Bonus: A Conversation About Tiger King and Rural America

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ms pod Robert, I'm behind the Bastards. This is Robert
Evans about people who aren't nice. Jesus Christ. That didn't
work out? Well, oh thank you? Okay, Well then that's
the intro every single day from now on, Christ just copy,
copy and paste that for every future. Well, we're here

(00:24):
today for a special episode of Behind the Bastards. Uh.
It's very different from our normal episodes. I don't have
anything prepared or written. But after watching Tiger King, Billy
and I got together via Sophia via the text messaging
app that these kids are all using today's texting It's
with the kids, they love it, uh, and we started

(00:48):
talking about how this show made us feel, and we
decided that we should probably do that for like an
hour or so. And I think even more than talking
about Tiger King, we're gonna wind up talking about the
South and the rural United States because the the overwhelming
impression I have as a result of Tiger King is
that most of my fellow Americans, because the majority of
Americans live in urban areas and they live outside of

(01:10):
the South, most of my fellow Americans. I felt like
this was some sort of bizarre fairy tale as opposed
to like I've known every fucking one of these people,
every single one of them. Yeah. So, Billy, how are
you doing today? I'm good. It's good to see you

(01:32):
guys even Yeah, just like this, do you guys like
my attire today? I dressed I dressed it on theme.
Sophie's wearing leopard print. Uh so she's she's ready to go,
matching leopard print. Anderson's wearing some sort of jungle print.
We look awful. It's great. You do look like you're

(01:52):
like a like a super Target customers somewhere. Yeah. Thank you.
Look like you're going to explain to me why the
master says that we can't eat in the dining room
and instead I have to eat in a barn off
of a floor for the first nine months that I'm
cleaning up the elephant slop. H Yeah, which is a

(02:12):
thing that happens kind of two people who joined doc
at least. Anyway, Billy, you wanna tell me about your
experience with with with Tiger King, Well, I mean someone's
I had heard of it. I had heard of Joe
Exotic before because friends of Mine's podcast, the last podcast,
guys like Henry and Ben and those guys they had

(02:35):
they came he came up on their radar because they
have the weirdo wonderful weirdo radar. So but I forgot
about it, and then as I'm watching it, I was like,
I know this dude is yeah he yeah, yeah, And
then it was like I think. My wife was like
some of this is unbelievable, and I was like, well,
I think they're leaving out the math part. Yes, they

(03:00):
lead to it, but not until like one of the
last episodes are like, oh and by the way, everybody
was really really fucked up. Yeah that was the thing
where like there was some of it where it was like,
all of this makes perfect sense with people I grew
up around or with, and then people have encountered traveling
my whole life. Yeah, the city, you're just like, yeah,

(03:23):
they it's or even in the city. I mean there's
a there's a little person in this neighborhood I used
to work in in New York City who had a
great dane who was taller than him and yeah, and
every I remember everyone was like, in't that crazy? And
I was like he would he would in my hometown.
That guy is like perfect, Yeah, I don't think who

(03:45):
walks his goat on Hollywood Boulevard every day. Yeah, that
doesn't even like I've stopped at a gas station in
Louisiana that had a tiger, Like there's a gas station
tiger in Louisiana. I don't think it's there anymore. Um.
I think though, that they've replaced it with the prison
was some sort of weird animal like the And there's
alligators too, like there's I've lost track of the number

(04:05):
of animals in gas stations, specifically throughout the South, that
should not be on display in those places. It's not
an uncommon thing to encounter. And I guess some of
why this didn't seem weird to me. I grew up
three hours away from Joe Exotic um like Winnie Woods,
about three hours away from Idabel to something like that um,
and it's as a little kid, some my earliest memories

(04:27):
are like driving to and from, you know, different chunks
of Oklahoma, and you would see these and there was
more than one different type of We have a bunch
of tigers on some land ads that you would see
by the highway, and all of them are the same business,
which is a dangerous person has acquired three acres of
land and an indiscriminate number of large cats. And that's

(04:49):
the business. The business, that's the business. It was just
always a part of my life. Um. I remember noticing
driving through Texas. This is site probably ten years ago,
and you're just you're used to seeing. I grew up,
My grandpa had cattle, so there's a certain height of
fence you're used to see. And then every now and

(05:10):
then you'd see one that's like, why is that because
they've got some stuff you shouldn't have in they have
a legal animal. Well they're not illegal animals because Texas
should have in Texas. Very fair. Yeah, so we should
like the statistics. Like one thing you'll hear a lot

(05:31):
that I have repeated myself that may or may not
be true, is the idea that there are more big
cats in private ownership in Texas than there are in
the wild. And this may or may not be true.
It might not be true for specific Texas, but it
is for the United States. They want I saw that, Yeah,
it's probably true for the United States. Five thousand is
a reasonable estimate, and most of those are in private hands. Um, well,

(05:54):
you'll you'll hear various estimates five thousand is the is
the kind of credible, kind of kind of incredible minimum estimate.
I would say, I don't know. It's hard to say
because all of the a lot of people will say no,
there's not nearly as many, like even five thousand is
too high. But all of their data is based on
like official government numbers. First, who is allowed to own

(06:16):
these animals? And the people that want these animals aren't.
They're gonna lie on a census, you know what. Yeah,
they're never gonna tell you. Yeah, yeah. I in fucking
Los Angeles, California. I got a couple of my tattoos
in a tattoo shop that was a former shark tank
for a drug dealer like that. It was it was
a warehouse that he had converted to his mansion, and

(06:38):
the room that later when he got busted became a
tattoo shop was where his shark lived ship like this.
That shark wasn't on a registry, he was not. It's guys,
listen to the stat there's estimated that there are ten
thousand big cats in the US. But those are those

(07:02):
are problematic numbers two because those are all from the
Humane society right or from some animal Welfare Society. Now
this is held in private ownership and it's from Yeah,
but where's the number from? I've seen I've seen this
number on several different websites. I'm not yea where they're
getting it tends to track back and in my from
my researchs always tracks back to the Humane Society or

(07:23):
someone similar, which isn't necessarily a bad source. But like,
also they make their money based off of donations from
convincing people that a lot of tigers and stuff are
being harmed. So it's like there's no we have no
way of knowing. Like the actual answer is that there
are thousands of tigers in America and no one will
ever know how many there are or who has them.
They're just all over the Yeah. Yeah, and so I

(07:50):
I we were talking about this a little earlier, and
I think I'm of the opinion that in terms of
from a legal standpoint, I think Carol Baskin is probably
in the right. I think she dotted her rise and
cross your teas. I believe every complaint she has about
the humane issues with with Joe exotics. Uh tiger uh.

(08:11):
Like legally everything Dick Cheney did was cool too. Yeah,
she's a Dick Cheney type person. Yeah, I I think
she and Doc Antley and Joe Exotic are all murderers. Um,
and I don't know who they've killed. Like, I'm not
even saying I think that that that she killed her husband.

(08:31):
H I have no idea rich Old. Like one of
the things you learned spending a lot of him in
rural America is Richmond in their seventies disappear for a
lot of reasons. Sometimes they just leave. Yeah, you might
just be in Mexico forty years. One of my favorite

(08:51):
things that I've read since watching this is what's on
her Big Cat Rescue dot org about refuting Netflix Tiger
King and their use of a meat grinder graphic, like
that was a choice you made. And it's just like
a ten minute video of her husband being like if

(09:12):
Kim Kardashian, You're welcome here anytime, I know you tweeted like,
so do we think Carol is a murderer? And like,
I don't know if anybody had spent a minute with
Carol they would know. But like, Kim, you can come,
Not all of you can come, but Kim you can come.
It's yeah, Carol, Carol is So there's I think what

(09:35):
I wanted to really get into, even more than specific
discussion about Tiger King, is the kind of people that
these folks are, because all three of these main main
characters in the documentary are part of a classification of
human being that exists only in America. Uh and and
I would I would broadly describe them all as rich

(09:57):
off grid criminals. Now, every town that is sufficiently in
the middle of nowhere has a rich off grid person,
if not more than one. And they fall into two groups.
They're all criminals. Every single one of them is committed
some sort of serious crimes. There are the non violent criminals.
So these are people who embezzled money, who committed tax fraud,
who stole a bunch of money, who were in the

(10:18):
drug business, and they're awesome if you can hang out
with those people do because they steal from the church,
that deity. There's people million dollars from the church, but
fuck it. Yeah, And they always have weird animals, and
they're often very nice people, and they have cool houses

(10:40):
and you can shoot on their land, and they a
lot of them. Rule they are fun until they are not.
These people that's a lot like the non violent ones.
And it can be hard to tell. The non violent
ones I've had good relationships with, but the the other
half of the rich off grid criminals are via with criminals,

(11:01):
and they are usually the outwardly nicest. U Like Doc Antlee,
I think is the kind of person that I've run
into the most in my travels through rural America. He
seems very familiar to me. He's got he's got some
Keith Rainery energy. I've met a couple of Doc Antley's

(11:22):
out in slab City. UM like it. It is a
type of dude you meet out in the middle of nowhere,
who knows a bunch of cool ship. They always have
like a bunch of talents. They're usually real good at
building ship. They have um something that they have created
that draws people to them. And they are usually very
friendly and the longer you know them, the more controlling

(11:45):
you realize they are. That is a type of person
you run into. UM they understand parts of human nature
in a way most people don't, but they're using their
power for usually sex. Most always sexy. And an interview
he gave like on a radio station after this came out,

(12:06):
he said that all those women you know we're relatives, daughters,
his children's wives. You know. He's like, yeah, okay, y'all
are all related, Sir, I got no judgments for like
a polyamorous guy who wants to live on a compound,
because I'm a polyamorous guy who wants to live on

(12:27):
a compound. And yes, if I could have a tiger,
I would have a tiger um. But that that was
very clear from the beginning there. Um. But yeah, he uh,
I got a story I want to tell about. But
you don't want to sell their cubs. You don't want
to sell their cubs. And Doc Antley like has been

(12:47):
accused of some horrific stuff. He has more than thirty
five u s d A violations from mistreating animals. Um.
As a result of his farm, the Humane Society tracked
one of his tiger cubs that he claims there know,
very ethically sort of you know, sold to different like
reputable people that wound up on like just basically a
tiger farm in the middle I think if I think

(13:08):
South Carolina, and it was like sent over with ringworm
at three weeks old, which is too young, and was
like immediately put into a petting zoo. Um. Yeah, he's done.
He does a bunch of fucked up ship. He's also
apparently a really good tiger trainer because he's his his
tigers and ship like they've been in a bunch of movies.
Like he knows his ship. He's not like bad at
what he does. He's a bad person who has created

(13:30):
a tiger breeding mill. Yeah, he's like a he's like
one of those country music singers in the fifties or sixties. Yeah,
where they have this gift. Yeah, and they use their
gift for like you said, mostly usually like bad money
stuff or bad sex stuff. That's what because they realize,

(13:51):
like I have this thing that attracts people, and I
can get him to do what I want and then
move on to the next. Yeah, there's certain everyone has talents,
but most of us don't have a talent that is
so specific and desirable that we don't have to ever
learn anything else. And if you are good at making
tigers like you and and keeping them alive and training

(14:14):
them and stuff, because of number one, the fact that
there's money in that, and number two the fact that
people lose their fucking minds around cats, which again I
lose my fucking mind around cats. I can't think straight
when I see I've seen, I've I've I have been
to the places where they have little baby tigers, and
its short circuit your fucking brain. I understand how these
women get like like stuck in this for years, because like, yeah,

(14:34):
if I got to I would put up with a
lot of ship to get to play with baby tigers
every day. Yeah, that was that's what he's doing, the
tiger junkies. That's I did. Yeah, I went when I
did this documentary a couple of years ago, we went
to this cat lady in Perrompt, Nevada. And she wasn't

(14:56):
She didn't she wasn't trying to make money off this
at all. Like it wasn't. She was a divorce lady
now her her ex husband was still alive. Uh. It
was that. It was interesting. I was like, oh, that's
probably why she made that such a point. Like when
I watched Tiger King, I was like, I remember thinking, like,

(15:16):
that's why she was so clear about her husband still
being alive, because we were all like, why don't she
why does she say that? Like that which is who
Carol Baskins was that, do you know what I mean?
But she had I guarantee you she did. Uh, and
her whole thing was like she rescued them. Yeah, I had.
I I do have some friends who live out in
the middle of nowhere who have a lot of land

(15:38):
and are looking at like figuring out how they can
like get and get involved in a program to like
rehab big cats that have been like abused or confiscated
from drug dealers. There's ways to do that. I have
a friend who does with giant lizards. Um, you know,
uh like that there are programs if you were if
you're if you're a non grifter, non monster, and you're like,

(15:59):
I want to make my whole life be about having
a giant cat that I take care of. That's a
dream you can achieve in this country. And I love
that about America. Um. Yeah, it's great. Um, But it
also like we don't talk enough about the mind altering
power of cats. I had some friends who kind of
accidentally acquired an F one hybrid civit um, which is

(16:23):
like a while it was like, I don't know, pound
half wild cat, um enough of a house cat that
it kind of it looked like an enormous, very muscular housecat.
The long tail Yeah, yeah, and and very smart and
very sweet, very personable, very um trainable, but also destroyed everything.

(16:46):
Um like could not be stopped. And they put up
with it for so long because they just love that
fucking cats so much. It was, you know, eventually they
found a farm for it, but it was this thing
of where I could see it, like, you guys know,
this is a bad ideas destroying your house. You can't
stop him from pooping everywhere, like he's he's he's murdering
every animal in the neighborhood. I think it sounds like

(17:09):
it's like you sound like you're describing someone that was
with Charlie Sheen is also yeah, where it's like it's
fun and like a lot of times like very engaging,
but then everything he'll destroy everything, you know. Just I've
known some people who know Andy Dick, and the stories
are not dissimilar. But big cats are well much better behaved.

(17:30):
I would. I've been I've been around Andy Dick on
several occasions, so every story I've ever heard, I'm like, yes,
and then I would much really be around a big cat.
So I wanted to get into a little bit of
like one of the posts that I saw from a
friend of mine on Twitter after they finished Tiger King

(17:51):
was I just finished Tiger King and I've realized that
I don't understand the South at all. Um. And I
love that people are having this react action because there's
some important stuff in Tiger King, Because a lot of
what people think is weird in Tiger King is not weird.
Like Joe's relationship with his guns and Tanner, right, is
I so fucking common? The putting faces on it is

(18:13):
a little weird, but not even that weird. Such such
a good point, Like I would go on Twitter and
like this. Some of the stuff people were like, I
couldn't believe this, Like I was like, oh, that didn't
even register in my brain. Is an odd thing. This
guy just always wears a gun. Yeah, and you know what,

(18:34):
you see him use it for a very practical purpose
at one point. He needs to have a gun. If
you're walking around in tiger cages, yes, yeah, straight that
you're left up to Mary's mom shows up, you gotta
shoot at her fate sometimes, sure, sure, sure, yeah. There's
tons of videos a Hunter Thompson out on his farm
in Colorado getting into friendly gun fights with his neighbors.

(18:56):
It's not weird. Okay, I've seen it from the south.
We used to shoot cannons at each other's. Yeah, we
used to fire into Lake Texelman until we had to
run away from the coast guard. You know, you'd blow
up chunks of the country every year. It was just
a it's not weird, Okay. The state park superintendent where

(19:18):
I live son set off a bomb in the state
park and all of us were like, oh, yeah, yeah,
that checks out. Spencer would do that. Yeah, And it's
I've also seen people talk about like how weird it
is that like law enforcement wasn't involved in more chunks
of this that like these people are just kind of
left to their own devices. And it's again this like

(19:41):
I think those people have spent most of their time
in the city U. I can remember one time out
on my um uh, my partners property in the middle
of nowhere in Texas, we had, as a result of
um a younger relative of hers making a poor decision
with fireworks, a USh fire that immediately got out of

(20:02):
control and got to like the acre and a half
two acres. It was going to like hit the vehicle
parking lot where we had all of our cars because
there were a lot of folks there and like burned
down this house. It was like a bad wildfire, and
like as we're scrambling to put this fucking thing out,
she's on the phone with the fire department and they
tell her finally like we can't figure out where you
are and hang up. That's the that's a lot of

(20:26):
people's experience with like, yeah, that's what the law is
out here, Like if there's a murder, someone will come eventually.
And y'all, y'all are telling us you don't know who
did that. You're telling us you're trying to tell us
the police that all seven of y'all that live out
there don't know who killed one of you. Okay, Okay,

(20:48):
Well I don't want to be here after dark, so
I guess that's the end of this investigation. That well,
And I think one of my one of the parts
I laughed the hardest at and I know I shouldn't,
but when they showed the footage from Zanesville, Ohio, the
press conference of that small town sheriff, he was like
he he's like, there's tailve lines, there's four bears in

(21:12):
one goddamn bad boon. The way he said it was
just like you can't say the F word, but he
said the F It was just like in a bad
boon is leaves And I was like, I just I
was like cry laughing in the bed, and my wife
was like, What's what's so funny about that. I was like,
I don't know, I'm just picturing that's exactly what my
town would do. Like, I'm just picturing people I know

(21:32):
growing up being in that position, being like you think
you want to shoot a line your whole life, and
then you're looking at one in the face and you're like,
this is the scariest, worst thing that's ever happened to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I I've spent some long nights actually out in the
farm as a dear friend of mine is uh, spraying

(21:53):
down like fucking crops um and like waiting for a
mountain lane with a rifle because we were, you know,
we were out in fucking rural central California and it
was a drought season and there were like the fucking
the big cat that was in the area, because there's
usually you know, in an area like that, there's like
a big cat that everyone knows about. You see signs

(22:14):
of it, you don't see the cat usually because they're
fucking good at nut being seen. But there will be
you know, in this case, like some of the land
she was on, um, this is like my partner at
the time, Like some of the land she was working
on had had little horses, um, and they were just
like torn apart. You would just see pieces of them
in the morning. And it was like, Okay, this is
clearly a problem because normally the mountain lion doesn't come

(22:35):
this close to human beings. It was close to the
house and so and people in town started talking about like, yeah,
it might kill somebody. Don't be out alone in the
field at night. Yeah, I've spent nights of my life
like with a rifle being like, I hope I don't
meet any cats because I've got an a K forty seven.
But also I know I'm not faster or better at

(22:55):
hunting than that cat. Yeah, and I need to used
as a k for that cat has got me. Yeah.
And I don't trust the stopping power of a weapon
that will put down human beings very easily to put
down a cat that quickly. And another one of the
scary things, speaking of terrifying rich people have known in
the middle of nowhere, I've known some folk who did,

(23:17):
who hunted it animals like that with crossbows and would
get very close and stock cats on their own with
a fucking bow. And those are people you don't want
to funk with. No, no, because they better at hunting
than a big cat. Yes, and they're getting something out
of it. The cat doesn't. Yeah, and they're there. I

(23:40):
don't want to. I will not say which state this
person is. I will not say their name. Um. I
will say those were not legal cat hunts. No, of
course not. Robert. Do you know do you know what
else is not illegal cat hunt? You know what won't
illegally hunt mountain lions? Know what? Well, unless it's the

(24:02):
Coke Coke industries Charles Coke cannot get erect without bathing
his penis in the blood of an infant mountain lion. Um.
And that's that's that's that's on record. He he talks
about that openly, so that this is considered this legally
binding Coke. I mean, there's a reason, absolutely it is
the masturbate with cat blood state. That's what they call Kansas.

(24:28):
Here's some ads services. We're back, um, and I kind
of wanted to move to telling some stories Billy, because
I think we both have stories of kookie folks we've
met out in nowhere who I kind of might go with.
This is like, I'm glad that people are enjoying Tiger King.

(24:50):
It is a fun show. I enjoyed it myself. I
would like people to understand how many Tiger Kings there
are out there in the world, even the ones that
don't have tigers. Yeah. I don't think if you didn't
grow up in the in the South, or not even
in the South, if you didn't grow up in a
rural area, I don't think you truly even then. Okay,

(25:13):
here's the thing. Even then, if you didn't live outside
of town, you might not understand these people too. I
think that has something like because even where I'm from,
because of where I lived out in the quote unquote country,
part of my rural county, I was still like a country.

(25:35):
They were like we people that lived in town, we
consider them city kids. Yeah, yeah, and that that I
think that is a part of it. Like there's there's rural,
and then there's like fucking nowhere, you know. Yes, yeah,
there's rural, and then there's there are not services. Yeah, yeah,
there's rural and then there's where your buddy's dad who's

(25:55):
a game warden, tells you not to go. Yeah. Yeah,
they're if you cross onto the wrong line, they just
shoot people because they got pot fields out there. Yeah yeah, yeah, yes,
yeah yeah. So I was out nowhere adjacent and one
of those. I was in a rural town UM that

(26:16):
was kind of bordered by fucking nowhere. This would have
been five six years ago with my partner at the time,
and it was around Thanksgiving and we were out on
the town walking around and she had an an Israeli
Air Force shirt on. Um. It was not a political statement,
I don't think either of us. Uh, we're yeah, it
was just she liked the logo on. It's a shirt

(26:37):
she'd had for years. So she's wearing the shirt and
a guy picks it out and he's like, hey, you know,
it's good to see somebody else who likes Israel. You
know I was in the I d F. And we're like,
oh cool. We talked for like ten minutes, UM and
he uh, he's he invites us over to his house
for dinner for the night. And this is a guy
like forties, early fifties something like that. UM does not

(27:00):
sound Israeli. Sounds very American. But you know, there's a
sizeable number of American like born, you know, Jewish folks
who went to Israel, serve in the I d F.
Came back. That's the thing that happened. So no alarm
bells yet. Just like this nice guy who uh invites
us out to his farm. So we drive out about
an hour and a half from the town, maybe less,
but we drive out quite a lot aways from the

(27:20):
town to get to this guy's house. And this is
the middle of the fucking mountains, and we are like
his his house is at the foot of one mountain
that's maybe five six seven thousand feet and then there's
a fourteen thousand foot peak like kind of a couple
of miles back. So he is he is in some
fucking rough country, and he's got this gigantic, beautiful stone

(27:41):
ranch mansion that's like my it's it's still to this
day like my from the outside, my dream home like
made out of like like clearly a hundred something years
old made out of like beautiful like stone work. Um.
And then there's this like massive complex of uh past
years and pins and like a ton of horses and
cows on. It's just this amazing ranch setup. And so
we're like, oh, ship, we're gonna meet Like I love

(28:04):
meeting cool people who own compounds in the middle of
the woods because you get to do fun ship on them.
So we think this is that. So we meet this guy. Um,
we we head into his house and the first thing
we noticed is that there's no furniture in his house
except for in one corner of one room. The second
is that one of the empty living rooms is filled
with bags of marijuana, which is not that weird for us,
but it also makes it clear like, Okay, this is

(28:27):
a normal residence. He's probably sixty to one hundred pounds,
you know, that was just kind of sitting out, so
not like the biggest operation in the world. But he's
clearly running a pot farm that's not tiny, you know. Um,
And it's also clear that like, oh, you don't really
like you live here, but you don't really live here.
This is a bit of a trap house, you know. Like.

(28:47):
But the other thing that we notice is that the
one corner of the big living room that has furniture
has like a couple of couches and then probably five
hundred or more different kind of knives, knives and swords
and not. And this is the thing, you know, me,
I got I I love, I love, I love knives.
I have a ton of knives around me. There's knives

(29:09):
hanging up on my walls. I'm always surrounded by knives.
Not I'm not going to judge a man for owning knives.
These were not the kind of knives that a person
who is that a reasonable person owns. Do you remember
bud K catalogs? May, yeah, vaguely. It's like all of
the knives that look like they were from like a
low budget horror movie where they're like claws, like wolverine

(29:30):
claws that you can stick on your fist, or like
these like curved daggers made out of and they're all
made out of like shitty steel, and they all break,
and they all look like something that like a bad
superhero from the nineteen nineties would have like welded to
his body like toy knives. And he has like five
hundred of these all stacked in a corner of the
room around his couch. And so that's weird. But he's

(29:53):
very nice and he brings us and he introduces us
to his child bride um, which is when things get problematic.
So again, this guy is in his mid forties to
early fifties, maybe his wife is not a day over eighteen,
and they have clearly been dating for a while, and
it becomes clear through conversations that she is, Yeah, this

(30:17):
is my wife. I'm raising um. And she cooks us
a lovely dinner and we have yes and doesn't talk much,
and he's very polite and tells us about his mom
who was some sort of great hero in the Israeli Army,
and it was all lies. It was very clear that
it was all like, no, your mom didn't kill sixty

(30:39):
guys in this one fight during the like it just
didn't happen, Like you're just lying about a person who
isn't real, um. And he repeatedly The thing that we
got to be really unsettling is he would repeatedly every
time like, you know, I try to be polite to
human beings. Every time, like his wife would like bring
in food or like would refa to drink, I would
thank her. I would thank him when he was like

(30:59):
bringing in and he'd be like every time either of
us thanked him, he would be like, you know, not
enough people show respect anymore. That's what I like is
seeing respect. People need to like, that's what maintenance makes
someone a good person or not a showing respect. And
it was such a constant thing he brought up to ours, like, oh,
something horrible happens in this household when you two are

(31:20):
the only ones here and she doesn't say thank you,
like and he he had big, doc ant lee and energy,
and I never got what his full grift was. But
he invited us to live with him by the end
of the night, which is not the first time that's
happened to me. It's actually happened quite a lot because again,
and this was a thing my partner and at the
eye at the time had this this habit of being
met by weird people in the middle of nowhere, and

(31:42):
they would invite us into their lives and we would
say yeah, sure, and then things would get horribly uncomfortable. Um.
And that time we were just like, as soon as
we got in the car, like, no, this guy lives
too far out in the middle of nowhere. He could
make us like it's we just lose this guy number
and never come back here. Um. So I don't know

(32:04):
what was going on there. You never You often don't
learn the whole story, right, You never know the whole
if you're smart, you never learned the whole story. That
that's something I learned. I mean just doing touring your
whole adult life. You do, especially in your twenties, because
you're looking for adventure more than you're just going through life,

(32:27):
especially if you're stand up, because you're like, I'm gonna
get I need some stories. Um. So early on I
would say yes to people after you know, I would
go places you're not supposed to go when it only
happened a couple of times. But there was always weird animals. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(32:49):
red tiles are pretty common that normally dietn't told me off,
but like they would always be Like the time I
remember where I was like, oh, I'm never doing this again.
Was these people I talked about pot and they're like, hey,
do you want to smoke afterwards? And I was like sure,
So I got in the car and went with them,
and then there weren't It was like there was a

(33:13):
snake and then they had weird rodents but as pets,
like ferret type rodents that weren't you know what I mean,
Like we're I was like, I don't know what those
are something, it's like what It was very clear that
they went to some effort to acquire animals people don't
normally have access to. Yes, and then by smoke they

(33:38):
pulled out Heroin and I was like, oh, yeah, okay,
I can't. I was very polite and I was like,
I don't That's not what I meant. I thought it
was pretty clear on stage in front of three D
people that I just smoke pot and they were like,
we thought you were speaking in code because you called

(33:59):
it dope, and I was like maybe it was just
like but then like that wasn't even the weirdest part.
It was those weird rodents. I kept thinking that was
the key to me that was weird. Like I might
have said there and watched them smoke Heroin, but the
animals where I was like, I don't understand what they
had this has to do with that, and I don't

(34:20):
like that. This is uncomfortable to me. My favorite weird
animal stories is my great great uncle. I remember going
this was like I was five or six. I remember
this so clearly. He had called a raccoon like he
had a bunch of coon dogs, so he did that,

(34:43):
I thought the dogs were cool, like a bunch of
beagles and a couple of actually at coon hounds, and
then they're cool. And then he had a trapped one
in a cage, and I remember me and my dad
walking up to look at it, and I went to
pet it, and my uncle I slapped my hand. He's like,
he don't want being paid. He's main. And I remember saying, then,

(35:05):
why do you have him? Why do you have him?
And I remember the look on my great great uncle's
face like that had never occurred to him. Well, yeah,
he shocked, like what, He's there an option besides having
this angry animal in my home? Like I caught one.
I didn't shoot it. I called it so that would
be a nice And I was like, what they're just

(35:26):
being five, being like, let that fucker go. He doesn't
like that. Growing up, my my aunt was dating a
fellow who had a huge no This was in suburban Texas,
had a shocking number of exotic reptiles in it. He
had a shark in his suburban house like a nurse
shark um. And he also had a massive, very ill

(35:48):
to profoundly ill tempered iguana. Now I love reptiles. I'm
a big reptile fan, and as a little kid, I
was even more into them, and I desperately wanted this
animal to be my friend. And he had to sit
you down and explain to me, like when I got
this animal was already an adult. It is not hand trained,
and it will kill you if it gets out and
you get close to it. That tail can break a

(36:10):
grown man's thigh bone. He would smash you into bits.
And then it got out like three days later when
we were watching his house for him and his parents
had to come over and there was like all of
the adults in my life were basically like wielding broomsticks
to try to knock this animal into like a box
that they could lock it into and then throw the
box in the cage. This Uh, yeah, why do you

(36:36):
have this thing? As an adult? I wonder why would
you continue to own an animal that hates you that much?
It hates you, I get, yeah, profoundly hates you. I
get having an animal that's indifferent to your existence because
fish are fun, but hates you. Yeah, I don't know.

(36:59):
I was messing with that. I remember messing with the liger.
This guy had a when we went to the cat lady.
Her husband brought up this Liger cub, and I know
we thought he was kidding because I didn't know they
were really real because the Napoleon dynamite, that's what I
so like literally when he's like it's a liger and

(37:20):
me and the sound guy were like this fucking asshole. Um.
And then as they're shooting b row, I went and
looked it up. I was like, dude, the real they
are real. Um. So then I start messing with it
and it's about the size of like a big Labrador retriever,
do you know what I mean, which is a cool
size for a cat, because like that's a fun dog

(37:42):
to mess with two like you can kind of waller
with it. And I was like messing with it like
a with a dog, like with its mouth and all that.
And then the guy goes stop that, and I was
just like, what what is gonna kill He's like no, no, no,
He's like when he gets older, he won't know that
that's playing and he'll kill me play. And I was like, oh, well,

(38:07):
I'm leaving like an hour Thunder's gonna keep. Animals like
that are kind of like the weird people you meet
out in the woods and that you have to have
very strong and sturdy boundaries in order to keep them
successfully without getting killed by them. Y Um, but there's
I don't know, it's a healthy respect. I think, yeah,

(38:29):
that we had it U this this girl lived in
our back house for a while and she had a
hairless cat that she rescued, and that was meme mean cat,
ye attack everybody. Well, one day I walked in there
when we were first getting used to it, and it
was just me and the cat, and the cat came
at me. And I was raised on a farm, so

(38:50):
my foot did this instinct thing and kicked the ship
out of the cat across them, sir, because uh, we're
establishing boundaries. And then my wife and our tenant a
couple of weeks later, like, why doesn't the cat attack you?
And I was like, oh, we haven't understand it because
I attacked back, and they would never the attack. They

(39:11):
were just afraid of the cat for two years. And
I was like, you, guys, it's an animal. There's a
certain level, and I think you have to grow up
around animal, like I grew up on a cow farm.
That was a lot of my earliest memories like it
wasn't we owned the farm. They weren't our cow. Somebody
else basically licensed the farm. But like it was my
backyard was like a hundred and fifty acres full of

(39:33):
you know, a hundreds something that head of cattle and
these two bulls that were pinned up separately. That bulls
were and like the only, the only like warning I
got for my parents was like, don't get close to
the bulls because they'll they'll kill you. But it was
also just like go do like you have a dog,
like the dog is expected to keep you alive, go
out and wander around in the field. Um, And there's
a level of I was maybe six the first time

(39:56):
I saw like the severed head and spinal column of
a of a dead calf. Um. And it's because some
sort of some sort of animal was murdering calves in
our yard. And then my dog found it in the
morning and dragged it out to show us and was like, look, guys,
look what I got. This is so happy, this is
such a good day. This is the best team thing ever. Yeah. Um,

(40:23):
it was just this to your comment about just sort
of like responding to an animal attack, he was like, yeah,
you fucking kick it, you know, like you kick it.
There's a level of brutality is the wrong word because
brutality implies that it's pointless there. But there's a level
of acceptance of physicality that is sometimes violent with animals
that comes with growing up in the country. Um, there

(40:47):
was a thing like again on my like um my partners,
former partners, um land out in the middle of nowhere,
Like they had a farm and every now and then
they would shoot a coyote on and in order to
keep the coyote away from the things you don't the
other coyotes away, you would hang the dead coyote up.
There's a warning to the others because they're smart enough

(41:07):
they know what like that means. Like they see it
the corps about coyote hanging above a bar and they're like, oh, yeah,
don't fucking go near there. Those people will kill you.
Um it's just like a thing that you do. Um
that that I think, Uh, it's communication, and yeah, it's
a it's nature's communication is more aggressive than a lot

(41:28):
of uh, city dwelling people understand. Yeah, I see it
like one of the things that frustrates me and actually
makes me laugh. Uh. It used to frustrate me. Now
it just makes me laugh. Uh, it's still frustrating me.
Is in l a you see, because vanity is such

(41:48):
a problem here, and aesthetic is what people are going for.
They'll they like the look of a certain dog. Yeah,
and they'll buy a dog that's not like it's breed.
Is like like a good example is like my cousin
in law, he had a beagle and he was like,
the thing is so loud and it just tears up

(42:10):
my house and they have horrible health problems with their ears. Yeah,
And I was like, yeah, because you shouldn't have it
in Culver City, California. That dog needs to be just
chasing whatever. And and it's loud because it needs me
to hear it, so I go shoot the thing it's chasing. Yeah.
It's like it's like people, I don't know. I don't

(42:32):
want to go in like a rant about huskies, but
it's Hollywood's a weird place for a dog like that
to exist and you see them. Um. But it's also like, yeah,
there there's there's this. There's two kinds of people who
will tell you that their dog is a wolf. Um.
It's that it's people in like fucking Portland, Oregon who
want to seem cool and just have a perfectly normal

(42:55):
husky dog. And then it's people out in the middle
of nowhere who we're telling you don't go into that
fenced in yard. That's where we keep the fucking wolf wolf.
You can't. You can't have him inside. He just destroys things.
He will eat his way, He will get bored and
eat his way through the wall. Let me show you
what he did to the last wall when we let

(43:17):
him inside. Before we tried to domesticate him. But then
we realize evolution hadn't domesticated him yet we keep him outside.
Now turns out he's just a hundred and eighty pound
monster that we keep in the yard. Yeah, hey, and
what we've and if we're being real honest, he allows
us to keep him. That fence won't hold him. If

(43:41):
he continues to not eat the children, we'll we'll keep
feeding it. We're good, We're good. Um. I think that's
the whole thing with the Tiger King. Like they don't.
I don't think people city people understand the relationship that

(44:02):
you have to have with animals in rural areas. They're
more part of your life like when I go to Alaska,
I know, I had to learn what animals like. You
see a moose and they look goofy and silly. They're huge,
but the way they move is just like but they

(44:24):
or than humans do in Alaska. So it's like that
kind of stuff where it's like someone got Someone walked
out of the Anchorage Public Library while I was up
there one time, and a moose kicked his head off,
not completely, but like enough to make him dead. And
that is why basically everywhere in Alaska you're allowed to

(44:45):
carry a gigantic handgun around it and then you can
be a little drunk. That's sure. Yes, I don't see
how being drunk should stop anyone from carrying a gun. Billy,
that's your right as an American. I just just like
found out of place. So you can't be drunk and
with a gun, but Alaska you can be. And when

(45:05):
you go up there like this, that makes sense you
should be a little drunk. It's interesting on a little
of a rant which place because in Texas, right, if
you have a concealed handgun license in the state of Texas,
any amount of alcohol, you could potentially get arrested. It's
kind of up to the officers discretion even if you're
under the legal limit. If you have a concealed handgun
license and are carrying, they can add their discretion arrest you.

(45:27):
Because um, Texas has good it's not a terrible rule necessary.
Especially Texas has um one of the highest rates of
alcohol related violent crimes in the United States. So like
there's a specific thing they're dealing with. The I have
a friend who was driving down fucking the fucking the
High Five and DFW and a bullet just went through

(45:50):
the windshield of his car right in front of his face.
It seems driving like who knows, I'm sure alcohol was involved. Um,
Whereas in Oregon you can be as drunk as you
want while carrying a concealed handgun. As far as I know,
it's never caused a problem, and I choose not to
look into that any further. Billy, Um, you need people,
you need lumberjacks. Lumberjack that's not drunk with a gun. Yeah,

(46:13):
I'll do your best drug tests and servers. There's yeah. Yeah.
If you if you require chefs to be sober, there
will be no food. Yeah, it just won't happen. Yeah,
So Billy, we're gonna roll out to ADS here and
I don't have a good transition, But when we come back,

(46:36):
I want to talk a little bit about what happens
when like this, the specific the specific species of rural
weirdo goes elsewhere in the world, because I have a
story or two about that. Um yeah, yeah, I want
to talk about an expat. I knew the rough story.
The title of the story I'll give you is the

(46:58):
pedophile who saved my life. Um, so we'll we'll talk
about that. Uh when we come back from Ads. Okay,
we're back. If Jared what if what if the pedophile
hostage lave was just Jared Fogel from Subway because he

(47:19):
just lost a lot of weight eating. He was a
little bit like if um Baga van aunty Uh was
a was a was a pedophile, which he might in
fact be, um but if he was doesn't help. There
was a weird Hindu mystic connection to this guy. Silly,
take my money for that. So we're talking about like

(47:43):
the weirdos, like because the kind of people who are
the focus of Tiger King and the kind of people
that I think I certainly find really charming about rural America,
Like is part of what draws me out to the
middle of nowhere is meeting these weirdos who are too weird.
They couldn't live in a city. They just wouldn't. It wouldn't.
The most normal guy in the entire docuseries was that

(48:04):
Mario guy that was sentenced to a hundred years behind bars. Yeah, yeah, guy,
the guy in South Florida that was had the compound
and he wouldn't let people in. Oh, the guy that
Scarface was based on. The Scarface guy as that guy.
He he was the normal guy in the entire thing,
and he was the guy that was sentenced to prison

(48:26):
for a hundred years and after twelve My friend Brooks Whalen,
a very funny comedian, said that about He was like,
he was like, yeah, the guy that based scarf they
based Scarface on, he's not even interesting enough to be
in this documentary exactly. That was like, that is true,
because he's he's pretty smart. Yeah, he's smart. He clearly

(48:48):
like the murders and stuff that he was related and
we're you know, business related as sort of like a
practical pragmatic thing. And I think all of the other
people who again I am explicitly alleging here have committed
mur um. I think they were more passionate killers. You know,
they got in the way of something they want. They
got business problem. Yeah, yeah, like you, if you were

(49:11):
to hang out on Mario's land with him, you'd be
perfectly safe, right unless you, like try to do violence
to him. And I'm sure you would have a great
time because he seems like he seems like a pretty
cool dude in spite of the fact that I'm sure
there's mountains of blood on his hands. But sometimes you
meet cool dudes who have killed a lot of people.
It's what I don't think that shook him. Yeah, like
you said, I think he's a business person, so he's yeah, Hey,

(49:34):
there's a good UFC fight on. I've got it. I'm
gonna use a projector the lins. We're gonna watch. It's
gonna be a good time, right. I bet he's got
good pot. I bet he's got great pot. He reminds
me of some folks I've hung out with in like
rural Bosnia, where it's like you, about fifteen years ago,
you did some things that I wouldn't believe if you

(49:57):
told me. But we're having a good time him now,
and you have so many weird puppies. Yes, respected his
wife's monkey clothes collection as somebody who dresses their animal
and clothes against their will. Yeah, yeah, it's the same time.
Animals don't have a right to not be dressed up.
I believe that strongly. Yeah, that is me. But it

(50:22):
is the type of like that Mario goes that. You're
exactly right. He has the same energy as like a
former like I worked for military intelligence and that's why
I married this Russian lady and I and I helped
were raised his lions. We're just like, my life was
very exciting. Now I'm retired and this is kind of
boring and nice to me. Yeah, this is boring and nice.

(50:44):
And I need I need whatever I do during the
day to have like a chance of killing me, But
I don't want it to require that much effort. Yes, yes,
I need to know why it's gonna kill me every
day and not change. Yeah. I've known variants of that
guy Who's dangerous thing was they were self taught electricians
who had like retired to the land and had they

(51:06):
had projects, and every one of their projects was like, well,
one of these days, you're gonna slip up like this
will catch up to you, and negative stuff about the
b L m Oh, they're very angry at the b
lm Okay, I got yeah. As a general rule, of

(51:28):
the folks we've talked about today, probably less than a
third of them have legal driver's licenses, but all of
them drive. Um, So the pedophile who saved my life,
we've got these. There are all these weird people that
we've talked about who live out in the middle of
the country, and they're because they're too weird for cities.

(51:49):
And then there's another classification of people, and most of
the ones I've met are in fact Southerners, but they're
too weird to live in the middle of nowhere. They
do something that gets them exiled for the United States
and they wind up as ex pats um and they're
they're always it's so I'll just tell you about this guy.
So I'm in guatemala Um and where I'm hiking there's

(52:11):
this big fucking volcano, the tallest peak in Central America
that I I hike up with a friend of mine
and we have a little a couple of friends of mine,
and we have a little standoff with some bandits and
it was a great, great memory. And so we come
down this mountain um and we get on a bus
to head back to the place we're staying, which is
like five hours away from the mountain and in rural Guatemala.
And the place we're staying is Lago A Tit Lawn,

(52:33):
is this beautiful place that has a decent amount of tourism,
you know, relatively built up cities, even though it's kind
of out of off like a little in the middle
of nowhere. But the road there, you're just in the
fucking jungle. So like a couple of weeks earlier, when
we've been on one of these drives we've been we'd
like charted a bus and had been driving in a
bus and we just got stopped in the middle of
the jungle in midnight by a dozen men in camouflage

(52:56):
with no patches or rank or insignia and machine guns
who stopped us and searched our vehicle, said nothing and
then waved us on. And that's that's the way you
want that to happen, though, Yeah, that is the way
you want that to happen. And there was like an empty,
flipped over box truck, you know, a quarter mile down
the road with its lights on that had clearly been robbed, Like,
who the funk knows what was going on. But this

(53:16):
is like the kind of country that you're driving through,
and we're driving through it, and we take what's called
a chicken bus, And a chicken bus is a giant
school bus that's been covered in chrome and painted ridiculous colors.
And they drive them on these hairpin a lot of
times unpaved mountain roads. They'll fill them up with fucking
two hundred people and just be darting down these things.
It's seventy miles an hour. It's it's real fun. So

(53:41):
we're taking this chicken bus and there's the aside from
you know, my friends and I it's it's my partner
at the time, her girlfriend, and my friend Josh, and
we're all fucking uh, we're all in this car and
we're the only other like uh, we're we're we're the
only other white people other than um, this one French
Canadian girl who set it up front, and everyone else

(54:02):
is a local. And when we get the bus stops
in the middle of a random small town and they
tell us are connecting buses there and it's the middle
of the night, and they toss our bags off, and
they tossed the French Canadian girls bags off, and then
they drive off with her still in the bus. So
we realize, thirty minutes are so into this. We're in
the middle of a jungle, there's no one around us,

(54:25):
we're not in a town, and no buses coming to
pick us up. And also we have this stranger's back
and we're in fucking bandit country. So after you know,
I don't know what, So thirty or forty minutes going
to this and we just start hiking. Um, and it's

(54:45):
a kind of situation where like, yeah, this could go
really really badly, Like we're we're in the middle of nowhere.
We don't even really know how to We have a
vague direction for where the town we're going is, but
it's probably at least a five hour hike away. Um,
we're just in the middle of nowhere, in the jungle
in a foreign country. And as we're hiking and like

(55:05):
terrified as to whether or not we're ever going to
like figure out how to get to where we're trying
to go, this range rover pulls up and sitting in
the front of a range rover is a dude who
looked like the Doughbert guy. He was a yeah, land
Rover or range rover, land rover, because that would even

(55:26):
that's even more like, what where the fun you got
a range rover? No? No, this was like a real act.
Like this wasn't like a like a like an l
a mom land Rover either, like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he pulls up and he's like this Gilbert Dad
Scott Adams looking motherfucker like he's he's thin and he's
bald and he has a very like gentle Arkansas accent

(55:51):
um so like and yeah, so he pulls us. So
he pulls over by the side and he asks, like,
very politely, do you all need to ride? We're like yes,
you know, what are the odds that we run into
this American in the middle of someone like we can
talk to and very easily explain where we're going? And
so we pile into his car and he's like, oh,
it's you know, it's great that y'all are heading to

(56:11):
a title and I'm headed there myself. And then he
picks up a bag of raw meat of an indeterminate
type that is sitting like by my feet in the
front seat. Of the car and says, I'm going to
go sell this to my friend Paul, he runs a
hotel in the town. And this sparks a very strange
series of conversation. So it comes clear that he's butchered

(56:34):
some some animals um and has decided to drive the
unrefrigerated meat down to try to sell to a hotel,
and that sparks the conversation about why he had to
leave the United States in the first place, which is see,
he has these theories, Billy Wayne. He had these very
theories based on Hindu mythology about how his wife needed
to eat and hydrate while she was pregnant with their child,

(56:58):
and this has been I would have been asleeping back
and I would have woke up me and like keep going,
So what's happening here? Well, his theory was that it
was actually all of the problems kids have is because
their moms eat while they're pregnant, and that his wife
shouldn't eat anything at all, nothing but water. Um. And
his proof that this has had worked was that his

(57:18):
baby came out blue, which meant that it was blessed
by So at this point we're still in the in
the jungles of Guatemala in a guy's car who we're
reliant on to get us to the town. And now
we're having this and I look back and like everyone,
everyone in the back of the car has kind of
that look on your face, and I realized, like I

(57:40):
have to I have to continue this conversation for however
long it takes us to get where we're going. Oh,
is free me? Yeah, there's a tax on this ride.
So we talk about he has a lot of opinions
on rainbow gatherings, which are like this thing that hippies

(58:00):
do that's kind of like a precursor to burning Man
and also still occurs. It's like a gathering, and you'll
you'll encounter different opinions on rainbow gatherings depending on who
you talk to. This guy thinks they're a great thing,
but it is very angry, angry because he got banned
from ever attending again for misunderstandings. Um and it becomes
very clear that the misunderstandings are consent based, and also
very clear this is a lifelong pattern for this guy.

(58:22):
So we're taught as we we finally do get close
to town, which I was happy to hear, and as
we get close to our hotel, and our hotel is
the guy who ran it was another creepy expat, but
a British expat, so not dangerous, um and not at all.
He had like four wives, but it was fine. I
mean it wasn't fine. One of them like anyway, Um,

(58:46):
he wasn't. This guy there was there would make lates
and their stories you'd be like, there's some parts I
think they're leaving out. Yeah, that's okay, what just happened
right now? Continue? So we're we roll up to the
hotel and he's so Paul doesn't like to talk to
me anymore, but I need to sell him this meat
because it won't survive the trip back. Could you convince

(59:07):
him to buy meat from me? Which I have to
try to do because he's given us a ride. I
was gonna say, this is like and I and I do,
and Paul does not want to buy the meat. And
the guy hangs out in town, sleeping in his car
for another couple of days, trying to sell this meat
to people. And we had a couple of local friends

(59:29):
like I know who sent you here, I know who
sent So the next day we're like walking around town
and we see this guy and say hi, and one
of our local friends. We had a couple of friends
who are like actually like Guatemalan locals. Um. He sees
us talking to this guy as a dude. We like,
we drunk with a little bit. He was the security
guard at our hotel, so we would hang out at

(59:50):
night and have a couple of beers and he would
let us shot his gun into the air, because every
night he would shoot his gun into the air, so
people knew a guy with a gun was at the hotel. Um.
So that guy that we were sold us pot too.
He was a great dude. He was awesome. He comes
up to us after we say goodbye to this fellow,

(01:00:11):
and he says it notably, he looks less friendly than
he ever has before, and he very carefully asks us,
is that man your friend? And I say very clearly, no,
not really. He just gave us a ride last night.
I don't really know him. And he said, yeah, well,
that guy has done some very bad things to some

(01:00:32):
of the kids in this town, and we're going to
run him out of town tonight. And if he doesn't
leave on his own, like he's going to go by
other means. Um and you probably shouldn't be seen talking
to him. So that was the that's my story if
the pedophile who saved my life. It's not as exciting
maybe as it sounds, but it was a fun two

(01:00:52):
days and then you you gave him some extra time
in town. Not not on purpose, no, that's what I mean,
but like he saw you guys and was like, oh,
this is this is my take it in Yes, this
is because these guys are mad at me because of
my ye, my misunderstandings. I don't know. I love weirdos,

(01:01:16):
like obviously, I don't love that this guy was has
been leaving a trail of broken lives and had to
flee the United States because he definitely poisoned his kid.
Who he was. He assured us his kid was doing
great and the genius. But no, no, no he's not.
Now what he did was malnutrition. That's what what you

(01:01:36):
did was malnutrition. And you are the kind of ex
pat who just can't ever come back home. Yes, oh man,
yeah is it was fun um those places though, like
where like it just made me think of like a

(01:01:56):
friend of mine was touring the world doing stand up
and he was like I called him and I was
like where are you at? And he's like, I'm trying
to get out of and I'm not gonna say the
islands he was in in the South Pacific or Southeast Asia,
but he was trying because he was like I just
realized the guy I was staying with is not as

(01:02:17):
cool as I thought. I was like why. He was like, well,
he said he's not allowed back in South Africa. And
I was like, yeah, man, you should go right, you should.
I'm I'm gonna hang up right now. I don't want
to be talking. You know, that's not super easy to
get banned from South Africa, That's what I told. I
was like, it's I was like, they're pretty loose on
what you can do there. And he's like, no, I'm away.

(01:02:40):
You need to have done a very specific kind of
bad thing to get banned from South Yes, yes, yeah,
yeah that and that was he was like no, no,
and that he said it so casually too. I was like,
yeah that you gotta go mm hmm, yeah, yeah, you

(01:03:00):
wind up. I wound up kind of slightly beholden to
some folks like that over the years, because like I
was always working while I was living on the road,
and so I would it was critical to me to
have internet access. So sometimes you just have to be
good friends with whoever owns the business with the best
internet access in town. And sometime like there was this
other guy who owned a bar in Guatemala who was

(01:03:21):
a former highway patrol officer from Arizona, UM and said
that It's one of the first things he told me
when I met him, was like, I used to be
a highway patrol officer in Arizona and I can never
go back now. And he clearly had in the recent past,
had a couple of hundred grand to spend on buying
a hotel in a bar, and those two things were connected. Yeah,

(01:03:45):
he was a cricket highway patrol officer, yes, And and
he was also like the big drug dealer in town UM,
which I'm sure also tied into why he's no longer
a highway patrol office. He sell a business opportunity and
it was like, I don't want to be at law before,
I want to run a shady ass bar that gets

(01:04:05):
European kids dangerously intoxicated UH on their holidays, And that's
what he did. My last memory of this guy is
because he also had a seventeen year old wife who
had just given birth. Um, which another it's high. That's
what I don't think. People that don't same eyes, they

(01:04:26):
don't know. I've told people this a long time ago too.
Was like some of my friends that don't travels, like,
we'll be on a bar and I'm like, hey, this
is gonna happen. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. They
be like what and then it would happen there? How
did you know that? I'm like, I just I've seen this.
We're all the same. This guy got invited us to
a cool party. No, I've known this guy before, and
you do not want to go to that party? And

(01:04:47):
no you don't. It's gonna get weird about in the morning.
That's when it gets. It's gonna be fun until then
and you're like, oh were this This wasn't the party,
was it? Yeah, And it's not gonna just get like weird,
like your f gets drunk and starts crying. It's gonna
get like nothing else will ever be normal again for
the rest of your life weird. Yes, it will change

(01:05:08):
you as a person, yes, yes, um yeah. My last
memory of that cop was he had his baby on
a bassinet around his chest, and he was shirtless other
than the baby he was wearing. And he was leaning
over the counter of his bar with a jar of
mushrooms preserved and honey, and he was spooning them into

(01:05:28):
a naked Danish boy's mouth. Yes, just like by Alan. Yes.
And here's the thing. I don't think people understand, like
unless you've been in these situations, like I could. I
could do this podcast for eighteen hours because everything you
bring up there's like things that I've forgotten. Oh yeah

(01:05:51):
that guy or oh that time. It's like you like,
you can't stop these people. You can't stop the Tiger King,
you can't stop Carol Baskins. They have an energy that
that's what propels them in this life. It's like a
Trump kind of person that kind of goes through the

(01:06:12):
only thing that stops them is there. Yeah, like Carol
Baskins will eventually, like her wanting fame the way she
does is gonna be her undoing. Yeah. Yeah, it's the
I don't know. I don't know philosophy. But there's the thing.
People who I know who talk about philosophy talk about

(01:06:34):
the phrase they use the will to power, And I
don't really know what that means, but there is a
will to something specific in all of these people. Power,
I guess might be one way to find it, but
it's usually something weirder than that. I think Carol Baskin
has this will to like I want to be the
person who takes care of the most hurt cats. Um,
like the bogwan Baga Van wants what it like you

(01:06:55):
see what he wants like this, He's built this little
paradise for himself. They all want called himself lord. Yeah.
I mean it's very clear where you're like, is it? Yeah,
I'm on an armchair therapist. This make oh okay yeah yeah.
And most of them are harmless on the societal level

(01:07:16):
because their dreams are so specific, right, they want to
have a hundred cockatoos or something like that, and it's
like okay, like, yeah, I want to give more mushrooms
to seventeen year old Danish kids than anyone else has
ever done. Yeah. Fine, Like I mean not fine, because
some kids got into some really bad health situations over there,
but like whatever, they knew what they were getting into

(01:07:39):
some stuff. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's whatever. Um, most of
them don't do societal levels of harm because of the
specificity of their dreams. And I guess that's the thing.
The ones that are can be fun to hang out
with and that can give you cool stories are the
ones who have a weird, specific dream um and but

(01:08:04):
also sometimes that dream is to see what happens if
they don't let their white eat wife eat while she's pregnant.
It is well, it breeds that because like it reminds
me of like because the eighties and nineties when there
was a huge comedy boom, like these guys would own
these clubs, and some of them still exist, and there's

(01:08:25):
like a handful of them that are very Tiger king
esque type because what it is they own their own
little kingdom that doesn't really mess with anything else, and
the people that come in their kingdom come and go,
but it's there's so they make the rules. Like there's
certain clubs where I'm like, oh, I just don't play

(01:08:47):
there anymore because you just that's you just can't. I
don't have to. He has this trap where like that's
the business model or whatever, where it's like he's gonna
drink three bottles of Crown Royal in three days and
then take his shirt off after the show. You know what,
he gets to do that because he's the owner and
I need dollars this week. Yeah, yep, yep, that's it. Yeah,

(01:09:13):
that's capitalism too. Yeah, that's that's the problem like that.
That's a big part of my issue with capitalism is
the amount of power it gives these people. Like these
people are a product of capitalism in a lot of ways.
Like there's aspects of what's going on their head that obviously,
I'm sure whatever it is makes these people the way

(01:09:34):
they are. People like this have always existed, but the
fact that they are able to hold money over other
people is at the end of the day, what makes
almost all of them able to do the bad stuff
that they do. Um, because that gives them power over people.
And it is this the problem, isn't It's not necessarily
a bad thing to want to live on a compound

(01:09:56):
in the woods because I have a fond dream, Billy,
I have several zelo properties, yeah yeah, yeah, and getting
to shoot off my porch and write a TV S
with my friends and maybe keep a tiger or two
and some alligators, right, well, a couple of alligators looking Yeah,
I think a tiger too. Much just end up on

(01:10:16):
our property if possible. And what's what's the harm. The
problem is is that they build these fiefdoms that are
based on this very strict hierarchy that is them and
the only thing that really meant they're all cults, right, Um,
even if there's no religious like, all of the people
in Tiger King are cult leaders. Um. That guy I

(01:10:38):
met in his fucking ranch in nowhere, California was a
cult leader. He just only had one member, but he
was hoping he would do more. Yeah. Um, that's that's
what it is. And it's if we discarded capitalism tomorrow
for a more ethical system, they would still exist, but

(01:10:58):
it would be harder for the to do what it
is they do. Yu. It would take longer and it
would be a Carole Baskin situation. You have to volunteer.
And then these this tiered because they're all they're all
wonderful manipulators. Yeah yeah, yeah, because that's what they're doing

(01:11:19):
to the animals is they're manipulating these base animals. Um,
I mean they're manipulating these animals on this base thing
like you want food, you gotta do this, you gotta
do this, And that's what they're doing to these people
that want to be around the cats. Yeah, and that's
why my motto is, never trust anyone with a well
behaved dog. Just any anyone who can train a dog

(01:11:41):
is a dangerous, manipulative person. That is my I'm taking
a strong stance against the training of dogs here. That's well,
some of them, Yeah, it's it's it's a bit that
didn't doesn't have any legs, but it's safe. That German
shepherd is like, you can't really control. And they say
they're very smart, but they, like everybody I've ever talked to,

(01:12:03):
it like, every now and then they just get nuts
and you're like, well, it's like that'd be like if
you're you're like, yeah, I mean, I have this machine gun.
It's pretty great. Every now and then it just shoots
for enough fucking reachon it usually only fires when I
pulled the trigger. I mean that's a little bit like
owning a Taurus actually, but or certain rimming tunes. Unfortunately.

(01:12:26):
Um yeah, you go, look, triggers are hard. You can't
be expected to get them all right. They're not that importanate,
you know, no, exactly, there's so many other parts of
the gun to get right. But the triggers, right Jesus, Well, Billy,
I feel like you got any other stories you wanted

(01:12:47):
to make sure to drop out on this one before
we roll out from this special episode. I mean, I'm
just I'm trying to I mean, there's not like I mean,
I went to people in the body that was the
one that stood up because she was a big cat,
and that was very specific type of human being. Um,

(01:13:08):
but animal people are weird. Animal people are always fascinating.
I mean, I've got that's been a lot of time
in Florida, so I've got I could I'll write a
book about some of these characters, because it's just, yeah,
I there's an I know that I am profoundly driven
to meet and hang out with these kinds of people

(01:13:31):
in my life, and it has caused me to make
a number of decisions that if my life were a movie,
I would have gotten murdered very quickly. Oh I'm in
a cabin in the woods and there's a dangerous person
showing me his antique. Got okay, you know, Like I
got a drunk Native girl in our cabin in Alaska

(01:13:55):
at the morning. I mean I eventually got her out,
but the next day I told people about it, and
they were they yelled at me. Not They're like, oh,
that would have been that could have been terrible because
everyone's armed. I was like, oh, it was snow and
it was cold. I don't know right now, just leave her.
And I was like, okay, all right, just because like

(01:14:18):
you're not supposed to let strangers into your cabin at night. Yes, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah,
I we I make the we make these bad calls
because there there is something like with the tigers, there's
something intoxicating about being around this kind, which is why
they're able to form cults. And the healthy amount to

(01:14:40):
be around them is just long enough to realize they're
profoundly dangerous. And then you leave with the story. Um,
I'm sure you just nailed why I love the show.
That's it's because I've been around all these people. It's scary,
but when I'm watching them through the television, I can
turn it off in it's just funny. Yeah, this won't

(01:15:03):
be a problem for me. For me, it's from me.
It will be a problem. It is a problem. Yeah,
on a societal level, it's a problem. Um, and another
lot of individuals, guys, you another just a quick when
did you realize math was such a part of it before?

(01:15:26):
I mean, because they don't tell you too later, but
like when was it clear? Oh, when I saw when
I saw the boyfriend's teeth, you know, yeah, that was
a pretty clear like Okay, that's what that's that's I mean,
there's also like Joe's general demeanor. You can tell when
people have been abusing methamphetamine for a long period of

(01:15:46):
time because of their speech patterns, in the way that
they move their body in a lot of ways, and
the way that kind of like the their emotions within
a sentence will art. Yeah, he's on the four wheeler
chase in that tornado. I was cry laughing, and I

(01:16:07):
was like, they've got to talk about him being on drugs.
That's someone on drugs. Yeah, And I was like, well,
I don't know people that the tornadoes happened there a lot.
And I was like, yeah, they do. And that's why
people don't chase them on fucking four wheelers. They do
a lot. They know not to do that. And I

(01:16:30):
think the thing people have to understand about methamphetamine as
it relates to these folks is that it isn't the
cause of the behavior in the same way that if
you start a gasoline fire, the gasoline doesn't cause the fire.
The lighter causes the fire, just like any other fire
you light. But the gasoline alters the character of the

(01:16:50):
fire in certain predictable ways that can be dangerous. Yes, yes,
um yeah, there's certain barriers in nature has put in
front of that human being that math is like, we'll
just get rid of those. Yep, yep. I've only done
meth once and it wasn't crystal meth, you know it was.
It was in its pill form um and that was

(01:17:12):
about enough. You know it? It it. I can see
how you can lose yourself in it because what it
what it really does that's that I imagined would be
most addictive, is it makes it so much easier to
tunnel into a task like that thing people talk about
about that state of flow um like that like fucking

(01:17:33):
you know, everybody in Silicon valleys trying to figure out
how to like hack your brains. You can be in
a flow state and produce more. Um. Meth is a
shortcut to that in some ways. And I was in
the one of the most blissful flow states of my
life filling up a hundred and twenty gallons worth of
five gallon gasoline cans shirtless in the back of a
truck in rural Texas. And I was not taking the

(01:17:55):
proper safety precautions, but I loved every minute of that.
It done. Yeah, um, it's that and and it's that
Joe is in. Joe lived his life in a state
of flow, um until he wound up in prison because
he was not thinking about certain consequences. No, no, he
was not. No, that is an interest that flow is

(01:18:19):
like I know, uh, friends of mine talk about the
sipping that syrup, that codeine syrup. Oh yeah, yeah, like
uh and they talked about like, oh I was there.
Comedie is a comedian friend of mine, and he was
like I was rapping and flowing like it was unbelievable.
I was like, oh so that. He's like it's He's like,

(01:18:41):
your brain doesn't work until you start talking, and then
it's the sharpest thing you've ever Like, you you're the
sharpest you've ever been when you talk. And I was like, Oh,
that's why rappers. He was like, that's exactly why rappers
use it. He's like, because it channels this thing. And
I was like, I was like it also calls the seizures.
He's like, that's why I had to stop doing. Yeah,
it's that fucking d x m m hmm. Fascinating because

(01:19:06):
that's what we're all trying to get too, is that. Yeah,
And I think that, um, drugs and the kind of
people who can make us feel like we're on drugs
are are the most dangerous thing in the world. Um,
and uh, they're also pretty fun. So go drive out

(01:19:28):
into the middle of nowhere, find a rich, dangerous person
and hang out for no more than three hours or so. Yeah,
that's gonna I was gonna say, treat in like like
it's like Vegas is three or four days. Treated that
kind of person like three or four hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And like don't like when when you're hanging around with

(01:19:49):
a tiger, don't turn your back on him. That that's
they're both wild animals. Yes, yeah, And and if you
haven't seen the Carol Baskins TikTok video, you should probably
go do that. So iph he's a fan of the talks.
I don't think it's going to catch on. No, don't

(01:20:11):
don't like to talks like this. Talks the Chinese are
opening will Yeah, I don't know. I'm not gonna make it.
Although there's an easy one to make. There's an easy
one to make. Yeah, they can put that one together.
There's enough of that from the racists that I don't
need to encourage it. I hate when like I have

(01:20:34):
an idea for like this would be a good joke,
but it's not far enough from what racist people like
from that, from that kind of humor for me to
make it. It's not a racist, but it's my whole career.
I know this mouth Yeah, yeah, oh, I've got it.
I could sell that got to I can't do it.

(01:20:55):
I'm gonna have to sell the Yeah. We did eventually,
just as a coda to the story of the pedophile
who saved me, we did eventually. Um, we we got
into contact. So like the next day when we were
in town, like the Ia Dante, which is like the
assistant bus driver like found us and got the woman's bag,
and like I we reached out to her on Facebook

(01:21:16):
that night because we found her info written in the
bag and like he got the bag and we assumed
everything was fine. And three years later she messages me
on Facebook like I never saw this message until now, No,
no one ever brought my bag to me? Guy, just
stole your bag. It was a good time. It was
d Yeah, and that's the end of this episode. Um, yep,

(01:21:42):
go Where can people follow you, Billy christ Be Davis
on Twitter and Instagram. Uh if you want to catch where,
I'm gonna be touring one day uh one day bwd
tour dot com. And then I have a cannabis uh
podcast coming out April. It's called Grown Local where we

(01:22:05):
go to the first season's about Eugene, Oregon and the
community and people that make up their cannabis excellent. Well,
speaking of cannabis. A lot of dangerous rich people in
the cannabis industry, so hang out in rural Oregon too.
It's a great place to meet him. Um, you should listen.
This is that I was doing that edit where I

(01:22:26):
was like a couple of them and I was like,
oh that, well, we'd that's a different podcast, so I
can't talking about that all right. This has been Behind
the Bastards. You can find us online up Behind the
Bastards dot com. But there's no sources for this episode.
Just life experience. Um. You can watch Tiger King if
you haven't yet. It's fun. It's exploited, but whatever. Like

(01:22:50):
I I'm going to rule right now that it's okay
to make exploitative TV about the South because of the Confederacy. Yes,
that's the way we're going on. This has been trying
to change the correct perception of the South. Also, I
guarantee we end up doing it behind the Bastards on

(01:23:12):
Jeff Low one day. That guy seems to have so
many Oh you wear an Oakley hat like that. Immediately
I was like, immediately, yeah, oh my god. Anyways, you
can follow us at Bastards pod on Twitter, Instagram, you
can follow Robert and I right okay, And you can
buy a shirt or a mug or uh waal art

(01:23:34):
or a sticker or a magnet at public dot com.
And you can take my again legally actionable advice to
hang out with dangerous people in the middle of nowhere.
It always ends well. Or if you're board, you can
listen to the Women's War. You can do it on

(01:23:54):
the way to where they live, because you're gonna you're
gonna be driving ninety minutes or more. Yeah, they're always
like and they always talk about like it's a short drive.
You need to ask what that means to a lot
of people like that. Yeah, you get a lot of
direction that tells you to turn its stumps and stuff.
Yeah yeah. Anyways, this is this is the episode. This

(01:24:19):
is done. It's over. Bye bye

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Bonus: A Conversation About Tiger King and Rural America