Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride are Emmy-nominated filmmakers. Their latest production is the HBO docu-series "Chimp Crazy." www.hbo.com/chimp-crazy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Gentlemen, thank you for being here.
Please introduce yourselves. Eric Goode.
Jeremy McBride.
Did you guys both do Tiger King as well?
Yeah, I mean, I kind of came in towards a tail end. I remember meeting you about this.
Keep it this close to your face.
Okay.
You can scoot your – it moves and stuff.
Okay. Yeah, I met Eric kind of towards a tail end of filming Tiger King. Yeah, that was kind of the first experience I had with him.
You guys, like, struck lightning with that because it came right at the pandemic where everyone's locked at home and everyone was like, what the fuck? 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 like basically all in the same vein.
And it is so odd how nutty these animal people are, these people that have captive animals. their home it's such a bizarre there's there I would like to see like a psychologist like a clinical psychologist do an examination of what type of personality wants to have these enormous wild animals captive in their homes yeah no for sure it's
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, you know, the reality of observable science is also there, unfortunately. You know, we're just a weird animal. We're the fucking weirdest ones. But the show Chimp Crazy, I just finished episode three last night, and we got to number four, and my daughter wanted to watch number four.
I'm like, I don't think I could do it. I was so bummed out after episode three. I was like, oh, my God. I mean, I don't want to give away anything for people who haven't watched the series yet. I highly recommend it. It's really fucking good. But episode three, man, it's like... It's like there's something about, first of all, this is one of the rare times where I'm fully with PETA.
When you're, you know, it's like when you side with PETA on things, it's like, you know, like this has got to be an egregious example of something absolutely horrific. And, you know, the one situation where the woman who was so drunk kept the chimp and then attacked her daughter and the whole thing. It's like at the end of the show, it's like, oh, my God, I don't know if I can keep doing this.
Yeah. No, it's interesting you mentioned PETA because I'm not fully aligned with PETA on a number of things. But in this case, I am aligned with PETA. But just to touch on PETA, you know, I work with reptiles and I try to save animals. turtles and tortoises, which actually are the most endangered group of animals, along with primates.
If you think about the percentage that are on the brink of extinction, over half of primates are on the brink of extinction, and over half are turtles and tortoises.
But where I am not aligned with PETA is when you have to make a choice between eradicating a rat that's killing off the last Galapagos tortoises or eradicate a mongoose that was introduced that's killing off an iguana in the Caribbean. I will make that choice. PETA basically views it as the rat has rights just as much as the tortoise.
And I'd like to have the tortoise around for future generations. So I'm not always aligned with PETA, but in this case, yes.
Well, they have a background with the Animal Liberation Organization, which essentially doesn't think that any animals should be captive. And I do understand their point. But then you have Carl. How's 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 PETA keep dogs, it said like 95%. Which is crazy. So it's a little hypocritical if they don't want people to have pets.
Well, you know, it's one of those things. It's like the... How it starts and how it's going you know like what would it where did it start from you know it start and? I see there look all dogs are a Horrible misjustice that's been done to wolves Like we somehow or another we have become friends with wolves and turned them into these strange things but the reality of life in 2024 is
We have dogs, and dogs need owners, and they love you. It's a great relationship. But it's in their genetics, right? They've been domesticated thousands and thousands of years. It's like saying that we should be going back to chimps. We should live in the jungle. We should live in trees, which is also crazy.
What is it, Erica? Chimps are more like chimps than we are human?
Chimps are closer to us than they are gorillas because we are the subfamily of chimpanzees, which are called homonyms. And, yes, chimpanzees are closely related to us more than any other ape. But it's, you know, back to what you said a minute ago about making these movies. I just want to touch on, you know, why we do this. Because a lot of people miss the point of Tiger King even. There's a point?
Yeah, there's a point.
I think I missed it. Okay.
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. And what we wanted to do is preach to people that don't know about the issue.
So you had to get a lot of eyeballs on it to make a difference, right? Right. So that was sort of the goal of both Tiger King and Chimp Crazy in the end.
Well, 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 collections. Yeah, wow. 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. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, there's also other animals that are in Texas that are exotics like scimitar oryx, which is very rare in the wild and is endangered in the wild, but is so common in Texas that you can hunt them. Yeah. and 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 different thing.
But what you're mostly getting is small enclosures of tortured animals who are fed cold meat. And that is not what they want. It's not what nature intended them. They're the cleanup crew. They're everything that has a limp, anything that's slow. They keep populations down. They make sure there's not an overpopulation problem of undulates. That's what tigers do. That's what they do in the wild.
And so all of their instincts, everything, their essence of their being – is all stifled by being captive. We were talking about giraffes, that they're the only animal that I don't have a problem with at the zoo, because they're so chill. They're so chill. Babies feed them.
When my daughters were young, we'd take them to the zoo, and you could hold a piece of lettuce, and the giraffe with his giant fucking head that's as big as his table would come over and gently take the lettuce with their tongue, and we're so confident that they have no aggression towards people, that we allow little babies to feed giraffes. Giraffes don't seem to have a problem at the zoo.
They seem to be totally relaxed with it. But there's a lot of animals where it's nothing but torture.
Yeah, yeah. No, for sure. And I think it's incredible that in the day that we live in, 2024, that 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 cetaceans 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 like to say, to being in captivity.
Yeah, like giraffes. I think giraffes is the only example.
Or a giant tortoise, maybe?
Yeah, that's a good example, too. Solitary animals. That's a good example, too. Solitary animals, well, even just animals that just don't, they're just happy that there's no predators. Sure. And then they're relaxed. Yeah. But the last time I went to a zoo, my daughters were, they were younger animals. But not like babies. And we were in Denver. And I was there for a gig. And we went to the zoo.
And, oh, man. To this day, it haunts me. There's this primate enclosure. And this one monkey was just screaming. Just screaming. Like in agony. Like being tortured. Just, ah! Just holding on to the bars and screaming because he was by himself and just 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 like an issue. Because it's animal prison. It's animal prison for animals that did nothing wrong.
You know, 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. You know, this is like 95% humidity, 90 degrees, and it was green. because it was covered in a film of algae. And so the polar bear was literally a green.
And you just say to yourself, if you have a zoo in Alaska, you could maybe have a polar bear. But Phoenix, Arizona, Singapore.
But even if you have a zoo in Alaska, polar bears are the one bear that does need anything but animals. So polar bears are extraordinarily predatory, and they have hunting instincts. So all day they just want to roam and hunt.
And I was – when I used to – I drove limos for a while, and I had this gig once in New Hampshire, and I was on my way home, and I stopped just because I had to do this job where I dropped somebody off. It was a few hours away. And on the way back, I got lunch, and I saw this zoo. So let me just check this zoo out. And I went to the zoo.
It was this little shitty zoo in like somewhere in, I think it was in Massachusetts. And there was this polar bear in this tiny little enclosure just going in circles. Like he was fucking crazy. Just going in circles. Tiny little enclosure. And I was like, what is, why is this okay? Like what is this? This is not a life. This is terrible. It's terrible.
There's another project we've been working on for equal time to Chimp Crazy, and you've been spending more time at 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 so deeply fascinating, I think it was something like 242 accredited zoos in this country. 750 million people visit zoos annually, which is more than the five major sporting events combined. Wow. The way in which zoos... It's like the 80-20 rule. There's five or 10 that contribute the majority of the income that cover most of the Mizzous.
And they run like 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 animals.
Well, what really rocked zoos was the film Blackfish. And they suddenly went, wait a minute. The public doesn't like us. And they started putting into effect all these kind of new programs for animal welfare, and particularly for bears, like polar bears, like what you just mentioned.
And they have a new word, it's not so new anymore, called enrichment, which means that you give a bear something to do so 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. Yeah. Do you think so? Yeah. Well, they live a long time. They live a long time. Maybe not granddaughters. Okay. But I say it more. I have little boys. I have a four-year-old and a one-year-old. And I think it's particularly interesting to kind of go through this experience because they're obsessed with animals. And you're kind of...
educating them on these kind of moral issues surrounding animals, the anthropomorphic characters that are created to describe the feelings and where they should live and how they should feel. And kids relate with them in some form of a bridge to humanity, I 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.
Well, where he's going right now is sort of a big part of our next documentary, which is about, you know, the illegal animal trade. But also zoos were complicit in that for a very long time, maybe still. So anyway, sort of.
But the zoo thing, I mean, you're into that. You get emotional on this. And I am. And what's really cool about this kind of medium that we're in, we have access to all this information and all these people over large decades of work in conservation and zoos and PETA and legislation, laws. It's really – I just love the idea of synthesizing this information to a point in today's context, 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. There should be – you should have to have a certain amount of acres for each individual species so that they don't – like we were talking about the chimp enclosure at the LA Zoo. They bite each other's fingers off and – They need space. 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 wildebeest and eat it. And instead what we do is we slide a tray underneath their cage. And that's torture for them. It really is.
It's torture for them to have an enclosed space where it's small. It's torture for them to not be able to express their natural instincts. I mean, it's one thing if you're talking about something like the thylacine, right, where they kept them in captivity and the last known survivors and you had this thing and like, wow, now we have video of this thing and now it doesn't exist anymore.
So the zoos were like the last hope to try to keep this thing from going extinct. And it may not be extinct. There's a lot of- Yeah, seed banks.
Yeah, the Tasmanian tiger, yeah. It was that eerie footage of the last ones.
Yeah, they think there might actually be living specimens that are alive. Well, in this state, they're bringing them back.
I know you know Forrest Gallant. Yeah, I was just about to bring up Forrest. I also have colleagues that have gone looking for thylacines in the highlands in New Guinea. So far, yeah, people anecdotally say, yes, there might be a thylacine. But it's unlikely, but there might be.
Well, they're very hard to find. I mean, like, try finding a wolverine. You know, wolverine populations are pretty healthy, but good luck finding one. They're very, very, very difficult to find unless you spend an enormous amount of time alone in the bush.
Yeah, good point.
And then you're dealing with thylacines. 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 Forrest 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 that. 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, no, I mean, of course, zoos were originally created just, it was like good civic planning, you know, 150, 200 years ago, like, you know, to have a park, a zoo, a library when you were building a city. So they were really just built as, you know, a good city needs to have a zoo, it's entertainment.
And they weren't really designed to have anything to do with conservation or anything to do with animal welfare. But, yeah, today, like you mentioned, the oryx here in Texas, you know, there are species that have either gone what we call biologically extinct, which means that one animal can't find another. They're virtually extinct or they are extinct in the wild and zoos.
may offer some hope for those animals where they can put them into what's called assurance colonies and try to maintain genetically diverse groups in a zoo for the day that one day you can return it to the wild. There may be a reason to have animals in captivity.
How much success has there been in returning animals to the wild, though?
Well, you know, where we live in California. But you just did it with the eastern box turtle.
No, no, no. Back to the example he's talking about is like California condors. California condors or black-footed ferrets or animals that, you know, I mean, whatever it's called, there's an endemic horse that they've done some work with. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, much less than it should be putting animals back into the wild that went extinct or went virtually extinct.
Much less than it should be.
Yeah, it should.
I mean, it should be a 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 Great 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 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... If you think about the number of animals that are shot with a bullet that aren't recovered, it's so small.
Interesting. Yeah.
You know, 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 can travel 400 miles in the thermals looking for a carcass. Right. And I would suspect that the fact that there's just less carcasses out there might be part of it.
I think that's the argument. I think the argument is there's less predators and there's less prey. So like California, for example, you have a fairly small deer population.
Because you have so many animals that kill deer right so you have California has a lot of coyotes in California has a lot of mountain lions and there's a lot of people where I used to live in the hills that did not like coyotes I'm like do you like rats? Okay. Well, if you don't like rats, you should like coyotes.
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 is ranching.
But there forever, forever, there was a bounty on coyotes where if you brought in two ears, you got like a buck. And people would bring in 100 sets of ears and get $100. I mean, they were vilified. When I grew up in California, there were ranchers next to us which were sheep ranchers because sheep are dumb and coyotes can get sheep easier than calves.
They would trap the coyote with those horrible traps. They'd pour gasoline on them. 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 you know they're just not cool if they eat your cat yeah but they're a fascinating animal i mean i i remember when i first saw them i moved to california in 94 and i was staying at uh do you know what the oakwood gardens are it's like those pre they're they're pre-furnished apartments that you just rent like people that are like sort of transient just moving it they allow you to like have a place before you get a place apartment yeah
And I was driving, so it was in Burbank, and I was driving down the street, and I was like, who are these fucking dogs? What is going on? Why are these dogs running around? And then I drove over here. I had never seen a coyote before. Oh, wow. I was like, that's a coyote? Yeah. Oh, my God. There's coyotes on the streets? Yeah. And that was pretty rare then. But-
30 years later, it became insanely common. I would rarely go, I lived in a fairly rural area where I lived in California. I lived about an hour outside the city, and I had a lot of acres, and it was cool to live out there, but you experience a lot of wildlife, and I saw coyotes almost every day. Almost every day.
Yeah, they looked like a mangy, 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 coy 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 humans.
you know human activity yeah than a lot of other animals and so coyotes are one of those because of garbage yeah because of garbage because of water we bring in water in arid areas and so they're highly adaptable um creature yeah and 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 make the eeriest noise together they they caught something
Yeah, but, you know, I'm sure you've seen that video from Woodland Hills where this man was unloading his car and a coyote came and snatched his toddler, like, right in front of him. It's hard. They're fucking predators, right? And you have to be careful. Little things and little people and animals will get eaten by them, and that is what they do.
Like dingoes in Australia do that.
Right, right, right. Dingo ain't my body. There's no doubt that we live in complex ecosystems and we do not like the idea of them. We've developed these bizarre ideas
establishments called cities and in these cities we have removed ourselves from nature and you know if you go to the mountains of colorado people are well aware of mountain lions they're well aware of bears they have to lock their garbage up they have to they have like a neighborhood email list where they talk about like bears broken this guy's car and everybody's on the look but they understand they're living in this system they're living in this ecosystem
Most people in the United States that live in urban areas have no idea that they're in an ecosystem because we've essentially done some very bizarre stuff and isolated ourselves from nature, which is one of the reasons why we have this strange idea that we are not animals and that we are not a part of nature.
Yeah.
You know, it's just weird. We're fucking weird. We're weird in our justifications. 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, you know, I couldn't ever connect with. this woman, Tanya, that kept this chimp and tried to explain to her, you know, that we are chimps, you know, effectively.
And, you know, and she just, you know, took the page out of, you know, Genesis, where she just said, you know, I'm not, you know, we're not animals. This is an animal and I can own it like property. Anyway, that was just one of the things she just never really fully understood. Yeah.
Well, to be kind, she's not bright. She's not a bright woman, not a well-read woman, unfortunately. And this seems to be part of the theme of all these folks, which is weird. And then you've got the one guy in Tiger King that's essentially running a little sex cult, right? That guy.
Doc Antle.
Yeah. And then you've got the Tiger King himself. Joe. You've got Joe Exotic, who is also kind of... Running astray is the sex cult. But, you know, 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, you know, because if he wasn't in jail, he would be a very popular person. He hasn't even seen the show, which is amazing.
Can you imagine if he wasn't?
Well, he's trying to get Donald Trump to exonerate him and pardon him. I mean, he was constantly, after I talked about Tiger King, I get messages from that guy. I don't know how he's giving me messages. I'm assuming it's someone who works for him. But I get messages all the time. Like, you've got to help get him out, put him on your podcast, do this, do that. Yeah.
Well, he also has communication in jail. Somehow he's able to get a phone. He's doing video calls and stuff. Well, you know how it goes. But there was a moment. There was a moment when we were filming this kind of like second installment of Tiger King where we covered this pardon, the presidential pardon.
There was a real shot where Joe was actually on a list, supposedly, that Trump was going to like. Hilarious. It's hilarious.
I don't remember exactly what the specifics of his accusation. So was he caught trying to hire someone to whack that lady? Yeah. So he was. Twice, yeah. And that lady, is there any truth to this idea that she whacked her husband?
Carol Baskin. There's a lot of circumstantial... I wouldn't say maybe evidence, but there's sort of, who else? It's not clean. Who else? And it was either, it feels as if it was her or members of her family and they were the only ones to gain. And so, yeah.
And what a great way to dispose of a body.
Uh-huh. I mean, I don't know how she disposed of the body.
It's nice to— Well, you have meat grinders on the premises, and you have enormous predators 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? Upon my disappearance, yeah. It's a very, very strange thing. No one says that, yeah.
And isn't there, like, a disparity? in the handwriting as well?
Yeah, 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 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 a 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. And so 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 thieves, but I'm sure you're a better person now.
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's plot and then intent. You know, paying someone to go do something. Right, right.
There's quite a few steps involved.
But yes, Joe's now pro-Trump again. He was pro-Biden when Trump didn't exist.
Because he was trying to get Biden to pardon him. They wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole, but Trump might.
Yeah, yeah.
Especially this time around. Yeah. Just for funsies.
Well, let's hope Tanya doesn't go to prison. I don't wish that on Tanya. No.
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, stop right now and scoot ahead by a few minutes. When they found that Tonka was in the basement, when I saw their film, when you guys were filming it, I was like, Jesus Christ, this lady is so crazy. She's showing everybody. I know. She has...
With all due respect, she just does not seem like a smart person. And she's almost like if you gave her an IQ test and then gave a chimp an IQ test, it'd be a toss-up. I mean, I think that's part of the problem. I don't think this lady understands the consequences of what she's doing, just like she doesn't understand how crazy her eyelashes look.
All of it is just – there's some fuses that are missing, some wires that aren't connected. And then because of the fact that at one point in time at least it was illegal for her to do what she was doing and they become accustomed to being able to have – and then their identity revolves around they're the person that has all the monkeys and all the chimpanzees. It was just fucking weird.
Well, 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 fucking chimp still?
Correct. There's 20 or so states legally you can do it. Oh, my God. Missouri's one of them.
Oh, my God.
But, you know, background, we spent about four years making this documentary series.
First of all, how'd you start? How do you find out about these people?
Go ahead.
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, you know, making Tiger King, I started filming some monkey moms. And I mean, like, as you see in Jim Crazy, you just can't make them up. And so after Tiger King, I just thought, you know, let's scratch the surface. Let's check into these monkey moms again. Yeah. And so, you know, it's.
these women that dress up their monkeys like dolls, like Joan Bonet Ramsey, like a little pageant doll, and they want them to be kids. And they seem to have the same pathology over and over and over. 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, well, my grandmother had a monkey. My grandmother had a monkey. Yeah, we hear the story a lot. She kept in the attic.
Really?
Yeah, the monkey's name was Chi-Chi, and Chi-Chi used to eat gum. So he'd give Chi-Chi a piece of gum. Chi-Chi would unwrap the gum and put the gum in his mouth or her mouth. I don't remember. It was a boy or a girl.
Do you know what kind of monkey?
I do not. I was very small. I was very young at the time, and I remember she had to get rid of it because it bit my cousin.
Yeah.
Well, that's what happens. Yeah.
Yeah.
But Chi Chi 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. So, you know, when I was young, in the 70s, 60s, 70s, 80s, you could buy a monkey in virtually any pet store across the United States. Oh my God. And thank God people realized, like your grandmother, they're not good pets. You 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, you know, if I had to guess. Wow. Yeah, if I had to guess.
Yeah, yeah. That's our kind of consensus on a lot of it.
Also a kid that doesn't talk back.
Yeah, yeah. It's a great book you'd love. It's by this guy who had a store in New York, Henry Treflick. It's called They Don't Talk Back.
And it's these kind of chronicles of his experiences, you know, through the last... This was a big exotic animal dealership that existed up until the 70s in New York City. But they had everything. Chimps, gorillas... elephants, and they sold stuff to the private sector and zoos.
You could walk into a Woolworth 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?
Some guy, well, there's one, that one guy, I think it was in Harlem who had a tiger in his house.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And there's a crazy image of the cops going up the fire escape and the tigers in the window. Yeah. And you see the tiger bearing its fangs in the window. That glass is that fucking thin, man.
That is so crazy This thing is trapped in this like regular apartment with regular glass Like at any moment the only thing keeping that thing out is it doesn't know that it could just smash that and get on that Firescape and just go run through the streets Yeah, yeah crazy great. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, but the bizarre thing is that there's humans that want those They want those I mean
I mean, the tiger thing is more of like kind of a macho thing, I think. If I had to, you know.
Well, what about Carol then? She's a woman.
Yeah, she's kind of an anomaly. You know, it's funny.
But she liked the lesser known cats, right?
I interviewed Tippi Hendren, you know, in the course of doing all of this. And her, you know, Xanadu, it's called Shambhala with all of her cats, you know. And I know you've talked about this, about Melanie Griffith growing up with lions.
And that crazy movie Roar. Yeah.
Oh, and that movie Roar. The bed photograph is fantastic. Oh, my God, that movie Roar. But, yeah, when I interviewed Tippi Hendren, literally on her property in California, she lives with all these tigers and lions. She built a museum for herself. So she's got her own museum, the Tippi Hendren Museum, where I interviewed her. But, yeah, there are some women, Tippi Hendren, Carol Baskin, but –
It's mostly a macho thing. Generally speaking, I think it's more men, yeah.
Well, I guarantee if you go through the Texas private collections, there's a bunch of good old boys. Yeah, exactly. Believe that? Probably. Yeah, yeah. Got some oil money.
You've got canned ranches in Texas.
There's a lot of those. Yeah. There's a lot of canned ranches, which is very odd. And some of them are fairly small. like a couple hundred acres, and they keep animals there. In my mind, what that is is agriculture. It's just you're doing a different form of deer agriculture. You're not really hunting. Hunting to me is you go into the wild, you go into the woods, and you experience real nature.
And it's 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, canned ranch, you can go shoot, like in South Africa, a lion. And the lion was raised in a kind 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, You know, there's a lot of things people don't know about hunting, which is, you know, one just obviously obvious statistic is that more wild lands are protected because of hunting. 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 percent of all sales of outdoor activities gets donated towards wildlife preservation. And this is the reason why we can have these enormous national forests. where you have wildlife biologists establish what the healthy numbers of these animals are and how many people can go hunt them.
And they also know because you have to when you 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. And so they have a very accurate number of how many animals in there, and they spend a lot of money doing this.
And these wildlife biologists do an absolutely incredible job. There's more white-tailed deer in this country right now than there were when Columbus landed. Wow. Part of that is because of agriculture. That's where it gets weird. So agriculture particularly – I have a good buddy of mine who is – he's an archer, a professional archer, and he lives in Iowa. Okay. 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 sort of...
sort of ethical bastardization of the wild right it's like dealing with the reality of what you have you have untold thousands and thousands of monocrop agriculture acres so thousands and thousands of acres of monsanto corn and they're all these deer thrive there because when they chop down the corn they don't chop it all down and you know these deer they go there after fresh feedings they 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. Like Iowa does not have a lot of – they don't have wolves. They don't have a lot of animals that would sort of balance out the population of these animals. And so you have insane amounts of car accidents.
Like when I was in, I went to visit my buddy there and just driving from the airport to his house, we saw like 50 fucking deer. And if you're going there around November, which is the rut, the men lose their mind. 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 into traffic.
And the males are running after them and they're running right into traffic. It's kind of nuts. It's a really nutty situation because it only exists because there's no predators. So, California has this bizarre model, and what California was 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 food and hunt animals in the wild, they treat it like we should have the animals take care of themselves. And so that's why it's illegal to kill a mountain lion in California, and they have a large number of mountain lions.
Probably underreported. I have mountain lions on my property.
All the time. They're dangerous. They're underreported. And 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 of yarn, and their instincts clip in, and they just go chasing after it. But I've seen mountain lions in the wild, and it is a sobering experience.
sobering moment when you stare into the eyes one of those things you 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 if you have a weapon you're you know you should really have that weapon ready because they will jump you every now and then they jump people there's a crazy video yeah well i believe two people were killed last year in the pacific northwest
Of all the big cats, I think jaguars kill the least people. Which is crazy. For some reason.
But they also live in the least populated areas.
For the most part, yeah. At Mount Lions, yeah, of course, they will kill someone. But, you know, typically, they're not looking for people.
Right. They're not looking for people.
It's not like a tiger that, you know, has all its prey, you know, get trapped by the local people in India. 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 probably – like grizzly bears behave very differently in places where grizzly bears are hunted. So in the lower 48, it's illegal to hunt grizzly bears.
So if they see you, if you run into them in the wrong – they're not going to run away. They might run towards you. Especially if you surprise them, it's very dangerous. And that's why – and they will treat you as food if they're really hungry.
You know, in the course of making Tiger King – I would interview people about tigers and how, you know, what it's like keeping a hundred tigers. And people would always say to me, I'd rather have a hundred tigers than one chimp. And that's because chimps, you know, and everyone thinks, oh, a tiger is so dangerous, but chimps,
can figure shit out and one of the chronic problems keeping chimps is that they can figure out how to escape and so you can never use a combination lock because they'll sit there all day and figure it out oh my god you got to use oftentimes like three layers of locks and i'm just bringing it back to chimps because you know people think oh it's a chimp it's so cute it's in the circus trust me it's a lot easier to have a tiger act than a chimp act
Oh, I could imagine. And also, when I was watching this lady's enclosure, I was looking at the steel that's drilled into wood, and I'm like, I could get out of that. 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.
It looks like you're encaged 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%. 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 chimps. 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. So he started, the guy gave the chimp Playboy, and then it graduated to porn.
And the chimp, because it had never seen other chimps, it was raised in isolation, started thinking it was human, and started sexually identifying with this woman that was keeping it, and started becoming sort of addicted to pornography. So just to give you a 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 sort of how weird it is to keep a chimpanzee. You don't have a tiger getting addicted to human pornography or watching Avatar all day long.
Well, 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 mean, I don't want to talk about it in too much detail here. But you have to ask yourself, like, how weird does it get?
Right. I mean, how weird does it get? Wasn't she giving it Xanax and wine?
Okay, that alone. And Viagra? What? And Viagra?
She was given it Viagra?
No, I'm joking.
Oh. 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 second episode.
How do gypsies 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.
So there's like a direct correlation between the size of the male's testicles, and they think that exists with human beings as well, but it's more problematic to examine. Oh, so that's my problem. 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.
Yeah.
Which is fantastic. It's so good. It's so good because it is a rare documentary that had this established... Element in that these scientists had been embedded in this group of chimpanzees for 20 years And so these scientists had very specific rules. You don't look them in the eye You don't get any closer than 20 yards if they come towards you 20 just move away.
Don't ever have food There's like a bunch of rules and as long as you have those rules they behave completely normally and they just you don't you're just a thing you're like a tree or a bird or something not they're not interested in and which is really interesting, right?
Yeah, yeah, amazing.
Because they got incredible footage of the social interactions. They got a detailed analysis of how they established dominance and who's in control. We used to think it's always the biggest, strongest chimp, but no, it's not. It's ones that form unions and bonds and communities. Very interesting. It's so much like us.
I think also what's just so amazing about that film is – and I give them an incredible – a ton of credit. Most people that go out to do a documentary don't have the capacity to film that many days. Like they covered that.
Yes.
I don't know. It was like hundreds of days or something.
Yeah, years.
And years. And I think – You know, they really invested the time and they deserve the credit because they put in that amount of time. I mean, for us to do even, you know, Trim Crazy, we filmed how many days?
It's probably close to 250 days. I mean, most people can't do that.
Right, right, right.
I mean, it's incredible. Resources suck. How much did it cost? That's where I'm going. Yeah, my God. It's not a relief.
But in order to make a documentary this way, you have to catch it while it's happening contemporaneously. So you have to be there. If you snooze, you lose. If you're not there, you're not going to make Chimp crazy.
Right, right.
Or Chimp Nation. Chimp Empire. Empire. There's two, right? Chimp Empire, right?
Chimp Empire. Is Chimp Nation another one?
Oh, 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 like, and what's her name again? Tanya. Tanya. Crazy Tonya, you know, and Joe Exotic. You need someone who's like the figurehead, like with the photo that you guys have on the promo of her laying down in the chimp behind her.
It's perfect. It's perfect. I mean, you need that nutty person to compel you because there's part of all of us that recognizes that
thought would come into our minds but then rational thought would go into play like you can't do this they're dangerous they're big they get older you can't control them what happens to them it's not fair for them to be and then you go I don't want to chimp but if you're
dull minded, if you got a nine volt brain and you look at this, like, I am gonna take, they're more important to me than my own babies. Like when she says stuff like that, you're like, oh, well, you shouldn't even have a dog. Like, you definitely shouldn't be allowed to vote.
No, but it's interesting you say you have to find those characters, but you also have to find a story. I mean, you can talk about this is how wide a net we cast because after Tiger King, it wasn't like we just jumped into this chimp mom world. We were filming you know, Mark the Shark and, you know, women.
Yeah, we were interested in- It took a lot of time to- In the animal-human relationship in a variety of forms. I think we, and you see in episode one, one of the first things we shot years before we even met Tanya, was this woman that's part of the circus family, Pam Rosaire, watching 2001 Space Odyssey with her chimpanzee Chance. Yeah, yeah. I mean, talk about sobering experience.
Me and Carl distanced with Chance the chimpanzee, 15 years old, pounding 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 enclosure, because the thing about tigers is, as long as they're about under the age four, even though it looks like a full-grown tiger, They haven't gone through puberty yet. They haven't gotten the tiger mentality of killing you.
But a chimp, anyway, the chimp filming was much more difficult.
Well, they're also like human characters and wiry, and you don't know what's going to happen. They're on these kind of leashes.
Well, it's also how they evolved. I mean, that's what kept them alive. You watch Chimp Nations, like those sort of instincts is what keeps them alive.
Oh, sure. Very murderous.
Well, we didn't really know how murderous they were until Attenborough. When David Attenborough did that series, I think it was in the 90s, when he captured the chimps eating monkeys.
Yeah.
And this is one of the things that when I had the guy from Chimp Nation on, I discussed it with him. He's like, how often do they eat monkeys? 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 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 open like a cantaloupe. I'm just saying that because, yes, they're really hardcore when it comes to the way they predate on other animals.
And they're about as strong as a 500-pound man. That's about right, yeah. Yeah. It's so insane for us. We had a chimp on the set of News Radio, like, 96 or something like that. There was a baby chimp. It was a baby in a diaper. And this chimp climbed on my back and whacked me a couple times in the back, just playing. It was just having fun. And...
I remember, first of all, the feeling of holding it. It's like it was made out of steel wires. It wasn't made out of 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 onto them and they're weak. These things were strong as fuck, like in a bizarre way.
We like to look at something that's close to our size and think, oh, I could probably overpower that. You know, oh, I know how to fight. I'll fight that fucking chimp off. No, you have zero chance. It's a different thing. Everything about it is different. The muscle structure is completely different. The tendon structure is completely different. And the amount of force it can generate.
The arm leverage is pretty incredible. But they also want to fuck with you.
I was just going to say, people always talk about, will a bear kill the lion? Or will the bear kill 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 chimp 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. And they also have zero remorse. So they're like a human in that they can think, but they have zero empathy. And they're fucking dangerous.
I'm writing this. You know, what was so fascinating, you'd think, knowing all this about chimps later, remember this, Eric, we were talking about, well, there must be like reported human deaths in the United States with chimp attacks. And we couldn't find any. It's only memes.
It's only little... I mean, there are globally, but somehow... Globally, a lot of them in Africa, little kids get snatched and stuff. Well, kids get eaten. Kids get eaten. But in the U.S., there has been no really human death caused by chimpanzee. Now, what was fascinating, and you haven't watched this yet, but in episode four, we kind of go... It comes from delusion to reality, and it's heavy.
We filmed our first chimpanzee funeral. And what we didn't show... which I just remember this now, everyone that would come up to say their piece would share a story where they were attacked by that animal. Oh, God. It was so, the kind of juxtaposition of this celebration of life and these attacks in this context of a situation they shouldn't have ever been in, it was kind of remarkable.
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 attacks 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. So if you have a boring-ass fucking life in some middle-of-nowhere town, but you also have a lion... You're cool. Life's pretty interesting. And that's Joe Exotic, right? 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. And when people live boring-ass lives, things like that seem like something that that's who I am. Like, that's me.
Because it's extraordinary experiences from persons that are, you know.
Where does that come from, though?
Is it influence? I think we like experiences first. There's a part of evolution where human beings, part of our lust for innovation and for constant improvement of our environment and circumstances is we like extraordinary experiences. I think it's what made people successful.
I think the more daring and the more addicted you are to extraordinary experiences, the more likely you are 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 chick bait. It's like a little pooch gets you a lot of cooch, like a guy that's walking a dog. Joe had tigers to get boys.
Which is so wild.
They got 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 mean, I'm more interested in Carl now, you know? What's your motivation over there with that baby dog?
Isn't it interesting when you see Carl interact with Marshall? Because Marshall's like, I don't want to hurt you. I don't want nothing to do with this. Stop biting me. What are you doing? Yeah, you can see it. Yeah. But you've got two different kinds of things. One of them is like a little bulldog, 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 the movement, right? It's the movement?
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 in his mouth. Like he got a squirrel that quick. Wow. And he wanted me to know. He was so happy. And I was like, dude, what did you do? And he was like, ooh, what did I do? I'm like, what did you do, man? And so I got rid of the squirrel.
But whenever he sees one, it's just – nobody had to teach him that. He's locked in. Like that's what he wants to do. He wants to go get squirrels. And he wants to bring them back to you. It's a weird thing because it's like – You understand predatory instincts like cats have them. They're the worst. Cats have killed so many fucking birds.
It's something like multiple billions of mammals and birds are killed every year by outside cats.
The first thing that kills songbirds is glass windows, skyscrapers and 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 wormhole of cats, predatory cats. And there's compilations of cats just jacking pigeons, jacking squirrels, jacking everything. Everything they can get their hands on.
Yeah. Now, cats are bad unless they're indoors, domestic cats. In Hawaii, cats are the reason why so many species in Hawaii went extinct. Yep.
And 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. So 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. And they understand, you know, praise them. And then eventually they understand commands and they have this like pathway that you've carved into their system of chasing the ball, bringing it back.
We're going to have fun. Chase the ball, bring it back. Marshall, it was in there.
It was already in there. But that's his programming, right? Which is crazy. Which is so much of what we found so interesting about the justification for this love that a lot of the subjects we've covered had for these chimpanzees was that they love me. 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.
And I feel what we've realized is this kind of imbalance of this mutuality of caregiving that I think exists with a lot of our people. 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, a 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 don't have a cage for your dog. Right.
and it just seems so obvious like tanya this chimp does not love you the way you love it well i think it does but it also doesn't have a choice right so if tanya lived in the jungle if she had a shack in the jungle and the chimp lived in the jungle wild and free how much for the chimp visitor first of all i wouldn't be eating chicken nuggets and drinking coca-cola which is weird too that she's feeding this thing and she said it has congestive heart failure
Spoiler alert again. It's still good. You still got to watch it, folks. But if you give a person that, they fucking get sick. Like nothing you're doing to that chimp is natural. The cage is not natural. The food's not natural. Nothing's natural.
You know one of the saddest things for me was when she was showing at Instagram reels and just scrolling through reels and the chimp's just staring at the screen. That was the weirdest one. That's really disturbing. But meanwhile, I do that.
That's a lot of the sentiment we see from people is a reaction to that. We are basically doing that ourselves.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're doing it to ourselves.
You're not looking at your son. You can make a choice. Yeah, sure.
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. It was looking at a bunch of things, but just staring at the screens. But I don't think it probably understood that those were his kids, but it probably did remember what it was like to have babies.
And to be outside. Sitting there in that cage in the basement looking at these chimps washing a Mercedes that's outside. We both still talk to Tanya almost daily or communicate with Tanya. And 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.
And 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.
Which, you know... It's hard not to be compassionate with a lot of these people, to be honest. Right. It's really hard. They're humans. They're humans.
Well, especially Tanya, because she led us into her life in such an intimate way that, you know, she was really generous that way. So it isn't black and white. There's a lot of gray.
I understand an audience reaction, though. And you can have those kind of conflicting views on it. But being part of making it as... you know, we're partially complicit to it too as well. I mean, in a way of sharing that story in a way.
Well, you know, there's the age-old term, with great power comes great responsibility. It is a great responsibility to hold a large chimpanzee in your house. That is a great power. It is an enormous responsibility. And 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 shouldn't, they should be killing us every chance they can too.
They are.
They're not just that, but infanticide. You know, 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, I think it's a long period of time. I think it's around six years. Oh, wow. See if that's true. Wow. So what the male will do will kill the babies.
The males will kill the babies to force her into estrus, so she will start breeding again. So what the females do to counteract that is to have sex with as many male dolphins as they can. So they have sex with all the male dolphins. They're not monogamous in any way, stretch, or form. They just go and fuck as many guys as they can.
So those guys will protect their babies because they don't know if that's their baby or not because they know they've had sex with her. 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. Penguins are. But they only do it for like a year. They're monogamous for like a year.
But they also look exactly the same, which is a trap.
They used to think macaw parrots were monogamous and swans. And then they started doing the genetics and they realized they cheat like hell.
Yeah, I'm sure they do. It 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.
Yeah.
And we communicate.
Tell stories.
Yes. And we empathize with each other. And we recognize things in other people, even heinous people, even people you don't like, like whether it's Joe Exotic or Tanya. You recognize, like, I see. She's not. I get it. You know, she's just a person who's all fucked up. Even that crazy drunk lady who had the one that attacked her daughter. Like, what happened to her?
You know, like, what was her childhood like? You know, it couldn't have been good.
And she's the one person out there who's still alive who I really don't want to hear from. Because I really wonder right now, what is she thinking?
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 – you know, was her son, and then later was dressing, you know, the chimp up with the same clothing as her deceased husband. I think she wanted out, and somehow she figured it out.
Well, the life choice is really remarkable. They're also basically in cages, the humans taking care of the chimpanzee. Right, right, right. You really think about it, and the same goes for Sandy, Sandy Harold. You know, what was so great about revisiting that story in Connecticut, you know, we basically... We were set to come out with this show in March 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 kind of foundational piece for the Travis story. We tracked him down. He says, I have everyone that was part of that story and they have archive. Do you want to do it? And so we basically said, you know, is this going to make our story better? Meaning that we're going to have to extend for at least four or five months to do this right and postpone our entire delivery schedule. Yeah.
And once we got into it, it was so worth it because we got this total intimate view of what it was like to be in Sandy's world. We had this archive. The video that you see has never been seen before. This portrait of a family, this kind of very complicated, complex family life. That's been inhabited by Travis, which was a descendant of Connie Casey's place in Missouri.
If you think about that, where our starting point was for this whole project was was always around. How do we understand where captive primates came from in America? Connie Casey was this place, this kind of, you know, breeding ground for all of these animals that were kind of cycled through Hollywood. And what I found very interesting is this kind of this lineage that led to Travis.
Travis was sold to Sandy. It's so incestuous. It's so incestuous that they're all connected. And you'll see a little bit of episode four.
There it is.
Travis the Menace. And it's a remarkable story. This is Sandy who bought Travis from Connie. Connie, you know, it was Susie.
By the way, how much does that photograph freak you out?
Yeah.
When you see that chimp holding that baby at any minute and just decide to pull that baby's head off.
And when chimps smile, it's actually a sign of aggression. It's not like us. We smile because we're happy. That's not a happy chimp doing that.
So he's trained. 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. Right.
It's more of a grimace. It's more of a happy smile, I guess, if you want to call it that. Right, right, right. So it was fascinating to us to get access to this story. We go into it and... He's drinking soda from McDonald's. That's disturbing. Yeah, he got too big.
Well, you're giving him the standard American diet. But look at the canines compared to ours. Oh, yeah. 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. Yeah, sure. It's a different thing.
And when you're taking this thing and you're, you know, it's a time bomb. You have like four years where you can control it, maybe five, right? And then they say after five, it's just like you're basically rolling the dice anytime someone comes over your house.
Yeah. Exactly. That's basically it. Just so crazy. But he was, you know, this classic story. It was this kind of gothic fairy tale in Stanford, Connecticut, which was so unusual because it's a suburb of Manhattan. You know, everyone thought this was in the South or wherever. It was happening in Stanford, Connecticut. And Sandy had this kind of void in her life.
She buys Travis and raises her part of the family. And you see the story, the same arc as every other Chimp story in a family setting. Yeah. They get too mature and they have to, you know, the thing that I thought you'd appreciate in terms of our kind of this idea that we show in the story really well, I think, is this this chimp is happy and connected to the community because he's free.
He's socializing. He's a town celebrity. He's at work with Sandy in the tow shop, you know, answering phones, you know, filling out paperwork. The mascot of the tow shop, Desire Me Motors. Right. Yeah, he's airbrushed everywhere on trucks.
And he lives a cool life. He lives a cool life.
And then one day... Everyone gets to see the chimp, right? And then until one day, he gets too aggressive. And he this this incredible story, which we don't cover in the 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 gets out.
you know, stops traffic, you know, and it's covered in the news and it's a joke. Everyone's like, oh my God, it's Planet of the Apes again. But the chimp is trying to get a hold of the kid. The chimp's trying to, like, he's irritated. Why would you bother the chimpanzee? He threw a can of Coke at him. He runs out of the car trying to figure out what's going on.
Meanwhile, Sandy gets an ice cream cone, brings 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've 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 kind of the other stuff that we learned, but...
What everyone kind of talks about in revisiting media at the time is he – it was annexed. It was the wine glasses. He was drunk. 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. Right.
And the person who he runs into first, Sharla, represents confinement. Right. He was a nanny. Right. So what do you think is going to happen? It was also reported he was fucking or he left already. He was like cruising around and he was in the graveyard fucking with the guy who was digging graves.
That's what we heard.
Insanely bored. Just like a person that's stuck in a cage.
And chimps, when they're bored and you always see it, they rock. And so you see, if you're watching that section of Chimp Crazy, Travis is just sitting there rocking, which is like a tick. Big cats do a figure eight over and over and over. Chimps do this rocking. And 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 here. because we think we can control things. I mean, that's what, if you've seen the movie Nope, this great footage with this chimp Gordy, which he covers and is a through line in the show, it's inspired based on this whole idea of spectacle and humans that can control things.
Nope, in that scene with Gordy, 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 have they been able to avoid all that?
She's careful. I mean, she's 77 years old, Pam Rosaire. When she was seven years old, she was asked what she wants to do with her life in this circus animal family. And she says, I want to train chimps. I want to do something hard. I want to do something difficult. The rest of her family trained horses and elephants. And 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 Rosaire. how come she's the one person that has sort of been immune to it, or has she?
I think she's got some, you know, look, I think she's lucky. I think it's the best way. I don't know what happens behind the scenes, to be honest. I think, you know, to be fair, I think, I don't know. But I do know that when I watched her interaction, You know, there's a real, like, understanding. And it's, and she has a leash on them.
Well, and she also, they are neutered. Castrated, yeah.
I'm sure they're less aggressive.
They do, you know, they remove their canines oftentimes. They do have to alter them to be able to continue to work with them.
They're modified.
I mean, I should say there's a lot of dark parts of our story that we didn't go into. 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. And more recently, in recent time, we've seen a lot of Central American and Mexican species coming into the U.S., so there's a pipeline.
you know, I'm sort of saying, well, what we, what we look, what, so yeah, yes, it is. We didn't realize also how dark this was coming out of it. Cause we were so close to it and the reaction by people, it's very heavy. Um, so I'm, we're all desensitized from, from seeing this. Um, there's some really interesting stuff that happens in for joy. I hope you finish it, uh, including another attack.
Uh, but this time with a person, uh, that we all know. And, um, Oh, you're teasing me. I'm teasing you a little bit. I'm sorry. It's pretty good. It's pretty good.
I'll probably want to watch it. Okay. It's good. It's pretty good. A part of her body gets bitten off.
Oh, come on, man. I'm not kidding. Similar to Trump. Now you're giving away way too much. You fucked it up. You fucked up the whole show. I'm going to look at her ear the whole show now. Yeah. 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 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, sometimes.
And how much of castrating it changes its behavior?
I think significantly. Because Buck in Oregon was castrated. The Connecticut chimpanzee, was that castrated? Probably, but Buck was castrated and started wearing a shock collar. In order to manage a chimp, as you say, after four or five years old, they typically alter them, remove their canines, castrate them, shock 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 chimpanzee, what are you doing? What did you do to him? It's like fixing a human.
But also, by the way, think about what the medical care they get. The guy who's a horse vet is the guy working on a chimpanzee? If you're lucky. If you're lucky. If you're lucky, yeah. 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 kind of what is this about, mainly we're talking about this very niche subject matter of captive chimpanzees in America, is which we learned there really only is about 1,300 remaining in captivity, which includes those who are already in sanctuaries in the U.S., about half of that 1,300.
And big zoos.
And big zoos. Big zoos have about 250 of them still. So in terms of the kind of roadside zoo private home environment, it's between less than 100 chimpanzees that remain in captivity. So to answer your question, there might be more. But it's hard to hide a chimp.
But globally, there's still many chimps in Thailand and all over the world that are, you know, so the U.S., at least there's less and less in this.
There's less and less. The primates in general in terms of, you know, monkeys as pets, it's, you know, it's reported somewhere around 15,000 people in America have primates as pets. 15,000 people. 15,000 according to the American Animal Welfare Institute. Yeah. So that's what we're finding. But, you know, through that, we had to zoom out.
And I think that what we've learned, what I've learned personally about organizations that are doing something to protect wild lands and protect wild populations of chimpanzees, there's a lot of great ones out there. So we've been supporting a program that's doing 12 project sites in Africa, $10 million, 10,000 chimpanzees. And that's what we're hopeful for.
I mean, Africa is basically 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. I mean, chimpanzees. Certainly not after they're castrated. Not chimpanzees.
They've done all these projects. I don't know if you like any of the 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 sort of an island in a, you know, it's like a freshwater river where they have released chimps, but, you know, chimps that are just placed in Africa. 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?
That's a good, you know, there's that famous, you know, 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 into northern Argentina, where jaguars have now disappeared.
But the jaguar program, they do it very carefully, and they put the jaguar in these enormous enclosures and let them capture wild prey before they release them. It takes a lot of time.
Well, I mean, we were talking about house cats earlier. Oh, house cats. No, no, no. I wasn't saying that. I just meant cats a job. But I'm saying that house cats, which are completely domesticated, you can come to them and pet them. If you let them loose, they survive fine as 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. And almost every night you'll see on our streets, there's a certain night of the week when the garbage comes out, all the garbage cans are tipped over because of the bears. And you're right, you're right. Once they learn that, then they have a pattern and they go after those dumpsters.
Well, you know, California used to have big, big brown bears.
California's state flag is a grizzly bear.
Yeah, 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 get nutty. All these people that want to reintroduce animals, like, okay, it's just you have to understand you're playing God. You're throwing.
And there's a reason why it stinks because the last grizzly bear in California was shot about 100 years ago, and it's because they eat people.
Levesque, California is named after the last guy who died from a grizzly bear attack. Yeah. I think his name is Steven Levesque. And he got fucked up. They were big, you know, big brown bears. And we killed them all because they were killing people. I'm not saying you 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 than 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. You know, I think a better solution would be let's make sure that wherever they live naturally, their populations are fine. I think that's probably the better solution. There's been some success of reintroducing wolves into Montana, the Yellowstone reintroduction in the 1990s.
Yeah, we know those guys.
Really interesting. They did have an overpopulation problem of undulates because bears can only eat so many of them and wolves are much more clever and they act together. And it's kind of balanced things out for now.
We work with Turner Endangered Species, Ted Turner, and we work very closely with this guy, Mike Phillips in Montana, who's been probably the key guy to bring back gray wolves into this part of the Western part of the United States. But yeah, it's been without, I mean, I know, because we do this, that even gray wolves, there's a lot of controversy from ranchers.
Imagine bringing back big grizzlies, brown bears to California.
Yeah, it's going to be a problem. But people that live in urban areas don't understand what that 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 B.C. He lives in like 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. Yeah. 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. Timothy Treadwell.
That's fascinating.
He was lunch.
That's my favorite unintentional comedy. Yeah. Because Werner Herzog, I think, made that movie funny on purpose.
Of course. Of course. That's like our, you know, source of inspiration. It's a really good, it's a good movie. It's great.
But I never forget watching it in New York City. I was watching it at a theater. The whole time, I was just saying, like, oh, my God. Like, I just was being, I was angry with this guy. Right. You know? He was worried about his bandana or whatever he was worried about. I was so pissed watching it, but it was a good movie.
But it's the same thing. It's a less than extraordinary person who gets attached and addicted to extraordinary experiences. You're constantly around these. I mean, he got some incredible footage. Yeah. That guy got some amazing footage. He did some fucking hard camping. Okay, that guy was out there roughing it for a long-ass time in a tent, surrounded by monsters, living in the grizzly maze.
He's a maniac.
Yeah, talking baby talk to the bears.
Pulled it off. 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. You know, I don't have any 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 is 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.
Well, the bear ate his girlfriend after it ate him. Right. It killed him. She was trying to defend him. She was hitting it with a frying pan. Yeah, but she was, like, you know, collateral damage.
I feel bad for the girlfriend.
I do, too, but again, like, what kind of choices are we making in this life?
But think about, you asked a question about retroduction 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 the chimpanzee. He gets charged with destruction of property. It's a felony. Oh, 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 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 can do. You could survive for a little bit, but it's going to tear you apart. That's just how it is.
And if that guy is not armed and he can't protect himself, then what do you have? 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 kind of far away from where we were going with these themes. Right. 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? Sure.
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 gonna steal their animals.
And so a lot of these people have very valuable animals and they're extremely guarded and paranoid about letting you in. Now, of course, it's even become harder because in our case, we've become known. And so to continue this model of doing another story on, I don't know, bears, yeah, people are gonna be suspicious. But as far as being natural, I don't think that's so hard.
With Tanya and Joe, Joe's obviously a performer in a sense, but we just film them. And the more intimate you can make that filming experience for them, the more natural they become. So we work with hardly anybody. 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 God. 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 insurers 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 was the perfect timing of people being locked in during the pandemic. You guys were kind of the early stars of the pandemic, your show. Yeah. It was like it was also a welcome escape from the craziness that we were all experiencing. We're experiencing everyone's wearing a mask. You're keeping away from people.
Yeah.
I think I was telling Eric this, you know, it's so we could ask this question a lot about, you know, the state of, you know, non scripted, unscripted shows, documentaries and this this dramatization that you're seeing is a trend. People making very cinematic movies. real stories, dramatic recreations.
And Eric and I, we're talking about it a lot because so much of our content is so much more surreal than anything we can even make up or recreate. And 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 reality, okay? And especially the kind of reality shows you think of as reality shows, they have all these scenarios set up. They'll edit things to make them look like different things happened because they just want you to keep them – 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. And then she'd show up and she'd say – Oh, you know, I got to go get my eyes done. And then I would be like, Tanya, you're three hours late. Can I at least film you getting your eyes done?
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, and we also have, you know, Eric, we're also fortunate to have an incredibly talented team that can help, you know, create these experiences in a way on screen that make it authentic. Well, and it's also the editing process. Editing, of course. We had a great team. Incredible group of guys, of teams.
So as they're doing it, are they like marking down like key moments? Do they have someone who's like a stenographer or something who's like marking down so you know like what to look for? Or do you at the end of the day go, that thing where she went and got her lips done, 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. It's pretty organic. I think there's also, you know, you follow the core story, which was Tanya's story. We kind of knew that we had it. the minute the missing chimpanzee happened, or the supposed death occurred. So that was the story. Where is the chimp?
And through that story, we're able to kind of latch on all these other things. Now, what you don't know is we shot these other stories, you know... out of sequence. Travis came at the very end, so we had to figure out a way to weave it into episode two, weave it into episode four. 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. Because it's not. Because there's all these sort of 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 Chimp Crazy after Tiger King, we actually filmed so many different things to get to Chimp people.
How do we spend less time on these things is what we've realized. It's exhausting. It's worth it, though.
It seems like there's no other way to keep it authentic than to just shadow these people forever and then splice it down to four hours. Yeah, yeah. Which is like, you have 250-plus hours of footage? 250 days of footage.
It's about 1,300 hours, roughly.
Okay, 1,300 hours down to four.
Yeah. Now, that's just primary camera. It's like summarizing the days. I mean, multiple cameras, multiple things happening in a day, right? We're very efficient. It's an 8- to 12-hour day. We're capturing a lot of stuff in that day.
So are you archiving at the end of the day so you know what day this happened and what day that?
There's a process. There's a field process to ingest that has kind of the notes that we have for the day. What happened? What's interesting about the day?
And are you trying to form the narrative of how you're going to have the whole documentary series play out as you're doing that? No.
Or is it just... That comes so much later. Yeah. Like, we have no idea where it's going. Probably for the first year and a half of filming. You know, in the case of Chimp Crazy, we didn't even discover Tanya until a year and a half in? A year and a half in.
No, what kind of made it... What made it more complicated... Like, we got our star. Well, you know, what's so interesting, Joe, and I want to come back to this about... You know, I saw you get a little emotional with the Buck story because I... 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 were 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 to.
So we decided to film everything, everything including our conversations and process, like very meta, which ended up becoming part of the story too, as you'll see more in four where we have to turn her in basically. So the point with Bean is that the buck story happened.
We thought we'd just send this guy, Dwayne, who we recruited to kind of join the team into Festus to cover this confiscation, thinking nothing was going to happen. Day happens. Take the animals out. One is missing. Yeah. And then the guy that we had sent there became friends with her and we just had to keep following, following it.
So this guy became essential to the story with with no intended intended, you know, reasoning for that. So, yeah, it's it's the making of became more interesting than the actual subject matter in a way to us. And kind of weaving that together came much, much later. It's not a good formula if you want to make money with documentaries.
I mean, I'm interested, though.
So you're also kind of an outsider in this. But what was your kind of response to the industry, you know, formulaic kind of way of doing things?
Well, I mean, doing what kind of 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 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
And so Bob wants Mexican food. Sally wants Chinese food. You have to figure it out, and you have to go around town and figure out where to eat, and you're eventually going to decide this. And this is the place you're going to eat. You're going to be happy. And so the whole thing is the personal dynamics, the— The relationships these people have to each other.
And then they create drama along the way. Along the way, you're going to run into your friend from high school who's perfectly made up. Well lit with a microphone on. Whoa. So it's bullshit. 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.
Yeah.
And then, you know, you have dating shows, which are super, super popular. Because, like, who is he going to pick? Who is she going to pick? How is this going to work? Yeah. You know, we get excited about that. Or fucking these garage shows where someone shows up at a storage unit. Well, you know, a lot of those shows, they fake it. They load up the storage unit.
Because, yeah, so they can't be assured that this storage unit's gonna have some fucking pirate's treasure in it, right? So what do they do? They put pirates... You ruin that for them. Yeah, so they pretend that they got this at an auction. Like, who knows what's in it? Apparently the guy died in a mysterious way, and there's people looking for him. We might really be onto something.
And then you cut to commercial. Is that gold? Cut to commercial. Cut back from commercial. Is that gold?
But I even thought... I don't watch any of those shows. I even thought some of these, like, you know, nature shows, like Steve Irwin... You know, and I know you know Forrest Gulland, but I always kind of 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, like, one of the more interesting things today is YouTube, right? Because YouTube, you have these small, independent people. Like, there's this guy we had on called Python Cowboy. And this guy goes out into the Everglades every day and captures pythons. Yeah. And, you know, like there's videos of him.
He got bit by one, like really fucked up. His arm's gushing blood. He's holding on. They're enormous. There's more pythons in the Everglades than anywhere on Earth. Burmese pythons. Yeah, Burmese pythons that used to be people's pets or used to be a part of a reptile facility.
So we're doing our next doc series is about reptiles and the smuggling of reptiles. We have a whole section on that.
It's another thing I went down the rabbit hole last night. Nile crocodiles. I was going to the Nile crocodiles in the Everglades.
I can tell you a lot about Nile crocodiles.
Tell me about Nile 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 Nile crocodiles came from the same gene line. So they think they came from the same genetic source.
But then there was another guy that I was watching this documentary last night, or this YouTube video rather last night, where he was saying that there's like huge crocodiles that take out cattle on the west side of Florida. No. Yeah, so he was sketching me out. He's like, 18-foot crocs killed cows.
There's like 23 or 24 species of crocodilians in the world. That includes caimans, crocodiles, alligators, gaurails. And the only crocs that are really, really dangerous to man are saltwater crocodiles, nile crocodiles, mugger crocodiles. But the crocs in Florida that are native, American crocodiles, they are brackish water reptiles. They're not like Nile crocodiles that are in freshwater.
So in Florida, you basically just have American alligators. And there's a very small population of American crocodiles that are still native, but they're in sort of estuaries and brackish water. They're smaller. Which ones are smaller?
The 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 alligator or American crocodile? I was under the impression that they were a smaller species than the alligators were. And definitely smaller than the rest of the crocodiles. Check me on that. That's an alligator. No, that's alligator. Monster cattle-eating alligator 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 wow i love this fact check okay here we go 14 foot yeah so they're smaller yeah wait what's the largest american alligator then
It's bigger, definitely, for sure. Is it really? Wow. Yeah, because that one that we have out there is 14 feet long. Damn.
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. Yeah, okay, 19 feet, two inches.
Oh, Joe, you're right.
Yeah, all right.
I'm wrong. I love this.
Well, so there's a bunch of different ones, right? And the Nile crocodiles are a different animal. Nile crocodiles regularly get to 18 feet, and there's some really interesting reports from back in the day of much larger ones. And so the question is, here's the thing about alligators and crocodiles in particular. They don't die of old age. They just keep getting older and bigger.
And when you introduce human beings and guns into the equation, what are the people going to shoot? Well, they're going to shoot the biggest ones. So you have guns being introduced in the 1800s, and now in 2024, you can't find the really big ones. Well, one of the reasons for that is a really big one would take hundreds of years to get that big.
So an alligator like that big 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?
Right.
The other part of the speculation is, well, for sure we know crocodiles used to be bigger. There was many, many species of crocodiles that were fucking enormous. Dinosaur-eating crocodiles, huge. What is the biggest ancient crocodile that was ever discovered fossilized? I think it's like in the neighborhood of 50 plus feet long.
I like this right now, what we're doing. And I like that you were right and I was wrong. I like that too. You should tell me about Gigantico.
Well, so my point is that like these things are so different than us that it's hard for us to even imagine. Okay, the biggest freshwater croc ever was 40 feet long.
Yeah, that's remarkable.
110 million years ago. What about saltwater?
Wow.
Is that the largest crocodile period, or is it the big ones freshwater? All right. Is that the largest, biggest crocodile fossil ever found? Okay, largest sea-dwelling one, 30 feet long. Interesting. So the 40-foot-long one was bigger. Interesting. So these ones that they—okay, super croc, massive fossilized croc discovered in the Aguila—how do you say that? Aguila?
Aguila Formation in Big Bend National Park, 40 to 50 feet long. Jaws with six-inch teeth. Good Lord. Wow. Big bend. Good Lord. Six-inch teeth. Okay. Just imagine fucking six-inch teeth and it's 40 feet long.
Oh, my God. I mean, I think saltwater crocs and Nile crocs eat more people, right? Yes. Today.
Well, I have a friend, Jim Shockey, who's actually a professional hunter that was hired to go to Africa to shoot some of these man-eating crocodiles that were taking out these people in this village. And 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, like, encase this area. Right. But the problem is crocodiles have 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 water. And then they go, oh, the fuckers, they only go in this little area. How do I get in that area? And they're watching you underwater for hours without breathing.
I work a lot in Madagascar. And we have not crocodiles in Madagascar. But they're not as big as mainland crocodiles. But I know that in Madagascar it's when people go to wash their clothing around the edge of these lakes that they get, you know.
That's their instincts because that's how they get deer, like these little animal species.
Every year people die washing their clothing in Madagascar from Nile crocs.
Fuck that. So the speculation is that there's breeding populations of those Nile crocs in the Everglades. Really? Wow. They've seen enough of them. See if you can find what's the latest. Breeding crocodile, 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 in the making of this reptile documentary we're doing. The reason we've been told that they're not anacondas in the Everglades is that they didn't import anacondas in the way they did 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 U.S. And that never happened with anacondas. But you think about anacondas because they would live in the Everglades.
You're meeting the guy responsible for that tomorrow.
It's unclear if Nile crocodiles are breeding.
You are.
It's unclear if they are breeding in the wild in Florida, but here's some information about Nile crocodiles and breeding in Florida. Nile crocodile first observed in Florida in the 60s. Wow. Wow. Believes they've captured all the Nile crocodiles in the area. Nile crocodiles become established before they could threaten native species. Well, that's what pythons have done.
I mean, they might have to bring in the Nile crocs to kill the pythons.
But what's interesting about that, you know, in the 60s, in the 60s, alligators were endangered.
Yes. Well, I lived in Florida in the 70s. And when I lived in Florida, they were in danger. They were on the endangered species list. People used to feed them marshmallows. Oh, wow. Yeah, I lived in Gainesville, Florida. We used to go. And then when I was there, some lady got her dog snatched. And then everybody got kind of freaked out. Everybody in the town was like, whoa.
Because they got way too comfortable with alligators. Because alligators, when they get used to people, they just lay around. So they would just sit on the banks. And we would go to the fucking park, like Lake Alice is where the lake is. We'd go to the park and hang out. And alligators would just be hanging out there. And I was a little kid. It was normal.
It was normal to see alligators just sunning themselves. And they were endangered back then. And now they're not endangered at all. Now they're everywhere.
And crocodile farming had a lot to do with why they're not endangered. Really? From what I understand. Yeah, 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 skins, right? Right.
And the farming of crocodiles has been a really, you know, it's controversial, but it's really been a success story for wild crocodilians.
But why is that?
How does it affect alligators? Well, that's a good question. I think it was crocodile farming. You should ask. But I know croc farming in general has protected crocodilians across the board. I guess they used to hunt alligators also for skins, or am I wrong?
Oh, yeah, for sure. They still do. I mean, they still breed them for skins and hunt them for skins, but now they have an overpopulation problem. So I was just curious to like, how would 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.
Yeah, that may be true. I know croc farming has helped crocodilians across the board. Sure. That's for sure.
Well, and 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.
There used to be elk all 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. Wow.
You're now making me think about something, and I don't know the facts, but the Migratory Bird Act is something that we used to shoot birds all the time, and obviously the most common bird or one of the most common birds was passenger pigeons. Oh, yeah. Right? And there were so many. Fill the sky. Fill the sky, yeah.
Yeah.
And then I think the migratory burdock came into effect. Anyway, but you're right. Around the Teddy Roosevelt period.
Yeah, because people killed off all the birds. There were so many passenger pigeons. 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.
So what do you think? So you have Teddy Roosevelt National Park system. I like that you called me on stuff. In services, you have things like migratory board deck. 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 U.S.
zoo systems that you see. Mm-hmm. So what happens next, I guess, is kind of the question.
It's really complex. And the problem is people are very dug in on their sides. You know, you have people that are very dug in with the animal liberation idea. They're very dug in with PETA and veganism and dug in with anti-hunting. And then there's people that are ranchers. And then there's people that are very dug in to animals are our property.
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 kind of work together because you're right they're so polarized well there's also um the problem is like we were talking about with bc i didn't really finish my thought but the reason why they outlawed bear hunting in 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.
And the way to control the populations ethically... is you do it through hunting.
As much as this seems counterintuitive to people that love wildlife, the right way to do it is you have informed, well-schooled biologists that really do a great job of managing the numbers that are in the area, and then you have people that spend enormous amounts of money to hunt those things, and then that money goes into maintaining the population and make sure that it's at a healthy balance.
If there's too many bears... Infanticide in bears is common. Almost all bears are cannibals. They eat their own babies. The whole thing is mad. And if they don't have enough food or if the males come out of the – if they're hibernating and they come out before the female does with her cubs, they'll actively seek out those cubs for food.
And they will do less of that if there's less of them and if there's more of a balance between predator and prey. And that's where it gets weird because as a person who loves nature, who are we to say you should kill a certain amount of bears and a certain amount of wolves? That seems fucked. Like we should just sort of like let it be what it is.
enjoy it but the problem is it leaks over into this strange world that we've created and this is the reality if you want to be able to go to Starbucks if you want to be able to go outside and have a cheeseburger in an outdoor patio you can't have fucking wolves everywhere okay this is just reality and we're accustomed to this artificial enclosure that we've created to keep human being safe and we've lost our perspective in what it means to be an animal in the world
No, 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 elephants are Africa is 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, like, oh, my God, black bears are extinct. But, you know, go to New Jersey.
Everywhere, right? So it's not that the animal is that, you know, you shouldn't have any of them. It's just like there should be places where they exist and places where they don't exist. And if you want to maintain a city, you're going to have to do something about the population of predators. You're going to have to do something.
It's just like how far outside of your city does human control radiate? Well, then you have ranchers, right? Okay, if you want to have a guy who grows cows so you can eat steak, you're going to have to be able to protect this guy's crop or it's not going to be profitable for him to do this. You're going to have to be able to protect his animals.
I completely agree. Keep animal-human conflict. If you want to keep it at bay, keep wild animals in the wild. Right. I would question, and I think you're right, bringing or reintroducing grizzly bears into areas where there are high densities of humans. It's a recipe for trouble. Well, it's also completely theoretical.
And right now it's theoretical, although they did just recently 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. Like you really don't know. And especially if they get to a point where they become bold and they're not threatened by people at all anymore. And 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. Yeah. It can get weird.
The outcome of Tiger King, I mean, no one knows this, but I'll tell you this. I don't think anyone knows it publicly. But, you know, 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 sort of privately is we donated a million dollars to tiger conservation in India.
And one of the countries where tigers are still doing quite well. And so we went to visit the program last September in India, and it just was so interesting, because you were talking about bears attacking people. In India, they do live with tigers, and they do have, obviously, a certain amount of people that get killed every year. But the key is to keep enough prey
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, you know, basically start looking at humans as something to eat.
But anyway, I just bring that up because it was something that, it was a byproduct of Tiger King that, you know, it was something that we did just quietly as the people that I did Tiger King with, including you. Not so quietly now. Donated that money not so quietly now.
Are you aware of the Sunderbands? Yeah.
And the tiger attacks in the Sunderbands? Absolutely.
The Sunderbands are fascinating because hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by tigers over the last several hundred years. Beautiful wetland. Yeah, but also brackish water. And they think that might contribute to the aggression of the tigers. They drink 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When they walk around there and they do surveys of the animals. But it's also insanely difficult to find out where they are, too, because the grass is so high. And, you know, they're just built to fuck things up. That's what their job is. And if people live around them, people are on the menu. That's just what it is with tigers.
It didn't make it into Tiger King, but we filmed in southern Nepal, a place called 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.
You know, there's a reason why human beings don't live. 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 some sort of an area there where they don't have to live like that.
There's a lot of people.
I mean, it is amazing. 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.
Right.
Like you think you're going off on some rural road. It's just there's people.
Right, but if you go into a place where the jungle is, like where the tigers live, it's like really hard to live there. And then the people that are living there are probably, they have no options. They're the poorest.
Yeah.
And so they're living, you know, in sort of a traditional way, out exposed. And then they have to figure out how to protect themselves from these enormous stealthy cats that are sneaking around everywhere they go. Yeah. Fuck.
But you see plenty of cows, which is amazing, by the way. Which is so nuts. Just roaming these kind of, you know, windy 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, you know, in these roads that have no lanes and they're all just kind of... India is wild.
But it's so crazy that they stick to this one thing. Like, 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. Yeah.
See if you can find that, James.
Oh, they're also probably Muslim.
I believe they were. Yeah. But more people die from what in India in terms of wildlife? Is it snakes? Probably mosquitoes. I mean, of course mosquitoes. But after that, snakes or tigers?
I don't know. It's a good question. I don't think it's tigers. I think the Sundarbans is the area where they get jacked pretty regularly. Right. And also, how many...
how many people are doing surveys on how many people are missing you know when you're going into these like very remote areas how many people know Indian authorities bulldogs bulldoze homes of 11 people after finding beef in fridges incredible slaughter of cows which Hindus worship as a deity is banned in most of India as is consumption of their meat isn't that fucking fascinating well you cut down an oak tree in California you're right but they're not gonna bulldoze your fucking house you know depends what kind of tree isn't that nuts
People found beef in their fridge and cows in their backyard. So they bulldozed their homes.
Wait, so in India you can eat a hamburger? You cannot. Yeah, they don't really. Really? I was just in India. I think you can get it in hotels and stuff. I think so.
You can't get it at like a. Oh, wow. They allow it in hotels? Yeah, you can get it at a. 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 would just... Oh, wow. Because one of the oldest... What is it? I think it's called Choctaw Hayook. It's like one of the oldest known civilizations, which was a cattle-worshiping civilization.
And they had these... Why were people who were fucking starving to death, barely getting by, why were they into worshiping cows?
Hmm.
Well, that's where you got all your mushrooms. It completely makes sense. It's almost the only thing that makes sense. It's almost the only thing that you could – especially if you have like ancient stories of –
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.
Getting very confusing information on the burger and India situation. They have chicken. Chicken all you want, baby. They definitely seem to have burgers, but I don't know that they're making them with, like, ground beef. Right. Could be, like, a lamb burger. Sure be. It could be all kinds of stuff that they call burger.
Right. When you get Indian food, it's always lamb. It's a bit more Western now. I mean, if you're going, like, kind of more, you know. Not to these people. Yeah.
These people wasn't Western enough. They bulldozed their fucking house a couple of months ago.
That's remarkable. That's incredible. I bet you they're also Muslim, though. That's awesome. Yeah, right, right. It's like the Uyghurs get treated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of that, you know.
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 like a really stunted relationship. 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. It's kind of perverse, our relationship with animals. It is.
Well, cities, as much as I love them, they are perverse. They're strange and they've done us a lot of harm psychologically. They've created people that are much more vulnerable than they've ever been before. They're soft and lazy and entitled and everything comes easy to them. And I don't think that's normal for human beings either.
And you can get food anywhere you want and all the worst kinds of food. and you're in a prison of your own choosing. You're going from one closed environment to another closed environment, riding around in your car or the subway or whatever you're doing, and we're completely disconnected to what it meant to be a human being for hundreds of thousands of years, and it happened in a blink of an eye.
In a couple of hundred years, all of a sudden, we're fucked. And we're trapped in this bizarre system. And in this system, you know, occasionally we interact with animals. And our understanding of it and what we think of it – what we think it is is so – and we have anthropomorphization through, like, you know, Yogi Bear and all that kind of stuff.
And we're so weird with the way we interact with animals. And we – Every piece of it.
I was 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.
Oh, it's beautiful up there.
But then I spent 40-something years in New York City. But I never lost that, what you're talking about, and that interest and love of going out into nature. But I think you're right. 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? Very few.
Yeah, we've lost our connection. I think we had this conversation with Carl, Eric, recently, which kind of put it really well for me. So much of the conversations you have is, oh, we're going to go connect with nature. We're going to Botswana for the summer and, you know, do tourism. But what you really can do is put a bird feeder outside your window and connect to nature that way.
And you'll see lots of different birds.
But you must have grown up in nature in some way or no? No.
Not really. No, not really.
But why do you then have such a connection to it in a good way?
Because 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 the – Just whatever the pull of urban life is.
Like, what is the gravity of urban life that's changed us into these soft, non-self-sufficient beings that is completely relying on some strange system that's ultimately polluting the world and decimating of its resources? Like, what are we? Like, we're weird. Yeah. The 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, see them existing. It's incredible. It's better than any movie. It gives you a vitamin that you didn't know you needed.
You know, like the feeling that you get when you go out in the sun, like maybe you've been indoors in the winter and then there's a nice sunny day in the spring and everybody's outside in the park like, ah, give me my vitamins, right? Doesn't it feel like that? You're lying down like, give me my vitamins. That's what it feels like on 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.
Where wherever we are and we don't think we are because we live in an apartment and we play Nintendo and we you know We're locked into this thing that human beings have created, but we're missing something and it's not as Extreme as Tonka being trapped in that lady's basement, but it's in the neighborhood. There's something about it It's real similar. There's something about it.
That's real weird where we're Our own prison of our own choosing is not good for us.
And it's interesting. Most all of the characters in Tiger King and Chim Crazy have never seen chimps or tigers in the wild or had any interest. That's crazy. 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 with 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 dexterous enough, and they have eaten so much McDonald's, they do know how to do that. So they do dip the nuggets in the sauce.
I don't think it's in that shot. I've seen they actually peel it with their mouth.
Yeah.
They peel the wrapper 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.
Yeah.
Like, is he going to dip? And then it cut away. We don't know. Is he fucking dipping?
I mean, the sauce toss moment was just so surreal. You want your sauce? Here's your sauce. Yeah. 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. Yeah.
they knew too much it's too creepy it's too it's it's so weird i mean you guys did an amazing job of capturing it and thank god you found that one nutty lady because she really glues it all together but everybody everybody should watch it it's it's really good and everybody should watch it also because you have to know that that's a thing like you you know
You don't know what people are really capable of until you watch a serial killer documentary and you go, oh, Jesus Christ, that's a 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 kind of the, people are like, oh my God, is this America? Of course, go outside 45 minutes away from where you live. Right. Right, right.
I didn't know it was a thing, and I've been involved with animal people my whole life. So, yeah, it's a thing. Monkey moms. Yeah.
I mean, I'm not saying that it's a common thing. If you let people do it, they'll do it. There's some strange obsessions in this world.
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.
You know, and one day when AI can transcribe dolphin communication, we're going to probably realize they're as smart as us. And that's where it gets really, really, really scary is that we have been engaging in a form of indentured slavery. We've captured them. We've raised them from child from the time they're a baby. They've been in captivity. The whole thing is completely disgusting.
And yet it's a normal part of life. And until blackfish, most people weren't even aware that it was a thing or what it actually was. When you see orcas behave in the wild versus the way you see them trapped in those swimming pools, it's torturous. Their skin's falling off and the whole thing.
But think about this. A hundred years ago, you can go to the Bronx Zoo and see, you know, a boy in a cage. Adabanga. Right, right, right. Check that photo. The photo is remarkable.
A West African pygmy that they kept in a cage. Right.
1913.
Or 20s? Was it 20s, maybe? He ultimately shot his brains out. Even people then knew that Adabanga, this, you know—
basically a indigenous man from West Africa with these. 1912 or something like that. Anyway, but he, even then people were disturbed to see a human being next to a gorilla. And he was in a cage by himself? I think he was in the ape house at the Bronx Zoo.
Well, first he was brought for the World's Fair on display.
Wow.
You know, to show, here you 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 Bronx Zoo? So he died in 1916, that's right.
Okay, so he was an exhibit in 1904. Turn of the century, yeah. So that's our history. 1964, Bronx Zoo. This incredible... I love this image. It was an exhibition, right?
The...
uh world's most dangerous animal and it's a reflection oh yeah it's a mirror with bars and you walk into it and you see yourself wow but they were really cool they were conscious of that in 1964 1964 well it was 20 years after we dropped a fucking couple of nuclear bombs yeah this is a this is how cool is that image that is cool that's yeah you would never have that today
The most dangerous animal in the world is us, which is so true.
Well, it certainly is numerically. Yeah. And also just the impact we have overall. We're a sketchy group. But we know more about us because of stuff like what you guys have done. So thank you very much.
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 probably went midstream. So we kind of typically what we do is we figure out if we have something. We self-fund and develop something until we get to a point where we think it's ready. I mean, Tiger King, I almost finished it before I brought it to anybody.
Oh, wow.
I think now we have the ability to kind of control output in terms of control of what the ultimate product can be. It was a little bit harder back then. But, yeah, we kind of figure out if it's worth it or not, and then we take it out. Joe, thanks for having us.
My pleasure. You guys nailed it twice. Chimp Crazy is really good. And, of course, Tiger King was awesome, too. And what I said, I really mean. I think you guys are doing something that's you're giving us a better understanding of humans.
You know, through this very strange lens of watching these very bizarre people and their psychological misfortunes, like whatever it is about them, whatever unfortunate aspect of their their their mind, the way they interface with the world allows them to do that. It gives us a better understanding of ourselves. I really think so.
So I appreciate you having us.
My pleasure. Thank you, guys.
And please finish the show.
I will. I will. I was just bummed out last night. Thank you very much, guys. Thanks so much. Bye, everybody. Bye.