Behind the Bastards - Bonus: A Conversation About Tiger King and Rural America

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

Robert is joined by Billy Wayne Davis for a bonus episode inspired by the Netflix series, Tiger King. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you have a bastard 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. I liked it. Oh, thank you. Okay, well then that's the intro every single day from now on.

Chris, just copy and paste that for every future episode. I did not like it that much. Well, we're here today for a special episode of Behind the Bastards. 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. And we started 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 going to wind up talking about the South and the Ruins. Talking about the South and the rural United States, because 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 the South, most of my fellow Americans 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. So Billy, how are you doing today? I'm good. Hi, Billy.

Hey, Sophie. It's good to see you guys even just like this. Do you guys like my attire today? I dressed it on theme. Sophie's wearing leopard print. So she's ready to go work with Dachshund. Not matching leopard print. Anderson's wearing some sort of jungle print.

We look awful. It's great. You do look like you're like a super target customer somewhere. Yeah. Thank you, Billy. 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. Okay. Yeah. Which is a thing that happens kind of to people who joined Dachshund. Anyway, Billy, you want to tell me about your experience with Tiger King? Well, I mean, someone, I had heard of it. I had heard of Joe Exotic before because Friends of Mine's podcast, the last podcast guys like Kenry and Ben and those guys,

they 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 who this dude is. Yeah. 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 meth part. Yes. They elude 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 I've encountered traveling my whole life. Yeah. If you leave a city, you're just like, yeah, they, it's, or even in the city. I mean, 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. Yeah. And every, I remember everyone was like, isn't that crazy? And I was like, nah, he would sit right in my hometown.

That guy is like, perfect. Yeah. Or the guy who 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. Yes. There was a gas station tiger in Louisiana.

I don't think it's there anymore. I think though that they've replaced it with even, there's some sort of weird animal like they, and there's alligators too. Like there's, I've lost track of the number 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.

Yeah. Like Winnie Woods about three hours away from Ida Bell too, something like that. And it's, as a little kid, some of my earliest memories 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 300 acres of land and an indiscriminate number of large cats.

And that's the business. That's the business. That is the business. It was just always a part of my life. I remember noticing driving through Texas. This was like probably 10 years ago. And you 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 seeing.

Yeah. And then every now and then you'd see one and they're just like, why is that motherfucker 20 feet? Oh, because they've got some stuff you shouldn't have in Texas. Yeah, they have a legal animal. Well, they're not illegal animals because Texas... I didn't say illegal. I said it should have in Texas.

Very fair. Yeah. So we should, like the statistics, like one thing you'll hear a lot 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.

I saw that said it's horrifying. Yeah, it's probably true for the United States. 5,000 is a reasonable estimate and most of those are in private hands. Well, you'll hear various estimates. 5,000 is the kind of credible minimum estimate. I don't know. It's hard to say because a lot of people will say, no, there's not nearly as many.

Even 5,000 is too high. But all of their data is based on official government numbers for those allowed to own these animals. And the people that want these animals aren't... They're going to lie on a census. You know what I mean? Yeah, they're never going to tell you. Yeah.

No. 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. It was a warehouse that he had converted to his mansion and the room that later, when he got busted, became a tattoo shop was where his shark lived. Like shit like this.

That shark wasn't on a registry? No. No, he was not. He's still on a registry. It's estimated that there are 10,000 to 20,000 big cats in the U.S. But those are problematic numbers too because those are all from the Humane Society, right? Or from some animal welfare society, right?

No, this is held in private ownership and it's from... Yeah, but where's the number from? I've seen this number on several different websites. I'm not sure where they're getting it. It tends to track back, from my research, it always tracks back to the Humane Society or someone similar, which isn't necessarily a bad source but 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. 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. No, because a lot of people keep making them fuck too. Yeah, and so 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 eyes and crossed her T's. I believe every complaint she has about the humane issues with Joe Exotic's tiger slaytations. Yes, but that's like saying legally everything Dick Cheney did was cool too. She's a Dick Cheney type person. Yeah, I think she and Doc Antley and Joe Exotic are all murderers and I don't know who they've killed. I'm not even saying I think that she killed her husband. I have no idea.

One of the things you learn spinning a lot of time in rural America is rich men in their 70s disappear for a lot of reasons. Yeah, they do. Sometimes they just leave. Yeah, he might just be in Mexico. They've been thinking about that for 40 years. One day I'm just gonna leave. One of my favorite things that I've read since watching this is what's on her big cat rescue.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 10 minute video of her husband being like, if Kim Kardashian, you're welcome here anytime. I know you tweeted like, so do we think Carol's 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 really funny. Yeah, Carol is, so there's, I think what 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 characters in the documentary are part of a classification of human being that exists only in America. And I would broadly describe them all as rich off-grid criminals. 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. They're the nonviolent criminals. So these are people who embezzled money, who committed tax fraud, who stole a bunch of money, who were in the drug business. And they're awesome.

If you can hang out with those people, do because they have cool shit. Technically what I did was steal from the church. That is technically what I did. Fuck it. I did embezzle $100 million from the church. You could... Fuck it. Yeah.

And they always have weird animals, and they're often very nice people, and they have cool houses, and you can shoot on their land, and a lot of them rule. They are fine until they are not. That's who these people are. That's a lot. The nonviolent ones, and it can be hard to tell. The nonviolent ones I've had good relationships with.

But the other half of the rich off-grid criminals are violent criminals. Yes, they are. And they are usually the outwardly nicest. Yes. Like Doc Antley, 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. Keith Ranieri guy?

He's got some Keith Ranieri energy. I've met a couple of Doc Antleys out in Slab City. Like, it is a type of dude you meet out in the middle of nowhere who knows a bunch of cool shit. They always have like a bunch of talents. They're usually real good at building shit. They have 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 you realize they are. That is a type of person you run into. They understand parts of human nature in a way most people don't. But they're using their power for usually sex. He's almost always sex. Yes. In an interview he gave like on a radio station after this came out, he said that all those women you know were relatives, daughters,

his children's wives, you know, he's like, yeah, 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 a compound. And yes, if I could have a tiger, I would have a tiger. Sure. Yeah, we know that. That was very clear from the beginning, sir.

But yeah, he, 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. I think he's like, has been accused of some horrific stuff. He has more than 35 USDA violations for mistreating animals. As a result of his farm, the Humane Society tracked one of his tiger cubs that he claims are, you know, very ethically sort of, you know, sold to different like reputable people that wound up on like just a basically

a tiger farm in the middle, I think of, I think 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. Yeah, he's done, he does a bunch of fucked up shit. He's also apparently a really good tiger trainer, because he's his tigers and shit, like they've been in a bunch of movies. Like he knows his shit. He's not like bad at what he does.

He's a bad person who has created 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. Yes. 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 like I have this thing that attracts people and I can get them 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. Yeah. And if you are good at making tigers like you and, and keeping them alive and training 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 been to the places where they have little baby tigers and it short circuits your fucking brain. I understand how these women get like, like stuck in this for years because like, yeah,

I would put up with a lot of shit to get to play with baby tigers every day. Yeah, it's drugs. It's drugs. They're junkies. That's what he's doing. He's creating like these tiger junkies. That's, I did a, yeah, I went, when I did this documentary I hosted a couple years ago,

we went to this cat lady in Perunth, Nevada, and she wasn't, she didn't, she wasn't trying to make money off this at all. Like it wasn't, she was a divorced lady. Now her ex-husband was still alive. Good to know. It was, 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, that's why she was so clear about her husband still being alive because we were all like, why she, why she say that like that? We didn't know who Carol Baskins was then. You know what I mean? But she did. I guarantee you she did.

And her whole thing was like, she rescued them. Yeah, I had, I do have some friends who live out in the middle of nowhere. Who have a lot of land and are looking at like figuring out how they can like get in, 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 giant lizards. You know, like there are programs if you are,

if you're a non grifter, non monster and you're like, 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. It is great. Yeah, it's great. 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 F1 hybrid civet,

which is like a wild, it was like, I don't know, 20, 30 pound, half wild cat. Enough of a house cat that it kind of, it looked like an enormous, very muscular house cat. Yeah. With a long tail. Is that what the one you're talking about? Yeah. Yeah. And very smart and very sweet, very personable, very trainable,

but also destroyed everything. Like could not be stopped. Yeah. And they put up with it for so long because they just love that fucking cat 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 idea. You can't put it in your house, you can't stop him from pooping everywhere.

Like he's murdering every animal in the neighborhood. I think you're, it sounds like, it's like, you sound like you're describing someone that was with Charlie Sheen as also. Yeah. Where it's like, he's fun and like a lot of times like very engaging, but then everything, he'll destroy everything you know, just because. Yeah. I've known some people who know Andy Dick and the stories are not dissimilar,

but big cats are well, much better behaved. I would, 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 rather be around a big cat than Andy Dick. I could say that. 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 was, I just finished Tiger King and I've realized that I don't understand the South at all.

And I love that people are having this reaction 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 Tannerite is so fucking common. The putting faces on it is a little weird, but not even that weird. Such a good point, Robert. Such a good point. Like I would go on Twitter and like some of the stuff people were like, like I couldn't believe this. Like I was like, oh, that didn't even register in my brain as an odd thing.

This guy just always wears a gun. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what? 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. Or if the straight kid that you're left up to Mary's mom shows up, you got to shoot at her feet sometime. Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah, there's tons of videos of Hunter Thompson out in his farm in Colorado getting into friendly gunfights with his neighbors. It's not weird, okay? I've seen it. I'm from the south. We used to shoot cannons at each other on the Fourth of July. Yeah. That's pretty cool. We used to fire into Lake Texoma 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 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. 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, I think those people have spent most of their time in the city. Yes. I can remember one time out on my, my partner's property in the middle of fucking nowhere in Texas, we had as a result of a younger relative of hers making a poor decision with fireworks, a brush fire that immediately got out of control and got to like the acre and a half, two acre. 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. Oh my God. That's a lot of people's experience with like, yeah, that's what the law is out here. Yes. Like if there's a murder, someone will come eventually. And 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. Well, I don't want to be here after dark. So I guess that's the end of this investigation. That's... Well, I think one of the parts I laugh 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's like, there's 12 lines. There's four bears in one goddamn baboon. The way he said it was just like, he can't say the F word, but he said the F. It was just like, and a baboon is loose. And I was like, I was like cry laughing in the bed and my wife was like, 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. I'm just picturing people I know 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've spent some long nights actually out in a farm as a dear friend of mine is spraying down like fucking crops and like waiting for a mountain line with a

bull 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, an area like that. There's like a big cat that everyone knows about. You see signs of it. You don't see the cat usually because they're fucking good at not being seen. But there will be, you know, in this case, like some of the land she was on, this was like my partner at the time, like some of the land she was working on had

little horses 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 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.

So 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 AK-47 but also I know I'm not faster or better at hunting than that cat. Yeah, and by the time I realized I need to use this AK-47, 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. No. And another one of the scary things, speaking of terrifying rich people I've

known in the middle of nowhere, I've known some folk who did, who hunted animals like that with crossbows and would get very close and stalk cats on their own with a fucking bow. And those are people you don't want to fuck with. No. No, because they're better at hunting than a big cat. Yes, and they're getting something out of it a cat doesn't. Yeah, and they're, I will not say which state this person is.

I will not say their name. I will say those were not legal cat hunts. No. No, of course not. Robert, do you know what else is not a legal cat hunt? You know what won't illegally hunt mountain lions? Know what? Well, unless it's the coke industries.

Charles Coke cannot get erect without bathing his penis in the blood of an infant mountain lion. And that's on record. He talks about that openly. So this is consider this legally binding coke layers. I mean, there's a reason he chose Wichita. Absolutely. It is the masturbate with cat blood state.

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stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And I kind of wanted to move to telling some stories, Billy, because I think we both have stories of kooky folks we've met out in nowhere who I kind of my goal with this is like, I'm glad that people are enjoying Tiger King. 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, 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 to, 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. There were like, we, people that lived in town, we considered them city kids. Yeah, yeah. And 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. 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 a game warden tells you not to go. Yeah. Yeah, there's, if you cross onto the wrong line, they just shoot people because they got pot fields out there. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I was out, nowhere adjacent and one of those, I was in a rural town that 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 Israeli Air Force shirt on.

It was not a political statement. I don't think either of us were, yeah, it was just, she liked the logo on it. It's a shirt 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 IDF and we were like, oh, cool. We talked for like 10 minutes and he invites us over to his house for dinner for the night. And this is a guy, late 40s, early 50s, something like that, does not sound Israeli.

Sounds very American, but you know, there's a sizable number of American, like born, you know, Jewish folks who went to Israel, served in the IDF, came back. That's the thing that happened. So no alarm bells yet, just like this nice guy who 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 ways from the town to get to this guy's house. And this is the middle of the fucking mountains. And we are like, his house is at the foot of one mountain that's maybe five, six, seven

thousand feet. And then there's a 14,000 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 ranch mansion that's like, it's still to this day, like from the outside my dream home, like made out of like, like clearly a hundred something years old, made out of like beautiful like stonework. And then there's this like massive complex of pastures and pins and like a ton of horses and cows online.

It's just this amazing ranch setup. And so we're like, oh shit, we're going to meet, like I love meeting cool people who own compounds in the middle of the woods because you get to do fun shit on them. So we think this is that. So we meet this guy. We, we head into his house. And the first thing we notice 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, oh, okay, this is not a normal residence. He's probably 60 to 100 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. Yeah. 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, 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 500 or more different kind of knives, knives and sorts and not. And this is the thing. You know me. I got, I love, I love, I love knives. I have a ton of knives around me.

There's knives 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? Mate? 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 claw like Wolverine 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 1990s would have like welded to his body like toy knives and he has like 500 of these all stacked in a corner of the room around his couch and so that's weird, but he's very nice and he breaks us in and he introduces us to his child bride, which is when things get problematic. So again, this guy is in his mid 40s to early 50s, maybe his wife is not a day over 18 and they have clearly been dating for a while and it becomes clear through conversations

that she is not in contact with her family. Yeah, this is my wife. I'm raising and she cooks us a lovely dinner and we have a very sure as hell she does. 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 was very clear that it was all like no your mom didn't kill 60 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. 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 refill the drink I would thank her I would thank him when he was like 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 us like oh something horrible happens in this household when you two are the only ones here and she doesn't say thank you like

and he he had big doc antley 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 I at the time had this this habit of being met by weird people in the middle of nowhere and they would invite us into their lives and would say yeah sure and then it would things would get horribly uncomfortable. 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 child bride lose

this guy's number and never come back here. So I don't know what was going on there you never you often don't learn the whole story right never know the if you're smart you never learn the whole story that's something I learned I mean just doing touring your whole adult life you do especially in your 20s because you're looking for adventure more than you're just going through life especially if you're stand up because you're like I'm going to get I need some stories. So early on I would say yes to people after you know I would go places you're not supposed to go and it only happened a couple of times but there was always weird animals.

Yeah yeah yeah there's always very old reptiles are pretty common that normally didn't tell me off but like there would always be like the time I remember where I was like oh I'm never doing this again was these people I 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 snake and then they had weird rodents but as pets defined yeah like ferret type rodents that weren't you know what I mean like where I was like I don't know what those are something it's like you it was very clear that they went to some effort to acquire animals people don't normally have access to yes yeah yeah

and then by smoke they pulled out a heroin and I was okay I can't I can't I was very polite and I was like that's not what I meant I thought it was pretty clear on stage in front of 300 people that I just smoked pot and they were like we thought you were speaking in code because you called it dope and I was like maybe whoa it was just like but then like that wasn't even the weirdest part it was those weird rodents I can't think that was the key to me yeah that was weird like I might have sat 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 like that yeah this is uncomfortable to me yeah 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 caught a raccoon like he had a bunch of coon dogs so he did that I thought the the dogs are cool like a bunch of beagles and a couple actually a 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 like slapped my hand he's like he don't like being pet he's mean and I remember saying then why do you have him why do you have him as a pet and I remember the look on my great great uncle's face like that had never occurred to him well yeah he's shocked like what is there an option besides

having this angry animal in my home he's like I caught one I didn't shoot it I caught it so that would be a nice and I was like that's a boy I've been just being five and like let that fucker go he doesn't like that growing up my my aunt was dating a fellow who had a huge known this was in suburban Texas had a shocking number of exotic reptiles and he had a shark in his suburban house like a nurse shark and he also had a massive very ill 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 me 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 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 wow yeah why do you have this thing as an adult I wonder why would you continue to own an animal that hates you that much hate 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 I was messing with that I remember messing with the Liger this guy had it when we went to the cat lady her husband brought out this Liger cup and I oh no we thought he was kidding because I didn't know they were really real because in the holy dynamite that's what I right right I mean yeah so like literally when he's like it's a Liger and me and the sound guy were like this fucking asshole and then as they're shooting b-roll I went looked it up and I was like dude they're real they are real 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 to mess

with to like you can kind of waller with it and I was like messing with it like I would a dog like with its mouth and all that and then the guy goes stop that I was like what is it 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 yeah and I was like oh well I'm leaving them like an hour or so I'm just gonna keep doing this yeah animals like that are kind of like the weird people you meet out in the woods in that you have to have very strong and sturdy boundaries in order to keep them successfully without getting killed by them yes but there's I don't know it's a healthy respect I think yeah but we had it this this girl lived in

our back house for a while and she had a hairless cat that she rescued no and that was mean mean cat yeah 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 my foot did this instinct thing and kick the shit out of the cat across the shore because we're establishing boundaries and then my wife and our tenant a couple weeks later is like why doesn't the cat attack you and I was like oh we have an understanding because I attack back and they would never the attack they were just afraid of the cat for two years and I was like you guys it's an animal yeah 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 cows somebody else basically licensed the farm but like it was my backyard was like 150 acres full of you know 100 something ahead of cattle and these two bowls that were pinned up separately that bulls were and like the only the only like warning I got from 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 and there's a level of I was maybe six the first time I saw like the severed head and

spinal column of a of a dead calf and it's because some sort 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 there's free food back there yeah this is such a good day why do you guys look so sad this is great this is the best team thing ever yeah um it was just laying there this to your comment about just sort of like responding to an animal attacking you like yeah you fucking kick it you know like you kick it there's a level of it 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 yes there was a thing again on my like um my partner 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 it 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 warning to the others because they're smart enough they know what like that means like they see it the corpse of a 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 of uh city dwelling people understand yeah I see 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 and it still frustrates me is in LA you see because vanity is such 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 like tears up my house oh and they have a horrible health problems with their ears yeah and I was like yeah because you shouldn't have it in culver city California no that

dog needs to be just chasing whatever it 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 want to go on 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's there's this there's two kinds of people who will tell you that their dog is a wolf um it's the it's people in like fucking Portland Oregon uh who who want to seem cool and just have a perfectly normal husky dog and then it's people out in the middle of nowhere we're telling you don't go into that fenced-in yard that's where we keep the fucking wolf and that's a wolf yeah

that's a 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 him inside before we tried to domesticate him but then we realized evolution hadn't domesticated him yet so we keep him outside now turns out he's just a hundred and eighty pound monster that we keep in the yard yeah he and what we've and if we're being real honest he allows us to keep him that's what it is that fence won't hold him feed if he continues to not eat the children we'll we'll keep feeding them we're good we're good um I think that's the whole thing with the tiger kingdom yeah they don't

I don't think people city people understand the relationship that 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 oh yes but yeah they walk like that yeah yeah more than humans do in Alaska so it's like that kind of stuff was 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 carry a gigantic handgun around yes and you can

be a little drunk 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 like a lot of places you can't be drunk and with a gun but Alaska you can be and when you go up there like Dallas that makes sense you should be a little drunk it's interesting on a little of a rant which places 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 officer's discretion even if you're under the legal limit if you have a concealed handgun license and are carrying they can at their discretion arrest you because Texas has a good rule it's not a terrible

rule necessary especially Texas has 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 I have a friend who was driving down fucking the the the fucking the high five and DFW and a bullet just went through the windshield of his car right in front of his face to see his driver like who knows I'm sure alcohol was involved whereas in Oregon you can be as drunk as you want while carrying a concealed handgun and as far as I know it's never caused a problem and I choose not to look into that any further Billy no you need people you need lumberjacks you need lumberjack that's not drunk with a gun yeah yeah sure do your best yeah drug

testing servers there's not gonna be a restaurant yeah yeah if you if you require chefs to be sober there will be no food nope 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 smooth 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 yeah yeah I want to talk about an expat I knew the rough story the the the title of the story I'll give you is the pedophile who saved my life so we'll talk about that when we come back from ads during the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations and you know what they were right I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the FBI sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside an undercover investigation in the first season of alphabet boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns he's a shark and on the good badass way and nasty sharks he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio

app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science the problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price to death sentences in a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI how many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus it's all made

up listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync what you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space and when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories but there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down it's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart and now he's left defending the Union's last outpost

this is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast okay we're back was just Jared what if the pedophile who saved your life was just Jared Fogle from Subway because he just lost a lot of weight he he was a little bit like if um Bhagavan only uh was a was a was a pedophile which he might in fact be um but if he was that name doesn't help there was a weird Hindu mystic connection to this guy so really take my money for that so we're talking about like 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 yet they couldn't live in a city they just wouldn't it wouldn't work right the most normal guy in the entire docu series was that Mario guy that was sentenced to 100 years behind bars yeah yeah he's a nice 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 yeah yeah I like that guy he seemed like a good guy normal guy in the entire thing and he was the guy that was sentenced to prison for 100 years and that's what after 12 my friend Brooks Wayland 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 uh exactly I was like that is true because he's he's pretty smart yeah he's smart he clearly like the murders and stuff that he was related in were you know business related as sort of like a practical pragmatic thing and I think yeah all of the other people who again I am explicitly alleging here have committed murder um I think they were more passionate killers you know well they got in the way of something they want they got in the way business problem yeah yeah yes yes like you if you were to hang out on Mario's land with him you'd be perfectly safe right unless you like tried to do violence to him and I'm sure you would have a great time because he

seems like a night 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 well I don't think that shook him yeah like you said I think he's a business person so he's yeah hey there's a good UFC fight on I've got it I'm gonna use a projector the lines are gonna watch it's gonna be a good time you're like 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 like you about 15 years ago you did some things that I wouldn't believe if you told me but we're having a good time now and you have so many weird puppies yes really respected his wife's uh monkey

clothes collection as somebody who dresses their animal and clothes against their will yeah yeah that's it's the same time animals don't have a right to not be dressed up I believe that strongly yeah that is me I but I like would you like a treat yeah it is the type of like that Mario guys 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 help her raise these lions we were 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 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 yeah yeah I've known variants of that guy whose dangerous thing was they were self-taught electricians who had like retired to the land and had they had projects and every one of their projects was like well one of these days you're gonna slip up like and this will catch up to you and they say negative stuff about the BLM for no reason oh they're very angry at the BLM yes where I was like I don't even know is that some terrorist oh no they're just okay I got what yeah okay as a general rule of the folks we've talked about today probably less than a third of them have legal driver's licenses but all of them drive yeah so the pedophile who saved my life so yeah back to that 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 there because they're too weird for cities 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 from the United States and they wind up as expats and they're they're always it's so I'll just tell you about this guy so I'm in Guatemala and where I'm hiking there's this big fucking volcano the tallest peak in Central America that I that I hike up with a friend of mine 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 and we get on a bus to head back to the place we're staying which is like five hours away from the mountain in rural Guatemala and the place we're staying is Lagoa Tietlan 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 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'd been on one of these drives we'd 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 at midnight by a dozen men in camouflage 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 fuck knows what was going on but this 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 200 people and just be darting down these things at 70 miles an hour it's it's real fun so 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 we're all in this car and we're the only other like we're the only other white people other than this one french canadian girl who's seated up front and everyone else is a local and when we get the bus stops in the middle of a random small town and they tell us our connecting bus is there and it's the middle of the night and they toss our bags off and they toss the french canadian girls bags off and then they drive off with her still in the bus so we realize 30 minutes or so into this we're in the middle of a jungle there's no one around us we're not in a town and no bus is coming to pick us up and also we have this stranger's bag and

we're in fucking bandit country so after you know i don't know her bags in french we don't even know what it means so 30 or 40 minutes go into this and we just start hiking um and it's 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 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 dobert guy he was a can i can i interrupt yeah land rover

or range rover land rover okay because the range rover that would even that's even more like what where the fuck you got a range rover no no this was like a real at like this wasn't like a like a like an la mom land rover either yeah yeah i was just thinking like NFL life yeah okay yeah yeah yeah so he pulls up and he's like this dillbert Scott Adams looking motherfucker like he's he's thin and he's bald and he has a very like gentle Arkansas accent um so like and yeah so he pulls us so he pulls over by the side and he asks like very politely do y'all need a 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 a teat lawn 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 becomes clear that he's butchered some some animals um and has decided to drive the unrefrigerated meat down to try to sell to a hotel and that sparks a 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 the theories based on hindu mythology about how his wife needed to eat and hydrate while she was pregnant with their

child and this has been i would have been asleep in the back and i would have woke up being like keep going going yeah yeah 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 baby came out blue which meant that it was blessed by so at this point no 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 now realize like i have to i have to continue this conversation yeah however long it takes us to

get where we're going oh that's what that phrase nothing 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 do that's kind of like a precursor to burning man it also still occurs it's like a gathering and you'll encounter different opinions on rainbow gatherings depending on who you talk to this guy thinks they're a great thing but is very angry angry because he got banned from ever attending again for misunderstandings and it becomes very clear that the misunderstandings are consent based and also very clear this is a lifelong pattern for this guy 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 not at all he had like four wives but it was fine i mean it wasn't fine one of them like anyway um he wasn't this guy there was that would make leaps in their stories you'd be like there's some parts i think they're leaving out yeah that's okay like so we're what just happened right now continue so we're we roll up to the hotel and he's like 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 him to buy this which i have to try to do because he's giving us a ride i was going to say you this is like parts of minds you got to 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 like i know who sent you here i know who sent you yeah so the next day we're out 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 were like actual like guatemalan locals um he sees us talking to this guy uh this is a dude we like we drunk with a little bit he was the security guard at our hotel so we would hang out at night and have a couple of beers and he would let us shoot 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 communication that's what we're talking about sold his pot too

he was a great dude he sounds fun he was awesome he comes up to us after we say goodbye to this fellow and he says 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 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 of the pedophile who saved my life it's not as exciting maybe as it sounds but it was a fun two days well and then you you gave him some

extra time in town so i'm not out not on purpose no that's what i mean but like he saw you guys and was like oh this is a little bit this is my ticket in yes this is because these guys are mad at me because of my yeah my misunderstandings i don't know i love weirdos 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 a genius but no no no he's not no now what he did was malnutrition that's what you did was malnutrition and you are the kind of expat who just can't ever come back home yes oh man yeah is is it was fun um there aren't like those places though like where like i i it just made me think of like a

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 going to 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 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 not i'm gonna hang up right now i don't want to be talking to you 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 he's like no i'm aware you need to have done a very specific kind of bad thing to get

banned from south africa yes uh yeah yeah that he was like no no and he said it so casually too i was like yeah you gotta go yeah yeah you'll 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 it like there was this other guy who owned a bar in guatemala who was a former highway patrol officer from arizona um and said that i 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 a hundred grand to spend on buying a hotel in a bar and those two things were connected yeah they are yeah he was a crooked 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 officer he saw a business opportunity and was like i don't want to be a law enforcement anymore no i want to run a shady ass bar that gets 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 17 year old wife who'd just given birth um which is another it's a tie it's a tie that's what i don't think people that don't the same eyes they don't i've told people this a long time ago too was like

some of my friends that don't travel was like we'd be in a bar and i'm like hey this is gonna happen this is gonna happen this is gonna happen they'd be like what and then it would happen there how'd you know that i'm like i just i've seen this yeah this is we're all the same yeah yeah 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 no you don't it's gonna get weird about 145 in the morning that's when it gets it's gonna be fun until the end you're like oh we're this this wasn't the party was it yeah and it's not gonna just get like weird like your friend gets drunk and starts crying it's gonna get like nothing else will ever be normal again for the rest of your life it will change

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 in honey and he was spooning them into a naked danish boys mouth yes just like bye alan yes and here's the thing i don't think people understand like unless you've been in these situations like yeah i could i could do this podcast for 18 hours oh yeah because everything you bring up there's like things i've forgotten about oh yeah that guy or oh that time yeah it's like you wait like you can't stop these people no you can't stop the tiger king you can't stop carol baskins no they have an energy that that's what

propels them in this life it's like a trunk kind of person that kind of goes through only thing that stops them is them yeah like carol baskins will eventually like her wanting fame the way she does is going to be her undoing yeah yeah it's the i don't know i don't know philosophy but there's a thing people who i know who talk about philosophy talk about a 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 define 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 bagwan bagavan wants what like you see what he wants like this he's

built this little paradise for himself they all want to call himself lord yeah i mean yeah very clear where you're like yeah i'm gonna armchair therapist this make oh okay big fan of the doc aren't you yeah yeah and most of them are harmless on the societal level because their dreams are so specific right yes 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 17 year old danish kids than anyone else has ever done yeah fine like uh 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 yeah yeah i'm taking some stuff where i'm like 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 weirdly specific dream um and but 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 other well because like it reminds me of like and because the 80s and 90s when there was a huge comedy boom yeah like yeah these guys would own these clubs and some of them still exist and there's like a handful of them that are very tiger king esque type yeah 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 theirs so they make

the rules and like there's certain clubs where i'm like oh i just don't play there anymore because you just that's you just can't i don't have to he has this trap or 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 but he gets to do that because he's the owner and i need $1400 this week yeah yep yep that's it yeah that's capitalism too yeah that's 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 of capitalism in a lot of ways like there's aspects of what's going on in their head that obviously i'm sure whatever it

is makes these people the way 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 the bad stuff that they do 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 in the woods because i have a fond dream billy i have several zillow properties yeah yeah yeah and getting to shoot off my porch and write atvs with my friends and maybe keep a tiger or two and some alligators right well a couple of alligators the way things are looking yeah i think a tiger or two might just end up on our property it's possible and what's what's the

harm the problem is is that they build like these fiefdoms that are based on the this very strict hierarchy that is them and the only thing that really meant they're all cults right even if there's no religious like all of the people in tiger king are cult leaders yes um that guy i met in his fucking ranch in nowhere california was a cult leader he just only had one member but he was hoping that he would get two 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 it would be harder for them to do what it is they do yes it would be more it would it would take longer and it would be a carol baskin situation yeah you have to volunteer and then this this tiered because

they're all they're all wonderful manipulators yeah yeah all of them because that's what they're doing to the animals is they're manipulating these base animals i mean they're manipulating these animals on this base thing like you want food you gotta do this yeah 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 is a dangerous manipulative person that is my i'm taking a strong stance against the training of dogs here um that's well some of them yeah it's it's it's a bit that didn't that doesn't have any legs but sometimes it's like a german shepherd is like you can't really control and they say they're very smart but they're like

everybody i've ever talked to is like every now and then they just get nuts and you're like well then it's like that'd be like if you're like yeah i mean i have this machine gun it's pretty great every now and then it just shoots for no fucking reason it usually only fires when i pull the trigger i mean that's a little bit like owning a torus actually but or certain rimmington's unfortunately um yeah you gotta make things in my ass look triggers are hard you can't expect to get them all right they're not that important you know no exactly there's so many other parts of the gun to get right but the trigger that's exactly right oh Jesus well billy i feel like you got any other stories you wanted to make sure to drop out on this one before we we roll out from this special

episode so i mean i'm just i'm trying to i mean there's not like i mean i went to the people in nevada that was one that stood up because she was a big cat and that was a very specific type of human being um but animal people are weird animal people are always fascinating i mean i've got i spent 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 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 have regularly been like oh i've been a cabin in the woods and there's a dangerous person showing me his antique okay hmm you know

like i let a drunk native girl in our uh cabin in alaska uh at five in the morning boy yeah i mean i eventually got her out but the next day i told people about it and they were they yelled at me not to they were like oh that would have been that could have been terrible because everyone's armed i was like i don't know it was snowing it was cold i don't know right now just leave her and i was like okay all right just because like 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 be around them

is just long enough to realize they're profoundly dangerous and then you leave with a story um that i'm sure yeah you just nailed why i love the show that's it's because i've been around all these people yeah it's scary but when i'm watching them through the television i can turn it off and it's just funny yeah this won't be a problem for me for me it's for me yes yeah it will be a problem it is a problem yeah on a societal level it's a problem um and it's a problem for a lot of individuals huh yeah guys you another just a quick when did you realize meth was such a part of it before i mean because they don't tell you till 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 yeah you can tell when people have been abusing methamphetamine for a long period of time because of their speech patterns and the way that they move their body in a lot of ways and the way that kind of like their emotions within a sentence will arc that's yeah when he's on the four wheeler chasing that tornado i was cry laughing and i was like they've got to talk about him being on drugs yeah that's someone on drugs yeah my wife was like well i don't know people like the tornadoes happen 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 happen a lot they know not to do that and i 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 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 like but the gasoline alters the character of the fire in certain predictable ways that can be dangerous yes um yeah there's certain barriers 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 about enough you know it it 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 they're about that state of flow um like that like fucking you know everybody in silicon valley is trying to figure out how to like hack your brain so you can be in a flow state and produce more um meth is a shortcut to that in some ways and i was in uh the one of the most blissful flow states of my life filling up 120 gallons worth of five-gallon gasoline cans shirtless in the back of a truck in rural texas and i was not taking the proper safety precautions but i loved every minute of that you get it done yeah um it's that 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 internet that flow is like i know uh friends of mine talk about the sipping that syrup the codeine syrup oh yeah yeah like uh and they talk about like oh i was there can be as 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 your brain doesn't work until you start talking and then it's the sharpest thing you've ever like you're the sharpest you've ever been when you talk and i was like oh that's why rappers use 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 causes seizures he's like that's why i had to stop doing it yeah it's that fucking dxm mm-hmm yep oh boy fascinating because that's what we're

all trying to get to is that yeah and i i think that um drugs and the kind of people who can make us feel like we're on drugs uh are the most dangerous thing in the world um and uh they're also pretty fun so yeah go drive out into the middle of nowhere find a rich dangerous person and hang out for no more than three hours or so yeah that's what i was gonna say yeah treat them 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 you're hanging around with a tiger don't turn your back on them that that's they're both wild animals that yes yeah yeah and and if you haven't seen the carol baskin's tiktok video you should probably go do that so if he's a fan of the

tox i don't think it's gonna catch on no don't don't like the tox like this tox the chinese are opening well yeah i don't know i'm not gonna make a coronavirus joke although there's an easy one to make you know we'll let an easy one to make yeah they can put that one together there's enough of that from the racists but i don't need to encourage it i hate when like i have 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 racism to my career but it's my whole career yeah i know this mouth yeah yeah yeah i oh i've got it i could sell that you gotta be careful sell that one i can't do it i'm gonna have to sell that that's a lot of yeah yeah we did eventually

just as a 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 aya dante which is like the assistant bus driver like found us and got the woman's bag and like i'd we reached out to her on facebook 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 that guy just stole your bag uh it was a good time it was a great end yeah anyway i just saw this i didn't get that back there and that's the end of this episode um yep go where can people follow you billy christ be

with you billy Wayne davis on twitter and instagram uh if you want to catch where i'm going to be touring one day uh one day bwdtour.com and then i have a cannabis uh podcast coming out april 20th it's called grown local where we go to the first season's about you gene 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 them uh you should listen this is that's i was doing that edit where i was like a couple of them i was like oh that uh well we're that's a different podcast so i can't talk about that all right this has been behind the bastards you can find us online at behindthebastards.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 exploitative but whatever like it's fun really sad 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 my whole career has been trying to change the correct perception of the south yeah also i guarantee we end up doing a behind the bastards on jeff lowe one day that guy seems to have so many anybody uh you wear an oakley hat like that immediately i was like immediately yeah yeah oh my god anyways you can follow us at bastard's pod on twitter and instagram you can follow robert at i write okay and you can buy a shirt or a mug or uh wall art or a sticker

or a magnet at tpublic.com and you can take my again uh legally actionable advice to hang out with dangerous people in the middle of nowhere it always ends well or if you're bored you can listen to the women's war i have that is also an option you can do it on the way to where they live oh there we go exactly video because you're gonna you're gonna be driving 90 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're gonna get a get a lot of direction that tells you to turn its stumps and stuff yeah yeah anyways this is the this is the episode yeah this is done it's over bye bye alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover

investigations in the first season we're diving into an fbi investigation of the 2020 protest it involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what if i told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest i was incarcerated two days after her first birthday listen to csi on

trial on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts did you know lance bass is a russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well i ought to know because i'm lance bass and i'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the soviet union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last soviet on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts