00:00:45.000Like, it seems like it was partially pet owners who let them go, and partially there was some sort of a reptile research facility or something like that.
00:03:55.000The doctor, you know, in the emergency room said, the last guy in here that got bit by a rattlesnake lost his toe or something or lost his digits.
00:04:03.000And he said, good thing you didn't get bit on a finger because the necrosis can rot away your finger.
00:04:08.000And he said, good thing you got bit on the middle of the foot.
00:05:19.000But yet you feel like you're going to die and stop breathing.
00:05:22.000But the serum sickness is just unbelievably intense for weeks and you just have the most insane fever and you got these red blotches all over you.
00:05:31.000But they make a different serum now that that one was made out of horse antibodies that they put into you and my body didn't like those horse antibodies.
00:09:20.000But I was pretty closeted, but I still kept them in New York.
00:09:23.000And, you know, fast forward, when I decided to try to do a film about it, I had been traveling all over the world to Madagascar and Sulawesi and different parts of South America,
00:09:36.000trying to study reptiles and especially turtles and tortoises that were very rare.
00:09:44.000Like, you know, kind of notable people, Christopher Walken and, you know, Slash and I don't know, all kinds of people that I knew in New York City.
00:09:53.000And I would just ask them to hold a turtle or tortoise and say some words, like PSAs.
00:09:58.000And I was doing that with these two guys named the Safety Brothers.
00:10:02.000And fast forward, they now, Josh has just had a film called Marty Supreme with Timothy Chalamet that was up for an Oscar.
00:10:09.000Little did I know that I was working with these kids that were going to be these new filmmakers.
00:10:46.000Why do you think you're going to get killed?
00:10:48.000He read The Lizard King and he said, You know, you're going to do a story about this guy that went to prison for 100 years and this other guy that, you know, is the Pablo Escobar reptiles.
00:12:03.000But, you know, in the kind of pre, you know, customs TSA days, as intense as it is now, it's very easy to, you know, carry animals and carry wildlife.
00:12:13.000Yeah, that was something I didn't even think about until I was watching.
00:12:16.000I was like, oh, God, I remember those days where they didn't check your bags and they didn't even check your ID.
00:12:37.000You go, you see in the early episode of episode one, people traveling around the world, you know, finding rare endangered animals, putting them in their suitcase and bringing them back, putting them on a price list and selling them to a consumer.
00:12:52.000I mean, the story, The Lizard King, but many much, you know, in our series, it's a handful of guys, mainly guys, you know, start a multi billion dollar industry.
00:13:02.000And you see this kind of innovation happen over the course of the series as, you know, As the years go on.
00:14:02.000Well, it depends on the type of python.
00:14:04.000But yeah, the python skinning business actually is where all the Burmese pythons came from in the 70s that I had as a kid.
00:14:11.000They would skin the pythons, take the eggs, incubate the eggs, sell the baby pythons to the United States and other countries.
00:14:16.000consumer countries that wanted baby pythons.
00:14:18.000Most of the pythons that are skinned in Southeast Asia, and I've been to python skinny places in Sumatra, blood pythons, reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons, but mostly blood pythons, reticulated pythons.
00:14:31.000They're wild cod, and most of them are not endangered.
00:14:35.000But there are less and less pythons out there, but they're not endangered, those pythons.0.96
00:14:41.000Well, there's a shit ton in Florida.0.96
00:16:09.000Well, that's where the laws, I think, are really screwed up.
00:16:14.000When they basically say all pythons are bad to sell, when the Indian rock python is endangered, and there are a few endangered pythons, but to say all pythons cannot be used for the skin trade and sold in California.
00:16:30.000Because of one python out of many pythons.
00:17:10.000I mean, I don't know anything about what it tastes like, but this guy made like a stir fry over rice and they were eating it and they're like, oh my God, this is sensational.
00:18:55.000With Onyx Off Road, you'll find legal open trails around you, and even better, guided trails mapped by real off roaders.
00:19:03.000Each one includes photos, terrain descriptions, and difficulty ratings, so you'll know if your vehicle is capable before you go.
00:19:11.000Unlike other apps, Onyx gives you turn by turn directions on the trail, and their new dispersed camping layer shows where you can legally set up camp.
00:19:21.000You'll also get private land boundaries, public land overlays, and the ability to download maps for offline use so that you're never guessing even when you're off the grid.
00:19:31.000It's a powerful tool built for serious off roaders.
00:19:54.000And in our show, we feature what's called a Fiji Island iguana, a very endangered iguana that unfortunately people in the private sector in this country cannot own.
00:20:03.000I don't know why private people can't own them, but the San Diego Zoo and this zoo and that zoo can have Fiji Island iguanas.
00:20:33.000Well, listen, also, which again, going back to the show, but you know, we the central figure of the book is this guy named Mike Van Nostrom and his dad Ray Van Nostrom.
00:20:44.000They run an enterprise called Strictly Reptiles.
00:22:42.000I mean, I don't know what that means because, like, we decide what a direwolf is and what a direwolf isn't.
00:22:48.000But if you take literal direwolf DNA that's 7,000 years old and you add it, To these gray wolves, and this is what they did, and they created essentially a dire wolf.
00:22:58.000It's like people are arguing over semantics, whatever it is, that's not a wolf.
00:23:16.000Well, like maine wolves in Argentina look very different than our wolves.
00:23:20.000So they're very different types of canines.
00:23:23.000Wild dogs in Africa look very different than ours.
00:23:27.000But, yeah, I mean, one thing I'd just say about iguanas, just since we were on it, is that because I'm on an organization called the International Iguana Foundation, and we protect iguanas around the world, and people get confused.
00:23:39.000They think, oh, iguana, that's so common.
00:23:41.000They're falling out of trees in Florida.
00:23:42.000But there are a lot of really rare cool iguanas.
00:23:45.000There's about 45 species and there's pink iguanas in the Galapagos Islands, land iguanas, there's marine iguanas, there's a very rare high elevation pink iguana, there's another land iguana in the Galapagos, there's a marine iguana.
00:24:00.000But that lizard was fairly recently discovered.
00:24:03.000And there's some iguanas that were thought to be extinct, Joe, like the Jamaican iguana, and that was thought to be extinct forever, the Jamaican iguana, but they found a tiny population recently.
00:24:13.000So there's a lot of iguanas that are in trouble.
00:24:17.000And, you know, we should care about iguanas, and they're not just green iguanas.
00:24:21.000Yeah, that pink iguana, that's a marine iguana and a regular Galapagos land iguana, and then you see some of the pink form.
00:24:28.000Jamie, see if you can find a video on Florida people hunting iguanas.
00:29:11.000They don't want to eat a rabbit particularly, they want to eat some lettuce or some greens.
00:29:16.000So turtles and tortoises is what I gravitated to.
00:29:20.000And then I found out one day they're the most endangered group of animals on the planet, along with primates, if you measure it by how many turtles and tortoises there are in the world and how many are facing extinction, along with primates.
00:29:32.000So then I was like, okay, I want to do something to help them.
00:29:35.000And this show we're doing is really to teach people about the evolution of the reptile trade and to make people realize they're cool and they shouldn't be disposable pets.
00:29:54.000But what's different, though, is that this isn't some side hustle for animal love gone wrong.
00:30:00.000You know, it's there's these people, the reptile people, the herb people are incredibly obsessive about living art, about these living things.
00:30:14.000They like the, it's like a baseball card.
00:30:34.000No, but it's really a trade formed around scarcity.
00:30:38.000And this sort of desire and adventure people have going out to find the rarest of the rare and bringing it back and selling it, trading it, keeping it.
00:30:54.000But it's different than, you know, An individual person that has an attachment to a chimpanzee that she saw with watching Tarzan when she was growing up, and she wanted to have that in her life.
00:31:03.000So, in other words, freaky people, like just people.
00:31:24.000And these are very unusual people because it's a very unusual thing to be connected to, something that really doesn't give a fuck about you.0.95
00:31:32.000Like, we're really concerned about this pink iguana.0.99
00:31:35.000That pink iguana doesn't give a fuck about people.0.99
00:31:37.000If all the people on earth died, it would just keep going about its business and not.1.00
00:32:16.000So some snakes, like, you know, Texas has a coral snake, for example, a very venomous, elapid type of snake, like a cobra, not like a rattlesnake.
00:32:28.000And I think they have less and less antivenom for snakes that rarely bite people.
00:32:32.000Because, like sea snakes, the coral snake, which is the red, black, and yellow one that you have in East Texas, you know, when the dog gets bit by them, you were talking about your dog getting bit by rattlesnakes, a lot of time the vet doesn't know because you can't even see the bite.
00:33:00.000Well, there may be some antivenom, but there's not a lot of it.
00:33:03.000Antivenom has gotten very expensive, and it's very sophisticated now, and it's mostly for, you know, in the U.S. for vipers, you know, for rattlesnakes, you know.
00:33:50.000Yeah, you wind up dead, but I'm getting it wrong.
00:33:52.000But there's a saying, and it doesn't hold true for all coral snakes because there's some coral snakes outside of the U.S. That don't have that same pattern.
00:33:59.000So, if there's no anti venom and they take you to the hospital, what did they do?
00:35:03.000When we were young, they had these little rattlesnake kits.
00:35:06.000I'm a little older than you, but it was insane what they told people to do back then.
00:35:11.000They told you to cut yourself and then put a tourniquet and then suck the venom out, which is completely insane because when a rattlesnake strikes, they never hold on a rattlesnake.
00:35:21.000They strike and let go immediately and then they track their prey.
00:35:24.000And it's literally like a hypodermic needle going into your body.
00:35:29.000And the venom is already just like when they inject you with something, it's already in you.
00:35:41.000Luckily, I wasn't too far away from my car, and I was up in the mountains about an hour away from a hospital.
00:35:46.000I drove well, I drove like a bat out of hell to the hospital, actually.
00:35:49.000But you're supposed to be calm, um, and get to a hospital.0.90
00:35:53.000Incredible, yeah, and it was just, huh?
00:35:56.000Well, everything, imagine taking out the woods, you're like, we're fine, yeah, everything you shouldn't do today, everything you should, and so you just stay mellow and get to the hospital.
00:36:04.000And if they don't have any anti venom, you just die.
00:36:06.000Well, in my case, they didn't have it in the hospital.
00:36:09.000They had to see Highway Patrol to bring it from Ventura, and it took about 45 minutes, and I thought I was going to die on the gurney.
00:36:18.000But, yeah, you get to a hospital and you get antivenom if it's a bad bite.
00:36:22.000And if they don't have antivenom, you die?
00:36:25.000Well, it depends on the kind of snake.
00:36:26.000Like, water moccasins usually aren't lethal, but certain rattlesnakes can kill you.
00:36:31.000And how much time do you have from the time you get bit where you must get the antivenom in you?
00:36:36.000I mean, in my case, I swear to God, I thought I was going to stop breathing.
00:36:40.000About two hours into it, it just slowly feels like this pressure on your chest, like you can't breathe.
00:36:46.000Yeah, like you're like you, it felt like somebody put sandbags all over me, and like you have this pressure, and you feel like you're going to stop breathing.
00:37:06.000Bill Haas, he lived to like a hundred, but and I know people that inject themselves with venom.
00:37:11.000I was in Myanmar, in Burma, one time, and this guy had snake tattoos all over him.
00:37:16.000And he was a snake wrangler at this zoo in central Burma.
00:37:19.000And every tattoo he had put on his body, he had put some venom in it so he could handle these really dangerous crates, which are like cobras.
00:37:27.000And he was this guy with all these snake tattoos, but he had envenomated himself so he would have antibodies so he could handle these things.
00:37:45.000Had this giant cobra, you know, with sculpture basically.
00:37:49.000Here's the question if they do that with allergies, where they give you like a little bit of the allergen, you develop a resistance to it, could they do that with snakes?
00:37:56.000It's like if you live in a snake prone area, should you do that?
00:38:03.000There's a guy right now in the U.S. that's doing it.
00:38:05.000I think they're doing a film about him injecting all these venomous snake venoms into him like a pincushion.
00:38:14.000No, I don't think people should do it, but people do do it, not a lot of people.
00:38:18.000If it does build up your antibodies and you know that you're going to come in contact with snakes, wouldn't that be bad for you to do?
00:38:25.000Look, the country that I think has the most deadly snake bites is probably India, the country where there's the most deaths and envenomation.
00:38:36.000The snake that probably kills more people in the world is a puff outer in Africa, but it's many countries.0.67
00:39:10.000I mean, there's a few people that die this year in California, but typically it's like only a few people a year die in the country from snake bites.
00:39:17.000And is it generally because they just don't get to medical treatment in time?
00:39:20.000Or they're older or they get bit three times, like not just once by the rattlesnake.
00:39:33.000Young ones have a more condensed, more dangerous venom, but big snakes are much more dangerous because they can put far more venom into you.
00:39:42.000The little ones have a more potent venom, but they can't inject as much into you.
00:39:47.000So that's kind of, people misunderstand that stat.
00:39:51.000Not that I'm a snake expert, I'm more of a turtle expert, and I'm more of a freak expert.
00:39:56.000So I'm good at finding these crazy people to cover.
00:39:59.000Do you get uncomfortable being around these people?
00:42:26.000There's an entire episode that talks about kind of the 80s in Miami and the sort of overlap between the drug trade and the illegal wildlife trade and the reptile trade.
00:43:13.000And certain things I would say to him would make him really upset.0.99
00:43:16.000But I have to say, the only time I was ever shot at in my life was in fucking Miami.0.96
00:43:21.000I was shot at, you know, going to a payphone in the early 90s in a van trying to go to a nightclub with a bunch of people.0.97
00:43:29.000And these guys were walking towards me, and they started just blowing out the windows of the van.
00:43:34.000I remember I didn't go to the nightclub, I went back to my hotel, and I woke up in the morning with that chopped, you know, car glass all in my hair.
00:43:43.000I had long hair back then, I had hair back then.
00:43:46.000But Miami was, you know, it was pretty wild in the 80s and early 90s.
00:43:50.000I have a good friend of mine, my friend Steve, did his residency.
00:43:53.000He's an ophthalmologist, did his residency in Miami in the 80s and worked in emergency rooms.0.95
00:43:58.000And he said it was fucking insane.0.98
00:44:00.000It's just like so many gunshot wounds.0.99
00:44:02.000So many drug deals gone bad, so many heists.
00:44:06.000He said it was like an insane place to work.
00:44:09.000I swear to you, you say that because I said to all my characters, I said, What's it like, you know, having been in and out of prison so many times?
00:44:16.000He goes, Bro, everyone in Florida has been in prison, you know.
00:44:20.000And I was kind of like, Well, what's it like, you know?
00:44:22.000But everyone in Florida has been in prison.
00:44:49.000Well, what you'll like about this second episode about this period, it's from the point of view of this young, at the time, you know, coming right out of college, young DEA agent on the beat chasing bad guys.
00:45:02.000And he was assigned this guy, Mario Tabraue.
00:45:05.000The case that was a cold case, no one could ever touch him.
00:45:07.000And you see him kind of chase after him and understand the whole weaving of this story.
00:45:13.000But it's a really, you know, being around that guy was, you know, talk about our subjects in this animal world, you know, law enforcement.
00:45:21.000This guy sleeps with a gun every night and gets literally orgasmic with the thought of this guy coming to his house.
00:45:49.000And he would just, you know, he would brag about all the gun shit, you know, the bullets you can find from this, you know, leftover from the Civil War in his backyard.0.99
00:45:57.000And, you know, he was very, very good with a gun.0.98
00:46:00.000We did a lot of shooting verite with him.
00:46:02.000And he was just a really, at the time, very generous with his time, wanting to tell his story.
00:46:09.000But, you know, clearly, Killed a lot of people and would make some very soft references to that that would be very unnerving, you know.
00:46:19.000Like, yeah, you're really great with it.
00:46:44.000You know, bringing this guy was bringing a lot of drugs from, you know, he was Cuban, and you'll see it in episode two, but he really just doesn't understand how the guy got out of prison.
00:46:55.000And the fact that the very guy that put him in prison wouldn't know that, that they like whoever the powers that be that got him out of prison after 12 years, you would think he would know, you know, but he's still to this day worried about retaliation.
00:47:08.000So this was what's cool is that his dad was actually the person, he was like an HR person for kind of the Cuban, it was at the time of the Cuban Bay of Pigs, you know, invasion, that kind of era.
00:47:25.000And he was responsible for taking care of all these kind of Cuban exiles.
00:47:29.000During that time, and he would be the one that was kind of going house to house and giving people checks.
00:47:35.000So he had this kind of very interesting network of people and had this incredible access.
00:47:40.000And so, what has been insinuated is that his dad had these relationships and knew where everyone was and knew all these people and had information that was useful to the government at the time.
00:48:51.000But that was at a time, look, Pablo Escobar, like there were people around Pablo Escobar that got indicted that were trafficking ivory horns and stuff.0.99
00:48:58.000Like it was very, you know, one degree of separation for like wildlife crime and drugs in that era.
00:49:04.000Why do you think there's that connection?
00:49:09.000I think there's been connections, you know, like you can put cocaine inside of a boa constrictor.
00:49:15.000Who's going to open a box at customs or, you know, Fish and Wildlife Service and look inside the boa constrictor?
00:49:21.000So there's some pretty ingenious ways to meaning you put it in their stomach?
00:49:24.000Yeah, like you either force feed the boa constrictor, like, you know, like you put them in those balloons, you put cocaine in, or you even and then you have to cut them open to get your cocaine?
00:49:33.000Yeah, you cut them open and get your cocaine.
00:49:34.000But even more I remember in New York when the fish markets used to put these drugs you talk so casually about that, by the way.
00:49:40.000But fish markets used to put the drugs in fish in the you know, in the fish market, like with New York.
00:49:45.000Yeah, because no one wants to handle the fish and open up the fish and they'd shove all the drugs into the fish.
00:49:50.000So, you know, like smelly, dangerous animals are a good cover for drugs.
00:49:54.000Or, even more simply, you know, trafficking wildlife, there was a legal version of that.
00:50:00.000So, what they would do is take the crates and they'd pack them and they'd put the drugs at the bottom and they'd put, you know, another layer of animals and they'd mix in some, you know, look alike animals that were really rare but looked like the common animal.
00:50:13.000So, they'd mix them together and then they'd put something like, you know, spitting cobras up the top.
00:50:17.000No one was reaching into the crate when there were these very dangerous animals.
00:50:22.000So that's how they kind of got they were able to prey on the lack of resources at these kind of major ports of entry and realize that fish and wildlife didn't really have any resources at the time.
00:50:41.000Many Komodo dragons that made it into this country came in illegally in a crate and they would just put a little Komodo dragon in with some other monitor lizards and the inspectors couldn't tell the difference.
00:50:52.000And they'd go through, and the Komodo dragon that bit Sharon Stone's husband at the Los Angeles Zoo was one of those Komodo dragons.
00:51:00.000So it was somebody's private collection, and they got released to the zoo?
00:51:04.000No, it was in a sting that's in our show where they were bringing in illegal animals coming from a guy in Malaysia who's sort of the Pablo Escobar, the kingpin globally of all the reptile animal trade.
00:51:16.000A guy that we finally accessed after COVID, whose name is Anson Wong, and he was sort of the You know, bad guy number one in the world for reptile and animal smuggling.
00:51:27.000And so he was sent by Interpol, and I'll, you know, he did the longest sentence in the U.S. for wildlife crime ever at the time in the 90s.
00:51:36.000He was busted in Mexico, but and then brought extradited into the U.S.
00:51:39.000But he was bringing in Komodo dragons and really rare reptiles.
00:51:43.000And the zoos were the beneficiary of those reptiles once they were confiscated.
00:51:47.000So the LA Zoo, San Diego Zoo, Bronx Zoo, a lot of these animals came from reptile smugglers.
00:52:48.000But you've got to think that the type of people that are going to be even interested in having a snake as a pet, that's a very unusual person.
00:53:15.000I think of them as a monster that you feed that allows you, you know, it's not big enough to eat you, so it allows you to feed it.
00:53:24.000And then you have to keep it in this box, which is kind of weird.
00:53:26.000Yeah, well, that's why I like tortoises.
00:53:28.000You don't have to keep them in a cage or a box.
00:53:30.000Because does a snake experience discomfort because they're in a terrarium?
00:53:36.000Listen, there's a lot of myth out there that, oh, snakes can live in a little teeny sweater box or a shoe box, and you can put them in racks like you see in snake stores and snake brewers.
00:53:47.000The truth is, real snakes in the wild do not live in little boxes.
00:53:51.000They may go underground at a certain time of year and hibernate, but they come out and they hang out like us and they move around, and most snakes.
00:57:26.000Yeah, I know they've captured at least two of them.
00:57:28.000Well, the biggest reptile in the world in terms of weight, back to our size conversation, is a saltwater crocodile and it's neck and neck with a leatherback sea turtle.
00:57:58.000Well, I know that there's legend, right, about Congo crocodiles, that there's crocodiles that people had supposedly seen, you know, back in the early 1900s and the 1800s.
00:58:25.000Depending upon their food source and how much.
00:58:28.000Yeah, I think in captivity they wind up dying, but I think there's some thoughts as to why that happens, how they're actually eating, whether they're getting fed, what's the difference between the way they live in the wild.
00:58:45.000But there's some accounts from back in the day where these guys were on a boat and the crocodile was bigger than the boat they were on.
00:58:52.000I mean, the thing about crocodilians, and I think there's about 27 different types, but once they get to a certain size, you know, they're vulnerable when they're little, right?
00:59:01.000Like birds and fish and things can kill them and eat them.
00:59:03.000But once they get a certain size, you know, like you're saying, they're pretty much invincible.
00:59:44.000Good friends with Peter Beard, and he would go to Kenya and Ethiopia and call crocodiles.0.99
00:59:49.000There's a really incredible photo of him inside a crocodile that they killed, and he's like writing in his journal, but half his body is in a huge Nile crocodile.
00:59:59.000But he would go and call them for probably a similar reason as you just said.
01:00:03.000Once they start targeting villagers, once they find that there's a place that they can hunt and get regular food, they're there all the time.
01:00:10.000They're so sneaky that what they developed was they These people had put posts into the ground in the water.0.60
01:00:19.000So, into the area where they would wash their clothes and gather food, they essentially built like some sort of containment area where the crocs couldn't get through these poles.
01:00:30.000So, what the crocs did was go around the poles and into the water.0.77
01:00:39.000Where they realize, like, oh, the people go, like, they must have been watching and realizing, oh, the people go into this area, so I've got to go on the ground at night.1.00
01:00:47.000Then I'll go back out of the water and then I'll catch these fuckers slipping.0.99
01:01:35.000And there's some really endangered crocodiles.
01:01:37.000And you'll see in our show, I think even episode one, there's the zoo curator that says, oh, we bought a few Philippine crocodiles from this dealer.
01:03:16.000Well, people get into it and they get addicted and they buy more and more and more, and then they get divorced and they get rid of them all or they get burnt out on it because after a while it's a lot of work taking care of a lot of reptiles.
01:03:26.000So it's kind of like, you know, people get really into it and sometimes it's hard to sustain it, you know.
01:03:32.000But more trade than the other collectible culture.
01:06:39.000So, when a zoo has the option to sell the dead body and then someone turns it into a taxidermy statue, it's gone on for a long time.
01:06:49.000I had nothing against zoos, but that was one way to get really unusual animals.
01:06:53.000Like, I have a friend, I met a guy I know that's taxidermy a number of Komodo dragons that came from zoos because people don't have Komodo dragons in the private sector.
01:07:01.000Well, I guess no harm, no foul, it's already dead.
01:07:04.000But I guess I make the point you're making, I'm just sort of saying it's interesting how fish, even though certain fish can live over a hundred years, certain rock fish and Longevity that's incredible.
01:07:15.000We don't think of them in the same way as we think of these higher-right, we don't care at all.
01:08:52.000Are threatened with extinction and it's growing at an accelerated rate, mainly because of things that we explore in our show pet trade, exotic smuggling, all of that.
01:09:04.000But to get people to care about things that can harm you, believe it or not, we have challenges with subject matter in the show that we'll get notes back and it might be too hardcore for people to see because it is a brutal volume based industry.
01:09:24.000We try not to show the bludgeoning and the cruelty of animals.
01:09:28.000We try to avoid that with Tiger King and Jim Crazy in this show because people turn the channel.
01:09:32.000So we try, if we wanted to, we could do that.
01:09:35.000Well, I think we're just, but I'm more talking more about the point of like, what, how do people respond to something through an interest?
01:10:00.000They're a different sort of predatory lizard thing, and I think in our mind they harken back to the days where these things were a real problem for human beings.
01:10:08.000I think crocodiles and alligators, like there's a
01:10:15.000visceral reaction that people have to them that I think is warranted.
01:10:20.000But you don't think because we like to talk about the warm, cuddly, charismatic animals like a panda bear or a koala bear or a Well, that I think is anthropomorphism that's done by Disney movies.
01:10:40.000But I would argue that a bear, you know, a Kodiak bear, a polar bear, a lion, is a lot more concerning than most reptiles.
01:10:50.000You know, so why we vilify reptiles and have that, you know, feeling about them is, I think, maybe more as to what you said about the anthropomorphism.
01:13:09.000Okay, if we're going to play into this lane, it's like, look, everyone was shocked that you could buy, you could basically get one for free.
01:13:14.000Well, we've talked about it before on the podcast, but there's more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the wild of the world.
01:14:27.000Because hosting Fear Factor, I got to see people with legitimate arachnophobia and legitimate aphidophobia, where it is like nothing else.0.97
01:14:36.000Like they see it and they fucking freak out.0.69
01:15:17.000We move the rattlesnake and we put it somewhere else.
01:15:20.000We move the gopher snake, the king snake.
01:15:22.000But they just have this, you know, some of them, as you were just saying, just can't wrap their head around even touching the snake because they just, it's instilled in them.
01:15:31.000You know, from their parents or from whatever their childhood that they're scared of snakes.
01:15:36.000But with kids, like I'm sure with your kids and your daughters, like I see with little boys, you know, six and three, how their reaction and they're not fearful.
01:15:46.000Like, and it's partially because of the influence of the work that I'm doing, but, you know, I watch them interact.
01:15:53.000I see their friends, I see their cousins that are fearful.
01:16:05.000I mean, if you grow up and you're used to being around different kinds of animals and the wildlife and different things, you'll probably be more comfortable around unique animals.
01:16:14.000But if you're a person who grows up entirely in the city.
01:17:46.000And they were, at that time, they were actually endangered.
01:17:50.000So, alligators, like they were telling people not to feed them marshmallows because people would throw marshmallows on the lake because you could watch the alligator come up and eat the marshmallow.
01:18:07.000But they were concerned about giving the alligator sugar rush.
01:18:10.000Yeah, they were concerned about giving the alligator non nutritious food, which I thought was funny because they were saying that they were endangered.
01:18:15.000And it And it's amazing that in the 50s and 60s, they were really endangered and it was hard to find an alligator.
01:18:21.000And when you think about that now and how the Endangered Species Act did help bald eagles, birds of prey because of DDT.
01:18:32.000But it brought back alligators and now alligators, like you can't even imagine they were endangered.
01:18:48.000What's interesting about this work in the show that spans so much time.
01:18:53.000You know, we had, which you know, you shared in this, you know, curiosity, but we had great access to all of these great people in different industries.
01:19:03.000So you have heads of the zoo, you have, you know, DOJ, DEA, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the collectors, you know, the bigger suppliers, and you have all aspects of this sort of industry.
01:19:18.000And what the show became, you know, as we were working through the edit is this kind of You know, this real clear story of unintended consequences, which is the more you enforce, you have great laws that happen, but it triggers something else,
01:19:34.000And you see this kind of time after time after time again.
01:19:37.000And in some cases, it leads to some positive things like ESA or the Dangerous Species Act, or you have a pop culture event that drives sales of an animal that's going to be poached out of extinction.
01:19:52.000So it's a really interesting way of looking at this.
01:19:57.000What you realize, and you'll see, Joe, if you continue watching, that the pathology behind everyone, the law enforcement, they're going after their prize, right?
01:20:09.000They're going after their big trophy is the bad guy.
01:20:13.000The bad guy, you know, the dealer, the smuggler, is going after the rarest reptile.
01:20:18.000The zoos got very competitive with reptile houses in the 70s and 80s because they started realizing they were very popular.
01:20:25.000One of the most popular things in zoos are reptile houses.
01:20:28.000They wanted the Komodo dragon, the rare reptile.
01:20:31.000And the collector, like guys like me that really dig reptiles, wanted the pink Galapagos land iguana that no one has, or the unattainable.
01:20:41.000So everyone kind of is going after each other.
01:20:43.000The reptile, the feds are going after the bad guys.
01:21:16.000And you'll see there's no clear right and wrong, and sometimes the laws don't work, so it's messy, and sometimes there should be laws where there aren't laws.
01:22:57.000In Florida, there's a lot of interesting people, a lot of colorful people that are, you know, hitting some of these themes that we're exploring in different works.
01:23:04.000So, I think, so we're able to kind of do that.
01:23:08.000But the duration, the duration's great because, like, you know, sometimes constraints are, no, I think it's great in some ways if you're able to kind of balance other work because, you know,
01:23:19.000holding out for access to a really important person might not happen in the first go around, but.
01:23:24.000You know, a year later or two years later.
01:23:26.000What is the common factor that you guys are looking for when you decide what kind of documentaries you're making?
01:23:35.000Not just, like, that would be too superficial.0.98
01:23:39.000Like, there's too many fucked up people out there.0.98
01:23:41.000But fucked up people in connection with wildlife is the theme of the big three that you've got.0.99
01:23:46.000And people that have a story that's somewhere hidden in there.0.99
01:24:18.000And I would say this is not a good recipe for people that want to make documentaries.
01:24:22.000Like anyone starting out in life to try to make docs, don't do what we do because it's not a good way to get rich and it takes forever and you may never have a story.
01:26:13.000I think it's a risk factor that's considered.
01:26:15.000And especially in the sense of, like, I think most of them, Jeremy, I think most of them think they're going to get away with it or they're smarter than the feds.
01:26:22.000But they have this sort of, you know, worst case thinking about if there was something to happen, it's, you know, eight months at a camp.
01:26:29.000You know, they're not going to get away with it.
01:26:30.000A lot of them go to prison multiple times.
01:26:32.000While we were filming this show, during the filming, we were shocked that one of the lead guys in our film was under investigation, being indicted.
01:27:23.000Well, a lot of it's Eric, the one recently that happened.
01:27:26.000I just took a confiscation three weeks ago of 300 three-toed box turtles that come out of the central part of the U.S., Oklahoma, Missouri.
01:27:37.000And two weeks later, a guy was busted coming into Mexico with turtles, and I took those turtles from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
01:27:45.000So animals are coming into the country out of Mexico, you know, different countries, and then we're exporting now.
01:27:51.000Which is new in the last 10 years, a lot of native turtles and reptiles and other wildlife to Southeast Asia and Europe.
01:28:02.000Mostly, it's mostly air cargo, carry on.
01:28:07.000This particular confiscation three weeks ago, they busted the guys with more box turtles in their luggage once they got to Hong Kong and China.
01:28:18.000Like I said, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Jakarta, the reptile. industry is enormous for now keeping them as exotic pets, enormous.
01:28:28.000I mean, it's, you know, you know, in Asia, like the bird world, the birds are called the cut flowers of the wildlife trade in Asia because like we might have a bouquet or a plant in our house.
01:28:39.000They have a bird cage in Southeast Asia.
01:28:41.000And there's something like some insane statistic about how many people have a bird in their house.
01:28:46.000And when you go to the bird markets in Jakarta, it's just surreal.
01:28:50.000Or in Thailand, there's one in Bangkok called Chatachat Market.
01:28:56.000You know, we talk about where COVID came from, but the scale of these animal markets, you know, bushmeat, wildlife, it's on a scale that's beyond your imagination.
01:29:43.000It didn't come from the lab, but now I'm beginning to think it might have come from the lab.0.78
01:29:46.000I think a lot of people were influenced to say that it was a natural spillover because they didn't want to admit that we were fucking around with gain of function research.
01:29:54.000I think the evidence now shows that it may have come from that.
01:30:30.000Well, there's in China alone, there's over a billion people, so there's just more people, and the scale and the size of Asia and China. is much bigger than the US and Europe combined, so they have a bigger market.
01:30:45.000And the climate's pretty good to keep exotic animals like Florida.
01:30:48.000So it's just, it's like, you know, on steroids, the collectors in Asia.
01:30:53.000And why I think that the industry, the trafficking number is so underreported is, you know, you have this, there's like one person, one person that is responsible for coordinating in the US, one person, she's in Delaware,
01:31:05.000who's responsible for coordinating with the US Fish and Wildlife to deal with, you know, these placements of confiscated wildlife.
01:31:58.000The percentage of wildlife that leaves the country, native wildlife to the U.S., it's like 50% is kind of marine stuff like coral and invertebrates that are in the ocean.
01:32:09.000And the rest is mostly reptiles, mostly turtles.
01:32:12.000Mammals are very small these days, birds are very small.
01:32:15.000So for whatever reason, You know, turtles and the U.S. has the most, out of any country in the world, we have more species of turtles and tortoises than any country in the world.
01:32:29.000You know, India, I think, is maybe third.
01:32:32.000But so Asia now really wants these turtles where you grow up, you know, in New Jersey and other places where we have these really cool turtles, spotted turtles, bog turtles, wood turtles, really beautiful colored eastern box turtles.
01:32:48.000The shipment that just went out that we received the confiscation from, it was about a half a million dollars.
01:32:53.000Just those turtles once they get to China.
01:32:56.000So it's big money, and they use mules, and the people they got arrested or busted usually aren't the real ones that are, you know, organizing the whole thing.
01:33:05.000Well, that's a good thing about this docuseries is that you guys are exposing this to people because I think most people would be completely unaware.
01:34:18.000You know, especially the guys who go salmon fishing.
01:34:20.000When they come back from salmon fishing, you literally have like 30, 40 eagles just waiting on the lawn for these boats to arrive because they know that they're going to throw the carcasses out.
01:36:55.000Silent Spring, the author, she changed everything because no one listened to her about DDT and pesticides, which were making the eggs of birds of prey not viable.1.00
01:37:19.000Because of pesticides we were using, because of DDT was doing this thing to the eggs where pelicans, Birds of prey were disappearing at alarming rates because of spraying of DDT for agriculture, for pesticides.
01:39:55.000It's different in reintroducing animals to where there's agriculture and where there's a bunch of animals that are in pens and then they start eating them.
01:40:26.000Well, there's certain states where they're overpopulated, and there's a lot of argument they should be relisted and that people should be able to hunt them again like they do in Alaska.
01:40:35.000But the Native Americans in California do, by and large, want grizzlies back, and they have this new technology that might be able to keep them kind of in certain areas.
01:40:46.000They haven't figured it out fully yet, but hopefully they keep them in a certain area because grizzlies migrating into LA like the wolves right now might not be a good idea.
01:40:55.000Well, you already have the mountain lions.
01:40:57.000There was a great video the other day.
01:40:58.000I don't know if you guys saw it of a mountain lion in a guy's backyard in Santa Monica.
01:41:53.000Well, it's Bay Area, wherever it is, where they have these depredation tags where they have to shoot problem mountain lions because they're eating pets.
01:41:59.000And they find out that that's half their diet.
01:44:24.000Anyway, I've been working with this species of tortoise for almost 20 years, and we were able to get some confiscated plowsher tortoises out of China and Taiwan, and we waited patiently for 15 years to try to breed them.
01:44:38.000And right when we finished this show, and this is a tortoise that's never been bred successfully in the Western world.
01:44:45.000No zoo institutions have tried to breed them and failed.
01:44:49.000We were lucky enough to get our first hatchling of this really endangered tortoise right when we finished the show.
01:44:55.000And so we filmed it, and it made it into the end of the show.
01:44:58.000But it's a story about the reptile trade.
01:45:00.000And this was a story in the end of the show about a confiscated group of animals that came from the reptile trade, the rarest and most valuable tortoise in the world.
01:45:10.000And today we're trying to bring it back to Madagascar, which we're working on, which is happening as we talk to you.
01:45:14.000And is the problem that if you bring them back to Madagascar, people are going to go to Madagascar and steal them again and then use them in the pet trade?
01:45:23.000It's somewhat about showing Madagascar that we're not trying to profit and take their natural heritage and what they rightfully should have.
01:45:33.000So, part of it is showing that we can go full circle, confiscate an animal that was in the illegal exotic reptile trade, breed it, and then return it to Madagascar.
01:45:42.000The part that no one wants to talk about that's really controversial is in this particular case, and it's not like one thing fits all.
01:45:53.000I said this to the folks that are working with this tortoise in Madagascar to try to save it.
01:45:57.000You know, hey, the only way you're going to take pressure off of this tortoise, it's like drugs, is if you either legalize drugs or, you know, in the case of drugs, or make this tortoise available for people around the world so they can have it because it breeds quite easily.
01:46:11.000Breed them, try to have them in the private sector, in institutions, in zoos.
01:46:16.000They turn out not to be that difficult to breed, even though no one's ever bred them in the Western world, in Europe or the U.S.
01:46:22.000Well, it takes a long time to reach maturity, right?
01:46:25.000Well, it's an animal that takes longer, twice as long as a human, or three times.
01:46:29.000They don't reach sexual maturity until they're about 30 years old, 40 years old.
01:46:33.000You can raise them faster in captivity than the wild.
01:46:56.000So the dremeline is a way to deter poachers, deter value.0.64
01:47:01.000Our organization is the group with Dural that did this dremeline to try to deface them, like cutting off a rhino horn so poachers wouldn't take them.
01:47:09.000So we were dremeling those tortoises' shell to basically deface the tortoise so poachers would not take the tortoises.0.99
01:47:41.000You can see it over there, the center.
01:47:43.000That's called the vertebral scoots of the tortoise, and we dremeled them, and we put MG for Madagascar and a number, and we were hoping that defacing the tortoise would make collectors not want to have them, but it didn't work in the end.
01:49:06.000People have been playing with turtles forever, so maybe they came up with a lot of things that relate to turtles.
01:49:12.000But it's odd that it syncs up with a 28 day lunar calendar.
01:49:15.000I know sports stadiums in the beginning, or things that were shaped like that, like a geodesic dome, came somewhat from how turtles are designed.
01:49:25.000Like there was some architectural thing that came from turtles.
01:49:34.000And I know turtles, the first writing.
01:49:36.000turtles, the first writing, the earliest writing was on the plaster on the bottom of a turtle shell in China, maybe some of the earliest writing going back some really, I don't know, a couple thousand years.
01:49:49.000So turtles have been used for all kinds of things, for writing, for medicinal medicine, especially in Asia.
01:49:58.000It's gone back thousands of years using turtles for qi and for vitality and all these kinds of things.
01:50:05.000If you get sick, you may Some turtle shells.
01:50:07.000There's a lot of weird stuff with that.
01:50:08.000There's a lot of stuff that has to do with that.
01:51:36.000It's like wild rhino horn is worth more because they think the wild rhino eats things that are medicinal versus just a captive rhino that's eating hay.
01:51:44.000And it's the stuff they eat that goes into the horn, which makes sense, like your fingernail.
01:54:45.000No, that one's so rare, there's so few of them.
01:54:47.000That one is, people buy it as an exotic pet that's really rare.
01:54:52.000So this is kind of a cat, it's a tricky situation because, on one hand, if they're extinct in the wild and these people have them as pets, maybe you can recover them somehow or another.
01:55:56.000But solutions to the scarcity problem that you're describing, you know, pet trade can.
01:56:01.000Commercializing aspects of it can reduce But what's important about this conversation, actually, is people think of ivory, rhino horn, you know, whales, and they have no idea that a turtle.
01:56:13.000Pound for pound could be more valuable than a rhino horn, possibly.
01:56:18.000Nobody knows this, but it's crazy what the money involved in these, back to the confiscations we're getting and the trade in turtles going out of this country is in the millions and millions and millions and millions.
01:56:31.000And there are people in China and other parts of Asia that are getting very rich in the turtle trade.
01:56:36.000And we always hear about pangolin scales, rhino horn, ivory, and those things are important, but the turtle trade is really massive, and the reptile trade is massive.
01:56:46.000And there's a lot of money in it, and they're easy to transport because a turtle doesn't need to eat or drink.
01:56:51.000Just wrap them in socks, put them in a box, shove them all in there, put them in diapers, tape them up, ship them.
01:56:59.000They need a little air, but they have a very low blood pressure, not like we have a higher blood pressure than reptiles, and they can live without water or food, as you know, for a very long time.
01:57:09.000So they're, you know, like wildlife nature with handles.
01:57:12.000You can just take them, transport them.
01:57:14.000And if they're really worth $20,000 to $40,000, you're putting that in your bag.
01:57:44.000Yeah, so in if you've been to Taiwan or China, there's these snake bars where you can literally have a snake bleed out while it's alive, a cobra, and put it in your drink.
01:57:58.000What kind of diarrhea you get from snake blood?
01:58:00.000I was many years ago, oh my god, I was in Myanmar and Burma.
01:58:04.000At a snake place, and they were just loading snakes up in these trucks, like, you know, big trucks, just stacking snakes, and they were heading into China.
01:59:49.000Don't get me started to talk about animal penises.0.94
01:59:52.000My favorite movie as a kid was a movie called Birds Do It, Bees Do It.0.98
01:59:55.000I don't even know if it still exists, but all it was was animals having sex from a praying manis, like eating the head off of the male, to a rhino.
02:01:07.000Consumption of tiger meat is highly illegal, though an illicit black market persists, primarily fueled by commercial tiger farms.
02:01:14.000Despite strict domestic bans, thousands of tigers are bred in captivity across the country, creating a Complex web of illegal luxury consumption is a crazy word.
02:01:27.000Luxury consumption of tiger meat, traditional beliefs, and international conservation concerns.
02:01:33.000Well, it's what you just said earlier that started this conversation that people go to restaurants and eat exotic animals and bear gallbladder.
02:03:25.000There's a snake in Japan called a habu, and I remember getting sake, and this really incredible snake was in my sake, but you know, like.0.92
02:03:34.000Look, we're hypocrites in this country.
02:03:37.000We eat tuna and they're endangered.0.99
02:05:03.000I agree that it's important, but I am also fascinated by our desire to sort of manage nature because 90 whatever percent of any animal that's ever been alive ever is done.
02:06:45.000There's a bunch of videos of guys cooking them in walks outdoors.
02:06:51.000And so is that another thing where it's like one of those exotic things that you're not supposed to have and that's why they're cooking it?
02:06:56.000Because I mean, it looks like there's a funny one where a dude's singing.
02:07:00.000He's like rapping over it, and the guy's cooking about a guy cooking a dragon.
02:08:43.000But I've seen dogs being killed in Sulawesi in huge numbers in Indonesia, just the way they kill them, and then they take these blowtorches and burn the hair off of them.
02:08:53.000And people buy them just like you're in a regular grocery store.0.99
02:08:57.000And it's just what's normal in one culture.
02:09:00.000Those are snapping turtles, American snapping turtles.
02:09:51.000You're going to really gross out a lot of people.
02:09:54.000So, you know, you say you guys have a bunch of projects always kind of in the works.
02:09:59.000Like, how do you go about choosing them?
02:10:01.000You just like find these very bizarre people and these very bizarre niche groups, and I think, you know, listen, I am more aware of time as I get older,
02:10:13.000so you got to choose carefully what you want to do because it takes time to make these projects.
02:10:17.000So, you know, a lot of them we hope there's some silver lining or something maybe positive about telling these stories and not just frivolous stories about freaky people.
02:10:29.000It helps to have some freaky people in a story to make people interested sometimes, but that's not the real goal.
02:10:36.000We're also doing projects that have nothing to do with wildlife.
02:10:40.000I did a documentary in the last 10 years about my mom and my parents.
02:10:46.000I don't know if anyone will ever see that, and they both died, but I did that to keep them relevant.0.85
02:10:51.000I had a crazy family, a gay father, and a crazy mother who was into animals.0.99
02:12:11.000You know, some of this independent work, especially some of this documentary work, it takes many, many, many years.
02:12:17.000And many people are only really able to show it to the people that know about the issues, and nothing happens, especially if there's an impact aspect to it.
02:12:28.000It happens to be, you know, these subcultures that have a higher propensity of finding crazy people or people with far-out beliefs.
02:12:36.000More than anything, it's more beliefs that are more interesting that make us curious.
02:12:42.000So I think that's the sort of mixture of.
02:12:44.000Conservation storytelling plus far out beliefs, you know, in a niche that are able to zoom out and talk about themes of extinction or attachment or ego or crime, you know.
02:12:56.000Maybe there's something to the overfishing thing to do because there's been a lot done on the issue.
02:13:14.000Alex They tend to preach to the con- The tone is boring.
02:13:17.000Well, they tend to preach to the converted, not the unconverted.
02:13:20.000And you want to reach a bigger audience by somehow telling that story about overfishing in a way where you can get more people seeing it that don't know the issue.
02:13:29.000And the other thing I would just say, overfishing is a big deal.
02:13:31.000Invertebrates, insects, butterflies, and what's happening with insects is a big deal.
02:13:35.000We're losing a lot of really weird insects, and they haven't even been described yet.
02:13:40.000Marine fish and even tropical fish is really interesting to us.
02:13:45.000Where do all the saltwater tropical fish come from?
02:13:55.000There's a lot of different groups of animals that we don't really think about and talk about that we kind of take for granted and we think of them as disposable.
02:14:03.000You know, we'll just put more tropical fish in our aquarium in a Vegas hotel.
02:14:08.000And imagining the extinction businesses are going to solve our problems.
02:14:11.000I think that's also interesting to us.
02:14:12.000And there's just not a consciousness for smaller vertebrates and invertebrates.
02:14:16.000But I would just say one other thing that I think we do that you probably are aware of that, you know, people think you have to be in a city to get.0.92
02:14:24.000The weird shit going on, New York City, LA, whatever, big cities.0.76
02:14:29.000And what I found is oftentimes it's the places that you least expected.0.99
02:14:34.000Some weird suburban landscape where you start turning over the rocks and you find and see that there's weirdness happening everywhere.