Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LhRFF02vSA
Joe Rogan podcast check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day gentlemen thank you for being here please introduce yourselves Eric good Jeremy McBride and you got did you guys both do Tiger King as well yeah I mean um I kind of came in towards a tail end I remember meeting you about this keep it this close to your face yeah you can scoot your it moves and stuff yeah I um I met Eric uh kind of towards a tail end of filming Tiger King um yeah that was kind of the first experience I had with 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 [ __ ] is going on with these guys yeah yeah captive cats and captive audience and just crazy people and um and then your new show chimp crazy is like basically along the same vein and it is so odd how nutty these animal people are these people that have captive animals at their home it's such a bizarre there's there I I would like to see like a psychologist like a clinical psychologist do an examination of what type of Personality wants to have these enormous w wild animals captive in their homes yeah no for sure um it's um it's incredible and of course that's what's interest us because you know I'm an animal guy but you know you have to have interesting people to tell a good story well we are animals and we are animals that's the the weird part about it we're this bizarre animal yeah that likes to uh keep animals in cages and some people think we should have been in the same genus as Apes yeah you know but of course there's something called religion and dominion and of course you know we're not animals we're not Apes well we certainly are I mean those people they they still believe in religion but uh you know the reality of observable science is also there so unfortunately you know we're just a weird animal we're the [ __ ] weirdest ones but um the show chimp crazy I'm I just finished episode 3 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 go I was so bummed out after episode three I was like oh my God the 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 [ __ ] good but episode three man is it's like it's like there's something about first of all this is one of the rare times where I'm fully with Peta 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 and um you know the one situation where the woman who was so drunk kept the chimp and then attacked her daughter and the whole thing it's like at the end of the show I was like oh my God I don't know if I could keep doing this yeah no it's interesting you mentioned Peta because I'm not fully aligned with p on a number of things but in this case I I am aligned with Peta um but just to touch on Peta you know you know I work with reptiles and I try to save Turtles and tortoises which um actually are the most endangered group of animals along with primates uh if you C and toris really if you think about the percentage that are on the brink of Extinction over half of primates on the brink of Extinction and over half of turtles and tortoises I had no idea but where I I'm not aligned with Peta is when you have to make a choice between you know eradicating a rat that's killing off the last galpagos tortoises or or eradicate Mongoose that was introduced as killing off you know an iguana in the Caribbean I will make that choice 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 um so I'm not always aligned with Peta but in this case yes well they they have a background with the animal Liberation Organization which essentially doesn't think that any animals should be captive and I I do understand their point but then you have Carl how do you how's Carl gonna not have an owner how's how's little Carl over there not going to be fed do you want french bold doogs to go extinct cuz they will they can't even breed if you did a poll and asked how many people at P that keep do it's like 95% which is crazy so it's a little hypocritical if they don't want people to have pets well you know it's one of those things it's like the how it
starts and how it's going you know like what what where did it start from you know it start and I see their look all dogs are a a horrible misjustice that's been done to wolves like we 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 you know and you know dogs need owners and they they love you and they it's a great relationship like but it's in their genetics right I me they've been years right it's like saying that we should be going back to chimps we should live in the jungle we should we should live in trees which is also crazy what is that Erica we chimps are more like chimps and we are human is that chimps are closer to us than they are gorillas cuz we are the sub family of chimpanzees which are called homonyms and yes chimpanzees are closer closly related to us more than any other ape yeah yeah but it's you know back to what you said a minute ago about making these movies I just want to touch on you know why we do this because a lot of people miss the point of Tiger King even um there's a point yeah there was a point I think I missed it well we were really trying to get Joe Exotic elected president that was the point um no but the point was that a lot of docks man are great and they they are really informative but they preach to the converted people that already know the issue you know like the Cove or and they're great right and you know what we wanted to do is preach to people that don't know about the issue so you had to cast you had to get a lot of eyeballs on it to make a difference right right so that was sort of the goal of both Tiger King and Jim crazy in the end this episode is brought to you by zip recruiter running a business ain't easy especially a small business you have to wear a lot of different hats to keep things running smoothly and when you have to do everything on top of hiring it can be a nightmare thankfully there's a place you can go to for help zip recruiter and even better you can try it for free right now at ziprecruiter.com Rogan ZipRecruiter does most of the work for you to make hiring more manageable and the secret to their success is their powerful matching technology as soon as
you post your job zip recruiter will get to work finding qualified candidates for your role experience faster easier hiring with zip recruiter four out of five employers who post on zip recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day try it for free at this exclusive web address ziprecruiter.com Rog again that's zip recruiter.com Rogan zip recruiter the smartest way to hire well I think you definitely did that I mean I I had a joke in one of my earlier comedy specials about Texas and tigers and I don't you know the the statistics there's no more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the wild of the world in private collections not in zoos in people's yards there's these wacky people that have [ __ ] tigers in their backyards yeah and there's a lot of there's thousands of tigers in Texas that are in people's yards yeah yeah that statistic has been going around for a long time that may change um 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 yeah yeah they think there's 5,000 in Texas yeah believe it well you know there's also other animals that are in Texas that are Exotics like uh Simer orex which is uh very rare in the wild and is in danger in the wild but is so common in Texas that you can hunt them yeah 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 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 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 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 they they keep populations down they make sure there's not an overpopulation problem of undulates that's what tigers do that's that's what they do in the wild and so their all of their instincts everything their essence of their being is all stifled by being captive you know we were talking about giraffes that 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 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 [ __ ] head that's like as big as his table would come over and gently take the lettuce with their tongue and we're so confident that they have no aggression towards people that we allow little babies to feed giraffes giraffes don't seem to have a problem at the zoo they they seem to be totally relaxed with it yeah but there's a lot of animals where it's nothing but torture yeah yeah no for sure and I think it's incredible that in the day that we live in 2024 that and the consciousness of the you know the culture that we still keep certain animals in zoos I really are miserable you know those are things like you know the whales and cations and and elephants are not happy in zoos and monkeys and most and most primates are not happy in zoos um and yes and I think there are animals that lend themselves more I like to say to being in captivity like giraffes I think giraffes is the only example yeah or or a giant toris maybe yeah that's a good example Sol example too solitary well even just animals are 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 um my daughters were they were younger U 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 man to this day it haunts me there's this primate enclosure and this one monkey was just screaming just scream screaming like in agony like being tortured just just holding on to the bars and screaming because he was by himself and just the this tiny little cage and there was nowhere to go and people just staring at him all day and he was just losing his [ __ ] mind I'm like I don't want to do this anymore I can't cuz I felt super hypocritical because I I've always had like an issue cuz it's animal prison it's animal prison for animals that did nothing wrong you know I was at the 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 taipe zoo but there was a polar bear at the Singapore Zoo you know this
is like 95% humidity 90° and it was green because it was covered in a film of algae and so the polar was literally a green and you just say to yourself like there's just you know if you have a zoo in Alaska you could maybe have a polar bear but Phoenix Arizona Singapore but even if you have a zoo in Alaska polar bears are the one bear that does need anything but animals so polar bears are extraordinarily predatory and they have hunting instincts yeah so all day they just want to roam and Hunt yeah and uh I was when I used to I drove limos for a while and uh I had this gig once in New Hampshire and I was uh on my way home and I stopped just because I I I 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 this Zoo so let me just check this Zoo out and I went to the zoo there's this little shitty zoo in like somewhere I think it was in Massachusetts and there was this polar bear in this tiny little enclosure just going in circles like he was [ __ ] crazy just going in circles tiny little enclosure and I was like what is why is this okay like what what what is this this is not a life this is terrible it's terrible we um this this current there's another project we've been working on for equal time to Chimp crazy and you've been spending more time in over 10 years uh which Loosely covers the Exotic Animal uh Wildlife trade international Wildlife trade and through that interest we've had this incredible opportunity to explore all of these you know moral truths about American zoos um for us uh one thing that was so deeply fascinating that there's something like 242 accredited zoos in this country uh 750 million people visit zoos annually which is more than the five major sporting events combined wow the the way in which zoos function there's it's like the 8020 rule there's five or 10 that contribute the majority of the income that cover most of the missus um and they run like entertainment complexes like amusement parks and very little money goes back into conservation now there's a lot of Zo that are doing great stuff and I I think the the things that we're learning about is the educational value of zoos for kids is no longer is what they intended it to be I think there's great things that they do but
there's not there's nothing proven around you know zoos are educational facilities for anal well what really rocked zoos was the film Blackfish and they suddenly went wait a minute the public doesn't like us 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 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 doesn't do what you were just saying you put their food in ice so they have to work to get it out you put their food in a ball you make them have to do things but you know that was the big shakeup for zoos in terms of animal welfare and and now you know of course they're it's still evolving and zoos are scared when they see Tiger King and even chimp crazy but Joe's daughter's grandkids will still see orcas at SeaWorld you think so yeah I mean because the well they live a long time they live a long time and they the se you know maybe not granddaughters but okay but I I say it more um I'm you know I I have little boys of have a four-year-old and a one-year-old and I think it's particularly interesting to kind of go through this experience because they're obsessed with animals and you're kind of educating them on um 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 and kids relate with them in some form of a bridge to humanity I I believe and we um 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 well that he's where he's going right now is the sort of a big part of our our next document country which is about you know the illegal animal trade but also zoos were complicit in that uh for a very long time maybe still so anyway sort of sorry but but the zoo thing I mean you're you're into you get emotional on this and I I um what's really cool about the this kind of medium that we're in you know we have access to all these all this information and all these people over large Decades of of work in conservation and zoos and paa and legislation laws
it's really encour I just love the idea of synthesizing this information to a point in today's context which is yeah it's when you go to a zoo no one seems to ask where the animals comes from you know it's it is a very you know simple idea that many people miss the point of when they go there now I'm not anti zooo totally either you know and I have no real position or credibility to also suggest that but I do think I'm I'm interested in asking those questions of what we can do to make these institutions better yeah I mean for sure they should be bigger I mean there should be a size requirement there should be you should have to have a certain amount of acres for each individual species so that they don't like we were talking about the chimp enclosure at the LA Zoo they bite each other's fingers off and 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 we going to let goats in into the Tiger cage and just let them sort it out cuz that's really what they want yeah you know what lions want to do is Chase down a w to beast and eat it and instead what we do is we slide a tray underneath their cage 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 I mean there's it's one thing if you're talking about something like the thilosene right where they they kept him in captivity and the 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 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 banks yeah the Tasmanian Tiger yeah that was an eerie footage of the last ones yeah they they think there might actually be living specimens that are alive and you know there's well in this state they're bringing them back I know you know Forest Gant bring up I also have colleagues that have gone looking for thines in uh the highlands in New Guinea so far yeah people anecdotic say yes there might be
a thine um but I it's unlikely but there might be but yeah well they're very hard to find I mean like try finding a wolverine you know there's Wolverine populations are pretty healthy but good good luck finding one they're very very very difficult to find unless you spend an enormous amount of time alone in the bush yeah good point yeah so and then you're dealing with scen you're dealing with a very unpopulated area that's extremely hostile to people but there are anecdotal sightings and hopefully that thing does exist and I would I would love for Forest to be the guy who finds it because he spent so much time looking for it 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 so if you wanted to find out about 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 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 yeah 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 par a zoo a library when you're building a city so they were really just built as you know a good City needs to have a zoo it's it's entertainment and they weren't really designed to be you know have anything to do with conservation or anything to do with animal Weare um but yeah today like you mentioned the orics here in Texas you know there are species that have either gone what we call biologically extinct which means that one animal can't find another they're virtually extinct or they are extinct in the wild and zoos may offer some Hope For Those Animals where they can put them into what's called a shance colonies and try to maintain uh you know genetically diverse groups uh in a zoo for the day that one day you could return it to the wild right you know there's maybe a reason to have animals in captivity how much success has there been in returning animals to the wild though well you know where we live it but you just sit it with um box turtle in New Jersey no no no back to like the example he's talking
about is like California Condors California Condors or blackf footed ferrets or animals that you know I mean the whatever it's called there uh there's a endemic horse that they've done some work with but yeah it's you know 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 yeah it should I mean it should be a a priority um if with certain animals spec specifically yeah you know 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 in Arizona there was 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 you know hundreds in the wild but at a very expensive price tag because what made them go extinct in that case was the lead bullets that you know kill a deer the Condor would eat the deer and then die from the lead um so Condors you know that to use that example there's just a lot of management to keep them alive in the world 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 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 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 I believe that because a condor in a day not to go off the charts on a cond a condor in a day can travel 400 miles in The Thermals looking for you know a carcass right right and I would suspect that you know the fact that there's just less carcasses out there might be part of it think that's the argument I think the argument is there's less predators and there's less prey right so you have a a de you know so like California for example like the you have a fairly small deer population because you have so many animals that kill deer right so you have
California has a lot of coyotes in California has a lot of mountain lines and there's a lot of people where I used to live uh 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 yeah don't leave your dog outside cuz your dog's going to get you know and my daughter's puppy got killed by a coyote and uh I've had chickens killed by Coyotes ranchers hate coyotes more than anything and they kill fawns they they kill yeah they kill uh baby cows they kill baby everything that's just what they do and that's their job you know but there's an ecosystem and that's that's a part of the ecosystem and what's really unnatural is ranching but there forever forever there was a bounty on coyotes where if you brought in two ears you got like a buck and people would bring in hundred sets of ears and get $100 I mean they were vilified when I grew up in California the ranchers next to us which are sheep ranchers because sheep are dumb and coyotes can get sheep EAS easier than you know Cales they would trap the coyote with those you know those horrible traps they'd pour gasoline on them they'd light them on fire and let them run off burning I mean they they hate coyotes which is really unfair well they're cool you know they're just not cool if they eat your cat you know 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 oak wood Gardens are it's like those pre they're they're pre- furnished apartments that just rent like people that are sort of transient just moving they allow you to like have a place before you get a place and uh I was driving so it was in Burbank and I was driving down the street and I was like these [ __ ] dogs like what is going on what these dogs running around and then I I drove up I had never seen a coyote before oh wow 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 would rarely go I lived in a fairly rural area where I lived in California I lived about an hour outside the city and I had a lot of acres and it was it was cool to live out there but you experien
a lot of Wildlife and I saw coyotes almost every day almost every day yeah they look like a mangi mly skinny dog that's yeah but they're cool there's something cool about coyotes but the reality of coyotes uh I don't know if you have know why they're so successful but one of the reasons why is because they're the only so red wolves can interbreed with coyotes and that you get the koi wolf but gray wolves do not breed with coyotes they just kill them and so because the grey wolf which lived in California and lived all over the the West Coast was the predominant Predator Cal the the coyotes had to develop a way of surviving 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 and then they will expand their territory so because they were persecuted by Wolves they expanded their territory 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 this was not the case just 30 years ago 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 and and crows are one of those animals raccoons are one of them coyotes and they're weirdly can do Thrive and do better around you know human activity yeah than a lot of other animals and so coyotes are one of those because of garbage yeah because of garbage because of water we bring in water in in arid areas and so they're highly adaptable um creature and and 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 they're cool they they they make the eous noise together they they they caught something yeah but you know I'm sure you've seen that video from Woodland Hills where this man was unloading his car and a coyote came and snatched his toddler like right in front of him it's hard they're [ __ ] Predators right and you have to be careful little things and little people
and animals will get eat by them and that is what they do like dingos in Australia do that right right right dingo ain't my body um there's you know there's no doubt that we live in complex ecosystems and we do not like the idea of them 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 lies 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 into this guy's car and everybody's on the look but they understand they're living in this system they're living in this ecosystem 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 yeah you know it's it's just weird it's we're we're [ __ ] weird we're weird in our justifications we're weird in what we allow ourselves to do yeah that's back back to the chimpanzees that was one of the things that I just couldn't ever you know ex I couldn't ever connect with this woman Tanya that kept this chimp and tried to explain to her you know that we are chimps you know effectively and you know and she just you know took the page out of uh you know Genesis where she just said you know I'm not you know we're not animals this is an animal and I can own it like property anyway that was just one of the things I she just never really fully understood well to be kind she's not bright you know she's not a bright woman not a well- read woman you know unfortunately and this seems to be part of the the theme of all these folks which is weird you know and then you got the one guy in Tiger King that's essentially running like a little sex cult right that guy doc anle yeah and then you've got the Tiger King himself Joe 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 and uh if he wasn't in jail
it's really unfortunate you know cuz if he wasn't in jail he would uh he'd be a very popular person seen can you can you imagine if he was well he's trying to get Donald Trump to to uh exonerate him and he and and pardon him I mean he was uh 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 I'm assuming it's someone who works for him yeah 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 like he also has Communication in jail he gets a somehow he's able to get a phone he's doing video calls and stuff well you know how it goes yeah you know but there was a moment there was a moment um when we were filming uh this kind of like second installment of Tiger King where we covered this this pardon the presidential pardon there was a real shot where Joe was actually on a list supposedly that Trump was going to like a kind of hilarious hilarious so I don't remember exactly what the specifics of his his accusation so was he caught trying to hire someone to whack that lady yeah he so he was twice yeah you know and that lady is there any truth to this idea that she whacked her husband Carol Basin um there's a lot of circumstantial I wouldn't say maybe evidence but there's it's sort of who else it's not clean who else and and it was either it feels as if it was her or members of our family and they were the only ones to gain and so yeah there what a great way to dispose of a body uhuh I don't know I mean I don't know how she disposed of the body it's nice to well you have meat grinders on the premises and you have enormous Predators you know on premisis tiger don't you think the only the only thing I would say Eric is the um the circumstances surrounding the change in the will I mean who who who Alters it to count for disappearance my disappear it's a very very strange no one says that yeah and is there like a disparity in the handwriting as well we did handwriting experts we did the entire thing um to prove otherwise it's also just when she talks about it you know but Joe back to back to Joe uh Joe Exotic you know I was on the phone with him a lot up until he was convicted you know from prison and he just was convinced he was going to be exonerated
and you know not convicted and they offered him the feds offered him a deal uh which was something like six or seven years you know you can plea or you can go to court he'd probably be out by now yeah I was just going to say he'd be out now and so he was so convinced that he was going to win which is so delusional um but yeah poor Joe would be out right now had he made that deal by the way how crazy is that that you could plot to kill somebody they let you out in four years like you I know you've been locked up with a bunch of murderers and thieves but I'm sure you're a better person no yeah yeah well it's plot it's plot and then intent you know paying someone to go do something right right there's quite a few steps involved but yes Joe's now Pro Trump again he was Pro Biden when Trump cuz he was trying to get Biden to Pardon him they wouldn't touch that with a 10- foot pole but Trump might yeah yeah especially this time around yeah just for fun well let's hope Tanya let's hope Tanya doesn't go to prison I don't wish that on Tanya um I haven't seen episode 4 so I don't know but when you guys were filming again spoiler or please if you're watching the series stop right now and Scoot ahead by a few minutes um when they found that tonko was in the basement and when when I saw they're film when you guys are filming it I was like Jesus Christ this lady is so crazy she's showing everybody I know she's she's she has I know with like all due respect she's she just does not seem like a smart person and she's almost like like if you gave her an IQ test like and then gave the chimp an IQ test it'd be a toss up you know I mean I think that's part of the problem I don't think this lady understands the consequences of what she's doing just like she doesn't understand how crazy her eyelashes look 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 it just [ __ ] weird well it's still legal uh to it's still legal I thought they
changed it no there's no federal law U preventing ownership of CH J Christ you can own a [ __ ] chimp still there's 20 or so States legally you can do it oh my God I thought Missouri is one of them oh my God but you know background we um we spent about four years making this documentary series um first of all how'd you start how do you find out about these people I yeah go ahead how do you get after Tiger King how do you get anybody to talk to you on camera I've not I've known a lot of anible people Joe but I did not know about monkey moms and along the course of you know making Tiger King I started filming some monkey moms and I you mean like as you see in chimp crazy you just can't make them up and so after Tiger King um I just thought you know let's scratch the surface let's check into these monkey moms again um yeah and so you know it's these women that dress up their monkeys like dolls like Joon B ramsy 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 uh 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 um yeah my grandmother had a monkey Grandmother Had a monkey we heard the story lot that she she kept in the Attic really yeah monkey's name was Chi-Chi and Chi-Chi used to eat gum so you 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 as a boy or girl do you know what kind of monkey I do not I was very small I was very young at the time and I remember she had to get rid of it cuz it bit my cousin yeah well that's what happens yeah yeah yeah it but Chi-Chi couldn't be around anybody other than my grandmother my grandmother was very eccentric yeah and they're and they're they're Territorial and they Territorial and they're protective of their owner so um you know when I was young in the 70s and 60s 7s 80s you could buy a monkey in virtually any pet store across the United States oh my God and thank God people realize like your grandmother they're not good pets buy them in the newspaper yeah they're not good pets 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 a guess yeah yeah that's our that's our kind of consensus on a lot it also a kid that doesn't talk back yeah yeah it's a great um book you book you'd love it's by this guy who had a store in New York Henry treick it's called they don't talk back um and it's these kind of Chronicles of his experiences you know through the last you there was this was a big animal uh exotic animal dealership that existed up until the 70s in New York City but they had everything chimps gorillas uh elephants and they sold stuff to the private sector and zoos but yeah I mean you could you could walk into a woth right and um and buy monkeys they still to this day catch people with large animals in their apartments in New York City yeah like wasn't there one real recently where a guy had a large reptile venomous snakes yeah right was it snakes the venomous snake bite Eric some guy well there's one that one guy I think it was in Harlem who had a tiger in his house yeah yeah yeah and that there's a crazy image of the cops going up the fire escape and the Tiger's in the window yeah and you see the tiger bearing its fangs in the window like that glass is that [ __ ] thin man that is so crazy this thing is trapped in this like regular apartment with regular glass yeah like at any moment the only thing keeping that thing out is it doesn't know that it could just smash that and get on that fire escape and just go run through the streets yeah it just yeah yeah crazy crazy yeah it's crazy yeah but the bizarre thing is that there's humans that want those they want those I mean yeah I mean the tiger thing is more of like kind of a macho thing I think if I had well how what about Carol then she's a woman yeah she's kind of an anomal you know it's funny she liked the Lesser known cat I interviewed Tippy hrin uh you know in the course of doing all of this and her you know zanado do it's called Shambala with all of her cats you know and I know you've talked about this about Melanie Griffith growing up with uh lions that crazy movie Roar yeah oh and that movie roared photograph is a fantastic God that movie War but yeah
when I interviewed Tippy henin literally on her property in California she lives with all these tigers and lions she built a museum for herself of like so she's got her own museum the tippy h Museum where I interviewed her um but yeah there are some women Tippy Henry Carol Baskin but you know generally a macho generally speaking I think it's more men yeah well I guarantee if you go through the Texas Private collections there a bunch of good old boys yeah exactly believe that probably yeah yeah you you got you've got canned ranches in Texas there's a lot of those yeah there's a lot of lot of canned ranches which is very odd and some of them are fairly small like a couple hundred acres yeah and they keep animals there yeah it's in my mind what that is is agriculture okay it's it's just you're doing a different form of uh of deer agriculture you're not really hunting you know 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 there's something about it's also so lonely there's something about being in those mountains just puts you in check none of that exists in Ranch yeah can Ranch you can go shoot like in South Africa a lion you know and the lion was raised in a kind of domestic situation recently released yeah so it just sits there you know there's no sport in it hunting in the United States you know for Elk or deer you know there's a lot of things people don't know about hunting which is you know one just obviously obvious statistic is that more wildlands are protected because of hunting so yeah you're killing a year but you're protecting all the other stuff well the amount of money because of the Pitman Robertson act the amount of money that gets I think it's 10% of all sales of outdoor activities gets donated towards Wildlife preservation 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 and they also know because you have to when you like say if you shoot a deer you have to register that you shot the deer they you have a tag they make sure that your tag is right you you got the right species you got the right sex the whole deal 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 there's more white tailed deer in this country right now than there were when Columbus landed wow part of that is because of Agriculture that's where it gets weird so um agriculture particularly I have a good buddy of mine who is uh he's an Archer a professional Archer and he lives in Iowa Iowa rather I always get those confused and in Iowa it's all farmlands right and they have enormous deer and they set these ranches up he has a place that's like 600 acres it's all there's no fences 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 yeah so it's 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 so thousands and thousands of Acres of Monsanto corn and and they're all these deer Thrive there 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 they go there you see them eating corn and grass there's 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 like when I was in uh I went to visit my buddy there and just driving from the airport to his house we saw like 50 [ __ ] deer and if you're going there around November which is the rut the men lose their mind so the the male deer they're 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 it's kind of nuts it's kind it's a really nutty situation because it only exists because there's no Predators wow so if like California has this bizarre model and what California would like I mean California is I think the only state that doesn't have uh eff ficient
game department they have fishing wildlife and so they treat it very differently 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 and so that's why it's illegal to kill a mountain lion in California and they have a large number of mountain lions probably under reported I have mountain lions on my property like 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 of yarn and their their instincts clip in and they just go chasing after it but I've seen uh Mountain lines in the wild and it is a sobering sobering moment when you stare into the eyes of one of those things you're 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 you don't run if you if you have 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 crazy video yeah well I believe two people were killed last year in the Pacific Northwest of all the big cats I think Jaguars kill the least people which is crazy which for some reason but but well they also live in the least populated areas for the most part yeah but Mount Lions yeah of course they will kill someone but you know typically they're not looking for people right they're not looking for people you know 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 often times 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 and you know so they're probably AIG like grizzly bears behave very differently in places where grizzly bears are hunted so in the lower 48 it's illegal to hunt grizzly bear so if they see you you know if you
run into them in the wrong they're not going to run away they might run towards you 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 you know you know in the course of making Tiger King I would interview people about tigers and how you know what it's like keeping a 100 tigers and people would always say to me I'd rather have a 100 Tigers than one chimp and and be and that's because chimps you know and everyone thinks oh tiger is so dangerous but chimps can figure [ __ ] out and one of the chronic problems keeping chimps is that they can figure out how to escape and so you can never use a combination lock because they'll sit there all day and figure it out oh my God and you got to use often times like three layers of locks and I I'm just bringing it back to chips because 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 oh I could I could imagine and also when I was watching um 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 I could get out of 100% the way the way that thing is bolted into the woods all you have to do is kick that door enough you kick that door hard enough and that wood will give out it's the wood that you're it looks like you're in caged in in steel bars but the steel bars are connected by wood Wood's easy for a chimp to break they're so much [ __ ] stronger than than us if that thing knew that it could just grab those bars and slam slam it would have worked on that all day 100% it would have got through you you would have had to figure out a way way way better cage especially the one that she put in her home 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 and all the chimp I 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 it never seen other chimps he was it was raised in isolation started thinking it was human and started sexually identifying with this woman
that was keeping it and started you know be started becoming sort of addicted to pornography so just to give you weird sory I'm segue but how crazy and and and you know like these chimps they'll have a favorite show like like I remember a group of them in South Africa all they watched was Avatar but anyway just a back to sort of how ironic weird it is to keep a chimpanzee you don't have a tiger getting addicted to human pornography right watching Avatar all day long so anyway they're too intelligent they're just way too intelligent especially as they get five six and seven years old they get really [ __ ] dangerous that lady in Connecticut I had heard that she was she slept in the bed with that that chimpan 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 oh I mean I don't want to talk about it in too much detail here but you have to ask yourself ask question you have to ask yourself like how weird does it get right I mean how weird does it get it she wasn't she giving it Xanax and wine did that alone uh you haven't seen the what Viagra she was giving it Viagra joking oh I but who knows you can't joke about that you're going to get sued yeah you cannot joke but but speaking of that though we were you saw the second episode we obviously don't think chips need Viagra no they're very active yeah you know it's funny I heard nuts I heard that a chimp can [ __ ] 50 times a day that's right in the wild I someone like so maybe they don't need Viagra okay well primates are very promiscuous and chimpanzees in particular if you notice that chimpanzees have the largest ball of any primate and there's a reason for that the more promiscuous the female chimpanzees are the more sexually active the males become and the bigger their testicles are oh interesting so there like a direct correlation between the size of the male's T testicles and they think that exists with human beings as well but it's a little more problematic to examine but that oh so that's my problem yeah if you're around a bunch of ladies that are a bunch of [ __ ] you might get fired up no wonder I never got Mar
I 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 yeah yeah which is fantastic it's so good it's so good because it is a rare documentary that had this established element in that these scientists had been embedded in this group of chimpan for 20 years and so these scientists had very specific rules you do not look them in the eye you don't get any closer than 20 yards if they come towards you at 20 just move away 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 which is really interesting right yeah amazing cuz they got incredible footage of the social interactions they got a detailed analysis of how they established dominance and who's in control and then it's it's we used to think it's always the biggest strongest chimp but no it's not it's ones that form unions and bonds and communities very interesting it's so much like us well I think also it's just so amazing about that film is and I give them incredible a ton of credit most people that go out to do a documentary don't have the capacity to film that many days like they covered that I don't know it was like hundreds of days or something yeah years or and years and I think 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 trimp crazy we filmed how many days it's probably close to 250 days I mean most people can't do that you know so I mean it's incredible resource suck like how much did it cost that's where I'm going yeah my God but in order to make a documentary this way you have to catch it while it's happening you know contemporaneously so you have to be there if you snooze you lose if you're not there you're not going to make chimp crazy right right or or chimp what's it called chimp Nation yeah chimp Empire empire yeah well see chimp there's two right chimp Empire right chimp Empire is chimp Nation another one or chimp Empire I'm talking yeah um the way that see the
thing about the difference between your show is you need someone who's compelling and so you have to find someone like and you what's her name again t t 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 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 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 what happens to them it's not fair for them to be and then you go I don't want to Chimp but if you're dull-minded if you got a 9volt brain and you look at this like I am going to take they're more important to me than my own babies like when she says stuff like that you're like oh well you shouldn't even have a dog like you definitely shouldn't be allowed to vote no but it's interesting you say you have to find those characters but you also have to find a story and I mean you can talk about this is how wide a net we cast because after Tiger King it wasn't like we just jumped into this chimp mom world we were filming you know Mark the shark and you know women yeah we were we were interested it took a while out of time in the in the animal human relationship in variety of forms I think we we we and you see in episode one one of the first things we we shot um years before we even met Tanya was uh this woman this part of the circus family Pam Roser uh you know watching 2001 Space Odyssey with her chimpanzee chance yeah um it's a I mean talk about sobering experience I'm you know me and Carl dist with chance the chimpanzee 15 years old pounding a basically a modified trailer home the floor echoing the the loudness was was that of that sound on the floor was so loud i' had to take my headset off yeah it was a lot scarier and you were there it was a lot scarier to film chimps than Tigers the crew didn't have a problem going in into a tiger closure cuz the thing about tigers is as long as they're about under the year age the age four even though it looks like a full-grown tiger they you know they haven't gone through puberty yet they haven't gotten the tiger you
know mentality of killing you but a chimp uh anyway that the chimp filming was a much more difficult they're also like human Char characters and and wiry and you don't know what's going to happen they're oned these kind of um leashes well 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 oh sure very murderous well we didn't really know how murderous they were until Attenborough um when David aten bro did that series I think it was in the 90s when he captured the uh chimps eating monkeys yeah RI 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 I how how often of the eat monkeys is like we couldn't even show it all we we we it would just be like the whole show would be chimp eating monkeys 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 but they also like monkeys they cbus monkeys yeah and they eat you know I'm a reptile guy and in in the range of those chimps in the wild they there's a tortoise and this tortoise it's like our box turtles but it's much bigger but it's called a hingeback tortoise and it literally closes up like a rock like 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 up in like a cantaloupe wow and they they're I'm just saying that because yes they're really hardcore when it comes to the way they predate on other animals and they're about as strong as a 500 lb man which it's so right yeah it's so insane for us we had a chimp on the set of news radio like 96 or something like that there was a baby chimp it was a baby it was a in a diaper and this chimp climbed on my back and whacked me a couple times in the back just playing was just having fun and I remember first of all the feeling of holding it is like it was made out of steel wires it wasn't made out like a baby you know you pick up a baby babies are like soft little you pick up a three-year-old they all soft little things and you hold on to them and they're weak these things were strong as [ __ ] like in a bizarre way we like to look at something that's close to our size and think oh uh I could probably
over that you know oh I know how to fight I'll fight that [ __ ] chimp off no you have zero chance it's a different thing 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 pretty incredible they also want to [ __ ] with you they also want to people always talk about like will a bear kill the lion or with the you know the bear killed the tiger I think chimpanzees you know and you're into obviously fighting and you know I think they are the most diabolical Fighters cuz 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 they know how to [ __ ] you up like nothing else yeah they know how to debilitate you and take away what makes you a human yeah yeah and they also have zero remorse they so they're like a human and that they can think but they have zero empathy and they're [ __ ] dangerous right I'm writing this you know was so fascinating you'd think knowing all this about chimp Slater and remember this Eric we were talking about well there must be like reported human deaths in the United States with chimp attacks and we couldn't find any it's only mes it's only it's only little I mean there are globally but GL a lot of them in Africa little kids get snatched and stuff kids get eaten kids get eaten but in the US there has been no really human death caused by chimpanzee now what was fascinating and you haven't watched this yet but in episode 4 we kind of go it comes like from delusion into reality and it's heavy um 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 peace would share a story where they were attacked by that animal oh God it was it was so so the kind ofos of of this celebration of life and these attacks in in this context of a situation they shouldn't have ever been in it it was kind of remarkable an animal attacks in general across the board in roadside zoos and and private sector are completely underreported because people don't want their animals taken away so if a tiger attacks someone
and they have a huge laceration they'll go to the hospital saying it was a chainsaw you know because the second they say it was my tiger or my chimp right you know they run the risk of losing that animal you also have the problem with less than extraordinary people being addicted to extraordinary circumstances so if you have a boring ass [ __ ] life in some middle of nowhere town but you also have a lion you like all of a sudden life's pretty interesting you know I mean and that's Joe Exotic right well Joe Exotic I think is pretty smart is odd for sure but intelligent but in Tanya's case like what would that lady be like if she didn't have chimps like it it is the focal point of her life to the point where she neglected her own biological children yeah it gives her an identity yeah in a weird way in a weird way in a in a very compelling way and when people live boring ass lives things like that seem like something that that's who I am like that's me because it's extraordinary experiences from persons that are you know it's where does that come from is it influence it's I think we like experiences first of all there's a part of evolution where human beings part of our lust for Innovation and for constant Improvement of our our environment and circumstances is we like extraordinary experiences I think it's what made people successful I think the more daring and the more uh addicted you were to extraordinary experiences the more likely you were to find new hunting grounds the more likely you were to conquer neighboring tribes the more likely you to survive an attack by like I think human beings like extraordinary experiences we like Comfort but not as much as we like extraordinary experien but having some of these animals is like chickbait you know 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 which is so wild that where he got straight guys I mean that guy had some [ __ ] game exactly yeah I guess I guess I see your point you know um come on if you have a chimp a baby chimp you're walking around Austin Texas sure you get people come up to you and go oh Joe I love your little gy that's interesting though with you what a weird way to try to attract well they always say that about puppies like guys bring a
puppy to I mean I'm more interested with in Carl now you know what what's your motivation over there with that baby dog isn't it interesting when you see Carl interact with Marshall cuz Marshall's like I don't want to hurt you I don't want nothing to do is just stop biting me what are you doing yeah you can see it yeah but you got two different kinds of things you know like one of them is like a little Bulldog it's a little psychopath and the other one is golden retriever is like a Love Sponge like all he wants to do is be your friend yeah he wants to be your friend and unless you're a squirrel and that's really interesting he watch his reaction to squirrels like his intensity when it comes to like squirrels and birds he it's a movement right is it 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 uh retrievers is it's not to eat it it's to bring it to you it's always to bring it to you like one time I uh I got home and uh I let the dog out I opened up the back door and I just had to take a leak so I took a leak and then as I flushed washed my hands open the door he standing there with a squirrel in his mouth like he got a squirrel that quick and he so happy and I was like dude what did you do he's like what did I do I'm like what did you do man and so I got rid a squirrel but whenever he sees one it's just nobody had to teach him that he's locked in like that's what he wants to do he wants to go get squirrels and he wants to bring them back to you it's it's it's a weird thing because it's like you you understand predatory instincts like cats have them they're the worst cats are they've killed so many [ __ ] Birds it's something like a bill it's multiple billions of uh of mammals and birds are killed every year by outside cats the first thing that kills you know song birds birds is glass window skyscrapers and glass window second is domestic cats and they are killing machines and they really do take a toll on wild birds I went getting ready for this podcast I went down a a dirty Road last night a wormhole of cats predatory cats and there's there's compilations of cats just jacking pigeons jacking squirrels jacking everything everything they're they can get their hands on yeah now
cats are bad unless they're indoors the best of cats they've you know in Hawaii cats are the reason why so many species in Hawaii went extinct yep yeah you know they're just in Australia Australia they brought them in in Australia to deal with certain animals and then they got out of control and now in Australia they hunt them dodo birds when extinct because of domestic cats that were introduced into Marius and you know 200 300 years ago whenever doo birds one extinct but no they're killing machines they're machines 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 like I didn't even have to teach him to 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 in it's brought into them whereas every other dog that I've had I had to teach them and you throw the ball you're like come on bring it back come on bring it back you bring it back give him a treat and they understand you you know you praise them they and then eventually they understand commands and they have this like pathway that you've carved into their system of chasing the ball bringing it back we're going to have fun chase the ball bring it back Marshall it was in there it was already in that's programming right I mean which is crazy which is which is so so much of what the what we found so interesting about the the justification for this love that a lot of the subjects we've covered had for these chimpanzees was that they love me you know they do these things with me I've I've trained them to believe that they have feelings for me and I have feelings for them we have this understanding and I feel I feel what we've realized is this kind of imbalance of of um this this mutuality of caregiving that I think exists with a lot of our our subjects that we cover but also some of the chimpanzees it's very very incredibly selfish around the symmetry of needs 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 chimp Tonka
but the chimp is like incarcerated in this cage it's like Tanya if you really love this chimp and Tonka loves you back why the cage right you know you don't have a cage for your dog right and it just seems so obvious like Tanya this chimp does not love you the way you love it well I think it does but it also doesn't have a choice right 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 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 spoiler alert again still good you still got to watch it folks but if you give a person that they [ __ ] get sick like nothing you're doing to that chimp is natural the cage is not natural the food's not natural nothing's natural you know one of the saddest things for me was when she was showing it Instagram re and just scrolling through reels and the chimp's just staring at the screen that that was the weirdest one that's really disturbing that for whatever but meanwhile I do that I know that but that's a lot of that's a lot of the sentiment we see from people is a reaction to that we are basically doing that ourselves oh yeah yeah we're doing it to ourselves you're not looking at your son you can make a choice I'm going to put this down and I'm going to go out 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 it's essentially a prisoner for no reason and it likes the guard and that chimp you know Tonka was looking at its kids in that footage you know whether it Tonka knew it or not but and Instagram 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 you know and to be outside yeah 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 T Tanya almost daily or communicate with oh my God and it's the most bizarre communication because you know we don't you 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 and she was like oh it's you let's let's keep filming for another year and a half but she continues to talk with us and we continue to tell her Tanya you know maybe this is an opportunity for you to rethink and reinvent yourself you know like it's anyway it's really interesting well it doesn't seem like she has a lot of self-reflection with all due respect I know which you know it's hard not to be compassionate with a lot of these people to be honest it's really hard because I humans they're humans well especially Tanya because she led us into her life in such an intimate way that you know it was you know she was really generous that way um so it isn't black and white there's a lot of gray I understand I understand an audience reaction though you can have those kind of conflicting views 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 um of sharing that story in a way well you know there's the age-old term with great power comes great responsibility it is a great responsibility to uh hold a large chimpanzee in your house that is a great power it is an enormous responsibility and she should not have the option to have that responsibility she's not capable of managing that situation 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 too they are they're not just that but uh infantri side you know the the reason why female um dolphins are so promiscuous know 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 of time I think it's around six years oh wow see if that's true um wow but so what a male will do will kill the babies the males will kill the babies to force her into estris 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 they're not monogamous in any way
stretched or form they they just go and [ __ ] 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 are any animals monogamous cuz they used to think so penguins penguins are but they only do it for like a year they're monogamous for like a year they also look exactly the same which is trap they used to they used to think maau parrots were monogamous and swans and then they started doing the genetics and they realized they cheat like hell yeah I'm sure they do it just it doesn't it doesn't seem to serve any purpose uh evolutionarily for them to be monogamous it it seems contrary to the idea of natural selection like she you should be wanting to if you have potent genes you should want to spread those genes as much as possible 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 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 we can do all kinds of things that other animals can't do but more importantly we communicate and we communicate stories yes and this and we empathize with each other and we recognize things in other people even heinous people even people that you don't like like whether it's Joe exotic or t you recognize like I see she's not I get it you know she's just a person who's all [ __ ] 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 and she's the one one person out there who's still alive who I really don't want to hear from yeah cuz I really wonder right now what is she thinking well the calmness while her daughter was being attacked on the phone the calmness of that phone call was just shocking suspicious um I think you know when that lady from the liquor store was
talking about how much that lady drinks like who knows what she's even responsible for anymore like she's she's got to be out of her [ __ ] mind all time if she's drinking that much booze I think she wanted out with the chimp I think the she was as caged as depressed as the chimp possibly in that house after 15 years living with this chimp that she thought you know was her son and then later was dressing you know the chimp up with the same clothing as her deceased husband I think she wanted out and somehow she figured it out well the life choice is is really remarkable they're they're they're also basically in cages the the humans taking care of the chimpanzee right you really think about it and um uh the same goes for Sandy Sandy Harold you know this what was so great about revisiting that story in Connecticut you know we basically um we were set to come out with this show in March uh 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 we we work with this guy who wrote this incredible article a New York Magazine article named Dan Le uh it's one of the best written articles about Travis it's called Travis the Menace um he has no attribution of sources you don't know who is talking um 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 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 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 Sand's world we had this archive the video that you see has never been seen before this portrait of a family this 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 if you think about that where our our starting point was for this whole project was was always around how do we understand where captive primates came from in America 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 um what I found very interesting is this kind of this lineage that led to Travis Travis was sold to Sandy and then you see the so incestuous it's so incestuous that they're all connected you'll see a little bit episode four there it is Travis the Menace um and it's a remarkable story this is Sandy who um bought Travis from Connie uh Connie um you know it was it was the the suie was by way 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 and when chimps smile it's it's actually a sign of aggression it's not like us we we you know smile because we're happy that's not a happy chimp doing that so he's trained he's trained to but he's trained to smile he's not necessarily aggressive right here he's trained to show his teeth cuz it's cute right it's more of a um Grimace it's more of a more of a happy smile I guess if you want to call it that right right so it was fascinating to us to get access to this story we we get we we go into it and um he's drinking soda from McDonald that's disturbing 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 you oh well the bite force everything I mean everything about them is we are so watered down by The evolutionary process and I was real aware of that when I was touching that 2-year-old chimp with diapers like real wear this 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 yeah exactly that's basically just so crazy but he was you know this this class story it was this kind of Gothic fairy tale in Stanford Connecticut which was so unusual because it's a suburb of Manhattan you know everyone thought this was in the South or wherever it was happening in in Stanford Connecticut and Sandy had this kind of void in her life she buys Travis and raises are part of the family and you see the story the same Arc as every
other chimp story in a family setting they get too mature and they have to you know the the thing that um I thought you'd appreciate uh in terms of our kind of the this idea that we show in the story really well I think is this this chimp is happy and connected to the community because he's free he's socializing he's a town celebrity he's at he's at work with Sandy in the toe shop you know answering phones you know filling out paperwork the mascot of the toe shop desire me Motors right yeah he's airbrushed everywhere on trucks and he lives a cool life he lives a cool life and then one day everyone gets to see the chimp right and then until one day he gets too aggressive and he this this incredible story which we don't cover in the dock but he's in this intersection very busy intersection in Connecticut a little boy throws a canic Coke over to the car with the chimp the chimp gets out uh you know stops traffic you know and it's covered in the news and it's a joke everyone's like oh my God it's planet of the a CH is trying to get a hold of the kid CH chim's trying to like he's irritated why why would you bother the chimpanzee he threw a can of coke at him 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 the state of Connecticut says no way you can't have this chimp anymore out in public you got to put him in home so this this this chimp is is out in space for majority of his life and then built a confinement for the majority of his life and so fast forward and and I'll spare you kind of the other stuff that we learned but you know what what everyone kind of talks about in revisiting media at the time is he it was Annex it was the wine glasses he drunk it was uh maybe the relationship went wrong but he grabbed car keys he wanted to go for a ride he could drive a car he want to get the [ __ ] out of there yeah that's what happened right and and the person who he runs into first Charla represents confinement he was a nanny right right right so what do you think's going to happen it was also reported he was [ __ ] or he left already he was like cruising around and he was in the
graveyard [ __ ] with the guy who was digging Graves that's we insanely bored just like like a person that's stuck in a cage yeah and chips 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 you know big cats do a figure eight over and over and over you know chimps do this rocking and it when you see that you know that's a really desperately depressed chimp but we love we love this you know I'm sorry love but we we're we're interested in this in this tension because we think we can control things 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 this whole idea of spectacle and humans that can control things nope is in that scene with Gordy the chimp is probably one of the most beautiful displays C you know cinematically that I've seen of it's horrible it's very tragic but the the one person that has the 15-year-old Chimp in their house How would they been able to avoid all that she's careful I mean she she's 77 years old Pam R there um when she was seven years old she was asked what she wants to do with her life in this circus animal family and she says I want to train chimps I want to do something hard I want to do something difficult the rest of her family trained horses and elephants and that was culturally that's a really good question how is it that Pam hasn't okay you're thinking about more diff different measures but like I'm thinking about attacks that's what I'm thinking it's a really good question because I always wondered that about Pam there how come she's the one person that has sort of been immune to it or has she I think she's got some you know can 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 watch her interaction you know there's a real like understanding and it's and she has a leash on them I mean it's she also neutered they these CH castrated I'm sure I'm sure they do you know they remove their canines often times 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 there's a lot of dark parts of our story that we didn't go into like one of the things we learned was that so many of the monkeys that are being sold you know by Tanya and others are coming across the border from Mexico just you know along with probably drugs and more recently in recent time we've seen a lot of central uh American and Mexican species coming into the US so there's a pipeline you know I'm sort of segue well what we what we look what so yes it is we didn't realize also how dark this was coming out of it because we were so close to it and the reaction by people it's very heavy um so I'm we're all desensitized from from seeing this um there's some really interesting stuff that happens in for Joe I hope you finish it uh including another attack uh but this time with a person uh that we all know and um oh you teasing me I'm teasing you a little bit I'm sorry I uh it's it's pretty it's pretty good I'll probably want to watching okay pretty good it's it's it's it's a part of her body gets bitten off oh come on man I'm not kidding similar to Trump in yeah now you're giving away way too much you [ __ ] it up [ __ ] up the whole show I'm going to look at her ear the whole show now yeah um so is that lady in with the 15-year-old champ is that the only one that you know of that keeps uh full grown adult and has it just wander around with everybody we've learned it more it's also C to be clear Pam doesn't live in the chimp doesn't live in our house like like it's in there sometimes there sometimes but it's and how much of the castrating it changes its Behavior I think significantly cuz uh buck in Oregon was castrated and then it you know the Connecticut chimpanzee was that castrated 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 collors it's so crazy like fixing a dog is so commonplace people don't even think twice oh is your dog neutered oh you're a good pet owner you know that way your dog's not going to have unwanted puppies yeah but fixing a chimpanzee like what
are you doing like what did you do to them that's like fixing but also by the way think about what the medical care they get you know the guy who's a horse vet is the guy working at a chimpanzee if you're lucky if you're lucky if you're lucky yeah um so if you think about the car it's it's really horrible um but I was going to add to what you were saying Eric one thing that we learned through the process about kind of what is this about more mainly you know we're talking about this very Niche subject matter of captive chimpanzees in America uh which we learned uh they're really only is about 13300 remaining in captivity which includes those who are already in sanctuaries in the US about half of that 1300 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 you know less than 100 chimpanzees that remain in captivity so to answer your question there might be more but it's hard to die to Chimp but glob globally there's still uh many chimps in Thailand and you know all over the world that are you know it's so the us at least there's less and less in this there's less and less the over the the 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 pimp chimpan as a as as pets 15,000 15,000 according to the American welfare Animal Welfare Institute um so that's what we're finding but you know through that we had to zoom out and I think the the what we've learned what I've learned personally about organizations that are that are doing something to protect wild lands and protect wild populations of chimpanzees there's a lot of great ones out there um so we've been supporting a program that's doing um 12 project sites in Africa $10 million 10,000 chimpanzees um and that's what we're hopeful for I mean Africa is basically going to be China One Day what do you do though um 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 ch certainly not after the castrated not chimpan they've done all these project I don't know if you like any 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 well there there's a place in Africa there's a sort of an island in a you know there's a it's like a freshwater river where they have released chimps but um you know chimps that are just placed in Africa but yeah to release them actually back into a population while chimps hasn't been done successfully for sure not with chimps have they done it with [Music] cats that's a good you know there's that famous you know image of uh Putin releasing a tiger in Russia that was captive 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 but it the Jaguar program is it's very uh they do it very carefully and they they put the jaguar in this enormous enclosures and let them capture a wild prey before they release them takes a lot of time well I mean we were talking about house cats earlier oh house cats no no no no I wasn't saying I just saying cats in general but I'm saying that house cats which are like completely domesticated you come to and pet them if you let them loose they survive fine yeah 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 um 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 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 where we live in California we have Bears black bears not grizzly bears and we have Mountain lines and almost every night you'll see on our streets when the there's a certain night mid 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 they they once they learn that then they have a pattern and they go after those dumpsters well you know California used
to have big big brown bears California state flag is a grizzly bear which is crazy and we work with an organization that's trying to bring them back to Califor folks settle down we to keep them alive where they are don't get nutty all these people that want to reintroduce animals like okay it's it's just you have to understand you're th you're playing God you're throwing and there's a reason it went extinct because they the last grizzly bear in California was shot about 100 years ago and it's because they eat people levette California is named after the last guy who died from a grizzly bear attack yeah I think his name was Steven LC yeah and uh he got [ __ ] up they were big you know big brown bears and we killed them all because they were killing people and I'm not saying you should kill them all I'm not saying we what we did was good but once youve established an ecosystem that if you make the con I believe I like humans more than I like other animals 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 going to eat people I'm like hey like this is not good for us it's not good for us we don't have to reintroduce them to places 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 um there's been some success of reintroducing wolves into Montana you know the Yellowstone reintroduction 1990s really interesting like they they did have an overpopulation problem of undulates 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 we we work with Turner and dangered species Ted Turner and uh we work very closely with this guy Mike Phillips and Montana who's been probably the key guy to bring back greywolves uh into this part of you know the western part of the United States um but yeah it's been without I mean I I know because we we do this that even greywolves there's a lot of controversy from ranchers imagine imagine bringing back big Grizzlies brown bears to California yeah it's going to be a problem but people that
live in urban areas don't understand what that problem is like this is the problem that Vancouver has so uh British Columbia outlawed uh brown bear hunting you can hunt black bears because people eat black bears and you can eat brown bears as well but most people don't and they so they have in their mind hunting grizzly bears is in line with what they want to call trophy hunting which is gross you're just killing an animal so you could 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 he's like they're [ __ ] dangerous he Sho one that was trying to break into his cabin fromt away he shot a large grizzly bear trying to get into his cabin and eat him from 3 feet away yeah he said they're really bold now because they haven't hunted them for for a few years so if you're running into a four or five-year-old male they don't know what it's like to be hunted there's not no one has any feelings of being nervous around human beings and you remember the movie The Grizzly Man right yes yeah Timothy Treadwell that's a fascinating he was that's my favorite unintentional comedy because it's wner Herzog I think made that movie funny on purpose of course that was that's like our it's a good movie but I I would 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 like I just was being I was angry with this guy right you know the the de he was like worried about his bandana or his you know his whatever whatever he was worried about I was so pissed watching it but it was a good movie but it's the same thing it's a less than extraordinary person who gets attached and addicted to extraordinary experiences you're constantly around these I mean he got some incredible footage yeah that guy got some amazing footage and he did some [ __ ] hard camping okay 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 yeah talking baby talk to the Bears he pulled it off pulled it off for a long time um but you knew what was going to happen if you watch that like eventually
something's going to decide to eat him and then that's exactly what happened it's like these chips with these women similar but at least that gu going to where they live yeah of course you know I don't have any problem with someone deciding to do that if you you're that [ __ ] crazy and you want to throw yourself into the system and maybe live with them for as long as it lasts I mean and maybe it also was suicide by Bear right because that guy seemed really depressed and didn't seem like he was having a good time yeah but he had the bear eat his girlfriend too that was like 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 and yeah but she was like you know collateral damage it was I feel bad for the girlfriend I do too but again like what kind of choices are we making in this life but think about you you asked a question about retroduction or these attacks that occur we there was a story we didn't include it was just too tangential tangential but there was a neighbor of uh 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 in in a single property um one escapes a 19-year-old boy recognizes his dog in the backyard's being attacked by a chimpanzee he grabs a gun shoots a chimpanzee he gets charged with destruction of property it'ss a felony oh my God he went he went to prison oh God for six months gets out his lot he missed the the birth of his daughter that's insane and his name is Jason coats it's a it's a really interesting story who the [ __ ] tried that and then guess what here's what happened two two years ago I think he gets his record expunged finally at 40 years old and now he can he can't get work you know the guy's like a you know contractor and he he couldn't get work that's so crazy defending his property he shouldn't have been in that situation in the first place also defending his life yeah like the the reality if you understand chimpanzees the person who had that champ chimpanzee is responsible it's not this man who's defending his life you are so vulnerable to a chimpanzee if they decide to get after you there's not a lot you can do you 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 you have a person that gets torn apart by a chimpanzee that the idea that you can't protect yourself from someone's crazy [ __ ] idea of harboring an animal an orous animal that's insanely strong and Hyper aggressive and intelligent and uncontrollable yeah that was a tragic story terrible it's 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 well you have to have some discretion in in in the process of casting subjects I mean it's a choice but I also think the idea is it it was also kind of far away from where we were going with these themes I think well it seems like you could do multiple series oh my God we could continue with this thing I I it's harder and it's getting harder and harder to do but is it also harder to get people to be natural on camera and to not be performative it's harder I mean what is harder now and it's it was hard in the very beginning also is that these people that keep you know I'm generalizing a little bit but they for the most part they're very guarded about letting you in because one you know they don't know if you're a spy for animal rights groups they don't know if you're the feds and they don't know if you're going to steal their animals and so a lot of these people have very valuable animals and they're you know extremely guarded and paranoid about letting you in now of course it's even become harder because in our case we've been sort of you know become known and so to continue this model of doing another story on I don't know Bears um yeah people are going to be suspicious um but as far as being natural I don't think that's so hard um with Tanya and Joe you know 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 we work with hardly anybody you know with with Tiger King it was just me and a camera guy and then you know and I drove back and forth from Texas to Oklahoma constantly you know Dallas to
Oklahoma City it was just two of us and so the more intimate it is the more you know the less of an audience is watching while you're filming the better it is and also before Tiger King there's no way they could have known how big that was going to be oh my God I didn't know no we didn't know no no way they could have ever anticipated some bizarre obscure documentary on people that are keeping pet cats I start our torist didn't even know but I started making a film about the six Extinction big cats in America yeah okay that's like low RIS RK we didn't we didn't even know it was going to be successful so well I like I said you guys caught lightning in a bottle is the perfect timing of people being locked in during the pandemic you guys were kind of the early stars of the pandemic your show it was like it was also a welcome escape from the craziness that we were all experiencing we're experiencing everyone's wearing a mask you're keeping away from people and then you're at least when you're home with your family like oh my God we're not these [ __ ] idiots we're crazy but we're not this crazy like this this world is so much more insane than this new insane world that it became sort of a little bit of a pania for us yeah I I think I was telling Eric this you know it's so um we get asked this question a lot about you know the state of you know non-scripted unscripted shows documentaries and this this dramatization that you're seeing is a trend people making very cinematic real stories uh dramatic Recreations and Eric I we're we're talking about it a lot because so much of our content is so much more surreal than anything we can even make up right or or recreate and that's what's um that's what's so surre about our process and and also just the stuff we capture right it's um it's it's Stranger Than Fiction it 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 they'll edit things to make them look like different things happen cuz they just want you keep them keep people tuned in for drama so if you're you know you're following a family around they
they create drama they have scripted [ __ ] it's and it feels like it right the thing about Tiger King and the thing about chimp crazy is it feels very authentic 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 you know she'd be like 3 hours late for some reason uh and then she'd show up and she'd say oh you know I got to go get my eyes done and then I would be like Tanya you were three hours late can I at least film you with getting your eyes done and not once were we setting her up or saying can you you know get your lip injections she just would say no I got four o00 appointment with my lip injection and we we just shadowed her so it was just her life yeah so it is authentic yeah and we also have we also ER 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 the editing process we had a great team incredible group of guy of team so as they're doing it are they like marking down like key moments do they have someone who's like a stenographer or something who like marking down so you know like what to look for or do you at the end of the day go that thing where she went and got her lips done we have to have that in I wish we had what you just said it would be very helpful SS like we don't doing well it's pretty it's pretty organic it's pretty organic I think there's also you know you you you follow the core story which was Tanya's story we kind of knew that we had it um the minute the the missing chimpanzee happened or the the supposed death occurred so that was a story where's where's the chimp and through that story we're able to kind of latch on all these other things now what you don't know is we shot these other stories you know out of sequence you know the Travis came at the very end so we had to figure out a way to you know weave it into episode 2 and weave it into episode 4 we knew we really wanted that end to serve as thematic connection to Tanya story but um I just have to make one big overriding point which is that this is not a good recipe for people yeah sure making films like this because it's not because we you know like there's all these sort of formulaic styles of documentaries like a biopic a
famous person or a take down documentary or True Crime what what we do and I think we've just been really lucky is we just start filming somebody never knowing of course where this is going to go you know and and that is not a good smart way to make probably documentaries because what if it goes nowhere right you know I'm just I'm just bringing that up because right you know and so in order to do chimp crazy after Tiger King we actually film so many different things to get to gy people you know how do spend less time on these things is what we've like kind of realized it's like exhausting it's worth it though it seems like there's no other way keep it authentic then to just Shadow these people forever and then spice it down to four hours yeah yeah which like you have 250 Plus hours of footage 250 days of footage it's like about it's about 1300 hours rly 1300 hours down to four yeah that's now that's just um primary camera that's like know summarizing the days I mean multiple cameras multiple things happening in a day right we were very efficient you know it's a 8 to 12 hour day we're capturing a lot of stuff in that day 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 F to form The Narrative of how you're going to have the whole documentary series play out as you're doing that or is it just that comes so much later like we have no idea where it's going probably for the first year and a half of filming you know you know the case of chimp crazy we didn't even discover Tanya until a year and a half in year and a half in what no what kind of made made what made it more complicated we got our star well you know what's so interesting Joe and I want to come back to this about you know I saw you get a little emotional with the buck story because I um we spent it was really it was really a hard one for us to tell um but an important one to make sure we got that in but the we missed it we missed it we missed the cover we were going to go Eric and I were going to go to Pendleton to cover
what was happening with but because we knew there was a violation that occurred from the state of Oregon that basically said Tamara you have to do these improvements otherwise we're taking the animal away from you and that had happened we thought we would cover the response to that 4 days later uh was shot and we said to our and I remember this so vividly we we can't we have to trust our like instincts like when we like are into something let's cover it film it send someone out and cover it if we need to um so we decided to film everything everything including our conversations and process like very meta which ended up becoming part of the story too as you'll see more and four where we have to like turn her in basically um so uh 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 uh into Festus to cover this confiscation thinking nothing was going to happen 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 following it so this guy became essential to the story with with no intended intended um you know reasoning for that um so yeah it's a it's the making of became more interesting than the actual uh subject matter in a way to us um and kind of weaving that together came much much later it's not a good formula if you want to make money documentary I mean I'm interested though you're so you're also kind of an outsider in this in but what was your kind of response to the industry you know formula kind of way of doing things well I mean doing what kind of things uh with reality TV programming or programming in general well I think they with reality TV 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 and so these people who are already respected television producers they made their way into reality television and then they realized some of these people are pretty [ __ ] boring most of the time 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 and so Bob wants Mexican food Sally wants Chinese food you have to figure it out and you have to go around town and figure out where to eat and you're eventually going to decide this and this is the place you're going to eat you're going to be happy and so the whole thing is the personal Dynamics the the you know the relationships these people have to each other how and then they create drama along the way along the way you're going to run into your friend from high school who was like perfectly made up you know like well lit with a microphone on whoa so it's like it's [ __ ] it's [ __ ] it's not really reality but it's also not really uh a drama it's real human beings they're doing nonsense and you feel it and then there's also like reality shows that are on specific subjects and those are [ __ ] too yeah and then you know you have dating shows which are super super popular cuz like who's he going to pick who's she going to pick how's this going to work yeah you know get excited about that or [ __ ] 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 unit because yeah so they can't be assured that this storage unit's going to have some [ __ ] Pirates treasure in it right so what do they do they P you ruin that for yeah so they pretend that they got this at an auction like who knows what's in it apparently the guy died in in a mysterious way and there's people looking for him we might really be on to something and then you cut to commercial is that gold cut to commercial cut back from commercial is that gold 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 you know and I I'm not I know you know Forest Gant but I always kind of Wonder like is he walking through the jungle and there he suddenly finds the snake is it it's got to be set up a lot of the time a lot of the time I'm sure it is or the crocodile some of those shows but a lot of the ones like one of the more interesting things today is YouTube right because YouTube you have these small all independent people like there's this guy we had on called python
cowboy and this guy goes out into the Everglades every day and captures pythons yeah and you know like there videos of him he got bit by one like really [ __ ] up his arms gushing blood he's holding on they're enormous there's more pythons in the Everglades than anywhere on Earth bur Burmese pythons Burmese pythons that used to be people's pets or used to be a part of a reptile facility so we're doing a our next doc series is about reptiles in the reptiles we have a whole section on that it's another thing I went down to Rabbit Hole last night Nile crocodiles I was going into Nile crocodiles every I can tell you I can tell you a lot about n crocodiles tell me about n crocodiles in the Everglades though cuz what they were saying is they found a few and the ones that they identified uh 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 where who saying that there's like huge crocodiles that take out cattle on the west side of Florida no yeah so he was he was sketching me out he like 18 foot 18t K cows there's like 23 or 24 species of crocodilians in the world you know that's that includes Cayman crocodiles alligators G rails and the only Crocs that are really really dangerous to man are saltwater crocodiles Nile crocodiles mugger crocodiles but the Crocs in Florida that are na native you know American crocodiles they are a brackishwater Croc they're not like Nile crocodiles that are in freshw 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 the estuaries and brackishwater they're smaller they which ones are smaller American crocodiles well they're bigger than alligators are they really yeah for sure what's the biggest American crocodile they've ever found oh they can be big I've seen American crocodiles cuz American crocodile one we have in South Florida is the same Croc that you see in coastal Mexico goes down into Costa Rica you can see I've looked over you know I've seen a lot of American crocodiles
in Mexico Costa Rica they're big they're long longer than a than your alligator out there really not that much longer longer 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 check beyond that that's an alligator no that's alligator that's alligator monster cattle eating alligator shot in Florida look at the size of that thing okay but that's unusual 15 ft oh my goodness wow look at the size of that sucker but you said earlier crocodile American crocodile what's the largest American crocodile Jamie and the largest American alligator right I think the largest American alligator was 20 ft long wow really that big that's the longest one they've ever found wow wow I love this fact check for you okay here we go 14 foot yeah so they're smaller what yeah wait what's the largest American alligator then um it's bigger definitely for sure yeah because that one that we have out there is 14 long yeah it's like when you catch a fish right you say it's this big I think that's how I'm being with yeah okay 19 feet 2 in oh Joe you're right I'm wrong I love this well so there's a bunch of different ones right and the the Nile crocodiles are a different animal like Nile crocodiles regularly get to 18 F feet and there's there's some really interesting reports from back of the day of much larger ones and so the question is like what here's the thing about alligators and crocodiles in particular they don't die of old age they just keep getting older and bigger 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 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 so an alligator like that big [ __ ] that they had that they cattle eating 15 foot alligator that guy might be 90 years old you know so uh an a crocodile that gets to 30 ft long which is you know there was reports of ones that were longer than a 38t boat that these guys were on this is a long time ago though and so
there's all this speculation uh would these people just freaking out cuz it was big and they exaggerated is this hyperbole like what what is this well there's the other part of the speculation is well for sure we know crocodiles used to be bigger there was many many species of crocodiles that were [ __ ] enormous dinosaur eating crocodiles huge thing what is the biggest ancient crocodile that was ever discovered fossilized I think it's like in the neighborhood of 50 plus feet long 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 me about gigano 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 uh freshwater Croc ever was 40t long yeah it's remark million years ago what about saltwater wow is that the largest crocodile period or is it what they off the big ones freshwater right what is the is that the largest biggest croc fossil ever found okay cross SE largest sea dwelling one 30 ft 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 agula how do you say that auya auya formation in Big Ben National Park 40 to 50 feet long jaws with 6 in teeth good Lord wow big big band good Lord 6 in teeth how C just imagine [ __ ] 6 in teeth and it's 40 ft long oh my God I mean I think saltwater crocs and Nile Crocs right eat more people right yes today well I have a friend uh Jim shaki 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 and the footage that he got of it is so disturbing cuz everyone in the village is missing something 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 a laundry so it's a very poor Village and these people are at the mercy of these monsters that are actively hunting them so what they do is they so if they want to um do something like uh 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 figured it out and then they go in there and they just settle in and they just wait for you cuz they can walk around on land obviously so they go out of the wall and then they go oh the [ __ ] they only go in this little area how do I get in that area and they're watching you underwater for hours without breathing you know I work a lot in Madagascar and we have n crocodiles in Madagascar but they're not as big as Mainland Nile Crocs but I know that in Madagascar it's when people go to wash their clothing around the edge of these lakes that they get you know and that's their instincts cuz that's how they get deer like these little animal species every year people die washing their clothing in Madagascar from from Nile Crocs yeah but um [ __ ] that yeah um so the speculation is that there's breeding populations of those uh Nile Crocs in the Everglades really wow they theyve seen enough of them see if you can find like what's the latest breeding crocodile breeding uh Nile Croc ciles in the Everglades they have a shet onite order for them I mean it makes sense I always wondered why there were not anacondas and in the making of This reptile documentary we're doing the reason we've been told that they're not anacondas in the Everglades is that they didn't import anacondas in the way they did burmes pythons burmes pythons from what we understand the uh python skin people in in Thailand and Malaysia they would collect the eggs and breed you know have the babies and send thousands of babies baby burmes pythons to the us and that never happened with anacondas but you think about anacondas because they would live in the Everglades you're also you're meeting the guy responsible for that tomorrow it's unclear if n crocodiles are breeding unclear if they are breeding in the wild in Florida but here's some information about n crocodiles and breeding in Florida n Croc first observed in Florida in the 60s wow wow believe they' have captured all the N crocodiles in the area n crocodiles become established for 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 but what's interesting about that you know in the 60s but in the 60s alligators were danger yes well I lived in Florida in the 70s and when I lived in Florida they were in danger they were on the endangered species list people used to feed them marshmallows oh wow yeah I lived in Gainesville Florida we used to go and then when I was there some lady got uh her dog snatched and then everybody got kind of freaked out everybody in the town was like whoa cuz they got way too comfortable with alligators CU 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 [ __ ] Park like Lake Alice is where the lake is we'd go to the park and hang out and alligators would just be hanging out there and I was a little kid it was normal it was normal to see alligators just sunning themselves and they were endangered back then and now they're not endangered at all now they're everywhere and crocodile farming had a lot to do with why they're not endangered really from what I understand yeah cuz what took pressure off of Crocs just globally not so much alligators but Crocs in general was when the farming happened it took pressure off of hunting them obviously for skins right right and and and the farming of crocodiles has been a really you know it's controversial but it's really been a a success story for wild crocodilians but why is that how's it affect alligators well they did they that's a good question 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 oh yeah for sure they still do Ian they still breed them for skins and hunt them for skins but now they have an overpopulation problem so I was just curious to like how would uh crocodile farming make that happen I don't think that I think it's probably just a natural reaction to the fact they weren't hunted anymore and then they just blossomed and it just took a few decades and then you have enormous populations over yeah that may be true I know Croc farming has helped crocodilians across the sure that's for sure well and storms patterns right
shifting isn't that also true American alligators were on the endangered speci list like they very they were very rare in the 60s now they're incredibly common well they were very rare because they were over hunted they were over hunted exactly 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 and they had wiped out everything there used to be elk over 50 states they used to be everywhere well the Eastern elk is extinct yes exactly and we have Rocky Mountain elk now that have been transplanted into the East but the the market hunting was a real problem we had decimated the populations of all these things they were just hunting deer and all these different animals and and selling them for food and often times it's like bison they would just sell their tongues which is really crazy because bison meat is thought to be like some of the best meat but they were they were pickling their tongues and sending them back e you're now making me think about something and I don't know the facts because I I'm but the migratory bird Act is some you know that we used to shoot birds all the time and obviously the most common bird or one of the most common birds was passenger PS right and it was there were so many fill the sky fill the sky yeah and then I think the migratory bird act came into effect anyway but but you're right around the Teddy Roosevelt period yeah because people killed off all the bir there were so many passenger pites they were [ __ ] everywhere and we killed them off for food and for feathers and people hats apparently crazy anyway yeah we're gross but so what what do you think so so you have you have Teddy Roosevelt call me on stuff in Services you have things like migratory borec you have things like the esa which you know had its own unintended consequences which you C we actually cover in our series about stopping importation but propelling domestic interest yeah through breeding and and and you know the demand that's created through US Zoo systems that you see mhm um so what happens next I guess is is it's really complex and the problem is people are
very um dug in on their sides yeah you know you have people that are very dug in with the animal Liberation idea they're very dug in with 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 or our property it's uh it's quite complicated and it's just one of those things about being a human being is there's Nuance to most things that are important to all of us sure and the success of wildlife is important to all of us and 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 well there's also um the problem is like we were talking about with BC I didn't really finish my thought but the reason why they outlawed bear hunting in BCS cuz the high population centers are all Urban so people don't have any experience with grizzly bears trying to eat their dogs or grizzly bears killing hikers or G they don't experience it if they did they'd be terrified there it's a giant predator and you have no chance if it catches you out in the wild I 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 is you do it through hunting as much as this seems counterintuitive to people that love wildlife the right way to do it is you have informed uh well schooled biologists that really do a great job of managing the 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 make suring that it's at a healthy balance if there's too many bears look Genoa I mean infantri side and bears is common almost all bears are cannibals they they they eat their their own babies it's the whole thing is mad and if they don't have enough food and or if the the males come out of the um if if if they're hibernating and they come out before the female does with their cubs they'll actively seek out those Cubs for food 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 [ __ ] like we should just sort of like let it be what it is and 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 [ __ ] 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 yeah no so I mean like calling uh elephants if you don't manage elephants they'll Denude everything and then you they'll all die well there's that but there's also they don't give a [ __ ] 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 and then elephants come in and and eat all your vegetables you could very easily eily starve to death and that's real too and people don't want to think about that because you think of Elephants or elephants are endangered yes they are elephants are hunted for their Ivory yes they were but also elephants are a Africa is [ __ ] huge there's not the same amount of uh black bears in San Francisco as there are in you know rural Wyoming right it's because that's the the environment to live if you went to San Francisco you like oh my God black bears are extinct but you know go to New Jersey they're everywhere right so it's it's not that the animal is that you know you shouldn't have any of them it's just like you there there should be places where they exist and places where they don't exist and if you want to maintain a city you're going to have to do something about the population of predators you're going to have to do something it's just like how far outside of your city does does human control radiate well then you have ranchers right okay if you want to have a guy who grows cow so you can eat steak you're going to have to be able to protect this guy's 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 I completely agree keep Animal Human conflict you know if you want to keep it at Bay keep wild animals in the wild right I would question and I think you're right bringing or reintroducing grizzly bears into areas where there are high densities of humans it's a recipe for trouble well it's also completely theoretical and right now it's theoretical although they did just recently re reintroduced Grizzlies back into Washington State no I don't mean theoretical in a sense they haven't done it as as far as what the outcome's 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 and and that's what happens in certain parts of the country that's what happens when they have too many of of them in a specific area and then they compete for resources and it can get weird out 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 um you know a few things happen one thing this uh federal law called big cat Public Safety Act was passed largely because of Tiger King but the other thing we did just sort of privately is we donated a million dollars to Tiger conservation in India uh and uh one of one of the countries where tigers are still doing quite well and uh so we went to visit the program last September in India and you know it's just was so interesting because you we're 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 the key is to keep enough prey 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 as something to eat but anyway I just bring that up because it was something that it was a byproduct of Tiger King that um you know it was something that we did just quietly as the the people that I did Tiger King with including you not so quietly Don that money not so quietly now you got you aware of the Sunder bands yeah the tiger attacks and the bands absolutely sunnd bands are fascinating cuz hundreds
of thousands of people have been killed by tigers over last several hundred years 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 really yeah there's this one story of this uh group of men that are in a boat and uh they're rowing this boat in the water and they're I don't know if they're rowing it but they're they're trying to get away from this tiger 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 were they wearing masks behind their heads they weren't but yeah that's also what they do when they walk around there and they do surveys of the animals but it's also insanely difficult to find out where they are too because the grass is so high and and you know they're just built to [ __ ] things up that's what their job is and if people live around them people are on the menu that's just what it is with tigers it didn't make it into Tiger King but we filmed in um Southern Nepal a place called chitwan National Park where tigers are doing very well and they actually have armed gu you know guards with like machine guns to protect the Tigers from poachers we filmed there um but it's pretty remote and I don't remember how many people get killed but but yeah it where there are Tig people are going to you know have problems if there's High densities of people you know it's all there's a reason why human beings don't live you're not supposed to live there you shouldn't be living with the tig they have to they're stuck they're [ __ ] but boy we should figure out a way to develop some sort of an area there where they don't have to live like that there's a lot of people too me it ising right India has a billion people it's amazing that in India they're still tigers at all because it's one of or the second most populated country in the world or is it yeah I it feels like when you're in India there's people everywhere right like you think you're going off on some Rural Road it's just there's people right but if you go into a place where
the jungle is like where the Tigers live it's like it's really hard to live there like and then the people that are living there are probably they have no options they're the poorest yeah and so they're living you know in sort of a traditional way out exposed and then they have to figure out how to protect themselves from these these enormous stealthy cats that are sneaking around everywhere they go [ __ ] but you see plenty of cows which is Amazing by the way just roaming which is so just roaming these kind of you know that is I would really love to know what the origin of the sacred cow is really love to know the origin of that that's a one of the most fascinating things that you have a place where people are starving and they choose not to eat cows yeah fascinating yeah and they stop and the just the tra the traffic stopping which is you know in these roads that have no lanes and they're all just kind of India is wild but it's it's so crazy that they stick to this one thing like I was just watching this uh news report of this group of people that were not Hindu um 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 arrested for them and they bulldozed their homes oh wow wow yeah see if you can find that J well they're also probably Muslim I believe they were yeah but more people die 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 it's a good I don't think it's Tigers I think the Sunder bands is the the area where they get jacked pretty regularly um but and also how many many people are doing surveys on how many how many people are missing you know when you're going into these like very remote areas how many people know Indian authorities bulldog bulldoze homes of 11 people after finding beef and incredible that's Slaughter of cows which Hindus worship as a deities Bann in most of India as is consumption of their meat isn't that [ __ ] fascinating well you cut down an oak tree in California you're they're not going to bulldoze your [ __ ] house you know dep depends
what kind of tree isn't that nuts people found beef in their fridge and and cows in their backyard so they they India you can eat a hamburger you cannot yeah they don't really I was just in I think you can get in like hotels and stuff you can't get like a oh wow they allow it in hotels yeah you can get it at India you can eat lamb you can eat sheep you can eat um you could eat other different animals you just can't eat cows yeah wow I didn't even think of that when I was there a lot of people think it has its frots and psychedelic mushrooms that psybin grows on C manure and that these people would just cuz one of the oldest what is it I think it's called Chuck tal huk it's like one of the oldest known um civilizations which was a cattle worshipping civilization and they had like these like why were people who are [ __ ] starving to death like barely getting by why were they like into worshiping cows 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 somma and these different psychedelic compounds that the Hindus would would eat and these different psychedelic Notions or potions rather that were uh talked about where we don't really know what the composition of them was but we do know that s cyan mushroom has a long history of use and it's really common to find them growing on cure why why also poor people that don't have any food not eat this one animal I don't know but I've seen mushrooms and C manure getting very confusing information on the burger and India situation they have chicken you chicken all you want baby they definitely seem to have Burgers but I don't know that they're making them them with like ground beef that right could be like a lamb burger sure be it could be all kinds of stuff that 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 [ __ ] these people wasn't Western enough they bulldozed their [ __ ] house a couple months ago that's remarkable that's incredible I bet you they're also Muslim though that's also yeah right right it's like the weers get treated yeah yeah there's a lot of the
you know yeah I'm sure there's some of that too yeah but it's um it's just our relationship with animals is very bizarre and I think um most people have like a really stunted understanding of it they they're never really around wild animals it's a squirrel or a pigeon or something like that like they they don't see kind of perverse our relationship with animal well so cities as much as I love them they are perverse they're strange and they've they've done us a lot of harm psychologically uh they've they've created people that are much more vulnerable than they've ever been before 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 you're going from one closed environment to another closed environment riding around your car or the Subway or whatever you're doing and we're completely disconnected to what it meant to be a human being for hundreds of thousands of years and it happened in a blink of an eye in a couple of hundred years all of a sudden we're [ __ ] and we're trapped in this bizarre system and in this system you know occasionally we uh we interact with animals and we our understanding of it and what we think of it what we think it is is so and we have anthropomorphization through like you know Yogi Bear and all that kind of stuff and we're we're so weird with the way we interact with animals and we every piece of it I was I was so lucky to grow up in nature and I take it for granted now I grew up mostly in Northern California but I was like a feral kid my mom my mother always said Eric you were feral we didn't plan anything I would spend my days fishing and hiking in the Creeks what what part of Northern California in Sonoma area but I 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 today people don't have the experience I had so many kids are from an urban you know world and they can't connect we don't even know what it's like but there I mean I would imagine if
you went to a city you're average say like a New York City or Los Angeles the average person there what what percentage of them spend any time at all alone in the woods yeah very few yeah we've lost our connection I think um 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 we're going to batswana for the summer and you know do tourism but what you really can do is put put a bird feeder outside your window and connect with nature that way and you'll see lots of different birds and but you must have 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 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 um I'm fascinated by the just whatever the pull of urban life is like what is the gravity of urban life that 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 what are we like we're weird and time I spend in the woods in the in the wilderness just just being out there you just you get a a different sense of what life actually is you 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 yeah you know like the feeling that you get when you go out in the sun like maybe you've been indoors in the winter and then there's a nice sunny day in the spring everybody's outside in the park like ah give me my vitamins right doesn't it feel like that you're lying down like give me my vitamins that's what it feels like in a nice sunny day at in like Central Park right that is a there's a a vitamin that we get in the wilderness that uh we are we don't know we're lacking in yeah I think it's a part of being a person I think I think it's a part of being interconnected to every life form that exists 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 there's something about it that's real similar there's something about it that's real weird where where our Our Own Prison of our own choosing is uh not good for us and it's interesting you know most all of the characters in Tiger King and Chim crazy did have have never seen Cham sort tigers in the wild or had any interest you know they were just they were just they didn't have the wanted control they didn't have the intellectual curiosity that you would think they would have to see them in the wild I'm not shocked um I do have a question though really important um the chimp with the McNuggets chicken nuggets did does he open up the sauce and dip yes did you show him dipping he peels yeah he well in that I think he just went like this but they suck but they are dextrous enough and they have eaten so much McDonald's they do know how to do that so they do dip the the nuggets in the sauce I don't think it's in that shot no they I've seen the the they actually peel it with their mouth yeah they peel the wrapper off they like wers but do they dig in with the Nugget get I think they just squeeze it in their mouth oh not dipping I like that question that's a good one we were confused like he's going to dip and then it cut away we don't is he [ __ ] dipping I mean the sauce toss moment was just so surreal amazing you want your sauce's your sauce it was so surreal incredible they know too much like just the the communication get that piece of paper and he gets the paper and brings it back they knew too much it's too creepy it's too it's it's so weird I mean you guys did an amazing job of capturing it and thank God you found that one nutty lady cuz she really glues it all together but everybody everybody should watch it it's it's really good and everybody should watch it also because you have to know that that's a thing like you you know you don't know what people are really capable of until you watch like a serial
killer documentary and you go oh Jesus in Christ that's the thing yeah so you don't know that people are keeping chimps in their house until you watch your show and you go oh that's a thing but but wake it wakes you up from Human confinement to the you know the symptom you just described of urbanization and Coastal bubbles it's it's kind of the people are like oh my God is this America like what are you of course like go outside 45 minutes away from where you live right right right I did know was a thing and I've been involved with animal people my whole life so yeah it's a thing monkey moms it's yeah there I mean I'm not saying that I'm not saying that it's it's if they'll do it there's some strange obsessions in this in this world yeah if if you give people free license to do it's one of the great things about being an American you have so many freedoms there's so many things you could do but it's also like at a certain point in time we got to wake up and go hey putting a dolphin in a [ __ ] swimming pool is evil you know and one day when AI can transcribe dolphin communication we're going to probably realize they're as smart as us and that's where it gets really really really scary is that we have been engaging in a form of indentured slavery we've 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 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 their Skin's falling off and the whole thing yeah but but think about this 100 years ago you can go to the Bronx Zoo and see you know a boy in a cage out of banga it was photo remarkable they kept in a cage right what year was that 198 is it 20s maybe he should he ultimately shot his brains out even people then knew that aanga this you know you know basically a indigenous man from West Africa with these 1912 or something like that I want anyway but he even then people were disturb to see a human being next to a gorilla in the and he was in a cage by himself I think he was in the ape house at the Bronx well first he was brought
for the World's Fair on display wow you know to show uh go there he is there you go they shaved his teeth down uh to to be more like fangs oh my God 1904 there it is so when what year at the Bron Su 190 so he died 1916 that's right okay so he was an ex in 1904 turn of the century yep Jesus so that's our history uh 1964 Bronx Su this incredible I I I I I love this this image it was a it was a it was an exhibition right the the uh world's most dangerous animal and it's a reflection it's a mirror with bars and you walk into it and you see yourself wow they were really cool they were conscious of that in 1964 1964 well it was 20 years after we dropped a [ __ ] couple of nuclear bombs this is a this is a how cool is that image that is cool that's yeah you would never have that today the most dangerous animal in the world is us which is you know so true well it certainly is numerically yeah you know and also just the impact we have overall we're a sketchy group um but we know more about us because of stuff like what you guys have done so thank you very much cool it was really fun talking to you um and did HBO fund this or did you guys bring it to HBO after it was done we Pro went mid Midstream so we we kind of typically what we do is we figure out if we have something we sell fund and velop something until we get to a point where we think it's ready I mean Tiger King I almost finished it before I brought it to anybody oh wow so I think now we have the ability to kind of control output in terms of control of what the ultimate product can be it was a little bit harder that back then um but yeah it's uh we kind of figure out if it's worth it or not and then we take it out but Joe thanks for having us my pleasure you guys nailed it twice it's really 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 that's um you're giving us a a better understanding of humans you know through this very strange lens of watching these very bizarre people and their psychological misfortunes like whatever it is about them whatever unfortunate aspect of their their 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 oh so I appreciate you having us my pleasure thank you guys and please finish the show I will I will I was just bummed out last night okay thank you very much guys bye bye everybody bye [Music] [Applause] [Music]