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Episode: #2203 - Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride

Author: Joe Rogan
Duration: 02:34:08

Episode Shownotes

Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride are Emmy-nominated filmmakers. Their latest production is the HBO docu-series "Chimp Crazy.

"  www.hbo.com/chimp-crazy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_04
Jeremy McBride and you got did you guys both do Tiger King as well?

00:00:24 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, I kind of came in towards the tail end, I remember meeting you about this.

00:00:28 Speaker_06
Keep this close to your face.

00:00:29 Speaker_00
Okay.

00:00:30 Speaker_06
You can scoot your, it moves and stuff.

00:00:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, I met Eric kind of towards the tail end of filming Tiger King. Yeah, that was kind of the first experience I had with him.

00:00:44 Speaker_06
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?

00:00:56 Speaker_01
Yeah, captive cats and captive audience.

00:00:58 Speaker_06
And just crazy people. And then your new show, Chimp Crazy, is basically all in the same vein. And it is so odd how nutty these animal people are, these people that have captive animals.

00:01:15 Speaker_06
their home it's such a bizarre there's I would like to see like a psychologist a clinical psychologist do an examination of what type of personality wants to have these enormous wild animals captive in their homes yeah no for sure it's

00:01:40 Speaker_01
It's incredible, and of course that's what interests us, because I'm an animal guy, but you have to have interesting people to tell a good story. Well, we are animals. And we are animals.

00:01:51 Speaker_06
That's the weird part about it. We're this bizarre animal that likes to keep animals in cages.

00:02:00 Speaker_01
And some people think we should have been in the same genus as apes. But of course, there's something called religion and dominion. And of course, we're not animals. We're not apes.

00:02:13 Speaker_06
Well, we certainly are. I mean, those people, they still believe in religion. But the reality of observable science is also there, unfortunately. You know, we're just a weird animal. We're the fucking weirdest ones.

00:02:27 Speaker_06
But the show Chimp Crazy, I just finished episode three last night and we got to number four and my daughter wanted to watch number four. I'm like, I don't think I could do it. I was so bummed out after episode three. I was like, oh my God.

00:02:41 Speaker_06
I mean, I don't want to give away anything for people who haven't watched the series yet. I highly recommend it. It's really fucking good. But episode three, man. It's like...

00:02:54 Speaker_06
It's like there's something about, first of all, this is one of the rare times where I'm fully with PETA.

00:03:01 Speaker_06
When you're, you know, it's like when you side with PETA on things, it's like, you know, like this is, this has got to be an egregious example of something absolutely horrific.

00:03:13 Speaker_06
And, um, you know, the one situation where the woman who was a drunk kept the chimp and then attacked her daughter and the whole thing is like, at the end of the show, it's like, Oh my God, I don't know if I could keep doing this.

00:03:24 Speaker_01
Yeah. No, it's interesting you mention PETA because I'm not fully aligned with PETA 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

00:03:42 Speaker_01
turtles and tortoises, which actually are the most endangered group of animals along with primates. Turtles and tortoises, really?

00:03:50 Speaker_01
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. I have no idea.

00:03:59 Speaker_01
But where I am not aligned with PETA is when you have to make a choice between eradicating a rat that's

00:04:07 Speaker_01
killing off the last Galapagos tortoises, or eradicate a mongoose that was introduced that's killing off an iguana in the Caribbean, I will make that choice.

00:04:17 Speaker_01
PETA basically views it as the rat has rights just as much as the tortoise, and I'd like to have the tortoise around for future generations. So I'm not always aligned with PETA, but in this case, yes.

00:04:29 Speaker_06
Well, they have a background with the Animal Liberation Organization, which essentially doesn't think that any animals should be captive. And I do understand their point. But then you have Carl. How is Carl going to not have an owner?

00:04:49 Speaker_06
How's little Carl over there? Not gonna be fed. Do you want French bulldogs to go extinct? Because they will. They can't even breed.

00:04:56 Speaker_01
If you did a poll and asked how many people at PNIC keep dogs, it's like 95%. Which is crazy. So it's a little hypocritical if they don't want people to have pets.

00:05:05 Speaker_06
Well, you know, it's one of those things. It's like how it starts and how it's going. You know, like where did it start from? And I see their, look, all dogs are, a horrible misjustice that's been done to wolves.

00:05:24 Speaker_06
Somehow or another, we have become friends with wolves and turned them into these strange things, but the reality of life in 2024 is We have dogs, and dogs need owners, and they love you. It's a great relationship. But it's in their genetics, right?

00:05:42 Speaker_06
They've been domesticated thousands and thousands of years. It's like saying that we should be going back to chimps. We should live in the jungle. We should live in trees, which is also crazy.

00:05:53 Speaker_00
What is it, Erica? Chimps are more like chimps than we are human?

00:05:57 Speaker_01
Chimps are closer to us than they are gorillas, because we are the subfamily of chimpanzees, which are called homonyms. And yes, chimpanzees are closely related to us more than any other ape.

00:06:12 Speaker_01
But it's, back to what you said a minute ago about making these movies, I just want to touch on why we do this, because a lot of people miss the point of Tiger King even. There's a point? Yeah, there's a point. I think I missed it.

00:06:28 Speaker_01
Well, we were really trying to get Joe Exotic elected president. That was the point.

00:06:34 Speaker_01
No, but the point was that a lot of docs, man, are great, and they are really informative, but they preach to the converted, people that already know the issue, like the Cove, and they're great.

00:06:47 Speaker_01
And what we wanted to do is preach to people that don't know about the issues. So you had to cast, you had to get a lot of eyeballs on it to make a difference, right?

00:06:55 Speaker_06
Right, so that was sort of the goal of both Tiger King and Jim crazy In the end, but I think he definitely did that I mean I I had a joke in one of my earlier comedy specials about Texas and tigers and I know that the statistics But there's no more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the wild of the world in private collections.

00:07:15 Speaker_05
Wow. I

00:07:15 Speaker_06
Not in zoos, in people's yards. There's these wacky people that have fucking tigers in their backyards. And there's a lot of, there's thousands of tigers in Texas that are in people's yards.

00:07:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, that statistic has been going around for a long time. That may change, 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.

00:07:41 Speaker_06
Yeah, they think there's 5,000 in Texas. 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 endangered in the wild, but is so common in Texas that you can hunt them.

00:08:02 Speaker_06
and they have them on these enormous ranches, you know, 30,000, 50,000 acres, and they're wild. But they live wild. I don't have a problem with that.

00:08:10 Speaker_06
Like, 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, you're talking about a different thing.

00:08:31 Speaker_06
But what you're mostly getting is small enclosures of tortured animals who are fed cold meat. And that is not what they want. It's not what nature intended them. They're the cleanup crew. They're everything that has a limp, anything that's slow.

00:08:46 Speaker_06
They keep populations down. They make sure there's not an overpopulation problem of ungulates. That's what tigers do. That's what they do in the wild. And so all of their instincts, everything, their essence of their being,

00:08:59 Speaker_06
is all stifled by being captive. You know, we were talking about giraffes. They're the only animal that I don't have a problem with at the zoo because they're so chill. They're so chill. Babies feed them.

00:09:10 Speaker_06
When my daughters were young, we'd take them to the zoo and you could hold a piece of lettuce 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.

00:09:22 Speaker_06
And we're so confident that they have no aggression towards people, that we allow little babies to feed giraffes. Giraffes don't seem to have a problem at the zoo. They seem to be totally relaxed with it.

00:09:35 Speaker_06
But there's a lot of animals where it's nothing but torture.

00:09:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. No, for sure. And I think it's incredible that in the day that we live in, 2024, that in the consciousness of the culture that we still keep certain animals in zoos that really are miserable.

00:09:54 Speaker_01
Those are things like the whales and cetaceans and elephants are not happy in zoos.

00:10:01 Speaker_05
Monkeys.

00:10:02 Speaker_01
And most primates are not happy in zoos. Yes, and I think there are animals that lend themselves more, I like to say, to being in captivity.

00:10:11 Speaker_06
Yes, like giraffes. I think giraffes is the only example.

00:10:16 Speaker_01
Or a giant tortoise, maybe? Yeah, that's a good example too. Solitary animals.

00:10:21 Speaker_06
Solitary animals. Well, even just animals that just don't, they're just happy that there's no predators. And then they're relaxed. But the last time I went to a zoo, my daughters were, they were younger.

00:10:35 Speaker_06
uh... but not not like babies and we were in denver and uh... i was there for a gig and uh... we we went to the zoo and to this day it haunts me there's this primate enclosure and this one monkey

00:10:50 Speaker_06
was just screaming, just screaming like in agony, like being tortured, just, just holding onto the bars and screaming because he was by himself and just the, this tiny little cage and there was nowhere to go and people were just staring at him all day and he was just losing his fucking mind.

00:11:13 Speaker_06
I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore. I can't because I felt super hypocritical because I've always had like an issue because it's animal prison. It's animal prison for animals that did nothing wrong.

00:11:23 Speaker_01
I was at the Singapore Zoo once, which is a good zoo for zoos in Asia. It's one of the best zoos, maybe the best zoo, along with the Taipei Zoo. But there was a polar bear at the Singapore Zoo. This is like 95% humidity, 90 degrees, and it was green.

00:11:42 Speaker_01
because it was covered in a film of algae. And so the polar bear was literally a green. And you just say to yourself, if you have a zoo in Alaska, you can maybe have a polar bear. But Phoenix, Arizona, Singapore.

00:11:56 Speaker_06
But even if you have a zoo in Alaska, polar bears are the one bear that doesn't eat anything but animals. So polar bears are extraordinarily predatory and they have hunting instincts. So all day they just want to roam and hunt.

00:12:12 Speaker_06
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, it was a few hours away, and on the way back I got lunch and I saw this zoo.

00:12:29 Speaker_06
So let me just check this zoo out. And I went to the zoo. It was this little shitty zoo in like, somewhere in, I think it was in Massachusetts. And there was this polar bear in this tiny little enclosure just going in circles.

00:12:43 Speaker_06
Like he was fucking crazy, just going in circles. Tiny little enclosure. And I was like, what is, why is this okay? What is this? This is not a life, this is terrible. It's terrible.

00:13:00 Speaker_00
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.

00:13:15 Speaker_00
And through that interest, we've had this incredible opportunity to explore all of these moral truths about American zoos. For us, one thing that was so deeply fascinating, I think there's something like 242 accredited zoos in this country.

00:13:32 Speaker_00
750 million people visit zoos annually, which is more than the five major sporting events combined. Wow. The way in which zoos It's like the 80-20 rule. There's five or ten that contribute the majority of the income that cover most of the mazoos.

00:13:51 Speaker_00
And they run like entertainment complexes, like amusement parks. And very little money goes back. into conservation.

00:13:59 Speaker_00
Now, there's a lot of zoos that are doing great stuff, 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.

00:14:09 Speaker_00
I think there's great things that they do, but there's nothing proven around, you know, zoos are educational facilities for animals.

00:14:16 Speaker_01
Well, what really rocked zoos was the film Blackfish, and they suddenly went, wait a minute, the public doesn't like us.

00:14:24 Speaker_01
And they started putting into effect all these kind of new programs for animal welfare, and particularly for bears, like polar bears, like what you just mentioned.

00:14:33 Speaker_01
And they have a new word, it's not so new anymore, called enrichment, which means that you give a bear something to do so it doesn't do what you were just saying. You put their food in ice so they have to work to get it out.

00:14:44 Speaker_01
You put their food in a ball, you make them have to do things. But that was the big shakeup. for zoos in terms of animal welfare. And now, of course, it's still evolving, and zoos are scared when they see Tiger King and even Chimp Crazy.

00:15:00 Speaker_00
But Joe's daughter's grandkids will still see orcas at SeaWorld. Do you think so? Well, they live a long time. Maybe not granddaughters.

00:15:13 Speaker_00
I say it more, I have little boys, a four-year-old and a one-year-old, and I think it's particularly interesting to go through this experience because they're obsessed with animals.

00:15:23 Speaker_00
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.

00:15:34 Speaker_00
And kids relate with them in some form of a bridge to humanity, I believe. And we, you know, you ask this fundamental question when you go to the zoo, hey, where did all the animals come from? No one really begs to think that question.

00:15:48 Speaker_01
Well, where he's going right now is sort of a big part of our next documentary, which is about the illegal animal trade, but also zoos were complicit in that for a very long time, maybe still. But the zoo thing, you get emotional on this.

00:16:09 Speaker_00
What's really cool about this kind of medium that we're in, we have access to all this information and all these people over large decades of work in conservation and zoos and PETA and legislation, laws.

00:16:23 Speaker_00
I just love the idea of synthesizing this information to a point in today's context, Yeah, when you go to a zoo, no one seems to ask where the animals come from. It is a very simple idea that many people miss the point of when they go there.

00:16:39 Speaker_00
Now, I'm not anti-zoo totally either, 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.

00:16:52 Speaker_06
Yeah, I mean, for sure they should be bigger. I mean, there should be a size requirement.

00:16:58 Speaker_06
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.

00:17:09 Speaker_06
They need space, you know, they need space and they need activities and ideally what we should do is emulate their wild existence But then you have this moral question of are we are we gonna let goats in?

00:17:25 Speaker_06
Into the tiger cage and just let them sort it out because that's really what they want Yeah, you know what lions want to do is chase down a wildebeest and eat it Yeah, and instead what we do is we slide a tray underneath their cage

00:17:39 Speaker_06
And that's torture for them. It really is. It's torture for them to have an enclosed space where it's small. It's torture for them to not be able to express their natural instincts.

00:17:49 Speaker_06
I mean, it's one thing if... You're talking about something like the thylacine, right?

00:17:54 Speaker_06
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.

00:18:02 Speaker_06
So the zoos were like the last hope to try to keep this thing from going extinct. And it may not be extinct, there's a lot of hope.

00:18:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, the Tasmanian tiger, yeah. It was that eerie footage of the last ones.

00:18:13 Speaker_06
Yeah, they think there might actually be living specimens that are alive.

00:18:19 Speaker_00
Well, in this state, they're bringing them back, apparently. I know you know Forrest Gallant.

00:18:22 Speaker_01
Yeah, I was just about to bring up Forrest. I also have colleagues that have gone looking for thylacines in the highlands in New Guinea. So far, yeah, people anecdotally say, yes, there might be a thylacine. But it's unlikely, but there might be.

00:18:36 Speaker_06
Well, they're very hard to find. I mean, try finding a wolverine. You know, wolverine populations are pretty healthy, but good luck finding one. They're very, very, very difficult to find, unless you spend an enormous amount of time alone in the bush.

00:18:50 Speaker_01
Yeah, good point.

00:18:52 Speaker_06
And then you're dealing with thiosines, you're dealing with a very unpopulated area that's extremely hostile to people.

00:18:58 Speaker_06
But there are anecdotal sightings and hopefully that thing does exist and I would love for Forrest to be the guy who finds it because he spent so much time looking for it.

00:19:07 Speaker_06
But other than a dying species, I can't see a good argument for keeping these things. It used to be that A zoo existed before there was videos, right?

00:19:21 Speaker_06
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. Look at that. Look at that lion.

00:19:31 Speaker_06
And the kids are, and it is educational for children, but at what cost and is there, are there better resources now? And I think video is a much better resource. It's much better to see lions in the wild.

00:19:44 Speaker_01
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.

00:19:55 Speaker_01
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 have anything to do with conservation or anything to do with animal welfare.

00:20:10 Speaker_01
But yeah, today, like you mentioned, the oryx here in Texas, 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 to the wild in zoos.

00:20:26 Speaker_01
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 you can return it to the wild.

00:20:41 Speaker_01
There may be a reason to have animals in captivity.

00:20:44 Speaker_05
How much success has there been in returning animals to the wild though?

00:20:48 Speaker_01
Well, you know, where we live in California.

00:20:50 Speaker_00
But you just did it with the eastern box turtle in New Jersey.

00:20:54 Speaker_01
No, no, no. Back to, like, the example he's talking about is, like, California condors. California condors or black-footed 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.

00:21:10 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's much less than it should be, putting animals back into the wild that went extinct or went virtually extinct. Much less than it should be.

00:21:20 Speaker_05
Yeah, it should.

00:21:22 Speaker_06
I mean, it should be a priority with certain animals specifically.

00:21:30 Speaker_01
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. California condors, the problem is they've reintroduced them into the Great Grand Canyon and Arizona.

00:21:42 Speaker_01
When I was young, in the 70s, there was maybe 28 of them left in the wild. They brought them into captivity. Today, there's probably hundreds in the wild. but at a very expensive price tag.

00:21:55 Speaker_01
Because what made them go extinct in that case was the lead bullets that kill a deer. The condor would eat the deer and then die from the lead. So condors, to use that example, there's just a lot of management to keep them alive in the wild.

00:22:10 Speaker_06
I think there's some dispute about that. About which about whether or not it's the lead from the bullets that was killing them.

00:22:17 Speaker_06
I mean, that's what they say But maybe yeah, I was reading something recently about that that it just doesn't doesn't make sense It doesn't attribute to the you think about the number of animals that are shot with a bullet that aren't recovered It's so small interesting.

00:22:32 Speaker_06
Yeah, you know that it's 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

00:22:42 Speaker_01
I believe that because a condor in a day, not to go off the charts on a condor, but a condor in a day can travel 400 miles in the thermals looking for a carcass.

00:22:53 Speaker_01
And I would suspect that the fact that there's just less carcasses out there might be part of it.

00:22:59 Speaker_06
I think that's the argument. I think the argument is there's less predators and there's less prey. So like California, for example, You have a fairly small deer population because you have so many animals that kill deer.

00:23:20 Speaker_06
California has a lot of coyotes and California has a lot of mountain lions. And there's a lot of people where I used to live in the hills that did not like coyotes. I'm like, do you like rats? Okay, well if you don't like rats, you should like coyotes.

00:23:35 Speaker_06
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.

00:23:44 Speaker_01
But ranchers hate coyotes more than anything.

00:23:46 Speaker_06
And they kill fawns. They hate them. Yeah, they kill baby cows, they kill baby everything. That's just what they do, and that's their job. But there's an ecosystem, and that's a part of the ecosystem. And what's really unnatural is ranching.

00:24:01 Speaker_01
But there forever, there was a bounty on coyotes where if you brought in two ears, you got like a buck. And people would bring in 100 sets of ears and get $100. I mean, they were vilified.

00:24:16 Speaker_01
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 calves, they would trap the coyote with those horrible traps. They'd pour gasoline on them.

00:24:30 Speaker_01
They'd light them on fire and let them run off burning. I mean, they hate coyotes. Which is really unfair.

00:24:35 Speaker_06
Well, they're cool. You know, they're just not cool if they eat your cat Yeah, but they're a fascinating animal. I mean, I I remember when I first saw them I moved to California in 94 and I was staying at do you know what the Oakwood Gardens are?

00:24:48 Speaker_06
It's like those pre They're they're pre furnished apartments that you just rent like people that are like sort of transient. Oh, yeah They allow you to like have a place before you get a place.

00:24:58 Speaker_05
Yeah

00:24:58 Speaker_06
And I was driving, so it was in Burbank, and I was driving down the street, and I was like, who are these fucking dogs? Like, what is going on? What are these dogs running around? And then I drove over, I had never seen a coyote before.

00:25:11 Speaker_06
I was like, that's a coyote? Oh my god, there's coyotes on the streets? And that was pretty rare then. But 30 years later, it became insanely common. I lived in a fairly rural area where I lived in California.

00:25:27 Speaker_06
I lived about an hour outside the city, and I had a lot of acres, and it was cool to live out there, but you experience a lot of wildlife, and I saw coyotes almost every day. Almost every day.

00:25:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, they look like a mangy, motley, skinny dog.

00:25:40 Speaker_06
Yeah, but they're cool. There's something cool about coyotes.

00:25:43 Speaker_06
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 in that you get the coy wolf, but gray wolves do not breed with coyotes.

00:26:01 Speaker_06
They just kill them. And so, because the gray wolf, which lived in California and lived all over the West Coast, was the predominant predator, The coyotes had to develop a way of surviving.

00:26:14 Speaker_06
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.

00:26:30 Speaker_06
And then they will expand their territory. So because they were persecuted by wolves, they expanded their territory.

00:26:36 Speaker_06
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. So coyotes are now in every single city in the United States.

00:26:50 Speaker_06
This was not the case just 30 years ago.

00:26:52 Speaker_01
They're what we call, there's a word for that, it's called subsidized predators. And these are animals that do better around man.

00:27:00 Speaker_01
And crows are one of those animals, raccoons are one of them, coyotes, and they weirdly thrive and do better around humans. human activity than a lot of other animals. And so coyotes are one of those. Because of garbage.

00:27:14 Speaker_01
Because of garbage, because of water. We bring in water in arid areas. So they're a highly adaptable creature. And just for the record, I do like coyotes. And I listen to them almost every night having a tailgate party behind my house. They're cool.

00:27:32 Speaker_01
They're cool. They make the eeriest noise together. They caught something.

00:27:36 Speaker_06
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 him. It's hard. They're fucking predators, right?

00:27:47 Speaker_06
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. There's no doubt that we live in complex ecosystems and we do not like the idea of them.

00:28:07 Speaker_06
We've developed these bizarre Establishments called cities and in these cities we have removed ourselves from nature And you know if you go to the mountains of Colorado people are well aware of mountain lions.

00:28:19 Speaker_06
They're well aware of bears They have to lock their garbage up They have to they have like a neighborhood email list where they talk about like bears Broken this guy's car and everybody's on the look, but they understand they're living in this system.

00:28:31 Speaker_06
They're living in this ecosystem and

00:28:34 Speaker_06
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.

00:28:53 Speaker_06
You know, it's just weird. We're fucking weird. We're weird in our justifications. We're weird in what we allow ourselves to do.

00:29:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's back to the chimpanzees. 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 that we are chimps, effectively.

00:29:21 Speaker_01
And she just took the page out of Genesis where she just said, we're not animals. This is an animal and I can own it like property. Anyway, that was just one of the things she just never really fully understood.

00:29:40 Speaker_06
Well, to be kind, she's not bright. She's not a bright woman, not a well-read woman, unfortunately. And this seems to be part of the theme of all these folks, which is weird.

00:29:55 Speaker_06
And then you've got the one guy in Tiger King that's essentially running a little sex cult. Right, that guy.

00:30:00 Speaker_01
Doc Antle.

00:30:01 Speaker_06
Yeah, and then you've got the Tiger King himself.

00:30:04 Speaker_01
Joe.

00:30:05 Speaker_06
You got Joe Exotic, who is also kind of... running a strange little sex cult. But, you know, he's just got all this personality, and he's so interesting and fascinating.

00:30:18 Speaker_06
And if he wasn't in jail, it's really unfortunate, you know, because if he wasn't in jail, he would be a very popular person.

00:30:25 Speaker_01
He hasn't even seen the show, which is amazing. Can you imagine if he was...

00:30:28 Speaker_06
Well, he's trying to get Donald Trump to exonerate him and pardon him. I mean, he was constantly, after I talked about Tiger King, I get messages from that guy. I don't know how he's giving me messages. I'm assuming it's someone who works for him.

00:30:45 Speaker_06
But I get messages all the time, like, you've got to help get him out, put him on your podcast, do this, do that.

00:30:52 Speaker_00
Well, he also has communication in jail. He gets a somehow he's able to get a phone. He's doing video calls. Well, you know how it goes. Yeah.

00:31:02 Speaker_00
There was a moment there was a moment when we were filming this kind of like second installment of Tiger King where we covered this this pardon, the presidential pardon.

00:31:12 Speaker_00
There's a real shot where Joe was actually on a list, supposedly, that Trump was going to like a kind of hilarious. It's hilarious.

00:31:22 Speaker_06
I don't remember exactly what the specifics of his accusation. So was he caught trying to hire someone to whack that lady? Yeah. So he was?

00:31:34 Speaker_01
Twice, yeah.

00:31:35 Speaker_06
And that lady, is there any truth to this idea that she whacked her husband?

00:31:42 Speaker_01
Carol Baskin. 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 it was either, it feels as if it was her or members of her family, and they were the only ones to gain. And so, yeah.

00:32:05 Speaker_06
And what a great way to dispose of a body.

00:32:08 Speaker_01
Uh-huh. I mean, I don't know how she disposed of the body.

00:32:11 Speaker_06
It's nice to... Well, you have meat grinders on the premises, and you have enormous predators on premises, and you feed them a tiger.

00:32:19 Speaker_00
Don't you think the only thing I would say, Eric, is the circumstances surrounding the change in the will. I mean, who alters it to account for disappearance? Upon my disappearance, yeah. It's a very, very strange...

00:32:31 Speaker_06
And isn't there like a disparity in the handwriting as well?

00:32:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, we did handwriting experts. We did the entire thing to prove otherwise.

00:32:37 Speaker_06
It's also just when she talks about it.

00:32:42 Speaker_01
But Joe, back to Joe Exotic, I was on the phone with him a lot up until he was convicted from prison. And he just was convinced he was going to be exonerated and not convicted.

00:32:58 Speaker_01
And they offered him, the Feds offered him a deal, which was something like six or seven years. You can plea, or you can go to court.

00:33:05 Speaker_06
He'd probably be out by now.

00:33:07 Speaker_01
I was just gonna say it. He'd be out now. And so he was so convinced that he was gonna win, which is so delusional. But yeah, poor Joe would be out right now had he made that deal.

00:33:16 Speaker_06
By the way, how crazy is that, that you could plot to kill somebody and let you out in four years? I know you've been locked up with a bunch of murderers and thieves, but I'm sure you're a better person now.

00:33:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, it's plot and then intent. You know, paying someone to go do something. Right, right.

00:33:32 Speaker_06
There's quite a few steps involved.

00:33:34 Speaker_01
But yes, Joe's now pro-Trump again. He was pro-Biden when Trump didn't exist. Was he?

00:33:39 Speaker_06
Because he was trying to get Biden to pardon him? They wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole, but Trump might. Especially this time around. Just for funsies.

00:33:48 Speaker_01
Well, let's hope Tanya doesn't go to prison. I don't wish that on Tanya.

00:33:52 Speaker_06
I haven't seen episode 4 so I don't know but when you guys were filming Again spoiler alert, 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 when I saw their film when you guys are filming it.

00:34:10 Speaker_06
I was like Jesus Christ. This lady is so crazy She's showing everybody. It's just she's she has With all due respect, she just does not seem like a smart person.

00:34:25 Speaker_06
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. I mean, I think that's part of the problem.

00:34:36 Speaker_06
I don't think this lady understands the consequences of what she's doing just like she doesn't understand how crazy your eyelashes look you know like all of it is just there's some fuses that are missing some wires that aren't connected and then because of the fact that at one point in time at least it was legal for her to do what she was doing and they they become accustomed to being able to have and then their identity revolves around they're the person that has all the monkeys and all the chimpanzees and

00:35:05 Speaker_06
It was just fucking weird.

00:35:06 Speaker_00
Well, it's still legal. It is still? It's still legal.

00:35:09 Speaker_06
I thought they changed it.

00:35:11 Speaker_00
No, there's no federal law preventing ownership of chimpanzees.

00:35:14 Speaker_06
Jesus Christ, you can own a fucking chimp still?

00:35:16 Speaker_00
Correct. There's 20 or so states, legally, you can do it. Oh my God. Missouri's one of them.

00:35:20 Speaker_06
Oh my God.

00:35:21 Speaker_00
But, you know, background. We spent about four years making this documentary series. First of all, how'd you start? How do you find out about these people? Go ahead.

00:35:34 Speaker_06
After Tiger King, how do you get anybody to talk to you on camera?

00:35:37 Speaker_01
I've known a lot of edible people, Joe, but I did not know about monkey moms. And along the course of making Tiger King, I started filming some monkey moms. As you see in Chimp Crazy, you just can't make them up.

00:35:54 Speaker_01
And so after Tiger King, I just thought, you know, let's scratch the surface. Let's check into these monkey moms again. Yeah, and so it's,

00:36:05 Speaker_01
these women that dress up their monkeys like dolls, like Joan Bonnet Ramsey, like a little pageant doll, and they want them to be kids, and they seem to have the same pathology over and over and over.

00:36:17 Speaker_01
There's a lot of monkey moms out there that we did not film, and they have annually something called a monkey ball, where they all come together with their monkeys. Anyway, we discovered them in the course of making Tiger King, and Yeah.

00:36:31 Speaker_06
Well, my grandmother had a monkey.

00:36:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, we hear the story a lot.

00:36:35 Speaker_06
My grandmother had a monkey. Yeah, we hear the story a lot. She kept in the attic.

00:36:39 Speaker_00
Really?

00:36:39 Speaker_06
Yeah, the monkey's name was Chi-Chi, and Chi-Chi used to eat gum. They'd give Chi-Chi a piece of gum, Chi-Chi would unwrap the gum and put the gum in his mouth or her mouth. I don't remember if it was a boy or a girl.

00:36:48 Speaker_00
Do you know what kind of monkey?

00:36:49 Speaker_06
I do not. I was very small. I was very young at the time, and I remember she had to get rid of it because it bit my cousin.

00:36:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, that's what happens.

00:36:56 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:36:57 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:36:57 Speaker_06
Yeah, but Chi Chi couldn't be around anybody other than my grandmother. My grandmother was very eccentric.

00:37:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, and they're territorial, and they're protective of their owner. So, you know, when I was young, in the 70s and 60s, 70s, 80s, you could buy a monkey in virtually any pet store across the United States.

00:37:17 Speaker_01
And thank God, people realize, like your grandmother, they're not good pets. I could buy them in the newspaper. Yeah, and they're not good pets.

00:37:23 Speaker_06
I think my grandmother, after her kids were grown, she just decided she wanted a kid forever, you know, if I had a guess. Wow. Yeah, if I had to guess.

00:37:33 Speaker_00
That's our kind of consensus on a lot of it.

00:37:35 Speaker_06
Also, a kid that doesn't talk back.

00:37:39 Speaker_00
It's a great book you'd love. It's by this guy who had a store in New York, Henry Treflick. It's called They Don't Talk Back.

00:37:47 Speaker_01
And it's these kind of chronicles of his experiences, you know, through the last... This was a big exotic animal dealership that existed up until the 70s in New York City, but they had everything, chimps, gorillas,

00:38:00 Speaker_06
Elephants and they sold stuff to the private sector and zoos But yeah, I mean you could you could walk into a Woolworth right and and buy monkeys They still to this day catch people with large animals in their apartments in New York City Yeah, like it wasn't there one real recently where a guy had a large reptile venomous snakes.

00:38:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, it was it snakes the venomous snake bite Eric

00:38:23 Speaker_06
Some guy well, there's one that one guy. I think it was in Harlem who had a tiger.

00:38:27 Speaker_06
That's yeah Yeah, and that there's a crazy image of the cops going up the fire escape and the Tigers in the window Yeah, and you see the tiger bearing its fangs in the window that glass

00:38:40 Speaker_06
That is so crazy that 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 it could just smash that And get on that fire escape and just go run through the streets.

00:38:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, it just yeah. Yeah crazy crazy Yeah, it's crazy.

00:38:58 Speaker_06
Yeah, but the bizarre thing is that there's humans that want those They want those I mean

00:39:07 Speaker_01
I mean, the tiger thing is more of like, kind of a macho thing, I think.

00:39:12 Speaker_06
What about Carol, then? She's a woman.

00:39:15 Speaker_01
Yeah, she's kind of an anomaly.

00:39:16 Speaker_01
You know, it's funny, I interviewed Tippi Hendren, you know, in the course of doing all of this, and her, you know, Xanadu, it's called Shambhala, with all of her cats, you know, and I know you've talked about this, about Melanie Griffith growing up with lions.

00:39:33 Speaker_06
In that crazy movie, Roar.

00:39:34 Speaker_01
Oh, in that movie, Roar. The bed photograph is fantastic. Oh my God, that movie, Roar. But yeah, when I interviewed Tippi Hendren, literally on her property in California, she lives with all these tigers and lions, she built a museum for herself.

00:39:49 Speaker_01
So she's got her own museum, the Tippi Hendren Museum, where I interviewed her. But yeah, there are some women, Tippi Hendren, Carole Baskin. It's mostly a macho thing. Generally speaking, I think it's more men, yeah.

00:40:01 Speaker_06
Well, I guarantee if you go through the Texas private collections, it's a bunch of good old boys. Yeah, exactly. Believe that? Probably. Yeah, yeah.

00:40:10 Speaker_01
You've got some oil money. You've got canned ranches in Texas.

00:40:13 Speaker_06
There's a lot of those.

00:40:14 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:40:14 Speaker_06
There's a lot of canned ranches, which is very odd. And some of them are fairly small. Like a couple hundred acres, and they keep animals there. In my mind, what that is, is agriculture. It's just you're doing a different form of deer agriculture.

00:40:33 Speaker_06
You're not really hunting. Hunting to me is you go into the wild you go into the woods and you experience real nature and it's it's Fascinating it's enthralling.

00:40:44 Speaker_06
There's something about it's also so lonely there's something about being in those mountains just puts you in check and None of that exists in the Cairn Ranch.

00:40:52 Speaker_01
Yeah, Cairn Ranch, you can go shoot, like in South Africa, a lion. And the lion was raised in a kind of domestic situation.

00:41:01 Speaker_06
And recently released.

00:41:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, so it just sits there. There's no sport in it. Hunting in the United States, for elk or deer,

00:41:10 Speaker_01
you know, there's a lot of things people don't know about hunting, which is, you know, one, just obviously, the obvious statistic is that more wild lands are protected because of hunting.

00:41:20 Speaker_01
So, yeah, you're killing a deer, but you're protecting all the other stuff.

00:41:23 Speaker_06
Well, the amount of money because of the Pittman-Robertson Act, the amount of money that gets, I think it's 10 percent of all sales of outdoor activities gets donated towards wildlife preservation.

00:41:36 Speaker_06
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 and how many people can go hunt them.

00:41:49 Speaker_06
And they also know because you have to when you say if you shoot a deer, you have to register that you shot the deer that you have a tag. They make sure that your tag is right, you got the right species, you got the right sex, the whole deal.

00:42:02 Speaker_06
And so they have a very accurate number of how many animals in there, and they spend a lot of money doing this. And these wildlife biologists do an absolutely incredible job.

00:42:11 Speaker_06
There's more white-tailed deer in this country right now than there were when Columbus landed. Part of that is because of agriculture. That's where it gets weird.

00:42:20 Speaker_06
So agriculture, particularly, I have a good buddy of mine who is, he's an archer, a professional archer, and he lives in Iowa. I always get those confused. In Iowa, it's all farmlands, right? And they have enormous deer, and they set these ranches up.

00:42:37 Speaker_06
He has a place that's like 600 acres. It's all, there's no fences, the animals come and go. 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.

00:42:51 Speaker_06
So it's this weird sort of- Planned community. Sort of ethical bastardization of the wild, right? It's like dealing with the reality of what you have. You have untold thousands and thousands of monocrop agriculture acres.

00:43:06 Speaker_06
So thousands and thousands of acres of Monsanto corn. And they're all, these deer thrive there.

00:43:12 Speaker_06
Because when they chop down the corn they don't chop it all down and you know these deer they go there after fresh feedings They go there you see them eating corn and the grass is grass everywhere There's plenty and plenty of food and a very low number of predators like Iowa does not have a lot of they don't have wolves they don't have a lot of animals that would sort of balance out the population of these animals and so you have insane amounts of car accidents and

00:43:39 Speaker_06
Like when I was in, I went to visit my buddy there, and just driving from the airport to his house, we saw like 50 fucking deer. And if you're going there around November, which is the rut, the men lose their mind.

00:43:50 Speaker_06
So the male deer, they're horny as hell, they're crazy, and the female are breeding, and the female are running from the males, and they're running right into traffic, and the males are running after them, and they're running right into traffic.

00:44:02 Speaker_06
It's kind of nuts. It's a really nutty situation, because it only exists because there's no predators. So if like California has this bizarre model and what California would like

00:44:14 Speaker_06
I mean, California is, I think, the only state that doesn't have a fish and game department. They have fish and wildlife. And so they treat it very differently.

00:44:26 Speaker_06
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.

00:44:35 Speaker_06
And so that's why it's illegal to kill a mountain lion in California, and they have a large number of mountain lions.

00:44:41 Speaker_01
Probably underreported. I have mountain lions on my property.

00:44:44 Speaker_06
All the time they're dangerous They're underreported and they they are a predator and they will kill people and they have killed people 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 They think you're trying to run from them, and they can't even help themselves It's like a kitten with a ball yarn and their their instincts clip in and they just go chasing after it, but I've seen mount lines in the wild and it is a

00:45:11 Speaker_06
Sobering sobering moment when you stare into the eyes one of those things you like whoa, what are you supposed to do? Well, you can't do much man. Make a lot of noise You're not supposed to run.

00:45:21 Speaker_00
You don't run.

00:45:23 Speaker_06
It's a weapon You're you know, you should really have that weapon ready because they will jump you every now and then they jump people There's a video. Yeah. Well, I believe two people were killed last year in the Pacific Northwest. I

00:45:35 Speaker_01
Of all the big cats, I think jaguars kill the least people. Which is crazy. For some reason.

00:45:41 Speaker_06
But they also live in the least populated areas.

00:45:45 Speaker_01
For the most part, yeah. At Mount Lyons, yeah, of course they will kill someone, but typically they're not looking for people.

00:45:53 Speaker_06
Right, they're not looking for people.

00:45:54 Speaker_01
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, and they have to go out and try to find prey, and it's people oftentimes.

00:46:05 Speaker_06
And jaguars have to, at this point in time, have realized that people have bows and arrows and spears, and every now and then, if you go after a person, you can get jumped.

00:46:14 Speaker_06
And you know so they're probably a fit 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 gonna run away They might run towards you if 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 and

00:46:36 Speaker_01
In the course of making Tiger King, I would interview people about tigers and what it's like keeping 100 tigers. And people would always say to me, I'd rather have 100 tigers than one chimp.

00:46:51 Speaker_01
And that's because chimps, and everyone thinks, oh, a tiger's so dangerous, but chimps can figure shit out. And one of the chronic problems keeping chimps is that they can figure out how to escape.

00:47:03 Speaker_01
And so you can never use a combination lock, because they'll sit there all day and figure it out. And you've got to use, oftentimes, like three layers of locks. And I'm just bringing it back to chimps, because

00:47:14 Speaker_01
You know, people think, oh, it's a chimp, it's so cute, it's in the circus. Trust me, it's a lot easier to have a tiger act than a chimp act.

00:47:21 Speaker_06
Oh, I could imagine. And also, when I was watching this lady's enclosure, I was looking at the steel that's drilled into wood, and I'm like, I could get out of that.

00:47:34 Speaker_06
Get out of the hundred percent the way the way that thing is bolted into the woods all you have to do is kick that door Enough yeah, you kick that door hard enough, and that wood will give out It's the wood that you're it looks like you're encased in steel bars But the steel bars are connected by wood woods easy for a chimp to break There's so much fucking stronger than us if that thing knew that it could just grab those bars It would have worked on that all day 100%

00:48:00 Speaker_06
You would have had to figure out a way, way, way better cage, especially the one that she put in her home.

00:48:05 Speaker_01
You know, I'll tell you a really weird story that I just never would have thought in a million years about a chimp. I was interviewing a guy in Kenya that had a chimpanzee. And the keeper was this blonde woman.

00:48:18 Speaker_01
And all the chimp ever saw was this blonde woman. So he started, the guy gave the chimp Playboy. And then it graduated to porn. And the chimp, because he'd never seen other chimps, it was raised in isolation, started thinking it was human.

00:48:33 Speaker_01
And started sexually identifying with this woman that was keeping it, and started becoming sort of addicted to pornography. So just to give you a weird sort of segue. But how crazy, and you know, like these chimps, they'll have a favorite show.

00:48:49 Speaker_01
I remember a group of them in South Africa, all they watched was Avatar. But anyway, back to sort of how weird it is to keep a chimpanzee. You don't have a tiger getting addicted to human pornography or watching Avatar all day long.

00:49:06 Speaker_06
They're too intelligent. They're just way too intelligent, especially as they get five, six, and seven years old. They get really fucking dangerous. That lady in Connecticut, I had heard that she slept in the bed with that chimpanzee.

00:49:19 Speaker_01
Well, that's where I was going. 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? I mean, I don't want to talk about it in too much detail here.

00:49:32 Speaker_01
But you have to ask yourself, like, how weird does it get?

00:49:39 Speaker_06
Right. I mean, how weird does it get? Wasn't she giving it Xanax and wine? That alone?

00:49:45 Speaker_00
And Viagra? What? She was giving it Viagra? No, I'm joking. Oh. But who knows?

00:49:52 Speaker_06
You can't joke about that. You're going to get sued. Yeah, you cannot joke.

00:49:56 Speaker_00
But speaking of that, though, you saw the second episode.

00:50:00 Speaker_06
We obviously... How big chimps need Viagra?

00:50:03 Speaker_00
No, they're very active.

00:50:04 Speaker_01
You know, it's funny. I heard that a chimp can fuck 50 times a day in the wild.

00:50:12 Speaker_06
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.

00:50:24 Speaker_06
The more promiscuous the female chimpanzees are, the more sexually active the males become, and the bigger their testicles are.

00:50:31 Speaker_06
So there'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. Oh, so that's my problem.

00:50:43 Speaker_06
Yeah, if you're around a bunch of ladies that are a bunch of sluts, you might get fired up. No wonder I never got married.

00:50:51 Speaker_06
Think that um with you know chimpanzees you're dealing with these incredibly complex social structures I'm sure you guys have seen chimp nation.

00:51:00 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:51:00 Speaker_06
Yeah, which is fantastic It's so good. It's so good because it is a rare documentary that had this established

00:51:10 Speaker_06
Element in that these scientists had been embedded in this group of chimpanzees for 20 years And so these scientists had very specific rules.

00:51:18 Speaker_06
You don't look them in the eye You don't get any closer than 20 yards if they come towards you 20 just move away.

00:51:25 Speaker_06
Don't ever have food There's like a bunch of rules and as long as you have those rules they behave completely normally and they just you don't you're just a thing you're like a tree or a bird or something not they're not interested in and

00:51:35 Speaker_06
Which is really interesting, right?

00:51:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, amazing.

00:51:37 Speaker_06
Because they got incredible footage of the social interactions. They got a detailed analysis of how they establish dominance and who's in control. We used to think it's always the biggest, strongest chip, but no, it's not.

00:51:50 Speaker_06
It's ones that form unions and bonds and communities. Very interesting. It's so much like us.

00:51:56 Speaker_01
I think also what's just so amazing about that film is, and I give them a ton of credit, most people that go out to do a documentary don't have the capacity to film that many days. They covered that. It was like hundreds of days or something.

00:52:12 Speaker_06
Yeah, years.

00:52:13 Speaker_01
And years. You know, they really invested the time, and they deserve the credit, because they put in that amount of time. I mean, for us to do even, you know, Trim Crazy, we filmed how many days?

00:52:27 Speaker_00
It's probably close to 250 days. Wow.

00:52:29 Speaker_01
Most people can't do that. Right, right, right.

00:52:33 Speaker_06
I mean, it's incredible. Resources suck. Like, how much did it cost?

00:52:38 Speaker_01
That's where I'm going. Yeah, my God. It's not a relief. But in order to make a documentary this way, you have to catch it while it's happening contemporaneously. So you have to be there. If you snooze, you lose.

00:52:51 Speaker_01
If you're not there, you're not going to make Chimp crazy. Right, right. Or Chimp, what's it called? Chimp Nation. Chimp Empire. Empire. Is that what it is? There's two, right? Chimp Empire, right? Chimp Empire.

00:53:03 Speaker_06
Is Chimp Nation another one? 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 like and you What's her name again Tanya Tanya?

00:53:20 Speaker_06
Crazy Tanya, you know and Joe Exotic you like you need someone who's like the the figurehead Like with the photo that you guys have on the promo of her laying down in the chimp behind her.

00:53:31 Speaker_06
It's perfect 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

00:53:41 Speaker_06
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.

00:53:55 Speaker_06
But if you're Dull-minded if you got a 9-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.

00:54:06 Speaker_01
You shouldn't even have a dog You definitely should 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 why the net we cast because after Tiger King?

00:54:20 Speaker_01
It wasn't like we just jumped into this chimp mob world we were filming you know, Mark the Shark and, you know, women.

00:54:28 Speaker_00
Yeah, we were interested in... It took a lot of time to... In the animal-human relationship in a variety of forms. I think we... And you see in episode one one of the first things we shot years before we even met Tanya.

00:54:42 Speaker_00
was this woman, this part of the circus family, Pam Rosaire, watching 2001 Space Odyssey with her chimpanzee Chance. Talk about sobering experience.

00:54:54 Speaker_00
Me and Carl distanced with Chance the chimpanzee, 15 years old, pounding a basically a modified trailer home, the floor echoing. The loudness of that sound on the floor was so loud I had to take my headset off.

00:55:11 Speaker_01
It was a lot scarier, and you were there, it was a lot scarier to film chimps than tigers.

00:55:16 Speaker_01
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 you know, they haven't gone through puberty yet.

00:55:30 Speaker_01
They haven't gotten the tiger, you know mentality of killing you but a chimp Anyway, the chimp filming was a much more difficult.

00:55:38 Speaker_00
They're also like human characters and and wiry and You don't know what's gonna happen. They're on these kind of leashes.

00:55:47 Speaker_06
It's also how they evolved I mean that's what kept them alive you watch chimp nations like those sort of instincts is what keeps them alive.

00:55:54 Speaker_00
Oh sure very murderous

00:55:55 Speaker_06
Well, we didn't really know how murderous they were until Attenborough. When David Attenborough did that series, I think it was in the 90s, when he captured the chimps eating monkeys.

00:56:07 Speaker_06
And this is one of the things that when I had the guy from Chimp Nation on, I discussed it with him. He's like, how often do they eat monkeys? We couldn't even show it all. It would just be like the whole show would be chimps eating monkeys.

00:56:21 Speaker_06
Because that's what they want to do. They want to eat monkeys. That's their primary source of protein. They like fruit. Fruit's great.

00:56:27 Speaker_01
But they also like monkeys. Colobus monkeys. Yeah. And they eat. You know, I'm a reptile guy. And in the range of those chimps in the wild, there's a tortoise. And this tortoise, it's like our box turtles, but it's much bigger.

00:56:40 Speaker_01
But it's called a hingeback tortoise. And it literally closes up like a rock. You can't see it. Any flesh. The chimps will grab that tortoise and they'll just bang it against the tree and just crack it open like a cantaloupe.

00:56:53 Speaker_01
I'm just saying that because, yes, they're really hardcore when it comes to the way they predate on other animals.

00:57:01 Speaker_06
And they're about as strong as a 500-pound man. That's about right, yeah. It's so insane for us. We had a chimp on the set of NewsRadio, like, 96 or something like that. There was a baby chimp. It was a baby in a diaper.

00:57:17 Speaker_06
And this chimp climbed on my back and whacked me a couple times in the back, just playing, just having fun. I remember, first of all, the feeling of holding it. It's like it was made out of steel wires. It wasn't made out of, like, a baby.

00:57:32 Speaker_06
You know, you pick up a baby. Babies are, like, soft. You pick up a three-year-old, they're all soft little things, and you hold on to them, and they're weak. These things were strong as fuck, like in a bizarre way.

00:57:44 Speaker_06
We like to look at something that's close to our size and think, oh, I could probably overpower that. You know, oh, I know how to fight. I'll fight that fucking chimp off. No, you have zero chance. It's a different thing.

00:57:57 Speaker_06
Everything about it is different the muscle structure is completely different the tendon structure is completely different and the amount of force it can generate The arm leverage is yes pretty incredible, but I want to fuck with you.

00:58:08 Speaker_01
They also want to Talk about like with a bear kill the lion or with a you know the bear killed the tiger

00:58:17 Speaker_01
Think chimpanzees you know and you're into 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 has you know goes after your genitals your fingers your face Yeah, they know how to fuck you up like nothing else.

00:58:36 Speaker_06
Yeah, they know how to debilitate you and take away What makes you a human yeah? Yeah, and they also have zero remorse. So they're like a human in that they can think, but they have zero empathy. And they're fucking dangerous.

00:58:50 Speaker_00
I'm writing this. You know, what was so fascinating, you'd think knowing all this about chimps later, remember this, Eric, we were talking about, well, there must be like reported human deaths in the United States with chimp attacks.

00:59:00 Speaker_00
And we couldn't find any. It's only memes it's only it's only little I mean there are globally but globally a lot of them in Africa little kids get snatched and stuff kids get eaten kids get eaten yeah but in the U.S.

00:59:11 Speaker_00
there has been no really human death caused by chimpanzee 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

00:59:22 Speaker_00
We filmed our first chimpanzee funeral and what we didn't show, which I remember being, I just remember this now, everyone that would come up to say their piece would share a story where they were attacked by that animal. Oh God.

00:59:37 Speaker_00
It was 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 in, it was kind of remarkable.

00:59:49 Speaker_01
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. Tiger attacked someone and they have a huge laceration.

01:00:03 Speaker_01
They'll go to the hospital saying it was a chainsaw You know because the second they say it was my tiger or my champ, right? You know, they run the risk of losing that animal.

01:00:12 Speaker_06
You also have the problem with less than extraordinary people being addicted to extraordinary circumstances So if you have a boring ass fucking life in some middle-of-nowhere town, but you also have a lion Life's pretty interesting.

01:00:32 Speaker_06
Yeah, you know, I mean and that's Joe exotic, right? Well jokes. I think it's pretty smart. I Is odd for sure but intelligent but in Tanya's case like what would that lady be like if she didn't have?

01:00:44 Speaker_06
Chimps like it is the focal point of her life to the point where she neglected her own biological children Yeah, it gives her an identity.

01:00:52 Speaker_06
Yeah in a weird way in a weird way in a very compelling way and when people live boring ass lives There's things like that seem like something that that's who I am like that's me because it's extraordinary experiences from persons that you know, it's Influence it's I think we like experiences first of all

01:01:13 Speaker_06
There's a part of evolution where human beings, part of our lust for innovation and for constant improvement of our environment and circumstances, we like extraordinary experiences. I think it's what made people successful.

01:01:28 Speaker_06
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 were to survive an attack.

01:01:42 Speaker_06
I think human beings like extraordinary experiences. We like comfort, but not as much as we like extraordinary experiences.

01:01:51 Speaker_01
But having some of these animals is like chick bait. It's like a little pooch gets you a lot of cooch, like a guy that's walking a dog. Joe had tigers to get boys.

01:02:01 Speaker_04
Which is so wild. He got straight guys.

01:02:04 Speaker_06
I mean, that guy had some fucking game. Exactly. Yeah, I guess I see your point.

01:02:10 Speaker_01
Come on, if you have a chimp A baby chimp? You're walking around Austin, Texas. Sure. People come up to you and go, oh, Joe, I love your little chimp. That's interesting.

01:02:19 Speaker_06
I want to go out with you. What a weird way to try to attract people. They always say that about puppies. That's right.

01:02:25 Speaker_00
Guys bring a puppy to the park. I mean, I'm more interested in Carl now, you know? What's your motivation over there with that baby dog?

01:02:32 Speaker_06
Isn't it interesting when you see Carl interact with Marshall? Because Marshall's like, I don't want to hurt you. I don't want nothing to do with this. Stop biting me. What are you doing? Yeah, you can see it. Yeah.

01:02:43 Speaker_06
But you've got two different kinds of things, you know? Like, one of them is like a little bulldog, this little psychopath. And the other one is a golden retriever. It's like a love sponge. Like, all he wants to do is be your friend.

01:02:53 Speaker_06
He wants to be your friend, unless you're a squirrel.

01:02:56 Speaker_06
That's really interesting you watch his reaction to squirrels like his intensity when it comes to like squirrels and birds He's so movement right is it's the movement is that it's just Instincts it just fires up that part in their DNA that knows that that's what they do but the bizarre thing with Retrievers is it's not to eat it.

01:03:16 Speaker_06
It's to bring it to you and It's always to bring it to you like one time.

01:03:20 Speaker_06
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 wash my hands open the door He's standing there with a squirrel in his mouth

01:03:32 Speaker_06
Like, he got a squirrel that quick, and he wanted me to know. He was so happy. And I was like, dude, what did you do? And he was like, ooh? What did I do? I'm like, what did you do, man? And so I got rid of the squirrel.

01:03:44 Speaker_06
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 a weird thing, because it's like,

01:03:56 Speaker_06
You understand predatory instincts like cats have them. They're the worst cats are they have 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

01:04:11 Speaker_01
The first thing that kills, you know songbirds birds is glass windows skyscrapers a glass one second is domestic cats And they are killing machines and they really do take a toll on wild birds I went get ready for this podcast.

01:04:24 Speaker_06
I went down a dirty road last night a wormhole of cats Predatory cats and there's these compilations of cats just jacking pigeons jacking squirrels jacking everything everything there they can get their hands on

01:04:40 Speaker_01
Yeah, no cats are bad unless they're indoors domestic cats They've you know in Hawaii cats are the reason why so many species and why I went extinct. Yep.

01:04:50 Speaker_06
Yeah, you know they're just in Australia Australia brought them in in Australia to deal with certain animals and then they got out of control and now in Australia they hunt them and

01:05:00 Speaker_01
Dodo birds went extinct because of domestic cats that were introduced into Mauritius and you know 200 300 years ago Whatever dodo birds went extinct, but no they're killing machines their machines.

01:05:09 Speaker_06
Sorry to interrupt you no no no no worries, but like so like their predatory instincts are more Reasonable like I understand that they're cats And that's what cats do and but the weird thing about a retriever is he's not doing it to eat it He's doing it to bring it to me

01:05:25 Speaker_06
Like I didn't even have to teach him to bring a ball back Like he learned within like the first two or three throws if I throw the ball, he brings it back to me It's just it's brought into them.

01:05:36 Speaker_06
Whereas every other dog that I've had I had to teach him you throw the ball You're like come bring it back. Come on. Bring it back. You bring it back. Give him a treat. I And they understand, you know, we praise them.

01:05:47 Speaker_06
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. Marshall, it was in there.

01:05:58 Speaker_00
It was already in there. But that's his programming, right? Which is crazy. Which is so much of what we found so interesting about the justification for this love that a lot of the subjects we've covered had for these chimpanzees was that they love me.

01:06:13 Speaker_00
They do these things with me. I've trained them to believe that they have feelings for me and I have feelings for them. We have this understanding.

01:06:21 Speaker_00
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 our subjects that we cover, but also some of the chimpanzees.

01:06:36 Speaker_00
It's very, very incredibly selfish around the symmetry of needs.

01:06:39 Speaker_01
But it's so disturbing, you know, you have a beautiful lab, a dog, that, you know, Tanya says, you know, constantly how much she loves this chimpanka. But the chimp is incarcerated in this cage.

01:06:54 Speaker_01
It's like, Tonya, if you really love this chimp and Tonka loves you back, why the cage? You don't have a cage for your dog. And it just seems so obvious. Tonya, this chimp does not love you the way you love it.

01:07:07 Speaker_06
Well, I think it does, but it also doesn't have a choice. 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, how much would the chimp visit her?

01:07:18 Speaker_06
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.

01:07:27 Speaker_06
spoiler alert again still good you still got to watch it folks but if You give a person that they fucking get sick like nothing you're doing to that chimp is natural The cage is not natural the foods not natural Nothing's natural.

01:07:42 Speaker_06
You know one of the saddest things for me was when she was showing it Instagram reels and just scrolling through reels and the chimps just staring at the screen and That was the weirdest one. That's really disturbing. But meanwhile, I do that.

01:07:56 Speaker_00
That's a lot of the sentiment we see from people as a reaction to that. We are basically doing that ourselves.

01:08:02 Speaker_06
Oh, yeah. We're doing it to ourselves.

01:08:03 Speaker_00
You're not looking at your son. You can make a choice.

01:08:05 Speaker_06
I'm going to put this down. I'm going to go out in the real world and have fun with human beings and have a good time with my friends. You can make those choices. The chimp doesn't have a choice.

01:08:13 Speaker_06
It's essentially a prisoner for no reason, and it likes the guard.

01:08:18 Speaker_01
And that chimp, Tonka was looking at its kids in that footage, whether Tonka knew it or not.

01:08:24 Speaker_06
And Instagram. It was looking at a bunch of things, but just staring at the screens. 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.

01:08:34 Speaker_01
And to be outside, sitting there in that cage in the basement, looking at these chimps, washing a Mercedes that's outside. You know, we both still talk to Tanya almost daily, or communicate with Tanya.

01:08:46 Speaker_01
And it's the most bizarre communication because, you know, everyone thinks I lied to Tanya about this film. She would have talked to me anyway. I'm convinced of that. And when I did come into the picture, she didn't skip a beat.

01:09:00 Speaker_01
And she was like, oh, it's you. Let's keep filming for another year and a half. But she continues to talk with us, and we continue to tell her, Tonya, maybe this is an opportunity for you to rethink and reinvent yourself.

01:09:16 Speaker_01
Anyway, it's really interesting.

01:09:19 Speaker_06
Well, it doesn't seem like she has a lot of self-reflection, with all due respect.

01:09:26 Speaker_00
It's hard not to be compassionate with a lot of these people, to be honest. It's really hard. They're humans. They're humans.

01:09:32 Speaker_01
Well, especially Tanya, because she led us into her life in such an intimate way that, you know, she was really generous that way. So it isn't black and white. There's a lot of gray.

01:09:44 Speaker_00
I understand an audience reaction, though. And you can have those kind of conflicting views on it, but being part of making it as You know, we're partially complicit to it, too, as well. I mean, in a way of sharing that story, in a way.

01:09:59 Speaker_06
Well, you know, there's the age-old term, with great power comes great responsibility. It is a great responsibility to hold a large chimpanzee in your house. That is a great power. It is an enormous responsibility.

01:10:13 Speaker_06
And she should not have the option to have that responsibility. She's not capable of managing that situation.

01:10:20 Speaker_06
it's it's i don't think anybody's capable of it i think the same way i just think dolphins were lucky that they're nice that's what i think we're lucky that they're nice because they shouldn't they should be killing us every chance they can too they are they're not just that but uh... infanticide you know the reason why female uh... dolphins are so promiscuous well male dolphins when they find a female uh... if the female has babies she will not breed for i think it's a long period time i think it's around six years see if that's true uh...

01:10:50 Speaker_06
But so the way the male do will kill the babies the males will kill the babies to force her into estrus So she will start breeding again So what the females do to counteract that is to have sex with as many male dolphins as they can So they have sex with all the male dolphins.

01:11:02 Speaker_06
They're not monogamous in any way stretch or form They just go and fuck as many guys they can so those guys will protect their babies Because the they don't know if that's their baby or not because they know they've had sex with her But if they have not had sex with her and then she has babies they will kill that baby

01:11:17 Speaker_06
Are any animals monogamous? Because they used to think so. Yeah, penguins.

01:11:21 Speaker_01
Penguins are.

01:11:22 Speaker_06
But they only do it for like a year. They're monogamous for like a year. But they also look exactly the same, which is a trap.

01:11:28 Speaker_01
They used to think macaws, parrots were monogamous, and swans. And then they started doing the genetics, and they realized they cheat like hell.

01:11:37 Speaker_06
Yeah, I'm sure they do. It doesn't seem to serve any purpose evolutionarily for them to be monogamous. It seems contrary to the idea of natural selection. If you have potent genes, you should want to spread those genes as much as possible.

01:11:53 Speaker_06
So that means we shouldn't be monogamous. 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. And we are evolving.

01:12:07 Speaker_06
We are clearly different in that we are animals, but we can manipulate our environment like no animal that's ever existed. We can travel to any place in the world, which no animal could ever do on its own.

01:12:19 Speaker_06
We can do all kinds of things that other animals can't do, but more importantly, we communicate. And we communicate.

01:12:24 Speaker_00
Tell stories.

01:12:25 Speaker_06
Yes. And we empathize with each other. And we recognize things in other people, even heinous people, even people you don't like, like whether it's Joe Exotic or Tanya, you recognize like, I see, she's not, I get it.

01:12:38 Speaker_06
You know, she's just a person who's all fucked up. Even that crazy drunk lady who had the one that attacked her daughter. Like what happened to her? You know, like what was her childhood like? You know, it couldn't have been good.

01:12:48 Speaker_01
And she's the one person out there who's still alive who I really don't want to hear from. Because I really wonder right now, what is she thinking?

01:12:58 Speaker_06
Well, the calmness while her daughter was being attacked on the phone, the calmness of that phone call was just shocking.

01:13:05 Speaker_01
Suspicious.

01:13:07 Speaker_06
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 like she's She's got to be out of her fucking mind all the time if she's drinking that much booze I think she wanted out with the chimp.

01:13:23 Speaker_01
I think they she was As caged as depressed as the chimp possibly in that house after 15 years living with this chimp that she thought was her son, and then later was dressing the chimp up with the same clothing as her deceased husband.

01:13:40 Speaker_01
I think she wanted out, and somehow she figured it out.

01:13:44 Speaker_00
Well, the life choices is really remarkable. They're also basically in cages, the humans taking care of the chimpanzee. Right, right, right. You really think about it. The same goes for Sandy, Sandy Harold.

01:13:57 Speaker_00
What was so great about revisiting that story in Connecticut, we basically,

01:14:02 Speaker_00
We were set to come out with this show in March this year, and we were basically wrapped in November, and we were going through finishing, and we suddenly got access to the entire Travis story.

01:14:15 Speaker_00
We work with this guy who wrote this incredible article, a New York Magazine article named Dan Lee. It's one of the best written articles about Travis. It's called Travis the Menace. He has no attribution of sources. You don't know who is talking.

01:14:30 Speaker_00
So it's the kind of foundational piece for the Travis story. We tracked him down. He says, I have everyone that was part of that story and they have archive. Do you want to do it?

01:14:40 Speaker_00
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.

01:14:51 Speaker_00
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. We had this archive, the video that you see has never been seen before.

01:15:01 Speaker_00
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.

01:15:12 Speaker_00
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?

01:15:22 Speaker_00
Connie Casey was this place, this kind of, you know, breeding ground for all of these animals that were kind of cycled through Hollywood. And what I found very interesting is this lineage that led to Travis.

01:15:36 Speaker_00
Travis was sold to Sandy, and then you see... It's so incestuous. It's so incestuous that they're all connected. And you'll see a little bit of this in episode four. There it is. Travis the Menace. And it's a remarkable story. This is Sandy who?

01:15:50 Speaker_00
bought Travis from Connie Connie You know it was it was a this Susie was by the way.

01:15:59 Speaker_06
Yeah, how much does that photograph freak you out? Yeah, when you see that chimp holding that baby at any minute and just decide to pull that baby's head off

01:16:06 Speaker_01
And when chimps smile, it's actually a sign of aggression. It's not like us. We smile because we're happy. That's not a happy chimp doing that. So he's trained.

01:16:17 Speaker_06
He's trained to smile. He's not necessarily aggressive right here. He's trained to show his teeth because it's cute.

01:16:26 Speaker_00
Right. Grimace is more of a happy smile, I guess, if you want to call it that. So it was fascinating to us to get access to this story. We go into it and... He's drinking soda from McDonald's. That's disturbing.

01:16:38 Speaker_06
Yeah, he got too big. Well, you're giving him the standard American diet. But look at the canines compared to ours. Look how they're daggers. Oh, well, the bite force, everything. I mean, everything about them.

01:16:49 Speaker_06
We are so watered down by the evolutionary process.

01:16:53 Speaker_06
I was real aware of that when I was touching that two-year-old chimp with diapers like real wear It's a different thing and when you're taking this thing and you're you know It's a time bomb you have like four years where you can control it maybe five right and then they say after five It's just like you're basically rolling the dice anytime someone comes over your house.

01:17:15 Speaker_06
Yeah

01:17:15 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's basically it. Just so crazy. But he was, you know, this classic story. It was this kind of gothic fairy tale in Stanford, Connecticut, which was so unusual because it's a suburb of Manhattan.

01:17:25 Speaker_00
You know, everyone thought this was in the South or wherever. It was happening in Stanford, Connecticut. And Sandy had this kind of void in her life. She buys Travis and raises her part of the family.

01:17:37 Speaker_00
And you see the story, the same arc as every other chimp story in a family setting.

01:17:42 Speaker_00
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 the story really well, I think, is this chimp is happy and connected to the community because he's free.

01:17:58 Speaker_00
He's socializing, he's a town celebrity, he's at work with Sandy in the tow shop, you know, answering phones, you know, filling out paperwork. The mascot of the tow shop, Desire Me Motors. Yeah, he's airbrushed everywhere on tracks.

01:18:11 Speaker_06
And he lives a cool life. He lives a cool life.

01:18:13 Speaker_00
And then one day... Everyone gets to see the chimp, right? And then until one day he gets too aggressive. And this incredible story, which we don't cover in the doc, but he's in this intersection, very busy intersection in Connecticut.

01:18:25 Speaker_00
A little boy throws a can of Coke over to the car with the chimp. The chimp gets out.

01:18:31 Speaker_00
uh... you know stops traffic you know it's covered in the news and it's a joke everyone's like oh my god it's planted at the age of seven trying to get a hold of kids trips is trying to like he's irritated by why would bother the chimpanzee through kennicoke and he runs out of the car trying to figure out what's going on meanwhile sandy gets an ice cream cone brings back in the car and everything's cool two hours later two hours later right so it does the state of connecticut says no way you can have this chip anymore on public you gotta come in home

01:18:58 Speaker_00
So this chimp is out in space for the majority of his life and then built to confinement for the majority of his life.

01:19:05 Speaker_00
And so fast forward, and I'll spare you kind of the other stuff that we learned, but what everyone kind of talks about in revisiting media at the time, is he It was annexed. It was the wine glasses. He was drunk.

01:19:19 Speaker_00
It was Maybe the relationship went wrong, but he grabbed car keys. He wanted to go for a ride.

01:19:26 Speaker_00
He could drive a car He want to get the fuck out of there Yeah, that's what happened right and and the person who he runs into first Sharla represents confinement, right? He was a nanny

01:19:37 Speaker_06
Right.

01:19:37 Speaker_00
So what do you think's going to happen? It was also reported he was fucking or he left already. He was like cruising around and he was in the graveyard fucking with the guy who was digging graves. That's what we heard. That's what we heard. Yeah.

01:19:47 Speaker_06
Insanely bored. Just like a person that's stuck in a cage. Yeah.

01:19:51 Speaker_01
And chimps when they're bored and you always see it. They rock. And so you see, if you're watching that section of Chimp Crazy, Travis is just sitting there rocking, which is like a tick. Big cats do a figure eight over and over and over.

01:20:07 Speaker_01
Chimps do this rocking, and when you see that, you know that's a really desperately depressed chimp.

01:20:14 Speaker_00
But we love this, I'm sorry, love, but we're interested in this tension. because we think we can control things.

01:20:21 Speaker_00
I mean, that's what, if you've seen the movie Nope, this great footage with this chimp Gordy, which he covers and is a through line in the show, it's inspired based on this whole idea of spectacle and humans that can control things.

01:20:32 Speaker_00
Nope is, in that scene with Gordy, the chimp, is probably one of the most beautiful displays cinematically that I've seen of, it's horrible, it's very tragic, but.

01:20:44 Speaker_06
The one person that has the 15-year-old chimp in their house, How have they been able to avoid all that?

01:20:53 Speaker_00
She's careful, I mean, she's 77 years old, Pam Rosaire. 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.

01:21:06 Speaker_00
I want to do something difficult. The rest of her family trained horses and elephants, and that was culturally what they were part of.

01:21:11 Speaker_01
But that's a really good question.

01:21:12 Speaker_00
How is it that Pam hasn't... Okay, you're thinking about more different measures, but like... I'm thinking about attacks.

01:21:18 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. So really good question, because I always wondered that about Pam Rosaire. How come she's the one person that has sort of been immune to it, or has she?

01:21:28 Speaker_00
I think she's got some, you know, look, I think she's lucky. I think it's the best way. I don't know what happens behind the scenes, to be honest. I think, you know, to be fair, I think, I don't know. But I do know that when I watched her interaction,

01:21:41 Speaker_00
There's a real understanding, and she has a leash on him. I mean, it's a choke on his collar.

01:21:47 Speaker_01
Well, and she also, they are neutered. These chimps.

01:21:50 Speaker_00
Castrated, yeah. I'm sure the life is less aggressive.

01:21:52 Speaker_01
They do, they remove their canines oftentimes. They do have to alter them to be able to continue to work with them. They're modified. I mean, I should say, there's a lot of dark parts of our story that we didn't go into.

01:22:06 Speaker_01
Like, one of the things we learned was that so many of the monkeys that are being sold by Tanya and others are coming across the border from Mexico, just along with probably drugs.

01:22:19 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:29 Speaker_00
You know, I'm sort of saying what we what we look what so Yeah, 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 So I'm we're all desensitized from from seeing this There's some really interesting stuff that happens in for joy.

01:22:47 Speaker_00
Hope you finish it including another attack but this time with a person and that we all know and Are you teasing me? I'm teasing you a little bit. I'm sorry It's pretty it's pretty good. It's pretty good Okay, that's good. It's pretty good.

01:23:04 Speaker_01
It's it's it's a part of her body gets bitten off.

01:23:07 Speaker_06
Oh, come on, man I'm not gonna similar to Trump and yeah, you know, you're giving away way too much I'm gonna look at over here the whole show now I So is that lady in with the 15 year old champ?

01:23:24 Speaker_06
Is that the only one that you know of that keeps a full-grown adult and has it just wander around with everybody we've learned more To be clear Pam doesn't live in the chimp doesn't live in our house like like it's in there sometimes yeah sometimes but it's not much of the castrating it changes its behavior and

01:23:43 Speaker_01
I think significantly. Because Buck in Oregon was castrated. The Connecticut chimpanzee, was that castrated?

01:23:52 Speaker_01
Probably but buck was castrated and started wearing a shock collar 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 It's so crazy like fixing a dog is so commonplace people don't even think twice.

01:24:09 Speaker_06
Oh is your dog neutered? Oh, you're a good pet owner. You know that way your dog's not gonna have unwanted puppies. Yeah, but Fixing a chimpanzee like what are you doing? Like what did you do to him?

01:24:18 Speaker_00
It's like fixing but also by the way, I think about think about what the medical care they get it You know the guy who's a horse vet right the guy working in a chimpanzee if you're lucky if you're lucky if you're lucky Yeah, so if you think about the care, it's it's really horrible.

01:24:31 Speaker_00
I But I was going to add to what you were saying, Eric.

01:24:34 Speaker_00
One thing that we learned through the process about kind of what is this about, mainly, you know, we're talking about this very niche subject matter of captive chimpanzees in America, which we learned 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 1,300.

01:24:56 Speaker_00
And big zoos. And big zoos, big zoos have about 250 of them still. So in terms of the kind of roadside zoo private home environment, it's between less than 100 chimpanzees that remain in captivity.

01:25:07 Speaker_00
So to answer your question, there might be more, but it's hard to hide a chimp.

01:25:11 Speaker_01
But globally, there's still many chimps in Thailand and all over the world that are You know, it's a so the u.s.

01:25:19 Speaker_00
At least there's less and less in there's less and less the over the primates in general in terms of you know monkeys as pets it's you know, it's reported somewhere around 15,000 people in America have primates as chimpanzees as a as pets 15,000 15,000 according to the American Welfare Animal Welfare Institute So that's what we're finding but you know through that

01:25:43 Speaker_00
We had to zoom out, 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.

01:25:55 Speaker_00
So we've been supporting a program that's doing 12 project sites in Africa, $10 million, 10,000 chimpanzees. And that's what we're hopeful for. I mean, Africa is basically gonna be China one day.

01:26:07 Speaker_06
What do you do, though, with With animals that have been kept in captivity their whole life, you can't really introduce them to the wild, can you? It depends on the species. Certainly not, I mean chimpanzees. Certainly not after the castrated.

01:26:20 Speaker_06
Not chimpanzees.

01:26:20 Speaker_00
They've done all these projects. Chimpanzees definitely not.

01:26:22 Speaker_00
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. It doesn't work. It ends horribly.

01:26:33 Speaker_01
Well, there's a place in Africa, there's a sort of an island, it's like a freshwater river, where they have released chimps, but chimps that are just placed in Africa.

01:26:45 Speaker_01
But yeah, to release them actually back into a population of wild chimps hasn't been done successfully, for sure. Not with chimps. Have they done it with cats? There's that famous image of Putin releasing a tiger in Russia that was captive.

01:27:04 Speaker_01
They have done it with cats, actually. I work with an organization that's been releasing jaguars back into northern Argentina, where jaguars have now disappeared.

01:27:13 Speaker_01
But the jaguar program, they do it very carefully, and they put the jaguar in these enormous enclosures and let them capture wild prey before they release them. It takes a lot of time.

01:27:28 Speaker_06
O'Reilly Well, I mean, we were talking about house cats earlier. No, no, no. No, I wasn't saying that. I just meant cats in general. But I'm saying that house cats, which are only completely domesticated, you can come to them and pet them.

01:27:39 Speaker_06
If you let them loose, they survive fine. Feral cats. They all have instincts to kill and eat things. So I would imagine cats would probably be one of the easiest ones to reintroduce to the wild. But then you have things that are accustomed, like bears.

01:27:54 Speaker_06
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. They will come back to that, no matter what.

01:28:05 Speaker_06
You can't scare them off. You scare them off, you're only scaring them for an hour, they'll be back. They know there's food there.

01:28:09 Speaker_01
Where we live in California, we have bears, black bears, not grizzly bears, and we have mountain lions.

01:28:14 Speaker_01
And almost every night, you'll see on our streets, there's a certain night of the week when the garbage comes out, all the garbage cans are tipped over because of the bears. And you're right, you're right.

01:28:24 Speaker_01
Once they learn that, then they have a pattern, and they go after those dumpsters.

01:28:29 Speaker_06
Well, you know, California used to have big, big brown bears.

01:28:32 Speaker_01
California's state flag is a grizzly bear. Which is crazy. And we work with an organization that's trying to bring them back to California.

01:28:39 Speaker_06
Settle down, folks. Settle down. Keep them alive where they are. Don't get nutty. All these people that want to reintroduce animals, like, okay, it's just, you have to understand, you're playing God. You're throwing.

01:28:52 Speaker_01
And there's a reason it went extinct, because the last grizzly bear in California was shot about 100 years ago, and it's because they eat people.

01:28:59 Speaker_06
live at california's named after the last guy who died from a grizzly bear attack yeah i think his name steven levack uh... and uh... he got fucked up they were big you know big brown bears and we kill them all because they were killing people i'm not saying still mall not saying which is what we did was good but once you've established an ecosystem that if you make the con

01:29:23 Speaker_06
I believe I like humans more than I like other animals.

01:29:26 Speaker_06
This is my thought I believe that we're more important to each other than animals are to us doesn't mean that I don't care about animals But if you start bringing in things that are gonna eat people, I'm like, hey This is not good for us.

01:29:39 Speaker_06
It's not good for us. We don't have to reintroduce them to places and You know, I think a better solution would be, let's make sure that wherever they live, naturally, their populations are fine. I think that's probably the better solution.

01:29:53 Speaker_06
There's been some success of reintroducing wolves into Montana, you know, the Yellowstone reintroduction in the 1990s.

01:29:59 Speaker_00
Yeah, we know those guys.

01:29:59 Speaker_06
Really interesting. 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. And it's kind of balanced things out, for now.

01:30:11 Speaker_01
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 this part of, the western part of the United States.

01:30:26 Speaker_01
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. Imagine bringing back big grizzlies, brown bears to California.

01:30:38 Speaker_06
Yeah, it's going to be a problem. But people that live in urban areas don't understand what their problem is. Like, this is the problem that Vancouver has. So British Columbia outlawed brown bear hunting.

01:30:51 Speaker_06
You can hunt black bears because people eat black bears. And you can eat brown bears as well, but most people don't. And so they have in their mind, hunting grizzly bears is in line with what they want to call trophy hunting, which is gross.

01:31:04 Speaker_06
You're just killing an animal so you can stuff it. It's gross. We all agree it's gross. 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.

01:31:15 Speaker_06
He's like, they're fucking dangerous. He had to 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.

01:31:29 Speaker_06
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. No one has any feelings of being nervous around human beings.

01:31:42 Speaker_01
And you remember the movie The Grizzly Man, right? Yes. Timothy Treadwell.

01:31:47 Speaker_06
That's a fascinating one.

01:31:47 Speaker_01
He was lunch.

01:31:48 Speaker_06
That's my favorite unintentional comedy. Werner Herzog, I think, made that movie funny on purpose. Of course.

01:31:55 Speaker_00
That's like our source of inspiration. It's a good movie. It's great.

01:31:59 Speaker_01
I'll never forget watching it in New York City. I was watching it at a theater. The whole time, I was just saying, like, oh my God. I was angry with this guy. He was worried about his bandana or whatever he was worried about.

01:32:16 Speaker_01
I was so pissed watching it, but it was a good movie.

01:32:19 Speaker_06
But it's the same thing. It's a less-than-extraordinary person who gets attached and addicted to extraordinary experiences. He got some incredible footage. That guy got some amazing footage. He did some fucking hard camping, okay?

01:32:34 Speaker_06
That guy was out there roughing it for a long-ass time in a tent, surrounded by monsters, living in the grizzly maze. He's a maniac.

01:32:41 Speaker_01
Yeah, talking baby talk to the bears.

01:32:43 Speaker_06
He pulled it off. Pulled it off for a long time. But you knew what was going to happen if you watched that. Like, eventually, something's going to decide to eat him. Right. And then that's exactly what happened.

01:32:52 Speaker_01
It's like these chips with these women.

01:32:55 Speaker_06
Similar but at least that guy's going to where they live.

01:32:57 Speaker_06
Yeah, of course that you know, I don't have any problem with Someone deciding to do that if you hear that fucking crazy And you want to throw yourself into the system and maybe live with them as for as long as it lasts I mean and maybe it also is suicide by bear right because that guy seemed really depressed and didn't seem like he was having a good time and

01:33:18 Speaker_01
Yeah, but he had the bear eat his girlfriend, too.

01:33:20 Speaker_06
Well, the bear ate his girlfriend after it ate him. Right. It killed him. She was trying to defend him. She was hitting it with a frying pan. Yeah, but she was like, you know, collateral damage.

01:33:31 Speaker_01
I feel bad for the girlfriend.

01:33:33 Speaker_06
I do, too.

01:33:34 Speaker_05
But again, like, what kind of choices are we making in this life?

01:33:37 Speaker_00
But think about, you asked a question about reintroduction or these attacks that occur. There was a story we didn't include. It was just too tangential.

01:33:46 Speaker_00
There was a neighbor of the Missouri Primate Foundation, the chimp party place where all the animals were bred. At a time in the 90s, she had 42 chimps living in the house in a single property. One escapes.

01:34:02 Speaker_00
A 19-year-old boy recognizes his dog in the backyard is being attacked by a chimpanzee. He grabs a gun, shoots the chimpanzee. He gets charged with destruction of property. It's a felony. He went to prison for six months. Gets out.

01:34:18 Speaker_00
He missed the birth of his daughter. That's insane. And his name is Jason Coates. It's a really interesting story. Who the fuck tried that? And then guess what? Here's what happened.

01:34:29 Speaker_00
Two years ago, I think, he gets his record expunged finally at 40 years old. And now he can't get work. You know, the guy's like a contractor and he couldn't get work. That's so crazy. Defending his property.

01:34:42 Speaker_00
He shouldn't have been in that situation in the first place.

01:34:44 Speaker_06
Also defending his life. The reality, if you understand chimpanzees, the person who had that chimpanzee is responsible. It's not this man who's defending his life. You are so vulnerable to a chimpanzee.

01:34:57 Speaker_06
If they decide to get after you, there's not a lot you can do. You could survive for a little bit, but it's going to tear you apart. That's just how it is. And if that guy is not armed and he can't protect himself, then what do you have?

01:35:08 Speaker_06
You have a person that gets torn apart by a chimpanzee.

01:35:12 Speaker_06
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.

01:35:25 Speaker_01
Yeah, that was a tragic story. Terrible. 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.

01:35:36 Speaker_00
Well, you have to have some discretion in the process of casting subjects. I mean, it's a choice. But I also think the idea is it was also kind of far away from where we were going with these themes. Well, it seems like you could do multiple series.

01:35:49 Speaker_00
Oh my god, we could continue with this thing. It's harder. It's getting harder and harder to do.

01:35:54 Speaker_06
But is it also harder to get people to be natural on camera and to not be performative?

01:36:00 Speaker_01
It's harder, I mean what is harder now, and it was hard in the very beginning also, is that these people that keep, I'm generalizing a little bit, but for the most part they're very guarded about letting you in because one, they don't know if you're a spy for animal rights groups, they don't know if you're the feds.

01:36:20 Speaker_01
and they don't know if you're gonna steal their animals. And so a lot of these people have very valuable animals, and they're extremely guarded and paranoid about letting you in.

01:36:30 Speaker_01
Now, of course, it's even become harder, because in our case, we've become known. And so to continue this model of doing another story on, I don't know, bears, yeah, people are gonna be suspicious. But as far as being natural,

01:36:47 Speaker_01
I don't think that's so hard. With Tonya and Joe, Joe's obviously a performer in a sense, but we just film them. And the more intimate you can make that filming experience for them, the more natural they become. So we work with hardly anybody.

01:37:05 Speaker_01
With Tiger King, it was just me and a camera guy. And I drove back and forth from Texas to Oklahoma constantly. Dallas to Oklahoma City, it was just two of us filming.

01:37:18 Speaker_01
And so the more intimate it is, the less of an audience is watching while you're filming, the better it is.

01:37:25 Speaker_06
And also, before Tiger King, there's no way they could have known how big that was gonna be.

01:37:29 Speaker_06
My god, I didn't know we didn't know no no way they could have ever anticipated some bizarre obscure documentary on people that are keeping pet cats I Started even know but I started making a film about the sixth extinction big cats in America.

01:37:46 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:37:46 Speaker_01
Okay, that's like low risk We didn't even know it was gonna be successful. Yeah, I

01:37:52 Speaker_06
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.

01:38:01 Speaker_06
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.

01:38:10 Speaker_06
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.

01:38:19 Speaker_06
This world is so much more insane than this new insane world that it became sort of a little bit of a panacea for us.

01:38:28 Speaker_00
I was telling Eric this. We get asked this question a lot about the state of non-scripted, unscripted shows, documentaries. and this dramatization that you're seeing as a trend, people making very cinematic real stories, dramatic recreations.

01:38:46 Speaker_00
And Eric and I were talking about it a lot because so much of our content is so much more surreal than anything we can even make up or recreate. And that's what's so surreal about our process, and also just the stuff we capture.

01:39:03 Speaker_00
It's stranger than fiction, as I said.

01:39:06 Speaker_06
It's stranger than fiction, and it also comes off as authentic. And as someone who's worked in reality TV, it's not reality, okay? And especially the kind of reality shows you think of as reality shows, they have all these scenarios set up.

01:39:20 Speaker_06
They'll edit things to make them look like different things happened, because they just want you keeping Keep people tuned in for drama. So if you're following a family around, they create drama. They have scripted shit. And it feels like it, right?

01:39:33 Speaker_06
The thing about Tiger King and the thing about Chimp Crazy is it feels very authentic.

01:39:38 Speaker_01
It's crazy. God, I'm so glad you say that because I would fly into St. Louis, drive down to the Ozarks to film Tanya. And she'd be like three hours late for some reason. And then she'd show up and she'd say, Oh, you know, I gotta go get my eyes done.

01:39:55 Speaker_01
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 get your lip injections?

01:40:06 Speaker_01
She just would say, no, I got four o'clock appointment with my lip injection. And we just shadowed her. So it was just her life.

01:40:13 Speaker_06
Yeah, so it is authentic.

01:40:15 Speaker_00
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 on screen that that make it authentic. Well, it's also the editing process.

01:40:30 Speaker_00
Of course, we had a great team, an incredible group of team.

01:40:33 Speaker_06
So as they're doing it, are they marking down key moments? Do they have someone who's a stenographer or someone who's marking down so you know what to look for?

01:40:42 Speaker_06
Or do you, at the end of the day, go, that thing where she went and got her lips done, we have to have that in?

01:40:47 Speaker_01
I wish we had what you just said.

01:40:49 Speaker_00
It would be very helpful. It seems like you guys are doing well. It's pretty organic. It's pretty organic. I think there's also, you follow the core story, which was Tanya's story. We kind of knew that we had it.

01:41:02 Speaker_00
the minute the missing chimpanzee happened, or the supposed death occurred. So that was a story. Where is the chimp? And through that story, we're able to kind of latch on all these other things.

01:41:13 Speaker_00
Now, what you don't know is we shot these other stories, you know, out of sequence. Travis came at the very end, so we had to figure out a way to weave it into episode two, weave it into episode four.

01:41:25 Speaker_00
We knew we really wanted that end to serve as thematic connection to Tanya's story.

01:41:32 Speaker_01
I just have to make one big overriding point, which is that this is not a good recipe for people making films like this. because it's not.

01:41:42 Speaker_01
There's all these formulaic styles of documentaries, like a biopic, a famous person, or a takedown documentary, or a true crime.

01:41:50 Speaker_01
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 gonna go. And that is not a good, smart way to make probably documentaries, because what if it goes nowhere?

01:42:06 Speaker_01
I'm just bringing that up because And so in order to do Chimp Crazy after Tiger King, we actually filmed so many different things to get to chimp people.

01:42:17 Speaker_00
How do we spend less time on these things is what we've realized. It's exhausting. It's worth it, though.

01:42:23 Speaker_06
It seems like there's no other way to keep it authentic than to just shadow these people forever and then splice it down to four hours. Which is like, you have 250 plus hours of footage? 250 days of footage.

01:42:38 Speaker_00
It's about 1,300 hours, roughly.

01:42:41 Speaker_06
1,300 hours down to four.

01:42:45 Speaker_00
Now that's just primary camera. It's like summarizing the days. I mean, multiple cameras, multiple things happening in a day, right? We're very efficient. It's an eight to 12 hour day. We're capturing a lot of stuff in that day.

01:42:57 Speaker_06
So are you archiving and you 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 there's a process there's a field process to ingest that has kind of the notes that we have for the day what happened what's interesting about the day and are you trying to fill to form the narrative of how you're going to have the whole documentary series play out as you're doing that.

01:43:19 Speaker_01
That comes so much later. We have no idea where it's going, probably for the first year and a half of filming. In the case of Chimp Crazy, we didn't even discover Tonya until a year and a half in? A year and a half in.

01:43:35 Speaker_00
No, it's what kind of made it more complicated. You're like, we got our star. Well, you know, it's so interesting, Joe, and I want to come back to this about, I saw you get a little emotional with the buck story because I,

01:43:47 Speaker_00
We spent, it was really a hard one for us to tell, but an important one to make sure we got that in, but we missed it. We missed it, we missed the cover.

01:43:58 Speaker_00
We were gonna go, Eric and I were gonna go to Pendleton to cover what was happening with Buck, 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.

01:44:12 Speaker_00
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 have to trust our instincts.

01:44:25 Speaker_00
When we are into something, let's cover it, film it, send someone out and cover it if we need to.

01:44:30 Speaker_00
So we decided to film everything, everything including our conversations and process, very meta, which ended up becoming part of the story too, as you'll see more in four where we have to turn her in, basically.

01:44:42 Speaker_00
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.

01:44:58 Speaker_00
day happens, take the animals out, one is missing. And then the guy that we had sent there became friends with her and we just had to keep following it. So this guy became essential to the story with no intended reasoning for that.

01:45:14 Speaker_00
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. It's not a good formula if you want to make money with documentaries. I mean, I'm interested though.

01:45:30 Speaker_00
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?

01:45:38 Speaker_06
Well, I mean, doing what kind of things?

01:45:40 Speaker_00
With reality TV programming or programming in general?

01:45:42 Speaker_06
Well, I think with reality TV, it was pretty simple. I could see how it started. It was people that were involved in scripted shows. And then scripted shows somewhere around the early 2000s got decimated by reality shows.

01:45:57 Speaker_06
And so these people who were already respected television producers, they made their way into reality television. And then they realized some of these people were pretty fucking boring most of the time.

01:46:08 Speaker_06
We don't have enough time to spend 250 days to film one episode of a show, right? Which is what you guys had to do. So instead what they do is they say, okay, today you're going to argue about what to have for lunch, you know?

01:46:23 Speaker_06
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.

01:46:33 Speaker_06
And this is the place you're going to eat, you're going to be happy. And so the whole thing is the personal dynamics, the relationships these people have to each other. And then they create drama along the way.

01:46:44 Speaker_06
Along the way, you're going to run into your friend from high school who's like perfectly made up, well lit with a microphone on. Whoa, so it's like it's bullshit. It's bullshit.

01:46:55 Speaker_06
It's not really reality, but it's also not really a drama It's real human beings.

01:47:01 Speaker_06
They're doing nonsense and you feel it And then there's also like reality shows that are on specific subjects and those are bullshit, too Yeah, and then you know you have dating shows which are super super popular cuz like who is he gonna pick?

01:47:14 Speaker_06
Who's she gonna pick? How's this gonna work? Yeah

01:47:16 Speaker_06
You know we get excited about that or fucking these garage shows where someone shows up at a storage unit Well, you know a lot of those shows they fake it they load up the storage Because yeah, so they can't be assured that this storage unit's gonna have some fucking pirates treasure in it, right?

01:47:32 Speaker_06
So what do they do? Yeah, so they pretend that they got this at an auction like who knows what's in it apparently the guy died in a mysterious way and And there's people looking for him. We might really be on to something.

01:47:43 Speaker_06
And then you cut to commercial. Is that gold? Cut to commercial. Cut back from commercial. Is that gold?

01:47:48 Speaker_01
But I even thought, I don't watch any of those shows. I even thought some of these like, you know, nature shows like Steve Irwin.

01:47:56 Speaker_01
And I know you know Forrest Galand, but I always kind of wonder, is he walking through the jungle and there he suddenly finds the snake? It's gotta be set up a lot of the time.

01:48:07 Speaker_06
A lot of the time, I'm sure it is. Or the crocodile. Some of those shows, but a lot of the ones, one of the more interesting things today is YouTube, right? Because YouTube, you have these small, independent people.

01:48:19 Speaker_06
There's this guy we had on called Python Cowboy. And this guy goes out into the Everglades every day and captures pythons. You know like this videos of him. He got bit by one like really fucked up his arms gushing blood.

01:48:31 Speaker_06
He's holding on these they're Enormous yeah, there's more pythons in the Everglades than anywhere on earth Burmese pythons yeah Burmese pythons that used to be people's pets or used to be a part of a reptile facility

01:48:43 Speaker_01
So we're doing our next doc series is about reptiles and the smuggling of reptiles. We have a whole section on that. It's another thing.

01:48:49 Speaker_06
I went down the rabbit hole last night. Nile crocodiles. I was going to the Nile crocodiles in the Everglades.

01:48:55 Speaker_01
I can tell you a lot about Nile crocodiles.

01:48:57 Speaker_06
Tell me about Nile crocodiles in the Everglades though.

01:49:00 Speaker_06
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 So they think they came from the same genetic source But then there was another guy that I was watching this documentary last night or this YouTube video rather last night whether he was saying that there's like Huge crocodiles that take out cattle on the west side of Florida No

01:49:23 Speaker_06
Yeah, so he was sketching me out. He's like, 18 foot, 18 foot, kill cows.

01:49:29 Speaker_01
There's like 23 or 24 species of crocodilians in the world. That includes caimans, crocodiles, alligators, gaurales. And the only crocs that are really, really dangerous to man are saltwater crocodiles, Nile crocodiles, mugger crocodiles.

01:49:44 Speaker_01
But the crocs in Florida that are native, American crocodiles, they are brackish water,

01:49:52 Speaker_01
Croc they're not like Nile crocodiles that are in freshwater so in Florida you basically just have American alligators And there's a very small population of American crocodiles that are still native, but they're in sort of estuaries and brackish water They're smaller

01:50:06 Speaker_01
They, which ones are small?

01:50:07 Speaker_06
American crocodiles.

01:50:08 Speaker_01
Well, they're bigger than alligators. Are they really? Yeah, for sure.

01:50:11 Speaker_06
What's the biggest American crocodile they've ever found?

01:50:13 Speaker_01
Oh, they can be big. I've seen American crocodiles, because the American crocodile, the one we have in South Florida, is the same croc that you see in coastal Mexico, goes down into Costa Rica.

01:50:23 Speaker_01
You can see, I've looked over, I've seen a lot of American crocodiles in Mexico, Costa Rica. They're big, they're long. Longer than your alligator out there. Not that much longer, but longer.

01:50:33 Speaker_06
Jamie, can you find out what's the largest American alligator or American crocodile? I was under the impression that they were smaller species than the alligators were, and definitely smaller than the rest of the crocodiles.

01:50:43 Speaker_01
Check beyond that.

01:50:44 Speaker_06
That's an alligator? No, that's an alligator. A monster cattle-eating alligator shot in Florida. Look at the size of that thing.

01:50:51 Speaker_01
Okay, but that's unusual.

01:50:53 Speaker_06
15 feet. Oh my goodness. Wow, look at the size of that sucker.

01:50:58 Speaker_01
But you said earlier crocodile. Right, American crocodile.

01:51:01 Speaker_06
What's the largest American crocodile, Jamie? And the largest American alligator, right? I think the largest American alligator was 20 feet long. Wow, really, that big? Yeah, I think that's the longest one they've ever found. Wow, wow.

01:51:15 Speaker_01
I love this fact check for you. Okay, here we go.

01:51:17 Speaker_06
14 foot, yeah, so they're smaller. What? Yeah.

01:51:20 Speaker_01
Wait, what's the largest American alligator then? Um, it's bigger, definitely, for sure. Is it really? Wow.

01:51:26 Speaker_06
Yeah, because that one that we have out there is 14 feet long. Damn.

01:51:29 Speaker_01
It's like when you catch a fish, right? You say it's this big.

01:51:33 Speaker_06
I think that's how I'm being with it. Yeah, okay. 19 feet, 2 inches.

01:51:36 Speaker_01
Oh, Joe, you're right. Yeah, all right. I'm wrong. I love this.

01:51:38 Speaker_06
Well, so there's a bunch of different ones, right? And the Nile crocodiles are a different animal. Like, Nile crocodiles regularly get to 18 feet, and there's some really interesting reports from back in the day of much larger ones.

01:51:52 Speaker_06
And so the question is, here's the thing about alligators and crocodiles in particular. They don't die of old age. They just keep getting older and bigger.

01:52:03 Speaker_06
And when you introduce human beings and guns into the equation, what are the people going to shoot? Well, they're going to shoot the biggest ones, right? So you have guns being introduced in the 1800s, and now in 2024,

01:52:15 Speaker_06
You can't find the really big ones. Well, one of the reasons for that is a really big one would take hundreds of years to get that big.

01:52:22 Speaker_06
So an alligator like that big fucker that they had, the cattle-eating 15-foot alligator, that guy might be 90 years old.

01:52:31 Speaker_06
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. This is a long time ago, though. And so there's all this speculation.

01:52:46 Speaker_06
Were these people just freaking out because it was big and they exaggerated? Is this hyperbole? Like, what is this?

01:52:52 Speaker_06
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 Dinosaur eating crocodiles huge thing.

01:53:03 Speaker_06
What is the biggest ancient crocodile that was ever discovered fossilized? I think it's like in the neighborhood of 50 plus feet long.

01:53:12 Speaker_01
I like this right now, what we're doing. And I like that you were right and I was wrong. I like that too. You should tell them about Gigantico.

01:53:18 Speaker_06
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. Okay, the biggest freshwater croc ever was 40 feet long.

01:53:31 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's remarkable.

01:53:33 Speaker_06
110 million years ago. What about saltwater? Is that the largest crocodile period or is it what they all the big ones freshwater? What is the, is that the largest, biggest crocodile fossil ever found?

01:53:48 Speaker_06
Okay, largest sea dwelling one, 30 feet long, interesting. So the 40 foot long one was bigger. Interesting. So these ones that they, okay, super croc, massive fossilized croc discovered in the Agulla, how do you say that?

01:54:05 Speaker_06
Agulla, Agulla Formation in Big Bend National Park, 40 to 50 feet long. Jaws with six-inch teeth. Good Lord. Wow. Big bend. Good Lord. Six-inch teeth. Just imagine. Fucking six-inch teeth, and it's 40 feet long.

01:54:24 Speaker_01
Oh my God. I mean, I think saltwater crocs and Nile crocs eat more people, right? Yes. Today.

01:54:30 Speaker_06
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.

01:54:42 Speaker_06
And the footage that he got of it is so disturbing because everyone in the village is missing something.

01:54:47 Speaker_06
Everyone in the village is either missing an arm or missing a leg or has a bite taken out of them and while he was there a woman got snatched up when she was trying to do laundry.

01:54:56 Speaker_06
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

01:55:04 Speaker_06
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. But the problem is crocodiles figure it out.

01:55:21 Speaker_06
And then they go in there, and they just settle in. And they just wait for you.

01:55:26 Speaker_06
Cuz 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?

01:55:35 Speaker_01
You know I work a lot in Madagascar, and we have not crocodiles in Madagascar, but they're not as big as mainland Madagascar

01:55:41 Speaker_01
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.

01:55:49 Speaker_06
That's their instincts, because that's how they get deer, like these little animal species.

01:55:52 Speaker_01
Every year people die washing their clothing in Madagascar from Nile Crocs.

01:55:58 Speaker_06
Fuck that. So the speculation is that there's breeding populations of those Nile crocs in the Everglades really yeah Yeah, why not enough of them see if you can find like what's the latest breeding crocodile breeding?

01:56:16 Speaker_06
Nile crocodiles in the Everglades they have a shoot-on-sight order for them

01:56:19 Speaker_01
I mean, it makes sense. I always wondered why there were not anacondas in the making of this reptile documentary we're doing.

01:56:26 Speaker_01
The reason we've been told that there are not anacondas in the Everglades is that they didn't import anacondas in the way they did Burmese pythons. Burmese pythons

01:56:36 Speaker_01
From what we understand, the python skin people in Thailand and Malaysia, they would collect the eggs and have the babies and send thousands of baby Burmese pythons to the U.S. And that never happened with anacondas.

01:56:51 Speaker_01
But you think about anacondas, because they would live in the Everglades.

01:56:55 Speaker_00
You're meeting the guy responsible for that tomorrow.

01:56:57 Speaker_06
It's unclear if Nile crocodiles are breeding in the wild in Florida, but here's some information about Nile crocodiles and breeding in Florida. First observed in Florida in the 60s. Wow. Wow.

01:57:11 Speaker_06
Believes they have captured all the Nile crocodiles in the area. Nile crocodiles become established before they could threaten native species. Well, that's what pythons have done. I mean, they might have to bring in the Nile crocs to kill the pythons.

01:57:22 Speaker_01
But what's interesting about that, you know, in the 60s, in the 60s, alligators were endangered. Yes.

01:57:29 Speaker_06
Well, I lived in Florida in the 70s. And when I lived in Florida, they were endangered. They were on the endangered species list. People used to feed them marshmallows. Oh, wow. Yeah, I lived in Gainesville, Florida.

01:57:37 Speaker_06
We used to go, and then when I was there, some lady got her dog snatched, and then everybody got kind of freaked out. Everybody in the town was like, whoa. Because they got way too comfortable with alligators.

01:57:48 Speaker_06
Because alligators, when they get used to people, they just lay around. So they would just sit on the banks, and we would go to the fucking park, like Lake Alice is where the lake is.

01:57:57 Speaker_06
We'd go to the park and hang out, and alligators would just be hanging out there. 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 at all.

01:58:09 Speaker_01
Now they're everywhere. Crocodile farming had a lot to do with why they're not endangered. Really? From what I understand.

01:58:17 Speaker_01
What took pressure off of crocs just globally, and not so much alligators, but crocs in general, was when the farming happened, it took pressure off of hunting them, obviously, for skins, right?

01:58:28 Speaker_01
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. But why is that? How does it affect alligators? Well, that's a good question.

01:58:42 Speaker_01
I think it was crocodile farming, you should ask. But I know croc farming in general has protected crocodilians across the board. I guess they used to hunt alligators also for skins, or am I wrong?

01:58:52 Speaker_06
Oh, yeah, for sure. Sure, they still do. They still breed them for skins and hunt them for skins, but now they have an overpopulation problem. So I was just curious, how would crocodile farming make that happen?

01:59:03 Speaker_06
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 of them.

01:59:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, that may be true. I know croc farming has helped crocodilians across the board. Sure. That's for sure.

01:59:17 Speaker_00
Well, and storms patterns, right? Shifting, isn't that also true?

01:59:22 Speaker_01
American alligators were on the endangered species list. They were very rare in the 60s. Now they're incredibly common.

01:59:28 Speaker_06
Well, they were very rare because they were overhunted.

01:59:30 Speaker_01
They were overhunted, exactly.

01:59:31 Speaker_06
I mean, that's the problem. 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.

01:59:45 Speaker_06
And they had wiped out everything. There used to be elk all over 50 states. They used to be everywhere.

01:59:49 Speaker_01
Well, the eastern elk is extinct.

01:59:51 Speaker_06
Yes, exactly. And we have Rocky Mountain elk now that have been transplanted into the east. But the market hunting was a real problem. We had decimated the populations of all these things.

02:00:02 Speaker_06
They were just hunting deer and all these different animals and selling them for food. And oftentimes it's like bison, they would just sell their tongues.

02:00:09 Speaker_06
which is really crazy, because bison meat is thought to be some of the best meat, but they were pickling their tongues and sending them back east.

02:00:15 Speaker_01
Wow. You're now making me think about something, and I don't know the facts, but the Migratory Bird Act, we used to shoot birds all the time, and obviously the most common bird, or one of the most common birds, was passenger pigeons. Oh, yeah. Right?

02:00:30 Speaker_01
And there were so many- Fill the sky. Fill the sky, yeah. And then I think the Migratory Bird Act came into effect. Anyway, but you're right, around the Teddy Roosevelt period,

02:00:39 Speaker_06
Yeah, because people killed off all the... There were so many passenger pitches, they were fucking everywhere, and we killed them off for food.

02:00:45 Speaker_01
And for feathers in people's hats, apparently.

02:00:48 Speaker_06
Crazy.

02:00:48 Speaker_01
Anyway.

02:00:49 Speaker_06
Yeah, we're gross.

02:00:50 Speaker_00
So what do you think? So you have Teddy Rose Developed National Park System. I like that you call me on stuff.

02:00:56 Speaker_00
And services, you have things like Migratory Board Act, you have things like the ESA, which, you know, had its own unintended consequences, which we actually cover in our series.

02:01:06 Speaker_00
about stopping importation but propelling domestic interest through breeding and the demand that's created through U.S. zoo systems that you see. So what happens next, I guess, is the question.

02:01:19 Speaker_06
It's really complex, and the problem is people are very dug in on their sides.

02:01:25 Speaker_06
You know, you have people that are very dug in with the animal liberation idea, they're very dug in with PETA 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 are our property.

02:01:41 Speaker_06
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.

02:01:51 Speaker_01
Sure.

02:01:51 Speaker_06
And the success of wildlife is important to all of us.

02:01:54 Speaker_01
It's so true. 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, they're so polarized.

02:02:08 Speaker_06
Well, it's also, the problem is like we were talking about with B.C. I didn't really finish my thought, but the reason why they outlawed bear hunting in B.C. is because the high population centers are all urban.

02:02:20 Speaker_06
So people don't have any experience with grizzly bears trying to eat their dogs, or grizzly bears killing hikers. They don't experience it. If they did, they'd be terrified.

02:02:28 Speaker_06
It's a giant predator, and you have no chance if it catches you out in the wild. I don't think we should ever kill off all the grizzly bears, but they should control the populations, and the way to control the populations ethically

02:02:41 Speaker_06
is you do it through hunting.

02:02:43 Speaker_06
As much as this seems counterintuitive to people that love wildlife, 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, and then you have people that spend enormous amounts of money to hunt those things, and then that money goes into maintaining the population and making sure that it's at a healthy balance.

02:03:07 Speaker_06
If there's too many bears, Genocide, I mean, infanticide in bears is common. Almost all bears are cannibals. They eat their own babies. The whole thing is mad.

02:03:19 Speaker_06
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 her cubs, they'll actively seek out those cubs for food.

02:03:31 Speaker_06
and they will do less of that if there's less of them and if there's more of a balance between predator and prey and that's where it gets weird 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 that seems fucked like we should just sort of like let it be what it is

02:03:53 Speaker_06
Enjoy it, but the problem is it leaks over into this strange world that we've created And this is the reality if you want to be able to go to Starbucks If you want to be able to go outside and have a cheeseburger in an outdoor patio, you can't have fucking wolves everywhere Okay, this is just reality and we're accustomed to this artificial enclosure that we've created to keep human being safe and we've lost our perspective of what it means to be an animal in the world

02:04:22 Speaker_01
No, I mean like calling elephants. If you don't manage elephants, they'll denude everything and then they'll all die.

02:04:30 Speaker_06
Well, there's that, but there's also they don't give a fuck who planted that food. If you're in a village and your whole family survival is dependent upon you getting these vegetables that you've planted,

02:04:41 Speaker_06
and then elephants come in and eat all your vegetables, you could very easily starve to death. And that's real, too. And people don't want to think about that, because you think of elephants, oh, elephants are endangered. Yes, they are.

02:04:54 Speaker_06
Elephants are hunted for their ivory. Yes, they were. But also elephants are Africa is fucking huge. There's not the same amount of black bears in San Francisco as there are in, you know, rural Wyoming, right?

02:05:10 Speaker_06
It's because that's the environment to live. If you went to San Francisco, like, oh, my God, black bears are extinct. But, you know, go to New Jersey. They're everywhere. Right. So it's it's

02:05:19 Speaker_06
Not that the animal is that, you know, you shouldn't have any of them. It's just like there should be places where they exist and places where they don't exist.

02:05:27 Speaker_06
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 human control radiate? Well then you have ranchers.

02:05:39 Speaker_06
If you want to have a guy who grows cows so you can eat steak, you're going to have to be able to protect this guy's crop or it's not going to be profitable for him to do this. You're going to have to be able to protect his animals.

02:05:48 Speaker_01
I completely agree. Keep animal-human conflict. 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.

02:06:03 Speaker_01
It's a recipe for trouble. Well, it's also completely theoretical. And right now it's theoretical, although they did just recently reintroduce grizzlies back into Washington state.

02:06:13 Speaker_06
I don't mean theoretical in the sense that they haven't done it as far as what the outcome is going to be. Like you really don't know. And especially if they get to a point where they become bold and they're not threatened by people at all anymore.

02:06:25 Speaker_06
And that's what happens in certain parts of the country. That's what happens when they have too many of them in a specific area. And then they compete for resources. It can get weird.

02:06:35 Speaker_01
The outcome of Tiger King, I mean, no one knows this, but I'll tell you this. I don't think anyone knows it publicly, but a few things happened. One thing, this federal law called Big Cat Public Safety Act was passed, largely because of Tiger King.

02:06:50 Speaker_01
But the other thing we did, just sort of privately, is we donated a million dollars to tiger conservation in India, one of the countries where tigers are still doing quite well. And so we went to visit the program last September in India.

02:07:07 Speaker_01
And it just was so interesting, because you were talking about bears attacking people. In India, they do live with tigers. And they do have, obviously, a certain amount of people that get killed every year. But the key is to keep enough prey.

02:07:21 Speaker_01
within the area where these tigers are. 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.

02:07:33 Speaker_01
But anyway, I just bring that up because it was something that, it was a byproduct of Tiger King that, you know, it was something that we did just quietly as the people that I did Tiger King with, including you.

02:07:45 Speaker_00
Not so quietly now.

02:07:45 Speaker_01
Donated that money, not so quietly now.

02:07:48 Speaker_06
You got you aware the Sunderbans yeah, I'm the tiger attacks the Sunderbans absolutely Sunderbans are fascinating because hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by Tigers beautiful wetlands several hundred years Yeah, yeah, but also brackish water, and they think that might contribute to the aggression of the Tigers They're drinking like salty water, and they're just constantly irritated, but they seem to kill people for sport

02:08:09 Speaker_06
Really? Yeah, there's this one story of this 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.

02:08:19 Speaker_06
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 one or two guys got away.

02:08:33 Speaker_01
Were they wearing masks behind their head?

02:08:34 Speaker_06
They weren't but yeah, that's also what they do Yeah, yeah, and 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 and You know, they're just built to fuck things up That's what their job is.

02:08:49 Speaker_06
And if people live around them people are on the menu. That's just what it is with Tigers

02:08:53 Speaker_01
It didn't make it into Tiger King, but we filmed in southern Nepal, a place called Chitwan National Park, where tigers are doing very well, and they actually have armed guards with machine guns to protect the tigers from poachers.

02:09:07 Speaker_01
We filmed there, but it's pretty remote, and I don't remember how many people get killed. But yeah, where there are tigers, people are gonna have problems if there's high densities of people.

02:09:21 Speaker_06
You know, it's all, there's a reason why human beings don't, you're not supposed to live there. You shouldn't be living where the tigers live. They have to, they're stuck, they're fucked.

02:09:29 Speaker_06
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.

02:09:34 Speaker_00
There's a lot of people.

02:09:35 Speaker_01
I mean, it is amazing.

02:09:36 Speaker_06
Right, India has a billion people.

02:09:38 Speaker_01
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, it feels like when you're in India.

02:09:48 Speaker_01
There's people everywhere right like you think you're going off on some rural road. It's just there's people

02:09:52 Speaker_06
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 are probably they have no options So 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 these these enormous stealthy cats that are sneaking around everywhere they go

02:10:17 Speaker_00
But you see plenty of cows, which is amazing by the way, just roaming these kind of windy roads.

02:10:24 Speaker_06
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. Fascinating.

02:10:39 Speaker_06
Yeah, and they start in the just the traffic stopping which is you know in these roads that have no lanes and they're all just kind of wild But it's it's so crazy that they stick to this one thing like I was just watching this news report of this

02:10:54 Speaker_06
group of people that were not Hindu. I think they were of some other religion, and they lived in India, and they got arrested for killing cows. So they had cows in their yard, they were arrested for them, and they bulldozed their homes.

02:11:10 Speaker_06
Wow, yeah, see if you can find that.

02:11:12 Speaker_00
Well, they're also probably Muslim.

02:11:13 Speaker_01
I believe they were yeah More people died from what in India in terms of wildlife. Is it snakes probably mosquitoes? I mean, of course mosquitoes, but after that snakes or Tigers, I don't know.

02:11:23 Speaker_06
It's good. I don't think it's Tigers I think the Sundarbans is the the area where they get jacked pretty regularly but and also how many Maybe people are doing surveys on how many people are missing.

02:11:37 Speaker_06
You know, when you're going into these very remote areas, how many people would know? Indian authorities bulldoze homes of 11 people after finding beef in fridges. Oh, incredible. That is incredible.

02:11:48 Speaker_06
Slaughter of cows, which Hindus worship as a deity, is banned in most of India as is consumption of their meat. Isn't that fucking fascinating?

02:11:54 Speaker_00
Well, you cut down an oak tree in California, you're... Right, but they're not gonna bulldoze your fucking house. You know it. Isn't that nuts? Depends what kind of tree.

02:12:01 Speaker_06
Isn't that nuts? People found beef in their fridge and cows in their backyard. So they bulldozed their homes.

02:12:07 Speaker_00
Wait, so in India you can eat a hamburger? You cannot. Yeah, they're not really... Really? I was just in India. I think you can get it in like hotels and stuff. I think so.

02:12:14 Speaker_06
But you can't get it at like a... Oh, wow. They allow it in hotels?

02:12:17 Speaker_00
Yeah, you can get it at a... Maybe it's another animal.

02:12:19 Speaker_06
I was just in India. Well, you can eat lamb. You can eat sheep. You can eat other different animals. You just can't eat cows. Yeah. Wow. I didn't even think of that when I was there.

02:12:29 Speaker_06
A lot of people think it has its roots in psychedelic mushrooms, that psilocybin grows on cow manure, and that these people- Oh, wow. Because one of the oldest- I think it's called Choctaw Hayuk.

02:12:41 Speaker_06
It's one of the oldest known civilizations, which was a cattle-worshiping civilization. And they had these- why were people who were fucking starving to death, barely getting by, why were they into worshiping cows?

02:12:55 Speaker_06
Well, that's where you got all your mushrooms. It completely makes sense. It's almost the only thing that makes sense. It's almost the only thing that you could, especially if you have like ancient stories of

02:13:09 Speaker_06
Soma and these different psychedelic compounds that the Hindus would 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 why was the poor people that don't have any food not eat this one animal?

02:13:35 Speaker_01
Hmm. I don't know but I've seen mushrooms and cow manure and

02:13:38 Speaker_03
Confusing information on the burger and India's chicken chicken all you want, baby They definitely seem to have burgers, but I don't know that they're making them with like ground beef that right could be like a lamb burger Sure, be it could be stuff.

02:13:49 Speaker_00
So they call burger right when you get Indian food. It's always lamb It's a bit more Western now. I mean if you're going like kind of more, you know, not to these people. Yeah, I

02:13:57 Speaker_06
Bulldoze their fucking house.

02:14:00 Speaker_00
That's remarkable. That's incredible. I bet you they're also Muslim though. That's awesome Yeah, right, right. It's like the Uyghurs get treated. Yeah. Yeah.

02:14:07 Speaker_06
Yeah, there's a lot of that, you know, yeah, I'm sure there's some of that too Yeah, but it's it's just our relationship with animals is very bizarre and I think most people have like a really stunted understanding of it.

02:14:24 Speaker_06
They're never really around wild animals. It's a squirrel or a pigeon or something like that. They don't see animals.

02:14:31 Speaker_00
It's kind of perverse. It's a relationship. It is.

02:14:35 Speaker_06
Well, cities, as much as I love them, they are perverse. They're strange, and they've done us a lot of harm psychologically. They've created people that are much more vulnerable than they've ever been before.

02:14:48 Speaker_06
They're soft and lazy and entitled, and everything comes easy to them, and I don't think that's normal for human beings either. And you can get food anywhere you want, and all the worst kinds of food. and you're in a prison of your own choosing.

02:14:59 Speaker_06
You're going from one closed environment to another closed environment, riding around in 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.

02:15:11 Speaker_06
And it happened in a blink of an eye. In a couple of hundred years, all of a sudden, we're fucked.

02:15:16 Speaker_06
Yeah, we're trapped in this bizarre system and in this system, you know occasionally we we interact with animals and we our understanding of it and what we think of it what we think it is is so did 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 and

02:15:39 Speaker_06
Every piece of it.

02:15:41 Speaker_01
I was so lucky to grow up in nature, and I take it for granted now. Where'd you grow up? I grew up mostly in Northern California, but I was like a feral kid. My mother always said, Eric, you were feral. We didn't plan anything.

02:15:53 Speaker_01
I would spend my days fishing and hiking in the creeks.

02:15:56 Speaker_06
What part of Northern California?

02:15:57 Speaker_01
In Sonoma area. Oh, it's beautiful up there. But then I spent 40-something years in New York City. But I never lost that, what you're talking about, and that interest and love of going out into nature. But I think you're right.

02:16:09 Speaker_01
Today, people don't have the experience I had. So many kids are from an urban world and they can't connect.

02:16:17 Speaker_06
We don't even know what it's like. I would imagine if you went to a city, your average city, like New York City or Los Angeles, the average person there, what percentage of them spend any time at all alone in the woods? Very few.

02:16:30 Speaker_00
Yeah, we've lost our connection, 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.

02:16:39 Speaker_00
We're going to Botswana for the summer and do tourism. But what you really can do is put a bird feeder outside your window and connect with nature that way. And you'll see lots of different birds.

02:16:50 Speaker_01
But you must have grown up in nature in some way, or no? Not really. Okay. No, not really. But why do you then have such a like connection to it in a good way?

02:16:59 Speaker_06
I like interesting things, you know, I'm It's it's really interesting 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.

02:17:17 Speaker_06
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 of its resources? Like, what are we?

02:17:33 Speaker_06
Like, we're weird. And

02:17:36 Speaker_06
time I spend in the woods and in the wilderness just just being out there you just you get us a different sense of what life actually is you know you just it's it's so extraordinary to see wild animals in the wild like wild deer and elk and bears and see them existing it's it's incredible it's better than any movie it's it's like it gives you a vitamin that you didn't know you needed

02:18:02 Speaker_06
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 Vitamins right doesn't it feel like that you lying down like give me my vitamins That's what it feels like a nice sunny day at MIT and like Central Park, right?

02:18:21 Speaker_06
There's a vitamin that we get in the wilderness that we don't know we're lacking in. I think it's a part of being a person. I think it's a part of being interconnected to every life form that exists.

02:18:37 Speaker_06
Where wherever we are and we don't think we are because we live in an apartment and we play Nintendo And we you know, we're locked into this thing that human beings have created but we're missing something and it's not as Extreme as Tonka being trapped in that lady's basement, but it's in the neighborhood.

02:18:55 Speaker_06
There's something about it. It's real similar There's something about it. That's real weird where our own prison of our own choosing is not good for us.

02:19:06 Speaker_01
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. You know, they were just interested.

02:19:21 Speaker_01
They didn't have the intellectual curiosity that you would think they would have to see them in the wild.

02:19:25 Speaker_06
I'm not shocked. I do have a question, though, really important. The chimp with the McNuggets, chicken nuggets, does he open up the sauce and dip?

02:19:35 Speaker_00
Yes.

02:19:36 Speaker_06
Did you show him dipping?

02:19:37 Speaker_00
He peels, yeah.

02:19:38 Speaker_01
Well, in that case, I think he just went like this.

02:19:40 Speaker_00
Oh, he sucks it out?

02:19:41 Speaker_01
But they are dexterous enough, and they have eaten so much McDonald's, they do know how to do that. So they do dip the nuggets in the sauce.

02:19:50 Speaker_00
I don't think it's in that shot. I've seen they actually peel it with their mouth.

02:19:55 Speaker_06
Mmm.

02:19:56 Speaker_00
Yeah, they peel the wrapper off, right?

02:19:58 Speaker_06
I don't like wrappers Dig in with the nugget.

02:20:01 Speaker_00
I think they just honey mustard. Oh not dipping. I like that question. That's a good one We were confused.

02:20:06 Speaker_06
Yeah, he's gonna dip and then it cut away I mean the sauce toss moment was just so surreal They know too much like just the the communication get that piece of paper and he gets the paper and brings it back and They knew too much. It's too creepy.

02:20:24 Speaker_06
It's so weird. 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 should watch it. It's really good.

02:20:39 Speaker_06
And everybody should watch it also, because you have to know that that's a thing. You don't know what people are really capable of until you watch a serial killer documentary and you go, oh, Jesus Christ, that's a thing?

02:20:52 Speaker_06
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?

02:20:58 Speaker_00
But it wakes you up from human confinement to the symptom you just described of urbanization and coastal bubbles. It's kind of the, people are like, oh my God, is this America? Of course, go outside 45 minutes away from where you live. Right, right.

02:21:14 Speaker_01
I didn't know it was a thing, and I've been involved with animal people my whole life, so yeah, it's a thing. Monkey moms.

02:21:20 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that it's a common thing. If you let people do it, they'll do it. There's some strange obsessions in this world.

02:21:29 Speaker_06
Yeah, if you give people free license to do it, I mean, it's one of the great things about being an American. You have so many freedoms. There's so many things you could do.

02:21:38 Speaker_06
But it's also, like, at a certain point in time, we've got to wake up and go, hey, putting a dolphin in a fucking swimming pool is evil.

02:21:45 Speaker_06
You know, and one day, when AI can transcribe dolphin communication, we're going to probably realize they're as smart as us. And that's where it gets really, really, really scary, is that we have been engaging in a form of indentured slavery.

02:22:02 Speaker_06
We've captured them, we've raised them from child, from the time they're a baby, they've been in captivity. The whole thing is completely disgusting. And yet it's a normal part of life.

02:22:13 Speaker_06
And until Blackfish, most people weren't even aware that it was a thing or what it actually was. When you see orcas behave in the wild versus the way you see them trapped in those swimming pools, it's torturous.

02:22:25 Speaker_06
Their skin's falling off and the whole thing.

02:22:28 Speaker_00
But think about this, a hundred years ago, you can go to the Bronx Zoo and see, you know, a boy in a cage, Atabanga. Check that photo. The photo is remarkable. Right, what year was that? 1930s? 1920s maybe? He ultimately shot his brains out.

02:22:40 Speaker_01
Even people then knew that Atabanga, this, you know, basically an indigenous man from West Africa. 1912 or something like that. Anyway, but even then people would disturb to see a human being next to a gorilla. And he was in a cage by himself?

02:23:06 Speaker_01
I think he was in the ape house at the Bronx Zoo.

02:23:09 Speaker_00
First he was brought for the World's Fair on display.

02:23:12 Speaker_02
Wow.

02:23:12 Speaker_00
You know, to show... There he is. There you go. They shaved his teeth down to be more like fangs. Oh my God. Like shark teeth. 1904, there it is.

02:23:23 Speaker_01
So what year at the Bronx Zoo?

02:23:26 Speaker_00
So he died in 1916, that's right. Okay, so he was an exhibit in 1904. So the turn of the century, yeah. So that's our history. 1964, Bronx Zoo. This incredible, I love this image. It was an exhibition, right?

02:23:47 Speaker_00
World's most dangerous animal and it's a reflection. Oh, yeah, it's a mirror with bars And you walk into it and you see yourself Wow, but they were really cool.

02:23:57 Speaker_06
They were conscious of that in 1964 1964 well, it was 20 years after we dropped a fucking couple of nuclear bombs Yeah, this is a this is but how cool is that image? That is cool. That's yeah, you would never have that today. I

02:24:12 Speaker_01
the most dangerous animal in the world is us, which is, you know, so true.

02:24:17 Speaker_06
Well, it certainly is numerically. Yeah. You know? And also just the impact we have overall. We're a sketchy group. But we know more about us because of stuff like what you guys have done. So thank you very much.

02:24:31 Speaker_02
Cool.

02:24:31 Speaker_06
It was really fun talking to you. And did HBO fund this, or did you guys bring it to HBO after it was done?

02:24:37 Speaker_00
We probably went mid-stream. So 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.

02:24:51 Speaker_00
Oh, wow. I think now we have the ability to control output in terms of control of what the ultimate product can be. It was a little bit harder back then. But yeah, we kind of figure out if it's worth it or not, and then we take it out.

02:25:05 Speaker_00
But Joe, thanks for having us.

02:25:07 Speaker_06
My pleasure. You guys nailed it. Twice. Chimp crazy is really good. And of course Tiger King was awesome, too And what I said, I really mean I think you guys are doing something.

02:25:18 Speaker_06
That's You're giving us a better understanding of humans, you know through this very strange lens of watching these very bizarre people and their psychological

02:25:31 Speaker_06
misfortunes, like whatever it is about them, whatever unfortunate aspect of their mind, the way they interface with the world, allows them to do that. It gives us a better understanding of ourselves. I really think so.

02:25:45 Speaker_01
So I appreciate you having us. My pleasure. Thank you guys. Really cool. And please finish the show. I will.

02:25:50 Speaker_06
I will. I was just bummed out last night.

02:25:52 Speaker_01
Okay.

02:25:52 Speaker_06
Thank you very much, guys.

02:25:53 Speaker_03
Thanks so much.

02:25:53 Speaker_06
Bye, everybody.

02:25:54 Speaker_03
Bye.