#2536 - Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Joe Rogan Experience #2536 – Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride

Date: August 6, 2026
Guests: Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride
Main Theme: The secretive, bizarre, and sometimes dangerous world of the exotic reptile and wildlife trade—focusing on insights from the new HBO docuseries "Monsters of God," pop culture’s influence, wildlife smuggling’s criminal overlap, and our relationships with animals most people find repulsive or fearsome.

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Episode Overview

Joe Rogan sits down with filmmakers Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride to discuss their new HBO docuseries "Monsters of God." The trilogy explores the dark and fascinating world of the exotic reptile trade, the colorful characters at its center, the multi-billion dollar illegal wildlife industry, and why society demonizes reptiles while idolizing mammals. The podcast covers their experiences making the series, personal animal stories, the psychology of collectors, the global black market, culture’s role in animal popularity, and conservation’s complicated ethics.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Origins and Premise of "Monsters of God"

• [00:12 | Joe Rogan]: Introduction to the doc, describing it as a wild look at the reptile trade and its possible link to Florida’s python invasion.
• [00:44 | Eric Goode]: Discusses multiple theories about how invasive Burmese pythons took over Florida, referencing his own teenage pet python, and how responsibility often gets lost in the "monster" pet trade.
  • "[People] buy them when they’re this big, and then when they're 15ft, they let them go."' —Eric Goode [01:05]

2. Personal Animal Stories & Responsibility

• Rogues' Gallery of Animal Lovers:
  • Goode’s lifelong obsession with reptiles started with a childhood tortoise and catching rattlesnakes in his lunchbox [02:44, 02:55].
  • Goode recounts a harrowing, near-fatal rattlesnake bite and hospital antivenom odyssey [03:25-06:03].
  • Rogan shares dog-rattlesnake bite stories, raising questions about animal adaptation and resistance [06:03-07:09].

3. Entering the Reptile Underground

• The Lizard King & Documentary Genesis:
  • Goode reveals his “closeted” reptile-keeper status while running 1980s NYC nightclubs, hanging out with celebrities, and his journey into film and global reptile research [10:33-12:26].
  • "Why do this?" Fisher Stevens warned Goode about the danger of exposing criminal kingpins [12:28]; Goode shrugs, driven by passion and curiosity.

4. The Criminal Underside of Wildlife Trafficking

• Scale and Scope:

  • McBride: "Illegal wildlife trafficking represents about a $20 billion a year industry... only after guns, drugs, and human trafficking" [13:01].
  • Early smuggling was surprisingly easy—suitcases full of rare reptiles, low customs enforcement pre-TSA [13:44-14:06].
  • Asia’s surging demand for exotic pets and medicine—“They took a page out of our playbook” [15:12-15:36].

• Python Skins and U.S. Laws:

  • Rogan and Goode debate python skin bans, convoluted lawmaking, and the often-misguided blanket regulations in places like California [15:37-18:20].

5. Iguana Invasion and Pop Culture’s Impact

• Pop culture spikes pet demand:
  • “Jurassic Park comes out… Everyone wanted a pet dinosaur. The green iguana market went on fire. He [Ray Van Nostrand] was selling 5,000 a week.” —Jeremy McBride [22:52]
  • The iguana cooking/hunting YouTube subculture and Florida’s “iguana problem”—often pets gone wild [18:39-27:02].
  • Varieties of invasive lizards and why the pet industry is not just harmless fun [27:50].

6. The Psychology of Reptile Collectors

• Herp People:
  • Rogan notes the difference between chimp and reptile enthusiasts—chimps are relatable, reptiles are “looking into the abyss” [29:31].
  • Goode and McBride discuss obsession, scarcity, the baseball-card-like trading culture, and the appeal of the rarest creatures [32:09-32:44].
  • “It’s about kind of the psychology of people in this particular, very niche way.” —Jeremy McBride [32:45]

7. The Dangers of the Job

• Accessing the Reptile Black Market:

  • Goode describes the years-long “courtships” needed to film secretive, sometimes dangerous players; interactions with ex-cons and former kingpins, including Mario, who served time for murder and drugs [42:10-43:42].
  • “Sometimes that courtship takes years... you just kind of like, you know, is this the time I’m going to go there and he’s going to really fuck me up?” —Eric Goode [42:10]

• Wildlife Law Enforcement’s Gray Area:

  • The overlap between drug smuggling, wildlife crime, and law enforcement’s own moral ambiguities [47:01, 82:56].

8. Conservation, Loopholes, and Unintended Consequences

• Misguided Regulation & Enforcement:
  • Laws often lag behind reality: blanket bans hitting non-threatened species, enforcement pushing the market underground, or even triggering more poaching [80:28-81:36].
  • “The more you enforce, you have great laws that happen, but it triggers something else…” —Jeremy McBride [80:28-81:36]
• Zoo collections originating from seized smuggled animals [52:21-53:33].

9. Animals as Status Symbols, Culture, and Cuisine

• Luxury Animal Markets:
  • The “wildlife mall” phenomenon in Asia—bird markets, owl surplus post-Harry Potter, culinary customs driving demand for rare turtles, snakes, and salamanders [91:22-130:00].
  • Wild-caught turtles worth $20,000–$200,000 as medicine, meat, or prestige pets [113:46-117:44].
  • Snake blood bars, tiger penis soup, bear gallbladders, and giant salamanders: the weirdness of luxury consumption [119:54-130:00].
• Status-driven demand for exotic or endangered animals, echoing rare wine/collectibles [125:04-126:19].

10. Why Do We Love Mammals and Hate Reptiles?

• Anthropomorphism & Cultural Roots:
  • Rogan and guests unpack why people are repelled by reptiles: evolutionary fears, religion (the original “serpent”), Disney’s impact, pop culture, and how some are more likable simply because they’re “cute” [71:32-75:26].
  • “People are really concerned about this pink iguana. That pink iguana doesn’t give a fuck about people.” —Joe Rogan [33:03]

11. Conservation, Extinction, and Human Impact

• Turtles and Tortoises as Case Studies:

  • Goode’s work to breed and reintroduce ultra-endangered plowshare tortoises, the dilemma of keeping them safe vs. creating forbidden fruit [105:05-108:33].
  • “Why is our show called Monsters of God? We’re the monsters, not the reptiles.” —Eric Goode [126:24]

• Accidental Ecosystem Disasters:

  • U.S. and Asian failures: mongooses, rats, salamander hybrids, and Hawaii’s extinction legacy [127:34-128:46].

12. Broader Themes and What’s Next

• Documentary Method:
  • The “wide net” approach—filming hundreds of people, following stories for years, sometimes lucking into explosive events (like “Tiger King”) [85:16].
• The overlooked economics of the reptile trade and its proximity to other animal industries, plus the challenges of getting audiences to care about “ugly” species [117:18-118:30].

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Growing up reptile:

  • “I was catching rattlesnakes in my lunchbox.” —Eric Goode [02:55]
  • “Don’t play God, Eric. You gotta let it go at the end of the summer.” —Eric Goode (on mother’s moral compass) [64:15]

• Human nature in animal crime:

  • “The only difference between the prisoner and the guard are the bars.” —Jeremy McBride [82:52]

• Pop culture meets the pet trade:

  • “Thank God people can’t buy a velociraptor because people would have them.” —Joe Rogan [23:50]

• On the psychology of collectors:

  • “I’m not the guy that just wants the little pet bearded dragon. I want the Rolls Royce of reptiles.” —Eric Goode [32:29]
  • "People get into it, they get addicted, and they buy more and more and more, and then they get divorced and they get rid of them all or they get burned out." —Eric Goode [64:56]

• Society, wildlife, and hypocrisy:

  • “We’re hypocrites in this country. We eat tuna, and they’re endangered, and in Asia they eat other things.” —Eric Goode [125:51]
  • “Why is our show called Monsters of God? We’re the monsters, not the reptiles.” —Eric Goode [126:24]

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Section Timestamps of Interest

| Segment | Description | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------|---------------| | Beginnings with reptiles | Childhood obsession, first pets, bite stories | 00:44–06:03 | | The reptile trade's dark side | HBO doc, criminal smuggling, The Lizard King | 12:26–14:06 | | Laws, pop culture, & pet demand | Python bans, iguana overrun/TikTok stir fry/YouTube | 15:37–27:02 | | Collector psychology | Herp people, trading subculture, “Rolls Royce of reptiles” | 32:09–32:44 | | Interacting with kingpins | Dangerous access, guardedness, ex-cons, Mario’s sentence | 42:10–43:42 | | Conservation’s gray zone | Law enforcers as collectors; unintended consequences | 80:28–83:27 | | Asian wildlife markets | Animals as status, medicine, cuisine, luxury consumption | 91:22–130:00 | | Plowshare tortoises—case study | Failed, then successful captive breeding, return to wild | 105:05–108:33 | | Why we hate reptiles | Evolution, religion, media; “Serpent” and “cultural norms” | 71:32–75:26 | | On documenting animal subcultures | Approach and methods; “casting a wide net” | 85:16–86:31 |

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Tone and Language

• Conversational, humorous, and sometimes irreverent: Rogan’s incredulity (“Who wants python skins?!” [16:22]), Goode’s wry perspective (“I’m more of a freak expert” [41:12]), and McBride’s dry, data-driven interventions.
• A mix of shocking anecdotes, in-depth industry knowledge, and big philosophical ideas.
• Plenty of poking fun at the absurdities, as well as critique of regulatory and cultural blind spots.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers an immersive, wide-ranging tour of the exotic animal underworld—through wild stories, expert insights, and candid conversations. It explores why we love some animals and hate others, why regulation is broken, and how pop culture, greed, and obsession drive extinction and unintended consequences. Ultimately, the theme emerges that, “We’re the monsters, not the reptiles.” The podcast leaves listeners with a nuanced, if disturbing, understanding of the stakes involved in the global wildlife trade, and the very human pathologies at its heart.

"Monsters of God" premieres August 6th on HBO.

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Transcript

[Eric Goode]

Joe Rogan podcast.

[Jeremy Goode]

Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

[Eric Goode]

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day.

[Joe Rogan]

Good, bro. Gentlemen, good to see you again. You're back into the world of crazy people and animals. I watched episode one today. Like, oh, God. First of all, where the fuck do you find these people? You, you live in that world. Like you, you're in the world of reptiles. We should just explain. It's a docu series, it's on hbo. It's called Monsters of God. And it's all about the reptile trade, which may or may not be responsible for Florida having 500,000 pythons.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, yeah. It's.

[Joe Rogan]

It's debatable, right? Like, it seems like it was partially pet owners who let them go, and partially there was some sort of a reptile research facility or something like that.

[Eric Goode]

Well, there's different theories. There was a hurricane theory. There was the people letting go go. I think the more reasonable one, because I had a Burmese python in the 70s when I was a teenager. I have a photo of it around my neck.

[Joe Rogan]

What happened to it?

[Eric Goode]

People buy them when they're this big and then when they're 15ft, they let them go because what are you, you know, and they're.

[Joe Rogan]

Is that what you did?

[Eric Goode]

I did not let it go, but I.

[Joe Rogan]

What did you do?

[Eric Goode]

I have no idea what happened to it, to be honest.

[Joe Rogan]

I had weird. I know you had a monster and it just. You don't know what happened to your monster.

[Eric Goode]

I, I think when I went to college briefly, I gave it to someone and then I don't know what happened to. But I gave my whole menagerie away to people. When I went to college, I had reptiles in my room.

[Joe Rogan]

Is there an extra level of responsibility when you're giving away monsters? You know, I mean, like if you have a chihuahua and you say, and your friend's like, I'll take her, I love her.

[Jeremy Goode]

That's.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, you don't really have to worry about your, you know, you have a fucking python, you're giving away a python.

[Eric Goode]

You got to worry about your Chihuahua because your, the pythons in the Everglades are going to eat your chihuahua when it gets away.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, certainly you worry about that, but I mean, you don't worry about your chihuahua being a monster.

[Eric Goode]

I'm kidding.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, if you have a 15 foot python that can eat a lot of things and it kind of needs to eat a lot of things.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Burmese pythons did really well in South Florida. Iguanas did really well. In Florida. You know, they weren't there in the beginning.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a good way to put it. Did really well. Another way to put it is invasive species is destroying the ecosystem.

[Eric Goode]

Well, they're like us, Joe. They're like us. We came here and we took over.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I guess in a lot of ways. So why did you choose this particular subject for this new docu series?

[Eric Goode]

I'm not gonna let Jeremy talk. No, he'll talk, but I'll just give you a lot of it. Starts with me so you can play me.

[Jeremy Goode]

And then Jeremy.

[Eric Goode]

Jeremy you can blame later.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, we guys did Chimp Crazy, which is one of my favorites. It's so fucking insane. That world is so insane.

[Eric Goode]

Well, episode one is kind of setting the table. It gets better, Joe. It gets more off the, you know, charts when you. I can only imagine three and four, but. And five. Yeah, it all started. First of all, I'm a reptile guy. I've been keeping reptiles and studying reptiles for over, you know, I'm an old guy. I'm older than you are, so, you know, I've kept them for, I don't know, 60 years, you know, Plus, I've kept reptiles since my parents gave me a tortoise when I was six and I was catching rattlesnakes in my lunchbox and horned lizards and. You got horned lizards in Texas here that are really cool and rattlesnakes. I've been bit by rattlesnakes. It's not fun.

[Joe Rogan]

You got bit by a rattlesnake?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, but that's another story.

[Joe Rogan]

More times than one.

[Eric Goode]

No, I got bit once because I learned my lesson after the first one.

[Joe Rogan]

What happened?

[Eric Goode]

It wasn't good. Don't get bit.

[Joe Rogan]

Where'd you get bit?

[Eric Goode]

On my foot.

[Joe Rogan]

Did you experience necrosis? Necrosis, rather, you know.

[Eric Goode]

So normally you would get necrosis. Necrosis, where you. Dead tissue, your finger would rot and then this, that. You know, the doctor that I went to at a hospital, you know, pull up the microphone. The doctor, you know, in the emergency room said, the last guy in here that got bit by a rattlesnake lost his toe or something or lost his digits. And he said, good thing you didn't get bit on a finger, because the necrosis can rot away your finger. And he said, good thing you got bit on the middle of the foot. You're going to be okay. But this type of rattlesnake I got bit by, there's the most venomous rattlesnake in the country, is called a tiger rattlesnake. But it's not the most dangerous. Most dangerous is probably a Mojave rattlesnake or an eastern diamondback rattlesnake, but you have western diamondbacks here. But I got bit by a rattlesnake that had both hemotoxin and neurotoxin. So the necrosis was less evident with me and it was more like a cobra where I was starting to stop breathing. And I felt like someone had put sandbags on my chest an hour into it. But the first thing you sense is obviously it feels like someone jabbed me with an X acto knife. I looked down and the rattlesnake was retracting. I looked at my foot, but then you taste a metallic taste in about 15, 10 minutes. 15 minutes. And you realize, oh, this wasn't a dry bite, but it's not fun. I got a lot of antivenom. They make a different antivenom today. I got bit 25 years ago.

[Joe Rogan]

And how long does it take you to recover from something like that?

[Eric Goode]

You know, the most painful part was the serum sickness from the antivenom, the stop breathing thing. I remember I was on a gurney and I felt like I was going to stop breathing, but weirdly, not that painful. But yet you feel like you're going to die and stop breathing. But the serum sickness is just unbelievably intense for weeks. And you just have the most insane fever and you get these red blotches all over you. But they make a different serum.

[Jeremy Goode]

Now.

[Eric Goode]

That one was made out of horse antibodies that they put into you. And my body didn't like those horse antibodies. Oh, God.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Goode]

Also, maybe don't wear Birkenstocks when you hike.

[Eric Goode]

That's probably the river sandals. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Because I got bit. Most people got bit around with a rattlesnake. I wasn't.

[Joe Rogan]

What is this? Jeremy? Dad. They used all of the anti venom at the hospital and had to go get more from another hospital. Ran out of anti venom after using a whopping 36 vials. Holy fuck, man.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yikes. They're fucking scary, man. I've had dogs bit. I had this one dog, he got bit twice. Yeah, it was a real problem. His face would swell up. I had to bring him to the vet, but luckily they have anti venom for dogs. It works pretty well. Yeah, he was kind of out of it for a few days. Then he came back.

[Jeremy Goode]

How fast the response?

[Joe Rogan]

Not bad. Not bad. It was funny because he got bit once. He was a crazy dog. He was always killing lizards. That was his thing, anything in the backyard, he would kill. And he got bit by the rattlesnake. And I knew it because I was out there. I heard him, I heard the commotion, I saw the snake, I knew what it was. So I got him to the veterinarian immediately. They got him. His face swell up, but they got him the antivenom and he was good. And then he got bit again like maybe a year later. And I brought him to the ve because I said I saw him get bit by rattlesnake. And the vet was like, well, I don't see any swelling and I don't see a hole. But he had developed a resistance to it because he had gotten bit once. And so then I got him home and all of a sudden his face starts swelling up. I'm like, ah, fuck. And I bring him back to the vet. Then he had to get the anti vet.

[Eric Goode]

But a good sized dog.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, he was about a 90 pound dog.

[Eric Goode]

And that was a western diabet rattlesnake, I gather.

[Joe Rogan]

California, I don't know.

[Eric Goode]

Oh, it was in California.

[Joe Rogan]

It was in California. Oh, so it wasn't out here?

[Eric Goode]

Oh, it was. What did me then, Probably Southern Pacific rattlesnake. Yeah, okay.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, we. We had a problem in my California house, one of the houses that I used to live in. It was. It was. There was a lot of. It was very cany. It was a lot of stuff.

[Eric Goode]

That's the same steak that bit me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Spooky, man. We were running once. We were running the trail, and in mid stride, I realized that the log that I thought was across the road was a giant rattlesnake. It was big, man, like the biggest one I'd ever seen out in the wild. And the dogs didn't notice it. They ran right over it. And then I ran over it. I was like, oh, man. And then I'm trying to figure out what to do because I know we're going to have to come back this way when we go back up the hill. So I'm throwing rocks at it, trying to get it to run away.

[Eric Goode]

Now, I've handled a lot of rattlesnakes in my life and cobras and other snakes, and to get bit that way is very unusual. Usually people are being jerks and idiots and drunk and handling a steak and it bites them.

[Joe Rogan]

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[Jeremy Goode]

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[Joe Rogan]

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[Eric Goode]

I was hiking in the mountains north of LA just a bit and I was actually looking for snakes as I made mistakes and I didn't see the snake. The snakes saw me first and I was bushwhacking. I wasn't on a trail, I didn't see it and it bit me on my foot.

[Joe Rogan]

So you have this lifetime experience with reptiles and snakes and so you just decide you must have interacted with a lot of these really crazy people and just decided this is the next.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, it takes one to no one. Yeah, be careful.

[Joe Rogan]

Next point of focus.

[Jeremy Goode]

That's sort of where it all started. Really?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

No, no, listen, I was, you know, a closeted reptile guy living in New York City, hanging out with, you know, Madonna, cool people. In the 80s and 90s. I had a nightclub and I had friends with lots of artists. Andy Warhol and I never really talked about reptiles.

[Joe Rogan]

Actually.

[Eric Goode]

Andy asked me, what am I going to do with my money? He interviewed me one time for Andy Warhol tv and I said, I'm going to buy reptiles. I actually said, I'm going to Buy tortoises. He was like, tortoises. But I was pretty closeted, but I still kept them in New York and, you know, fast forward when I decided to try to do a film about it. I had been traveling all over the world to Madagascar and Sulawesi and different parts of South America trying to study reptiles and especially turtles and tortoises that were very rare. I started photo filming people like, you know, kind of notable people, Christopher Walken and, you know, Slash and, I don't know, all kinds of people that I knew in New York City. And I would just ask them to hold a turtle or tortoise and say some words for, like, psas. And I was doing that with these two guys named the Safdie Brothers. And fast forward they now. Josh has just had a film called Marty supreme with Timothee Chalamet that was up for an Oscar. Little did I know that I was working with these kids that were going to be these new filmmakers, and we were making these films. And then we made a short film about reptiles, it's crazy, called Trophy Hunter. It's very short. And we did that together. And then I said to them, hey, man, you guys will read this new book called the Lizard King. It's about the reptile world. Let's do a doc about the reptile world. And I'd already told Fisher Stevens, a friend of mine, hey, let's do a doc about this, you know, book, the Lizard King. He said to me, how are you going to do that doc without getting killed, Eric? And, you know, he won an Oscar for the COVID And I thought, you know, I'm going to get these good guys into a doc about reptiles. So anyway, we started in 2000.

[Joe Rogan]

Why did you think. Why do you think you're going to get killed?

[Eric Goode]

He read the Lizard King and he said, you know, you're going to do a story about this guy that went to prison for 100 years and this other guy that, you know is the Pablo Escobar reptiles. And he just said, it's a dark world. I don't know how you're going to do this without getting killed.

[Joe Rogan]

So what is it about the lizard world or the reptile world that makes it so dark? Like, why are those people, do you think, attracted to it?

[Eric Goode]

Well, not all of them are scary people. And I would say a lot of them may be misunderstood a little bit. But in the case of Mario, there was a crossover with drugs, smuggling drugs and animals into the country.

[Jeremy Goode]

But for background, you know, what is different than these other films that we've done. You know, this was an industry story that kind of looks back at the past half century. You know, what most people don't know is illegal wildlife trafficking represents about a $20 billion a year industry. It's kind of underreported actually, only after guns, drugs and human trafficking. And what's really interesting about that is there's a convergence of all of it. Wildlife trafficking also involves drugs and trafficking of guns. There's a lot of mix mixture of it.

[Joe Rogan]

Whenever people are bringing in things illegally, they tend to be a risk taking type, of course.

[Jeremy Goode]

But you know, in the kind of pre customs TSA days when as intense as it is now, it's very easy to carry animals and carry wildlife.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. That was something I didn't even think about until I was watching. I was like, oh God, I remember those days where they didn't check your bags and they didn't even check your id. You just had a ticket.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And you just get on the plane. So you just get on the plane with lizards.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah. Now most cases. Yeah. Strapped to your body. Right. The thing with about what was so interesting about reptiles in this case within the trade is they're portable, they're nature with handles. You go, you see in the early episode of episode one, people traveling around the world, you know, finding rare endangered animals, putting their suitcase and bringing them back, putting them on a price list and selling them to consumer. And that was the kind of early days. I mean the story the Lizard King. But many much, you know, in our series it's handful of guys, mainly guys, you know, start a multi billion dollar industry and you see this kind of innovation happen over the course of the series as, you know, as the years go on.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, but when we say multi billion, I have to kind of contextualize that. It's when people say that the wildlife trade is multi billion dollar industry, you gotta remember it's a lot of its consumption. You know, the Asian population eats a lot of turtles, a lot of snakes, a lot of it's traditional medicine. A lot of its skins, you know.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Plant material, alligator skin bags, crocodile skin bags, lizard skin bags, snake skin bags. So it's a lot more than just the exotic pet industry, but that's gotten enormous in Asia. They picked, they took a page out of our playbook about 25 years ago. You know, China is now a huge consumer of not just eating these reptiles, but keeping them as exotic pets. That didn't happen before 25, 30 years ago.

[Jeremy Goode]

Asia.

[Eric Goode]

Asia. Why?

[Joe Rogan]

Why does California have a ban on python skin? Isn't pythons are not endangered, right?

[Eric Goode]

Well, it depends on the type of python. But yeah, the python skinning business actually is where all the Burmese pythons came from in the 70s that I had as a kid. They would skin the pythons, take the eggs, incubate the eggs, sell the pythons to the United States and other consumer countries that wanted baby pythons. Most of the pythons that are skinned in Southeast Asia and I've been to python skinny places in Sumatra. Blood pythons, reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons, but mostly blood pythons. Reticulated python pythons are wild cod and most of them are not endangered. But they're, it's. But you know, there are less and less pythons out there, but they're not endangered, those pythons.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, there's a shit ton in Florida. That's what I don't understand. I mean, there's this giant problem in Florida where they're overrun with pythons and yet California, you can't sell python skins. It seems like there's a solution there. You know, people want python skins. Oh, look, a place that's overrun with pythons. Maybe you should get your python skin there.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. The cooler python skins are not Burmese pythons. The ones in Florida, the cooler ones people like, like Nick Cage and what was that film where he's wearing that python skin jacket? It's a reticulated python.

[Jeremy Goode]

Wild at heart.

[Eric Goode]

That's. Yeah, Wild at heart. That's gold and black. The cooler python skins just happen not to be Burmese pythons, which are the ones running rampant in Florida, although they should make those trendy and use Burmese pythons. But they're not usual. You don't. You rarely see.

[Joe Rogan]

There it is.

[Jeremy Goode]

There it is.

[Eric Goode]

That's. That's a reticulated python. That's not a Burmese.

[Jeremy Goode]

That.

[Eric Goode]

That's the one people want. That's from Southeast Asia. That's not the one running wild in Florida.

[Joe Rogan]

Is that. That's illegal in California right now then,

[Eric Goode]

that jacket, is that right?

[Joe Rogan]

I believe so. I don't believe you can get it imported. I think.

[Jeremy Goode]

Let's try.

[Joe Rogan]

I had read something about python being one of the things that they made illegal. Why California bans python skin band dates to 1970.

[Jeremy Goode]

Oh.

[Joe Rogan]

Aimed at protecting endangered and vulnerable species, particularly the Indian python, which was on the endangered species list. California chose to pivot all python products rather than distinguish by species. Created an extraordinarily broad statute banning all python imports. Oh, that's interesting. I thought it was fairly recent.

[Eric Goode]

Well, that's where the laws I think are really screwed up when they basically say all pythons are bad to sell when the Indium rock python is endangered. And there are a few endangered pythons. But to say all pythons cannot be used for the skin trade and sold in California because of one python out of many pythons.

[Joe Rogan]

Welcome to California.

[Eric Goode]

I happen to live there. I know what it's like. I love Austin, by the way. I might buy a house next to you now.

[Joe Rogan]

Austin rules. But California is just so over regulated with everything, so particularly wildlife.

[Jeremy Goode]

And same thing in Florida, though, with, with the green iguana, Eric. Right? I mean, at the same time.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, same thing. Household regulation wise.

[Eric Goode]

I mean, again, there's 40 people eat those. There's 45 types of iguanas in the world.

[Joe Rogan]

Did you not know that? No. Oh, yeah. There's a whole YouTube community of people who hunt iguanas and cook them in exotic ways. They make iguana stir fry in South Florida. Yeah. Yeah, it looks good. I mean, I don't know anything about what it tastes like, but this guy made like a stir fry over rice and they were eating and they're like, oh my God, it's sensational. Like teriyaki look, very good.

[Eric Goode]

Everyone always says croc, alligator, iguana, rattlesnake. Tastes like chicken. Yeah. But yeah, they eat the tail.

[Jeremy Goode]

I mean, I mean, I have, you can imagine I have a really messed up algorithm from being involved in this for so long, but that I never came across. But the, the, you know, the frozen.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Here's a guy.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

They use the legs. They cook the legs.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. In the back of the tail.

[Joe Rogan]

Because there's the tail.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So he's got it marinating. Ziplocked it.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Then it looks like he's gonna.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, look, he's got the whole thing.

[Eric Goode]

Oh, wow. Usually it's the back of the tail. Like, like, like crocodiles, you eat the back of the tail.

[Jeremy Goode]

But it's far out. I mean, there's a, there's a. Wow, look at that.

[Eric Goode]

He's eating the whole thing.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

In Mexico, I always see them make, you know, guana tamales out of the, the back part of the iguana.

[Joe Rogan]

So he put it in a kamado. Oh, wow. And he's got a little sauce he's making here with some butter and spices, basting it. I mean, why not, if it tastes good? And apparently it does taste good, according to all these guys that I've seen on YouTube channels. Like they are pretty honest about it. Like they bring it to their family. They let their family try it. Yeah, I think, you know, that might be the only way out because they're everywhere in Florida. Like they, when it gets cold out, they fall out of trees.

[Jeremy Goode]

I love the news reports.

[Joe Rogan]

They're big too, man.

[Jeremy Goode]

They're massive.

[Joe Rogan]

There's some, some channels where these guys hunt them and some of them are like four and a half, five feet long. This episode is brought to you by ONX Off Road. Ever wonder how to reach these epic mountain lakes? They're tucked away dispersed campsites. With ONX Off Road, you'll find legal open trails around you and even better guided trails mapped by real off roaders. Each one includes photos, terrain descriptions and difficulty ratings so you'll know if your vehicle is capable before you go. Unlike other apps, ONX gives you turn by turn directions on the trail. And their new dispersed camping layer shows where you can legally set up camp. You also get private land boundaries, public land overlays, and the ability to download maps for offline use so that you're never guessing even when you're off the grid. It's a powerful tool built for serious off roaders. Try ONX off road. For 50% off, go to onxmaps.com Joe Rogan it's crazy.

[Eric Goode]

The males get crazy and they get very orange and really big.

[Joe Rogan]

The male iguanas, they're so beautiful. They're such a cool looking lizard, man.

[Eric Goode]

There's a lot of really cool iguanas. And in our show we feature what's called a Fiji island iguana, very endangered iguana that unfortunately people in the private sector in this country cannot own. Zoos can own them. I don't know why private people can't own them. But the San Diego Zoo and this zoo and that zoo can have Fiji island iguanas. But they, in our show, they literally. This one guy says it's reptile magic. It's like reptile art. A Fiji island iguana, you might want to put it up there.

[Joe Rogan]

It's really just the beauty of it,

[Eric Goode]

just the sheer beauty, the sheer beauty.

[Jeremy Goode]

It's like yellow lemon highlights, turquoise and green.

[Eric Goode]

And it's, it's a very endangered iguana.

[Joe Rogan]

So the Florida iguana problem was that all people's pets that got released, probably all of it.

[Jeremy Goode]

Well, listen, also, what's again going back to the show, but you know, we, the central figure of the book is this guy named Mike Van Nostrom and his dad, Ray Van Nostrand. They run an enterprise called Strictly Reptiles in Hollywood. Right. It's in Hollywood.

[Eric Goode]

Hollywood, Florida.

[Jeremy Goode]

Hollywood, Florida. Yeah. And they're sort of this, like. You know, I would call it, like, more of a fulfillment center for wildlife all across America. They are. I mean, in many way, they're this like.

[Joe Rogan]

It's an Amazon warehouse. Click. I want a tortoise.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

They were selling 5,000 iguanas a week. Well, green baby iguanas.

[Jeremy Goode]

Well, it got to that point, so the story goes, dad moves to Florida, starts a business, evolves. Jurassic park comes out. Jurassic park comes out. Everyone wanted a pet dinosaur. The green iguana market went on fire. He was selling 5,000 a week. And, you know, I was a 90s kid. I had an iguana in my. You know, my bedroom.

[Eric Goode]

Jeremy's a virgin, but he did have a iguana.

[Jeremy Goode]

I had a pet iguana to reptile that unfortunately passed away. The rock thing, you know, the heated rock, you know, that happens. But, yeah, no, there's sort of. So the story still.

[Joe Rogan]

Did he do the rock thing?

[Jeremy Goode]

No, they have this rock thing where it's. It sits on and it keeps it warm. And then I think it kept on too long. I think he.

[Eric Goode]

He cooked his iguana.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, sadly, he cooked his iguana.

[Joe Rogan]

Thanks.

[Jeremy Goode]

But I've learned a lot, but filled with these unintended consequences. You know, I think this idea of a big movie coming out, the correlation to, you know, driving, you know, demand for pet sales.

[Joe Rogan]

Thank God people can't buy a fucking velociraptor because people would have them. They'd have fences set up in their yard.

[Eric Goode]

Joe, you've had the Colossus people on this show, I think.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah.

[Eric Goode]

They want to bring back one of those. And a woolly mammoth.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, there's no chance that they can bring with current technology. They don't have dinosaur DNA. It's too old.

[Eric Goode]

I'm joking.

[Joe Rogan]

But they're. I mean, I met the dire wolves. I know it's wild. They brought back the direwolves. What does that mean? I mean, if you talk to Genesis, what is it? It is a bunch of different traits.

[Eric Goode]

Don't go down that rabbit hole. It's close to a dire wolf.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, I don't know what that means, because, like, we decide what a direwolf is, what a direwolf isn't. But if you take literal direwolf DNA that's 7,000 years old and you add it to these gray wolves, and this is what they did, and they created, essentially, a dire wolf, it's like people are arguing over semantics. Whatever it is. That's not a wolf. It's very different. It looks different than a regular wolf, like a gray wolf. The stature is different. It has a mane. It's really crazy looking. They're white, they're stockier, they're built differently. You see, like. Oh, that's different.

[Eric Goode]

Well, like what? Like maned wolves in Argentina look very different than our wolves. So they're very different types of canines. You know, wild dogs in Africa look very different.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah.

[Eric Goode]

You know, than our, you know, so. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, one thing I'd just say about iguanas, just since we were on it, is that because I'm on an organization called the International Iguana foundation and we protect iguanas around the world. And people get confused. They think, oh, iguana, that's so common. They're falling out of trees in Florida. But there are a lot of really rare, cool iguanas. There's about 45 species. And there's pink iguanas in the Galapagos Islands, land iguanas. There's marine iguanas. There's a very rare high elevation pink iguana. There's another land iguana in the Galapagos. There's a, you know, marine iguana, but that lizard was fairly recently discovered. And there's some iguanas that were thought to be extinct. Joe. Like the, like the Jamaican iguana, and that was thought to be extinct forever, the Jamaican iguana, but they found a tiny population recently. So there's a lot of iguanas that are in trouble. And, you know, we should care about iguanas. And they're not just green iguanas. Yeah, that pink iguana, that's a marine iguana and a regular Galapagos land iguana. And then you see some of the pink form.

[Joe Rogan]

Jamie, see if you can find a video on Florida people hunting iguanas. Said Florida people hunting giant iguanas. Because some of them are so big, you just, you see them, you're like, oh, my God, are those bad to eat, though? The big giant ones? Would you eat one being like a pet, A reptile pet? Guy, look at the size of that one.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, that's a male. That's a male. Crazy when they get orange like that. Yeah, that's a big male.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, these things are gigantic.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, yeah. Now that's a common green iguana. And the males lose their green and get that incredible yellow orange.

[Joe Rogan]

Those are males.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Isn't that crazy? How many of them There are, though. I mean, it is just over with iguanas, I guess. They have no natural predators, right? There's nothing that eats them there.

[Eric Goode]

Not once they get big like that when they're little. Some birds of prey and some snakes can eat baby iguanas, but not once they're like that.

[Jeremy Goode]

But they're pretty chill. I mean, they don't really do much harm.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, don't they go to people's crops and people's houses?

[Eric Goode]

No, they do. They do do damage. They're not supposed to be in Florida, let's put it that way. Iguanas like water. Typically they like to be around water. The green iguanas. But you know, reptiles have a bad PR problem. And that's why we're here, Joe. We're trying to elevate the publicity of people loving reptiles and not killing them.

[Joe Rogan]

This dude is all out there killing them. Who's this? This dude? Top shelf anglers on Instagram.

[Jeremy Goode]

Oh, you can do an expedition.

[Joe Rogan]

So he's just a Florida guy that's enjoying the great excursions also.

[Eric Goode]

No, that now is a different. That's a. Called a tinosaurus. That's a type of Central American Mexican rock iguana. That lizard that's not a green iguana.

[Joe Rogan]

So Florida has a variety.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, they have those as well. And they have tegus in Florida that come from South America. A different type of lizard that's invasive in Florida.

[Joe Rogan]

And all of it is pets.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, People letting them.

[Joe Rogan]

I had no idea that many people had iguanas that it could be this big of a problem.

[Eric Goode]

Pat, Iguanas were everywhere at one time. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And is this really.

[Eric Goode]

That's the tegu. That's also invasive in Florida.

[Joe Rogan]

That's crazy looking.

[Eric Goode]

I used to sleep with one of those when I was a teenager.

[Joe Rogan]

That looks like a snake with legs. It does. The other face, right? Totally.

[Eric Goode]

And that lizard really loves to eat eggs. I used to feed mine eggs and I've seen them in the wild eating eggs, bird eggs, duck eggs.

[Joe Rogan]

When I lived in the valley, there was a reptile store and it was a place where I used to go buy goldfish because I used to have piranhas and I used to have turtles too. And the turtles were way more vicious than the. Those aquatic. When you put goldfish in with the turtles.

[Jeremy Goode]

Turtle, sure.

[Joe Rogan]

It's. They're crazy, man. And they grab a hold of them and they're biting him. It's like very Jurassic park.

[Jeremy Goode]

Like you're watching alligator, snapping turtle.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Well, these are just little.

[Eric Goode]

You Know, little green sliders.

[Joe Rogan]

Sliders? That what they're called?

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

But they had a crocodile monitor in that place and. Oh, yeah. I briefly thought, like, maybe I could figure out an enclosure crocodile monitor, feed it rabbits and shit.

[Eric Goode]

Don't get bit by a crocodile monitor. They're close to, like, a Komodo dragon bite. They have scalpel teeth. They're serious. Getting bit by a crocodile monitor, it looked pretty vicious.

[Joe Rogan]

It did. I mean, they just look like dinosaurs. It's like a forgotten thing of the. Pat, there it is. Yeah, there's a crocodile monitor. Look at that face, man. It totally looks like a dinosaur.

[Eric Goode]

Well, there's Tommy, who's. Who's. Yeah, that's a guy who's in our.

[Jeremy Goode]

Feeding it, you know, Chicken.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, Tommy. They're the weirdest fucking people. Because I kind of understand the chimp people more because the chimp people, like a chimp is interacting with you. It's a mammal, it's a primate. It's intelligent. There's a lot going on. There's emotions and jealousy and chimps, they're connecting with you, these things. You're just looking into the abyss until

[Eric Goode]

the chimp rips your head off.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, well, I'm not advocating for people to have chimps as pets. I just say I understand the appeal of a pet chimp. I think it's a crazy idea.

[Eric Goode]

Well, especially a baby.

[Joe Rogan]

I think if anybody's even remotely thinking about it, they should watch Jim. Crazy.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

But, yeah, especially the babies. They're so cute. And then they eventually get to the point where they kill your neighbor, but it's just. You don't want. You know, I get. I just get the appeal of it. The appeal of the reptile thing to me is just very strange. Like, these people love them.

[Eric Goode]

Well, I loved. You know, I used to keep snakes and lizards, but I ultimately. They were my gateway drug. And then I ultimately got into tortoises because they. I like the tortoises coexisting in the garden. I like plants, like gardens, and so it didn't feel like they were in a cage and they kind of, you know, maybe I'm anthropomorphizing my tortoises, but I kind of felt like they were having a pretty good life in my garden, so.

[Joe Rogan]

For sure.

[Eric Goode]

So I like keeping tortoises. They don't, you know, want to eat a rabbit, particularly. They want to eat some lettuce or some greens or. So turtles and tortoises is what I gravitated to. And then I found out one Day, they're the most endangered group of animals on the planet, along with primates, if you measure it by how many turtles and tortoises there are in the world and how many are facing extinction along with primates. So then I was like, okay, I want to do something to help them. And this show we're doing is really to teach people about the evolution of the reptile trade and to make people realize they're cool and they shouldn't be disposable pets.

[Joe Rogan]

Also freak show. And freak show, of course, really good at freak shows.

[Eric Goode]

As I said, it takes one to know one.

[Jeremy Goode]

But.

[Joe Rogan]

Of course.

[Jeremy Goode]

But what's different. What's different, though, is that this isn't some, like, side hustle for animal love gone wrong. You know, it's. It's. There's these people. There's this. The animal, the reptile people. The. Her people are incredibly obsessive about, you know, living art, about these living things. They like the. It's like a baseball card. Like the. What was that word you use?

[Joe Rogan]

The herp people.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, herpetology.

[Eric Goode]

Herp people. Herpetology. Amphibians and reptiles.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, I'm sorry. Well, you know, coded, decoded.

[Eric Goode]

The herpes people.

[Jeremy Goode]

Herpes. No, but, but it's, you know, it's a. It's. It's really a trade formed around scarcity and, you know, this sort of desire and adventure people have going out to find the rarest of the rare, you know, and bringing it back and selling it, trading it, keeping it.

[Eric Goode]

I'm in that category.

[Jeremy Goode]

You are in that category?

[Eric Goode]

I'm in that category. I'm not the guy that just wants the little pet bearded dragon. I want the Rolls Royce or reptiles.

[Jeremy Goode]

But it's different than, like, you know, an individual person that has an attachment to a chimpanzee that she saw with, you know, watching Tarzan when she was growing up and she wanted to have that in her life.

[Eric Goode]

So in other words, freaky people.

[Jeremy Goode]

Freaky people, Extreme obsessions. But it's about kind of psychology of people in this particular, very niche way.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, any time you're dealing with extreme animal people, it's about the psychology of the human being that's really invested in it.

[Jeremy Goode]

Right? Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Best in show.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, for sure. And these are very unusual people because it's a very unusual thing to be connected to something that really doesn't give a fuck about you. Like, we're really concerned about this pink iguana. That pink iguana doesn't give a fuck about people. If all the people on earth died it would just keep going about its business and not shed a tear.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, especially things that can kill you in this way, like a taipan or whatever. Someone's playing with that.

[Eric Goode]

An inland taipan is a venomous snake from Australia that may be the most venomous snake in the world, but it's all relative because a black mamba, you know. Yeah. Australia has a lot of venomous stuff. Spiders, box jellyfish, a lot of snakes that are very dangerous. Australian tiger snake, brown snake, inland taipan. They're all things that equally can kill you. So to say one's more dangerous than the other. They all kill you.

[Joe Rogan]

Is there anti venom for all of them?

[Eric Goode]

No, actually. So it's a good question. So some snakes, like, you know, Texas has a coral snake, for example, a very venomous elapid type of snake, like a cobra, not like a rattlesnake. And I think they have less and less antivenom for snakes that rarely bite people because like sea snakes, the coral snake, which is the red, black and yellow one that you have in East Texas, you know when the dog gets bit. By then you were talking about your dog getting bit by rattlesnakes. A lot of time the vet doesn't know because you can't even see the bite. The snake bite is so tiny. So some snakes do not have antivenom. Some really dangerous snakes, the coral snakes,

[Joe Rogan]

they don't have antivenom for them.

[Eric Goode]

I think I heard that. Maybe not anymore. I'm sure it's faded.

[Joe Rogan]

So happens if you get bit.

[Eric Goode]

Well, there may be some antivenom, but there's not a lot of it. Antivenom has gotten very expensive and it's very sophisticated now. And it's mostly for, you know, in the US for vipers, you know, for rattlesnakes, you know, But I don't know. Good question. That would be something someone smarter than me would know about. Coral snake antivenom, but it's an elapid, like a cobra.

[Joe Rogan]

A friend of mine had two of them in her carport.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

They took pictures of it and sent it to people and everyone's like, yeah, yep, that's. Keep away from that. Just chilling in her carport. Yeah. But they're generally not aggressive. Is that the deal?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, there's a saying and it doesn't fit all because there's coral snakes that don't have this. But yellow against black is a friend of Jack. Yellow and black against red is. Anyway, I can't even say anymore.

[Joe Rogan]

You wind up dead or something.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, you wind up dead. But I'm getting it wrong. But there's a saying, and it doesn't hold true for all coral snakes because there's some coral snakes outside of the US they don't have that same pattern.

[Joe Rogan]

So if there's no anti venom and they take you to the hospital, what did they do? They stopped making the.

[Eric Goode]

I mean there's some.

[Joe Rogan]

They stop making it. It was cost.

[Eric Goode]

Is that what it says?

[Joe Rogan]

Effective.

[Eric Goode]

I think that's what I heard.

[Joe Rogan]

Cost ineffective. No longer cost effective.

[Jeremy Goode]

Let people die.

[Joe Rogan]

Cost effective is a crazy thing to say when it comes to fucking keeping people alive.

[Eric Goode]

Wow. I was right for a change.

[Joe Rogan]

Capitalist cunts. Maybe the socialists are right. Cost effective is crazy. So what did they do?

[Eric Goode]

You know, I heard every rattlesnake joke after I got bit. And there's one that these three guys are out hiking and someone gets bit here and they go to the doctor and the guy says, you got to go back and suck it out of him. And the guy just says to him, you're gonna die. So maybe you die with a coral snake.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, just leave you die.

[Jeremy Goode]

The thing I was. We recently were looking at this, the way of treating rattlesnake mites. Not too long ago, by the way, they used to sell these. Johnson and Johnson used to sell these kids where you used to have one, right? You'd actually literally slice out and you'd suck out the. Suck out the venom out of your. Out of your bite.

[Joe Rogan]

Does that actually work?

[Jeremy Goode]

No, that was what's incredible about it.

[Eric Goode]

When we were young, they had these little rattlesnake kits. You know, I'm a little older than you, but it was insane what they told people to do back then. They told you to cut yourself and then put a tourniquet and then suck the venom out. Which is completely insane because when a rattlesnake strikes, you know, they never hold on. A rattlesnake, they strike and let go immediately. And then they track their prey. And it's literally like a hypodermic needle going into your body. And the. You know, the venom is already. Just like when they inject you with something, it's already in. You can't suck.

[Jeremy Goode]

Whatever.

[Eric Goode]

A doctor.

[Joe Rogan]

So what should you do if you get bit by rattlesnake?

[Eric Goode]

Be mellow. In my case, I walked to my car. Luckily I wasn't too far away from my car and I was up in the mountains about an hour away from a hospital. I drove.

[Jeremy Goode]

Drove?

[Eric Goode]

Well, I drove like a bat out of hell to the hospital, actually. But you're supposed to be calm and get to a hospital.

[Jeremy Goode]

Incredible. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Geez. And it was just, huh. Well every imagine taking out the woods, you're like, we're fine. Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Everything you shouldn't, everything you shouldn't do today, everything you should.

[Joe Rogan]

And so you just stay mellow and get to the hospital. And if they don't have any anti venom, you just die.

[Eric Goode]

Well, in my case they didn't have it in the hospital. They had to get see highway patrol to bring it from another from Ventura and It took about 45 minutes and I thought I was going to die on the gurney. But yeah, you get to a hospital and you get antivenom if it's a

[Joe Rogan]

bad bite and if they don't have antivenom, you die.

[Eric Goode]

Well, it depends on the kind of snake. Like water moccasins usually aren't lethal, but certain rattlesnakes can kill you.

[Joe Rogan]

And how much time do you have from the time you get bit where you must get the antivenom in you?

[Eric Goode]

I mean in my case, I swear to God I thought I was going to stop breathing. About two hours into it. It just slowly feels like this pressure on your chest.

[Joe Rogan]

You can't breathe?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, like you're like you. It felt like somebody put sandbags all over me and like you have this pressure and you feel like you're gonna stop breathing. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of bizarre.

[Jeremy Goode]

Who's that guy? Ross. Ross Allen. He has the world record for the most. Is it cobra bites?

[Eric Goode]

No, I think you're talking about Serpentarium.

[Jeremy Goode]

That same guy, Bill Hoss, he lived

[Eric Goode]

to like a hundred but. And I know people that inject themselves with venom. I was in Myanmar, in Burma one time and this guy had snake tattoos all over him. And he was a snake wrangler at this zoo in central Burma. And every tattoo he had put on his body, he had put some venom in it. So he could handle these really dangerous crates which were like cobras. And he was this guy with all these snake tattoos. But he had envenomated himself so he would have antibodies so he could handle these things and if he got bit, he wouldn't die.

[Jeremy Goode]

But early roadside attractions in south. I mean that's the part about Florida. It goes back, it's in the 50s and 60s. It had, you know, Miami Serpentarium was an amazing looking place. Had this giant cobra, you know, with sculpture, basically.

[Joe Rogan]

Here's a question. If they do that with allergies, where they give you like a little bit of the allergen, you develop a resistance to it. Could they do that with snakes?

[Eric Goode]

That's the idea.

[Joe Rogan]

It's like if you live in a snake prone area, should you do that?

[Eric Goode]

No, but that's the idea.

[Joe Rogan]

Why wouldn't you do that?

[Eric Goode]

There's a guy right now in the US that's doing it. I think they're doing a film about him injecting all these venomous snake venoms into him like a pin cushion. But no, I don't think people should do it. But people do do it. Not a lot of people, but this guy.

[Joe Rogan]

But if it does build up your antibodies and you know that you're gonna come in contact with snakes, listen, wouldn't that be. Is it bad for you to do.

[Eric Goode]

Look, the country that I think has the most deadly snake bites is probably India, the country where there's the most deaths and envenomation. The snake that probably kills more people in the world is a puff adder in Africa. But it's many countries. But I think India has the highest U.S. it's pretty low chance you're going to get killed by a snake. You're going to get killed driving your car or shooting someone with your gun. You know, it's highly unlikely that the odds are very low that you're going to, to die from a snake bite no matter where you live in the country.

[Joe Rogan]

I understand that it's all well and good, but that doesn't comfort you if you get bit by a snake, like, oh, what are the odds?

[Jeremy Goode]

Seek medical advice, you have to deal with it or buy one of those kits.

[Eric Goode]

I think most people live, Joe. I think most people, I mean, there's a few people that died this year in California, but typically it's like only a few people a year die in the country from snake bites.

[Joe Rogan]

And is it generally because they just don't get to medical treatment in time

[Eric Goode]

or they're older or you know, or they get bit three times, like not just once by the rattlesnake, you know, you get more venom in them.

[Joe Rogan]

Is it true that the young ones give you more venom than the old ones?

[Eric Goode]

No, young, young, young ones have a more condensed, more dangerous venom. But big snakes will are much more dangerous because they can put far more venom into you. The little ones have, have a more potent venom, but they can't inject as much into you. So that's kind of. People misunderstand that stat. Not that I'm a snake expert, I'm more of a turtle expert and I'm more of a freak expert. So I'm good at finding these CR People to cover.

[Joe Rogan]

Do you get uncomfortable being around these people?

[Eric Goode]

That's a good question.

[Joe Rogan]

Because there's, There's a psychological aspect to all, particularly, like, chimp crazy. There's. There's something about those people that makes me uneasy watching it on tv. Like, you're so far gone. Like, some of these people are so far gone in terms of, like, just being a normal, present, rational person.

[Eric Goode]

There's a courtship, and sometimes that courtship takes years to get someone willing to be interviewed. It's generally the reptile world can be very guarded. People that have them don't want the Feds coming and taking their rare reptiles. They don't want animal rights groups, PETA coming and busting them. They don't want people coming because they're very valuable. Some reptiles are worth a lot of money, so they're very guarded. And to get access to a lot of these people took a lot of time at times. And sometimes that relationship would go up and down. And there were times when people that I was interviewing really did not like me. There was something that happened and then I'd have to go there and I'd be nervous because that person may have been someone who did a lot of time in prison and did some heavy things in his life. So, yeah, there are times when you're just kind of like, you know, is this the time I'm going to go there and he's going to really me up.

[Joe Rogan]

Why didn't they, like, know you.

[Eric Goode]

You. You know, man, you know, like, listen, I like this guy. He's done a. He's done what he's done in the past. He was sentenced to 100 years in prison. He got out for whatever reason. But that guy, that guy.

[Joe Rogan]

Wait a minute. Why did he go to jail for 100 years?

[Eric Goode]

Well, Mario Toi was sentenced to 100 plus years in prison. He got out early because he must have had some serious.

[Joe Rogan]

What was the crime?

[Eric Goode]

Murder and drugs.

[Joe Rogan]

And he got out early because he said he had information.

[Eric Goode]

He must have. He did 12 years and no one knows. No one knows why.

[Joe Rogan]

What? He only did 12 years for murder and drugs.

[Eric Goode]

But I like him.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, great.

[Eric Goode]

I wasn't the one murdered. I wasn't in his life back then. But he's kind of a. He really actually does love animals. I mean, in his way. And I was nervous sometimes going to his place a few times.

[Joe Rogan]

But why was he mad at you?

[Eric Goode]

You do you remember all the times he was mad at me? He's mad at. He's probably mad at me right now. As I'm speaking.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I definitely will be after the show, probably.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that's this.

[Jeremy Goode]

This is the next episode. There's an entire episode that talks about kind of the 80s in Miami and the sort of overlap between the drug trade and the illegal wildlife trade and the reptile trade. And he's a central character in it.

[Joe Rogan]

The 80s in Miami.

[Jeremy Goode]

Now he's kind of more tangential because it's really about this. This guy, Raven Nostrand, a guy from New Jersey, moved down to Florida, started a business that became strictly reptiles, as I was referencing. But, yeah, I mean, I don't think there was anything like particular, but he would get very particular about very specific things. Like, if you were. You could be right about a million things that he hated, but wrong about one thing that he cared about the most. And he would categorize you to be

[Eric Goode]

this person that there's an expression, honor among thieves. And he weirdly has this kind of honorable side.

[Jeremy Goode]

Unredeemable. Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

And certain things I would say to him would make him really upset. But I have to say, the only time I was ever shot at in my life was in fucking Miami. I was shot at, you know, going to a payphone in the early 90s in a van, trying to go to a nightclub with a bunch of people. And these guys were walking towards me, and they started just blowing out the windows of the van. I remember I didn't go to the nightclub. I went back to my hotel, and I woke up in the morning with that chopped, you know, car glass all in my hair. I had long hair back then. I had hair back then. But Miami was, you know, it was pretty wild in the 80s and early 90s.

[Joe Rogan]

I have a good friend of mine, my friend Steve, did his residency. He's an ophthalmologist, his residency in Miami in the 80s, and worked in emergency rooms. And he said it was fucking insane. It's just like, so many gunshot wounds, so many drug deals gone bad, so many heists. He said it was like an insane place to work.

[Eric Goode]

It's funny you say that, because I said to all my characters, I said, what's it like? You know, having been in and out of prison so many times? He goes, bro, everyone in Florida has been in prison, you know. And I was kind of like, what's it like? You know, everyone in Florida's been in prison.

[Jeremy Goode]

Sunny place with shady people, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Have you seen Cocaine Cowboys?

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Phenomenal, right? And that story where you find out that the entire graduating class of the police academy either wound up murdered or in jail for corruption.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. Have you seen Bad Lieutenant? Yes, I'm friends with Harvey.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, really?

[Eric Goode]

He's good in it, man.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah, no, it's a great movie,

[Eric Goode]

but there's parts of this story that are a little like Bad Lieutenant. You'll see in the end, you know,

[Jeremy Goode]

well, what you'll like about this second episode, about this period, it's from the point of view of this young at the time, you know, coming right out of college, young DEA agent, DEA agent on the beat chasing bad guys. And he was assigned, this guy Mario to Brawley, the case that was a cold case, no one could ever touch him. And you see him kind of chase after him and, you know, understand the whole weaving of the story, but it's a really, you know, being around that guy was, you know, being. Talk about the subjects in this animal world, you know, law enforcement.

[Eric Goode]

This guy sleeps with a gun every night and gets literally orgasmic with the thought of this guy coming to his house.

[Jeremy Goode]

There's like a hideaway.

[Eric Goode]

The guy that he put in prison for 100 years that got out, he literally waits. And you'll see a line in the show that it's kind of unbelievable what he says about that.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah. But just, you know, he lives in this kind of. We went to go see him. He lives in this kind of. Very kind of, you know, country part of West Virginia. And he's good with guns. Good with guns. And he would just, you know, he would brag about all the gunshots, you know, the bullets you can find from this, you know, leftover from the Civil War in his backyard. And, you know, he was very, very good with a gun. We did a lot of shooting verite with him. And he was just a really, at the time, very generous with his. With his time, wanting to tell his story, but, you know, clearly killed a lot of people and would make some very soft references to that. That would be very unnerving. You know, like, yeah, you're really great with. I've never shot a gun. He's. I don't have anything against it, but I've never shot a gun. And I would talk to him about it. I'm interested in it. And he'd be like, yeah, I've had to use it a lot, you know, more than I'd like to admit. So, you know, you're in these places. It's.

[Eric Goode]

But what's so peculiar about this guy? His name's Larry Loveless. He was a DEA agent in Florida back in those days. He put this guy in prison, you know, you know, bringing. This guy was bringing a lot of drugs from, you know, he was Cuban. And you'll see it in episode two, but he really just doesn't understand how the guy got out of prison. And the fact that the very guy that put him in prison wouldn't know that, that they, like the. Whoever the powers that be that put got him out of prison after 12 years, you would think he would know, you know, but he. He's still to this day worried. Worried about retaliating.

[Jeremy Goode]

So this was, what's. What's cool is that his dad was actually the person. He was like an HR person for kind of the Cuban. It was at the time of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, that kind of era. And he was responsible for taking care of all these kind of Cuban exiles during that time. And he was being the one that was kind of going house to house and giving people checks. So he had this kind of very interesting network of people and had this incredible access. And so what has been insinuated is that his dad had these relationships and knew where everyone was and knew all these people and had information that was useful to the government at the time. That's the idea. Gave information, no surprise.

[Eric Goode]

Or he helped bring down the real Pablo Escobar, or he knew a big drug lord that the government wanted. They made a deal, who knows? But it could have been. There's lots of theories.

[Jeremy Goode]

Quite an injustice, though. Like, even this guy, you know, some. You know, we filmed 200 people over how long? 15 years. Really. The last six was. Was more intense.

[Eric Goode]

More than 200 people.

[Jeremy Goode]

And you, you never get everybody in. And I remember meeting this guy, Tony Biscaro, Remember him? Yeah. He was the. This guy was part of. He flew planes for drugs. You know, he got busted with like, I think 600,000, you know, pounds of weed. At the time, he served the single largest sentence for marijuana smuggling crime. 40 years. 40 years. Got out maybe five years ago. And could you imagine coming out of prison for the longest sentence and then going to Miami? And you see weed stores everywhere.

[Joe Rogan]

You know what I mean?

[Jeremy Goode]

Your fucking life's over. And you see these weed stores everywhere. It's like insane to me.

[Eric Goode]

That's fucked up.

[Jeremy Goode]

But that was at a time. Look, Pablo Escobar. There were people around Pablo Escobar that got indicted that were trafficking ivory horns. Like, it was very, you know, one degree of separation for, like, wildlife crime and drugs in that era.

[Joe Rogan]

Why do you think there's that connection?

[Jeremy Goode]

Easy concealment.

[Joe Rogan]

Concealment.

[Eric Goode]

I Mean, look, I don't want to exaggerate. I think it. There's been connections, you know, like you can put cocaine inside of a boa constrictor who's going to open a box at customs or, you know, Fish and Wildlife Service and look inside the boa constrictor. So there's some pretty ingenious ways to.

[Joe Rogan]

Meaning you put it in their stomach.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. Like you either like force feed the boa constrictor. Like, you know, like you put them in those balloons, you put cocaine in or you even.

[Joe Rogan]

And then you have to cut them open to get your cocaine.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, you cut them open and get your cocaine.

[Jeremy Goode]

But even, but even more, I remember

[Eric Goode]

in New York when the fish markets

[Jeremy Goode]

used to put so casually about that,

[Eric Goode]

by the way, but fish markets used to put the drugs in fish. In the, in the, you know, in the fish market. Yeah. Because no one wants to handle the fish and open up the fish and they'd shove all the drugs into the fish. So, you know, like smellies, dangerous animals are good cover for drugs or even

[Jeremy Goode]

more simply trafficking wildlife. There was a legal version of that. So what they would do is take the crates and they'd pack them and they'd put the drugs at the bottom and they'd put another layer of animals and they'd mix in some look alike animals that were really rare but looked like the common animal. So they'd mix them together and then they put something like spitting cobras up the top. And no one was reaching into the crate when there was these very dangerous animals. Many. So that's how they kind of got. They were able to prey on the lack of resources at these kind of major ports of entry and realize that Fish and Wildlife didn't really have any resources at the time. They had limited wildlife inspectors. They had to go through these volumes, volumes of crates, and they played these games.

[Eric Goode]

Many Komodo dragons that made it into this country came in illegally in a crate. And they would just put a little Komodo dragon in with some other monitor lizards. And the inspectors couldn't tell the difference. And they'd go through. And the Komodo dragon that bit Sharon Stone's husband. Sharon Stone's husband at the Los Angeles Zoo is one of those Komodo dragons.

[Joe Rogan]

So it was somebody's private collection and then they got released to the zoo.

[Eric Goode]

No, it was in a sting that's in our show where they were bringing in illegal animals. Coming from a guy in Malaysia who's sort of the Pablo Escobar the kingpin globally of all the reptile animal trade. A guy that we finally accessed after Covid, who. His name is Anson Wong. And he was sort of the, you know, bad guy number one in the world for reptile and animal smuggling. And so he was sending my Interpol and I'll. You know, he did the longest, longest sentence in the US for wildlife crime ever at the time. In the 90s. He was busted in Mexico, but. And then brought extradited into the us but he was bringing in Komodo dragons and really rare reptiles. And the zoos were the beneficiary of those reptiles. Once they were called confiscated. So the LA Zoo, San Diego Zoo, Bronx Zoo. A lot of these animals came from reptile smugglers.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Jeremy Goode]

Very much the origins of collections. Yeah, pursues.

[Joe Rogan]

And I would also imagine the kind of people that are really into reptiles probably also do drugs. So they probably know a lot of people in that world.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, it's like a cross section of.

[Joe Rogan]

You're into metal, you got a python.

[Eric Goode]

There's a lot of inked guys. There's a lot of, like goth guys into.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Hot snakes, which are the venomous. A lot of bikers.

[Joe Rogan]

Hot snakes.

[Eric Goode]

Hot snakes.

[Joe Rogan]

That's what they call them.

[Eric Goode]

Hot snakes.

[Joe Rogan]

The kind that can kill you.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, they're called hot snakes.

[Joe Rogan]

Interesting.

[Eric Goode]

But yeah, a lot of badass guys. And there was definitely drugs. Listen, I did drugs in my life.

[Joe Rogan]

No way.

[Eric Goode]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

Come on. I'll go on.

[Eric Goode]

I've done everything. I had nightclubs in New York City for many years, Joe. Yeah. I'm like, you know, embalmed. It's made me live longer.

[Joe Rogan]

Maybe that's what saved you when you got bit by the rattlesnake. But you gotta think that the type of people that are gonna be even interested in having a snake as a pet, that's a very unusual person.

[Eric Goode]

I like snakes.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah. I don't know.

[Eric Goode]

Come on. You know, people that have snakes. Kids have ball pythons. You've got kids. They like a baby. A ball python, they're clean. You don't have to feed it every day like a rabbit or a dog. You can go on vacation, leave your ball python.

[Joe Rogan]

They.

[Eric Goode]

They're. They're a good pet. A lot of snakes, I don't think

[Joe Rogan]

of them as a pet. I think of them as a monster that you feed that allows you, you know, it's not big enough to eat you, so it allows you to feed it. And then you have to keep it in this box, which is kind of weird.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, well, that's that's why I like tortoises. You don't have to keep them in a cage or a box.

[Joe Rogan]

Cuz is a. Does a snake they experience discomfort because they're in a terrarium?

[Eric Goode]

Listen, there's a lot of myth out there that, oh, snakes can live in a little teeny like sweater box or shoe box. You can put them in racks like you see in snake stores and snake breeds. The truth is real snakes in the wild do not live in little boxes. They may go in the underground at a certain time of year and hibernate. They may, but they come out and they hang out like us and they move around. And most snakes do not live in a little teeny box. But yes, they can survive in a box. But there's all different kinds of snakes. There's racer snakes and indigo snakes and snakes that need to move fast and go places. And then there's some snakes like a ball python that can be in a more confined space. But you can't generalize.

[Joe Rogan]

But generally, like when people keep them as pets, they keep them in some condiment aquarium, right?

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, yeah.

[Eric Goode]

And they should give them more space. They should absolutely give them more space. I mean, part of what we're trying to do in this show is try to tell people, be responsible. Don't treat reptiles like disposable pets. Like a toy that you break one week and then you buy another one and you break it and the parents buy another one. You know, they're living creatures. The death toll when you import these animals is amazing. I mean, so much mortality. And we don't talk about mortality. Whether it's zoos or people bringing in these reptiles or even myself over the years. You asked me what happened to that snake. Probably died. Probably was flushed down the toilet by someone's mom, you know. You know, like baby green turtles that you had as a kid. Like what happened to most of those?

[Joe Rogan]

How long do snakes look like? How long does a python live?

[Jeremy Goode]

Live?

[Joe Rogan]

This episode is brought to you by Visible. It's officially summer, folks. And boy, what a summer we are having. It feels like one of those good old fashioned summers. We just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action. Your best companion this summer, Visible Wireless. Visible gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. So you can make this the summer of fun and savings. Visible is more than just a wireless plan. It's unlim wireless designed to always keep you connected with no contract to tie you down. Switch [e-mail] plan start at $25 a month or get our premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month. When you use promo code Rogan terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.

[Eric Goode]

So the longest lived animal, terrestrial animal on the planet is a giant tortoise. They can live almost 200 years. I have tortoises that are over one.

[Joe Rogan]

But what about snakes?

[Eric Goode]

Snakes, generally most snakes don't live more than 30 to 40 years, but there are a few that might. Lizards can live 70 years. Some of the big land iguanas can live a long time.

[Joe Rogan]

Those ones in Florida, they can live 70 years.

[Eric Goode]

I don't know about green iguanas, but there are some that can live 50 to 70 years. Some of the big lizards, tortoises, live the longest. Some crocodilians live a really long time. Snakes live the leaster time compared to most of the other reptiles.

[Joe Rogan]

That was another thing that they. They found in Florida, in the Everglades, they found Nile crocodiles and they think that they might have a breeding population. There's some suspicion, but it's basically from people having them as pets are gnarly.

[Eric Goode]

I've swam with Nile crocodiles. That's no joke.

[Joe Rogan]

Why'd you do that?

[Eric Goode]

I was in Madagascar. They have a form of Nile crocodile in Madagascar. They don't get quite as big as the mainland crocs. And I was looking for turtles and then I saw the crocodile. Nile crocodiles. And as you know, saltwater crocodiles are the two crocs that really kill the most people. You know, people come and wash their clothing next to the shore. You know, the croc comes up and grabs them. You know, you really got to watch it with Nile crocodiles. So if they're in Florida, they're much bigger than American crocodiles.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, they have a shoot on site order for them. Or they did, at least in this article that I was reading. It's from a while back.

[Eric Goode]

I didn't know that.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. Yeah, they found a couple of them. Yeah, yeah, I know. They've captured at least two of them.

[Eric Goode]

Of them, well, the biggest reptile in the world in terms of weight, back to our size conversation, is a saltwater crocodile. And it's neck and neck with a leatherback sea turtle. They're both over £2,000. So you imagine a 2,000 leatherback sea

[Joe Rogan]

turtle is that big?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I had no idea.

[Eric Goode]

That's great.

[Joe Rogan]

I would have never imagined that a sea turtle would have the same body weight. As a saltwater crocodile, they're neck and

[Eric Goode]

neck to over £2,000, both of them. That's the big, big turtle.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I know that there. There's legend, right, about Congo crocodiles, that there's crocodiles that people had supposedly seen, you know, back in the early 1900s and the 1800s, that they thought were 40ft long. And the thing about crocodiles is I don't think they die of old age. I think they just stay alive until they die.

[Eric Goode]

I want to be a crocodile.

[Joe Rogan]

And they keep getting bigger. That's the other thing. Like, depending upon their food source and how much. Yeah, one. I think in captivity, they wind up dying, but I think there's some.

[Eric Goode]

There's.

[Joe Rogan]

There's some thoughts as to why that happens. You know, how they're actually eating, whether they're getting fed. What's the difference between the way they live in the wild. But there's some accounts from back in the day where these guys were on a boat and the. The crocodile was bigger than the boat they were on.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, I mean, the thing about crocodilians, and I think there's about 27 different types, but once they get to a certain size, you know, they're vulnerable when they're little. Right. Like birds and fish and things can kill them and eat them. But once they get a certain size, you know, like you're saying they're pretty much invincible. Nothing can kill them, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

And some of them develop a taste for people.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, just movement in the water and. Just because they're an ambush predator, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Well, they hunt people, and they probably hunt people.

[Joe Rogan]

My friend Jim Shockey, he got hired to go to Africa. I forget what country it was, but he got hired to kill these crocodiles because they were preying on people. And while he was there, someone got snatched up while he was in camp. He said everybody there had, like, missing a leg bite taken out of their calf. Everybody was all fucked up.

[Eric Goode]

I was good friends with Peter Beer, and he would go to Kenya and Ethiopia and call crocodiles. And there's a really incredible photo of him inside a crocodile that they killed. And he's, like, writing in his, you know, journal, but he's half. His body is in a huge Nile crocodile, But he would go and call them for probably similar reason.

[Joe Rogan]

As you said, once they start targeting villagers, once they find that there's a place that they can hunt and get regular food, they're there all the time. They're so sneaky that. That, you know, what they developed was these people had put posts into the ground, in the water. So into the area where they would wash their clothes and gather food, they essentially built, like, some sort of containment area where the crocs couldn't get through these poles. So what the crocs did was go around the poles and into the water. So they had figured it out.

[Jeremy Goode]

Smart.

[Joe Rogan]

That's creepy. Creepy. That's creepy. Where they. They realize, like, oh, the people go. Like, they must have been watching and realizing, oh, the people go into this area. So I got to go on the ground at night, and then I'll go back in the water, and then I'll catch these slipping.

[Eric Goode]

And they're patient. They can wait years.

[Jeremy Goode]

Intelligent.

[Eric Goode]

They can wait a long time before they eat anything, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. They don't have to eat for a year, right?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Are they intelligent?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, well, they. They're one of the few reptiles that actually really does defend their babies. Like, you know, like a snake. This snake doesn't do that.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. Wow.

[Eric Goode]

That's amazing.

[Joe Rogan]

What a dinosaur, man.

[Eric Goode]

What is that, a saltwater or a Nile?

[Jeremy Goode]

This is salt water.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. In Australia.

[Eric Goode]

Wow, though.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. Those things ran the whole world at one point in time.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It's just weird. There's still creatures like that roaming around. Around. You know, that's a throwback.

[Eric Goode]

And there's some really endangered crocodiles. And you'll see in our show, I think even episode one, there's the zoo curator that says, oh, we bought a few Philippine crocodiles from this dealer. I think it's in the first episode. And Philippine crocodiles today are super endangered. You know, like, there's still some really, really rare ones. Not saltwater crocs and not Nile crocs, But there's some really endangered.

[Joe Rogan]

Is that a thrill for these guys that they get something that they're not supposed to have? Is that part of it?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, for sure.

[Jeremy Goode]

It's like a rare baseball card.

[Eric Goode]

No, it's like rare art. It's like having a. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there's a. I get excited by seeing something I never saw before. I'm like a kid in a candy store. No, but I see a cool, like, pink landing one. I've never seen one in the wild or anywhere. And I've been to the Galapagos, so. Yeah, it's a thrill. It's a horror.

[Jeremy Goode]

What you put in your backpack and take it home is probably not. Not encouraged.

[Eric Goode]

I'd stuff it down my pants. No, I. I'd be too scared.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you wouldn't Want to do that? Right.

[Eric Goode]

You'd want natural habitat. No, I wouldn't want. You know, my mother gave me a good moral compass with that. She used to say to me when I was a kid, don't play God, Eric. You know how to keep my. I was keeping things. And she'd tell me, you got to let it go at the end of the summer. So I was lucky to have that because a lot of people didn't have that mother, and I did. So I. I kind of, against my better judgment, when I was a kid, I did bad things that my mother didn't like. But later in life, she was right. Keep it in the wild.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, for sure. Well, they're fascinating in the wild. I just, like, I do appreciate them in the wild. I just. I'm perplexed as to why people would. They would have their life revolve around taking care of reptiles. It just seems really odd.

[Eric Goode]

Well, people get into it, and they get addicted, and they buy more and more and more, and then they get divorced and they get rid of them all or they get burned out on it, because after a while, it's a lot of work taking care of a lot of reptiles. So it's kind of like, you know, people get really into it, and sometimes it's hard to sustain it, you know,

[Jeremy Goode]

but more trade than the other collectible culture trade. It's more. More trade.

[Joe Rogan]

More, you know, like, I'll give you a crocodile.

[Jeremy Goode]

Sell trade. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

What's going on here, Jamie?

[Jeremy Goode]

Bear. Bear gallbladder.

[Eric Goode]

I've never seen this footage.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a shark.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So it's stealing a shark that a guy caught. Wow. That must be American crocodile, right? It's Australia. Okay. A lot of sharks in Australia. That makes sense. I don't know. Wow. So it just stole this guy's fish. Okay.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Goode]

What's been your interest in wildlife?

[Joe Rogan]

I'm fascinated by wildlife. I'm just much more interested in mammals for whatever reason. I mean, I'm interested in these things. I found them fascinating, but they're not as compelling to me for whatever reason. And I always wondered what that is. Like, you know, I did this thing on social media once, the social media hierarchy of dead animals. And I said, like, fish fillets of fish, no one cares. Dead fish. People care a little more, but not much. Dead turkey, not that big a deal. Dead deer. Okay, now we're getting weird. You know, dead bear, now people get mad at you. You. It's interesting.

[Eric Goode]

You know, I went to this thing called Safari Club International in Vegas. It's the biggest trophy hunting, you know, convention. And I was filming undercover, and I started out, you know, asking, yeah, can you taxidermy this and that? And then I kind of, you know, raised the bar, and I said, you know, can you taxidermy a chimp for me? And they're like, yeah, yeah, we can do a chimp. So what about an orangutan? Yeah, we could do an orangutan. Anyway, and I was going around to different taxidermists in this giant convention. They had elephants and lions and all of kinds. Kinds of stuff. Eventually, I asked someone if you could taxidermy a human, you know, and. And then suddenly I noticed all these guys starting to follow me, you know, and there was a big NRA booth and a lot of people with guns. And eventually they surrounded me, and I was trying to get rid of my, you know, camera gear and throw it in the garbage and stuff. But it was interesting where the line is and what you're allowed to.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it sounds like you're a psychopath. You're asking if you could taxidermy a human. You don't think that's. They probably thought for sure you're a fed or someone or a joke undercover or. I mean, obviously, it was kind of.

[Eric Goode]

It was kind of a joke, but they literally started putting eyeballs on me and saying, who the fuck is this guy?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah. Wouldn't you. Yeah, but they were, hey, how do you take a fucking human and turn it into a statue?

[Eric Goode]

People have shrunken heads. I know people with shrunken heads, actually, you know, they collect them. But no, it's pretty macabre. But the fact that they would taxidermy a chicken chimp and an orangutan and a gorilla.

[Joe Rogan]

So who are these people that said they would do that? They're just.

[Eric Goode]

Just taxidermists that are in this convention that taxidermy.

[Joe Rogan]

So someone would have to smuggle it back.

[Eric Goode]

A lot of what happens is in a lot of the, you know, when zoo animals die, sometimes they send it to people that taxidermy it. So I know people that get a lot of zoo carcasses and they, you know, taxidermy a chimp. I've seen it. But, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So when a zoo. A zoo has the option to sell the dead body, and then someone turns it into a taxidermy statue.

[Eric Goode]

It's gone on for a long time. Nothing against zoos, but that was one way to get really unusual animals. Like, I have a friend, I mean, a guy I know that's texted me A number of Komodo dragons that came from zoos because people don't have Komodo dragons in the private sector.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I guess no harm, no foul. It's already dead.

[Eric Goode]

But I guess I make the point you're making. I'm just sort of saying it's interesting how fish, even though certain fish can live over 100 years, certain rock fish and longevity. That's incredible. We don't think of them in the same way as we think of these. Higher.

[Joe Rogan]

We don't care at all.

[Eric Goode]

We don't care at all.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, we don't seem to. You know, going fishing is much more common than going hunting.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. Now that I said what I just said, you know, maybe that's a little twisted. Twisted?

[Joe Rogan]

What do you mean?

[Eric Goode]

About taxidermic person?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it is twisted. Yeah. You asked them.

[Eric Goode]

I think I said that out of context.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa. You could buy this? Yeah, it says it's real. I was trying to look to see

[Eric Goode]

if it was fake.

[Jeremy Goode]

But what's real?

[Joe Rogan]

How is that legal? It's a document. I'm not sure on the screen. I mean, it wasn't hard to find.

[Jeremy Goode]

There's our friend.

[Joe Rogan]

It's only three grand. I mean.

[Eric Goode]

No, the guy.

[Jeremy Goode]

The guy Riverside.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. The guy that has the taxidermy.

[Jeremy Goode]

He's got a funny name for his museum.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. He's got the Komodo dragon. But now that I think about it, he had a number of taxidermied gorillas. Yeah. Now that I think about it.

[Joe Rogan]

Now, do they say where they got this from? Does it say how they acquired this body? That document might. Yeah, I have to pay for the document. That's fucking weird, man.

[Eric Goode]

But we.

[Jeremy Goode]

But to your point about, you know, this kind of societal reaction to, you know, wildlife issues, I think. I think, yeah, that's what we're super curious about, what drives people's obsessions around certain things. In this case, this happens to be part sport, part industry, part obsession with scarcity. But that is all, in this case, leading more to destructive extinction problems. Very few animal. More and more animals are threatened with extinction than ever before, particularly reptiles. Now, one out of every five are threatened with extinction, and it's growing at an accelerated rate, mainly because of things that we explore in our show. Pet trade, exotic, you know, smuggling, all of that. But, you know, to get people to care about things that can harm you. You know, believe it or not, you know, we have challenges with, you know, subject matter in the show that, you know, we'll get notes back and it might be too hardcore for people to see because it's a brutal volume based industry and there's a lot of spoil.

[Eric Goode]

We try not to show the bludgeoning and the cruelty of the animals. We try to avoid that with Tiger King and Jim crazy in this show because people turn the channel. So we try, if we wanted to, we could do that.

[Jeremy Goode]

Well, I think we're just more talking more about the point of, like, how do people respond to something through an interest and what turns them on. What turns them on and what is it about us that has this connection to certain. Why are there turtle people? Why do you like turtles?

[Eric Goode]

Why do you like it? Why do you think people vilify reptiles? You like mammals, you said. Why do you think people aren't so keen on reptiles?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, they're not like us. Right. They're a different sort of predatory lizard thing. And I think in our mind, they hearken back to the days where these things were a real problem for human beings. You know, I think, you know, crocodiles and alligators, like, they enact. Like there's a visceral reaction that people have to them that I think is warranted. It's genetic, probably.

[Eric Goode]

But you don't think. Because we like to talk about the warm, cuddly, you know, charismatic animals like a panda bear or a koala bear or a, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that I think is anthropomorphism that's done by Disney movies.

[Jeremy Goode]

Of course it is.

[Eric Goode]

Okay.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Because people in the pioneer days, they didn't think of bears that way.

[Jeremy Goode]

Right.

[Eric Goode]

But I, I would argue that a bear, you know, a Kodiak bear, a polar bear, a lion, is a lot more concerning than most reptiles.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Eric Goode]

You know, so why we vilify reptiles and have that, you know, feeling about them is I think maybe more as to what you said about the anthropomorphism. You can't. A snake has no legs like us. They don't breastfeed their babies like a bear or like a mammal. They have a forked tongue, they have no ears. A snake is weird. They're nothing like us. So maybe we feel so removed from them and they're scary, even though they're really not that scary.

[Jeremy Goode]

We talked to this guy. The Disney thing's so interesting to me because that was actually something I was kind of deep on. This guy Carl Safina, is he more of an anthropologist or he's more of a behavioralist?

[Eric Goode]

He's like an animal behaviorist and sort of more in the groove of like, you know, animal welfare and animal behavior.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, but this sort of creation of anthropomorphic characters through Disney, I mean they were, you know, if you track this sort of correlation to, you know, entry points into, you know, mainstream culture, you know, it's, you know, they're easy, they're great devices for human emotion. But then there's this more perverse side of, you know, it creates these demands for pets. You know, Zootopia. We would snakes like Zootopia had a snake as a central character and it's going crazy in China, you know.

[Eric Goode]

Well, that's a pop culture thing like,

[Jeremy Goode]

you know, but that's the, you know, so these well intentioned things and these ways which we portray animals.

[Eric Goode]

Finding Nemo, everyone wanted a clownfish. Harry Potter. Harry Potter. Everyone wanted a baby owl. I was in Asia after Harry Potter and they, I was like why are there like 50 baby owls in this market? And they were Harry Potter birds. That's a byproduct of pop culture, right?

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

You know, you know, Jurassic park. Everyone wants their little bearded dragon because they want a miniature dinosaur. So who knows what's going to happen after Monsters of God. They're all going to want snakes again.

[Jeremy Goode]

Hopefully have some.

[Joe Rogan]

Did Tiger King open up the door for that, you think? Did people like look at that and find it appealing? Like that's what I've been missing. Well, I, I think I've been looking for my niche.

[Jeremy Goode]

I think it gave the opposite of people like maybe questioning.

[Eric Goode]

It's like deliverance.

[Joe Rogan]

It's a little deliverance.

[Jeremy Goode]

Tiger King, the way you're talking, maybe question. When you take a photo with a baby tiger at a roadside zoo. I think that was more, more you know, because it was so big in pop culture.

[Eric Goode]

I want to get me a tiger. After tiger came, I want to get me a little baby tiger.

[Jeremy Goode]

Okay.

[Joe Rogan]

Too.

[Jeremy Goode]

If you're gonna play into this lane, it's like look, everyone was shocked that you could buy. You could basically get one for free.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, we've talked about it before on the podcast, but there's more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the wild of the world.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

In people's private collections.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

I think religion also has a. Is plays a big role in the vilification of reptiles, particularly snakes. You know, like, you know, something about the Adam and Eve complex and you know, the snake is bad.

[Joe Rogan]

Serpent.

[Eric Goode]

The serpent.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah. More I, I was. We were. More people dream that of snakes in this country than any other thing combined. It's mostly negative dreams.

[Eric Goode]

Not sharks.

[Jeremy Goode]

Snakes. Snakes.

[Eric Goode]

There's a Google did nightmare snake dreams.

[Jeremy Goode]

Google did this sort of, like, you know, infographic by country and, you know, what is the most common dream that people have? And it's usually around snakes, which is

[Eric Goode]

I have, like, someone chasing me or panic dreams. I never have a nightmare about a snake.

[Joe Rogan]

But you never hear of, like, a phobia directly attached to sharks. You know, you have aphidiophobia, which is a fear of snakes, but you don't hear of a sharkophobia or arachnophobia or. Right. Spiders.

[Eric Goode]

People are freaked out by spiders.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah. I think that's a genetic thing. I think there's a memory. I think someone either was bit or knows someone that was bit, and that information got transferred down to their offspring. I'm pretty sure of that. Because hosting Fear Factor, I got to see people with legitimate arachnophobia and legitimate ophidiophobia, where it is like nothing else. Like, they see it and they fucking freak out out. Like it's irrational. It's like everything in their body saying, you got to get out of here right now.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And it's not like everybody else. Everybody else who looked at is like, oh, yikes. And then a few people, they have that genetic memory, I think.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, that's just. I agree. And. And it's cultural. It's cultural.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Like. Like, we have a lot of Mexican guys that work with us, and every year we do a snake course. When the snakes start coming out in the spring and I show them how to. To put a rattlesnake.

[Jeremy Goode]

It's the only staff meeting he ever does.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

It's the only thing I care about. But I don't want people killing snakes that work for me. And I'm like, hey, you don't have to kill the snake. And they're so used to taking the machete and cutting the snake's head off, and we don't do that.

[Jeremy Goode]

We.

[Eric Goode]

We move the rattlesnake and we put it somewhere else. We move the gopher snake, the king snake, but they just have this. You know, some of them, as you were just saying, just can't wrap their head around even touching the snake because they just. It's instilled in them from their parents or from whatever their childhood that they're scared of snakes, and it's hard to change that.

[Jeremy Goode]

But with kids, I'm sure with your kids and your daughters, I see with little boys, 6 and 3, their reaction. And they're not fearful. It's partially because of the influence of the work that I'm doing. But I watch them interact I see their friends. I see their cousins that are fearful they have adverse reaction. I also think it's like. Like, you know, your exposure to it.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Goode]

You know, a lot. And you're right. Probably some genetic kind of.

[Joe Rogan]

Definitely exposure, too. I mean, if you grow up and you're used to being around different kinds of animals and the wildlife and different things, you'd probably be more comfortable around unique animals. So if you're a person who grows up entirely in the city.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Did your parents like animals? Did they.

[Joe Rogan]

Dogs. We had dogs and cats. Normal stuff.

[Eric Goode]

I had a weird mom. I had a weird mom that likes snakes. And so that played a role in it. And, like, salad salamanders.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, that explains.

[Eric Goode]

She would. She would take me to pet stores and actually steal the snakes and salamanders and steal them and put them in her purse and then take me out into the woods and we'd let them go. So that's the kind of mother.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

She didn't like seeing them in cages.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Eric Goode]

But she didn't mind kleptomania, so I got good at stealing for a while.

[Joe Rogan]

It's an odd mom who's, like, really into snakes.

[Eric Goode]

That's an odd mom. She just wanted to free them. She didn't like seeing them in cages, so.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, I understand.

[Eric Goode]

Aquariums.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't grow up around any of that. I didn't know anybody who had a snake as a pet. Not that I can remember, really.

[Eric Goode]

In New Jersey?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I was born in New Jersey, but I grew up all over the place. I lived in San Francisco until I was 11. Then I lived in Florida from 11 to 13. I actually was around a lot of alligators during that time.

[Jeremy Goode]

There it is.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. We were in Gainesville, and there was a place called Lake Alice there that had a lot of alligators. You'd see it all the time. When I was there, one lady got

[Jeremy Goode]

a clearly impressionable age.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was around them a lot, but they were. They were weird. Like, they didn't do anything. They just laid on the shore. You could see them and you could be fairly close. Even though, like, they could have clearly chased me and caught me. Because they can run like 30 miles an hour. Right. They could have caught me if they wanted to. They didn't. They weren't really interested in people. Apparently. They had plenty of food and they were. At that time, they were actually in danger. Endangered. So alligators, like, they were telling people not to feed the marshmallows because people would throw marshmallows on the lake because you could watch the alligator come up and eat the marshmallow. They like marshmallows. And they said, hey, these are not good for alligators. Yeah, they're super worried about alligator diabetes or something. Whatever.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

But they were concerned.

[Eric Goode]

Alligator sugar rush. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

They were concerned about giving the alligator non nutritious food, which I thought was funny because they were saying that they were endangered.

[Eric Goode]

And it's amazing that in the 50s and 60s they were really endangered and it was hard to find an alligator. And when you think about that now and how it's hard to believe. It's hard to believe. And how the Endangered Species act did help bald eagles, birds of prey, because it actually worked because of ddt, but it brought back alligators. And now alligators like you can't even imagine they were endangered. They're like ubiquitous in Florida.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, they're everywhere. They literally say every pond has the potential to have an alligator. Everywhere you go look, they move around, there's. They're very overpopulated. Yeah.

[Jeremy Goode]

What's interesting about this work in the show that spans so much time, you know, we had, which, you know, you, you share in this, you know, curiosity, but we had great access to all of these great people in different industry. So you have heads of the zoo, you have, you know, doj, dea, US Fish and Wildlife Service, the collectors, you know, the bigger suppliers. And you have all aspects of this sort of industry. And what the show became, you know, as we were working through the edit, is this kind of, you know, this real clear story of unintended consequences which is the more you enforce, you have great laws that happen, but it triggers something else and that triggers something else. And you see this kind of, kind of time after time after time again. And in some cases it leads to some positive things like ESA or the Dangerous Species act, or you have a pop culture event that drives sales of a, you know, animal that's, you know, going to be poached out of extinction. So it's a really interesting way of looking at this and analyzing in a way.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. What you realize and you'll see, Joe, if you continue watching that, that the pathology behind everyone, the law enforcement, they're going after their prize. Right. They're going after their big trophy is the bad guy. The bad guy, you know, the dealer, the smuggler, is going after the rarest reptile. The zoos got very competitive with reptile houses in the 70s and 80s because they started realizing they were very popular. One of the most popular things in zoos Are the reptiles houses. They wanted the komodo dragon, the rare reptiles. So. And the collector, like, guys like me that really dig reptiles wanted, like, the pink, you know, Galapagos land iguana that no one has, or the this. That. The. The unattainable. So everyone kind of is going after each other. The reptile, the. The, you know, the feds are going after the bad guys. And it's a similar pathology. And what you find out in the end of the series is there's a scene where law enforcement has something that you can't believe. And it's a little like doing a film about, you know, cocaine cowboys. And the law enforcement has a garage full of heroin and cocaine that they're selling. So it's. It's like. It gets very gray. And the psychology is similar between.

[Jeremy Goode]

The only difference between the prisoner and the guard are the bars. That's the sort of.

[Eric Goode]

And you'll see there's no clear right and wrong. And sometimes. Sometimes the laws don't work. So it's messy. And sometimes there should be laws where there aren't laws. You know, back to the marijuana. Back to the marijuana analogy. Like, fucking. How twisted is it that someone goes to prison for 40 years over pot and now you can go to a weed shop? Every corner in Oklahoma. Right. But it's a very messy, complex story that was hard to weave together. And I think it was the most challenging for us. Certainly more challenging than Tiger.

[Jeremy Goode]

The most proud. I think it's really deep and it's a good one. And we lived and we lived for. Now.

[Joe Rogan]

You guys spend a lot of time on these. Yeah. This is one of the things that I found shocking while you were just discussing this. You were saying it was like six years more. More. How many? So when did you plant the seed?

[Eric Goode]

Well, the seed was planted really in my head when I read this book, the Lizard King, in 2008, and I tried to buy the rights from this author, Brian Christie, who wrote this incredible book, the Lizard King, in 2008. So that's almost 20 years ago. I didn't start filming until 2014 with Josh Safdie, and that was the beginning. But Tiger King and other things got in the way. So, yeah, maybe six years, if you were to condense that time.

[Jeremy Goode]

But when we saw you a couple years ago, we were, you know, we were making many projects along this because, you know, you can't do them all. You know, it's a very unstructured way of working. You know, we don't have a certain amount of Shoot days. It's kind of a flow. We like these longitudinal.

[Eric Goode]

We shoot multiple projects at the same

[Jeremy Goode]

time, you know, and we're lucky because a lot of our, our worlds are in certain places. So, you know, it's one stop shopping in Florida. There's a lot of interesting people, a lot of colorful people that are, you know, are hitting some of these themes that we're exploring in different works. So I think. So we're able to kind of do that. But the duration, the duration's great because like, you know, sometimes constraints are. No, I think it's great in some ways because if you're able to kind of balance other work because, you know, holding out for access to a really important person might not happen in the first go around, but, you know, a year later or two years later.

[Joe Rogan]

What is the common factor that you guys. Is it fucked up people like that you guys are looking for when you decide what kind of documentaries you're making?

[Eric Goode]

Not just like that would be too superficial, like there's too many fucked up

[Joe Rogan]

people out there, but fucked up people in connection with wildlife is the theme of the big three that you've got

[Eric Goode]

and people that have a story that's somewhere hidden in there. So we cast a wide fucking net. Like we filmed shark people and taxidermists and the guy that breeds the most long tail macaque monkeys for medical research where we got Covid from. We're filming so many different subcultures of animal people and other people. And then you sort of hone in on something. And so the monkey mom thing became chimkrach crazy, you know, and we started seeing a story there. So it's not like we just go out and just lock into something and there's a story. We have to kind of find it. And I would say this is not a good recipe for people that want to make documentaries, like anyone starting out in life to try to make docs don't do what we do because it's not a good way to get rich. And it takes forever and you may never have a story. And so it's like, that's what I'm getting at. It's like we got lucky that Joe Exotic tried to kill Calabaskin while we were filming. Filming. We got lucky in a sense that. And we got lucky she, he didn't kill her. And we got lucky in a sense that Tanya kidnapped a chimpanzee. This is not a recipe for success. You know, we film, film, film, we do a lot of that.

[Joe Rogan]

No one ever sees Joe Exotic DMs me all the time on Instagram.

[Jeremy Goode]

Oh, still? Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

He wants to get out.

[Eric Goode]

You know, there's a way maybe we can get him out. By the way, I'll tell you after the show. I'll tell you after the show.

[Joe Rogan]

Do you want him to get out?

[Eric Goode]

You know, the government made a deal with him before the trial. They said, you can do six years or you're going to have a trial. Six years. He's been in jail now for nine years or whatever it's been. He would be out right now if he made that deal. He thought he was going to get off. And I was like, Joe, I was on the phone with him every day at the time from prison. I said, take the deal. I don't know. I'm not into throwing people in prison and throwing away the key forever.

[Jeremy Goode]

Tanya's in jail too.

[Eric Goode]

You know, we're good at that.

[Jeremy Goode]

For perjury. I think she doesn't deserve to be there for four years, you know, for perjury.

[Eric Goode]

Well, she didn't need to kidnap another chimp. We tried to help her, but she didn't. She was her own worst enemy anyway.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, these people are obsessed.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Goode]

I think also what attracts the crime element is the sentencing is low for wildlife trafficking, wildlife crimes.

[Joe Rogan]

But do they really consider that when they're getting involved, like, oh, no big deal, Only do four years. Years.

[Jeremy Goode]

They really think of that going back to it. They keep doing it.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. But I think that's because they're obsessed. They're trying not to get caught. Then I don't think they're looking at it and balancing out the low sentence rate and going, this is a good thing to get involved in.

[Jeremy Goode]

I think that involved heroin.

[Joe Rogan]

It's pretty stiff crime.

[Jeremy Goode]

You know, I think it's a risk factor that's considered and especially in the

[Eric Goode]

sense of, like, I think most of them, Jeremy, I think most of them think they're going to get away with it or they're smarter than the.

[Jeremy Goode]

But they have this sort of, you know, worst case, thinking about if there was something to happen. It's, you know, eight months at a camp.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Jeremy Goode]

You know, a lot of them go

[Eric Goode]

to prison multiple times while we were filming this show. During the filming, we were shocked that one of the lead guys in our film was under investigation, being indicted. He didn't tell us. And then finally he said, guys, I'm going to prison. And we don't cover it in the show because it was just too much. But. But we were like, what? You've Been filming with us for two years and you're going to prison now. And then he finally got out of prison. We filmed him more and he's got an ankle bracelet and he'd been prison five years before that or I don't know, eight years before that. So there's a lot of.

[Joe Rogan]

What was he going to prison for this time?

[Eric Goode]

For smuggling turtles that were going out to Asia. Three striped mud turtles.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah. We're no longer bringing wildlife in to buy and collect. It's actually coming out of our country into China.

[Eric Goode]

Really?

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

What stuff are we exporting to China?

[Jeremy Goode]

Well, a lot of it's Eric, the one recently that happened, I just took

[Eric Goode]

in a confiscation three weeks ago of 303 toed box turtles that come out of the central part of the U.S. oklahoma, Missouri. And two weeks later, a guy was busted coming into Mexico with turtles. And I took Those turtles from U.S. fish and Wildlife Service. So animals are coming into the country out of Mexico, you know, different countries. And then we're exporting now, which is new in the last 10 years, a lot of native turtles and reptiles and other wildlife to Southeast Asia and Europe.

[Joe Rogan]

And how are they getting there?

[Eric Goode]

Mostly it's mostly air cargo carry on this particular confiscation. Three weeks ago they busted the guys with more box turtles in their luggage once they got to Hong Kong and China. Like I said, China, Taiwan, a lot of socks. Malaysia, Jakarta. The reptile industry is enormous for now keeping them as exotic pets. Enormous. I mean, it's, you know, in Asia, like the bird world, the birds are called the cut flowers of the wildlife trade in Asia because like we might have a bouquet or a plant in our house. They have a birdcake in Southeast Asia and there's something like some insane statistic about how many people have a bird in their house. And when you go to the bird markets in Jakarta, it's just surreal. Or in Thailand there's, there's one in Bangkok called Chaduchat Market. These huge, you know, animal markets, you know, we talk about where Covid came from, but the scale of these animal markets, you know, bushmeat, wildlife, it's. It's on a scale that's beyond your imagination.

[Joe Rogan]

What are they? The colonels cooked up a new ten dollar bucket of the day just for you. Monday, 24 nuggets for ten dollars. Tuesday, eight piece fried chicken for ten dollars. Wednesday, ten wings for ten dollars. Thursday, eight tenders for ten dollars. Friday, 24 nuggets for. Oh, you guessed it, didn't you? Ten dollars. The $10 bucket of the day.

[Jeremy Goode]

Deal.

[Joe Rogan]

Every weekday only at KFC. It's finger licking. Goo prices and participation variable supplies last

[Eric Goode]

not available on third party ordering platforms.

[Jeremy Goode]

Tax extra.

[Eric Goode]

They're selling reptiles, they're selling birds for meat. No, no, these are for pets.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay.

[Eric Goode]

Birds are ornamental. In your house you have a songbird, you have an owl, you have a whatever. You can't believe they're people that are.

[Joe Rogan]

So they just have like a wildlife mall.

[Eric Goode]

It's effectively like an enormous wildlife mall.

[Jeremy Goode]

An outdoor mall.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. And in that, within that mall there's also seafood and then there's the reptiles and then there's the birds. It's like messy. No wonder. Maybe Covid came from that.

[Joe Rogan]

Maybe Covid didn't come from. From that.

[Eric Goode]

I don't know.

[Joe Rogan]

It came from a lab.

[Eric Goode]

I think you're maybe right. I have a friend, bless his heart, he's a good friend of mine. He said it was a zoonotic disease. It didn't come from the lab. But now I'm beginning to think it might have come.

[Joe Rogan]

I think a lot of people were influenced to say that it was a natural spillover because they did want to admit that we were around with gain of function research.

[Eric Goode]

I think the evidence now shows that.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, pretty clearly. But also it seems like if you see these kind of lab or excuse me, these marks, markets, you would say, what is this right here, Jamie? Chattachuka market.

[Eric Goode]

Which one is this?

[Joe Rogan]

This is one of those markets. Yeah, Jakarta.

[Eric Goode]

Oh, this. I've been to these markets in Jakarta.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. And it's just a wildlife market. And so it's all pets. So what is it about Asia that has such a desire for animals?

[Eric Goode]

Those are the Harry Potter, those are the Harry Potter owls. That footage is. Yeah,

[Jeremy Goode]

same things that were driving the

[Joe Rogan]

US but it's also more common in Asia.

[Eric Goode]

Well, in China alone there's over a billion people. So there's just more people. And the scale and the size of Asia and China is much bigger than the US and Europe combined. So they have a bigger market and the climate's pretty good to keep exotic animals like Florida. So it's just, it's like on steroids. The, the collectors in Asia and why

[Jeremy Goode]

I think that the industry, the trafficking number is so underreported is, you know, you have this. There's like one person, one person that is responsible for coordinating in the U.S. one person, she's in Delaware, who's responsible for coordinating with U.S. fish and Wildlife to deal with, you know, these placements of confiscated wildlife. If they're able to even detect them. I think it was something like 10,000 animals in the last few years were coming through LAX, basically the Torrance, the Border and LAX. It's very one little sample market.

[Eric Goode]

It's very understaffed, undermanned. To be able to manage all the wildlife coming in and out of the country, there's not enough.

[Jeremy Goode]

So even with dogs and detection advancement, they're finding ways to get animals out. And then the sad truth is that they've been starved and dehydrated. You know, recovering them is impossible. You know, you've gotten lucky with rewilding animals back into New Jersey and stuff like that through its organization. But, you know, it's a. It's a. It's a harmful reality that it's actually still happening. You know, we thought our stuff was

[Eric Goode]

the percentage of wildlife that leaves the country. Leaves the country. Native wildlife to this US it's like 50% is kind of marine stuff like coral and invertebrates that are in the ocean. And the rest is mostly reptiles, mostly turtles. Mammals are very small these days. Birds are very small. So for whatever reason, turtles. And the US has the most out of any country in the world. We have more species of turtles and tortoises than any country in the world. We have 51 species in the U.S. mexico, second, India, I think is maybe third. So Asia now really wants these turtles where you grow up, you know, in New Jersey and other places where we have these really cool turtles, spotted turtles, bog turtles, wood turtles, really beautiful colored eastern box turtles. Once they get to Asia, they're in the many thousands of dollars. The shipment that just went out that we received, the confiscation from, it was about a half a million dollars. Just those turtles once they get to China. So it's big money and they use mules. And the people that got arrested or busted usually aren't the real ones that are, you know, organizing the whole thing. It's like drugs.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that's a good thing about this docu series is that you guys are exposing this to people, because I think most people would be completely unaware.

[Jeremy Goode]

No idea. Yeah, yeah, no idea. No idea where, you know, zoo. You know, animals in the zoos came from.

[Joe Rogan]

Is there an issue with people stealing eagles and trying to import them as pets?

[Eric Goode]

So raptors are really interesting. So. So that sector of the bird world, I mean, the bird world is so vast. There's the songbird people, there's the parrot people. Really high end, you know, hyacinth macaws that are so expensive. One hyacinth macaw is like, you know, $60,000 today or 50,000 or whatever it is, 40,000. But Raptors are increasingly popular in the Middle East. You know, golden eagles and all these really far out birds of prey. And in the US we have really strict laws when it comes to birds of prey and owning them and falconry. Bobby Kennedy is a falconry guy. He loves falconry. But it's gotten more popular again around the world having, you know, big birds of prey.

[Joe Rogan]

Because it's interesting. You know, I have friends that live in Alaska, and in Alaska, eagles are really common. Like they're all over the place up there. Like they don't even think anything of them.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, especially the guys who go salmon fishing. When they come back from salmon fishing, you literally have like 30, 40 Eagles just waiting on the lawn for these boats to arrive because they know that they're going to throw the carcasses out.

[Eric Goode]

Bald eagles.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes, bald eagles. Yeah. I would imagine some people would want those as a pet, especially in other countries.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. You know, in the US only Native Americans can have like eagle parts. Unless you have a permit. Like, it's eagle parts. Well, you know, like feathers for their headdresses. Like Native Americans can still do things with.

[Joe Rogan]

If you have a stuffed eagle in your house, that's illegal.

[Eric Goode]

I think it's illegal.

[Joe Rogan]

Did you ask those guys? They could stuff you an eagle? Well, that would be interesting though. That's where we draw the line, by the way.

[Jeremy Goode]

I don't know if they actually have them, but we have this footage. I mean, imagine going in the confiscations room at lax. It's incredible.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, really?

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, it's incredible. You have like, you know, tiger, you know, just all this rare animal and transformed into so many objects at home. A table, a rug, a pool cues.

[Joe Rogan]

I was reading about this, that there was a, A place in China where people could go to eat endangered species and they would have an endangered species menu and they would have like a, a dinner every now and then. You know, like rarely, but it was by invitation only. And these like super weird wealthy people would go out there and they would, you know, eat a lot.

[Jeremy Goode]

If you're listening, invite us. We'd love to.

[Eric Goode]

You know, it's funny, it's, it's, it's up. You say that, but it's.

[Joe Rogan]

I make it.

[Jeremy Goode]

That's.

[Eric Goode]

It's funny you say that because, you know, we once went to this big turtle show in China and you know, there's, you know, it's this huge Turtle show, like a car show. And there's girls, like, in skimpy outfits with banners, like, you know, like a car show. But it's massive. And all these rare turtles are selling as pets. But then for lunch they have these like dim sum tables that are round and everyone served turtle soup. And it's like, how twisted is that? It would be like, you know, a reptile show in the US and we have lots of reptile shows in the us US and now at lunchtime you're eating reptiles. China is a whole different thing.

[Jeremy Goode]

I think it's this visibility paradox thing. You have this, you know, charismatic, you know, symbolic thing. There's very, very few. A lot of protection around them. People want it.

[Eric Goode]

What you talking about?

[Jeremy Goode]

Eagles, Just talking about what people want. What they don't, they can't have. That's the through line in this world. Especially for. For rare stuff.

[Eric Goode]

Eagles are like American alligators. They've bounce backs and ddt. And you know the book that what's her name did in this in the late 60s 70s, Silent Spring, that was the book that really changed everything for eagles and birds of prey.

[Jeremy Goode]

It's a Mara.

[Eric Goode]

What was her name? Silent Spring. The author, she changed everything because no one listened to her about DDT and pesticides which were making the eggs of birds of prey not. Not viable. And it really.

[Jeremy Goode]

Rachel Carson.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, Rachel Carson. It really took a toll. Rachel Carson was an unsung hero. People should know her name. And I forgot it for a minute, but she really is. Why you have bald eagles, you know, making that.

[Joe Rogan]

Were they on the verge of extinction

[Eric Goode]

because of pesticides we were using? Because of DDT was doing this thing to the eggs where pelicans, birds of prey were disappearing at alarming rates because of spraying of DDT for agriculture culture, for pesticides.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Eric Goode]

And then we banned it and eagles and birds of prey came back. Yeah. Peregrine falcons, all of it. Bald eagles. Golden eagles, yeah. So anyway, yeah, yeah, it's.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a. It's a weird animal, the bald eagle. That. That's our pet. That's our national animal.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So it's strange. It's Heartless raptor.

[Eric Goode]

It's a fishing eagle. And there are fishing eagles all over the world that are similar to bald eagles. Similar. It's a fishing eagle. That's what it is.

[Joe Rogan]

It's just such a cool one.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And there's something about watching them swim away with a salmon, their talons.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah. Well, and also photography's gotten so much better over the years. Right. You Can I know there's probably that video. You're right.

[Joe Rogan]

Where we live.

[Eric Goode]

There was that eagle cam, and there was a sick eagle. Bald eagle. And it was take. It became.

[Joe Rogan]

In California.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Where we live. And it became national news two weeks ago. Golden bald.

[Joe Rogan]

Bald eagle. Really?

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

And they. If you Google bald eagle, California. It's in the town we live in where they took it and they're bringing it back to health. But the amount of money that poured in to help that eagle was unbelievable for this little place.

[Jeremy Goode]

Going back to how people care, it's. It's remarkable.

[Eric Goode]

But people care more about eagles than. Had that been a turtle or a snake that was rescued.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that's the eagle's America's bird.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, it's America.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, people have it tattooed on their back. Yeah, there's something about an eagle. It's just.

[Jeremy Goode]

It's iconic.

[Eric Goode]

There's a lot of snake tattoos these days, but.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I'm sure.

[Eric Goode]

You know, you're right.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah. But there's something about the eagle tattoos. Different.

[Jeremy Goode]

Different. It's like America, but then the grizzly bear, you know, such an adverse reaction. So controversial.

[Joe Rogan]

They eat a lot of people.

[Eric Goode]

They've been in the news a lot lately.

[Joe Rogan]

There's a reason why the California state flag has a grizzly bear on it. And there's no grizzly bears in California.

[Jeremy Goode]

We have a friend that's actually trying to bring him back.

[Joe Rogan]

Good luck.

[Eric Goode]

We mentioned this to you last time. You were like, why? Or something.

[Joe Rogan]

Let them naturally retire, return. Reintroduction is always a disaster. Reintroduction of wolves in Colorado right now is a disaster.

[Jeremy Goode]

Well, they're back.

[Eric Goode]

They've now migrated into California, and they've been some wolf sightings even down.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, quite a few. A friend of mine filmed one. We showed it on the podcast. He filmed one near Bakersfield.

[Jeremy Goode]

Exactly.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. A black wolf that was out in the field near Bakersfield. Yeah, they. They can go incredibly long distances.

[Eric Goode]

Reintroduction works in some places. It's getting better. I have a good friend that's reintroducing jaguars back to northern Argentina. They're doing a pretty good job, but, yeah, it's tricky. Like condors, California condors.

[Joe Rogan]

There's a difference in reintroducing animals to where there's agriculture and where there's a bunch of animals that are in pens and then they start eating them.

[Eric Goode]

No, no, don't do that.

[Joe Rogan]

That's what Colorado's experiencing now.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. But I've worked with Ted Turner's group for many years in New Mexico on reintroduction programs. And the guy that did the wall free wild e of gray wolves is this guy named Mike Phillips who works for Turner. And yeah, they have a real PR problem, you know, and grizzlies are going to be a bigger PR problem. Yeah. To get people to wrap their arms around the idea of bringing grizzlies back to California.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, there's certain states where they're overpopulated and there's a lot of argument they should be relisted and that people should be able to hunt them again like they do in Alaska.

[Eric Goode]

But the Native Americans in California do, by and large want grizzlies back. And they have this new technology that might be able to keep them kind of of in certain areas. It hasn't. They haven't figured it out fully yet, but hopefully they keep them in a certain area because, you know, grizzlies migrating into LA like the wolves right now might not be a good idea.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you already have the mountain lions. There was a great video the other day, I don't know if you guys saw it, of a mountain lion in a guy's backyard in Santa Monica. Yeah, big cat.

[Eric Goode]

I have him in my backyard all the time.

[Jeremy Goode]

It's motivated by displacement from fires. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

It's also pets. They like to eat people's pets.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have these cameras.

[Joe Rogan]

What are you talking about? They eat them all the time. Pets get snatched up all the time.

[Eric Goode]

Jeremy. This woman down the street from me was walking her dog at three in the afternoon. The mountain lion grabbed her dog. She's literally on Ledera. She's walking her dog, a little dog, and the mountain lion just jumped and grabbed her dog.

[Joe Rogan]

She's looking at the dog holding a

[Eric Goode]

leash and goes, I better let go of this leash. And she did. And she never saw a dog again.

[Jeremy Goode]

I'm sort of saying this little particular suburban pocket of Santa Monica, it's not very common where I live.

[Eric Goode]

They eat people.

[Joe Rogan]

It's not common because you don't see

[Eric Goode]

them where I live.

[Joe Rogan]

They eat dogs where I live.

[Eric Goode]

The mountain lions are eating people's dogs from time to time.

[Joe Rogan]

They do it all the time. We were talking about Marin County. Well, it's Bay Area, wherever it is, where they have these depredation tags where they have to shoot problem mountain lions because they're eating pets. And they find out that that's half their diet. Half their diet is pets.

[Eric Goode]

Well, I see them on my cameras that we have these motion detector cameras and we see them at 3 in the morning. Right in front of my house.

[Joe Rogan]

Look at that fucker.

[Eric Goode]

I rarely see them with the naked eye.

[Joe Rogan]

Isn't that crazy?

[Eric Goode]

Well, you got one. You got one.

[Jeremy Goode]

One gets hit by a car, and they build a bridge across the road. You know, it was kind of amazing.

[Eric Goode]

You got a nice mountain lion in the lobby out there.

[Joe Rogan]

That was from my friend Adam. He hunted that in Colorado. That was a depredation mountain lion. That mountain lion had picked a ranch, and it was killing all the calves, and they actually got to it right after it had. It didn't even kill it. It was eating it while it was alive. And then it ran. They ran it. All the dogs had ran it off the carcass. They had to shoot this calf. It was just torn apart and still suffering alive. And then they. They killed it.

[Eric Goode]

Luckily, where I am, we have a lot of deer, and we find a deer carcass from time to time. That's a mountain lion kill.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, for sure.

[Eric Goode]

But, you know, back to our show, I want to just say one other thing about sort of the ending, which it was really fortuitous. I just want to bring it up even though you're not there yet, but spoiler alert. Well, it's not really the spoiler alert, but I'll say this. I spent about 20 years working in Madagascar with some rare Madagascar and tortoises. And I. Eventually, I was trying to save this tortoise in Madagascar, and I did a 60 Minutes piece with Leslie Stahl, took her to Madagascar, a New Yorker piece on this tortoise. I failed. Everyone failed. The tortoise functionally went extinct in Madagascar. The poaching was so intense, and the tortoise had a very.

[Jeremy Goode]

What is a plowshare tortoise?

[Eric Goode]

Well, it's a reptile that arguably has the most value in the pet trade over almost any other reptile in the world. There may be something close, like a fejile, an iguana, or maybe a komodo dragon, but it's. You know, some of them can be worth as much as 100 grand. And people in Madagascar are so poor, especially in the area where this animal comes from. And it only existed in a tiny part of northern Madagascar. That's it.

[Jeremy Goode]

There it is.

[Joe Rogan]

So where are they going?

[Eric Goode]

Mostly to Asia. There's a direct flight out of Madagascar to Bangkok. And so.

[Joe Rogan]

And they're pets.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. And some of those photos, I mean.

[Joe Rogan]

So is it possible to buy them in Asia and bring them back to Madagascar?

[Eric Goode]

Well, so this is where I'm going. Very hard to do that because of health screening. I took that photo over there, that little guy. I. I took the. You know, some of these photos I even took actually. Oh, that's. That's the guy that works for. For us. Anyway, I've been working with this species of tortoise for almost 20 years. And we were able to get some confiscated plaster tortoises out of China and Taiwan. And we waited patiently for 15 years to try to breed them. And right when we finished this show, and this is a tortoise that's never been bred successfully in the Western world. No zoo institutions have tried to breed them and failed. We were lucky enough to get our first hatchling of this really endangered tortoise right when we finished the show. And so we filmed it and it made it into the end of the show. But it's a story about the reptile trade. And this was a story in the end of the show about a confiscated group of animals that came from the reptile trade. The rarest and most valuable tortoise in the world. And today we're trying to bring it back to Madagascar, which we're working on, which is happening as we talk.

[Joe Rogan]

And is the problem that if you bring them back to Madagascar, people are going to go to mascara and steal them again and then use them in the pet trade.

[Eric Goode]

So, yes, to be blunt. And so it's somewhat symbolic. It's somewhat about showing Madagascar that we're not trying to profit and take their natural heritage and what they rightfully should have. So part of it is showing that we can go full circle, confiscate an animal that was in the illegal exotic reptile trade, breed it, and then return it to Madagascar.

[Jeremy Goode]

But.

[Eric Goode]

But the part that no one wants to talk about that's really controversial is in this particular case, and it's not like one thing fits all. I said this to the folks that are working with this tortoise in Madagascar to try to save it. You know, hey, the only way you're gonna take pressure off of this tortoise, it's like drugs is if you either legalize drugs or, you know, in the case of drugs, or make this tortoise available for people around the world so they can have it. Cause it breeds quite easily. Easily breed them, try to have them in the private sector, in institutions and zoos, they turn out not to be that difficult to breed, even though no one's ever bred them in the Western world, in Europe or the U.S. well,

[Jeremy Goode]

it takes a long time to reach maturity.

[Eric Goode]

Well, it's an animal that takes longer, twice as long as a human or three times they don't reach sexual maturity until they're about 30 years old, 40 years old, or they can do it. You can raise them faster in captivity than the wilds. So they are very slow to reproduce. They're not like rabbits. They're the opposite. And there's so few of them. And so they're very, very rare, very valuable. The only way ultimately I think you can really take the pressure off of the poaching is to allow people to start to have them. That's a radiated tortoise, which we also breed.

[Joe Rogan]

That is wild.

[Jeremy Goode]

So the dremeline is a way to deter poaching.

[Eric Goode]

Our organization is the group with dural that did this dremeling to try to deface them, like cutting off a rhino horn. So poachers wouldn't take them. So we were dremeling those tortoises shell to basically deface the tortoise. So poachers would not take the tortoises. It ultimately didn't work.

[Joe Rogan]

So they're just taking them because they're beautiful. And if you fuck up their shells,

[Eric Goode]

they have the most. They have the highest dome shell of any tortoise in relation to the size. So wild looking. They have it incredible longevity. Well over 100 years. They live and they're gold.

[Joe Rogan]

And so that dremeling that you did that, that's indicated, that's the top of it right there.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And that didn't help.

[Eric Goode]

We did that. You can see it over there, the center. That's called the vertebral scoots of the tortoise. And we dremeled them and we put MG for Madagascar and a number. And we were hoping that defacing the tortoise would make collectors not want to have them, but it didn't work. In the end.

[Joe Rogan]

Somebody told me this is a good time to bring this up, that turtle shells. When you look at a turtle shell, it's almost representative of a calendar. And that there is around the outside edge of the Turtle there's like 28 different little squares and then in the center there's 13. So it's basically like a 13 day, a 13 month, 28 day lunar calendar. Yeah, this is it. How weird is that?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, that's really interesting.

[Joe Rogan]

The lunar calendar on a turtle's back.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Goode]

You know a lot of turtle facts.

[Eric Goode]

I did not know that one. Actually. I don't know that one. I know a lot of cultures like Asia and American Indians believe that the earth sits on a turtle.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's turtles all the way down. It's a turtle Simpson song.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, I didn't know about that. That's interesting. Interesting.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. Isn't that weird?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, that's interesting.

[Joe Rogan]

Why? What is that all about? Like, that's very strange that it coincides. It's like exact to what a lunar calendar is. Yeah, very strange.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, that's super interesting. I mean, turtles have been on planet Earth longer than dinosaurs. They've been here for over 200 million years. So they've been around a long time. So there's been. People have been playing with turtles forever. So maybe they came up with a lot of things that relate to turtles.

[Joe Rogan]

But it's odd that it's syncs up with a 28 day lunar calendar.

[Eric Goode]

I know sports stadiums in the beginning or things that were shaped like that, like a geodesic dome came somewhat from how turtles are designed. Like there was some architectural thing that came.

[Joe Rogan]

It makes sense.

[Eric Goode]

From turtles.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, the geodesic, like the structure of it to keep rigidity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Eric Goode]

And I know turtles. The first writing, the earliest writing. Writing was on the plastron, the bottom of a turtle shell in China. Maybe some of the earliest writing really going back some really, I don't know, a couple thousand years. So turtles have been used for all kinds of things for writing, for medicinal medicine, especially in Asia. It's gone back thousands of years using turtles for chi and for, you know, vitality and all these kinds of things. If you get sick, you make some turtles.

[Joe Rogan]

There's a lot of weird stuff with that.

[Eric Goode]

There's a lot of stuff that has

[Joe Rogan]

to do with rhino horn things for boners. Like. Hey guys.

[Eric Goode]

Well, they really, like, they really. They really put some oracle bone script

[Joe Rogan]

on the bottom of a turtle shell. Look how cool that looks. Go back to that.

[Eric Goode]

Beautiful, right? Beautiful.

[Joe Rogan]

6200 BC 6600 to 6200 BC go to the images again of the writing on it. Look how cool that writing is.

[Eric Goode]

I mean, this one's beautiful on the right. That one's beautiful.

[Joe Rogan]

That's wild.

[Eric Goode]

But I think it was. Some of the earliest writing was on turtle shells like this.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it sounds like it. If it's 6,000 B.C.

[Eric Goode]

b.C.

[Joe Rogan]

6,000 B.C. i mean, that's. That predates ancient Babylonia.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Or at least what we know about it.

[Eric Goode]

So turtles have been used in native American culture forever. Yeah, yeah.

[Jeremy Goode]

Survived a lot of extinction events. That's an oxcapula and turtle shell.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, Ox scapula.

[Eric Goode]

I mean, there are turtle farms in China that you cannot believe. They're breeding these turtle turtles, mostly Asian box turtles, Chinese box turtles. And these people are multi, multi millionaires. And they sell one turtle for as much as like $20,000. One turtle. And the wild caught turtles are more valuable than the farm turtles. But there's turtle farms that are breeding. They're called golden coin turtles. It's a Chinese Asian turtle that can fetch huge amounts of money.

[Joe Rogan]

Why is the wild one worth more?

[Jeremy Goode]

More?

[Eric Goode]

It's like wild rhino horn is worth more because they think the wild rhino eats things that are medicinal versus just a captive rhino that's eating hay. And it's the stuff they eat that goes into the horn, which makes sense like your fingernail. It's keratin. So the wild rhino horn is going to have more good stuff for you. And of course, they'll probably grate some Viagra in it to make you really believe that it gives you like an erection. You know, they'll cheat, but no, unless it does. So the hornofin actually, well, they do grate the Viagra in the rhino horn sometimes. But the wild turtle is just eating things and has more chi than the farm turtle. But they have these enormous turtle farms, like, you know, 15 story buildings that are all turtles.

[Joe Rogan]

Jamie, I gotta see this. So wild turtle farms in China. China.

[Eric Goode]

So turtle farms in China.

[Joe Rogan]

And this is all just for pets?

[Eric Goode]

No, this is for consumption. This is. You'll pay 20 grand. Now there's turtles.

[Joe Rogan]

Wait a minute. 20 grand for. For consumption?

[Eric Goode]

For consumption for like a golden coin turtle. If it's a wild one, like big

[Joe Rogan]

money, they want to eat it.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, but then in China, you can also pay $100,000 for a Yunnan box turtle. A Yunnan box Turtle can be $100,000.

[Joe Rogan]

So these are these turtle farms. Yeah, but I'm not all for like turtle soup.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, but these are soft shelled turtles. In this image that you're looking at, I'm talking about things like golden coin turtles. Much more valuable turtles for consumption than these soft shell turtles.

[Joe Rogan]

Why are they worth more?

[Eric Goode]

More?

[Joe Rogan]

Is it just because it's rare?

[Eric Goode]

Oh, this guy. I know this guy. Garden State turtle. I know that guy in New Jersey. Yeah, he's a good guy. Chris Leone. Yeah, that's a golden coin turtle. So we breed these in where we are, where we work with turtles and we send these back to China from time to time.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay, but why? Explain the why is it worth 20,000?

[Eric Goode]

For whatever reason, this turtle is called a golden coin turtle. Cora trifalciata is the scientific name. And it is very Coveted. And apparently it has certain properties that can cure cancer and other diseases. And so this turtle is high on the list for consumption for medicinal reasons.

[Jeremy Goode]

But.

[Joe Rogan]

But rare allegedly can cure cancer, right?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Is there any false beliefs?

[Eric Goode]

But you can see 20 grand. 40 grand.

[Joe Rogan]

20 grand. As high as 40 grand for a turtle. Yeah, but then to eat it.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, but then there's turtles that can be a hundred thousand or two hundred.

[Joe Rogan]

So is it just because it's difficult to acquire that it's like a status thing thing that it's worth 20 or $40,000? Well, they're.

[Eric Goode]

They're very rare in the wild now, but they farm them. But they're very endangered. It's a critically endangered turtle. We breed them, you know, at my facility. But, you know, there's a lot of people in China, and if you want to save someone's life, you'll pay whatever it takes to save.

[Joe Rogan]

So when they're buying it for $20,000, they're buying it to try to save

[Eric Goode]

someone's life or someone's sick or they really want good health and they're wealthy.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay. So you could just get it just as, like a prophylactic turtle. You eat it for medicine to make sure you don't get sick.

[Eric Goode]

Something like that.

[Joe Rogan]

Sounds insane, though, that it's $20,000 for a turtle.

[Eric Goode]

But if you look up Yunnan box turtle, it was thought to be extinct for 50 years, and they rediscovered it. And a Yunnan box turtle today, if you could even get one, would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Another turtle similar to that.

[Joe Rogan]

Are they eating those, too?

[Eric Goode]

No, that one's so rare. There's so few of them. That one is. People buy it as an exotic pet. That's really rare.

[Joe Rogan]

So this kind of a cat, it's a tricky situation because on one hand, if they're extinct in the wild and these people have them as pets, maybe you can recover them somehow or another.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, no, that's not. That's an American box turtle. That's not.

[Jeremy Goode]

Or they're in a zoo, for example, by the way.

[Eric Goode]

So that's why that's a turtle that's being shipped to. That's a US Turtle from the east coast coast that's being sold and. And smuggled to China and other parts of Asia because look how beautiful our turtles are in the U.S. god, that

[Joe Rogan]

has a pretty turtle.

[Eric Goode]

Oh, you do have a photo of a Yunnan box turtle. It's just not the one there. That bland thing is a Yunnan box turtle.

[Joe Rogan]

That one above it?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, that one.

[Joe Rogan]

That's kind of gray right there.

[Eric Goode]

No, no, that's a three toad box.

[Joe Rogan]

That one. That one.

[Eric Goode]

That one. That one could be worth. That could be worth $200,000.

[Jeremy Goode]

Get him. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

What?

[Eric Goode]

That turtle. That turtle was thought to be extinct for over half a century.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a boring ass turtle. That other one you're training him on now.

[Eric Goode]

Well, don't get me down the turtle

[Jeremy Goode]

rabbit hole, but that one where your

[Joe Rogan]

cursor was just over the one that was. Yeah, that guy. No, the one to the left. Yeah, the yellow right of it, right, that one. Yeah, that one's cool as.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, that's a. That's a male eastern box turtle. They always have red eyes.

[Joe Rogan]

It's so beautiful.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, it's beautiful.

[Jeremy Goode]

But solutions to the scarcity problem. That's a male eastern describing, you know, pet. Pet trade can. Commercializing aspects of it can reduce.

[Eric Goode]

What's important about this conversation actually is people think of ivory, rhino horn whales, and they have no idea that a turtle, pound for pound, could be more valuable than a rhino horn, possibly a turtle.

[Joe Rogan]

I have no idea.

[Eric Goode]

Nobody knows this, but it's crazy what the money involved in these. Back to the confiscations we're getting. And the trade in turtles going out of this country is in the millions and millions and millions and millions of. And there are people in China and other parts of Asia that are getting very rich in the turtle trade. And we always hear about pangolin scales, rhino horn, you know, ivory, and those things are important. But the turtle trade is really massive and the reptile trade is massive and there's a lot of money in it. And they're easy to transport because a turtle doesn't need to eat or drink. Just wrap them in socks, put them in a box, shove them all in there, put them in diapers, tape them up, ship them them.

[Joe Rogan]

They don't even need much air.

[Eric Goode]

They need a little air. But they have a very low blood pressure, not like we have a higher blood pressure than reptiles. And they can live without water or food as, you know, for very long time. So they're, you know, like wildlife, nature with handles.

[Joe Rogan]

You can just transport them, transport them. And if they're really worth $20,000 to

[Jeremy Goode]

$40,000, you're putting that in your bag.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

And they really are. They really are worth it.

[Joe Rogan]

That is crazy. I would have never guessed, and I would never guess that it's for consumption. That's. That's even more.

[Eric Goode]

Well, no, the turtles that are leaving this country going to China are for extra pets, for exotic pets.

[Joe Rogan]

But the ones that are eating.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, the ones.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

That. That. It's worth $20,000. That's insane.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, yeah. At least.

[Joe Rogan]

Is there a market for snake meat?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. So in. If you've been to Taiwan or China, there's these snake bars where you can literally have a snake bleed out while it's alive. A cobra. And put it in your drink. There's snakes. There's snake blood.

[Joe Rogan]

You want to talk about diarrhea? What kind of diarrhea you get from snake blood?

[Eric Goode]

I was. Many years ago.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God.

[Eric Goode]

I was in Myanmar, in Burma, at a snake place. And they were just loading snakes up in these trucks. Like, you know, big trucks just stacking snakes. And they were heading into China. So the snake meat. The snake.

[Joe Rogan]

Snake meat is big in China, you know, Look.

[Eric Goode]

Tiger penis. Tiger this, tiger. Tiger bones. Hold on. Tiger parts it up.

[Joe Rogan]

Tiger penis.

[Eric Goode]

Tiger penis.

[Joe Rogan]

Tiger penis is a big delicacy over there.

[Eric Goode]

I think they're, you know, they're more creative than we are. They eat a lot of stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a fact. But the tiger penis thing, I was not aware of. That's a delicacy.

[Eric Goode]

I don't know what that does for you. Maybe that's another Viagra kind of thing. But there's tiger farms, and they part them out and they sell them to China, know.

[Joe Rogan]

So there's tiger farms that are just for consumption.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. Tiger bone wine. Tiger this, tiger that.

[Joe Rogan]

Tiger bone wine. Sounds like it's, you know.

[Eric Goode]

No, but tigers. What?

[Joe Rogan]

Jamie, it's like a rhino horn type deal, I think.

[Jeremy Goode]

I think that's giving them amazia.

[Joe Rogan]

It's believed to increase virility and enhance male sexual performance. Tiger phallus suit, one tiger penis.

[Eric Goode]

But a turtle is worth more than a tiger.

[Joe Rogan]

Guys, that's crazy. Yeah.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And. But I didn't know that there was a market for tiger meat. Yeah, and is it the. All the meat of the tiger or just dicks? Just so chop away the right.

[Eric Goode]

Joe, I've been to the turtle farms. I've been to the snake bars. I haven't gotten into the tiger penis.

[Joe Rogan]

The future of Chinese medicine. Hey, this guy's doing a workshop. We should go to this workshop.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

What is. What is this guy teaching a couple years ago? Yeah, there might be. He's on the run right now.

[Eric Goode]

Don't get me started to talk about animal penises. My favorite movie as a kid was a movie called Birds Do It, Bees Do It. I don't even know if it still exists. But all it was was animals having Sex from a praying mantis, like eating the hat off of the male to a rhino. And it was a great movie. Just sex.

[Joe Rogan]

I did not know that there was a market for the meat. What is that? Tiger dick? Yep. Nice. I thought it looked like crazy looking.

[Eric Goode]

That looks like a nudibranch. A sea slug.

[Joe Rogan]

It looks like a piece of sushi.

[Eric Goode]

No, it looks like a piece of sushi.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Looks like something you get at sushi by scratch. So when they're having these tiger farms where they're farming the meat, like, what. How are they cooking tiger meat? Like, what does that go into? Listen, is that really common over there?

[Eric Goode]

Even though I did Tiger King, I'm not an expert on tigers. I do know a little bit more about reptiles, but I have a friend that did a movie called. I think it's called. What's it called? Carl Amon did a movie about the tiger industry in Vietnam, in Cambodia and farming tigers. And I think it's called. Oh, God, I can't remember. But anyway, there's a whole tiger industry and people breeding tigers in parts of Asia for tiger parts.

[Joe Rogan]

It's still illegal, but they definitely still do it.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It's not like. Yeah, interesting. Consumption of tiger meat is highly legal, though an illicit black market persists, primarily fueled by commercial tiger farms, despite strict domestic bans. Thousands of tigers are bred in captivity across the country, creating a complex web of illegal luxury. Luxury consumption is a crazy word. That's a crazy phrase. Luxury consumption of tiger meat, traditional beliefs and international conservation concern.

[Eric Goode]

Well, it's what you just said earlier that started this conversation, that people go to restaurants and eat exotic animals and.

[Jeremy Goode]

Bear gallbladder.

[Eric Goode]

Bear gallbladder. But another thing that. Wait, back to Monsters of God. Look up Chinese giant salamander farms. Those are unbelievable. That's a salamander this big, that can eat like a rat or a rabbit. It's a salamander that they eat and farm in China.

[Joe Rogan]

I've seen that online. I've seen them cook it. And that's in TikTok videos.

[Eric Goode]

And that's a really rare animal that those. Those guys are really rare, so.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, really? And that yet they're still cooking them and eating them.

[Eric Goode]

There's two types of giant salamanders. There's a Japanese giant salamander and a Chinese one. The Chinese one is massive.

[Joe Rogan]

Can I see that?

[Eric Goode]

Is massive. And they're just.

[Joe Rogan]

What? Jamie?

[Jeremy Goode]

It said.

[Joe Rogan]

The one I stumbled down, it says it's AI.

[Jeremy Goode]

So I was.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, it's an.

[Eric Goode]

It's an incredible Animal. But they farm a lot of things. Things that you would never think of. Yeah, turtles, salamanders.

[Joe Rogan]

I just. The luxury consumption market. Just seeing that phrase, it's like, what a weird culture you have. Luxury consumption of highly illegal endangered species. And it's that. Well, that was what a friend of mine who had been to China said that was what the whole rhino horn thing was. It wasn't even as much as they believed that it would do it. It was just that this guy had rhino horns.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Stat. Status symbol.

[Joe Rogan]

Very wealthy people. Yeah. Guys, got a R. You want some rhino horn tea? Let's have a seat.

[Eric Goode]

Gentleman, come to my wine cellar and in it I got some rhino horn, I got a couple turtles that work.

[Jeremy Goode]

What's difference between that and rare wine from 50 years ago?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, first of all, an animal doesn't die. It's just wine. Yeah. You don't have tiger dick in your wine. What is the tiger bone? Wine? What is that about? About?

[Eric Goode]

I don't know.

[Joe Rogan]

Is it wine? They soak in bones of tigers?

[Jeremy Goode]

Sure, it's a barrel.

[Joe Rogan]

Is that what it is?

[Eric Goode]

I mean, they have sake with vipers in them. There's a snake in Japan called the Habu, and I remember getting sake. And this really incredible snake was in my sake. But, you know, like, look, we're hypocrites in this country. We eat tuna, and they're endangered, and in Asia they eat other things.

[Joe Rogan]

Are they endangered tuna?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Tuna endangered.

[Eric Goode]

Well, certain species of tuna, I think are becoming pretty endangered. They're not what they were.

[Joe Rogan]

They're certainly not the same numbers that they used to be at the turn of the century.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's easy to point fingers at other parts of the world when we've done a lot of things here. You know, we had passenger pigeons that, you know, made the skies dark, and we shot every one of them. We had Carolina parakeet. We almost got rid of our condors and bison. We've done a lot of damage, but there's a lot of damage.

[Joe Rogan]

Not you and me. We shouldn't say we.

[Eric Goode]

People.

[Jeremy Goode]

People.

[Joe Rogan]

People that lived here. It's not a us.

[Eric Goode]

Well, why is our show called Monsters of God? We're the monsters, not the reptiles. We did a lot of damage in the past. I'm just.

[Joe Rogan]

Some of us.

[Eric Goode]

Some of us, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It's a very small percentage of people that are out there eating turtles. Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Well, you're a good guy and I know that actually you somehow you didn't have maybe the mother I had, but you Must have had something good.

[Joe Rogan]

What with my love of animals.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, you got a good moral compass. I've watched you. You know what's right and wrong. Wrong.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, certainly eating tiger dick. I think there's better ways to go about your life.

[Jeremy Goode]

But the recovery stuff is real. You know, there's a lot of cool stuff happening with species recovery. And in this case, the plowshare tortoise is on its way back. I mean, you have to kind of still protect it for a while. That's expensive. For a long while and that's expensive. You know, anti poaching insecurity. It's a lot of work.

[Joe Rogan]

I agree that it's important, but I am also fascinated by our desire to sort of manage nature because 90 whatever percent of any animal that's ever been alive ever is done. They're all extinct. Everything goes extinct.

[Eric Goode]

And a lot of our good intentions managing nature doesn't work oftentimes.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, no. You do a terrible job.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Especially when we bring in animals. We were talking about this yesterday with Hawaii, how they brought in mongoose to eat the rats. But mongoose are diurnal.

[Eric Goode]

Rats are nocturnal. We know.

[Joe Rogan]

Never saw each other.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah. Hawaii. It's funny you say Hawaii because Hawaii is kind of the poster child of all the states in the country of extinction. Second is California. But Hawaii really fucked up Hawaii with cats. Mongooses were more in the Caribbean, but also Hawaii. And mongooses is why Back to the Jamaican iguana. The Jamaican iguana was extinct. We thought it was extinct because of mongooses. We just recently found a small population, but it's a very rare iguana.

[Jeremy Goode]

Reading.

[Joe Rogan]

A very similar thing happened with the salamanders in China. They were not originally thought of as anything special until the mid 20th century when famine forced people to find new stuff to eat. They started eating them and liked it. So they made a lot of places to do that. Oh. And that's what led them to. Well, so then they've been back into the wild because there was too many of them, which created a new problem. It says, there you go. They created a new species.

[Eric Goode]

Species.

[Joe Rogan]

So now you have hybrid salamanders, which

[Jeremy Goode]

is also like what.

[Joe Rogan]

We have that here in Austin.

[Jeremy Goode]

It's the same story over and over again.

[Joe Rogan]

What do these.

[Eric Goode]

Look at, look at that.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa. Can I send photos of giant salamanders?

[Eric Goode]

They are so massive. They're so massive.

[Joe Rogan]

Size that thing. There's a bunch of videos of guys cooking them in walks outdoors.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And so is that another thing where it's like one of those exotic things that you're not supposed to have. And that's why they're cooking. Chant. Yeah. Because, I mean, it looks. There's a funny one where dude's singing. He's like rapping over it, and the guy's cooking about a guy cooking a dragon. Is how you cook a dragon.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

They're pretty impressive.

[Joe Rogan]

But it is a weird desire that people have to eat something, like, incredibly exotic and rare. Whoa, look at that sucker.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, that's a real one. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Giant salamander cooked eight ways in the. I don't know what that word is. Xiamen. Xiamen. Seafood, China.

[Eric Goode]

You know, that was one creature we wanted to film and I never got to film for Monsters of God because that also is a monster of God.

[Joe Rogan]

So these guys are taking them. They're alive. Yeah. And they're gonna bring them over and kill them and cook them. So this is an endangered animal.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

That this guy's killing and cooking.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. That's crazy.

[Eric Goode]

But they breathe.

[Jeremy Goode]

They sort of know it. It's not by necessity. Entity.

[Joe Rogan]

They know it's in danger. And he's still boiling it up. So it's a. This. The fact that this luxury item that you get to eat this luxury item. What does it look like? See what it looks like at the end. Kind of crazy. A lot of meat looks delicious.

[Jeremy Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Would you eat it if you were there or would you feel bad?

[Eric Goode]

I. I don't. I wouldn't eat it, but I've been.

[Joe Rogan]

It's already there, though. It's already dead.

[Eric Goode]

I've been in Southeast Asia with friends that ate dog, you know, and I just couldn't eat it. But I'm not very adventurous.

[Joe Rogan]

Something I can't. I. I would only have. The only way I'd eat a dog is if I try to bite one of my kids, you know, but if it's like dogs, it's different.

[Eric Goode]

But, you know, we eat cattle, and in India, they don't eat cows. And then other places eat horses and then they eat dogs.

[Joe Rogan]

Sure.

[Eric Goode]

We have our own.

[Joe Rogan]

Yep.

[Eric Goode]

You know, sort of cultural norms about certain animals that we just can't wrap

[Jeremy Goode]

our head around the ways we justify.

[Eric Goode]

But I've seen dogs being killed in silhouettes, see by. In huge numbers in Indonesia. Just the way they kill them. And then they take these blowtorches and burn the hair off of them. And people buy them just like you're in a regular grocery store.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Eric Goode]

The way they. You know, and it's just what's normal in one culture? Those are snapping turtles. American snapping turtles. What's normal in one culture?

[Joe Rogan]

So have these been imported into Asia?

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, they. They're big and we still eat those, by the way, in New Orleans in the Southeast, we eat snapping turtles also.

[Jeremy Goode]

Also being.

[Eric Goode]

We eat that. We eat them in gumbo. But in Asia, they really love our American turtles.

[Joe Rogan]

And snapping turtles are not endangered in America.

[Eric Goode]

No, but alligator snapping turtles are.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, those things are crazy looking. Yeah, yeah.

[Eric Goode]

Which is. They have this, which you have in Texas.

[Joe Rogan]

They have what?

[Jeremy Goode]

That's.

[Eric Goode]

They're an ambush predator. They have a little appendage on their tongue. Fish is attracted.

[Jeremy Goode]

Feeding is incredible.

[Joe Rogan]

They got alligators. They're serving up alligators, crocodiles.

[Eric Goode]

Jesus Christ.

[Joe Rogan]

Imagine just hanging out there watching his buddies get butchered.

[Eric Goode]

You're good at finding gruesome stuff over there.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, there's a lot out there.

[Eric Goode]

You're gonna really.

[Joe Rogan]

There's a lot out.

[Eric Goode]

Gross out a lot of people.

[Joe Rogan]

So, you know, you say you guys have a bunch of projects always kind of in the works. Like, how do you go about choosing them? You just, like, find these very bizarre people and these very bizarre niche groups. And.

[Eric Goode]

And I think, you know, listen, I am more aware of time as I get older. So you got to choose carefully what you want to do because it takes time to make these projects. So, you know, a lot of them, we hope there's some silver lining or something maybe positive about telling these stories and not just frivolous stories about freaky people, you know, but it helps to have some freaky people in a story to make people interested sometimes. But that's not the real goal. We're also doing projects that have nothing to do with wildlife. You know, I did a documentary in the last 10 years about my mom and my parents. And, you know, I don't know if anyone will ever see that. And they both died, you know, but I did that to keep them relevant. And I had a crazy family, a gay father and a crazy mother who was into animals. And so, you know, everyone has a crazy family. But. But we did a story that we're working on about New York, and we're also doing some other animal stories. So not everything gets. Sees the light of day.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. But these last three big ones that you guys did are all about people and their bizarre relationship with strange animals.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

What else? What's next?

[Eric Goode]

I mean, we're doing a really interesting project right now that should come out next year that I think you'll like. Joe, I have to Say there are big carnivores in it again, and some really far out people that you know and you may have known personally. I don't think I can tell you who they are, but they were very famous and some of them anyway. But we're doing a project about that and we're doing.

[Joe Rogan]

What a tease you are.

[Jeremy Goode]

I know. That was a feeding into the tease too.

[Eric Goode]

I had too much coffee, sorry. And then we're really interested in a few other topics that people don't really talk about. We always talk about the charismatic megaphone and we're interested in some of the groups of animals that we don't even think about.

[Jeremy Goode]

But it's also, I mean this, this time we live in, in media, you know, there's so much stuff that gets made that no one sees and it's a, it's a shame. Especially, you know, some of this independent work, especially some of this documentary work. It takes many, many, many years and many people are only really able to show it to the people that know about the issues and nothing happens, especially if there's an image impact aspect to it. Right. So I think our formula is great. It happens to be, you know, these subcultures that are, have a higher propensity of finding crazy people or people with far out beliefs more than anything. It's more beliefs that are more interesting that make us curious. So I think, I think that's this sort of mixture of conservation storytelling plus far out beliefs, you know, in a niche that are able to zoom out and talk about, about themes of extinction or attachment or ego or crime.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, maybe there's something to the overfishing thing to do because there's been

[Eric Goode]

a lot done on.

[Joe Rogan]

It's a giant issue.

[Eric Goode]

It's a huge issue. There's been a lot done on it, but I think there hasn't been a doc on overfishing.

[Jeremy Goode]

I like Seaspiracy.

[Eric Goode]

But the problem with a lot of those traditional documentaries, they tend to preach

[Jeremy Goode]

to the conversation, the tone is boring.

[Eric Goode]

Well, they tend to preach to the converted, not the unconverted. And you want to read, reach a bigger audience by somehow telling that story about overfishing in a way where you can get more people seeing it that don't know the issue. And the other thing I would just say, yeah, overfishing is a big deal. Invertebrates, insects, butterflies, and what's happening with insects is a big deal. We're losing a lot of really weird insects and they haven't even been described yet. Marine fish and even tropical fish is really Interesting to us. Where do all the saltwater tropical fish come from? How do you get them? They dynamite the reefs in the Philippines. They, you know, they don't breed easily. Saltwater tropical fish, freshwater ones typically do. There's a lot of different groups of animals that we don't really think about and talk about that we kind of take for granted. And we think of them as disposable. You know, we'll just put more tropical fish in our aquarium in a Vegas

[Jeremy Goode]

hotel and imagining de extinction businesses are going to solve our problems. I think that's also interesting to us.

[Eric Goode]

And there's just not a consciousness for smaller vertebrates and invertebrates. But I would just say one other thing that I think we do. You probably are aware of that. You know, people think you have to be in a city to get the, you know, the weird shit going on. New York City, Louisiana. You know, whatever big cities. And what I found is oftentimes it's the places that you least expect it. You know, some weird, you know, suburban landscape where you start turning over, turning over the rocks and you find and see that there's weirdness happening everywhere. And. And that is a theme in our stories. It's not gravitating to the big cities to find it. It's places where, you know, the guy next door to you, next door where you live, has a garage full of hot snakes and. And the cobra escapes one day and it's in your yard or whatever the fuck the story is. But it often is in places that you wouldn't expect it to be.

[Jeremy Goode]

Your friend's carport.

[Eric Goode]

Yeah, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, listen, guys, thank you again for being here. I really appreciate it. Thanks for all the work you guys put in. You've really entertained the out of me over the years and disturbed me as well. So it's available Monsters of God on when. When does it come out?

[Eric Goode]

Tomorrow.

[Joe Rogan]

Tomorrow. So when this comes out.

[Eric Goode]

August 6th.

[Joe Rogan]

August 6th. All right, beautiful.

[Eric Goode]

Thank you for having this again.

[Joe Rogan]

Thanks for being here.

[Jeremy Goode]

Thank you.

[Joe Rogan]

Thank you.

[Eric Goode]

Bye, everybody. It.