard making these films because so many good stories fall on the cutting room floor and so many great subjects, and that was one of them.

[1474] Well, you have to have some discretion in the process of casting subjects.

[1475] I mean, it's a choice.

[1476] But I also think the idea is it was also kind of far away from where we were going with these themes.

[1477] I think...

[1478] Well, it seems like you could do multiple series.

[1479] Oh, my God.

[1480] We could continue with this thing.

[1481] It's harder.

[1482] It's getting harder and harder to do.

[1483] But is it also harder to get people to be natural on camera and to not be performative?

[1484] It's harder.

[1485] I mean, what is harder now, and it was hard in the...

[1486] very beginning also is that these people that keep you know I'm generalizing a little bit but for the most part they're very guarded about letting you in because one you know they don't know if you're a spy for animal rights groups they don't know if you're the feds and they don't know if you're going to steal their animals and so a lot of these people have very valuable animals and they're you know extremely guarded and paranoid about letting you in now of course it's even become harder because in our case, we've been sort of, you know, become known.

[1487] And so to continue this model of doing another story on, I don't know, bears, yeah, people are going to be suspicious.

[1488] But as far as being natural, I don't think that's so hard.

[1489] With Tanya and Joe, you know, Joe's obviously a performer in a sense, but we just film them.

[1490] And the more intimate you can make that filming experience for them, the more natural they become.

[1491] So we work with hardly anybody.

[1492] You know, with Tiger King, it was just me and a camera guy.

[1493] And then, you know, and I drove back and forth from Texas to Oklahoma constantly, you know, Dallas to Oklahoma City.

[1494] It was just two of us filming.

[1495] And so the more intimate it is, the more, you know, the less of an audience is watching while you're filming, the better it is.

[1496] And also before Tiger King, there's no way they could have known how.

[1497] big that was going to be.

[1498] Oh, my God.

[1499] I didn't know.

[1500] No, we didn't know yet.

[1501] No, no way they could have ever anticipated some bizarre, obscure documentary on people that are keeping pet cats.

[1502] Our insurers didn't even know.

[1503] But I started making a film about the sixth extinction.

[1504] Big cats in America.

[1505] Yeah, okay.

[1506] That's like low risk.

[1507] We didn't even know it was going to be successful.

[1508] Well, like I said, you guys caught lightning in the bottles, the perfect timing of people being locked in during the pandemic you guys were kind of the early stars of the pandemic your show it was like it was also a welcome escape from the craziness that we were all experiencing we're experiencing everyone's wearing a mask you're keeping away from people and then you're at least when you're home with your family like oh my god we're not these fucking idiots we're crazy but we're not this crazy like this this world is so much more insane that this new insane world that it became sort of a little bit of panacea for us.

[1509] Yeah.

[1510] I think, I was telling Eric this.

[1511] You know, we could ask this question a lot about, you know, the state of, you know, non -scripted, unscripted shows, documentaries and this dramatization that you're seeing as a trend, people making very cinematic real stories, dramatic recreations.

[1512] And Eric and I, we're talking about it a lot because so much of our content is so much more surreal than anything we can even make up.

[1513] Right.

[1514] Or recreate.

[1515] And that's what's so surreal about our process and also just the stuff we capture.

[1516] Right.

[1517] It's stranger than fiction.

[1518] It's stranger than fiction and it also comes off as authentic.

[1519] And as someone who's worked in reality TV, it's not a reality, okay?

[1520] And especially the kind of reality shows you think of as reality shows, they have all these scenarios set up.

[1521] They'll edit things to make them look like different things happen because they just want you to keep keep people tuned in for drama.

[1522] So if you're, you know, you're following a family around.

[1523] They create drama.

[1524] They have scripted shit.

[1525] And it feels like it, right?

[1526] The thing about Tiger King and the thing about Chimp Crazy is it feels very authentic.

[1527] It's crazy.

[1528] God, I'm so glad you say that because I would fly into St. Louis, drive down to the Ozarks to film Tanya.

[1529] And, you know, she'd be like three hours late for some reason.

[1530] And then she'd show up and she'd say, oh, you know, I got to.

[1531] go get my eyes done and then I would be like Tanya you were three hours late can I at least film you with getting your eyes done and not once were we setting her up or saying can you you know get your lip injections she just would say no I got four o 'clock appointment with my lip injection and we which we just shadowed her so it was just her life yeah so it is authentic yeah and we also have it we also have you know Eric we're also fortunate to have an incredibly talented team that can help, you know, create these experiences in a way on screen that make it authentic.

[1532] Well, that's also the editing process must be.

[1533] We had a great team.

[1534] A credible group of guys of team.

[1535] So as they're doing it, are they like marking down like key moments that they have someone who's like a stenographer or something who's like marking down so you know like what to look for or do you at the end of the day go that thing where she went and got her lips done?

[1536] We have to have that in.

[1537] I mean, I wish we had what you just said.

[1538] it would be very helpful.

[1539] It seems like we don't.

[1540] It's pretty organic.

[1541] It's pretty organic.

[1542] I think there's also, you know, you follow the core story, which was Tanya's story.

[1543] We kind of knew that we had it.

[1544] The minute the missing chimpanzee happened or the supposed death occurred.

[1545] So that was a story.

[1546] Where is a chim?

[1547] And through that story, we're able to kind of latch on all these other things.

[1548] Now, what you don't know is we shot these other stories, you know, out of sequence.

[1549] You know, the Travis came at the very end, so we had to figure out a way to, you know, weave it into episode two, we've been into episode four.

[1550] We knew we really wanted that in to serve as thematic connection to Tanya's story.

[1551] I just have to have to be one big overriding point, which is that this is not a good recipe for people.

[1552] Yeah, sure, no. Making films like this, because it's not, because we, you know, like there's all these sort of formulaic styles of documentaries, like a biopic, famous person or a takedown documentary.

[1553] or true crime, what we do, and I think we've just been really lucky is we just start filming somebody never knowing, of course, where this is going to go, you know, and that is not a good smart way to make probably documentaries, because what if it goes nowhere?

[1554] Right.

[1555] You know, I'm just bringing that up because, you know, and so in order to do Jim Crazy after Tiger King, we actually filmed so many different things to get to Jim people.

[1556] How do we spend less time?

[1557] I mean, these things is what we've, like, kind of realized it's, like, exhausting.

[1558] It's worth it, though.

[1559] Well, it's worth it.

[1560] It seems like there's no other way to keep it authentic, then it just shadow these people forever, and then splice it down to four hours.

[1561] Yeah.

[1562] Which is like, you have 250 plus hours of footage?

[1563] 250 days of footage.

[1564] Yeah, no, it's like about, it's about 1 ,300 hours.

[1565] Okay, 1 ,300 hours down to 4.

[1566] Yeah.

[1567] Now, that's just primary camera.

[1568] It's like, you know, summarizing.

[1569] the days.

[1570] I mean, multiple cameras, multiple things happening in a day, right?

[1571] We were very efficient.

[1572] You know, it's an 8 to 12 hour day.

[1573] We're capturing a lot of stuff in that day.

[1574] So are you archiving and, like, at the end of the day, so you know, like, what day this happened and what day that you're, so you do make sure that.

[1575] There's a process.

[1576] There's a field process to ingest that has kind of the notes that we have for the day.

[1577] What happened?

[1578] What's interesting about the day?

[1579] And are you trying to form the narrative of how you're going to have the whole documentary series play out as you're doing that or is it just that comes so much later yeah like we have no idea where it's going probably for the first year and a half of filming you know you know the case of chimp crazy we didn't even discover tanya until a year and a half in year and a half in i what kind of made it what it made it more complicated well you know what's so interesting joe and i want to come back to this about you know i saw you get a little emotional with the buck story because I we spent it was really a it was really a hard one for us to tell but an important one to make sure we got that in but that we missed it we missed it we missed the cover we were going to go Eric and I were going to go to Pendleton to cover what was happening with because we knew there was a violation that occurred from the state of Oregon that basically said Tamara you have to do these improvements otherwise we're taking the animal away from you and that had happened we thought we would cover the response to that four days later Buck was shot and we said to ourselves and I remember this so vividly we can't we have to trust our like instincts like when we like are into something let's cover it film it send someone out and cover it if we need to so we decided to film everything everything including our conversations and process like very meta which ended up becoming part of the story too as you'll see more in four where we have to like turn her in basically so the point with being is that the buck story happened, we thought we just send this guy, Dwayne, who we recruited to kind of join the team into Festus to cover this confiscation, thinking nothing was going to happen, day happens, take the animals out, one is missing.

[1580] And then the guy that we had sent there became friends with her, and we just had to keep following it.

[1581] So this guy became essential to this story with no intended reasoning for that.

[1582] So, yeah, the making of became more interesting than the actual subject matter in a way to us, and kind of weaving that together came much, much later.

[1583] It's not a good formula if you want to make money, the documentaries.

[1584] I mean, I'm interested, though.

[1585] So you're also kind of an outsider in this, but what was your kind of response to the industry, you know, formulaic kind of way of doing things?

[1586] Well, I mean, doing what kind of things?

[1587] With reality TV programming or programming in general.

[1588] Well, I think they, with reality TV, it was pretty simple.

[1589] I could see how it started.

[1590] It was people that were involved in scripted shows, and then scripted shows somewhere around the early 2000s got decimated by reality shows.

[1591] And so these people who already respected television producers, they made their way into reality television.

[1592] And then they realized some of these people are pretty fucking boring most of the time.

[1593] We don't have enough time to spend 250 days to film one episode.

[1594] of a show, right, which is what you guys had to do.

[1595] So instead, what they do is they say, okay, today you're going to argue about what to have for lunch, you know, and so Bob wants Mexican food, Sally wants Chinese food, you have to figure it out, and you have to go around town and figure out where to eat, and you're eventually going to decide this, and this is the place you're going to eat, you're going to be happy.

[1596] And so the whole thing is the personal dynamics, the, you know, the relationships these people have to each other.

[1597] And then they create drama along the way.

[1598] Along the way, you're going to run into your friend from high school, who's like perfectly made up, you know, like well lit with a microphone on.

[1599] Whoa.

[1600] So it's like, it's bullshit.

[1601] It's not really reality, but it's also not really a drama.

[1602] It's real human beings that are doing nonsense.

[1603] And you feel it.

[1604] And then there's also like reality shows that are on specific subjects.

[1605] And those are bullshit too.

[1606] And then, you know, you have data.

[1607] shows, which are super, super popular.

[1608] Because, like, who is he going to pick?

[1609] Who's she going to pick?

[1610] How's this going to work?

[1611] You know, we get excited about that.

[1612] Or fucking these garage shows where someone shows up at a storage unit.

[1613] Well, you know, a lot of those shows, they fake it.

[1614] They load up the storage unit.

[1615] Because, yeah, so they can't be assured that this storage unit's going to have some fucking pirates treasure in it, right?

[1616] So what do they do?

[1617] You ruin that for me. Yeah, so they pretend that they got this at an auction.

[1618] Like, who knows what's in it?

[1619] Apparently the guy died in a mysterious way.

[1620] And there's people looking for him.

[1621] We might really be on to something.

[1622] And then you cut to commercial.

[1623] Is that gold?

[1624] Cut to commercial.

[1625] Cut back from a commercial.

[1626] Is that gold?

[1627] But I even thought, I don't watch any of those shows.

[1628] I even thought some of these, like, you know, nature shows like Steve Irwin, you know.

[1629] And I know you know Forrest Golan, but I always kind of wonder, like, is he walking through the jungle?

[1630] And there he suddenly finds the snake?

[1631] Is it, it's got to be set up a lot of the time.

[1632] A lot of the time, I'm sure it is.

[1633] Or the crocodile.

[1634] Some of those shows.

[1635] But a lot of the ones, like, one of the more interesting things today is YouTube, right?

[1636] Because YouTube, you have these small, independent people.

[1637] Like, there's this guy we had on called Python Cowboy.

[1638] And this guy goes out into the Everglades every day and captures pythons.

[1639] And, you know, like there's videos of him, he got bit by one, like really fucked up.

[1640] His arms is gushing blood.

[1641] He's holding on.

[1642] They're enormous.

[1643] There's more pythons in the Everglades than anywhere on Earth.

[1644] Burmese pythons.

[1645] Yeah, Burmese pythons.

[1646] It used to be people's pets.

[1647] or used to be a part of a reptile facility.

[1648] So we're doing our next doc series is about reptiles and the smuggling of reptiles.

[1649] We have a whole section on that.

[1650] It's another thing I went down to rabbit hole last night.

[1651] Nile crocodiles.

[1652] I was going to the Nile Crocodiles in the Everglades.

[1653] I can tell you a lot about Nile Crocodiles in the Everglades, though.

[1654] Because what they were saying is they found a few, and the ones that they identified that they've captured, that were definitely Nile crocodiles, came from the same gene line.

[1655] So they think they came from the same genetic source.

[1656] But then there was another guy that I was watching this documentary last night, or this YouTube video rather last night, where he was saying that there's like huge crocodiles that take out cattle on the west side of Florida.

[1657] No. Yeah, so he was sketching me out.

[1658] He was like 18 foot, 18 foot, killed cows.

[1659] There's like 23 or 24 species of crocodilians in the world.

[1660] That includes Caymans, Crocodiles, alligators, gowls.

[1661] And the only crocs that are really, really dangerous to man are saltwater crocodiles, Nile crocodiles, Mugger crocodiles.

[1662] But the crocs in Florida that are native, you know, American crocodiles, they are a brackish water crock.

[1663] They're not like Nile crocodiles that are in freshwater.

[1664] So in Florida, you basically just have American alligators.

[1665] And there's a very small population of American crocodiles that are still native, but they're in sort of the estuaries and brackish water.

[1666] They're smaller.

[1667] They, which ones are small?

[1668] American crocodiles.

[1669] Well, they're bigger than alligators.

[1670] Are they really?

[1671] Yeah, for sure.

[1672] What's the biggest American crocodile they've ever found?

[1673] Oh, they can be big.

[1674] I've seen American crocodiles, because American crocodile, the one we have in South Florida, is the same crock that you see in coastal Mexico, goes down into Costa Rica.

[1675] You can see, I've looked over, you know, I've seen a lot of American crocodiles in Mexico, Costa Rica.

[1676] They're big.

[1677] They're long.

[1678] Longer than your alligator out there.

[1679] Really?

[1680] Not that much longer, but longer.

[1681] So, Jamie, can you find out what's the largest?

[1682] American alligator or American crocodile.

[1683] I was under the impression that they were smaller species than the alligators were.

[1684] And definitely smaller than the rest of the crocodiles.

[1685] Check me on that.

[1686] That's an alligator.

[1687] No, that's alligator.

[1688] That's all that.

[1689] A monster cattle eating alligator shot in Florida.

[1690] Look at the size of that thing.

[1691] Okay, but that's unusual.

[1692] 15 feet.

[1693] Oh, my goodness.

[1694] Wow.

[1695] Look at the size of that sucker.

[1696] But you said earlier, crocodile.

[1697] Right.

[1698] American crocodile.

[1699] What's the largest American crocodile, Jamie?

[1700] And the largest American alligator, right?

[1701] I think the largest American alligator was 20 feet long.

[1702] Wow, really?

[1703] That big.

[1704] That's the longest one they've ever found.

[1705] I love this fact check for you.

[1706] Okay, here we go.

[1707] 14 foot, yeah, so they're smaller.

[1708] What?

[1709] Yeah.

[1710] Wait, what's the largest American alligator then?

[1711] It's bigger, definitely for sure.

[1712] Is it really?

[1713] Yeah, because that one that we have out there is 14.

[1714] Damn.

[1715] It's like when you catch a fish, right?

[1716] You say it's this big.

[1717] I think that's how I'm being with it.

[1718] Yeah, okay, 19 feet, two inches.

[1719] Oh, Joe, you're right.

[1720] I'm wrong.

[1721] I love this.

[1722] Well, so there's a bunch of different ones, right?

[1723] And the Nile crocodiles are a different animal.

[1724] Like, Nile crocodiles regularly get to 18 feet.

[1725] And there's some really interesting reports from back of the day of much larger ones.

[1726] And so the question is, like, what, here's the thing about alligators and crocodiles in particular.

[1727] They don't die of old age.

[1728] They just keep getting older and bigger.

[1729] And when you introduce human beings and guns into the equation, what are the people going to shoot?

[1730] Well, they're going to shoot the biggest ones, right?

[1731] So you have guns being introduced in the 1800s, and now in 2024, you can't find the really big ones.

[1732] Well, one of the reasons for that is a really big one would take hundreds of years to get that big.

[1733] So an alligator like that big fucker that they had, that the cattle eating 15 -foot alligator, that guy might be 90 years old.

[1734] you know so a crocodile that gets to 30 feet long which is you know there was reports of ones that were longer than a 38 foot boat that these guys were on that this is a long time ago though and so there's all the speculation uh with these people just freaking out because it was big and they exaggerated is this hyperbole like what is this well there's the other part of the speculation is well for sure we know crocodiles used to be bigger there was many many species of crocodiles that were fucking enormous.

[1735] Dinosaur -eating crocodiles, huge thing.

[1736] What is the biggest ancient crocodile that was ever discovered fossilized?

[1737] I think it's like in the neighborhood of 50 -plus feet long.

[1738] I like this right now, what we're doing.

[1739] And I like that you were right, and I was wrong.

[1740] I like that, too.

[1741] You should tell me about Gigantico.

[1742] Well, so my point is that, like, these things are, they're so different than us that it's hard for us to even imagine.

[1743] Okay, the biggest freshwater crock ever was 40 feet long.

[1744] Yeah, that's remarkable.

[1745] 110 million years ago.

[1746] What about salt water?

[1747] Wow.

[1748] Is that the largest crocodile period, or is it what they're all, the big one's fresh water?

[1749] Right.

[1750] What is the, is that the largest, biggest crocodile fossil ever found?

[1751] Okay, cross -off fossil.

[1752] Largest seed dwelling one, 30 feet long.

[1753] Interesting.

[1754] So the 40 -foot -long one was bigger.

[1755] Interesting.

[1756] So these ones that they, okay, super crock, massive fossilized croc discovered in the Aguila, how do you say that?

[1757] Aguja, Aguilla formation in Big Bend National Park, 40 to 50 feet long, jaws with six inch teeth.

[1758] Good Lord.

[1759] Wow.

[1760] Big Lord.

[1761] Big bend.

[1762] Good Lord.

[1763] Six inch teeth.

[1764] Okay.

[1765] Just imagine.

[1766] Fucking six inch teeth and it's 40 feet long.

[1767] Oh my God.

[1768] I mean, I think Saltwater Crocs and Nile Crocs where I eat more people, right?

[1769] Yes.

[1770] Well, I have a friend, Jim Shockey, who's actually a professional hunter that was hired to go to Africa to shoot some of these man -eating crocodiles that were taking out these people in this village.

[1771] And the footage that he got of it is so disturbing because everyone in the village is missing something.

[1772] Everyone in the village is either missing an arm or missing a leg or has a bite taken out of them.

[1773] And while he was there, a woman got snatched up.

[1774] when she was trying to do laundry so it's a very poor village and these people are at the mercy of these monsters that are actively hunting them so what they do is they so if they want to do something like have a place where they can retrieve water safely what they do is they put like giant poles in the ground all around so they essentially like encase this area right but the problem is crocodiles figure it out yeah and then they go in there and then just settle in and they're just wait for you because they can walk around on land obviously so they go out of the wall and then they go oh the fuckers they only go in this little area how do I get in that area and they're watching you underwater for hours without breathing you know I work a lot in Madagascar and we have Nile Crockettles in Madagascar but they're not as big as mainland Nile Crocs but I know that in Madagascar it's when people go to wash their clothing around the edge of these lakes that they get you know and every their instincts because that's how they get deer like these little animal species every year people die washing their clothing in Madagascar from Nile Crocks.

[1775] Yeah.

[1776] But, um, yeah.

[1777] Fuck that.

[1778] Yeah.

[1779] Um, so the speculation is that there's breeding populations of those, uh, Nile Crocks in the Everglades.

[1780] Really?

[1781] They, they've seen enough of them.

[1782] See if you can find like what's the latest.

[1783] Breeding crocodile, breeding, uh, neil crocodiles in the Everglades.

[1784] They have a shoot on site order for them.

[1785] I mean, it makes sense.

[1786] I always wondered why there were not anacondas and in the making of this reptile documentary we're doing.

[1787] The reason we've been told that they're not anacondas in the Everglades is that they didn't import anacondos in the way they did Burmese pythons.

[1788] Burmese pythons, from what we understand, the python skin people in Thailand and Malaysia, they would collect the eggs and breed, you know, have the babies and send thousands of babies, baby Burmese pythons to the U .S. And that never happened with anacondas.

[1789] But you think about anacondas because they would live in the Everglades.

[1790] You're meeting the guy responsible for that tomorrow.

[1791] It's unclear if Nile Crocodiles are breeding.

[1792] You are.

[1793] It's unclear if they are breeding in the wild in Florida.

[1794] But here's some information about Nile Crocodiles and breeding in Florida.

[1795] Nile Croclerc...

[1796] First observed in Florida in the 60s.

[1797] Wow.

[1798] Wow.

[1799] Belize they have captured all the Nile crocodiles in the area.

[1800] Nile crocodiles become established before.

[1801] They get threatened native species.

[1802] Well, that's what pythons have done.

[1803] I mean, they might have to bring in the Nile Crocs to kill the pithons.

[1804] But what's interesting about that, you know, in the sixth.

[1805] But in the 60s, alligators were endangered.

[1806] Yes.

[1807] Well, I lived in Florida in the 70s.

[1808] And when I lived in Florida, they were in danger.

[1809] They were on the endangered species list.

[1810] People used to feed them marshmallows.

[1811] Oh, wow.

[1812] Yeah, I lived in Gainesville, Florida.

[1813] We used to go.

[1814] And then when I was there, some lady got her dog snatched.

[1815] And then everybody got kind of freaked out.

[1816] Everybody in the town was like, whoa.

[1817] Because they got way too comfortable with alligators.

[1818] Because alligators, when they get used to people, they just lay around.

[1819] So they would just sit on the banks.

[1820] and we would go to the fucking park like Lake Alice is where the lake is we'd go to the park and hang out and alligators would just be hanging out there and I was a little kid it was normal it was normal to see alligators just sunning themselves and they were endangered back then and now they're not endangered all now they're everywhere and crocodile farming had a lot to do with why they're not endangered from what I understand yeah because what took pressure off for crocs just globally not so much alligators but crocs in general was when the Farming happened, it took pressure off of hunting them, obviously, for skins, right?

[1821] Right.

[1822] And the farming of crocodiles has been a really, you know, it's controversial, but it's really been a success story for wild crocodilians.

[1823] But why is that, how does it affect alligators?

[1824] Well, they did.

[1825] That's a good question.

[1826] I think it was crocodile farming.

[1827] You should ask.

[1828] But I know crock farming in general has protected crocodilians across the board.

[1829] I guess they used to hunt alligators also for skins, or am I wrong?

[1830] Oh, yeah, for sure.

[1831] they still do.

[1832] I mean, they still breed them for skins and hunt them for skins, but now they have an overpopulation problem.

[1833] So I was just curious to, like, how would crocodile farming make that happen?

[1834] I don't think that, I think it's probably just a natural reaction to the fact they weren't hunted anymore, and then they just blossomed, and it just took a few decades, and then you have enormous populations over.

[1835] Yeah, yeah, that may be true.

[1836] No crock farming has helped crocodilians across the bore.

[1837] Sure.

[1838] That's for sure.

[1839] Well, on storms patterns, right, shifting, isn't it also true?

[1840] American alligators were on the endangered species list.

[1841] They were very rare in the 60s.

[1842] Now they're incredibly common.

[1843] Well, they were very rare because they were overhunted.

[1844] They were overhunted, exactly.

[1845] I mean, that's the problem.

[1846] When we were talking about deer, one of the things that was established through Teddy Roosevelt, and when they set up the national parks and wildlife services in this country, they had market hunting before that.

[1847] And they had wiped out everything.

[1848] They used to be elk over 50 states.

[1849] They used to be everywhere.

[1850] Well, the eastern elk is extinct.

[1851] Yes, exactly.

[1852] And we have Rocky Mountain elk now that have been transplanted into the east.

[1853] But the market hunting was a real problem.

[1854] We had decimated the populations of all these things.

[1855] They were just hunting deer and all these different animals and selling them for food.

[1856] And oftentimes it's like bison.

[1857] They would just sell their tongues, which is really crazy, because bison meat is thought to be like some of the best meat, but they were pickling their tongues and sending them back east.

[1858] You're now making me think about something, and I don't know the facts, because I but the migratory bird act is some you know that we used to shoot birds all the time and obviously the most common bird or one of the most common birds was passenger patients right and it was it was so many fill the sky they fill the sky yeah and then I think the migratory bird act came into effect anyway but but you're right around the teddy Roosevelt period yeah because people killed off all the there were so many passenger pages they were fucking everywhere and we killed them off for food and for feathers and people's hats apparently crazy anyway but yeah we're gross but what do you think so you have you have Teddy Roosevelt National Park system in services you have things like migratory Bordeck you have things like the ESA which you know had its own unintended consequences which you cover we actually cover in our series about stopping importation but propelling domestic interest yeah through breeding and and you know the demand that's created through US zoo systems that you see so what happens next i guess is it's really complex and the problem is people are very um dug in on their sides yeah you know you have people that are very dug in with the animal liberation idea they're very dug in with pita and veganism and dug in with anti -hunting and then there's people that are ranchers and then there's people that are very dug in to animals or our property it's uh it's quite complicated and it's just one of those things about being a human being is there's nuance to most things that are important to all of us.

[1859] Sure.

[1860] And the success of wildlife is important to all of us.

[1861] It's so true.

[1862] And one of the things we've tried to do a little bit is bring the animal rights groups closer together with the conservation biologist groups so that they can kind of work together because you're right.

[1863] They're so polarized.

[1864] Well, there's also the problem is like we were talking about with BC.

[1865] I didn't really finish my thought.

[1866] But the reason why they outlawed bear hunting in BC is because the high population centers are all urban.

[1867] So people don't have any experience with grizzly bears trying to eat their dogs or grizzly bears killing hikers or grizzly.

[1868] They don't experience it.

[1869] If they did, they'd be terrified.

[1870] It's a giant predator, and you have no chance if it catches you out in the wild.

[1871] I don't think we should ever kill off all the grizzly bears, but they should control the populations.

[1872] And the way to control the populations ethically is you do it through hunting.

[1873] As much as this seems counterintuitive to people that love the bears.

[1874] wildlife.

[1875] The right way to do it is you have informed, well -schooled biologists that really do a great job of managing the numbers that are in the area.

[1876] And then you have people that spend enormous amounts of money to hunt those things.

[1877] And then that money goes into maintaining the population and make sure it's at a healthy balance.

[1878] If there's too many bears, genocide, I mean, infanticide and bears is common.

[1879] Almost all bears are cannibals.

[1880] They, they they eat their own babies.

[1881] The whole thing is mad.

[1882] And if they don't have enough food or if the males come out of the, if they're hibernating and they come out before the female does with their cubs, they'll actively seek out those cubs for food.

[1883] And they will do less of that if there's less of them.

[1884] And if there's more of a balance between predator and prey.

[1885] And that's where it gets weird.

[1886] Because as a person who loves nature, who are we to say, you should kill a certain amount of bears and a certain amount of wolves.

[1887] That seems fucked.

[1888] Like we should just sort of like let it be what it is and enjoy it.

[1889] But the problem is it leaks over into this strange world that we've created.

[1890] And this is the reality if you want to be able to go to Starbucks.

[1891] If you want to be able to go outside and have a cheeseburger in an outdoor patio, you can't have fucking wolves everywhere.

[1892] Okay?

[1893] This is just reality.

[1894] And we're accustomed to this artificial enclosure that we've created to keep human beings.

[1895] being safe, and we've lost our perspective what it means to be an animal in the world.

[1896] Yeah.

[1897] No, so I mean like calling elephants.

[1898] If you don't manage elephants, they'll denude everything, and then they'll all die.

[1899] Well, there's that, but there's also they don't give a fuck who planted that food.

[1900] If you're in a village and your whole family survival is dependent upon you getting these vegetables that you've planted, and then elephants come in and eat all your vegetables, you could very easily starved to death.

[1901] And that's real, too.

[1902] And people don't want to think about that because you think of elephants.

[1903] Well, elephants are endangered.

[1904] Yes, they are.

[1905] Elephants are hunted for their ivory.

[1906] Yes, they were.

[1907] But also, elephants are, Africa is fucking huge.

[1908] There's not the same amount of black bears in San Francisco as there are in, you know, rural Wyoming, right?

[1909] It's because that's the environment to live.

[1910] If you went to San Francisco, you're like, oh, my God, black bears are extinct.

[1911] but you know go to New Jersey they're everywhere right so it's it's not that the animal is that you know you shouldn't have any of them it's just like you there's there should be places where they exist and places where they don't exist and if you want to maintain a city you're going to have to do something about the population of predators you're going to have to do something it's just like how far outside of your city does does human control radiate well then you have ranchers right okay if you want to have a guy who grows cow so you can eat steak you're going to have to be able to protect this guy's cropper it's not going to be profitable for him to do this.

[1912] You're going to have to be able to protect his animals.

[1913] I completely agree.

[1914] Keep animal -human conflict.

[1915] If you want to keep it at bay, keep wild animals in the wild, I would question, and I think you're right, bringing or reintroducing grizzly bears into areas where there are high densities of humans.

[1916] It's a recipe for trouble.

[1917] Well, it's also completely theoretical.

[1918] And right now it's theoretical, although they did just recently reintroduce Grizzlies back into Washington State.

[1919] I don't mean theoretical in a sense that they haven't done it.

[1920] as far as what the outcome's going to be.

[1921] Like, you really don't know.

[1922] And especially if they get to a point where they become bold and they're not threatened by people at all anymore.

[1923] And that's what happens in certain parts of the country.

[1924] That's what happens when they have too many of them in a specific area.

[1925] And then they compete for resources.

[1926] And it can get weird.

[1927] The outcome of Tiger King, I mean, no one knows this, but I'll tell you this, or I don't think anyone knows it publicly.

[1928] But, you know, a few things happened.

[1929] And one thing, this federal law called Big Cat Public Safety Act was passed largely because of Tiger King.

[1930] But the other thing we did just sort of privately is we donated a million dollars to tiger conservation in India.

[1931] And one of the countries where tigers are still doing quite well.

[1932] And so we went to visit the program last September in India.

[1933] And, you know, it's just was so interesting because we're talking about bears attacking people.

[1934] in India, they do live with tigers, and they do have, obviously, a certain amount of people that get killed every year.

[1935] But the key is to keep enough prey within the area where these tigers are.

[1936] It's when the local people, I guess, out hunt or, you know, compete with the prey that the tigers start going into more human, you know, basically start looking at humans as something to eat.

[1937] But anyway, I just bring that up because it was something that was a byproduct of Tiger King that, you know, it was something that we did just quietly as.

[1938] the people that I did Tiger King with, including you.

[1939] And that's so quietly now.

[1940] Don't need that money, not so quietly now.

[1941] Are you aware of the Sunderbans?

[1942] Yeah.

[1943] And the Tiger attacks than Sunderbans?

[1944] Absolutely.

[1945] Sundar bands are fascinating.

[1946] Because hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by tigers in the last several hundred years.

[1947] Yeah.

[1948] Yeah, but also brackish water.

[1949] And they think that might contribute to the aggression of the tigers.

[1950] They drink in, like, salty water, and they're just constantly irritated.

[1951] But they seem to kill people for sport.

[1952] Really?

[1953] Yeah.

[1954] There's this one story of this.

[1955] group of men that are in a boat, and they're rowing this boat in the water, and they're, I don't know if they're rowing it, but they're trying to get away from this tiger.

[1956] This tiger jumps into the water, swims up to the boat, kills a guy, drags him to shore, jumps back in the water, swims out to the boat again, kills another guy, drags him to shore, and one guy gets away to safety.

[1957] One or two guys got away to safety.

[1958] Were they wearing masks behind their heads?

[1959] They weren't, but yeah, that's also what they do.

[1960] Yeah, yeah.

[1961] When they walk around there and they do surveys of the animals, but it's also insanely difficult to find out where they are too because the grass is so high and you know they're just built to fuck things up that's what their job is and if people live around them people are on the menu that's just what it is with tigers it didn't make it into tiger king but we filmed in southern Nepal a place called Chituan National Park where tigers are doing very well and they actually have armed guards with like machine guns to protect the tigers from poachers we filmed there but it's pretty remote and I don't remember how many people get killed but but yeah it whether are tigers people are going to you know have problems yeah if there's high densities of people you know it's all there's a reason why human beings don't live there you're not supposed to live there you shouldn't be living with a tiger's also they have to they're stuck they're fucked but boy we should figure out a way to develop some sort of an area there where they don't have to live like that there's a lot of people I mean it is amazing it's amazing it's amazing that in India there's still tigers at all because it's one of or the second most populated country in the world or is it yeah I believe so it feels like when you're in India there's people everywhere like you think you're going off on some rural road it's just there's people right but if you go into a place where the jungle is like where the tigers live it's like really hard to live there like and then the people that are living there probably they have no options or they're the poorest yeah and so they're living you know and sort of a traditional way out exposed and then they have to figure out how to protect themselves in these enormous stealthy cats that are sneaking around everywhere they go fuck but you see plenty of cows which is amazing by the way just roaming which is so roaming these kind of you know that is fascinating I would really love to know what the origin of the sacred cow is really love to know the origin of that that's one of the most fascinating things that you have a place where people are starving and they choose not to eat cows yeah fascinating And just the traffic stopping, which is, you know, in these roads that have no lanes, and they're all just kind of...

[1962] India is wild.

[1963] But it's so crazy that they stick to this one thing.

[1964] Like I was just watching this news report of this group of people that were not Hindu.

[1965] I think they were of some other religion, and they lived in India, and they got arrested for killing cows.

[1966] So they had cows in their yard.

[1967] They were arrested for them.

[1968] and they bulldozed their homes.

[1969] Oh, wow.

[1970] Yeah.

[1971] See, you can find that, Jane.

[1972] Oh, they're also probably Muslim.

[1973] I believe they were.

[1974] But more people die from what in India in terms of wildlife.

[1975] Is it snakes?

[1976] Probably mosquitoes.

[1977] I mean, of course, mosquitoes.

[1978] But after that, snakes are tigers?

[1979] I don't know.

[1980] It's a good question.

[1981] I don't think it's tigers.

[1982] I think the Sundar bands is the area where they get jacked pretty regularly.

[1983] But, and also, how many people are doing surveys on how many people are missing.

[1984] You know, when you're going into these, like, very remote areas.

[1985] How many people would know?

[1986] Indian authorities, bulldogs, bulldoze homes of 11 people after finding beef and fridges.

[1987] Oh, incredible.

[1988] Slaughter of cows, which Hindus worship as a deity is banned in most of India as is consumption of their meat.

[1989] Isn't that fucking fascinating?

[1990] Well, you cut down an oak tree in California year.

[1991] Right, but they're not going to bulldoze your fucking house.

[1992] Isn't that nuts?

[1993] Depends their kind of tree.

[1994] Isn't that nuts?

[1995] People found beef in their fridge and cows in their backyard.

[1996] So they bulldoze their homes.

[1997] India, you can eat a hamburger.

[1998] You cannot.

[1999] Yeah, they're not really.

[2000] Really?

[2001] I was just in India.

[2002] I think you can get in, like, hotels and stuff.

[2003] I think so.

[2004] Oh, wow.

[2005] They allow it in hotels?

[2006] Yeah, you can get it out of...

[2007] I was just in India.

[2008] Well, you can eat lamb.

[2009] You can eat sheep.

[2010] You can eat other different animals.

[2011] You just can't eat cows.

[2012] Yeah.

[2013] Wow.

[2014] I didn't even think of that when I was there.

[2015] A lot of people think it has its roots and psychedelic mushrooms.

[2016] That psilocybin grows on cow manure and that these people...

[2017] Oh, wow.

[2018] Because one of the oldest, what is it, I think it's called Choctal Hayuk, it was like one of the oldest known civilizations, which was a cattle worshiping civilization.

[2019] And they had like these, like, why were people who are fucking starving to death, like barely getting by?

[2020] Why were they like into worshipping cows?

[2021] Well, that's where you got all your mushrooms.

[2022] It completely makes sense.

[2023] It's almost the only thing that makes sense.

[2024] It's almost the only thing that you could, especially if you have like ancient stories.

[2025] of Solma and these different psychedelic compounds that the Hindus would eat and these different psychedelic notions or potions rather that were talked about where we don't really know what the composition of them was but we do know that psilocybin mushroom has a long history of use and it's really common to find them growing on cow manure why else what's the poor people that don't have any food not eat this one animal I don't know but I've seen mushrooms and cow manure.

[2026] It's getting very confusing information on the burger in India situation.

[2027] They have chicken.

[2028] Chicken all you want, baby.

[2029] They definitely seem to have burgers, but I don't know that they're making them with, like, ground beef.

[2030] Right, it could be like a lamb burger.

[2031] It could be all kinds of stuff that they call burger.

[2032] Right, when you get Indian food, it's always lamb.

[2033] It's a bit more Western now.

[2034] I mean, if you're going to, like, kind of more, you know...

[2035] Not to these people.

[2036] Yeah.

[2037] These people wasn't Western enough.

[2038] I mean, they bulldozed their fucking house a couple months ago.

[2039] That's remarkable.

[2040] That's incredible.

[2041] I bet you they're also Muslim, though.

[2042] That's also a Muslim, yeah, right?

[2043] Right?

[2044] It's like the Uyghurs get treated.

[2045] Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of that, you know.

[2046] Yeah, I'm sure there's some of that too, yeah.

[2047] But it's just, our relationship with animals is very bizarre, and I think most people have like a really stunted understanding of it.

[2048] They're never really around wild animals.

[2049] It's a squirrel or a pigeon or something like that.

[2050] It's kind of perverse our relationship with animals.

[2051] Well, cities, as much as I love them, they are perverse.

[2052] They're strange.

[2053] And they've done us a lot of harm psychologically.

[2054] They've created people that are much more vulnerable than they've ever been before.

[2055] They're soft and lazy and entitled, and everything comes easy to them.

[2056] And I don't think that's normal for human beings either.

[2057] And you can get food anywhere you want and all the worst kinds of food.

[2058] And you're in a prison of your own choosing.

[2059] You're going from one closed environment to another closed environment, riding around your car or the subway or whatever you're doing and we're completely disconnected to what it meant to be a human being for hundreds of thousands of years and it happened in a blink of an eye in a couple of hundred years, all of a sudden we're fucked and we're trapped in this bizarre system and in this system, you know, occasionally we interact with animals and our understanding of it and what we think of it what we think it is is so different and we have anthropomorphization through like, you know, yogi bear and all that kind of stuff and we're so weird with the way we interact with animals and we every piece of it i was i was so lucky to grow up in nature and i take it for granted where you grew up i grew up mostly in northern california but i was like a feral kid my mom my mother always said eric you were feral we didn't plan anything i would spend my days fishing and hiking in the creeks what part northern california in uh sonoma area but i it's beautiful up there but then i spent 40 something years in New York City.

[2060] But I never lost that what you're talking about and that interest and love of going out into nature.

[2061] But I think you're right.

[2062] Today, people don't have the experience I had.

[2063] So many kids are from an urban, you know, world and they can't connect.

[2064] We don't even know what it's like.

[2065] I mean, I would imagine if you went to a city, your average city, like a New York City or Los Angeles, the average person there, what percentage of them spend any time at all alone in the woods?

[2066] Very few.

[2067] Yeah, we've lost our connection.

[2068] I think we had this conversation with Carl, Eric, recently, which kind of put it really well for me. So much of the conversations you have is, oh, we're going to go connect with nature.

[2069] We're going to Botswana for the summer and, you know, do tourism.

[2070] But what you really can do is put a bird feeder outside your window and connect nature that way.

[2071] And you'll see lots of different birds.

[2072] But you must have grown up in nature in some way, or no?

[2073] Not really.

[2074] No, not really.

[2075] But why do you then have such a, like, connection to it in a good way?

[2076] I like interesting things.

[2077] You know, it's really interesting.

[2078] The fact that so few people engage in it is also interesting to me because I'm fascinated by the, just whatever the pull of urban life is.

[2079] Like, what is the gravity of urban life that's changed us into these soft, non -self -sufficient beings that is completely relying on some strange system that's ultimately polluting the world and decimating.

[2080] of its resources.

[2081] Like, what, what are we?

[2082] Like, we're weird.

[2083] And time I spend in the woods, in the wilderness, just being out there.

[2084] You just, you get a different sense of what life actually is.

[2085] You know, you just, it's so extraordinary to see wild animals in the wild, like wild deer and elk and bears and see them existing.

[2086] It's incredible.

[2087] It's better than any movie.

[2088] It's, it's like, it gives you a vital.

[2089] that you didn't know you needed you know like the feeling that you get when you go out in the sun like maybe you've been indoors in the winter and then there's a nice sunny day in the spring everybody's outside in the park like uh give me my vitamins right doesn't it feel like that you're lying down like give me my vitamins that's what it feels like a nice sunny day in like central park right that is a there's a vitamin that we get in the wilderness that uh we are we don't know we're lacking in yeah i think it's a part of being a person i think I think it's a part of being interconnected to every life form that exists wherever we are.

[2090] And we don't think we are because we live in an apartment and we play Nintendo.

[2091] And we're locked into this thing that human beings have created, but we're missing something.

[2092] And it's not as extreme as Tonka being trapped in that lady's basement, but it's in the neighborhood.

[2093] There's something about it that's real similar.

[2094] There's something about it that's real weird.

[2095] where our own prison of our own choosing is not good for us.

[2096] And it's interesting, you know, most all of the characters in Tiger King and Chim Crazy have never seen chimps or tigers in the wild or had any interest.

[2097] You know, they were just, they were just interesting.

[2098] They didn't have the intellectual curiosity that you would think they would have to see them in the wild.

[2099] I'm not shocked.

[2100] I do have a question, though, really important.

[2101] The chimp with the McNuggets, chicken nuggets, does he open up the sauce and dip?

[2102] Yes.

[2103] Did you show him dipping?

[2104] He peels, yeah.

[2105] Well, in that case, I think he just went like this.

[2106] Oh, he sucks it out.

[2107] But they are dexterous enough, and they have eaten so much McDonald's.

[2108] They do know how to do that.

[2109] So they do dip the nuggets in the sauce?

[2110] I don't think it's in that shot.

[2111] I've seen the, they actually peel it with their mouth.

[2112] Yeah.

[2113] They peel the wrapper off.

[2114] Right.

[2115] I saw that.

[2116] But do they dig in with the nugget and get in the honey mustard sauce?

[2117] I think they just squeeze it in their mouth.

[2118] I like that question.

[2119] That's a good one.

[2120] We were confused.

[2121] He's going to dip?

[2122] And then it cut away.

[2123] We don't know.

[2124] Is he fucking dipping?

[2125] I mean, the sauce toss moment was just so surreal.

[2126] Amazing.

[2127] You want your sauce?

[2128] It's your sauce.

[2129] Yeah.

[2130] It was so surreal.

[2131] Incredible.

[2132] They know too much.

[2133] Like just the communication.

[2134] Get that piece of paper and he gets the paper and brings it back.

[2135] They knew too much.

[2136] It's too creepy.

[2137] It's so weird.

[2138] I mean, you guys did an amazing job of capturing it and thank God you found that one nutty lady because she really glues it all together but everybody everybody should watch it it's really good and everybody should watch it also because you have to know that that's a thing like you you know you don't know what people are really capable of until you watch like a serial killer documentary and you go oh Jesus and Christ that's the thing yeah so you don't know that people are keeping chimps in their house until you watch your show and you go oh that's a thing like but it wakes you up from human confinement to the, you know, the symptom you just described of urbanization and coastal bubbles.

[2139] It's kind of the people are like, oh, my God, is this America?

[2140] Like, what do you, of course, like go outside, 45 minutes away from where you live.

[2141] Right.

[2142] I didn't know as a thing, and I've been involved with animal people my whole life.

[2143] So, yeah, it's a thing.

[2144] Monkey moms.

[2145] Yeah.

[2146] I mean, I'm not saying that.

[2147] I'm not saying that it's a common thing.

[2148] They'll do it.

[2149] There's some strange obsessions in this.

[2150] in this world.

[2151] Yeah.

[2152] If you give people free license to do it, I mean, it's one of the great things about being American.

[2153] You have so many freedoms.

[2154] There's so many things you could do.

[2155] But it's also like at a certain point in time, we got to wake up and go, hey, putting a dolphin in a fucking swimming pool is evil, you know, and one day when AI can transcribe dolphin communication, we're going to probably realize they're as smart as us.

[2156] And that's where it gets really, really, really scary, is that we have been engaging in a form of indentured slavery.

[2157] We've captured them.

[2158] We've raised them from child, from the time they're a baby.

[2159] They've been in captivity.

[2160] The whole thing is completely disgusting.

[2161] And yet it's a normal part of life.

[2162] And until blackfish, most people weren't even aware that it was a thing or what it actually was.

[2163] When you see orcas behave in the wild versus the way you see them trapped in those swimming pools, it's torturous.

[2164] Their skin's falling off and the whole thing.

[2165] But think about this.

[2166] A hundred years ago, you can go to the Bronx Zoo and see, you know, a boy in a cage.

[2167] It was a...

[2168] Right.

[2169] Check that photo.

[2170] A West African pig me. Remarkable.

[2171] They kept in a cage.

[2172] Right.

[2173] What year was that?

[2174] 1930s.

[2175] Or 20s, maybe?

[2176] He should have this photo.

[2177] He ultimately shot his brains out.

[2178] Even people then knew that Otabanga, this, you know, basically a indigenous man from West Africa with these...

[2179] 1912.

[2180] or something like that.

[2181] Anyway, but he, even then, people would disturb to see a human being next to a gorilla.

[2182] And he was in a cage by himself?

[2183] I think he was in the ape house at the Bronx Zoo.

[2184] Well, first he was brought for the World's Fair on display.

[2185] Wow.

[2186] You know, to show, here you go.

[2187] There he is.

[2188] There you go.

[2189] They shaved his teeth down to be more, like fangs.

[2190] Oh, my God.

[2191] Shark teeth.

[2192] 1904, there it is.

[2193] So what year at the Bronx Zoo?

[2194] 1902.

[2195] Oh, so he died in 1960s.

[2196] that's right okay so here's an exhibit in 1904 turn of the century yeah so that's our history right 1964 bronxs you that this incredible i i i love this this image it was a it was a it was an exhibition right the the uh world's most dangerous animal and it's a reflection it's a mirror with bars and you walk into it and you see yourself wow but they were really cool They were conscious of that in 1964.

[2197] 1964.

[2198] Well, it was 20 years after we dropped a fucking couple of nuclear bombs.

[2199] Yeah.

[2200] This is a provocative thing.

[2201] But how cool is that image?

[2202] That is cool.

[2203] That's, yeah, you would never have that today.

[2204] The most dangerous animal in the world is us, which is, you know, so true.

[2205] Well, it certainly is numerically.

[2206] Yeah.

[2207] You know, and also just the impact we have overall.

[2208] We're a sketchy group.

[2209] but we know more about us because of stuff like what you guys have done so thank you very much cool it was really fun talking to um and did HBO fund this or did you guys bring it to HBO after it was done we cross probably went midstream so if we kind of typically what we do is we figure out if we have something we self -fund and develop something until we get to a point where we think it's ready i mean tiger king i almost finished it before i brought it to anybody oh wow so i think now we have the ability to kind of control output in terms of control of what the ultimate product can be.

[2210] It was a little bit harder that back then.

[2211] But yeah, we kind of figure out if it's worth it or not, and then we take it out.

[2212] Joe, thanks for having us.

[2213] My pleasure.

[2214] You guys nailed it twice.

[2215] Chimp crazy is really good.

[2216] And of course Tiger King was awesome too.

[2217] And what I said I really mean, I think you guys are doing something that's you're giving us a better understanding of humans.

[2218] you know, through this very strange lens of watching these very bizarre people and their psychological misfortunes.

[2219] Like, whatever it is about them, whatever unfortunate aspect of their mind, the way they interface with the world, allows them to do that.

[2220] It gives us a better understanding of ourselves.

[2221] I really think so.

[2222] Oh, so I appreciate you having us.

[2223] My pleasure.

[2224] Thank you, guys.

[2225] And please finish the show.

[2226] I will.

[2227] I will.

[2228] I was just bummed out last night.

[2229] Okay.

[2230] Thank you very much, guys.

[2231] Bye, everybody.

[2232] Bye.