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.

Did you guys both do Tiger King as well?

Yeah. I came in towards the tail end. I remember meeting you about this.

Keep this close to your face. Okay.

It's okay.

You can scoot your... It moves and stuff.

Okay. Yeah. I met Eric towards the tail end of filming Tiger King. Yeah, that was the first experience I had with you.

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

Yeah. Captive cats and captive audience.

And just crazy people. And then your new show, Chimp Crazy, is basically all in the same vein. And it is so odd how nutty these animal people are, these people that have captive animals at their home. It's such a bizarre... I would like to see a clinical psychologist do an examination of what type of personality wants to have these enormous wild mild animals captive in their homes.

Yeah, for sure. It's incredible. And of course, that's what interests us because I'm an animal guy, but you have to have interesting people to tell a good story.

Well, we are animals. And we are animals. That's the weird part about it. We're this bizarre animal that likes to keep animals in cages.

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

Well, we certainly are. I mean, those people, they still believe in religion, but the reality of observable science is also there. Unfortunately, we're just a weird animal. We're the fucking weirdest ones. But the show Chimp Crazy, I I just finished episode three last night, and we got to number four, and my daughter wanted to watch number four. I'm like, I don't think I could do it. I was so bummed out after episode three. I was like, Oh, my God. I don't want to give away anything for people who haven't watched the series yet. I highly recommend it. It's really fucking good. But episode three, man, it's like there's something about... First of all, this is one of the rare times when I'm fully with PETA. When you side with PETA on things, it's like, this has got to be an egregious example of something absolutely horrific. The one situation where the woman who was drunk kept the chimp and then attacked her daughter and the whole thing. At the end of the show, it's like, Oh, my God, I don't know if I could keep doing this.

Yeah. No, it's interesting you mentioned PETA because I'm not fully aligned with on a number of things. But in this case, I am aligned with PETA. But just a touch on PETA. I work with reptiles and I try to save turtles and tortues, which actually are the most endangered group of animals, along with primates. Turtles and tortues, 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 tortues. I had no idea. But where I'm not aligned with Pita is when you have to make a choice between eradicating a rat that's killing off the last Galapagos tortues or eradicate a mongoose that was introduced that's killing off an iguana in the Caribbean, I will make that choice. Pita basically views it as the rat has rights just as much as the tortus. I'd like to have the tortus around for future generations. I'm not always aligned with PETA, but in this case, yes.

Well, they have a background with the Animal Liberation Organization, which essentially doesn't think that any animals should be captive. I do understand their point. But then you have Carl. How is Carl going to not have an owner? How's little Carl over there not going to be fed? Do you want French Bulldogs to go extinct? Because they will. They can't even breed.

If you did a poll and asked, How many people at Pee that keep dogs? It's like 95 %. Which is crazy. So it's a little hypocritical if they don't want people to have pets.

Well, it's one of those things. It's like how it starts and how it's going. Where did it start from? And I see their Look, all dogs are a horrible misjustice that's been done to wolves. Somehow or the other, we have become friends with wolves and turned them into these strange things. But the reality of life in 2024 is we have dogs, and dogs need owners, and they love you. It's a great relationship.

But it's in their genetics, right?

They've been- Sure. They've been domesticated thousands of years.

It's like saying that we should be going back to chimps. We should live in the jungle. We should live in trees, which is also crazy.

What is it, Erica? Chimps are more like chimps than we are human?

Is that- Chimps are closer to us than they are gorillas because we are the sub-family of chimpanze, which are called homonyms. Yes, chimpanzees are closely related to us more than any other ape. But it's back to what you said a minute ago about making these movies, I just want to touch on why we do this because a lot of people miss the point of Tiger King, even.

This is a point? Yeah, there's a point. I think I missed it.

Well, we were really trying to get Joe, exotic elected President. That was the point. No, but the point was that a lot of docs, man, are great and they are really informative, but they preach to the converted, people that already know the issue, like the Cove, and they're great. What we wanted to do is preach to people that don't know about the issue. You had to get a lot of eyeballs on it to make a difference, right? Right. That was the goal of both Tiger King and Jim Crazy. That was the goal of both Tiger King and Jim Crazy. In the end.

But I think you definitely did that. I mean, I had a joke in one of my earlier comedy specials about Texas and tigers, and I don't know the statistics, but there's more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the wild of the world in private collection. Yeah. We were just talking about that. Not in zoos, in people's yards. There's these wacky people that have fucking tigers in their backyards. And there's a lot of... There's thousands of tigers in Texas that are in people's yards.

Yeah, That statistic has been going around for a long time. That may change. But yes, they used to say there's more than 3,000 tigers in Texas, and there's less than 3,000 tigers in the wild. Yeah.

They think there's 5,000 in Texas. Wow. Believe it? Well, there's also other animals that are in Texas that are exotics, like a cimiter oryx, which is very rare in the wild and is endangered in the wild, but is so common in Texas that you can hunt them. They have them on these enormous ranches, 30,000, 50,000 acres, and they're wild. But they live wild. I don't have a problem with that. If they could figure out a way to actually ensure that tigers could be kept in a 60,000 acre preserve, and you had adequate funding to where the fences were completely monitored every day to make sure that they don't get out and kill people. You're talking about a It's a different thing. But what you're mostly getting is small enclosures of tortured animals who are fed cold meat. 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 keep populations down. They make sure there's not an overpopulation problem of undulets. That's what tigers do. That's what they do in the wild. All of their instincts, everything, their essence of their being is all stifled by being captive.

We were talking about girafes. 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 fucking head that's as big as his table would come over and gently take the lettuce with their tongue. We're so confident that they have no aggression towards people that we allow little babies to feed girafes. Girafes don't seem to have a problem at the zoo. They seem to be totally relaxed with it. But there's a lot of animals where it's nothing but torture.

For sure. I think it's incredible that in the day that we live in, in before, that in the consciousness of the culture that we still keep certain animals in zoos that really are miserable. Those are things like the whales and cetations and elephants are not happy in zoos.

Monkeys.

And most primates are not happy in zoos. Yes, and I think there are animals that lend themselves more, I'd like to say, to being in captivity.

Like girafes. I think girafes is the only example.

Yeah, or a giant tortus, maybe.

Yeah, that's a good example.

Solitary animals.

Well, even just animals, they're just happy that there's no predators. Sure. And then they're relaxed. But the last time I went to a zoo, my daughters were, they were younger, but not like babies. And we were in Denver. And I was there for a gig, and we went to the zoo. And, man, to this day, it haunts me. There's this primate enclosed, and this one monkey was just screaming, just screaming like an agony, like being tortured. Just, just holding on to the bars and screaming because he was by himself and this tiny little cage and there was nowhere to go and people were just staring at him all day, and he was just losing his fucking mind. I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore. I can't. Because I felt super hypocritical because I've always had an issue because it's animal prison. It's animal prison for animals that did nothing wrong.

I was at the Singapore Zoo once, which is a good zoo for zoos in Asia. It's one of the best zoos, maybe the best zoo, along with the Taipei Zoo. But there was a polar bear at the Singapore Zoo. This is like 95 % humidity, 90 degrees. And it was green because it was covered in a film of algae. So the polar bear was literally a green. And you just say to yourself, if you have a zoo in Alaska, you can maybe have a polar bear. But Phoenix, Arizona, Singapore.

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. So all day, they just want to roam and hunt. When I used to... I I drove limos for a while, and I had this gig once in New Hampshire, and I was on my way home, and I stopped just because I do this job where I dropped somebody off. It was a few hours away. And on the way back, I got lunch and I saw this zoo. So let me just check this zoo out. And I went to the zoo. It was this little shitty zoo somewhere, I think it was in Massachusetts. And there was this polar bear in this tiny little enclosed just going in circles like he was fucking crazy, Just going in circles. Tiny little enclosure. And I was like, why is this okay? What is this? This is not a life. This is terrible. It's terrible.

This There's another project we've been working on for equal time to Chimp Crazy, and you've been spending more time in over 10 years, which loosely covers the exotic animal wildlife trade, international wildlife trade. And through that interest, we've had this incredible opportunity to explore all of these moral truths about American zoos. For us, one thing that was deeply fascinating, if there's something like 242 accredited zoos in this country, 750 million people visit zoos annually, which is more than the five major sporting events combined. The way in which zoos function, it's like the 80/20 rule. There's five or 10 that contribute the majority of the income that cover most of the zoos, and they run entertainment complexes, like amusement parks, and very little money goes back into conservation. Now, there's a lot of zoos that are doing great stuff. And I think the things that we're learning about is the educational value of zoos for kids is no longer as what they intended it to be. I think there's great things that they do, but there's nothing proven around zoos are educational facilities for- 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 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 it 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 that was the big shakeup for zoos in terms of animal welfare. And now, of course, it's still evolving. And zoos are scared when they see Tiger King and even Chimp Crazy.

But Joe's daughter's grandkids will still see Orcas at SeaWorld. Do you think so? Yeah. Well, they live a long time. They live a long time. Maybe not granddaughters. But I say it more... I have little boys, a four-year-old and a one-year-old. And I think it's particularly interesting to go through this experience because they're obsessed with animals and you're educating them on these 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 believe. And 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.

Where he's going right now is a big part of our next documentary, which is about the illegal animal trade, but also zoos were complicit in that for a very time, maybe still. Anyway,.

Sorry. But the zoo thing, you're into it. You get emotional on this. What's really cool about this medium that we're in, we have access to all this information and all these people over large decades of work in conservation and zoos and PETA and legislation laws. I just love the idea of synthesizing this information to a point in today's context, which Which is, yeah, when you go to a zoo, no one seems to ask where the animals come from. It is a very simple idea that many people miss the point of when they go there. Now, I'm not anti-zoo totally either, and I have no real position or credibility to also suggest that. But I do think I'm interested in asking those questions of what we can do to make these institutions better.

Yeah. I mean, for sure they should be bigger. I mean, there should be a size requirement. You should have to have a 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. 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 going to let goats into the tiger cage and just let them sort it out? Because that's really what they want. What lions want to do is chase down a wild of 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. It's one thing if you're talking about something like the thylacine, where they kept them in captivity and the last known survivors. And you had this thing and It's like, wow, now we have video of this thing, and now it doesn't exist anymore.

So the zoos were the last hope to try to keep this thing from going extinct. It may not be extinct. There's a lot of hope.

Seed Banks. Yeah, the Tasmanian Tiger. Yeah, it was an eerie footage of the last ones.

Yeah, they think they're might actually be living specimens that are alive.

In this state, they're bringing them back.

I know you know Forest Galante.

Yeah, I was just about to bring up Forest.

I also have colleagues that have gone looking for thylacines in the highlands in New Guinea. So far, people anecdotally say, yes, there might be a thylacine, but it's unlikely, but there might be.

Well, they're very hard to find. Try finding a Wolverine. Wolverine populations are pretty healthy, but good luck finding one. They're very, very, very difficult to find unless you spend an enormous amount of time alone in the bush. Yeah, good point. Yeah. And then you're dealing with thiosines. 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 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 a lion, 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 Look at that lion. And it is educational for children. But at what cost and are there better resources now? And I think video is a much better resource. It's much better to see lions in the wild.

No, I mean, of course. Zoos were originally created. It was like good civic planning 150, 200 years ago. To have a park, a zoo, a library when you were building a city. So they were really just built as a good city needs to have It's entertainment. They weren't really designed to have anything to do with conservation or anything to do with animal welfare. But yeah, today, like you mentioned, the oryx here in Texas, There are species that have either gone what we call biologically extinct, which means that one animal can't find another, they're virtually extinct, or they are extinct to the wild. Zoos may offer some hope for those animals where they can put them into what's called assurance colonies and try to maintain genetically diverse groups in a zoo for the day that one day you can return it to the wild. There's maybe a reason to have animals in captivity.

How much success Just as there been in returning animals to the wild, though?

Well, where we live in California- You just did it.

But you just did it with the Eastern box turtle in Jersey.

No, no, no. Back to the example he's talking about is California condors. California condors. Or black-footed ferrets or animals that... I mean, whatever it's called. There's an endemic horse that they've done some work with. But yeah, 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 be a priority with certain animals, 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 Grand Canyon in Arizona. When I was young, in the '70s, there was maybe 28 of them left in the wild. They brought them into captivity. Today, there's probably hundreds in the wild, but at a very expensive price tag, because what made them go extinct in that case was the lead bullets that kill a deer. The condor would eat the deer and then die from the lead. So the condors, to use that example, there's just a lot of management to keep them alive in the wild.

I think there's some dispute about that. About which one? 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.

It just 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 are covered. It's so small. Interesting. 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 charge on a condor. A condor in a day can travel 400 miles in the thermals looking for a carcass. And I would suspect that the fact that there's just less carcasses out there might be part of it.

I That's what I was going to say. I think that's the argument. I think the argument is there's less predators and there's less prey. You have a... California, for example, you have a fairly small deer population because you have so many animals that kill deer. California has a lot of coyotes, and California has a lot of mountain lions. There's a lot of people where I used to live in the hills that did not like coyotes. I'm like, Do you like rats? Okay, well, if you don't like rats, you should like coyotes. Yeah, don't leave your dog outside because your dog is going to get... My daughter's puppy got killed by a coyote, and I've had chickens killed by coyotes.

Ranchers hate coyotes more than anything.

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

But there forever, there was a bounty on coyotes, where if you brought in two ears, you got like a buck, and people would bring in 100 sets of ears and get $100. I mean, they were vilified. When I grew up in California, the ranchers next to us, which are sheep ranchers because sheep are dumb and coyotes can get sheep easier than calves. They would trap the coyote with those horrible traps. They'd pour gasoline on They'd light them on fire and let them run off burning. I mean, they hate coyotes, which is really unfair.

Well, they're cool. They're just not cool if they eat your cat. But they're a fascinating animal. I remember when I first saw them, I moved to California in 94, and I was staying at... Do you know what the Oakwood Gardens are? It's like those pre-furnished apartments that you just rent, people that are transient, just moving in. They allow you to have a place before you get a place. I was driving, so it was in Burbank, and I was driving down the street, and I was like, Who are these fucking dogs? What is going on? Why are these dogs running around? And then 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 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 cool to live out there. But you experience a lot of wildlife. And I saw coyotes almost every day. Almost every day.

Yeah, they look like a mangey, motley, skinny dog.

Yeah, but they're cool. There's something cool about coyotes. But the reality of coyotes, I don't know if you know why they're so successful, but one of the reasons why is because they're the only... So red wolves can interbreed with coyotes, in that you get the koi wolf. But gray wolves do not breed with coyotes. They just kill them. And so because the gray wolf, which lived in California and lived all over the West Coast, was the predominant predator, the coyotes had to develop a way of surviving. 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 crows are one of those animals, raccoons are one of them, coyotes. And they're weirdly can thrive and do better around human activity than a lot of other animals. And so coyotes are one of those. Because of garbage. Because of garbage, because of water. We bring in water in arid areas. So they're highly adaptable creature. And just for the record, I do like coyotes, and I listen to them almost every night having a tailgate party behind my house.

They're cool.

They're cool. They're interesting. They make the eeriest noise together. They caught something.

Yeah, but I'm sure you've seen that video from Woodland Hills where this man was unloading his car and a coyote came and snatched his toddler. Like right in front of them. It's hard. They're fucking predators, right? And you have to be careful. Little things and little people and animals will get eaten by them, and that is what they do.

Like dingos in Australia do that.

Right. Dingo ate my body. There's 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 here. And if you go to the mountains of Colorado, people are well aware of mountain lions. They're well aware of bears. They have to lock their garbage up. They have a neighborhood email list where they talk about bears broke in 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. It's just weird. We're fucking weird. We're weird in our justifications. We're we're weird in what we allow ourselves to do.

Yeah, that's back to the chimpanzees. That was one of the things that I just couldn't ever... I couldn't ever connect with this woman, Tanya, that kept this chimp and tried to explain to her that we are chimps, effectively. She just took the page out of Genesis, where she just said, I'm We're not animals. This is an animal, and I can own it like property. Anyway, that was just one of the things she just never really fully understood.

Well, to be kind, she's not bright. She's not a bright woman, not a well-read woman, unfortunately. This seems to be part of the theme of all these folks, which is weird. Then you got the one guy in Tiger King that's essentially running a little sex cult, right? That guy. Doc Antle. Yeah. Then you've got the Tiger King himself. Joe. You got Joe Exotic, who is also running a strange little sex cult. But he's just got all this personality, and he's so interesting and fascinating. And if he wasn't in jail, it's really unfortunate, because if he wasn't in jail, he'd be a very popular person.

He hasn't even seen the show, which is amazing.

Can you imagine if he was- Well, he's trying to get Donald Donald Trump to exonerate him.

And pardon him. I mean, he was constantly, after I talked about Tiger King, I get messages from that guy. I don't know how he's giving me messages. I'm assuming it's someone who works for him. But I get messages all the time. You've got to help get him out, put him on your podcast, do this, do that.

Well, he also has communication in jail. Somehow he's able to get a phone. He's doing video calls.

Well, you know how it goes. But there was a moment when we were filming this second installment of Tiger King, where we covered this pardon, the presidential pardon.

There was a real shot where Joe was actually on a list, supposedly, that Trump was going to like it. Hilarious. It's hilarious.

I don't remember exactly what the specifics of his accusation. Was he caught trying to hire someone to whack that lady?

Yeah.

So he was. Twice. Yeah. That lady, is there any truth to this idea that she whack her husband?

Carol Baskin. There's a lot of circumstantial, I wouldn't say maybe evidence, but it's who else?

It's not clean. Who else?

It was either... It feels as if it was her or members of her family, and they were the only ones to gain. And so, yeah.

And what a great way to dispose of a body.

I don't know how she disposed of the body.

It's nice to- Well, you have meat grinders on premises, and you have enormous predators on premises, and you feed them a tiger.

Don't you think the only thing I would say, Eric, is the circumstances surrounding the change in the will. I mean, who alters it to account for disappearance? It's a very, very That's right.

No one says that. It's a very, very strange thing.

And there's really a good disparity in the handwriting as well.

We did handwriting experts. We did the entire thing to prove otherwise.

It's also just when she talks about it.

But Joe, back to Joe He was exotic. I was on the phone with him a lot up until he was convicted from prison. And he just was convinced he was going to be exonerated and not convicted. And they offered him, the feds offered him deal, which was something like six or seven years. You can plea or you can go to court.

He'd probably be out by now.

I was just going to say he'd be out now. He was so convinced that he was going to win, which is so delusional. 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 and let you out in four years? I know you've been locked up with a bunch of murderers and steeds, but I'm sure you're a better person now.

Yeah. It's plot and then intent. Paying someone to go do something.

Right. There's quite a few steps involved.

But yes, Joe is now pro-Trump again. He was pro-Biden when Trump didn't exist. Was he?

Because he was trying to get Biden to pardon him. They wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole, but Trump might, especially this time around, just for funsies.

Well, let's hope Tanya doesn't go to prison. I don't wish that on Tanya.

I haven't seen episode four, so I don't know. But when you guys were filming, again, spoiler alert, please, if you're watching the series, to stop right now and scoot ahead by a few minutes. When they found that Tonka was in the basement, when they found that Tonka was in the basement. When you guys were filming it, I was like, Jesus Christ, this lady is so crazy. She's showing everybody. I know. She has... I know. With all due respect, she just does not seem like a smart person. She's almost like, if you gave her an IQ test, and then gave a chimp an IQ test. It'd be a toss-up. I 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. All of it is just there's some fuses that are missing, some wires that aren't connected. Then because of the fact that at one point in time, at least, it was illegal for her to do what she was doing, and they become accustomed to being able to have... Then their identity And it just involves around, they're the person that has all the monkeys and all the chimpanzees.

It was just fucking weird.

It's still legal. It is still? It's still legal.

I thought they changed it.

No, there's no federal law preventing ownership of chimpanzees. Jesus Christ.

You can own a Are you a fucking chimp still?

There's 20 or so states legally can do it.

Oh, my God.

I thought. Missouri is one of them.

Oh, my God.

But background, we spent about four years making this documentary series. First of all, how did you start?

How do you find out about these people?

Yeah, go ahead.

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

I've known a lot of animal people, Joe, but I did not know about monkey moms. And along the course of making Tiger King, I started filming some Monkey Moms. As you see in Jim Crazy, you just can't make them up. And so after Tiger King, I just thought, let's scratch the surface. Let's check into these monkey moms again. Yeah. It's these women that dress up their monkeys like dolls, like Jomba Day, Ramsey, like a little pageant doll, and they want them to be kids. They seem to have the same pathology over and over and over. There's a lot of monkey moms out there that we did not film, and they have annually something called a monkey ball, where they all come together with their monkeys. Anyway, we discovered them in the course of making Tiger King, and Yeah.

My grandmother had a monkey. We hear the story a lot.

My grandmother had a monkey. Yeah, we hear the story a lot. That she kept in the attic. Really? Yeah. The monkey's name was Chichi, and Chichi used to eat gum. So you give Chichi a piece of gum. Chichi 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 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 because it bit my cousin.

Yeah. Well, that's what happens. Yeah.

But Chichi couldn't be around anybody other than my grandmother. My grandmother was very eccentric.

Yeah, and they're territorial and they're protective of their owner. When I was young in the '60s, '70s, '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.

I could buy them in the newspaper.

Yeah, and they're not good pets. I think my grandmother, after her kids were grown, she just decided she wanted a kid forever. If I had a Wow. Yeah, if I had a guess.

That's our consensus on a lot of it.

Also a kid that doesn't talk back.

It's a great book. The book you love, it's by this guy who had a store in New York, Henry Treflic. It's called They Don't Talk Back. It's these chronicles of his experiences through the last...

This was a big exotic animal dealership that existed up until the '70s in New York City, but they had everything: chimps, gorillas, elephants, and they sold stuff to the private sector and zoos.

You could walk into a Wilworth and buy monkeys.

They still, to this day, catch people with large animals in their apartments in New York City. Wasn't there one real recently where a guy had a large reptile.

Venomous snakes, yeah. Was it snakes? The Venomous snake bite, Eric?

Well, that one guy, I think it was in Harlem, who had a tiger in his house. Yeah. And there's a crazy image of the cops going up the fire escape and the tigers in the window. And you see the tiger bearing its fangs in the lingo. That glass is that fucking thin, man. That is so crazy. This thing is trapped in this regular apartment with regular glass. 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's crazy.

But the The bizarre thing is that there's humans that want those. They want those.

The tiger thing is more of a macho thing, I think.

What about Carol, then? She's a woman.

Yeah, she's an anomaly. It's funny.

But she liked the lesser known cats, right?

I interviewed Tiffy Hendren in the course of doing all of this. And her Xanadu, it's called Shambala with all of her cats. I know you've talked about this, about Melanie Griffith growing up with lions.

That crazy movie, Roar?

Yeah. Oh, and that movie, Roar.

The bed photograph is a fantastic.

Oh my God, that movie, Roar. But yeah, when I interviewed Tiffy Hendren, literally on our property in California, she lives with all these tigers and lions. She built a museum for herself. She's got her own museum, the Tiffy Hendren Museum, where I interviewed her. But yeah, there are some women, Tiffy Henry and Carol Baskin. But it's generally But really speaking, I think it's more men.

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

Believe that?

Probably. You've got some oil money.

You've got canned ranches in Texas.

There's a lot of those. There's a lot of canned ranches, which is very odd. Some of them are fairly small, like a couple of hundred acres, and they keep animals there. In my mind, what that is is agriculture. It's just you're doing a different form of deer agriculture. You're not really hunting. Hunting, to me, is you go into the wild, you go into the woods, and you experience real nature. It's fascinating. It's enthralling. It's also so lonely. There's something about being in those mountains just puts you in check. None of that exists in a canned ranch.

Yeah, a canned ranch, you can go shoot, like in South Africa, a lion. The lion was raised in a of domestic situation.

And recently released.

Yeah, so it just sits there. There's no sport in it. Hunting in the United States for elk or deer, there's a lot of things people don't know about hunting, which is, one, just obvious statistic is that more wild lands are protected because of hunting. So, yeah, you're killing a deer, but you're protecting all the other stuff.

Well, the amount of money, because of the Pittman-Robertson Act, the amount of money that gets, I think it's 10 20% 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. They also know because say if you shoot a deer, you have to register that you shot the deer. You have a tag. They make sure that your tag is right. You got the right species, you got the right sex, the whole deal. They have a very accurate number of how many animals in there, and they spend a lot of money doing this. 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. Part of that is because of agriculture. That's where it gets weird. Agriculture, particularly, I have a good buddy of mine who is an archer, a professional archer, and he lives in Iowa. I always get those confused. In Iowa, it's all farmlands, right? And they have enormous deer, and they set these ranches up.

He has a place that's like 600 acres. There's no fences. The animals come and go. But they establish these food plots, and they put these things in to make it a good place for deer to be so they can hunt them. So it's this weird-Planned community.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. These deer thrive there because when they chop down the corn, they don't chop down the corn. They don't it all down. These deer, they go in there after fresh feedings. They go there, you see them eating corn, and they eat grass. There's grass everywhere. There's plenty and plenty of food, and a very low number of predators. Iowa does not have a lot of wolves. They don't have wolves. They a lot of animals that would balance out the population of these animals. You have insane amounts of car accidents. When I went to visit my buddy there and just driving from the airport to his house, we saw 50 fucking deer. And if you're going there around November, which is the rut, the men lose their mind.

So the male deer, they're horny as hell. They're crazy. And the female are breeding. The female are running from the males and they're running right in the traffic. And the males are running after them. They're running right in the traffic. It's nuts. It's a really nutty situation because it only exists because there's no predators. California has this bizarre model. And what California would like, I mean, California is, I think, the only state that doesn't have a fish and game Department. They have fish and wildlife, and so they treat it very differently. Instead of treating it as a renewable resource where people can go and get their own and hunt animals in the wild. They treat it like we should have the animals take care of themselves. That's why it's illegal to kill a mountain lion in California, and they have a large number of mountain lions. Probably underreported.

I have mountain lions on my property all the time.

They're dangerous. They're underreported. They are a predator, and they will kill people, and they have killed people. It's not often, but if you're on a bike, the problem with being on a bike is you're moving a little too quick, and their instincts take over. They think you're trying to run from them, and they can't even help themselves. It's like a kitten with a ball yarn and their instincts to clip in, and they just go chasing after it. But I've seen mountain lions in the wild, and it is a sobering moment when you stare into the eyes of one of those things.

You're like, whoa. What are you supposed to do?

You can't do much, man. Make a lot of noise.

You're not supposed to run.

You don't run. If you have a weapon, you should really have that weapon ready because they will jump you. Every now and then, they jump people. There's a It's a crazy video. The jogger. 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. For some reason.

But they also live in the least populated areas For the most part, yeah.

At Mount Lion, yeah, of course, they will kill someone, but typically, they're not looking for people.

Right. They're not looking for people.

It's not like a tiger that has all its prey, get trapped by the local people in India, and they have to go out and try to find prey, and it's people oftentimes.

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. So They're probably a figure. Like, grizzly bears behave very differently in places where grizzly bears are hunted. So in the Lower 48, it's illegal to hunt grizzly bears. So if they see you, if you run into them in the wrong, they're not going to run away. They might run towards you, especially Especially if you surprise them, it's very dangerous. And they will treat you as food if they're really hungry.

In the course of making Tiger King, I would interview people about tigers and what it's like keeping 100 tigers. People would always say to me, I'd rather have 100 tigers than one chimp. And that's because chimps, and everyone thinks, Oh, a tiger is so dangerous. But chimps can figure shit out. And one of the The chronic problem is 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 oftentimes three layers of locks. I'm just bringing it back to chimps because people think, Oh, it's a chimp. It's so cute. It's in the circus. Trust me, it's a lot easier to have a tiger act than a chimp act.

Oh, I could imagine. Also, when I was watching this lady's enclosed, 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 the 100%. 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 engaged in steel bars, but the steel bars are connected by wood. Wood's easy for a chimp to break. They're so much fucking stronger than us. If that thing knew that it could just grab those bars and slam and slam.

It would have worked on that all day.

100% it would have got through. You would have had to figure out a way, way, way better cage, especially the one that she put in her home.

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 ever saw was this blonde woman. The guy gave the chimp Playboy, and then it graduated to porn. The chimp, because he'd never seen other chips, he it was race in isolation, started thinking it was human and started sexually identifying with this woman that was keeping it and started becoming addicted to pornography. Just to give you a weird segue. But how crazy. And these chimps, they'll have a favorite show. I remember a group of them in South Africa, all they watched was Avatar. But anyway, back to how-How ironic. Weird it is to keep chimpanzee, you don't have a tiger getting addicted to human pornography or watching Avatar all day long. Anyway.

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

Well, that's where I was going. One of the things we did not cover, which I always wanted to know more about, is what really is going on in that bed with that woman? I I don't want to talk about it in too much detail here, but you have to ask yourself, how weird does it get?

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

And Viagra? You haven't seen the- What?

And Viagra?

She was giving it Viagra? No, I'm joking.

But who knows?

You can't joke about that. You're going to get sued.

Yeah, you cannot joke. But speaking of that, though, you saw the episode. How do chips need Viagra? No, they're very active.

You know, it's funny.

I heard that a chimp can fuck 50 times a day in the wild.

So maybe they don't need Viagra.

Well, Primates are very promiscuous, and chimpanzees in particular. If you notice that chimpanzees have the largest balls of any primate, and there's a reason for that. The more promiscuous the female chimpanzees are, the more sexually active the males become and the bigger their testicles are. It's like a direct correlation between the size of the male's testicles. They think that exists with human beings as well, but it's more problematic to examine. Oh, so that's my problem.

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

I think that with chimpanzees, you're dealing with these incredibly complex social structures. I'm sure you guys have seen Chimp Nation, 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 chimpanzees 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, just move away. Don't ever have food. There's a bunch of rules. And as long as you have those rules, they behave completely normally, and they just... You're just a thing. You're like a tree or a bird or something they're not interested in, which is really interesting.

Yeah, amazing.

Because they got incredible footage of the social interactions. They got a detailed analysis of how they establish dominance and who's in control. We used to think it's always the biggest, strongest chip, but no, it's not. It's ones that form unions and bonds and communities. Very interesting. It's so much like us.

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

Years.

And years. I think they really invested the time, and they deserve the credit because they put in that amount of time. For us to do even Trim crazy, we filmed... How many days?

It's probably close to 250 days.

Most people can't do that.

It's incredible. Resource suck. 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 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. Or what's it called? Chimp Nation.

Chimp Empire. Empire. Well, see, There's two, right? Chimp Empire, right?

Chimp Empire. Is Chimp Nation another one?

Chimp Empire. Yeah, this is the Netflix one.

The way that... See, the thing about the difference in your show is you need someone who's compelling, and so you have to find someone... What's her name again? Tanya. Tanya. Crazy Tanya. And Joe Exotic. You need someone who's the figurehead, 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. 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. You can't do this. They're dangerous. They're big. They get older. You can't control them. What happens to them? It's not fair for them to be in a... And then you go, I don't want to chimp. But if you're dull-minded, if you got a nine-volt brain and you look at this like, I am going to take... They're more important to me than my own babies. When she says stuff like that, you're like, Oh, well, you shouldn't even have a dog. You definitely shouldn't be allowed to vote.

No, but it's interesting. You say you have to find those characters, but you also have to find a story I mean, you can talk about this, is how wide a net we cast. Because after Tiger King, it wasn't like we just jumped into this chimp mom world. We were filming Mark the Shark and women. Yeah, we were interested.

It took a lot of time. In the animal-human relationship in a variety of forms. I think we... And you see in episode one, one of the first things we shot, years before we even met Tanya, was this woman, this part of the circus family, Pam Rosear, watching 2001's Space Odyssey with her chimpanzee, Chance. Yeah. I mean, talk about sobering experience. Me and Carl distance with Chance, the chimpanzee, 15 years old, pounding a basically a modified trailer home, the floor echoing. The loudness of that sound on the floor was so loud, I had to take my headset off.

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 into a tiger enclosed because the thing about tigers is as long as they're about under the age four, even though it looks like a full-grown tiger, they haven't gone through puberty yet. They haven't gotten the tiger mentality of killing you. But a chimp... Anyway, the chimp filming was much more difficult.

They're also human characters and wiry, and you don't know what's going to happen. They're on these leashes.

It's also how they evolved. I mean, that's what kept them alive. You watch Chimp Nation, it's like those instincts is what keeps them alive.

Sure. Very murderous.

Well, we didn't really know how murderous they were until Attenborough. When David Attenborough did that series, I think it was in the '90s, when he captured the chimps eating monkeys. Yeah, ripped them. This is one of the things that when I had the guy from Chimp Nation on, I discussed it with him. He's like, How often they eat monkeys? He's like, We couldn't even show it all. It would just be like the whole show would be Chimps 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 call them us monkeys. Yeah. And they eat... I'm a reptile guy, and in the range of those chimps in the wild, there's a tortoise. And this tortoise, it's like our box turtles, but it's much bigger, but it's called a hingeback tortoise, and it literally closes up like a rock. You can't see it any flesh. The chimps will grab that tortoise, and they'll just bang it against the tree and just crack it up in like a cantaloupe. I'm just saying that because, yes, they're really hard core when it comes to the way they on other animals.

And they're about as strong as a 500-pound man. That's about right. It's so insane for us. We had a chimp on the set of news radio, '96 or something like that. There was a baby chimp. It was a baby in a diaper. And this chimp climbed on my back and whacked me a couple of times in the back just playing. He was just having fun. I remember, first of all, the feeling of holding it is like it was made out of steel wires. It wasn't made like a baby. You pick up a baby, babies are soft. You pick up a three-year-old, they're all soft little things, and you hold on to them, and they're weak. These things were strong as fuck, in a bizarre way. We like to look at something that's close to our size and think, Oh, I could probably overpower that. I know how to fight. I'll fight that fucking chimp off. No, you have zero chance. It's a different thing. Everything about it is different. The The muscle structure is completely different. The tendon structure is completely different. The amount of force it can generate-The arm leverage is pretty incredible.

They also want to fuck with you. They also want to-I was just going to say, people always talk about, Will a bear kill the lion?

Or will the bear killed the tiger. I think chimpanzees, and you're into, obviously, fighting, and I think they are the most diabolical fighters because I don't know what a chimp would do to a grizzly, but a goes after your genitals, your fingers, your face. They know how to fuck you up like nothing else.

Yeah, they know how to debilitate you and take away what makes you a human. Yeah. They also have zero remorse. They're like a human in that they can think, but they have zero empathy, and they're fucking dangerous.

I'm writing this. It was so fascinating, you'd think, knowing all this about chimps later, and remember this, Eric, we were talking about, well, there must be reported human deaths in the United States with chimp attacks, and we couldn't find any.

It's only memes.

It's only little-I mean, there are globally, but-Globally, a lot of them in Africa, little kids get snatched and stuff. Kids get eaten. Kids get eaten. But in the US, there has been no really human death caused by chimpanze. Now, What was fascinating, and you haven't watched this yet, but in episode four, we go, it comes from delusion to reality, and it's heavy. We filmed our first chimpanze funeral. And what we didn't show, which I just remember this now, So everyone that would come up to say their piece would share a story where they were attacked by that animal.

Oh, God.

It was so the juxtaposition of this celebration of life and these attacks in this context of a situation they shouldn't have ever been in. It was remarkable.

And animal attacks in general across the board in roadside zoos and private sector are completely underreported because people don't want their animals taken away. So if a tiger attacked someone and they have a huge laceration, they'll go to the hospital saying it was a chainsaw. Because the second they say it was my tiger or my chimp, they run the risk of losing that animal.

You also have the problem with less than extraordinary people being addicted to extraordinary circumstances. If you have a boring ass fucking life in some middle of nowhere town, but you also have a lion, all of a sudden life is pretty interesting. That's Joe Exotic, right? Well, Joe Exotic, I think, is pretty smart. He's odd, for sure, but intelligent. But in Tanya's case, what would that lady be like if she didn't have chimps? 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 very compelling way. When people live boring-ass lives, things Things like that seem like something that that's who I am. That's me. Because it's extraordinary experiences from persons that are- Where does that come from, though?

Is it influence?

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 environment and circumstances, we like extraordinary experiences. I think it's what made people successful. I think the more daring and the more addicted you were to extraordinary experiences, the more likely you were to find new hunting grounds, the more likely you were to conquer neighboring tribes, the more likely you were to survive an attack. I think human beings like extraordinary experiences. We like comfort, but not as much as we like extraordinary experiences.

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

Which is so wild. They were straight guys. I mean, that guy had some fucking game. Exactly. Yeah, I guess I see your point. Come on.

If you have a chimp, a baby chimp, you're walking around Austin, Texas. Sure. People come up to you and go, Oh, Joe, I love your little chimp.

That's interesting. I want to go out with you. What a weird way to try to attract people. They always say that about puppies. Guys bring a puppy to the park.

I'm more interested in Carl now.

I What's your motivation over there with that baby dog?

Isn't it interesting when you see Carl interact with Marshall? Because Marshall is like, I don't want to hurt you. I don't want nothing to do. Just stop biting me. What are you doing?

Yeah, you can see it.

Yeah, but you got two different kinds of things. One of them is like a little bulldog, it's a little psychopath. And the other one is a golden retriever. It's like a love sponge. All he wants to do is be your friend. He wants to be your friend unless you're a squirrel. That's really interesting. You watch his reaction to squirrels, like his intensity when it comes to squirrels and birds.

It's a movement, right? It's the movement? Is that what it's ?

It's just instincts. It just fires up that part in their DNA that knows that that's what they do. But the bizarre thing with retrievers is it's not to eat it. It's to bring it to you. It's always to bring it to you. One time I got home and I let the dog out. I opened up the back door and I just had to take a leak. So I took a leak. And then as I flushed, washed my hands, opened the door. He's standing there with a squirrel on his mouth. He got a squirrel that quick. He wanted me to know. He was so happy. I was like, Dude, what did you do? He was like, What did I do? I'm like, What did you do, man? I got rid of the squirrel. But whenever he sees one, it's just nobody had to teach him that. He's locked in. That's what he wants to do. He wants to go get squirrels, and he wants to bring them back to you. It's a weird thing because you understand predatory instincts. Like, cats have them. They're the worst. Cats, they have killed so many fucking birds. It's something like a...

It's multiple billions of mammals and birds are killed every year by outside cats.

The first thing that kills songbird birds is glass window, skyscrapers of glass windows. Second is domestic cats, and they are killing machines, and they really do take a toll on wild birds.

I went, because I'm getting ready for this podcast, I went down a dirty road last night, a worm hole of cats, predatory cats. And there's these compilations of cats just jacking pigeons, jacking squirrels, jacking everything. Everything they can get their hands on.

Now, cats are bad unless they're indoors, domestic cats. In Hawaii, cats are the reason why so many species in Hawaii went extinct.

Yeah. 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 went extinct because of domestic cats that were introduced into Mauritius 200, 300 years ago, whenever Dodo birds went extinct. But no, they're killing machines. They're machines. Sorry to interrupt you.

No, no, no, no worries. Their predatory instincts are more reasonable. I understand that they're cats, and that's what cats do. 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. I didn't even have to teach him to bring a ball back. He learned within the first two or three throws. If I throw the ball, he brings it back to me. It's brought into them. Whereas every other dog that I've had, I had to teach him. 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, then they understand. They praise them. Then eventually, they understand commands, and they have this 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 there. But that's his programming, Which is crazy. Which is so much of what we found so interesting about the justification for this love that a lot of the subjects we've covered had for these chimpanzees was that they love me. They do these things with me. I've trained them to believe that they have feelings for me and I have feelings for them. We have this understanding. I feel what we've realized is this imbalance of this mutuality reality of caregiving that I think exists with a lot of our subjects that we cover, but also some of the chimpanzees. It's very incredibly selfish around the symmetry of needs.

But it's so disturbing. You have a beautiful lab, the dog, that Tanya says constantly how much she loves this chimp, Tonka, but the chimp is incarcerated in this cage. It's like, Tanya, if you really love this chimp and Tonka loves you back, why the cage? You You don't have a cage for your dog. It just seems so obvious. 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. 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. She said it has congestive heart failure. Spoiler alert, again. It's still good. You You still got to watch it, folks. But if you give a person that, they fucking get sick. Nothing you're doing to that chimp is natural. The cage is not natural. The food is not natural. Nothing's natural. You know, one of the saddest things for me was when she was showing it Instagram reels and just scrolling through reels and the chim's just staring at the screen. That was the weirdest one.

That's really disturbing.

For whatever. But meanwhile, I do that.

I know that's a lot of the sentiment we see from people as a reaction to that. We are basically doing that ourselves.

Oh, 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. I'm going to go out in the real world and have fun with human beings and have a good time with my friends. You can make those choices. The chimp doesn't have a choice. It's essentially a prisoner for no reason, and it likes the guard.

And that chimp, Tonka was looking at its kids in that footage, whether Tonka knew it or not.

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.

And to be outside. Sitting there in that cage in the basement, looking at these chims, washing a Mercedes that's outside. We both still talk to Tanya almost daily or communicate with Tanya.

Oh, my God.

It's the most bizarre communication because everyone thinks I lied to Tanya about this film. She would have talked to me anyway. I'm convinced of that. When I did come into the picture, she didn't skip a beat, and she was like, Oh, it's you. Let's keep filming for another year and a half. But she continues to talk with us, and we continue to tell her, Tanya, Maybe this is an opportunity for you to rethink and reinvent yourself. Anyway, it's really interesting.

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

I know.

It's hard not to be compassionate with a lot of these people, to be honest. It's really hard because-They're humans. They're humans.

Well, especially Tanya, because she led us into her life in such an intimate way that she was really generous that way. So it isn't black and white.

There's a lot of gray. I understand It seems-I understand an audience reaction, though, and you can have those conflicting views on it, but being part of making it as... We're partially complicit to it, too, as well. I mean, in a way of sharing that story, in a way.

Well, there's the age-old term, with great power comes great responsibility. It is a great responsibility to hold a large chimpanzee in your house. That is a great power. It is an enormous responsibility. She should not have the option to have that responsibility. She's not capable of managing that situation. I don't think anybody's capable of it. I think the same way, I just think dolphins, we're lucky that they're nice. That's what I think. We're lucky that they're nice because they should be killing us every chance they can, too. They're little rapists. They are. They're not just that, but Infanticide, the reason why female dolphins are so promiscuous. I know. Well, male dolphins, when they find a female, if the female has babies, she will not breed for a I think it's a long period of time. I think it's around six years. Oh, wow. See if that's true. The way the male will do will kill the babies. The males will kill the babies to force her into estrous, so she will start breeding again. What the females do to counteract that is to have sex with as many male dolphins as they can. They have sex with all the male dolphins.

They're not monogamous in any way, stretch, or form. They just go and fuck as many guys as they can. Those guys will protect their babies because they don't know if that's their baby or not, because they know they've had sex with her. But if they have not had sex with her, and then she has babies, they will kill that baby.

Are any animals monogamous? Because they used to think so.

Yeah, penguins. But they only do it for a year. They're monogamous for a year. But they also look exactly the same, which is a trap.

They used to think macabre parrots were monogamous and swans. Then they started doing the genetics, and they realized they cheat like hell.

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

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. We communicate-No stories. Yes, and we empathize with each other. We recognize things in other people, even heinous people, even people that you don't like, whether it's Joe Exotic or Tanya. You recognize, I see. She's not... I get it. She's just a person who's all fucked up. Even that crazy drunk lady who had the one that attacked her daughter, what happened to her? What was her childhood like? It couldn't have been good.

She's the one person out there who's still alive who I really don't want to hear from because I really wonder right now, what is she thinking? Well, the calmness.

While her daughter was being attacked on the phone, the calmness of that phone call was just shocking. Suspicious. I think when that lady from the liquor store was talking about how much that lady drinks, who knows what she's even responsible for anymore. She's got to be out of her fucking mind all the time if she's drinking that much booze.

I think she wanted out with the chimp. I think she was as caged, as depressed as the chimp, possibly in that house after 15 years living with this chimp that she thought was her son, and then later was dressing 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 really remarkable. They're also basically in cages, the humans taking care of the chimpanze. You really think about it. The same goes for Sandy, Sandy Harold. What was so great about revisiting that story in Connecticut. We were set to come out with this show in March this year, and we were basically wrapped in November, and we were going through finishing, and we suddenly got access to the entire Travis story. We work with this guy who wrote this incredible article, a New York magazine article named Dan Lee. It's one of the best written articles about Travis. It's called Travis the Menace. He has no attribution of sources. You don't know who is talking. So it's the 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, 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 Sandy's world.

We had this archive, the video that you has never been seen before. This portrait of a family, this 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 starting point was for this whole project was always around, how do we understand where captive primates came from in America? Connie Casey was this place, this breeding ground for all of these animals that were cycled through Hollywood. What I found very interesting is this this lineage that led to Travis. Travis was sold to Sandy, and then you see the descent. It's so incestuous. It's so incestuous that they're all connected. You'll see a little bit of an episode four.

There it is. Travis the Menace.

It's a remarkable story. This is Sandy who bought Travis from Connie. Connie, it was Susie was the mother.

By the way, how much does that photograph freak you out? When you see that chimp holding that baby at any minute and just decide to pull that baby's head off.

When chimp smile, it's actually a sign of aggression. It's not like us. We smile because we're happy. That's not a happy chimp doing that.

He's trained to.

But he's trained to smile. He's not necessarily aggressive right here. He's trained to show his teeth because it's cute.

It's more of a grimace. It's more of a happy smile, I guess, if you want to call it that. It was fascinating to us to get access to this story. We go into it and-He's drinking soda from McDonald's.

That's disturbing.

Yeah, he got too big.

Well, you're giving him the standard American diet.

But look at the canines compared to ours. Look how they're daggers.

Oh, well, the bite force, everything. I mean, everything about them. We are so watered down by the evolutionary process. I was real aware of that when I was touching that two-year-old chimp with diapers. Like, real aware. It It's a different thing. And when you're taking this thing and it's a time bomb, you have 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 it. Just so crazy. But this classic story. It was this gothic fairytale in Stanford, Connecticut, which was so unusual because it's a suburb of Manhattan. Everyone thought this was in the south or wherever. It was happening in Stanford, Connecticut. It. Sandy had this void in her life. She buys Travis and raises her part of the family. You see the story, the same arc as every other chimp story in a family setting. They get too mature and they have to... The thing that I thought you'd appreciate in terms of our this idea that we show in this story really well, I think, is this chimp is happy and connected to the community because he's free. He's socializing. He's a celebrity. He's at work with Sandy in the Toe Shop answering phones, filling out paperwork.

The mascot of the Toe Shop, Desire Me Motors.

Yeah, he's airbrush everywhere on tracks. 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 this incredible story, which we don't cover in the doc, but he's in this intersection, very busy intersection in Connecticut. A little boy throws a can of Coke over to the car with the chimp. The chimp out, stops traffic, and it's covered in the news, and it's a joke. Everyone's like, Oh, my God, it's Planet of the Apes.

The chimp is trying to get a hold of the kid.

The chimp is trying to... He's irritated. Why would you bother the chimpanze? 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 it back in the car, and everything's cool. Two hours later. Two hours later, right? So 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 chimp is out in space for a majority of his life and then built to confinement for the majority of his life. And so fast forward, and I'll spare you the other stuff that we learned, but what everyone talks about in revisiting media at the time is It was annexed. It was the wine glasses. He was drunk. It was maybe a relationship. Maybe the relationship went wrong. But he grabbed car keys. He wanted to go for a ride. He could drive a car. He wanted to get the fuck out of there. Yeah. That's what happened. And the person who he runs into first, Sharla, represents confinement. He was a nanny. So what do you think is going to happen?

It was also reported he was fucking or he left already. He was cruising around and he was in the graveyard, fucking with the guy who was digging graves. That's what we heard.

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

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. Big cats do a figure eight over and over and over. Chips do this rocking. When you see that, you know that's a really desperately depressed chimp.

But we love this. I'm sorry, love. But we're interested in this tension because we think we can control things. I mean, that's why if you've seen the movie, Nope, this great footage with this chimp Gordie, which he covers and is a through line in the show, it's inspired based on this whole idea. Of spectacle and humans that can control things. Nope, in that scene with Gordie, the chimp, is probably one of the most beautiful displays cinematically that I've seen. It's horrible. It's very tragic.

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. She's 77 years old, Pam Rosear. When she was seven years old, she was asked what she wants to do with her life in this circus animal family. 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. That was culturally what they were part of.

But that's a really good question. How is it that Pam hasn't-Okay, you're thinking about more different measures, but like-I'm thinking about attacks. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. It's a really good question because I always wondered that about Pam Roseaire. How come she's the one person that has been immune to it, or has she?

I think she's got some 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. To be fair, I think I don't know. But I do know that when I watch her interaction, there's a real understanding, and she has a leash on him. I mean, it's a- Well, and she also...

They are neutered.Castrated.Castrated..

I'm sure the last-They remove their canines, oftentimes.

They do have to alter them to be able to continue to work with them. They're modified. I should say there's a lot of dark parts of our story that we didn't go into. One of the things we learned was that so many of the monkeys that are being sold by Tanya and others are coming across the border from Mexico, just along with probably drugs. More recently, in recent time, we've seen a lot of Central American and Mexican species coming into the US. There's a pipeline. I'm It's a segue.

Well, what we look... So, yes, we didn't realize also how dark this was coming out of it because we were so close to it and the reaction by people, it's very heavy. So we're all desensitized from seeing this. There's some really interesting stuff that happens in Forgeo. I hope you finish it, including another attack, but this time with a person that we all know. Oh, you're teasing me. I'm teasing you a little bit. I'm sorry.

It's pretty good.

I'll probably watch it.

Okay. It's good. It's pretty good. A part of her body gets spitten off.

Well, come on, man. I'm not kidding.

Similar to Trump.

Now you're giving away way too much. You fucked it up. Fucked up the whole show. I'm going to look at her ear the whole show now. So is that lady with the 15-year-old chimp, is that the only one that you know of that keeps a full-grown adult and has it just wander around with everybody?

We've learned it more.

It's also castrated. To be clear, Pam doesn't live in... The chimp doesn't live in her house.

It's in there sometimes?

Yeah, there's sometimes.

But it's not- How much of castrating it changes its behavior?

I think significantly. Because Buck, in Oregon, was castrated.

The Connecticut chimpanze, 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 collars.

It's so crazy. Fixing a dog is so commonplace. People don't even think twice. Oh, is your dog neutered? Oh, you're a good pet owner. That way your dog's not going to have unwanted puppies. But fixing a A chimpanzee, what are you doing? What did you do to him?

It's like fixing a human. But also, by the way, think about where the medical care they get it. The guy who's a horse vet is the guy working on a chimpanze. If you're lucky. If you're lucky. If you're lucky. So if you think about the care, it's really horrible. But I was going to add to what you were saying, Eric. One thing that we learned through the process about what is this about, mainly we're talking about this very niche subject matter of captive chimpanzees in America, which we learned there really only is about 1,300 remaining in captivity, which includes those who are already in sanctuaries in the US, about half of that, 1,300- And big zoos. And big zoos. Big zoos have about 250 of them still. So in terms of the roadside zoo, private home environment, it's between less than 100 chimpanzees that remain in captivity. So to answer your question, there might be more, but it's hard to chimp.

But globally, there's still many chimps in Thailand and all over the world that are... So the US, at least, there's less and less in this.

There's less and less. The primates in general, in terms of monkeys as pets, it's reported somewhere around 15,000 people in America have primates as pets. 15,000. 15,000. 15,000, according to the Animal Welfare Institute. So that's what we're finding. But through that, we had to zoom out. And I think what we've learned, what I've learned personally about organizations that are doing something to protect wild lands and protect wild populations of chimpanzees, there's a lot of great ones out there. So we've been supporting a program that's doing 12 project sites in Africa, $10 million, 10,000 chimpanze. And that's what we're hopeful for. Africa is basically going to be China one day. What do you do, though, 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. Chimpanzis, certainly not after the castration.

Not chimpanze.

They've done all these projects. Chimpanzis, definitely not. I don't know if you like any of these other movies that were done about these scientific experiments people have in their homes in the '70s and '80s, bringing chimps and reintroducing them into the wild. It doesn't work. It ends horribly.

Well, there's a place in Africa, there's a an island. It's like a freshwater river where they have released chimps, but chimps that are just placed in Africa. But, yeah, to release them actually back into a population of wild chimps hasn't been done successfully, for sure.

Not with chimps. Have they done it with cats?

There's that famous image of Putin releasing a tiger in Russia that was captive. They have done it with cats, actually. I work with an organization that's been releasing jaguars back in the Northern Argentina, where jaguars have now disappeared. But the jaguar program, they do it very carefully, and 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, I wasn't saying that. I just meant cats of jaguars. But I'm saying that house cats, which are really completely domesticated, you come in to pet them. If you let them lose, they survive fine. It's 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. 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 lions. Almost every night, you'll see on our streets, there's a certain night of the week when the garbage comes out, all the garbage cans are tipped over because of the bears. You're right. Once they learn that, then they have a pattern and they go after those dumpsters.

California They used to have big, big brown bears.

California's state flag is a grizzly bear. Which is crazy. And we work with an organization that's trying to bring them back to California. Settle down, folks.

Settle down. Keep them alive where they are. Don't It gets nutty. All these people that want to reintroduce animals. Okay, it's just you have to understand. You're playing God.

You're throwing. And there's a reason it went extinct because the last grizzly bear in California was shot about 100 years ago, and it's because they eat people.

Lavec, California, is named after the last guy who died from a grizzly bear attack. I think his name is Steven LeVec. He got fucked up. They were big, big brown bears, and we killed them all because they were killing people. I'm not saying We should kill them all. I'm not saying what we did was good. But once you've established an ecosystem that if you make the... 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 animals are to us. It 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, this is not good for us. It's not good for us. We don't have to reintroduce them to places. 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. There's been some success of reintroducing wolves into Montana, the Yellowstone reintroduction.

Yeah, we know those guys.

Really interesting. They did have an overpopulation problem of undulets because bears can only eat so many of them, and wolves are much more clever, and they act together. It's balanced things out for now.

We work with Turner and Danger Species, Ted Turner, and We work very closely with this guy, Mike Phillips, in Montana, who's been probably the key guy to bring back gray wolves into the western part of the United States. But yeah, it's been without... I know because we do this that even gray wolves, there's a lot of controversy from ranchers. Imagine bringing back big grizzlies, brown bears to California.

Yeah, it's going to be a problem. But people that live in urban areas don't understand what their problem is. This is the problem that Vancouver has. So British Columbia outlawed 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. 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 can stuff it. It's gross. We all agree it's gross. But the reality of grizzly bears in rural areas. I have a good friend who lives in Northern BC. He lives in a very rural area. He's like, They're fucking dangerous. He had to shoot one that was trying to break into his cabin from three feet away. He shot a large grizzly bear trying to get into his cabin and eat him from three feet away. He said, They're really bold now because they haven't hunted them for a few years. So if you're running into a four or five-year-old male, they don't know what it's like to be hunted. No one has any feelings of being nervous around human beings.

And you remember the movie The Grizzly Man, right?

Yes. Yeah.

Timothy Treadwell.

That's a fascinating movie.

He was lunch.

That's my favorite unintentional comedy. Werner Herzog, I think, made that movie funny on purpose.

Of course. That's like our source of inspiration.

It's a really good movie. But I I never forget watching it in New York City. I was watching it at a theater. The whole time, I was just saying, Oh, my God. I was angry with this guy. He was worried about his bandana or his 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. He got some incredible footage That guy got some amazing footage. He did some fucking hard camping. That guy was out there ruffing it for a long-ass time in a tent, surrounded by monsters, living in the grizzly maze. He's a maniac.

Yeah, baby talk to the bears.

He pulled it off for a long time. But you knew what was going to happen. If you watch that, eventually, something's going to decide to eat him, and then that's exactly what happens.

It's like these chips with these women.

Similar, but at least that guy's going to where they live. Yeah, of course. I don't have problem with someone deciding to do that. If you're that fucking crazy and you want to throw yourself into the system and maybe live with them for as long as it lasts. I mean, 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 heavy.

Well, the bear ate his girlfriend after it ate him. It killed him. She was trying to defend him. She was hitting it with a frying pan.

Yeah, but she It was collateral damage. I feel bad for the girlfriend.

I do, too. But again, what choices are we making in this life?

But think about, you asked a question about reintroduction or these attacks that occur. There was a story we didn't include. It was just too tangential. But there was a neighbor of the Missouri Primate Foundation, the Chimp Party place, where all the animals were bred. At a time in the '90s, she had 42 chimps living in the house in a single property. One escapes. A 19-year-old boy recognizes his dog in the backyards being attacked by a chimpanzee. He grabs a gun, shoots a chimpanzee. He gets charged with destruction of property. It's a felony.

Oh, myOh, my God. He went to prison.

Oh, my God.

For six months. Gets out. He missed the birth of his daughter. That's insane. And his name is Jason Coates. It's a really interesting story.

Who the fuck tried that?

And then guess what? Here's what happened. Two years ago, I I think, he gets his record expunged finally at 40 years old, and now he can't get work. The guy's like a contractor, and 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. The reality, if you understand chimpanzees, the person who had that chimpanzee is responsible. It's not this man who's defending his life. You are so vulnerable to a chimpanzee. If they decide to get after you, there's not a lot you What can do. You could survive for a little bit, but it's going to tear you apart. That's just how it is. 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. The idea that you can't protect yourself from someone's crazy fucking idea of harboring an animal, an enormous animal that's insanely strong and hyper aggressive and intelligent and uncontrollable.

Yeah, that was a tragic story.

Terrible.

It's really hard making these films because so many good stories fall on the cutting room floor and so many great subjects, and that was one of them.

Well, you have to have some discretion in the process of casting subjects. I mean, it's a choice. But I also think the idea is it was also 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. It's harder. 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 was hard in the very beginning also, is that these people that keep... I'm generalizing a little bit, but for the most part, they're very guarded about letting you in because, one, they don't know if you're a spy for animal rights groups. They don't know if you're the feds, 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 extremely guarded and paranoid about letting you in. Now, of course, it's even become harder because in our case, we've become known. To continue this model of doing another story on, I don't know, bears. Yeah, people are going to be suspicious. But as far as being natural, I don't think that's so hard. With Tanya and Joe, Joe is obviously a performer in a sense, but we just film them. The more intimate you can make that filming experience for them, the more natural they become. So we work with hardly anybody. With Tiger King, it was just me and a camera guy. And I drove back and forth from Texas to Oklahoma constantly, Dallas to Oklahoma City.

It was just two of us filming. And so the more intimate it is, 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 I didn't know.

No, we didn't know.

No way they could have ever anticipated some bizarre, obscure documentary on people that are keeping pet cats.

Our insurance didn't even know.

But I started making a film about the sixth Extinction.

Big cats in America. Yeah, okay. That's like low risk.

We didn't even know it was going to be successful.

Well, like I said, you guys caught lightning in a bottle. It's the perfect timing of people being locked in during the pandemic. You guys were the early stars the pandemic, your show. 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, at least when you're home with your family, you're like, oh, my God, we're not these fucking idiots. We're crazy, but we're not this crazy. This world is so much more insane than this new insane world that it became a little bit of panacea for us.

I was telling Eric this. We I would ask this question a lot about the state of non-scripted, unscripted shows, documentaries, and this dramatization that you're seeing as a trend, people making very cinematic, real stories, dramatic recreations. Eric and I were talking about it a lot because so much of our content is so much more surreal than anything we can even make up or recreate. That's what's so surreal about our process and also just the stuff we capture. It's stranger than fiction.

It's stranger than fiction, and it also comes off as authentic. And as someone who's worked in reality TV, it's not a reality, okay? And especially the 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 happened because they just want you to keep people tuned in for drama. So if you're following a family around, they create drama. They have scripted shit, and it feels like it, right? 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 she'd be like three hours late for some reason. Then she'd show up and she'd say, Oh, I got to go get my eyes done. Then I would be like, Tanya, you're three hours late. Can I at least film you getting your I used to. And not once were we setting her up or saying, Can you get your lip injections? She just would say, No, I got four o'clock appointment with my lip injection, and we just shadowed her. So it was just her life.

Yeah. So it is authentic.

Yeah. We also have Eric, we're also fortunate to have an incredibly talented team that can help create these experiences in a way on screen that make it authentic.

Well, it's also the editing process.

Editing, of course.

We had a great team. A credible group of team.

So as they're doing it, are they marking down key moments? Do they have someone who's a stenographer or something who's marking down so you know 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. It seems like you guys are doing well.

It's pretty organic. I think there's also you follow the core story, which was Tanya's story. We knew that we it the minute the missing chimpanzee happened or the supposed death occurred. So that was the story. Where is the chim? And through that story, we're able to latch on all these other things. Now, what you don't know is we We got these other stories out of sequence. The Travis came at the very end, so we had to figure out a way to weave it into episode 2, weave it into episode 4. We knew we really wanted that in to serve as thematic connection to Tanya's story. I just have to make one big overriding point, which is that this is not a good recipe for people making films like this.

Yeah, sure. No. Because it's not. Because there's all these formulaic styles of documentaries, like a biopic, a famous person, or a takedown documentary or a true crime. What we do, and I think we've just been really lucky, is we just start filming somebody, never knowing, of course, where this is going to go. And that is not a good smart way to make, probably, documentaries, because what if it goes nowhere? I'm just bringing that up. And so in order to do Jim Crazy after Tiger King, we actually filmed so many different things. To get to Jim people.

How do we spend less time on these things? Is what we've realized. It's exhausting. It's worth it, though.

It's worth it. It seems like there's no other way to keep it authentic, then to just shadow these people forever and then spice it down to four hours.

Yeah.

Which is like, you have 250 plus hours of footage?

250 days of footage.

It's about 1,300 hours.

Okay, 1,300 hours down to four.

Now, that's just primary camera. It's like summarizing the days. I mean, multiple cameras, multiple things happening in a day. We were very efficient. It's an 8 to 12 hour day. We're capturing a lot of stuff in that day.

So are you archiving and you At the end of the day, so you know what day this happened and what day that. So you do make sure- There's a process.

There's a field process to ingest that has the notes that we have for the day. What happened, what's interesting about the day. And are you trying to form the narrative of how you're going to have the whole documentary series play out as you're doing that?

Or is it just- That comes so much later. We have no idea where it's going, probably for the first year and a half of filming. In the case of Chimp Crazy, we didn't discover Tanya until a year and a half in?

Year and a half in. No, it's what made it more complicated.

You're like, We got our star.

Well, it's so interesting, Joe, and I want to come back to this about I saw you get a little emotional with the buck story because it was really a hard one for us to tell, but an important one to make sure we got that in. But we missed it. We missed the cover. We were going to go, Eric and I, we're going to go to Pendleton to cover what was happening with Buck because we knew there was a violation that occurred from the state of Oregon that basically said, Tamara, you have to do these improvements, otherwise we're taking the animal away from you. And that had happened. We thought we would cover the response to that. Four days later, Buck was shot. And we said to ourselves, and I remember this so vividly, we have to trust our instincts. When we are into something, let's cover it, film it, send someone out and cover it if we need We decided to film everything, everything including our conversations and process, like very meta, which ended up becoming part of the story, too, as you'll see more in four, where we have to turn her in, basically.

The point with being is that the buck story happened. We thought we'd just send this guy, Dwayne, who we recruited to join the team 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 it. So this guy became essential to this story with no intended reasoning for that. So, yeah, the making of became more interesting than the actual subject matter in a way to us. And weaving that together came much later.

It's not a good formula. I'm interested, though.

So you're also an outsider in this. But what was your response to the industry formula way of doing things?

Well, I mean, doing what things?

With reality TV programming or programming in general.

Well, I think with reality TV, it was pretty simple. I could see how it started. It was people that were involved in scripted shows, and then scripted shows somewhere around the early 2000s got decimated by reality shows. And so these people who were already respected did television producers, they made their way into reality television. And then they realized some of these people are pretty fucking 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. 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 relationships these people have to each other. And then they create drama along the way. Along the way, along You're going to run into your friend from high school who's perfectly made up, well-lit with a microphone on.

It's bullshit. It's not really reality, but it's also not really a drama. It's real human beings that are doing nonsense, and you feel it. And then there's also like, reality shows that are on specific subjects, and those are bullshit, too. And then you have dating shows, which are super, super popular because who is he going to pick? Who's What are you going to pick? How's this going to work? We get excited about that. Or fucking these garage shows where someone shows up at a storage unit. Well, a lot of those shows, they fake it. They load up the storage unit. So they can't be assured that this storage unit is going to some fucking pirate's treasure in it. So what do they do? They put pirates. You ruin that for me. So they pretend that they got this at an auction. Who knows what's in it? Apparently the guy died 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 nature shows like Steve Irwin. I know you know Forrest Galand, but I always wonder Like, is he walking through the jungle and there he suddenly finds the snake? 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... One of the more interesting things today is YouTube, right? Because YouTube, you have these small independent people. There's this guy we had on called Python Cowboy, and this guy goes out into the Everglades every day and captures Pythons. And there's videos of him. He got bit by one, really fucked up his arms, gushing blood. He's holding on. They're enormous. There's more pythons in the Everglades than anywhere on Earth.

Burmese pythons.

Burmese pythons. It used to be people's pets or it used to be a part of a reptile facility.

We're doing our next Doc series is about reptiles and the smuggling of reptiles. We have a whole section on that.

It's another thing I went down to Rabbit Hole last night. Niall Crocodiles. I was going to the Niall Crocodiles in Everglades.

I can tell you a lot about Niall Crocodiles.

Tell me about Niall Crocodiles in the Everglades, though, because what they were saying is they found a few, and the ones that they identified that they've captured that were definitely Niall 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 he was saying that there's huge crocodiles that take out cattle on the west side of Florida.

No.

Yeah, he was sketching me out. He was like, 18-foot crocs, killed cows.

There's 23 There are 24 species of crocidillians in the world. That includes camions, crocodiles, alligators, guaureels. The only crocs that are really dangerous to man are saltwater crocodiles, Nile crocodiles, mugger crocodiles. But The crocs in Florida that are native, American crocodiles, they are a Brackishwater croc. They're not like Nile crocodiles that are in fresh water. In Florida, you basically just have American alligators. There's a very small population of American crocodiles that are still native, but they're in the estuaries in Brackishwater.

They're smaller?

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 because the American crocodile, the one we have in South Florida, is the same croc that you see in coastal Mexico, goes down into Costa Rica. You can see, I've looked over, I've seen a lot of American crocodiles in Mexico, Costa Rica. They're big, they're long. Longer than your alligator out there. Not that much longer, but longer.

Jamie, can you find out what's the largest American crocodile? I was under the impression that they were smaller species than the alligators were, and definitely smaller than the rest of the croc.

Check me on that.

That's an No, that's an elevator. Monster cattle-eating elevator shot in Florida. Look at the size of that thing.

Okay, but that's unusual.

15 feet. Oh, my goodness. Wow. Look at the size of that sucker.

But you said earlier, crocodile.

Right, American crocodile. What's the largest American crocodile, Jamie?

And the largest American alligator, right?

I think the largest American alligator was 20 feet long. Wow, really? That big? That's the longest one they've ever found. 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?

It's bigger, definitely, for sure. Is it really? Yeah, because that one that we have out there is 14. Damn.

It's It's like when you catch a fish, right? You say it's this big. I think that's how I'm being with it.

Okay, 19 feet, 2 inches.

Oh, Joe, you're right. I'm wrong. I love this.

Well, so there's a bunch of different ones, right? The Nile crocodiles are a different animal. Nile crocodiles regularly get to 18 feet. There's some really interesting reports from back in the day of much larger ones. The question is, here's the thing about alligators and crocodiles in particular. They don't die of old age. They just keep getting older and bigger. And when you introduce human beings and guns into the equation, what are the people going to shoot? 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. An alligator like that big fucker that they had, the cattle eating 15-foot alligator, that guy might be 90 years old. So a crocodile that gets to 30 feet long, which is... There was reports of ones that were longer than a 38-foot boat that these guys were on. This is a long time ago, though. And so there's all this speculation. Were these people just freaking out because it was big and they exaggerated?

Is this hyperbole? What is this? The other part of the speculation is, for sure, we know crocodiles used to be bigger. There was many, many species of crocodiles that were fucking enormous. Dinosaur eating crocodiles, huge thing. What is the biggest ancient crocodile that was ever discovered fossilized? I think it's in the neighborhood of 50 plus feet long.

I like this right now, what we're doing. I like that you were right, and I was wrong. I like that, too.

You should tell me about gigantico.

Well, so my point is that these things, they're so different than us that it's hard for us to even imagine. Okay, the biggest freshwater croc ever was 40 feet long. Yeah, it's remarkable. A hundred and ten million years ago. What about saltwater? Is that the largest crocodile period, or is it what they're all the big one's freshwater? What is the... Is that the largest, biggest crocodile fossil ever found? Okay, Crosophon. Largest sea dwelling one, 30 feet long. Interesting. So the 40-foot long one was bigger. Interesting. So these ones that they... Okay, Super Crock, massive fossilized crock discovered in the Agua... How do you say that? Aguia? Aguia formation in Big Bend National Park, 40 to 50 feet long. Jaws with 6-inch teeth. Good Lord. Wow.

Big bend. Good Lord.

6-inch teeth. Just imagine. Fucking 6-inch teeth, and it's 40 feet long. Oh, my God.

I think Saltwater Crocs and Nile Crocs eat more people, right? Yes. Today.

Well, I have a friend, 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. The footage that he got of it is so disturbing because 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 laundry. So it's a very poor village, and these people are at the mercy of these monsters that are actively hunting them. So what they do is they... So if they want to do something like have a place where they can retrieve water safely, what they do is they put like, giant poles in the ground all around. So they essentially encase this area. But the problem is, Crocodiles figured it out. And then they go in there and then just settle in, and they just wait for you because they can walk around on land, obviously. So they go out of the wall and then they go, oh, the fucker's They only go in this little area.

How do I get in that area? And they're watching you underwater for hours without breathing.

I work a lot in Madagascar, and we have Nile crocs 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- That's their instinct because that's how they get deer, like these little animal species. Every year, people die washing their clothing in Madagascar from Nile crocs. Fuck that.

So the speculation is that there's breeding populations of those Nile crocs in the Everglades.

Really? Wow.

Why not? Why not? They've seen enough of them. See if you can find what's the latest breeding Nile crocodiles in the Everglades. They have a shoot on site 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 there are not anacondas in the Everglades is that they didn't import anacondas in the way they did Burmese pythons. Burmese pythons, from what we understand, the Python skin people in Thailand and Malaysia, they would collect the eggs and breed, have the babies and send thousands of baby Burmese pythons to the US. That never happened with anacondis. But you think about anacondis because they would live in the Everglades.

You're meeting the guy responsible for that tomorrow.

It's unclear if Niall Crocodiles are breeding. You are. It's unclear if they are breeding in the wild in Florida. But here's some information about Niall Crocodiles and breeding in Florida. Niall Crocodiles first observed in Florida in the '60s.

Wow.

Wow. Believes they have captured all the Niall Crocodiles in the area. Nile crocodiles become established before. They could threaten native species. Well, that's what pythons have done. They might have to bring in the Nile crocs to kill the pythons.

But what's interesting about that, in the '60s, alligators were endangered.

They have people for that now.

Yes. Well, I lived in Florida in the '70s. 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. Then when I was there, some lady got her dog snatched, and then everybody got freaking out. Everybody in the town was like, Whoa. Because they got way too comfortable with alligators. Because alligators, when they get used to people, they just lay around. So they would just sit on the banks. And we would go to the fucking park, Lake Alice is where the lake is. We'd go to the park and hang out. And alligators would just be hanging out there. When 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. Because 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 her skins, right? The farming of has been a really, it's controversial, but it's really been a success story for wild crocodiliens.

But why is that? How does it affect alligators?

Well, that's a good question. I think it was crocodile farming. You should ask. But I know croc farming in general has protected crocodiliens across the board. I guess they used to hunt alligators also for skins, or am I wrong? Oh, yeah, for sure.

They still do. They still breed them for skins and hunt them for skins, but now they have an overpopulation problem. So I was just curious to How would a 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 of them.

Yeah, that may be true. I know crock farming has helped crocodilians across the board. Sure. That's for sure.

On storms patterns, right? Shifting. Isn't that also true?

American alligators were on the endangered species list. They were very rare in the '60s. Now, they're incredibly common.

Well, they were very rare because they were overhunted.

They were overhunted, 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. They 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 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 selling them for food. And oftentimes 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 pickling their tongues and sending them back east.

You're now making me think about something, and I don't know the facts, but the Migratory Bird Act is that we used to shoot birds all the time. And obviously, the most common bird or one of the most common birds was passenger poachers. It So there were so many- Fill the sky. Fill the sky, yeah. And then I think the Migratory Bird Act came into effect. Anyway, but you're right, around the Teddy Roosevelt period.

Yeah, because people killed off all the... There were so many passenger pages. They were fucking everywhere, and we killed them off for food.

And for feathers in people's hats, apparently. Crazy. Anyway.

Yeah, we're gross.

What do you think? So you have Teddy Roosevelt National Park system. I like that you call me on stuff. In services, you have things like migratory burdock. You have things like the ESA, which had its own unintended consequences, which we actually cover in our series about stopping importation but propelling domestic interest through breeding and the demand that's created through US zoo systems that you see. So what happens next, I guess, is- It's really complex.

And the problem is people are very dug in on their sides. You have people that are very dug in with the animal liberation idea. They're very dug in with PETA and veganism and dug in with anti hunting. And then there's people that are ranchers. And then there's people that are very dug in to animals are our property. 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.

It's so true. And one of the things we've tried to do a little bit is bring the animal rights groups closer together with the conservation biologist groups so that they can work together because you're right, they're so polarized.

Well, 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 BC is because 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. They don't experience it. If they did, they'd be terrified. It's a giant predator, and you have no chance if it catches you out in the wild. I don't think we should ever kill off all the grizzly bears, but they should control the populations. 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, well-schooled biologists that really do a great job of managing the numbers that are in the area. And then you have people that spend enormous amounts money to hunt those things. And then that money goes into maintaining the population and make sure that it's at a healthy balance. If there's too many bears, look, genocide, I mean, infanticide in bears is common. Almost all bears are cannibals.

They eat their own babies. The whole thing is mad. If they don't have enough food or if the males come out of the... If they're hibernating and they come out before the female does with their cubs, they'll actively seek out those cubs for They will do less of that if there's less of them and if there's more of a balance between predator and prey. That's where it gets weird because as a person who loves nature, who are we to say you should kill a certain amount of bears and a certain amount of wolves? That seems fucked. We should just let it be what it is and enjoy it. But the problem is it leaks over into this strange world that we've created. This is the reality If you want to be able to go to Starbucks, if you want to be able to go outside and have a cheeseburger in an outdoor patio, you can't have fucking wolves everywhere. This is just reality, and we're accustomed to this artificial enclosed that we've created to keep human beings safe, and we've lost our perspective of what it means to be an animal in the world.

No, this I mean like calling elephants. If you don't manage elephants, they'll denude everything, and then they'll all die.

Well, there's that, but there's also they don't give a fuck who planted that food. If you're in a village and your whole family survival is dependent upon you getting these vegetables that you've planted, and then elephants come in and eat all your vegetables, you could very easily starve to death. And that's real, too. And people don't want to think about that because you think of elephants. Elephants are endangered. Yes, they are. Elephants are hunted for their ivory. Yes, they were. But also, Africa is It's fucking huge. There's not the same amount of black bears in San Francisco as there are in rural Wyoming, right? It's because that's the environment to live. If you went to San Francisco, you're like, Oh, my God, black bears are extinct. But go to New Jersey. They're everywhere. It's not that the animal is that you shouldn't have any of them. It's just like there should be places where they exist and places where they don't exist. If you want to maintain a city, you're going to You're going to have to do something about the population of predators. You're going to have to do something. It's just like, how far outside of your city does human control radiate?

Well, then you have ranchers. 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. If you want to keep it at bay, keep wild animals in the wild. I would question, and I think you're right, bringing or reintroducing grizzly into areas where there are high densities of humans. It's a recipe for trouble.

Well, it's also completely theoretical.

Right now it's theoretical, although they did just recently reintroduce grizzlies back into Washington State.

I don't mean theoretical in the sense that they haven't done it as far as what the outcome is going to be. 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 that's what happens in certain parts of the country. That's what happens when they have too many of them in a specific area, and then they compete for resources, and it can get weird.

The outcome of Tiger King, no one knows this, but I'll tell you this, I don't think anyone knows it publicly, but a few things happened. One thing, this federal law called Big Cat Public Safety Act was passed, largely because of Tiger King. But the other thing we did just privately is we donated a million dollars to Tiger Conservation in India. One of the countries where tigers are still doing quite well. We went to visit the program last September in India. It just was so interesting because you were talking about bears attacking people. In India, they do live with tigers, and they do have, obviously, a certain amount of people that get killed every year. But the key is to keep enough prey within the area where these tigers are. It's when the local people, I guess, out hunt or compete with the prey that the tigers start going into more human, basically start looking at humans as something to eat. But anyway, I just bring that up because it was a byproduct of Tiger King. It was something that we did just quietly as the people that I did Tiger King with, including you.

Not so quietly now.

Donated that money not so quietly now.

Are you aware of the Sunderbands? Yeah. The tiger attacks in the Sunderbands? Absolutely. The Sunderbands are fascinating because hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by tigers. Beautiful wetland. For several hundred years. But also, Brackish water. They think that might contribute to the aggression of the tigers. They're drinking 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 group of men that are in a boat, and they're rowing this boat in the water. I don't know if they're rowing it, but 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 to safety.

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 they're just built to fuck things up. That's what their job is. And if people live around them, people are on the menu. That's just what it is with tigers.

It didn't make it into Tiger King, but we filmed in Southern Nepal, a place called Chitwan National Park, where tigers are doing very well. And they actually have armed guards with machine guns to protect the tigers from poachers. We filmed there, but it's pretty remote. I don't remember how many people get killed. But, yeah, Where there are tigers, people are going to have problems if there's high densities of people.

There's a reason why human beings don't... You're not supposed to live there. You shouldn't be living where the tigers live. They have to. They're stuck. They're fucked. But, boy, we should figure out a way to develop an area there where they don't have to live like that.

There's a lot of people.

It's amazing.

India has a billion people.

It's amazing that in India, there's still tigers at all because it's one of or the second most populated country in the world. Or is it? Yeah, I believe so. It feels like when you're in India, there's people everywhere. You think you're going off on some rural road, it's just there's people.

But if you go into a place where the jungle is, where the tigers live, it's really hard to live there. Then the people that are living there, they have no options. They're the poorest. And so they're living in a traditional way, out exposed, and then they have to figure out how to protect themselves from these enormous stealthy cats that are sneaking around Everywhere they go.

Fuck. But you see plenty of cows, which is amazing, by the way. Which is so nice. Which is so just roaming these winding roads.

That is fascinating.

I would really love to know what the origin of the sacred cow is.

Really love to know the origin of that. That's one of the most fascinating things that you have a place where people are starving and they choose not to eat cows. Yeah. Fascinating.

And just the traffic stopping, which is in these roads that have no lanes, and they're all just India is wild.

But it's so crazy that they stick to this one thing. I was just watching this news report of this group of people that were not Hindu. I think they were of some other religion, and they lived in India, and they got arrested for killing cows. So they had cows in their yard. They were arrested for them, and they bulldozed their homes.

Oh, wow.

See if you can find that, Jay.

Oh, they're also probably Muslim.

I believe they were.

More people die from what in India in terms of wildlife? Is it snakes? Probably mosquitoes.

Of course, mosquitoes.

But after that, snakes or tigers?

I don't know. It's a good question. I don't think it's tigers. I think the Sundubans is the area where they get jacked pretty regularly. Also, how many people are doing surveys on how many people are missing? When you're going into these very remote areas, how many people are missing? Indian authorities, Bulldogs, bulldoze homes of 11 people after finding beef in fridges. Incredible. Slaughter of cows, which Hindu worship as a deity, is banned in most of India as his consumption of their meat. Isn't that fucking fascinating?

When you cut down an oak tree in California, you're-Right, but they're not going to bulldoze your fucking house. You know it. It's Isn't that nuts? It depends on the tree.

Isn't that nuts? People found beef in their fridge and cows in their backyard. So they bulldoze their homes.

In India, you can eat a hamburger.

You cannot?

Yeah, they're not really. Really? I was just in India. I think you can get in hotels and stuff. I think so. Can't get it at like a-Oh, wow.

They allow it in hotels?

Yeah, you can get it at a beef.

I was just in India.

Well, you can eat lamb. You can eat sheep. You can eat other different animals. You just can't eat cows. Yeah.

Wow. I didn't even think of that when I was there.

A lot of people think it has its roots in psychedelic mushrooms, that psilocybin grows on cow manure, and that these people-Oh, wow. Which is because one of the oldest... What is it? I think it's called Chuktaal Hayuk. It's like one of the oldest known civil Civilizations, which was a cattle worshiping civilization. And they had like these... Why were people who are fucking starving to death, barely getting by? Why were they into worshiping cows? Well, that's where you got all your mushrooms. It completely makes sense. It's almost the That's the only thing that makes sense. It's almost the only thing that you could... Especially if you have ancient stories of Soma and these different psychedelic compounds that the Hindus would eat, and these different psychedelic notions or potions, rather, that were talked about, where we don't really know what the composition of them was. But we do know that psilocybin mushroom has a long history of use, and it's really common to find them growing on cow manure. Why would some poor people that don't have any food not eat this one animal?

I don't know, but I've seen mushrooms in cow manure.

Very confusing information on the burger in India.

They have chicken. You eat chicken all you want, baby. They definitely seem to have burgers, but I don't know that they're making them with ground beef. Right. It could be like a lamb burger. Sure be.

It could be all kinds of stuff that they call burger.

When you get Indian food, it's always lamb.

It's a bit more Western now. I mean, if you're going more...

Not to these people. These people wasn't Western enough. They bulldozed their in a fucking house a couple of months ago.

That's remarkable. That's incredible. I bet you they're also Muslim, though. That's also Muslim.

Yeah, right. It's like the Uyghurs get treated.

Yeah, there's a lot of that.

Yeah, I'm sure there's some of that, too. Yeah. But it's just our relationship with animals is very bizarre. And I think most people have a really stunted understanding of it. They're never really around wild animals. It's a squirrel or a pigeon or something like that. They don't see animals.

We're further and further. It's perverse, that relationship with animals.

It is. Well, cities, as much as I love them, they are perverse. They're strange. They've done us a lot of harm psychologically. 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. 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 We're going from one closed environment to another closed environment, riding around your car or the subway or whatever you're doing. And we're completely disconnected to what it meant to be a human being for hundreds of thousands of years. And it happened in a blink of an eye. In a couple of hundred years, all of a sudden we're fucked. We're trapped in this bizarre system. And in this system, occasionally we interact with animals. Our understanding of it and what we think of it, what we think it is is so different. We have through primorphization, through Yogi bear and all that stuff. We're so weird with the way we interact with animals. Every piece of it.

I was so lucky to grow up in nature, and I take it for granted now. Where'd you grow up? I grew up mostly in Northern California, but I was like a feral kid. My mother always said, Eric, you were feral. We didn't plan anything. I would spend my days fishing and hiking in the creeks.

What part of Northern California?

In Sonoma area. That's beautiful up there. But then I spent 40 something years in New York City. But I never lost that, what you're talking about and that interest and love of going out into nature. But I think you're right. Today, people don't have the experience I had. So many kids are from an urban world, and they can't connect.

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

We've lost our connection. I think we had this conversation with Carl Eric recently, which put it really well for me. So much of the conversations you have is, we're going to go connect with nature. We're going to Batswana for the summer and do tourism. But what you really can do is put a bird feater outside your window and connect to nature that way. And you'll see lots of different birds.

You must have grown up in nature in some way, or no?

Not really.

No, not really. But why do you then have such a connection to it in a good way?

I like interesting things. It's really interesting. The fact that so few people engage in it is also interesting to me because I'm fascinated by just whatever the pull of urban life is. Like, what is the gravity of urban life that has 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. What are we? We're weird. And time I spend in the woods, in the wilderness, just being out there, you get a different sense of what life actually is. It's so extraordinary to see wild animals in the wild, like wild deer and elk and bears, and see them existing. It's incredible. It's better than any movie. It gives gives you a vitamin that you didn't know you needed. The feeling that you get when you go out in the sun, 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. Give me my vitamins, right? Doesn't it feel like that? You're lying down, Give me my vitamins. That's what it feels like, a nice sunny day in Central Park, right?

There's a vitamin that we get in the wilderness that we don't know we're lacking in. I think it's a part of being a person. I think it's a part of being interconnected to every life form that exists wherever we are. And we don't think we are because we live in an apartment and we play Nintendo. We're locked into this thing that human beings have created, but we're missing something. 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 our own prison of our own choosing is not good for us.

It's interesting. Most all of the characters in Tiger King and Chimp Crazy have never seen chimps or tigers in the wild or had any interest. That's crazy. They were just interested. They didn't have the-They just 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. I do have a question, though, really important. The chimp the Mcnuggets, chicken nuggets, does he open up the sauce and dip?

Yes.

Did you show him dipping?

He peels, yeah.

Well, in that case, I think he just went like this.

Oh, he sucks it out. 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 nuggets in the sauce?

I don't think it's in that shot.

I've seen they actually peel it with their mouth. Yeah. They peel the wrap er off. Right. I saw that. They don't like wrappers.

But do they dig in with the nugget and get it in the honey mustard sauce?

I think they just squeeze it in their mouth. Oh, not dipping.

I like that question.

That's a good one.

We were confused. He's going to dip and then it cut away. We don't know who's he fucking dipping.

I mean, the sauce toss moment was just so surreal. Amazing.

You want your sauce? Here's your sauce.

It was so surreal.

Incredible.

They know too much. Like just 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 so weird. I mean, you guys did an amazing job of capturing it. And thank God you found that one nutty lady because she really glues it all together. But everybody should watch it. It's really good. And everybody should watch it also because you have to know that that's a thing. You don't know what people are really capable of until you watch a serial killer documentary and you go, oh, Jesus Christ, that's the thing? 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 it wakes you up from human confinement to the symptom you just described of urbanization and coastal bubbles. It's the people are like, oh, my God, is this America? Of course, go outside 45 minutes away from where you live. Right.

I I would know it was a thing, and I've been involved with animal people my whole life. So, yeah, it's a thing. Monkey moms.

I'm not saying that. If you let people do it, they'll do it. There's some strange obsessions in this world.

Yeah. If you give people free license to do it, 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 fucking swimming pool is evil. 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 of indentured slavery. 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 fallen off and the whole thing.

But think about this, a hundred years you can go to the Bronx zoo and see a boy in a cage out of Benga. A West African pygmy that they kept in a cage. The photo is remarkable.

They kept in a cage. What year was that?

1910. Or '20s? Is it '20s, maybe?

He ultimately shot his brains out. Even people then knew that Adabanga, basically an Indigenous man from West Africa with these- 1912 or something like that. Anyway, but Even then, people were disturbed to see a human being next to a gorilla in the Bronxoo.

And he was in a cage by himself?

I think he was in the ape house at the Bronxoo.

Well, first he was brought for the World's Fair on display. Wow. To show... Here he go. There he is. There you go. They shaved his teeth down to be more like fangs. Oh, my God. Like shark teeth. 1904, there it is.

So what year at the Bronxoo?

1904. So he died in 1916. That's right. Okay, so he was in an exhibit in 1904. Third of the century.

Yeah.

Jesus. So that's our history. 1964, Bronxoo. That's this incredible... I love this image. It was an exhibition, right? The World's Most Dangerous Animal. It's a reflection. Oh, yeah. It's a mirror with bars. You walk into it and you see yourself.

Wow.

But they were- It's a really cool- They were conscious of that in 1964. 1964.

Well, it was 20 years after we dropped a fucking couple of nuclear bombs.

This is a- But how cool is that image?

That is cool. Yeah, you would never have that today.

The most dangerous animal in the world is us, Which is so true.

Well, it certainly is numerically. Also, just the impact we have overall. We're a sketchy group, but we know more about us because of stuff like what you guys have on. So thank you very much. Cool. It was really fun talking to you. And did HBO fund this or did you guys bring it to HBO after it was done?

We went midstream. So typically what we do is we figure out if we have something. We self-fund and develop something until we get to a point where we think it's ready.

Tiger King, I almost finished it before I brought it to anybody. Oh, wow.

I think now we have the ability to control output in terms of control of what the ultimate product can be. It was a little bit harder back then. But, yeah, we 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. Chimp Crazy is really good. Yeah, thank you. And, of course, Tiger King was awesome, too. What I said, I really mean, I think you guys are doing something that's... You're giving us a better understanding of humans 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 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.

I appreciate you having us.

My pleasure. Thank you guys.

Really cool. And please finish the show.

I will. I was just bummed out last night. Okay. Thank you very much, guys. Thanks so much. Bye, everybody.

Bye. You very much, guys.Thank you.Bye, everybody.Bye..