Danny Jones Podcast - #430 - "Eaten Alive" Shark Week Filmmaker on Footage They Can Never Release | Andy Casagrande

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Andy Casagrande is a two-time Emmy winning wildlife cinematographer, producer, on-camera presenter, and shark diver best known for his long-running work on Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. He has filmed and produced hundreds of wildlife projects for National Geographic, Discovery, BBC, and Animal Planet.  @abc4explore SPONSORS http://kalshi.com/r/dannyjones - Download the Kalshi app and use code DANNYJONES to get $20 when you trade $20. https://butcherbox.com/danny - Get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, new york strip, or filet mignon in every box for a year. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS Andy's Channel:  @abc4explore *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com Get paid to make clips from the show: https://discord.com/invite/dannyjones FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Andy Casagrande's path to shark filmmaking 02:41 - Childhood, schizophrenia, and studying psychology 09:37 - National Geographic vs. Shark Week 12:07 - Filming Mick Fanning after his shark encounter 17:58 - Shark encounters while surfing 21:16 - Mark Healey freediving with great white sharks 23:28 - Do sharks get used to humans? 26:52 - Drone footage of sharks near swimmers 33:50 - Michael Phelps' Shark Week swim 37:17 - Why some beaches have more shark attacks 43:10 - Tracking great whites off Naples 53:09 - The tiger shark that nearly killed Andy's wife 59:03 - Tiger sharks vs. great whites 01:02:20 - Putting cameras on sharks 01:04:38 - Jaws, Ocean Ramsey & shark stereotypes 01:09:30 - Why whale sharks have teeth on their eyes 01:12:30 - The fatal Tiger Beach dive 01:18:08 - The Cove & learning to freedive 01:21:41 - Danny ran out of air underwater 01:26:19 - Why don't wild orcas attack humans? 01:32:06 - Blackfish & keeping orcas in captivity 01:33:58 - Working on Dolphin Tale 01:42:06 - Behind the scenes of MrBeast's shark shoot 01:46:47 - The dark side of commercial fishing 01:53:15 - NOAA's shark research fishery 02:00:33 - The Cove & Japan's dolphin hunts 02:05:22 - The psychology of trophy hunting 02:08:10 - The crocodile attack that took a diver's legs 02:17:23 - What happened to Steve Irwin 02:20:39 - Stranded in polar bear territory 02:29:20 - Greenland sharks that live over 400 years 02:36:08 - Why anxiety disappears in the wild 02:38:26 - Filming great white sharks mating 02:43:31 - John Lilly's dolphin experiments 02:48:00 - Do sharks make sounds? 02:52:45 - A great white that consumed a spearfisherman 02:55:45 - The real odds of a shark attack 03:00:37 - Surviving a great white attack in New Zealand Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How did you become the top shark cinematographer in the world? Your stuff on your Instagram and online is like some of the most insanely incredible cinematography I've ever seen. Thank you. Thank you. Not to say, not to even mention the fact that you're like face to face with some of the deadliest predators on Earth. Humans, right?

No, the other one. I mean, it all actually happened completely by accident. I never planned to become a filmmaker at all. It was a childhood fascination with sharks. First time I saw them was on television. I remember seeing them for the first time and thinking, holy shit, look at these monsters. But I also remember my parents telling me

not to believe everything you see on TV. If Superman can fly, jump off a bridge, don't do the same thing because not everything is real on TV. It's make-believe. So it took me a while after reading books, and this is way before the internet, I was born in 77. Jaws came out in like 75, two years before I was born, so sharks were kind of getting amped up in the media.

The only good shark was a dead shark kind of thing. But for me, as a kid, I saw that I was just like utterly fascinated. And basically that basically led to a, just a lifelong obsession with wanting to get close to sharks, learn about them. But my dad, he was like, dude, if you want to get close to sharks, instead of becoming like a marine biologist and ending up working at SeaWorld or struggling for money, become a businessman, you know, make a ton of money, and then play with sharks nine, 10 months out of the year and work for two months out of the year.

But I never was into business. I never liked, it just wasn't something I wanted to do. But anyway, long story short, I went to college, four different universities, Florida Tech over in Melbourne. I started in Marine Bio, but after the first year, I like peaked into the graduate students in the window. And they're in like white lab coats looking through microscopes and, you know, writing papers. And I thought, no way. I'm not doing four years of university. And then another two years of undergrad or go for my PhD just so I can get close to sharks.

So I quit that major, went into photojournalism because I always loved cameras. I always loved just like I never thought about doing it professionally, but I always loved just capturing things. So anyway, my mom was a paranoid schizophrenic. This is all over the place. But bottom line is I changed my major again to psychology. I don't know why, but I just wanted to learn more about crazy people. When I was 11 years old, I walked into my house and my mom threatened to kill me with a butcher knife. And it was unsettling as like an 11-year-old kid walking into the kitchen.

Hey, Mom. And you could tell if she was frightened. And she grabbed a butcher knife, backed away and said, who the fuck are you and what are you doing in my house? My older brother, Danny, walked in directly after me and said, Mom, it's Andy and Danny. My brother's name is Danny. My dad's name is Danny as well. And my mom like snapped out of it. And I always knew my mom like was a little bit off as a kid because she would hear things.

She would see things. I would hear her swearing and like and threatening or just it was weird. She would literally have visual and auditory hallucinations. But as a kid, my dad kind of like sheltered us from it. Didn't really tell us a whole lot about it. But just living with her day to day, I started to realize, okay, my mom. And it kind of became a thing with my friends. Your mom's crazy, dude.

She would also buy us beer, and she was a cool mom. But my friends were afraid of her because she did have these episodes, right? So anyway, back to the long story short. I studied abnormal psychology. And this is in Florida? No, so I should have, yeah, I bounced around too much. Florida Tech was my first year. Then I went to University of Pittsburgh.

I was born in New York City, but I grew up in Pittsburgh, so I had a lot of friends there. went back to Pitt, and there I jumped into this photojournalism psychology degree. I went on a semester at sea around the world. It's like a trip or a program that University of Pittsburgh used to run. Now I think it's through, like, University of Colorado. But you circumnavigate the world on a floating university, basically a cruise liner that was converted into a college. And we went from like Vancouver to Japan to Hong Kong. Vietnam, India, Cyprus, Greece, Israel.

When we were in Egypt, there was a terrorist attack that killed 73 people. It was targeted at our ship because it was Americans. This is when George Bush Jr. was president. It was when, this is in 97, when, like, terrorism was starting to hype up. Anyway, after that semester at sea, I was, like, I was completely changed. I had traveled around the world as, like, a 19-year-old. and then I was sick of the East Coast. The only school still accepting applications was Long Beach State, California.

I loved sublime. I loved California girls. I was never good at surfing, but I skateboarded a lot as a kid. And I got accepted there, and I finished out my last two years there, but it was like this crazy renaissance degree where I had a major in psychology with a minor in biology. Anyway, right out of school, my brother gets me a job at a software. company in San Francisco during the dot-com bubble, making like $70 grand a year out of school as a psych major in the year 2000 was pretty good money. I had a little Motorola flip phone. I learned a lot

about networking and ghosting computers, and I got my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineering certificate. But it was probably the most mindless, boring-ass job. I mean, it wasn't that bad, But the whole time I was Googling and learning about sharks. Plus, I was out by San Francisco, the Farallon Islands, Anionuevo. It's like the Red Triangle, Great White Shark Territory. So one of the dudes I worked with, software engineer, I said, dude, if you love sharks so much, because that's all I did was talk about sharks, he's like, you've got to get scuba certified.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, obviously. So in 2000, I got my scuba certification in Monterey. And on my very first open ocean scuba dive, while I'm with my dive buddy, he's learning his skills and I'm supposed to be paying attention. My mind drifted and I started thinking about Great Whites because it's Great White Shark territory. Visibility was horrible. I'm looking around and thinking I might see a Great White and then I turn around, I lost my dive master. I lost my dive buddy on my first open ocean dive.

So it was kind of embarrassing. I had to surface. They were there like, what the fuck, bro? Where'd you go? Oh, I just got, you know, dazed. I just lost my train. I thought I was thinking about sharks. They're like, dude, don't talk about sharks.

We're here. So anyway, I don't even know what the question was. Oh, filmmaker. After two years working in software, I had Googled all the Great White Shark research teams around the world. The Farallans had a research team. South Australia had a research team, South Africa. And I reached out to all of them. I said, hey, guys, I'm a software engineer guy, but I love sharks, and I know a lot about them through the internet.

Plus, I have a song about them. I wrote a song back in 2000 called The Great White Shark. song and it's about if I was a great white I wouldn't bite you but I swim right next to you and it's about surfers about spear fishermen about like mistaken identity it's supposed to be funny but it's also supposed to be like real

and this research team in Cape Town they're like dude this is the funniest song we ever heard like you're welcome to come here like if you want to come we can't pay you so I moved to Cape Town when I was I think 22 and working as an unpaid research cameraman taking photo IDs. They were doing like a population study on Great Whites

because every Great White has a unique dorsal fin. It's like a fingerprint, but a fin print. The trailing edge is unique on every single one. And visibility in Cape Town is horrible often, but the dorsals break the surface so you can get great ID shots like fin ID shots. Anyway, while I was there, National Geographic came down to make a documentary about the research it was going on. And the director's like, hey, I heard you have this song about Great White Sharks. This Great White Sharks song played for me. So I played it for her. She's like, this is amazing, man. Why don't you join us on the rest of this documentary up the coast of Africa to Durbin and all the way back down to Cape Town? And at the end of that shoot, she's like, do you want a job working for National Geographic?

And I was like, hell yeah. Sounds amazing. So it was just right place, right time, you know, your own luck by being there. But I never thought about becoming a filmmaker. I just wanted to be a great white shark researcher. Yeah. But not like in a traditional academic scientist way. More like swimming with them, diving with them, learning about them. And that's kind of how I got my job at Nat Geo, which then I eventually went to the dark side to Discovery Channel.

Shark Week. It's pretty hyped up. Why is that the dark side? I mean, Nat Geo always had this like yellow. border club, like this refined like we're better than everyone else because we're these explorers and 1888 was when

it started. So they kind of had this upper echelon like, and I can't, I'm not talking, I love National Geographic. I think they do amazing stuff. But now their television network chases ratings just like anybody else. They have Shark Fest like Discovery has Shark Week. Well,

when I say Darkside, Shark Week was always kind of seen as like jaws and claws, hyping things up for ratings, scaring the hell out of people, blood and guts so that people would watch. And as you know, like in media. Fear works, fear cells. Fear wells. If it bleeds, it leads kind of thing.

But I also realized, like Discovery Channel was doing 20 to 30 hours of shark programming every single year. And as a filmmaker, I mean, there's no other animal on the planet. Grizzly bears, maybe one or two documentaries a year, if they're lucky. That's crazy. Lions, the same thing. crocodiles, king cobras. I've worked on all those films, but sharks, between Natio and Discovery,

40 plus hours every single year. I mean, you're a filmmaker. You start out as a filmmaker, right? Yeah, yeah. Surf films, I mean, there's not a lot of money in it, and there's not a ton of them made, but it was like your passion, right? Yeah, yeah, 100%. And do you still, you still make films?

No, not at all. No? I haven't touched a camera. I haven't pulled focus on a lens in probably 10 years. But you worked with Zookerini and he worked on Dolphin Tail? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's how I got into doing this podcast for sure. Well, it's funny enough, I actually, I got into using cameras, like, just filming me and my friend surfing and skateboarding. And that led to, and I had an underwater housing to film surfing. Okay. So, and that led to, I had a bunch of friends with wealthy parents who loved sport fishing. Okay. And I eventually got invited out on a fishing tournament trip to Puerto Rico where I was jumping off the back of these sport fish boats to watch them pull up Blue Marlin.

Oh, wow. And with my underwater housing. And that led me to actually getting a job shooting a competitive fishing TV show with ESPN. And then that's kind of like how my whole thing spiraled. Okay. And then I met Pete on Dolphin Tail, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

ESPN, I got a funny story. I was in Australia Working on a Great White Shark documentary And I get a call from ESPN Hey Andy, we hear you're in Australia Yeah, yeah Hey listen Would you be up for shooting a sequence with Mick Fanning?

Oh, no shit. I'm like, well, I'll be straight up with you. I don't, I don't, I've never filmed surfing And I don't surf like I don't Oh, it's not that hard, you can do it. So I think for a second, I'm like, well, I'm telling you right now I've never filmed surfing. You want me to film one of the greatest surfers on the planet.

They're like, it's easy. He's going to be surfing at Snapper Rocks, like out by his house. Yeah. Like, everyone gives him the ride away. Like, it's going to be fine. So I was like, all right, well, I wrapped this shoot on this date. I was in Western Australia over in Perth. And they're like, yeah, you just need to get to Kulangada and that's where he's base. So I'm like, sweet. But I had to get a different housing because I had a big Gates housing, super heavy, 50-pound thing.

And I needed to get like an aquatech, like a surf housing. So I organized the surf housing through Aquatech, and then it started to dawn on me. Like, I still, I got the camera and the gear, but I still don't know how to get into the right position. And when you see these shots of these dudes in the barrels, I'm like, how the hell do I get the shot without getting barreled as well? So I call one of my best Australian friends, a director, Maddie, he lives in Sydney. And I said, bro, I just got a job to shoot McFanning. And I'm nervous. I don't know. I mean, I can't do this. I need your help. He's like, bro, I'll fly up there tomorrow.

We'll go out the day before and we'll do a test run. So we're out there on the beach looking at the waves and he's pointing to where like people where they drop in and all this. And as we're pointing, who runs right in front of us? Mick Fanning. He doesn't see us, but he runs straight past the goat into the lineup to surf. I'm like, holy shit. He's like, dude, this is perfect. Let's get out there and like, see if you can get close to him and see like, you know, he doesn't know who you are yet. or if you're on the, you know, shooting him the next day. Anyway, man, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I went to the little surf shop to buy the little bodyboarder fins. I had the leash on the camera. Just trying to get out past the whitewater, the brakes, the waves. I was half dead by the time I got out there, let alone the hundred surfers all in the lineup,

trying to find Mick. I'm shooting on a fish eye, like eight to 15 lens, whereas you know, you've got to be super close. Man, it was embarrassing. I couldn't get anywhere near him or anywhere. It was useless. So the next day, when I met him, I told him, I said, hey, man, listen, just so you know, I've never filmed surfing before. And he kind of looked, oh, it's all good, mate. Don't worry, it'll be, it's easy. Just like, stick close to me and I'll cruise past you and get out there. He sees that I'm struggling. He went by a few times, but it was like, it was embarrassing. I didn't get anything. And he's like, listen, bro, we'll go back to my house after this and

I'll surf right in front of my, right in front of my house. I actually have a picture of it. No way. A picture that my buddy Matt took when I was trying to get close to him in the lineup. You can see my little head here. See if I can make this bigger. But Mick surfing in front of his house on this tiny little wave. I'm like half drowning, shooting him.

This was right in front of his house. No one was out there but us. But the most fascinating part about this to me was he had. he had just had that scare in South Africa at Jeffries Bay where the Great White Shark basically rolled up on him, got tangled in his leash, and then he got sort of, not ragdolled, but he got thrashed around. This was right after that?

This was maybe a few months after that, within the same year. And I remember floating out there with him in front of his house. And he asked me, finally, he's like, hey, why did they fly an American all the way over here who doesn't shoot surf photography. Who shot, who filmed, who shipped you out there? So I was there for Discovery Channel. Okay. But ESPN somehow knew, oh, Mark Healy.

You know Mark Healy? Oh yeah, I know who Mark He is. He's a big wave surfer and I worked on a shark project with him. And I guess he mentioned that I was there. So his ESPN buddy called me, hey, can you shoot this? You're already here. And like I said, I should have said, no. But I said, sure, but just so you know, never it is.

But when I was floating out there with Mick, I said, hey, bro, he's like, why are you even here? Like, why would they fly you already here? And you don't even film surf. He's like, oh, I'm working on a great white shark documentary. He's like, oh. And then I'm like, hey, man, I saw what happened to you. Would you ever consider doing like a shark documentary for Nat Geo or Discovery?

He's like, nah, mate, I'm sweet. He's like, I made it out of that situation unscathed. It didn't hurt me. It didn't get me. I'd much rather just leave it alone, like not think about it. you could tell he was still kind of messed up by it. We make predictions every single day about culture, the economy, politics, and all the biggest stories making the headlines.

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Have you ever had any crazy shark encounters as a surfer? Have you ever had any scares or any friends that have been investigated or bit or attacked or anything like that? I mean, surfing like over on the East Coast in the New Smyrna area, there's sharks everywhere. And I've surfed through like infested waters with like sharks hydraplaining all around me and stuff. But I've never been bit or anything. I've had them like run into my leg and graze me. But like those are little, you know, three foot black tips and spinner sharks. Yeah.

I've luckily never had any encounter with like a deadly shark surfing. A legit like thing that could kill me. Yeah. I mean, obviously a three foot shark could kill you if you beat you in the right spot. For sure. But, but no, I've never, I mean, what happened to Mick, I think that was in Jeffrey's Bay in South Africa when that happened live. I remember watching that streamed live. Bro.

Scary. And it was just like this boil came up. And I think it got caught. What happened was the thing was like sniffing him or checking him out, maybe swam right into his leash. 100%. And then pulled his leash down. 100%. And then he was just, you know, pulling ass.

The scariest part about that footage, though, was you see like a shark fin thrashing. And then a wave, a wave starts, raises up. The swell rolls up. And you don't see him anymore. Yeah, yeah. And I'm fully expecting to just see blood and white water and just like a blood bath. But then, you know, it subsides the wave, you know, reveals him again. And I think he's sort of, you know, punching it or struggling.

But that was the way I. interpreted. The shark, you know, unless they just like bite first, ask questions later, which sometimes they do. They just rock it up and they, this thing, I'm pretty sure it had seen him. It got closer. It got closer. It was getting close enough to the point where it might have investigated or bid him, but the leash made contact and then sharks don't really like when stuff touched them, you know? So it basically felt the leash freaked out, but then was entangled in that. I mean, it was probably his leash that potentially prevented him from actually getting bit.

That's insane luck. It was crazy, dude. And years later, I ran into Mick in the Bahamas, and he was doing that show. He finally came to terms. Oh, did he? He wanted to do a show about sharks. One of his buddies, director buddy, they did it for National Geographic. But yeah, man, sharks and surfing.

It's like, it's one of those things that's always in the back, it's kind of always in the back of your mind, especially a new spot. been to. I would imagine. I feel way more comfortable under the water with sharks and obviously being able to see them than ever floating at the surface. This year I did a sequence for Shark Week out off the coast of California where I'm going next week to Santa Barbara, a ton of sharks out there and I'm floating around in a kayak and there's 16 plus foot great whites out there and there've been reports of them hitting kayaks and knocking fishermen out. They're not trying to eat the fishermen, but they're very visual predators, and they hunt elephant seals off the California

coast. And I'm sitting there, like, more nervous sweating it that I can't see the shark. I'm dry at the surface on a kayak than I am, like, underwater. Because I would imagine, I've only surfed a handful of times very badly in, like, Hawaii, a few places, just really like easy, holly-euvre. I'm buddies with Mark Healy, and the first time I met Healy, was out in California, no, sorry, Guadalupe Mexico, which was a hotspot for Great Whites.

They've shut it down now, the Mexican government, for some reason. Oh, really? Yeah, I think the cartels are involved. It's like a weird sort of situation where they've shut it down. But anyway, I'm down in Mexico. I actually have some footage where I was swimming around on my rebreather outside of the cage, and I look up, let me see where I can find this, I look up,

and I see this this crazy crazy ass dude swimming with a great white shark and he was free diving like breath hold and he's swimming with the great white out of the cage

and I was out of the cage I did a lot of stuff on my rebreather where they'd come and check you out but there's one thing when you're completely submerged you're on life support you can breathe you're not like at the surface

having to pop up and go down so right at this shot this is a big shark called Bruce and I'm swimming I'm swimming out and I get this shot and then I look up and I see this random spear fisherman dude swimming with this great white. And it's Mark Healy. With a spear gun? With a spear gun.

He's shooting like something, a fish that are like on top of it or something? We were doing a show for National Geographic and Healy had been flown in on a plane to the top of Guadalupe, took a ponga around and he arrived without me knowing. I knew he was showing up, but I didn't know it was that day. Anyway, I pop up. I'm like, hey, bro. I'm trying to shoot some natural history here. I'm trying to shoot like a sequence with the sharks. And he's like, natural history, what's that?

And he's one of the smartest dudes I know. I think he was messing with me. And later I said, bro, just give me like 20 minutes. I'll be done. And I finished the sequence, got to the surface. I met him officially. And I said, bro, have you ever seen great white sharks before? He's like, no.

I'm like, so your very first great white shark you ever saw, you just jumped in and swam with it. He's like, yeah. So I'm sure you know, he's quite a charger. He's a gnarly dude. Oh, my God, bro. But yeah, man, I mean, sharks are my life. So you said this is Guadalupe?

Yeah. Now, is there an argument to be made that these guys are accustomed to seeing humans? Totally, totally. Anywhere where you get sharks that are being fed, whether it's chumped for fishing, chump for diving, they do. They become habituated. They're not stupid. They know if they can get a free meal and they don't get their heads chopped off or shot by, you know, by fishermen or abused. They're likely to come back.

So there is an argument that, hey, shark diving, you're habituating sharks to boats and they're going to go to boat and eat people. I can't say one way or the other. All I know is any time I get in the water in the ocean, whether it's along the coast, in the deep blue, I'm always prepared and ready if I encounter a shark. Because it's better to expect it than it to happen upon you. And I actually have a video of the only time I've ever encountered a Great White where I wasn't expecting it. This has got one fleeting shot of it. Oh, wow. The situation was I was off the coast of South Africa.

One of my best friends owns a shark diving business. And they dive at Aliwal Sholl. And he had a boat that was a husband and wife couple. They charted the whole boat. And he said, hey, you can go out with him and you can dive. So I went out to dive alone. I jumped in first, swam down, and the visibility, as you can see. How deep is this?

It's about 60 feet. So I'm diving down. And as I dive down, I notice it's like pea soup. It's green water. They weren't baiting. This was just going to be a reef dive for fun. Right. So I swoon down.

For people that are listening to this on audio, I highly suggest you pull up the visual on Spotify or 2 because this is going to be a very visual episode. Yeah, man. I swim down through this pea soup And I'm thinking, wow, this visibility is horrible And one of the number one rules When you're interacting with any predator If you have low visibility, If you're walking around in the Serengeti at nighttime,

You got to expect lions and leopards can see you very well. If you're swimming around in murky water with sharks, you have to assume they can see you better than you can see And they can sense you And they've got all these other ways to detect What you're doing where you are. Anyway, as I swim down on a descend, I'm like, damn, this visibility is horrible.

but it opened up on the bottom as you can see there's a bit of like somewhat visibility on the bottom but then I turn and I look and I see the husband and wife couple they're descending down and this is before I saw the shark they're descending down and they start pointing at me and I'm like what they're pointing frantically

and right then is when I turned around and that shot here I rolled immediately as soon as I saw it it was swimming up close to me but as soon as I turned it turned off and then I instinctually swam towards it it because they don't like, some of them don't care, but the majority of white sharks and sharks in general,

they like to be stealthy. If you call them out and you make eye contact and you swim towards them and you alpha the shark, so to speak, it doesn't always work, but usually they're like, whoa, everything in the ocean swims away from me. Everything's afraid of me, aside from orcas, obviously. But anyway, long story short, I turned around, I got that shot and I look back, the husband and wife couple,

they're gone. They went straight back to the boat, and they left. But yeah, man, sharks underwater make me way less nervous than like surfers. Like Australia. Australia has a pretty heavy shark. My algorithm on social media, as long as I can remember, has been, I would say, 80% shark shit. Because I'm fascinated with it as well. I mean, not to the point where I'm, you know, diving with them like you.

Right. We've got to change that, bro. I don't know. I don't know, bro. One of the things that I've been seeing a lot of lately is these drones that they have in Australia now, where they have these shark spotters that are with drones. And there's so many crazy videos of giant, like 16-foot white sharks swimming right up to surfers, like sniffing them and then just like circling them once or twice and then just haul an ass.

And they have no clue. Bodyboarders, surfers, like everywhere. You're about to see, if you feel like you're about to see, you know, the worst disaster of your life in 4K, from a drone, but nothing seems to happen. That's what's fascinating. And there's footage... See if you can find some of that footage, Steve. That's crazy.

Yeah, all over California, they have amazing footage of surfers and sharks. And there's never been, from what I understand, no one's ever captured a bite or an attack or any real... There's a lot of... Even on Rogan, he posted a shot of my buddy, Scott. He had a shot of a swimmer, swimming, and a white shark was swimming right. it up to him and got within like a body's length. Oh, I saw this. I saw this like last week, I think.

Turned off, turned away. Yeah. But, you know. Find the footage that swimmer. It was very recent. This old guy. I think it was in... Santa Barbara.

Okay, Santa Barbara. Yeah, it was an older gentleman swimming in Santa Barbara. And you can... It's the drone shot of this giant shark swimming right up underneath him. It could be from my buddy Carlos, another guy out in California. But they're documenting this like every single day. and there's never really been, there have been attacks in California for sure.

Like triathlete got attacked and killed. There's been a few attacks out near the Farallons, spear fishermen, abalone divers. It's usually people that are, you know, they're doing something that's, yeah, attracting the shark's behavior. Or they're in an area where there's seals. The body, or sorry, the triathlete was swimming with a seal.

Oh, yeah, not a great idea. Another, a random friend of mine through the internet, was foiling. I don't know if you saw the footage. of these foilers. They're off the coast of also, like, Ventura, and they're foiling, and this shark chases this foiler for like 15 minutes. It's chasing this foiler.

And then just recently, one of them got knocked off their board by a large Great White, like knocked off the foil. And the shark came back and attacked the foil and basically, like, ragdolled it, attacked the board in front of him. I'm going to be meeting up with them next week to do, like, an interview for, a YouTube episode about... Oh my God. But, I mean, they're like super visual.

They're highly attuned to, like, vibrations. And, but the thing is, like, every year, there's usually single-digit fatalities, sharks and humans. Right. I'm not saying it's like a... It's something you want to, like, you know, just sweep under the rug. But this guy right there, that pink...

Oh, this might be what you're talking about. Is that him? This is three days ago. Yeah, this is the one I'm thinking of. Yeah, here you can hear the audio if you throw it. You can throw these on your audio. You're doing a leisurely dip in the ocean. But what is lurking right under his body?

It's an 11-foot great white shark. The swimmer has no idea about the danger below. Watch as he just keeps swimming as the shark circles him. The unbelievable sight was captured by drone off the coast of Santa Barbara. The drone operator tries to alert the swimmer of the impending danger by lowering the drone. The swimmer flips and flips. floats on his back. Then he adjusts his goggles before swimming back to shore. His interview afterwards was amazing.

Who the drone operator? The Carlos Gowna scrambled to find the swimmer when he swamble to find the swimmer. He's about your boy. Needless to say, the swimmer was shocked to hear how close he came to disaster. Let's know what he says. It is an arm links away from you. We spoke to Gowna and the swimmer, veterinarian Dr. Noel Doussela-Muller. I've been around these sharks quite hit myself, and they can change on a die.

The interview I saw was the old guy on the beach, and he's like, you know, I was thinking, if this is my time to go, at least I'm going to be in my element doing what I love. That's cool. That's cool. I mean, I think about it the same way because a couple producer buddies of mine equate me sometimes to the grizzly man. You're the guy who got eaten by the grizzlies. They're like, hey, man, do you ever think about you might become one day the shark man, as in you're going to get consumed and killed by it.

You live by the sword, die by the sword, or whatever. And I'm like, how cool would that be? That would be the coolest way. Heart attacks, car crashes? That's mundane bullshit. Like, same time, I don't want to make the sharks look bad. But if I make a mistake and put myself into a situation where I give the shark the opportunity to make a mistake, or sometimes they don't make mistakes.

They know what they're doing. They know that you're not their normal prey item. Very, very rare. but there have been consumptive attacks on humans where sharks have eaten people. And it's not always mistaken identity. Sometimes it's just predators and protein. Like they got to eat.

Sometimes they realize, hey, I know this isn't a seal. That's not a dolphin. It's not a tuna. That says like Speedo or O'Neill or Bellarm. Carnivores are opportunistic animals. Yeah. All of them. Yeah.

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Actually, I had a crazy situation in Cape Town on a Shark Week shoot where we were having Michael Phelps. It was about him racing a Great White. We were never going to have him race the shark, but we needed him to swim 100 meters along the South African coast. And the weather was continually, it was really bad weather. It was, the weather was really bad,

and it was like constantly a game. They were shifting locations because there was big swell along the beach. We needed him to swim in an area that was considered safe, right? Because he's like the world's greatest Olympian, and we don't want to actually feed him to sharks. Anyway, one thing led to another,

the weather was so bad that the production team in South Africa. decided, you know what, we're going to have Michael swim at this beach called Fish Hook. And when I heard that, I was like, is this a fucking joke? This is a beach where two humans have been consumed by Great Whites in public. Like people filmed the video of their intestines getting picked up by seagulls. An old lady named Tina Webb was killed. She was like 77 years old.

She swam every morning along the stretch of Fish Hook, this beach. She was consumed by a Great White in broad daylight. People witnessed it. Like he ate everything. Everything. The only thing they found was her like red swim cap. A couple years later, this Zimbabwean dude Floyd Skinner, he was consumed in the same exact location, same beach, in front of a bunch of people. And it was horrific. Like people, like I said, they filmed like bits of his body getting picked up by seagulls. This is the same beach that Shark Week decided we're going to have Michael Phelps swim.

So Mike and I became buddies during this film shoot. And I had it, when I heard that, I'm like, bro, I need to talk to you tonight. Well, you just sold me on that episode of Shark Week, so I'm going to go home and fly. They were doing their job. Bro, I told him, I said, we have to have a meeting. I got to tell you that where they want you to swim is the last place you want to swim. So I had this secret meeting with him. I went to his hotel.

It was in Cape Town. He had two armed guards outside. His agent was there. His wife was there. I go, I didn't tell anyone from discovery this. I just said, bro, I got to tell you, the place they want you to swim. read this, the International Sharkitect Fowl, check it out. Two people were consumed.

It's a difference between like just getting investigated a bit, you know, maybe lose a limb, but to be completely consumed by a Great White, this beach has some freaky stuff going on. Another person lost their leg there, but there is like, I do believe in this theory. I don't want to say it. Fish hook. Steve, find this on a map so we can look at it. And it's spelled H-O-E-K, Fish-H-O-E-K. South African or Afrikaans version.

But I lived in that town for six months when I was working with a research team in False Bay, which is the Air Jaws territory where they breach out of the water and this whole Polaris, like amazing jumping behavior. But yeah, it's pretty freaky fish hook, yeah. That's it, huh?

So people witnessed, you know, from the rocks. Oh, wow. Right there off the Cape Town. It's like a crazy little bay, right? Yeah, that little bay. So now that it's funny they have that red thing. They've set up fishing, sorry, not fishing, shark nets. And now that it's protected.

But right along that like where it says fishermen's watch, there's like rocks. And people were witnessing the shark consume these people from these rocks and from the beach. Why do you think there of all places this happened so many times? That's what's weird, man. There are certain beaches around the world, like in Australia as well. There's certain places that there have been more fatal attacks and more negative. encounters than other areas. I've actually been wanting to do a film about it for the networks that I would go to these locations, dive in these places where people have been fatally killed,

to say, oh, wow, there's this massive channel. There's a gutter down here. There's this perfect confluence of like the perfect storm of deep water, food, and a hideout. Like Great White's love to hunt, you know, and sneak up on things. If it's a flat sandy beach, often where you see this footage of the people swimming and they're cruising, it can be relatively shallow. But if there's deep drop-offs and they can hide and they have enough, you know, basically trajectory and momentum to come up and breach on something to ambush attack, they're more successful, they're hidden, it's stealthy. So I've always wanted to do a film about the sharkiest, bloodiest beaches in the world. It sounds all hyped up. But if we could learn, like, what makes a place more dangerous

than another place, even use AI to predict like shark attack, what's the word, predict like negative shark encounter probability. Like if you factor in bad visibility, temperature, the presence of bait, wind, current, moon phase, all these things play into effect when it comes to predators and their hunting abilities and their success rates. So I think it would be amazing to use AI and you go to the beach like, wow, it's kind of like a red day as in like this is more likely to encounter a shark hunting today than it would be, but we don't want to scare people.

I mean, that's one of my favorite things about the planet is that humans, we're these apex alpha predators, but we can also get eaten by prehistoric dinosaurs any day of the week. Highly unlikely, but totally possible. Well, also, there was that beach in Egypt where that guy got eaten alive a couple years ago. That was heavy. A couple days before that, someone else got bit or attacked. I don't know if they died or lived, but apparently there was like a string of people who had life-threatening shark attacks on them in that same little stretch of beach.

And apparently there was like sheep carcasses being dumped offshore right there they found out later. I've heard about that. And there was footage of that same pregnant tiger sharks circling around that little fishing pier earlier in that day. Right. So she was pregnant. They were dumping dead animals right off the coast there. So, I mean, you have kind of like the perfect alignment to have something like that happened. It's true. If you dig into the details, like even in Australia, they had three attacks. None of them were fatal.

No, I'm pretty sure none were fatal, but three attacks that happened within like 24-hour period. It could have been a 48-hour. I think it was three attacks in 24 hours. But when they dug deeper, there were these torrential rains that pushed all of the, like, the junk and all of the, when things wash into the ocean near a river mouth, like it drives like Predator Prey Act. There's more bait fish. There's murky water. There's lots of things. So the last thing you want to do is swim near a river mouth right after it's rained. And you see bait fish jumping because you get small fish. It brings in bigger fish, which brings in the biggest fish. So sometimes common sense will prevail will keep you safe. But then sometimes it's just like wrong place, wrong time. But like you were saying, you've you've surfed amongst a bunch of sharks, but they're not of the species that are really targeting. human-sized prey that I've seen at least yeah well exactly yeah yeah because Florida's getting more and more great whites Florida's getting it seems like just from I don't free dive anymore I haven't freed freed I haven't dived or free dived in years okay um but I have lots of friends who do it every day right and it's this seems to be the consensus that there's just more and more sharks more and more shark activity more and more sharks being seen and caught um in Florida and and this is not

Just like watching videos on Instagram. This is like hearing it firsthand from people I know who are out there. Right. And, you know, and I know for a fact spearfishing probably has a lot to do with it because I've been told that they can just go offshore now and just start popping their bands and sharks will start coming around. You know, because they're accustomed to the sound of those spear guns going off. And I'm sure it's a confluence of things. I heard, I don't know for sure. Steve, maybe you can like chat GBT this or something.

but ever since, I think long line fishing for shark, like the commercial shark fishing was like really pulled back in Florida. Right. The population has started to come back a lot. Right. And now it's like now that it's, you know, maybe reaching a homeostasis, people think that that's too much.

Right. And, you know, that combined with everyone spearfishing all the time and, you know, trying to, you know, they target these sharks. Like, you see the videos of these guys. swimming down on giant bull sharks. Shooting cobia off these bull sharks. It's just like, what is wrong with people, dude? I've seen people out of Catalina.

I was with them shooting giant kingfish yellowtail off of great whites. And, you know, I like taking risks. I've done some stupid stuff. But, like, I mean, at some point, like Darwin, right? He loves, he loves, what's the word? He's got a big appetite for dumb people, right? And if you continue to do like sketchy stuff, like you may pay the price. Yeah.

But at the same time, it makes life interesting. And it also shows that sometimes these sharks, they can definitely distinguish that you're not something they normally eat. You're not something they want to eat. But if you test an animal enough, you might, you know, end up on the wrong end of the bite. But back to the Great Whites in Florida, I run my own research project off of Naples. and this is some footage. It's at this place, I don't actually really want to say the specific place,

but it's 30 miles offshore at one of these Navy towers. And I have these ultrasonic listening stations, and this thing can detect sharks that are tagged that will transmit their serial IDs to this device in perfect conditions, like Lake Tahoe conditions. It can transmit up to 2 kilometers. A lot of scientists aren't going to believe that, but you can ask the manufacturer,

and they said that in perfect, like crystal clear, perfect clear water, they can transmit up to 2K. But on average, you're getting about a kilometer or less. And if it's bad visibility, murky water, there's turbidity and weird, like, different things in the water you get less. But something fascinating that I discovered at this location, I detected two great white sharks, one that was tagged in Cape Cod, another one that was tagged in South Carolina, both like a thousand miles apart or whatever that distance is, pretty damn far. Cape Cod, South Carolina, and over two years apart. But the craziest thing is both of these great white sharks showed up at the exact same day, on the exact same night, within an hour of each other, at 10 o'clock at night, on this offshore rig system, this Navy tower.

And people were like, where was this thing again? 30 miles off of Naples. Oh, my. Yeah. Two great white sharks tagged two years apart, 1,000 miles apart. and they showed up at the exact same night within an hour of each other in the dark.

But if you've ever dived out at these locations, do you know what's out there? Massive 800-pound Goliath Grupper. Huge Goliath Gruber. They're protected. You can't shoot them. You can't kill them. You can't fish them.

They're super balzy. Nothing messes with them because they're protected and they're the biggest thing out there on the reef. So if I was a great white shark and I knew that there was 800 pounds of protein that was cocky, slow, hanging out in a predictable environment, in a predictable place, I would go there, and I would hunt them at nighttime because white sharks have, you know,

they're really good at hunting and low light levels. And if you have a prey item that can feed you for a month and it's easy to catch, and Goliath, yeah, they can suction in fish and split their spines in half, and they're very powerful, like, suction feeders, but they don't have big sharp teeth. Like, they're the perfect meal for a great white shark. I can't prove it, but... Have you ever... Is there any evidence that a great white's ever eaten or preyed on Glythe Grupper?

Is that normal for them to hunt a bottom fish like that? Oh, yeah. Oh, really? Sharks, gray whites in particular, they start out eating fish and other small sharks and stingrays. And as they get bigger, they're like teeth calcify. They broaden, they get more serrated and they need more calories. That's when they start hunting mammals. And that's when they get elephant seals and tuna and dolphin.

I don't think I've ever seen footage of them actually, like, eating in the wild. I've only seen footage of them like eating from a chumps lick or like eating you go. Here's footage from, uh... I mean, like when they're trolling the stuff behind, you know what I mean? Decoys? Yeah. Oh, I take that back. I've seen them eat seals, like, like launch on seals, but...

Like, this was a sequence I shot out at Guadalupe with the Great Whites feeding on these elephant seals. And once they, and elephant seals, they're hunting subsurface because elephant seals can hold their breath for like, geez, something like, two hours. They're one of the longest, the deepest diving, longest breath holding. This is a female elephant seal. And I actually had planned to get in the water. Healy was out there with us when we were capturing this. Jesus, look that thing. I then decided it was reckless. It would have been stupid to get in the water. When you mess with an animal that's in full feeding mode and they're hangary, so to speak, the last thing you want to do is like interfere with that and then end up. Especially when you're downstream of the slick, right? You want to be.

You want to be out of the blood slick. Totally. Totally. But, you know... That's crazy. They seem scary. But in reality, like, all these TV shows, they play, you know, scary music when sharks are feeding. Think, and it's always in slow motion.

I mean, it's a pretty small percentage of their life where they're actually, you know, hunting and killing. They've got to do it to survive. How long can they go without eating? Nobody really knows for sure. But there have been reports of, like, over a month, up to three months. They've tried to put a great. white shark in a flume, which is like an underwater treadmill. They use it to like, what's the word, analyze or speculate on its metabolism, like how much it

needs to eat and how often. So it's like an underwater treadmill, like with currents, and they'll keep animals in there and they'll feed it a certain amount and then they'll measure its weight and they try to determine how much it metabolizes food and how often it needs to eat. But no one's been able to do it with a big shark, like a great. Great White. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of science is, you know, speculative.

They don't really... It's so hard to measure these things. Especially animals that, like, travel between continents and, you know. Right. It is so strange that those two white sharks that were caught in Cape Cod and South Carolina within the years of each other ended up in the same spot and the same day, at the same time. Within the same hour.

At nighttime. And I dive at that location. That's that footage of with the receiver. This is the receiver that detected. those great whites. Right. That's so bizarre, dude. And it's funny, though, when I'm out there, I'm often thinking like, you know,

what would happen if unrolled up on me. But, you know, really, if there's food for them to feed on, they're usually going for things they normally eat, and they want to go with the path of least resistance. Like humans can, with a spear gun or, like, you know, just they can inflict damage on a shark if they really wanted to, if they see it coming. But, man, like, this is from a strong.

Australia. This was swimming with these two great whites that I believe are brothers. We went back 14 months later and these two sharks were still swimming side by side. No way. And they have like this weird like formation where they and if you look close like their lower caudal lobe, their tail fins have like these matching birth marks. Oh yeah. Look at that. And what's crazy is like in the scientific world there's really no like they don't really believe that sharks have like family units or that they live within a family unit or cooperate. I mean they're starting. to be evidence of it, but like orcas. Everyone knows orcas hunt in a pod. Right. And whales have family units. And they also communicate. We know how they communicate. Yeah, exactly. Whereas sharks, they're pretty mysterious. Nobody knows for sure. But like, I'm convinced that sharks, like if you think about it, Great Whites can have up to 14 pups at a time. Like one of the this one. And if you look up, you'll see the boat about 75 feet up there. And I'm not even wearing fins. when I got out this day, it was a day I decided that the Viz was perfect,

the sharks were calm, I saw these two brothers swimming around, and my friend's in the cage filming me, and he refused to wear a full face mask, so he couldn't talk to me. Usually I have someone saying, okay, on your left, there's a shark coming behind you.

So I just had to be constantly looking behind me, looking at him, and just sort of keeping my head on a swivel. This one was getting close enough where I pet it just to let it know, like, hey, sometimes it lull you into this sense of false security. Will they get closer and closer and act like they're not aggressive?

And then occasionally they'll lash out. But these guys were curious more so than aggressive. What does that do when you reach out and touch them like that? It just reminds them like, oh, whoa, that thing just touched me. Nothing touches me. I mean, everything in the ocean swims away from me aside from Orcas. And these guys, I just kind of wanted to remind it that, hey, like, I know you're getting closer. I know that, like, you could eat me if you wanted to.

but I'm trying to get back to this place soon. It's off the coast of Western Australia. It's actually if you looked at a map of Australia and you cut it in half right down the center of the Great Australian Bight, there's these amazing group of islands where we think it's a ppping ground, it's a feeding ground, it's potentially a mating ground.

It's out in the middle of nowhere, so it's a lot of privacy. Like if you think about it, if you want to get it on with your girlfriend, you don't usually want to do it publicly. You want to find a place with some privacy. So it's a special spot. Do we have any ideas on how they communicate with each other?

I mean, they definitely use body language. Like basic, like when they're pissed off, they'll show their teeth and they'll gape and open and close their jaws. Sometimes they'll drop their pectoral fins and hunch their back. Like smaller sharks will show like agitated swimming posture. Like bull sharks. Yeah. And Great Whites, they often just like open and close their mouth and show their teeth. And then they just start acting more twitchy.

Bull sharks especially, they'll like, you know when they're pissed off. They like start to like twitch and you're like, okay, you're the boss. And there have been reports of bull sharks like retaliating. They get pissed off. People, if they pull their tail or they mess with them, there's a cameraman that was actually filming a Nat Geo sequence. They caught this bull shark. They put a camera on its fin. And right when they released it, the shark was so pissed off.

It swam straight down to the cameraman and bit him in the ribs. No way. And he survived, but it was like the shark retaliated. He's like, bro, you guys... How big of a shark was this? I think it was like a solid eight-foot bull. Bit him in the ribs. Bit him in the ribs.

And he lived. And he lived, yeah. How bad were the wounds? I wasn't there, but this guy's name was Nick Callionis. And he, I'm sure he continued to film, you know, after he recovered, but it was a pretty, pretty hefty bite. I've never been bit. I've never had my, I've had my cameras bit. I've had my Fin's bit.

My wife, who's here in the other room, people always ask, like, what's the scariest thing that's ever happened to you? The scariest thing that ever happened to me happened to her right in front of me. She almost got decapitated by a tiger shark in the Bahamas. It was a feeding situation, meaning we were baiting the sharks. It was her very first time with tigers. I screwed up. And funny thing was, this was like when the GoPro released the Hero 2. So this is like 10 plus years ago, maybe 15 years.

It was a long time ago. And I remember telling her, like, she wanted to shoot stills and some behind the scenes. And this was before YouTubers are like the shit, you know. I was like, babe, don't film like a YouTuber, like shaky and all over the place. I said, just hold your shots. Let the shark enter frame, exit frame. Don't just constantly follow it. Try to tell a story, like, reveal it and, like, make it mysterious, like it should look on television.

So that's exactly what she was doing. This shark was swam up over her head. She was letting it leave frame. But I forgot to say, like, never take your eyes off of the shark's head. Like, never stop looking at its mouth because, like, you can hold the frame, but still, like, follow the shark's face. Anyway, I forgot to tell her that. It swam over her head, turned its whole body, and put its entire mouth. Our bottom jaw here and its top jaw here over her little blonde head.

And all I could do is, I wasn't, she was probably about as far as the screen there. all I could do is scream, what the fuck? Like how I couldn't believe she didn't realize what was happening. And when she heard what the fuck, she actually thought she was in the shot. Mark Healy was there, actually. Mark Healy swam down.

He's got the best shot of it. I wish I had the shot. When GoPro saw the shot that evening, because it was for GoPro official, a corporate shoot, to release their dive housing, they watched the shot because they weren't in the water with us.

It was Healy, myself, my wife, this Italian supermodel that base jumps, topless. It was a crazy shoot. Healy got the craziest shot of this shark trying to bite my decapitate my wife. And as she heard me say, what the fuck? She pushed it away just like reactively. And Healy swam down and he was free diving, so he was much more agile.

I couldn't get to her in time. And he grabbed onto the shark's dorsal fin and like double, double fisted riding its dorsal like aggressively to scare it off. And it swam out of the area. What? And we all got back up to the surface. And Healy said himself, he's like, dude, that's the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life. And he's done some pretty sketchy stuff. This is on video?

This is on video. So GoPro, when they saw the shot, they said, we have to delete this. If our bosses, if Nick Woodman, if anyone ever sees this footage, they'll never let us do anything fun ever again. But you kept it, right? I kept it. But the craziest thing is, I can't find it. No. This is years ago, right?

And I wanted to, I always said that I would never release it because it does kind of make the shark look bad. It makes us look bad. But now that I'm sort of getting into YouTube, I thought this would be a great way to deconstruct the behavior, teach people how to not lose your head, so to speak. So what I do find it. It's a good educational piece. I will let you know. But it's funny, this was like, I had it on an IMA. That's crazy that it put its head or its mouth around her head and didn't bite.

Completely. Well, it was about to bite. But they have these. But that's a quick reaction to be able to like... She had a 5D camera. So she's filming it and it was going, going. And she was waiting for the tail to leave frame. And the craziest thing, her last, like, the shot is, like, the shark's tail all crinkled up.

It looks like a billion years old because it was completely contorting his body to bite down on her head. The other thing was we were using Mahi-Mahi as bait. And we had one bait, a bait wrangler, like getting the sharks to come close so we can get cool shots to them. But he kept pulling the bait away from them. And this bait was like a big white piece, big filet, a big white filet. And my wife had long blonde ponytail. So when it swam over her, she was also like, you know, kind of in the mix of all the chum and all, you know, the current was shifting like we were talking earlier. You don't really want to be in the mix of the chum and the scent and everything.

Either up current or far, not down current, but up current to stay out of them. You don't want to smell like they're prey. But she kind of got in the mix of everything. the shark tried to bite her. Its whole nicotating membrane they have these eyelids that great whites roll their eyes back so they don't have that

but tigers have this nicotating membrane. It was based like a zombie shark. Both of its eyes were completely white. Its mouth was open. My wife's little head was there. So for like months, I had nightmares. And she had no idea how bad it was

until that night she saw the footage and like she's already super white and bonded. So you had your camera on her? Well, that was a funny thing. I had a camera that literally had like every GoPro format. It was like 12 different cameras. Oh my.

But the thing is, when I saw it happening, the shot starts on her. But then I was like, babe, what the? So the sharp shot pans off of her. I didn't get the shot if her almost getting bit, but Healy got it perfectly because he was wearing a GoPro head cam swimming down on the whole situation. And it was getting closer and closer and closer. But you see her save herself, like bump the shark away.

you see that in Healy grab the shark by the dorsal and like really aggressively pull on it, yank on it, so it swims out of frame. But man, for months I had nightmares because I thought, man, I had just met my wife. I'm not even sure we were married yet. But I just read the headlines like Dickhead cameraman feeds his wife to tiger sharks because didn't tell her like, you know, how to interact with the sharks properly. I was more focused on the film work than the safety of my wife. but she forgave me. I think tiger sharks scare me the most. I think I'm a much more terrified of tiger sharks than I am of even Great Whites, I think.

Really? Yeah, even though I've never been in the water with either of them. Right. Just from... Well, you have. Well, I have. You just haven't known it. Just not wittingly, right?

Yeah. I think just from all the footage I've seen, I would be... It seems like the Great Whites are more chill. It can be. It can be. And the Tiger sharks are more just like... I mean, other than, you know, there's... people that do like all kinds of dives and swimming with tiger sharks and stuff,

but those are very well-fed tiger sharks, right? Yeah. And they're very accustomed to humans. Yeah. And Ocean Ramsey off of Hawaii. She's a good friend of mine. And the thing is those sharks she's interacting with, she has for decades, right? For years and years and years.

And they are used to people. But a completely wild tiger shark is a completely different animal. Totally. And when they want to, and they're like the ultimate generalists. They're like the Swiss army knives to the sea. They'll eat anything that they want to. And they even did studies to determine, like, Great Whites will hunt at a seal colony in the early morning

because, like, if you think about it, the sun rising on the horizon, it's like a flashlight. It's illuminating the surface really well, and air-breathing mammals are perfectly lit up. As the flashlight or the sun moves up, it starts to penetrate, the light levels start to penetrate deeper into the water. And the seals can start to see the sharks. The whole water column gets more bright,

and everything becomes less stealthy. But Tiger, so Grey Whites will use, like, the light levels, and they'll be early morning hunters late afternoon at Seal Colonies. But Tiger Sharks have known to be, what do we got there? Give me one of those. You want one? Yeah. Is there out, nicotine pouches?

I like them. You ever do those for it? So recently a company called, like, Ultra, they reached out to let me try these, like, Oh yeah, I do Ultra. I have Ultras too. Yeah. But I didn't get quite the same buzz as, uh. Yeah, well, the ultra ones aren't nicotine.

They're in like, Neutra. or whatever. New tropic stuff. They're great. They're awesome. They're just as good as those. They're just like sometimes I switch them up. Okay.

But what was I saying? So Great whites are pretty predictable in they're hunting. You're saying when the sun is low on the horizon, that's when they like to breach surface? Yeah. Okay. Because the seals breathe and porpoise at the surface. They're cruising. And as like the sun gets higher in the sky, the gig is up.

Seals are hypervigilant. They know that there's sharks out there trying to kill them. Right. But if they can't see in the low light levels, but they're being illuminated perfectly by like a sharp angle of the sun, it's the perfect advantage of the sharks have to see it, but not be seen. As the sun gets higher, they can be seen by the seals and they evade the situation. I'll show you a shot. One of my best predation shots that I got, it is, what do you call it? I had to crop it to vertical for whatever reason.

But this was a, I'm going to keep the music off too. This was a shot of a Great White catching a seal early morning Right like dead center nailed it And it's basically, you know, game over for the seal But that shark came up from like 50 feet below or even deeper And as the sun gets higher though, they lose that advantage But yeah, it was all pull up the wide shot at some point Has anyone never tried to strap a camera to a great white to see it go down

And then come up on We have the POV from the seal I want to see the POV from the shark. So I put cameras on sharks all the time, and I have put them on multiple Great Whites. I didn't load up anything on this one, but I never got to kill. I did get footage of Great Whites following big schools of tuna.

Great Whites, when the camera fell off and floated the surface, they went up and chewed on the camera. But I never got a kill. For a Nat Geo show, we did put cameras, these things called Catscams on Great Whites, but the thing was they were put on so tightly that sometimes the show. sharks were just breaching to take them off.

Oh, yeah, yeah. To shake them off. But this is footage from, like, the Bahamas on a great hammerhead. This was just, like, last year. And I love this thing called cinema science, where you're using, like, cinematography to help illustrate science. Whoa, that's... Whoa, dude.

That's a 360 camera. That's incredible. An Insta 360 with a great hammerhead in the Bahamas. And I've been doing this... This is the coolest thing I've ever fucking seen, dude. man, thank you. But it really gives you that like secret life of sharks. You can see it here trying to like shake it off at first.

It's totally non-evasive. It doesn't hurt them. But look at that little fish hanging on at the tip of the dorsal. It's like hanging on for dear life. But what's interesting and what's proved, what's proven is like they're not like the shark comes back to us. It comes back again multiple times. Right. If it was like detrimental to the shark or it was in pain or not interested.

it would flee and it would go and find a way to shake this thing off, but comes right back to us and then starts playing with the divers again. Obviously, we're giving it an incentive to hang out. We're giving it tuna or snap or whatever. And I know it's controversial, but to be honest, people at fish sharks, right? They're baiting, they're chumming. But I would much rather people bait sharks and take their picture than bait sharks and chop their heads off and sell their fins.

I'm not against fishing. I think fishing is cool. If it's sustainable and you like fishing, I grew up fishing. But sometimes there's malice towards sharks and they hate sharks. The only good sharks are dead sharks. Well, everyone's got their own agenda. Right. With sharks.

Totally. And, you know, obviously the Jaws movies were like a huge part in shaping culture and people's perception of sharks and how people perceive sharks, right? Oh, yeah. Paying them as this boogeyman. Right. And then you have, you know, the complete, it's just like, my thing is I don't know if the equal opposite it is the right answer either.

Like obviously, that wasn't a fair depiction of sharks as being this evil boogeyman that are just out to kill every human, right? Right. And it instilled this, this, you know, unbelievable fear in people who really didn't have any person, any interaction or any experience with sharks in real life. But like, then you have the Ocean Ramsey girl who is just like, these beautiful teddy bears. They're so gorgeous. I love them.

Like, it's like, that's the, that's an extreme. They're not that. Right. These things are killers. Right. These things are predatory killing machines. Right. So, like, if you come across a tiger shark and you're swimming, you know, in Hawaii,

don't treat them like that. Yeah. You're going to not, it's not going to end well. I mean, she does say herself that they're not puppy dogs and they can be dangerous, but she's developed like this relationship with her. I'm sure you saw the, or the shark whisperer. the documentary on Netflix. They did a whole sequence on her about...

Oh, really? It was kind of like my octopus teacher where that guy went diving with his octopus for years and years and developed their relationship with it. Ocean kind of has that with the tiger sharks there, but she will admit that not everyone should do this. People give her a hard time because they're saying, oh, well, you're inspiring people to go out and pet sharks and this.

It's like, listen, if you're dumb enough to see someone jump out of an airplane, some Red Bull diver, and base jump off a mountain and then you go out and try it because you saw it on TV. Darwin has a massive appetite for morons and he never forgets to eat, right? So if you're going to do something that you saw someone else do and you have no experience doing it, go for it. That's called evolution. It's like we need dumb people to die to prove to the rest of the world that, like, you shouldn't do certain things.

I'm not saying that like it's good to set a bad example. I don't think that she is. I think that she passionately loves sharks. they kind of need humans on their team or we would decimate them. If that Jaws mentality, the only good sharks, a dead shark kept the momentum that it had. Because right after Jaws, you were a hero. If you went out and killed a shark and strung it up at the local dock, you're a hero. You're making the beaches safer.

But it got to the point where people started to realize, okay, they're really, they're not malicious monsters. They can kill you. And there have been, obviously, there's fatal attacks. But for the level of fatalities and the reputation they have, it's like they have the best marketing team on the planet. They kill less than single digits every year, yet they're the biggest baddest motherfuckers, monsters ever to have lived. Whereas you look at mosquitoes or any other thing that kill way more people,

they don't have a good marketing team. They don't have Shark Week and Shark Fest and all this other. At the same time, it's way more scary to die from a great white shark, you know, biting your leg off than a good. mosquito bites. Right, totally. It makes sense. But people do give, you know, certain, like, I'm not a scientist, but I've been published

twice in nature, which is like considered, along with science, like the highest journal of scientific publication ever to exist. All because of my fin camera work. It's been published for a tiger shark. This is the sickest thing after you. Oh, there's so much fun. You did this to a tiger shark, you said? I put them on tigers, great whites, obviously hammerheads, nurse sharks.

Maco, but Maco's are really hard because they're so fast. Macos are wild. Yeah, they're badass. You see Manny Pugg hand-catching Miko sharks? Yeah, I've seen him getting bit by, I think, a Maco. He's been bit by a Maco, a lemon shark, Caribbean reef shark, and a nurse shark. Wow. And he said the worst one was the nurse shark.

Oh, really? Out of all of them. Because it just wouldn't let go? It wouldn't let go. And he ripped it off, and it took the skin. with it. And he said it was like they had to get a skin graft on his leg and stuff. He also told me that, I don't know if this is true,

he told me that a six foot nurse shark has the same jaw pressure as a thousand pound great white. It's possible. The thing about nurse sharks is they feed on like crustaceans and they crack like crab shells and they're focused. They don't really have sharp teeth. They have like grounded, rounded teeth that are like meant to crush and like pulverize.

So they need a lot more crushing power than like a Mako or Great White, which has a bunch of like... Avalanche of razor blades that like they can just cut through anything like butter. Yeah, look at these things. Oh, yeah, that's crazy. You know, what's also crazy is that whale sharks, if you Google whale shark eyeballs, whale sharks have teeth, these dermal denticles over their eyeballs. Because they're big, slow moving and they have huge eyes and they really can't protect themselves from...

They eat with their eyeballs? No, they don't eat with their eyeballs, but their eyes have these dermal. Dermal Dentacles that protect their eyes from getting bit by any sort of fish predator. Well sharks have dermal dendicles, tiny teeth like scales on their eyes to protect them. Can you find a better photo, Steve? Or do they have like maybe like a like so this is like actually on? This is on like the eye lid or like? On the actual eye.

That upper left, the very top left keep going. Right there that shows like dermal denticles like the tiny like little. Yeah, right there, the tiny little teeth. It's basically like an armored eye. Right. And I don't believe any other sharks have that setup. Because they're so slow and they're not agile. Like little fish could nip, nip away at their eyes.

They have similar teeth, like pulverizing teeth and they're filter feeders. So they don't have like any sharp arsenal to like scare, you know, predators away. Evolution is so fucking crazy, dude. It is crazy, man. It's like, it's like an alien dude. Like for real. It's insane to think that we've explored more of the moon and Mars than we have of our own oceans. It's nuts.

You know? And, you know, we got guys like Elon looking to like go to Mars and build and send people there. But like I kind of wish they would spend a bit more money on the ocean and exploring like the deep, like the Marianas Trench. And you got James Cameron doing a lot of work in that. But I kind of feel like there's a lot more to discover on planet Earth. Kind of feel like some people are writing it off and we need to find a business. bailout plan, but I mean, the ocean, like, they say like up to 70% of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. So often when people ask me, like, why are sharks important? Why would

I care about this monster that can kill me and bites people and kills children? And like, that's the funny thing. People think that sharks are man eaters, but they also eat women and children. So that's supposed to be a joke. But the reality is like sharks, they're balancing the oceans, right? And without the oceans being healthy, we have less air to breathe. whether you live on the mountains or in the deserts, like you're breathing oxygen that's supplied the majority of it from our oceans. So, like, I always try to get people to care about sharks in that respect. They're a super important piece of the puzzle, right?

Like, they eat fish that destroy the reefs and, like, they keep everything in balance so that the thing of the whole entire ocean can sustain itself. And, like, they've been here way longer than we have. Yeah, before the dinosaurs. And when you talk about the fish, like, some of this footage from my tiger shark fin cams. I'm not sure if I have the tiger shark stuff here. But they, we discovered in the

Bahamas that like tigers, like this is a big ass tiger in the Bahamas. Dude, some of the Bahama, Tiger Shark attacks, freak me the fuck out. Which ones? I saw one. I've heard of a few where basically like people have jumped in the water in the Bahamas and the tiger shark

literally like bit them in half. There was like a recent attack when I say recent within the past like two years that never really made the news, never really made the public. It happened on a Bahamian boat that was registered in fucking Mongolia. I heard it was like near one of the pig beaches where they have the pigs running around. Yeah, I'm not, I was pretty sure it happened out at Tiger Beach.

Oh, okay. Where this photo was taken. And from what I understand, there was an Austrian diver. She was a pro. She had like a fancy camera. She had dived there multiple times. The current shifted. And their boat, instead of just swimming straight to the swim.

swim step and going, you know, ascending 20, 25 feet or whatever, they had to swim like 150 feet back to the boat against the current. Oh, no. With multiple tiger sharks in tow because they had been baiting them a whole time. And one of these tigers grabbed the girl by the arm. And it started trying to ragdoll her. The dive masters, people swim over to help her, but they couldn't get the tiger to release. So the story is they just fucking left her.

And she was basically dismantled by the tiger. she made it to the surface, started screaming for help, and then the reef sharks got involved. Like whenever there's a frenzy, again, they're not like targeting humans, but their predators were protein when we are to them. And basically, they tried to deploy a tender to go save her, like a small boat, and they never got to her.

They found like her BCD, her tank, but essentially it was like a consumptive attack that was started by the tigers and then finished by the reefs. Again, I'll never sugarcoat sharks. Do you have this? Steve, is this thing connected? Oh, yeah. They're definitely, you know, formidable predators.

They're not malicious, but they're certainly capable of whatever they want to, really. And I was saying earlier about the Tigers, an interesting tactic that they've used and has been documented is that they're super crafty. They know that if they show up every morning on a reef, the turtles will start to habituate to their presence. And turtles are very anti-predatory. They don't want to get eaten. So instead of showing up at the same time and being predictable, tigers are using this pattern of complete unpredictability.

They'll show up at the reef at two in the afternoon, three in the morning, 12 o'clock, 5 o'clock. They show up whenever they want so that their prey can never develop a sense of like, okay, we're safe right now, let's feed. Whereas like Great Whites and Seals, the seals know like early mornings, very dangerous for us late afternoon. But I mean, it just shows the intelligence of tigers

where they're just like, I'm going to keep you guessing. You're never going to know when I show up. And when I do, I'm going to eat whatever I want, whenever I want. That's why when you said tigers scare you the most, they do. They certainly can be scary.

What is that one in the back with that huge dorsal fin? So that's a great hand. hammerhead actually. Oh, okay, that makes sense. And that's what's cool to me. You'll often get like multiple shark species out at this location, Tiger Beach. You get tigers, lemons, reefs, great hammerheads, nurse sharks, and they're all like kind of just hanging out with each other. I mean, obviously, we're there humans and we're, we're incentivizing them with bait. But this has been going on for decades. And again, I know it's like a controversial thing to

like be provisioning wild animals, but I just kind of feel like, I don't know, I mean, people provision and they bait them to kill them. So what's wrong with baiting them to take their photo? Right. And nobody is going out to Tiger Beach to go for a swim. You just don't want to mix the two. Yeah, there you go. You don't want to have people that are fishing for them or like chumming them up in the same spot that you're trying to get photos and take tourists down there.

Right. And then if you do, like people are expecting to interact with the sharks. It's one thing, and that's the other argument, it's like, well, what if you have a family that just happens to go out there and they don't know that this is a shark feeding zone or a place where people have been habituating sharks? Yeah, I mean, I'm always kind of like trying to see both sides. But at the same time, like, again, whether you catch them and kill them or bait them to take their picture, I would always, like sharks are way more valuable alive than dead. That one tiger shark, this shark, Emma, has been diving with people for 20 years. And people, the economy in the Bahamas, like the billions of dollars generated by keeping sharks alive as opposed to a finite, let's kill the shark, take its fins, sell its meat. It's dead forever.

It's never coming back. Right. Where, like, if money rules the world and people realize it's a sustainable resource, and there are sharks that can be fished and commercially harvest for, you know, food. but in the U.S., not a lot of people eat sharks. No, not that we're aware of at least. Yeah, I mean, they're Mako are on the menu or whatnot, but the thing is, like, they're top predators and they're eating other fish that have contaminants.

Like, Macos eat a lot of tuna, and they eat other top predatory fish that accumulate mercury. Yeah. So if you eat a lot of shark or a lot of tuna, you're eating a lot of, like, heavy metal contaminants, which can make you sterile. So, like, I think, like anything, there's a balance Yeah, it has a big neurological effect too.

Exactly. Have you seen the documentary The Cove? I have. By Rick O'Berry. I have. I got trained to free dive by Kirk Crack, who was part of that documentary. He was helping train those guys on rebreathers. And yeah, I actually learned, like we were talking about Zougarini, he's a big free diver.

I wanted to up my game as a filmmaker. So I took a free diving course with Performance Free Diving International over in Miami. And it was funny on like the first day, they teach you these breathe-up exercises. And on the first day, I already increased my breath hold, like, doubled it. It went from like a minute and 10 to like two and a half minutes. And then by the end of the class, I was doing five minutes of static apnea where you're just in the pool holding your breath. Just like relaxed. Relaxed.

Yeah. I hit like five minutes in one second. And then you start like doing the samba like you're basically passing out. Like you do jihitsu, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like when you're getting choked out and you're fighting and then suddenly you just, you start to go limp. But anyway, a funniest thing was I was so fascinated by this breathe-up technique like a dumbass on the first, second or third day of the class.

I was driving back to my hotel on like Collins Avenue in a rental car. And I thought, hey, man, I'm so impressed with my breath. I'm going to hold my breath while driving the car. I get through the first. I hold my breath at one red light. The next red light. The next I wake up. I wake up.

I had my, I passed out. My foot had slipped off the brake. I hit the car in front of me, which just so happened to be a smart car. But I just, like, rolled into it because my foot rolled off the brake. Right. But as I came to, I went to hit the brake and I hit the gas. And I pushed this smart car, like, two car lengths, like, into, like, an intersection that they had just stopped, luckily. And I came to, and I'm like, holy shit.

I jump out of the car. I had my, like, performance free diving manual on the front seat. So I ran up to this lady, like, I'm so sorry. I was holding my breath. And, like, she just puts the fucking window up, takes off. and luckily... She took off? Luckily, there was no damage to her.

Like, it was literally like I was right behind her and I rolled into her and then pushed her and I think she had her foot on the brake. Anyway, the next day I went in and I told Kirk who worked on the cove. He said, bro, I got something embarrassing to tell you. I was driving home yesterday and I decided to do the breathe-ups and hold my breath in the car. He's like, what? And I'm like, yeah, and I kind of got into a car accident. He's like, what the fuck is wrong with you?

I'm like, well, you never told us to not, you know, practice in the car. So now apparently in all his class... as he tells people, like, don't be an idiot. I had this student that help. He apparently doesn't name me by name, but it was me. But yeah, man, have you trained free diving? Not like officially. I never took, like, an official class.

But I've done a lot more free diving than I have done scuba diving. Okay. Like, I was certified to be, I got certified in scuba diving. And I've done quite a bit of it. But I prefer free diving. I'm just not good at paying attention to all the little thing, all the little like equipment O-rings and gauges

and like there's so much more that can go wrong scuba diving. Oh yeah. Free diving's like you know when you're in danger, right? You know how much breath hold you have, you know how much you can handle. Until you don't. Until you have a shallow water blackout. Right, right. So like eventually when I was young I did a lot of scuba diving

then I eventually just started doing mainly free diving because I had a better handle on my own limits that way. Right. And all those scuba diving It's just, you know, it's like being down there for an extended period of time is like nothing else. You know, that's a very unique experience being able to do something like that. Totally. And like, I've had a lot of close calls scuba diving. Really?

Close calls. I like, well, like one of the most recent ones were, it was like one of the last times I actually scuba dove was I was actually shooting some stuff in the Cayman Islands on like the big, there's a big wall there that drops off to like thousands of feet from the reef. Okay. So like the top. of the reef's like maybe 90 to 100 and then it like just goes off into like a vertical drop to like I think a thousand feet there's a big trench right there off grand camon yeah yeah I've heard of it and um we were shooting that and then we were coming back like probably 190 feet or maybe like 100 to 90 feet maybe like 95 feet something like that going through this like tunnel inside this reef or whatever

and I was just focused on my camera just getting the shot the whole time and I wasn't paying attention to any of my gauges. And we're like 90, 85 feet, I'm inside this cave. And all of a sudden, I sucked it dry. What? Yeah. Dude. And I found, I found this, I looked up this hole. I just started hauling ass to the surface. You were alone? No, I was with much people. Okay. And I started hauling ass. And then as I started shooting up, my buddy grabbed me by my fin and like, stop me. Yeah, he saved me. And then he gave me his octopus and I was fine. We had, we obviously had to do a safety stop because it's deep as fuck. So you were going to go straight up from 85 feet? I was going to go straight.

I wasn't thinking. I wasn't thinking at all. Damn. How long goes ahead? That was probably, fuck, dude. That was probably like 2008, nine around there. Damn.

Yeah. I've got a few out of breath. Yeah. I mean, you know what it's like more than anyone just to get lost in getting the shot, right? Oh yeah. And when you have to worry about also staying alive simultaneously with all these gauges and stuff, it's a lot.

It is a lot. It becomes like second nature, but that's the thing. I rarely will look at my gauges, but I'll start to feel like, okay, it's getting harder to breathe. I'll pay way more attention when I'm deep, deep, like deep water. But if I'm shallow, I know that if it starts feeling harder to breathe,

I've got like about a minute until I got to get up. But it's a stupid way to think about it. It's better to, like, look at your gauges. But you can get caught up in not like... I got actually a shot here where I got out of the cage and I was focused on just focused on the action. My buddy was in the cage, and I didn't see this is a selfie camera,

but this great white was biting the top of the cage. My buddy's there. And then it was coming up behind me, and you can see it really briefly where it's like head was, it just swam over top. But here you could see it like coming down, coming down on me, like turning off. But I saw it at that last second,

and looking up at that, it was um oh my god bro oh my god dude it was funny man i mean because my i wasn't paying attention to the anything but what was in front of me my buddy was filming it and then it was like a little duck i don't think it was really going for me but if i didn't turn around um in time it it may have and as a cinematographer you like this this was in new zealand this is an insane shot bro this was in new zealand i said this to steve last night in new zealand oh the back of the boat with the Phantom, that Flex 4K, and the shark was just kind of creeping up to the back of the swim step and dropped it in the water.

But it was like just kind of just hovering there. Did you know he was there when he dropped the camera? I saw it, but I wasn't expecting this, like, this cool reveal of the shark to kind of like show up in that little perfect, perfect little reveal there. But New Zealand is a place where they, you don't mess around. I've been there, I've been there, going every year since 2013. And just this past year, I got out of the cage. And I lasted less than 60 seconds to where I just, and I was also alone, meaning, again, a guy was in the cage watching me and I got out. Oh, you were free diving?

No, I was on scuba. Okay. But you weren't in a cage or anything? I was, but I climbed out the front of it. And I used the back of the cage. It's kind of like a soccer goal. Like, you can kind of not have to worry too much about behind you, except for that shot. I just showed you, where the sharks bite in the cage and, like, swim over.

Like, you can never let your guard down. I think you always just have to be hypervigilant if you're going to be swimming with Apex predators that, like, specialize in killing shit. Yeah. I don't think that they're out to get me, but they're definitely, you know, definitely no joke when they want to be. Yeah. And then this, too, man, just to go into the, like, these guys obviously eat great white sharks for breakfast. I never want to admit it that killer whales were. Orcas never, is it true, no documented attacks on humans in the wild?

In the wild. Only in captivity. SeaWorld all day long, obviously. But in the wild, there's never been, they have had Orcas swim up to, like, spear fishermen and crayfish or like lobster divers in New Zealand and grab on their little catch bags, like pull on their catch bags. But there's never been a reported, like, attack. Isn't that interesting? It is. It is fascinating.

Like they're, it's almost like this weird mutual respect that they have for us or something. Or they're just, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Like, if I was a killer whale, I would sample a human just to see what they taste like or play with it. Like, they're so intelligent they, you know, bat their prey around. And like even just swimming with these in New Zealand, it was intimidating. But knowing that they've never attacked someone in the wild was like, what do you call it? Just reassuring that they, you know, weren't going to. eat you until you become that first guy. There's also a bunch of different types of

species of orchas, right? There are, yeah. That prey on different types of foods. Like there's some that prey on rays. Exactly. And they're like cultural. That's what I never knew until I worked with a scientist in New Zealand. Ingrid Visser. She's a badass. She's like the orca lady. And like in New Zealand, they are... Ingrid, what's her last name? V-S-E-R. She is crazy, like in the good way, but she's nuts. But she taught me that orcas are very cultural and that the ones in New Zealand, they focus on eating sharks and stingrays, but they won't eat seals. Whereas you go off the coast of California or Patagonia, they love eating seals and whales. I'm actually going to Norway next month to dive with the killer whales off of the fjords there where they're hunting herring.

Wow. And there, they're fish eaters. Whereas in California, they're whale and mammal eaters. And then South Africa and in New Zealand, they're focused on sharks and stingrays. raise. It's weird because you think why not eat a seal if it's there? And they're just like, it's a cultural thing where they're taught and they're raised in a certain way where they, like this guy swim up to me like he was giving me trying to offer me part of the fish that it was hunting. But yeah, man, I think orcas are impressive. Isn't it also true that some orcas, like, migrate

long distances and they don't stay? They're like, they're transient. Transient orcas. Yeah. And some of them like, to stay in a... Some of them are resident and they'll show up at the same place year after year. Whereas other ones like, yeah, they're transient

and they're offshore type. There's the ones in Antarctica that focus on, you know, hunting the seals and the crab eater seals. Oh, yeah, you've been to Antarctica, huh? I haven't been to Antarctica.

Oh, you haven't been to Antarctica. I've just seen that footage, but I have not been there. I was invited a few times through National Geographic, but it was always over Christmas. I'm a family man. I got kids.

I don't want to miss Christmas. Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, I love my job. But, you know, TV's always going to be there. Right. You can always get another jump. I got to miss Christmas and I got to swim in like 10 degree water. Freezing ass water.

Exactly. But yeah, have you ever encountered Orcas? Never. I've heard lots of stories. Like I've heard Manny talk about some of them. Another guy, Forrest Galante. He said he jumped in a pod, jumped in front of a pod. And they circled him.

The little, you know, there was like a, he explained there was like a big bull in front with a big giant tail or the big giant dorsal rather. Yeah. And then a bunch of the little. baby cows or whatever, like we're circling around him, checking him out. He said he got within like 10 feet of them. They were like big eyeballs looking at them. And they eventually just like got bored of him.

Like this guy's fucking boring. I'm out of here. Well, that was a funny thing that Ingrid taught me. She said, if the orcas get bored with you, which they will, she said, just act weird. Act erratic. Act like you're injured. Start swimming with one fin and swim in a circle. So all this footage I captured off the north coast of North Island and New Zealand.

And when I first jumped in, they swim right up to. me and checked me out. And they were like swimming around and checking him, I was pretty nervous. And then after about like 40 minutes of getting cool shots, I was struggling to get them to come close. So then I did what she told me. I started swimming with one fin and acting like was injured and instantly. They're like, what's wrong with him? What's wrong? And they

swim over again and you're checking me out. And I was like, why do they do that? They're like, they're just smart. And when things change, they notice. So she told me to like bang on my housing and swimming circles and act weird. And then I started realizing, wow, they're getting a little too close. I'm going to start acting more confident

and relaxed again. Yeah. But it is fascinating that never attacked anyone. It is fascinating. Did you see this stuff that came out I don't know when this was reported on but there was apparently some fishing boats where these orcas were attacking it like systematically?

Yeah. They just did a show this year on Shark Week about that where they are... What was that about? The rumor is or the reports are that one of the baby orcas had a negative encounter with these boats out there. Like, they harassed it or they, they ran into it or they, it got entangled with some of the lines

or something. And the, the, the patriarch, like the mother and dad orcas, the adults witness this and they're like, vengeance. They're like, fuck these boats. They almost killed our little, our baby. And so they go out there and they ran boats. They disabled the rudders. And it's like a thing.

Like, they have become like vengeance. Wow. They don't like boats out there. But Ingrid would know best, but yeah, they definitely don't like boats. And they're trying, they've sunk a few sailboats out there. But I don't think they've ever. But they never, like, killed the people. Never injured the people.

They're just taking the boats out, which is weird. Yeah. Yeah. That's super weird, man. And it's, you know, the whole, the whole seaworld thing, what was the documentary that came out about the orcas of sea world? Blackfish. Yeah. Like, it's crazy to me that people still go to SeaWorld after that, you know?

that people would still go and like witness this. I feel like in, you know, a couple decades from now, people are going to look back at that. Like, same way we look back at like slavery. Oh, yeah. Like, how the fuck did we do? Like, you're driving these animals mentally insane that have like incredibly high intelligence that have brain,

you know, their cerebral cortex or part of their cortex is like four times the size of ours. And they're, they're measurably very intelligent. And their whole, their, their, their, their whole. home is the entire ocean. They swim thousands and thousands and thousands of miles where there are some species that can withstand being in an aquarium. They're like, you know, reef fish and fish that like don't travel between continents and don't need that exercise, so to speak. I'm not a huge fan of aquariums, but at the same time, there are certain, you know, what's the word, benefits where certain people can see something that they never would any other way.

Right. Kids that don't have the opportunity to go to the ocean. For sure. But again, orcas, one of the most telling things I ever saw was like a shot of SeaWorld from the Google Maps shot of it. And it showed the fucking parking lot, which was five acres for humans to park their cars to see the king of the ocean, the orca. And then they showed the orca's quarters, the swimming, the little tiny bathtub that they kept the orca in. There was five acres of parking lot and a fucking 200 yards for an orca to live. It's like, why don't you give the orca five acres to swim in and build another parking lot somewhere else?

I mean, it just shows it like, yeah, like it's basically a circus. That's what this aquarium down the street from here used to be, the Clearwater Marine Aquarium where they shot the Dolphin Tail movie. Okay. They found that, well, they originally found that dolphin caught in a crab trap with a car. crap trap rope wrapped around his tail. Right. And they amputated the tail and they tried to build a prosthetic tail, whatever. The movie goes.

Morgan Freeman was like a prosthetic guy and he built the dolphin the tail or whatever. Winter, right? Winter, the dolphin. So did you actually see? Did you, you worked on that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I worked on it with, that's how I met Pete Zucarini on that movie. And it was the most fun working with him because he did everything in the water, right?

Like they're in the, they're like, he was working in his own little world, apart from the other camera departments, right, who were doing all the stuff on land. He was just like doing all his underwater stuff building his, he had this housing he built that was like the size of a Volkswagen. Sure. Because they shot it in 3D. Oh, wow. So like they had these red camera rigs where they had two cameras pointing at this crazy mirror thing.

The beam splitter. The beam splitter. And they line up the two camera angles to make it 3D. Right. It was a bomb. The experience was insane. That was like my film school doing that. So why didn't you continue with that?

Why did you get out of filmmaking or? Are you still into it? So I was very, that's all I ever wanted to do was be in like filmmaking and make movies and that kind of stuff. And then I didn't, I wasn't, I never got into film school because I got shitty grades in high school. Okay. Okay. So I was always skipping school to go surf. Okay.

So I barely escaped graduating high school, like barely graduated. Barely, okay. And didn't get accepted to any film schools. And then I got the opportunity to work on that movie because I knew, uh, I have a friend who like has connections in clear water or whatever. And he's got me. He's like, hey, you could be a production assistant or whatever. And then I wheezed my way into being like an actual like camera department person. That's cool.

And then that whole experience made me realize I don't want to have anything to do with the movie business. Because of the Hollywood at like that. It was a to me like I worked construction when I was really young. That was the closest thing I'd ever done to work in construction. There was zero creativity. Yeah. In any of it. Every different department.

Every different department. Every different department. All these stupid rules. Yeah. Follow this, you know, schedule. So many moving parts. Yeah. You know, like my, my favorite.

part about that was like getting to like learn for Pete talk to Pete about like all the stuff that he's done see how he's building these camera rigs right explaining how he's teaching me all about like the light shafts and how like you shoot into the light shafts to get these crazy cool shots and stuff like that uh but all the dudes that I met with that were working on that like all the camera assistants there uh they came from you know the the the what is it the unions like the camera unions that are in Hollywood and And all these guys come from shooting one movie and go straight into shooting another movie. Like the guy, one of the guys I remember that I was working with closely in the camera department there, one of the camera assistants, he came straight from shooting the dark night. Oh, wow. To shooting this. Is this Neil? Jeez, what was his name? This guy's name was Mickey.

Okay. He was actually like one of the other coolest guys that I met there. Okay. There was a lot of really cool guys like Mickey and Nick, but there was a lot of other guys that were just. just miserable. Yeah. Just hated their jobs. They had the coolest job that any kid would dream of having.

Yeah. But like these older dudes who have been doing this for so long were just not happy. They, you know, were on their third wives and they never saw their kids. Yeah. They're facetiming their kids every day. Like that was like, that was the highlight of their day. The 10 minute face time they had with their kids that they never saw. Just like, and after that, I was just like, I don't want to do this.

Like, I want nothing to do with this. That's when I started doing everything online. And did you have a family at that point? No. No. But you knew that you didn't want to become that. I knew I didn't want to become that. I only worked on very, very few features.

And the one that I did, it was with, it was a Terrence Malick film called Mud with Matthew McConaughey. And I was a, I had a red, epic camera and I got a housing. And my buddy, Paul Atkins, he's like a multi-em-a-a-a-ward winning, amazing dude. He shoots a lot of stuff with Terrence Malik. Hollywood stars and he said, hey man, I want to use your camera and I'll hire you as a camera assistant and like, all you got to do is build the camera and I'm going to do everything else. I got a focus puller and all this. But I remember being on set in Austin and like I had to plug something in to charge batteries. And I went to go plug something in there. It's like,

whoa, whoa, bro. You can't move that fucking extension cord. That's electric. Your camera department. I'm like, well, I got to charge these batteries. Like, whoa, well, the electric's on lunch break and it's a meal penalty and this and that. I'm like, what is all this shit? And there were so many people there that weren't really doing anything. Right. But they're all following these rules that I thought the same thing. I'm like, screw this. I never want to work in this business. I love wildlife because a lot of people, it's a very small group of people. It's a team that wears multiple hats. You're shooting, producing, hosting, presenting, you're doing all this stuff and you have the freedom to like plug in your own batteries and do your own thing. And you're not

held to these like crazy union rules and schedules. I remember hitting up Pete saying, hey man, I want to get into shooting like some Hollywood stuff. He's like, no, you don't. He's like, kind of told me like, you got the perfect job. You're doing like the wildlife stuff. Now's your graphic shark week. Yeah. You get to have the fun and you don't have all these bullshit rules you got to follow. You don't get the health insurance and all these benefits you get from the union, but who cares? Like I'd rather be, I think Pete's got the job security is like they're big. biggest thing.

Yeah. They're so insecure about everything. I remember there's one day where Pete was in like this little pool and he was shooting, he was shooting like a close up of the dolphin. It was an animatronic dolphin that they were using like the stand-in dolphin for some close-up shots or whatever. And I took a photo with my cell phone. And the set photographer threw a fit.

Reported me. I had this right. up on me. This guy was crying to everyone that I took a photo and that's like threatening his job as the set photographer and all this stuff. And I was just like, dude, these fucking bitches. What a dick. Like, yeah, that just put a bad taste in my mouth. But like Pete's in it. He's, he's different though, because he gets to basically do whatever the fuck he wants, you know? Like being the, there's so few water cinematographers. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. Who really have like the creds that he has. He kind of gets a lot more.

freedom he gets to do. He gets to call the shots, right? Because he's, you know, he shot all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. He did fucking Avatar. I've seen that picture. He's the Cremdell Crem. He's like with Johnny Depp. His cameras right here, Jack Sparrow, and he's like two inches from his face. Yeah, bro. There are those, those cool, you know, the cool moments that sort of maybe make it worth it. But like, when you asked me initially, like, how did I become one of the top, you know, shark cinematographers? Like, again, it was by accident. It was because of my passion for sharks. I never, never even dreamed of working for National Geographic or becoming a cinematographer. I wanted to learn about the sharks and the tagging and genetics and their migration

routes. Yeah. And it was just luck of the draw that Nat Geo came. And then they sent me around the world to do king cobras and polar bears. I met my wife in the Serengeti shooting a lion film. So it was like it, and then I went to shoot, I've shot over 250 wildlife documentaries for Discovery, National DREa African BBC. And it's been the greatest career, greatest life accident that ever happened to me. Because it helped me meet my dream girl and create a family.

But there were many times where I had to say no to jobs because I didn't want to miss my son's birthday or my daughter's birthday or, you know, you have to kind of like, because I didn't get into it as a filmmaker or wanting to be a filmmaker, I just wanted to do it for the sharks and for the passion of wildlife,

it allowed me to say, no, I don't care about this film. Like, you hire the next guy. I mean, if you say no too much, then you definitely get phased out. But, like, even now, like, YouTube, I got to work with Mr. Beast off of Jupiter once, and he was doing this shoot. They hired me just to be, like, a shark logistics guy where I brought, like, these chain-mell suits, underwater communications, full-face masks, and, like, gave them, like, the basics on shark safety. And I'm like, so you sure I can't film? I'd love to. I even offered, my son wanted to meet Mr. Beast, of course. I said, dude, I'll do.

They were going to pay me like 50 grand to show up for one day and bring gear and do nothing but sit there. I said, I will do this for free if my son can meet Mr. Beast. They're like, oh, man, we get this all the time, but like we can't have minors on the set. Like if he's 18, maybe. So they, um, anyway, long story short, Mr. Beast comes out. We go out off the coast of Jupiter. He's got this little Steve McQueen backpack with like $100,000 in it. He's like, hey, he's like, hey, he's like, hey, you know, I'm off the coast of California, or I'm off here off the coast of Florida. This is $100,000.

Those are sharks, and he throws it in the water, and they did this, like, paper rock scissors on who had to get it, and, like, one of his subscribers was there, and the idea was, like, the subscriber was going to win the $100,000, but the catch was he had to go swim and get it amongst a bunch of bull sharks. Oh, jeez. They were never going to make him do it. They had one of Jimmy's, like, sidekick buddies do it, Chandler or something.

But it was funny. Mr. Beast was on set for, like, literally, 15 minutes. He got seasick. He did his like one line. He's like, this is $100,000. Those are sharks. He threw it in. Then he's like, get me out of here. He was really nice, really cool. He left his hat on the boat. So I stole his hat and I gave it to my, I mean, he's got plenty of hats. But I gave it to my son. So it worked out good. But I think YouTube is the way, like, is the way forward, man. Yeah. Totally, man. I mean, TV is definitely not going to be the future of this stuff. I mean, obviously there's going to be like a certain. niche for like very high level wildlife documentaries like what you're doing right but like I feel like most of the stuff's going independent you know with people self-publishing their own doing their own stuff yeah posting it online and you know especially like with the emergence of podcasting and all that stuff people can go out get the word out yeah and you know I think that's good I mean how did you get into the podcast world like to go from like working uh you know potentially to become a filmmaker

where you're working on Hollywood films to say, I'm not doing that because I don't like this lifestyle and all these rules. And then like surfing and everything else. Like what brought you to this point where you thought podcasting is like a great way to. Well, I was doing, I went from doing like the traditional stuff like being a camera guy for TV shows, getting hired to do that. That was like,

this happened for me like in the middle of like the reality boom. Remember when like Duck Dynasty was a thing and all those kind of shows? There was lots of those things. those shows were like little camera operator jobs were popping up all around Florida and I would get those and I would do as much underwater stuff as I possibly could. And eventually I got into like producing and like funding and like pitching TV pilots where I like come up with my own idea. Okay. And or like me and my friends would like come up with an idea and we would like all work together to try to like shoot something that we thought was cool. And then use our connections in Hollywood to try to like pitch it to TV network or not TV.

the production companies that had the relationships with the TV networks. Right. And then we spent, I remember I spent so much time working on a couple different projects. I got one project like all the way to a green light meeting with, I think A&E. Okay. Was like looking at doing it and it was like it got killed at the green light meeting. And I remember just being like so fed up with the emotional roller coaster of like, oh my God, this is something's going to happen. this is all going to pay off to like, no, nothing's going to happen.

This was all for nothing. One random exec doesn't like your idea. And it's like, nope, not happening. Like how was this show that you've put all this blood, sweat, and tears into for the last five years going to fit our advertiser. Yeah. Our list of advertisers that are currently paying us. So like such a backwards way of fucking doing it. It's so frustrating.

They're not even looking at the show. They're just looking at advertising revenue. Exactly. And then, you know, once they're not really buying your reel. They're just buying like the audience that could potentially be interested in that, you know? So I was like at one point I was just like so fed up I took a bunch of the footage that we had been working on for five years and I like re-edited it into 10 minute episode chunks and posted on YouTube. Okay. And that's what my YouTube started to take off doing that stuff.

And then I started branch out and do more kind of like weird little subculture, visey style documentaries and stuff like that. And one I did was actually in Madeira Beach, not too far away from here. John's Pass, which is at one point the group or capital. of the world. Oh, wow. Like, Moore Grupper was caught and brought in through John's Pass, which is like 20 minutes south of here. Okay. And we would always see these sort of like alcoholic dude, junkie fisherman dudes hanging out at this one bar at this 7, by the 711 all the time. And one day, me and my buddy were like, well, we decided to go interview this guy. And we started talking to him and whatever. He's like, he brought us back to his houseboat he lived on.

And we went on his houseboat and he had these like laser lights and he was blasting, like Metallica and Rob Zombie. He was like this little kid in a grown man's body who like, and he started explaining to us like what the whole fishing industry was like for him. I was like, how are you like this like homeless, drug addict, alcoholic, but also a fisherman? Like how does this work? And yeah, this is the, this is one of the episodes of the documentary. This is his houseboat right here.

So he had laser lights and fog machines and posters. He had a stack of porno DVDs like three feet tall And like living this crazy lifestyle And this is a random dude you like met outside Random dude we met in front of a 7-11 Yeah So we went we went to 7-Eleven We bought a 12 pack of bush

And we sat there and drank with him And just like hung out with him and watched him do his thing And it led us down this crazy rabbit hole The commercial fishing industry around here And it and basically like the way it works is guys like this, they're like the lowest rung of the fishing industry.

So there's like the people who own the quota, the people who own the fish houses. Then there's like the boat owners. Sometimes the boat owners are also the ones who own the fish houses. They own a bunch of boats. And then there's like these guys who are like the lowest level grunt workers

who are like doing all the hard work, like baiting the hooks and like putting out the reeling in the long lines and all that stuff. Getting paid the least. Getting paid the very, very, very least. And so when they're going out long lining,

they're gone for like seven to ten days at a time offshore. These guys, they finally come in, they hand these dues a couple grand, like five grand at most probably. And then they're on shore for a week, right? Maybe two weeks. Blowing all that money on. They blow it all on prostitutes, crack, booze, cocaine,

everything, right? Right. And some of them are just living out of hotels. And no one gives a shit about, them. They're just continuing to do this and be degenerates. Yeah. And then if they run out of money and they're all fucked up on pills and whatever it is, and then they're like, they run out of money, they have to go out fishing again. So they go knocking on all the fish houses. They try to get a job going out in a boat to catch more fish so they can

get more money to get fucked up. Okay. And when they go out to sea for 10 days, they like rehab at sea. They call it Chab. Oh, wow. So they're literally like detoxing at sea while they're fishing to get more money to rinse and repeat, right? For real. That's really good, man. And, um, so they're Like it basically like we we learned about this whole quota system on the golf with like the fishing industry here to where like it's monopolized to where now like to own the certain quota. The way it worked is like back in the day in like the 80s or the 70s it was just open fishing derby fishing. Okay. Like people could go out catch as much fish as they wanted. They come in.

They'd weigh it. And like it would be documented on how many pounds of Red Snapper or grouper that you caught that year. Okay. And there was an allotment, right? So they were only allowed to catch, just say, let's say a million pounds a year. So if they caught all of that million pounds by November, they had to stop fishing for the rest of the year. Right. So they changed it into this quota system to where the federal government came in and allocated a certain amount of quota to certain boats based on their previous catch history.

Okay. So there was guys that got handed like 100, 200,000 pounds of quota. every year by the federal government. Right. Right. This was like the best retirement plan known demand. Yeah. And then other guys got a little bit less quota.

Other guys got more quota. So a lot of these guys, since they got handed this, like, gift from the federal government of this allotment every year that no one else can get. Yeah. They started leasing that quota out to other fishermen. Right. And they can do that. And then they can do that. Yeah.

And then what happened is you started, they were able to sell the quota. So like dudes on Wall Street We're buying fishing quota And then leasing it out To people in the fishing community For even bigger prices For even bigger Yeah so like the money got less and less and less

Because people started trading the quota like fucking stock Where like they don't do that In other communities like in the northeast Like in Maine and stuff like that Where I think it's a law to where the boat owner actually Or the owner of the quota has to be on the boat Like at the helm catching the fish And it's more of like a...

They can't trade it like a commodity They can't trade it like commodity It's more of like a cultural family thing that they actually like, you know, they treat it more seriously in certain parts of the country. But yeah, anyways, we did this crazy documentary and it pissed off a lot of people. Is this still going on right now? I believe so. As then they still sell the quotas and they, and you said it pissed off a lot of people? It pissed off a lot of the owners of the fish houses.

Because it made them look bad. Yeah, it made them look terrible. Did you, I've had some running with fishermen who threatened to kill my family because I've been outspoken about the shark fishing tournaments. They're like killed tournaments in Alabama or off of Florida. And, you know, I'm pretty outspoken about, like, hey, it's fine for sport fisheries. If you're going to eat the shark, but just to, like, murder something for a trophy, I often, like, I'm pretty outspoken. But I've had multiple fishermen say, hey, I know where you live. Like, you can look up anybody's address in America through, like, the, you know, tax websites and anything else.

And when they started threatening my family, I realized, like, is it really worth to speak out about, like, trying to save sharks when I got people saying, I know where you live? and I'm going to kill your kids kind of thing. I would screenshot it and save it and report it to like Instagram or whatever, but like I never went to the cops about it because it was just kind of like, just like degenerate fishermen. I got nothing against fishermen. I think they work hard. There are some bad apples out there just like anything else where they're just malicious.

They hate sharks. They hate people that love sharks and they want to make an example of it. Yeah. And you were talking about these quotas. It's funny. Noah has this thing called the shark research fish. It's been going on since 2008, and it started with sandbar sharks, which they admitted were overfished and on the decline. So since 2008, Noah's been issuing these quotas up to 200,000 pounds of sandbar shark that can be caught and sampled every year to basically do a study on the size, the sex, and the abundance of sandbar sharks.

They've been doing it for 18 years now. How many years did they need to catch 200,000 pounds of sharks to tell how old they get and what size and sex they are? The craziest thing is these fishermen that get these quotas are allowed to sell the sharks. And the other bizarre and extremely, what's the word, suspicious thing about it is, Sandbar sharks have some of the largest dorsal fins of any shark species. Really? The coverheads have, like, the biggest dorsal fins with regards to their body ratio. But sandbars, which they admitted are on the decline and overfished,

have been getting these 200,000 pound quotas every year to fishermen that are allowed to catch them legally, kill them, and then sell the entire bodies, which in turn contain the fins. Like, I strongly believe it's, like, subsidized federal shark fin trade. Totally. Fishermen hate to hear that because, like, they're like, oh, bull. We have a permit. This is for research. But how many years do you got to murder sharks to prove that they get to this size, this sex, and they travel in these areas? Like, it doesn't make sense to me. There's also another quote of 100,000 pounds of large coastal sharks that can be caught and sampled. And this is NOAA? This is NOAA. Can you look that up, Steve? What was it called again? The NOAA.

It's called the NOAA shark. Noah Shark Research Fishery. Shark Research Fishery. Shark Research Fishery. where they're allowed to catch and kill these sharks for research purposes on a species that's already considered on the decline and overfished. It doesn't make sense to me. But if you think about it, the fisheries around the world are a billion, multi-billion dollar industry. Oh, totally. Even in Mexico, now the cartels are heavily involved in the tuna fishery.

It's basically like the drug trade, but it's somewhat sustainable where they can go and harvest all these tuna and everything else. The shark research fishery, yeah, it's like, So some of these are the fishermen that threatened to kill my wife and kids because I'm like, wow, this is messed up. Since 2008, you've been getting quotas of up to 200,000 pounds of dressed like the entire shark. Yeah. For research purposes, and they'll flaunt it.

They'll post pictures of them sitting on like hundreds of dead sharks and saying, doing shark research. But what's crazy is, like, they, it's approved. It's federal. It's subsidized. and they're allowed to sell the sharks after. So if I had a permit to catch and kill a bunch of sharks and sell their whole bodies, including their fins, I would be pretty stoked about it.

Yeah, that's very similar to, you know, how they do the quotas here, where it's like subsidized by the government. And, you know, the problem is when you get the government involved and you create this monopoly on top of it. Like, again, I have nothing, I have no problems with fishing. I've been fishing my entire life. And but the problem is when you start to give people like this, this blank check to to basically harvest this one pot of gold and they start making that money starts to blind you, right? And then people start questioning that like they're threatening your livelihood.

So it's like it becomes bastardized to a degree where like you're no longer, you know, looking out for the local community or like the, the, the lifestyle of fishing and like what that entails with everyone that comes there. And like, it's just you found this one niche where you can make a ton of profit. And you don't want people questioning that. And that's just human nature. And that's what started basically your YouTube kickoff where did you, did you foresee any of that? Or were you just like, well, man, look at these crazy Coke meth head fisherman. They're entertaining.

People will find them funny. And then you stumbled upon the quota system and then stumbled upon the Wall Street. Yeah, I had no idea that existed. But that's what people took notice of, right? That's what they were most fascinated by this dark underworld of quotas. I think so. Yeah, I think that as well as like, you know, these were some pretty wild fucking characters that we were interviewing and hanging out with. Like, it was entertaining as well.

And you think it's still going on today? I don't know. I don't know. I haven't really looked into it. I'm pretty sure that quota system is still happening. But like every single dude, every single there was a lady as well that were like we made subjects of that documentary. They're all dead. They were all dead within like six years of us publishing that thing.

Damn. Because they were all super strung out on drugs, you know? Yeah. It's not an easy lifestyle. No. But then I saw, so I was doing a lot of those documentaries like that and like other things on YouTube. And, you know, you know what it's like to make films and documentaries. It's not like a quick thing.

It takes a lot of time, a lot of editing, a lot of going out and shooting more stuff. and that's when podcasts, that's when I started to notice podcast becoming a thing. This was like 2015, maybe, 2014, 2015. And so we started doing just like me and my friends would do one podcast a month, two a month, maybe just like to fill the gaps. So we'd have more shit, more content on our YouTube channel. And then eventually the podcast just started getting more attention than the actual documentaries that I was spending so much goddamn time creating.

Right. And so my whole idea, with the podcast was like, I'm just going to treat this like the documentaries with no editing or B-roll. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So it works out. Yeah, it's way easier.

I can do way more. That's cool, man. Yeah. So, yes, the commercial individual fishing quota I-fq program remains fully in effect. All right. And allocations can be bought, sold, traded, often referred to as leasing. I mean, it's crazy, dude. The government does what they want, man.

And, like, when you speak out against it, like, I have a lot of good friends. that are, you know, bona fide, amazing shark scientists and marine researchers, and they, they collaborate with Noah. And they, you know, I think Noah does some good things. But I just, I'm pretty outspoken about some of their support of, like, this, like, sustained killing of sharks when they're supposed to be, like, protecting fisheries and studying them. But for 18 years, they've been killing 200,000 pounds of sandbar sharks every year, which just so happen to have massive dorsal fins. Yeah, that's weird. Very valuable on the, you know, the black market and whatnot.

But it's basically legalized. So, I mean, even saying this, people are going to get pissed. Like, oh, you don't know what you're talking about. We're doing research. It's important that we murder sharks for 18 years in a row to know how old they get and there's sex and size and where they hang out. But I don't know. Right.

It is what it is. The government's done way weird or shit, you know. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, even like that Cove documentary where those guys were going out and slaughtering all those dolphins in that cove. And, like, they were feeding that to all the public. public schools. All the public schools and the kids were getting this dolphin meat, which is super high in Mercury.

And it was creating all these health issues with people there. And like the Yakuza cartel or the Yakuza gang, whatever, in Japan, they were like somehow in on it and threatening Rick O'Berry. And like, dude, that was a crazy clandestine mission that they did for that film. And I don't know if that's still going on today or not. I think that the Taji dolphins, they still killing them. I'm not sure if they're still feeding them to school kids. And, you know, I know, you know, they still eat whales and this and that.

And again, like, I can see both sides of everything. If something's sustainable and well managed, then, sure. And it's not corrupt and monopolized and, like, just shady business going on behind the scenes. Then, sure, like, I'm not a total tree hugger, shark hugger. Like, if it's – you can always see both sides of a situation. But when it becomes, like, run by the underworld and the government's backing it and they're threatening to kill people if they expose it any further, then like it's pretty shady.

Yeah, for sure. I think it was, what was the name of the dude that we talked to, Steve, on the, we did the Patreon episode with him. It was Captain. He's the guy that's banned from the U.S. Oh, Paul Watson. Yes, Paul Watson. Yeah.

He was telling us about this one specific pirate ship that catches like a huge percentage of the illegal fish around the world every year. And he was explaining to us of like the entire seafood industry, like illegal fishing caught from pirates like this is like a vast majority of it.

Like more than 50%. Which blew my fucking mind, dude. Like the piracy on the high seas and the illegal fishing and like all over the planet. Like I mean, I'm not going to point fingers but there's certain countries that will fish just on the border of like

the maritime zones where they're allowed to and they'll sneak in at nighttime and sneak out. And there's people being paid behind the scenes to let it happen. I mean, it's like it's, yeah, the gold of the ocean. And when there's a lot of money involved, people will do whatever they need to to get it. It's pretty freaky. Yeah. And then like also that when it comes to the shark fin stuff where they're just slaughtering all of those sharks and bringing them in and just chopping their fins off and letting their bodies just like fall down to the shark. the bottom of the ocean. That's mainly in Japan. It's all over. I mean, Asia, like China,

Japan, a lot of the, you know, far east, they're big into shark fins. It used to be like where it was only for rich people. You'd have shark fin soup at your wedding. But then like the Chinese middle class exploded with, with money. And then they were able to afford shark fin. And then it was like at everybody's wedding. And it's like, if you're going to catch and kill sharks, like, you can use the entire carcass, the entire body for other things, even like dog food and weird things and makeup and all this stuff. But having a boat full of dead sharks as opposed to just a boat full of fins, you can harvest way more fins and store way more fins than you can having to land the entire carcass. Yeah. So it just doesn't make financial sense.

I wonder why they, you know, you would think that they would be able to make tons of money off the rest of the body, right? Like, why would they just discard it like that? But nowhere near what they can make on the fins. it's exponentially more valuable. And it's weird because it's like eating somebody's ear. It's like cartilage. It's just like a weird tasteless. They put like chicken broth on it to make it taste good.

It's just like rhino horn and like tiger penis and all the weird stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A friend of mine has asked me, he's like, hey man, you should develop something where it's like synthetic shark fin or some kind of shark fin that's made like that gives you the same effect, which is basically nothing. But I don't know. I never really wanted to get into like trying to. to sell even synthetic animal body parts. No, that's a weird thing. That's a weird thing that happens to you when, I don't know,

maybe when you like acquire enormous amounts of wealth, you just want weird shit. Weird shit. You know, like rhino horn to make your dick hard or fucking shark fin soup or whatever. Or like that. They have weird beliefs that these things do shit for them, you know? Yeah, exactly.

That's where it all stems from. But like, when you do the math or the science on it, there's like no nutritional value. There's nothing really it does. And when they introduce Viagra and all this other shit, they can get you hard and, like, the aphrodisiac effect that they think it has. But, yeah, there's some weird, there's some weird shit out there. I mean, I'm sure they can point fingers at us, too. Yeah.

I just, I don't know. I don't get, I don't understand psychologically the people that are, like, the trophy hunters, you know, that, like, want to, like, what sort of, like, hit, dopamine hit or what sort of, like, hit? or what sort of like gap in their psyche are they filling or like lack thereof by just killing this thing and posing with it for nothing to do nothing with it. It's weird. And they spend hundreds of, the one thing I will say is I've heard the argument against it is that the locals in those African countries, they charge like hundreds of thousands of dollars to those trophy hunters for the tags. Yeah. And a lot of that money goes to like helping the local communities and stuff like that. Right.

So, like, maybe if there's, like, an older elephant or, like, an older rhino, like, go ahead, sell the tag for 500 grand, let this rich fuck come kill it. Right. It'll help the community. No, I've heard that, too. And, I mean, still, I just can't understand the mentality when they, like, murder a giraffe or a lion-imposed. I mean, there are some funny stories where, like, trophy hunters have, like, try to kill, like, a bull elephant, and it's, you know, tramples and kills them. And there's, like, instant karma kind of thing. Yeah.

But yeah, I never really, never really understood that. I mean, I think if you get a chance to see some of these predators in the wild or these amazing animals, like in their natural habitat, living and thriving, like you develop like a love for them as opposed to like just wanting to, you know, put them up on your wall. Right. It's weird. Yeah. And I just for me, like one in the back of my head, it's always just been like, I don't, I don't not necessarily want to kill a shark because of, the shark.

Like, I don't, like, I don't really, it's kind of like a selfish thing for me where it's like karma. I spend so much time in the water. Sure. Just, I don't want to kill a shark because I don't want that to somehow come bite me in the ass later.

You know what I mean? Literally, yeah. Oh, I believe in karma, like, in full, full on every level. Yeah. Like, especially, I mean, how could you not when you're surrounding yourself with fucking wild animals?

Yeah. And I hear a lot of fishermen say that. The reason they don't get in the water because, like, yeah, my shark karma is not good. Too far gone. Yeah. So, but yeah, I mean, back to, it's amazing to me that, like, I've been doing it for, like, 20 years,

swimming with, like, more great white sharks and more locations than anyone on the planet, not to, like, brag, it's just, like, for credibility. And time and time again, they could have, at any point in time, swimming with these animals, they could have killed me if they wanted to. But, like, there are some of the most polite predators on the planet. They're not puppy dogs, but they're intelligent, they're polite. And they let you interact with them, which is crazy. Like, you can't really do that with crocodiles.

Like, I know you had Chris one of the gillette, Gillette, right? But he was part of the Gator Boys, right? And then I don't know if he told you the story or you know about the other gator boy that had both of his legs ripped off by a Nile Crocodile with one of Manny's buddies, Mark Rackley. Do you know Rackley? He's a crazy cameraman that filmed a. a lot of the stuff with Manny and the Wild Boys.

And he's one of the most cavalier craziest, craziest cameraman on the planet. Like, he was recently up in Cape Cod. That's actually not him, which is funny. He is the one on the far right, though, where it says Mark Rackley. Older dude? Far right, yeah. Oh, that guy. He's a total badass, but he actually jumped in the water with a feeding Great White Shark off of Cape Cod recently.

And he's just nuts. Like he's fearless. But he has no legs? Sorry, no. So Mark Rackley filmed Chris Gillette's co-host buddy in Botswana getting attacked by a Nile crocodile that ripped off both of his legs. And Rackley filmed it, was there. And Rackley actually saved his life by swimming up and like pushing the crock off

or just like getting him to disengage. And Rackley actually posted it on... The video? X. Yeah, it was on Twitter I don't know if it got taken down But see if you can find I bet you it didn't

There's lots of crazy stuff You might be out If you type in like crocodile Rips off legs Nile Crocodile Attack Mark Rackley No attack the other

Yeah it might But it might be linked to Rackley But he's the one who posted it So you should type this name Crocodile attack Rips legs off And then type in Gator Boy Because he was one of the Gator Boys

Gator Boy Okay Florida man survives a terrific 12 foot injures cameraman severed 8 foot So copy and paste that

into an X search Because it probably won't be on the internet Oh there's Rackley He got bit by a Oh geez A shark in a canal In the Keys He lives in the Keys

No way Yeah A blue shark A blue shark Yeah I was like bro Are you high Like there's no way

It was a blue shark He said it was a blue shark Oh is this it? No this I haven't seen this one Oh this guy he looks dead. This guy does not like...

Oh no, he's a lot. But the alligator's right there. It's like AI. Holding them, that might be AI. Yeah, that might be AI. This was like really murky water, Acovango, Crockadel Attack. It's like shot silhouette like from underneath free diving.

Like, I feel like maybe they pulled it, but you see it all this crazy stuff. So it was from Rackley's account? Yeah. Well, it was Rackley's shot. I'm not sure if it was his account. But Crocodile rips, leg off, gator boy, weird. One of the things I heard about crocs and gators, even if you get bit, like a minor bite,

you got to dump bleach on it because the things have, like, crazy bacteria from all the dead animals they eat and stuff. Mani was said he got bit on the back by a canal gator where it was like just a couple scratches. He had like a loose wet suit on. And the thing was behind him, like grabbed his wet suit, but it actually like punctured his skin a little bit.

And he said like the backwood. medicine they teach you to do is like just dump bleach. The doctors tell you not to do that, but all the guys that are back there doing with the gators, they say just dump bleach. Yeah. I would kill. I would do that. I would trust those guys before I trust the doctor, the hospital.

I would probably go to the doctor after, but I would still do that in the meantime. And that's the thing. I've been on a few shoots where people have been bit by sharks. It's mostly on the hand. I was on a shoot with Shaquille O'Neal and my safety diver was behind me. It was in the Bahamas, with reef sharks, so they're like pretty chill. but one of the reef sharks got in the cage with shack, which was pretty funny.

But I turned around and I looked, my safety diver was gone. I was like, that's weird, but whatever, the reef sharks, I wasn't worried. Turned out like he got bit by a reef badly on the hand, but he was embarrassed. He didn't want to pop up in the middle of, like, the shack shoot and make a scene.

So he swam underwater to one of the safety boats, told the safety boat to take him back to land. He took himself to the hospital. But it ripped open like you could see all of his tendons and all of this. Because it bit him and he ripped his hand out, like a knee-jerk reaction to pull it out. Whereas like...

Right, don't do that. If you can think, and it's not trying to remove your hand and you can open it. So those things could spin real quick and just completely detach your hand. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

When you go out on your dives, do you always bring like tourniquets and shit with you? I always have a tourniquet. I even have one in my backpack here. I always travel in the car or in a backpack when I travel anywhere, but always on my BCD. I have one strapped.

And then I usually give one to my... my safety diver in case like it happens to me or him or something like that. But yeah, it's good to be prepared. I've never had to use one. I've had a few close calls. But yeah, it's good to stop the bleed when you can. Yeah, I can't. I mean.

Have you ever had any super close calls with filming or any kind of? No, not other than what I told you. No, nothing like nothing luckily with animals. I've been in the water with like lots of sharks and stuff. but never had any close calls with animals, thank God. Yeah, right. I had like that scuba diving accident, or it was almost an accident where I ran out of air.

And then there was another time in the Cayman Islands where we were free diving. We were just like swimming through kayak caves. Okay. Where we were just like swim down, free diving, like swim through like a hole in the reef and then like swim through it and then swim out the other hole. Yeah.

You know, just like a caught in there? Like a thrill, you know what I mean? Because it's really cool, beautiful, so clear. Yeah. And I did it. it one day and I followed my buddy in through this little tiny hole in the reef and we were swimming along the sand. We're probably 30, 25, 30 feet deep. And he was exiting through a little hole, like the only exit that I was aware of. He was exiting. He was like taking a sweet time. So I was like,

I'm kind of running out of breath. I'm not going to wait. I'm going to keep going. Yeah. To another hole. To another hole. And I couldn't find another hole. And this was like, I think this is probably the closest I ever got to death because I actually saw my life flashing before. for my eyes. Like my whole life was playing in reverse. For real? Yeah. Like in my vision. You always hear about that. But in my vision, like everything, all like the, the most like important moments of my life were sort of like playing back in my mind. I thought like this could be it because I couldn't find an exit. And then finally like when I was barely had any air left, I saw one little light shaft coming through. And I saw the hole. I came up through it. And I could barely fit. I fit like my head and my shoulders came through it. But it was so tight. The reef was like scrubs. raping my torso because the hole was so small and I like barely made it through. Dude, that was, yeah, too many. Yeah, those two close calls were like enough for me to like dial it back.

Yeah, man. I've never had my life flash before my eyes. I've heard about that. I've had some scary encounters, but never were I, never were. I was in like a self-propelled cage in that same place where I showed you the footage of the two great white swimming over in my head. We were doing a night dive. And we were in this self-propelled cage where you had thrusters and little like DPVs,

dive propulsion vehicles. And you could put air into these ballasts, into this system to bring yourself up a little. But it was never like exact. And it was like, yeah. So it goes up and down with no cables. No cables. And we were doing it at nighttime. And it was time to come up.

And we were down at like, I don't know, almost 30 meters. It was like nearly 100 feet deep. and it was time to come up and we were putting air in this thing and it wasn't we didn't feel like we were lifting and we were getting low on air and it was night and we're like so me and my buddy the guy that was filming that we put too much air into it so we went from like a hundred feet to the surface in like I don't know five seconds so I was exhaling the whole time thinking like fuck this is the only time not even shark related I'm gonna die from an embolism from the bends from like aneurism but luckily we

held the whole way up. We had a paramedic on the boat. We immediately got on oxygen. Felt kind of dizzy and weird. But just like the little things, like the human, like you, you're swimming in these little holes. Like it was, I don't want to say it, you're fault. But like, you made the decision to go down there and swim around and try to come up through like in your buddy that was taking too long. It didn't help. But I always feel like it's the human error that's the most dangerous. It's like the sharks can decide to kill you if they want, but they're usually give you the benefit of the doubt or if you're playing by their rules for the most part, but it's just like stupid human error that gets people killed.

And often also things you never would expect. Oh, exactly. You know? Yeah. Or you go into that little like sea gate. What was that little submarine that they went into and they imploded? To explore the Titanic? Yeah, it was Ocean Gate or something.

Something like that, yeah. That's pretty creepy. That was insane. Yeah, I was just watching something the other day, this video interview with. the guy who was with Steve Irwin. Oh yeah, I watched that too, his cameraman. Yeah, bro. Talking about how it all went down.

Because I was actually out at Bat Reef, the place where he died. Really? And this was a few years after. And it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere. We were doing a Tiger Shark film. And yeah, I mean, it was just a freak accident for him to get, like, hit. But apparently, the footage, I didn't hear this guy talk about that. But apparently the footage, you could hear the stingray.

they'll make like a shuddering, like a low frequency, like warning, like almost like a growling sound. Really? And apparently like, you know, the stingray was giving them like the warnings. Like, hey, man, don't get any closer. But the way that the cameraman described it was like, but Steve, he wanted to keep the stingray in the foreground and then have Steve come behind it. And then he swim up behind it. And the stingray got a fright thinking it was a shark or a predator. And then just like stuck him in the heart.

And then he said it was like a 50 foot wide. wide bull ray or something? Is that possible? 50? That's what I thought I read. I mean, that would be massive. Find out about like, what about this stingray that killed him. I thought it was huge, maybe 30 feet.

But yeah, like, of all things to kill Steve Irwin fucking stingray. I know. If it hits you in the heart and I think it punctured both lungs, too. Eight feet across. Oh, only eight feet. What am the fuck am I talking about? Still, that's like, like the length of this table here, right? Yeah.

Yeah, and he died from blood loss, is that correct? Yeah. Like I think that they pulled it out. They pulled like the barb out of something. Eight inch long barb serrated. Yeah, brutal. I remember I was in South Africa working on a lion film for National Geographic. And all of our phones, the producers, the camera crew, everyone, all of our phones just started blowing up when he died.

Like everyone was texting. Like, did you hear what happened to Steve? and everyone kind of thought, oh, a crock got him or this, and then when we found out it was a stingray. I mean, it's just a testament to the fact, like, I don't know, man, if you live by the sword, die by the sword kind of thing. Like, he still, like, inspired millions and millions of people.

He was definitely way different than, like, jackass. Like, he was, he generally loved those animals. I think he did a lot for wildlife conservation by, like, showing people, like, the different sides of different predators. And he was so enthusiastic. I don't think he was being disrespectful. He just got caught out at the wrong time, you know? That footage has never been released, right?

No. Yeah. He talked about it how he said it just went like Steve came over top and all. He watched it after? Bubbled it. I assume they watched it. I'm assuming like Discovery or Animal Planet had to like kind of, you know, for insurance purposes to document what really happened.

Right, right. But I had heard about like a growling, like a low frequency sound that this animal was making to like kind of give them a. warning. And they said they had done it like hundreds of times, you know? Really? And that's the thing. I mean, not on that specific one, but they died with stingray as a bunch.

But yeah, nuts, man. Nuts. Have you ever dealt with any, like, polar bears or anything crazy? Like any? Dude, I have a crazy polar bear story. Actually, I was doing a show for National Geographic. It was a three-part series called Killer Shots about being a cameraman and getting, like, killer shots.

It was a stupid name. But they let me, it was a lion episode, a Great White episode, and a Polar Bear episode. And they let me produce and host the Lion and the Great White episode because I had tons of experience already in Africa with the Cape Town Great Whites. And I had done multiple lion films for Natio and the Serengeti in Kenya. And it was, they let me produce those. And, you know, producing you find out where you're going to go. You're going to use the same fixer. You're going to go the same location, same Land Rover.

It was all dialed in. The polar bear episode, though, I had no experience with polar bears, so they let the series producer handle that. But after like two attempts of getting polar bears in Canada, we striked out twice. And we didn't, they had pretty minimal budget. So we were going to James Bay and like their southernmost range. And it was like kind of a really hard place to film polar bears, but cheaper, like budget-wise. But after the second shoot, they're like, okay, well, we're out of money. We've not, we didn't get polar bears.

you know what, we'll talk about global warming and how they're really hard to find. I'm like, fuck that. Let's just talk about shitty producing. Like, we killed it on the Great White episode, the Lion episode. Now you're going to lie and say we didn't see the polar bears because of global warming. We didn't see them because we went to the wrong fucking place. So I called out a bunch of favors. I was friends with the Nat Geo Equipment Room manager, and I said, bro, I'm hosting this show.

I'm not going to say we struck out because of global warming. It's a lie. We didn't get it because we went to the wrong place. I say, can you lend me, I need an F-900, I need a long lens, I need tripods, I need all that. I called the Arctic Outfitter dude that was helping us in the first two shoots. I said, bro, can I borrow the bunny boots and the Arctic goose jacket? Can I borrow that? I'm coming back.

I'm going to do it on my own dime. So for less than like $5,000, I launched my own polar bear expedition. I reached out to this guy, Paul Nicklin. He's like National Geographic's poster boy for polar bears. and he's like the most famous National Geographic photographer of all time, Paul Nicklin. And I said, hey, Paul, man, I've rendered the situation. I got to get polar bears. He's like, oh, you got to go to this place, fly to Churchill, take the polar bear Express.

There's a place called Wa Chi. They always get polar bears, mother and cubs coming out of their dens. Like, they're not hunting, but you'll get polar bears. So I did it, and I called the Canadian Airlines. They hooked me up with like cheap tickets. So anyway, I went out there for like under five grand. And in the first two days, I get polar bears. But prior to this, while we were on those first shoots, we were out on the sea ice.

And the producers like, all right, man, we've got this cool thing. We've got you the most high-powered LEDs that Nat Geo makes. They were dropping them in the Marianas Trench, like these super high-powered LEDs. He's like, I did some research and you like Inuit and Eskimos or whatever, for lack of a better word, First Nation people, they will purposely not start fires out on the sea ice because it attracts polar bears. If you're out on the night sea ice, fires are like a telltale giveaway. A polar bear can see it miles away and they'll come to see if there's food or something

to eat. So our theory was I was going to camp out on the sea ice and use these high-powered LEDs to emulate, like not a fire, but to draw attention. Oh, Jesus. The funny thing was we were waiting, waiting and the producers are there. I set up an ice camp. The Aurora was happening. It was super cool. And then the producer was like, hey man, we're going to go back to the main camp.

Are you cool with staying here tonight? I'm like, yeah. And he's like, you know, we brought the bare fence. They gave me a little like, like a, it looks like dental floss. But the fucked up thing was this bear fence was supposed to be electrified by a car battery. They forgot the car battery. So there was no electrified fence. It was just this. But I was so desperate.

I'm like, all right, I'll stay. Like, I'm sure. And they, my guide gave me a gun. a shotgun. But little did I know, the snowmobile I was driving that day, the shotgun case that they gave me was slightly open and all the snow got packed into there. So after they left, I'm blasting these things out on the sea ice and I started getting nervous. I'm like, this is like Darwin a world winning shit. I got, I don't know anything about polar bears. I'm trying to attract them. I'm alone. I better go check this gun to make sure it works. So I go out

to the sled, get the gun out, and then it's ice frozen solid. Then I read, realize like, man, this is really dumb. I'm going to leave. So I try to start the, it was like a ghetto pull start snowmobile. I'm trying to start it. And every time I try to start it, it makes like a sound. And the light, I had already turned off the LEDs at this point because I'm like, I do not want to see polar bears alone with a gun that doesn't work.

And I'm pulling this snowmobile, trying to start it. And it won't start. I go back into my tent and I had this propane heater. And I'm like now doing a piece to camera. I'm like, okay, I'm out here alone. I'm trying to attract polar bears. I realize this is pretty stupid, actually. And then suddenly I smell something and my coat catches on fire.

Because I'm sitting next to this propane heater and my coat catches on fire. I'm like, Jesus. And all I had was this thermos that was full of hot chocolate for some reason. I pour this hot chocolate all over me. Now I'm soaking wet. I smell like hot chocolate. I'm trying to fucking attract polar bears. I got a gun that doesn't work.

The snowmobile won't start. So I like, I was, I never panicked. this much in my life. I was like, like, hyperventile panic. And I was like, dude, calm down, calm down. So I laid down on the sea ice and I started thinking, what am I going to do? I'm trying to call them on the sat phone. They won't answer. And then I'm like, I'm going to try to start this again. And finally, I started the snowmobile. I started and I, because it started, I hit the gas to make sure it would not like flood or it would go. Right. When I hit it, it flipped over and it smashed all my camera gear. And I like laid there on the ground and I just started laughing.

I'm like, dude, you're going to kill yourself out of sheer panic and freaking out. And I thought about the human element. Like, it's not the animals that are going to kill you. It's stupid mistakes and overreacting and panicking. So then I just lied there. I relaxed a bit. I pushed the snowmobile over. I eventually, like, calmly got it started.

I rode back to the main camp that night, which is about like two miles away in a snowmobile. And all the people were sleeping, all my, it was like two other crew members, a South African cameraman and American producer guy. I went to bed that night. and when I woke up, they saw me in the morning like, bro, what are you doing here? I'm like, bro, fuck this shit, this polar bear stuff. And anyway, long story short, I eventually got them on my own. But it was a point in time where I realized it was sheer panic.

I was freaked out. I was worried about eating by a polar bear, but it was all like in my head. We never did see polar bears on that shoot. But the next time I went out, I got them. But it just kind of dawned on me. Like, people, you can die if you make the wrong decisions and you panic. And if I was calm the whole time and relaxed, the same. result would have happened, but yeah,

catching myself on fire, hot chocolate, gun that didn't work. That is fucking bonkers. I actually have the, I don't think I have it here, but I shot a Aurora. Let's see if, what is it called?

Northern Lights, or Aurora. I don't know if it would be on here. Aurora. How do you spell it? A-U-R-O-R-A. Yeah, I think that's right. Let's see if it's in any of these things here. Oh, no, it's not going to be there.

I'll have to... Oh, is that no? No, maybe not. Arctic... I think I called it Polar Bear Camp. So when you got the show... When you finally did get shots of polar bears, was it at night? It was during the daytime.

During the daytime. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so it worked out where... And the BBC was there, actually, and they let me hang out in their Matt Tracks vehicle. It worked out so much better. It was just the story like I...

But even in the show, like, I did a thing to piece of... the camera, I'm like, the network gave up. You know, we ran out of money, but I'm not giving up on polar bears, and I eventually got them, which was fun. But it didn't come easy. But it was like a, I don't think I have the polar They're the scariest bear, for sure.

I heard they can swim like... Oh, they can. Like hundreds of miles. Yeah. I heard once they swam from Greenland to Iceland or something like that? Sounds about right. I mean... Which is nuts.

Yeah, I mean, they're considered a marine mammal, which is crazy. I mean, because they spend so much time at sea and swimming and, you know, in the ocean. I was working recently on a project about Greenland sharks where they, Greenland sharks are like the longest living vertebrate on Earth.

They're like over 400 years old. And they found polar bear remains in their stomachs. In the shark stomach? In the shark stomach. And they don't know if it was scavenged on like there was a dead polar bear. Or if they saw a polar bear swimming and came up and fed on it. because they also found seal remains. Because Greenland sharks are thought to be super slow moving.

Like, often they're blind because they have parasites on their eyes. But, you know, any animal that's been around for 400 years and is still alive. I'm not even good at math, but like, isn't that how old's America? 250 years old? Like, this was like... Almost twice the age of America. And it's still swimming around. How many of them do we know that can live to that age?

there was a study in science that proved that they got to 400 plus years old through like carbon dating and their vertebrae and stuff like that Jesus it's it's pretty incredible yeah you know that's another thing that's insane to me is how you can have people that are either biologists or you know studying these animals from like an incident from like an academic perspective and like studying like the dead bodies and you know doing autopsies on them or like, you know, cutting them apart and inspect. And they can be like, you know, world-renowned experts on these specific species of like marine animals. Yeah. But they've never seen them in the wild.

Dude, it's funny you say that because I worked on a project for Nat Geo a couple years ago. When we talked about seeing a great white shark breach from its perspective with the camera, these guys are putting the cameras on and they were putting them on so tight. And I was telling them like, guys, like, let's, you know, lose. in the springs a bit or whatever, like, oh, they don't care. I'm like, well, they do. And then we had visibility that was incredible in Cape Town, which is very unheard

of. And I said, why don't we go down on the bottom and deploy these cameras on the free swimming sharks? Because we were baiting them up to the boat and they were swimming by and we were like leaning over to put them on. And I said, this would be an incredible sequence to do it out of the cage on the bottom. And the director's like, I love this idea. This would be amazing.

But the scientists... Of course you ain't doing it. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's funny because the series was called Die Trying. It's about like explorers and people that could potentially die trying to like discover things and explore and find new amazing things in science. Anyway, I remember telling these Stanford Great White Shark PhD experts, hey, let's go on the bottom. It's going to be incredibly like, no, that's empirically, it's going to do nothing for us. I'm like, oh, but it'd be so incredible to see them on the, like, nope. I said, okay, we can use a cage.

Nope. And then it dawned on me. I'm like, wait a second. Have you ever seen a Great White Shark underwater? Have you ever gone underwater and seen a Great White? The first guy, nope, second guy. These two PhD great white. I was like, you are a PhD great white shark expert

and you've never seen the animal that you're a PhD in underwater, like in its own environment. They're like, there's no empirical reason to do that. It was just such a cold mentality of like, and that's why like going back to people like Ocean Ramsey, they give her such a hard time. She's not a scientist. She's not, she's an influencer.

These people don't know nothing. They're bad for sharks. Fucking Jane Goodall. One of the most renowned, incredible conservationist researchers on the planet when she moved to Africa to study the chimps for the first time. She had zero academic training or scientific methodology training. No university degree. Yet she went on to become one of the greatest naturalists of all time. Like changing how we think about how humans interact with wildlife.

She eventually went on to get her on. like a PhD, she skipped her bachelor's degree. They knew she was so smart and so observant and so good at science, yet she had zero academic training and zero degrees. Yeah. So I just, I hate it when like there's this mentality that you need to have a degree, you need to have a PhD, you need to go to eight years of school to actually contribute to conservation and research and to inspire people.

If you have passion and hard work and you truly care about something, you can change the world without having all. the fancy degrees and all the, again, I love scientists. So some of my best friends are scientists, but I kind of feel like there's this, even as filmmakers, like, you don't have to go to film school. You don't have to. You just got to be passionate. Like, again, I never plan to become a filmmaker. I've won a bunch of awards. I've made a bunch of films. I've made my whole life out of it by accident because I love sharks. Right. And it doesn't have to be one or the other, too, you know? No, exactly. It can be, I can understand, like, to me, it would be super frustrating to be dealing with those

kind of people when I'm the one who spends my life swimming with the sharks. But like, can those people actually be super helpful and beneficial to studying all the dead species in a lab somewhere? Of course, right? Like, there's definitely a benefit to that. And I'm sure they've come up with discoveries that, you know, the people who are actually interacting with them in the wild and documenting their behavior and all that stuff. There's like two pieces of the puzzle that, you know, you need to be able to fit together. 100%. And they, when they, when you could like marry the two and work together. Yeah.

And you have that hybrid of like passion and, you know, empirical science. Yeah, I mean, that's what, that's what, you know, runs the world, so to speak. That's what makes all of this impossible. And like I have thousands of people over the years, their parents and kids saying, oh, man, my son loves sharks because seeing you on Shark Week or you're Nat Geo Show. Or my daughter has fallen in love with sharks because of this. And then there's the other side where people like, oh, you're. You're a shark pornographer.

It's all jaws and claws and you're scaring people. Like after jaws, it was cool to go out and murder sharks. The only good sharks are dead shark. But through Shark Week and these cult following of like TV series and programs, like people have grown to like learn more about sharks, love sharks. You could write the most valid and incredible scientific paper on the planet. And thousands and thousands of people will read it. Or you can make a 15 second YouTube short and billions of people will see it.

billions of people have inspired. So again, I agree. You need both of them, but one shouldn't like shit talk on the other. It's like discredit. Oh, you don't have a PhD. You don't know what you're talking about. Oh, you never seen a shark in the real. Well, like, both together, it's like it works.

Yeah. That's what makes life fascinating. Like some people take the road of academics. Some people are meth heads outside of 7-Eleven and they're, you know, they become like incredible people. Or they die like six years later. Yeah. Right, exactly. And also another interesting thing is I've heard lots of people like you described,

lots of people who like spend a lot of time out there in the environment, whether it be like in the ocean or like in the Amazon rainforest or in the jungle, how they explain how like all of the anxieties and like clinical psychological bullshit that sets in when you're in like civilized society or in a city or in a town sort of like melts away. And then people kind of get, they get hooked on that. Whereas like they're almost like, for lack of a better word, addicted to being away

from civilization. And like they feel more in tune when they're in nature or in that different environment away from people. And like they connect more with the environment and the animals and it becomes just like a part of them. 100%. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to explain sometimes,

but like, yeah, I certainly feel most alive I'm like underwater interacting with sharks and like knowing that, okay, they could kill me. I mean, every time I get in the water, I am hypervigilant. I am fully expecting that something could go wrong. I'm not like head in the clouds like, oh, sharks are amazing, beautiful puppy dogs. I know that if I make a mistake, it could be my last. I don't want to dramatize it, but I also don't want to downplay it. And I love seeing people get inspired through media and through things they see on the internet.

and it like sparks this whole like empowerment of people feeling like, hey man, I can make a difference. I can like a single person can change the world if you're passionate enough. And it catches on and you inspire other people. It's just like, I don't know. It's like it's, I get a lot of people telling me now, oh man, you should be a coach. You should do these mentors and a master class and this. But also like ADHD, like can't sit still.

I can't build that platform. And that's why like I'm starting to get into YouTube more where I want to like teach people about cameras. I love that you can capture some of the greatest shots on a $300 gopro, and you don't need a Phantom Flex or a beam splitter with this custom rig. I mean, that helps if you're shooting for Hollywood. But I think, like, the Internet is leveled to playing field now for anyone that wants to get into media, filmmaking, podcasts, any of this stuff. And it's awesome.

Is there, like, one thing, like, cinematography-wise, that you've always wanted to capture, that you haven't been able to get, that you hope one day you'll be able to get, that's maybe limited you with technology or something else? Great White Sharks mating. Oh, shit. And I believe the way we're going to capture it

is through, like, thin cameras, putting the cameras on the sharks. Like, I was showing you before a couple of these hammerhead shots. I wish I had the great white stuff, but this is a really cool perspective of the great hammerhead cruising around. There's no divers around. I mean, there's the one in the background there, but they're interacting with each other.

And I think to capture sharks, you know, procreating specifically great whites, the only way to do it is, you know, with remote imaging where people aren't around because I think it's highly unlikely that they're going to... Yeah, with the people around. You know, get it on right in front of you. How do they do it? They go like belly to belly or what? Yeah, they basically the males will grab onto the pectoral fins of the females. And that's why they have two penises as well, right? They got two claspers.

I think it's for evolutionary advantage If you get your dick bitten off It's good to have a backup kind of thing So they have two penises But the male will grab onto the female And then roll And then they have these two claspers Where they'll inseminate the female

And the only reported Great White Shark mating event That was ever sort of somewhat verified Was off the coast in New Zealand This place called Nugget Point Which is on the South Island in New Zealand and a department of conservation worker said she was up there on a bluff and saw a massive Great White Shark swimming in the shallows

in like kind of the shallow surf zone. And another big-ass great white shark came up to it. And she reported that it looked like at first they were fighting. Like they encountered each other and there was a tussle and they were fighting. And then she said they went on to basically mate, like rolling and just kind of not super gently, but it went from like a violent encounter. to them intertwined and basically having sex. Whoa.

But it was just a visual, you know, like an eyewitness report. This was before iPhones and drones and all that. But I've always wanted to, there's been a few films talking about Great White's mating. And I've filmed nurse sharks mating in the Bahamas and there's plenty of reports of other species mating reef sharks and whatnot. But no one has ever documented Great Whites getting it on. And I think it would be, yeah. Are these sharks? This is, these look like, uh, they literally bite on.

Oh, is that looking at nurse. Uh, gray reef sharks. Sorry, gray nurse, which are called sand tigers here. But yeah, you can see how it was biting on. So is that why they have all those giant scars all over them? Yeah, the females have those big bite marks and wounds, which are, so what's also interesting is the female sharks often have skin that is twice as thick as male sharks. And that's like an evolutionary, you know, because the male grabs on to the female.

male grabs on. They don't have hands, obviously. So the only way they can really gain purchase and intertwine to, you know, mate is to grab. But obviously, if that shark wanted to, it could bite that fin clearly off. So they're, you know, it knows that it's got her there, but it doesn't bite down too hard. But yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty violent. I didn't know about the two dicks on this. Is that only white sharks or is that all sharks?

All sharks have two penises, yeah. Wow. They're called claspers. The whole point of the shirt is don't be a dick. Don't be a claspers. Oh, that's what that means. That's hilarious. But yeah, it's pretty fascinating.

And when you, there is footage of white sharks that are, what's the word, like sexually charged, where their claspers are hard. Yeah. They like, there are two like appendages at the bottom of the shark. But when they mate, they cross over. It's like a weird thing. And they, um, if you type in white shark claspers, um, you might want to go incognito, Steve. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So there, some of them see how, some of them are pretty, pretty big. Wow. Dude. Yeah. And then other ones. Dude, it's packing. Yeah. And they're just like, just like guys.

And it goes backwards. It goes backwards. Yeah. And when they mate, they're supposedly cross over it so that they can mate from kind of either side. That's nuts, dude. Yeah, and the females have nothing, just like a slit like Cloaca. Right. But yeah, imagine having two penises.

Can come in handy, I guess. Yeah, right, you get a lot done. But yeah, I think it's really like if they lose one because of mating can be pretty violent. And I'm sure there's some females that aren't in the mood kind of thing. Right. Get away from me. And if you get one bitten off, then you still have a chance of, you know, procreating. Or you can approach the female from either side, I think.

Dude, have you seen the documentary about the dolphin, the lady who was studying the dolphin? I can only imagine. So there was this, this was like in the John Lilly days. And John Lilly is the guy who invented the sensory deprivation tank. And he was given money by NASA to study dolphin intelligent. He was trying to discover and find, study communication with dolphins. Okay. And they put her in this like house and they filled it with like four feet of water.

And she was studying him or whatever. And he was swimming around or whatever. And then in the house. In the house. You can find photos of this. It's nuts. And basically like she couldn't get him to communicate on command. So she was whacking the dolphin off.

I heard about it. So like the dolphin would like wait for her to whack him. him off for him to like make sounds and communicate so she could record the sounds and study him and stuff. Creepy. Freaky. I've heard a friend of mine was like hired to film women having sex with dolphins. To film it. To film it.

Yeah, famous cameraman Bob Cranston. He's passed away now. But Zook Greeny knows him. I'm sure they were buddies. But yeah, dolphins and people. Look at this, bro. The dolphin who love me. The NASA funded project that went wrong.

Wow. So I guess it was in a house. I guess it was like maybe sort of a warehouse with like a water floor. Like a half-filled tub in it or something. I don't know. But from the photos that I remember seeing, it was like laid out where it looked like a house, but it was full of water. Nuts. And she had this like elevated platform she would sleep on.

Wow. NASA funded it because they were trying to use dolphins as like messengers or delivery like, you know, bombs. Well, yeah, they were doing that as well, but I guess they were trying to communicate and develop a language. NASA was trying to figure out like non-human intelligence and communication.

Like figure out if there was a way to communicate with dolphins, how would they do it? And like John Lilly famously like cut open the heads of dolphins to like stick probes in their brains and stuff, like very inhumane shit that he was doing. Well, it's funny to see that because back in the day,

the Bimini Shark Lab, which is just over there in the Bahamas, they used to sew sharks' eyes closed to see if they could navigate in total darkness. And if you... Or with using just the sensory systems with no vision to see how well they could navigate by sewing their eyes shut. So some pretty heavy action there. Yeah. What else did they do?

Yeah, some of the experiments that the military has done on and people is disturbing. I don't know a lot about the people stuff, but... Yeah. Well, there's like, there's stories of... I forget the names of these things, but there was one that Bill Clinton actually uncovered or, like, declassified when he was president where there was a program where we were testing,

injecting, I believe, uranium or plutonium into disabled kids. Why disabled kids? Because they were already... damage, so to speak? Because they were already damaged, maybe. But there was like a, there was like an institution on the, I believe it was in Massachusetts, Steve, try to fact check me and find this. There was an institution for like disabled children in Massachusetts. And they were injecting these kids with either, I think it was plutonium to try to study what effect that

would have on them. And like on, obviously all of them died. And they were, this was during the Cold War when they were trying to figure out, you know, different ways to kill people what the effects would be of like dropping a nuke on somebody. Damn. Yes, this is true dark piece of history. Between 1946 and 1953, research, easy for you to say, researchers from the Massachusetts institution of technology, MIT, and Harvard conducted nutrition and radiation experiments on children in Massachusetts.

The experiment primarily targeting young boys who are residents of the Walter E. state school in Massachusetts at the time. This was a state-run institution for children with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Yeah. Yeah. Nuts. Yeah. They want to do that on fucking kids.

Imagine what they're going to do to experiment with animals. There's no limit. Yeah. Back to the dolphin communicating with dolphins. You asked me before about how sharks communicate and I forgot. Yeah. See if you can pull up anything about sharks sounds. Because I think very recently there was a study that showed that sharks actually make sounds.

When you watch Shark Week and you see a shark, you always hear like a scary sound or a teradactal or the Jaws theme. Yeah, sharks aren't known for making sounds. But here, researchers capture the first recorded active... Whoa. Let's see here. Go back to that description on AI. Yeah, researchers capture the first recorded active sound from a shark species and a study published in the Royal Society of Open Science. The rig shark.

The rig shark. That's funny. You hear like, I don't even, I never even heard of the rig. The rig shark study. In New Zealand, rapid high frequency clicking noises when handled or startled underwater. Flicks lasted about 48 milliseconds with a broad frequency range. Interesting. Have you ever seen that?

Have you ever heard anything like this with a shark? Only recently when I heard about this about sharks. I mean, I'm the same. My Insta algorithm and all my internet algorithms. rhythms are always everything shark related. Yeah. And I found it fascinating because I, people would often ask me like sharks do have ears. They have inner ears where they have these little.

So they, you know, obviously they can hear sounds, but do they make sounds to communicate? No one ever really knew that. Sharks are maybe not as silent as we thought. There's got to be. Bro, I was thinking about this when you were talking about those great whites who ended up at that one spot off Naples. Yeah. Like, you know how like, like, mushroom. They say mushrooms can communicate through like the mycelium network under the ground.

Maybe there's this like completely separate sense that these sharks have, that we just don't have the technology to detect. Yeah. Like a secret shark language. Yeah, that we just have no idea about, yeah, that maybe we'll discover in 10 years that like somehow they can coordinate on things or communicate in a way. They have to be able to because how would they show up at the same place at the same time? I mean, obviously one could follow the other, are they bump into each other? Hey, where are you going?

Right. Maybe they're fucking telepathic. Who knows, dude? I mean, that secret shark society, the SSS. But you know what's interesting as well that it's been a theory and that's been brought up a few times? I'm sure you've heard about how the killer whales have been targeting Great Whites in South Africa.

And in other areas, they catch and kill Great Whites and they only eat the liver because of shark. They don't really get fat. They store all of their energy in their liver. and the liver can be up to like 25% of its body weight. So if you have a 4,000-pound shark, they have a thousand-pound liver. I'm not great at math, but that should work out, right? Can you find a photo of a great white liver?

But what's interesting is like these orcas, they're targeting great whites, they're killing them, they're eating their livers, but now there's a theory that tagged animals, great whites that have tags. They have these ultrasonic tags would transmit like a frequency of usually like 69, kilohertz. They're thinking, yeah, look at the size of the liver on that thing.

So that's where all their nutrients, all their energy stores, all their like nutritional value. Because otherwise trying to eat a shark, it's like eating cardboard with like a super muslin cardboard. Whereas if you can be like,

what's the dude, Hannibal, and just eat the liver and farther beans or whatever. Oh my God, dude. But there's theories now that orcas are potentially targeting sharks with tags because they,

can hear the tag. No. So, I mean, they obviously can echo locate and find a shark that's in the, that's in vicinity of echo location. But if they can listen for like a kilometer away and hear tick, tick, hear the tag

transmit, like, hey, we know that things that wear these tags are usually nutritional and they have massive livers. So there is now a theory that orcas are potentially targeting sharks that are tagged because they can track them down easier, which is interesting. It's like we are helping orcas

you know, hunt and kill great whites. Again, that's great. What a crazy, like, incidental side effect. We're trying to save the sharks by tagging them. Of us just trying to meddle with shit and learn more. Yeah. It's nuts. Dude, that liver is insane.

They got really, they really good a drinking. So delicious. Yeah. And nutritious. And they can drink like a fish, obviously. But no, they're pretty incredible, man. ever since I was a kid, they were just always fascinating. And on top of the fact that they occasionally eat people,

I actually was in South Australia once, picking up tanks at a scuba shop. And this Australian guy was there and he had this big tattoo, this fresh tattoo on his arm. And it said, RIP in somebody's name. And it had like a shark, a great white, a white pointer on there. I was like, hey, man, what's up with your tattoo? He's like, oh, it's in honor of my mate, Jono, or whatever his name was.

I'm like, what happened? He's like, oh, he was eaten by a fucking five-meter great white shark. I'm like, eaten? He's like, no, he was consumed in front of his friends. It was off of South Australia. They were spear fishermen. And apparently there was a spear fishing tournament coming up. And I guess there's a rule where you're allowed to go out the day before to scout

and look where the fish are and find the spots that you want to go shooting the next day for the tournament. So five guys swim out from the beach, offshore a bit. don't know how far off they went, but they were all scouting and free diving, you know, like with their big spear guns, their super long blades, their fins. And apparently they were, you know, kind of finished for the day and they were all swimming back in. And the kid telling me this story in the dive shop, he's like, I was probably like 10 feet from my mate.

We were all swimming back in formation, five of us all about 10 feet apart, you know, just heading back to shore. And he just said he heard his friend scream. and he turned over to see his friend, his entire lower torso from the long blades and everything, like a five-meter great white shark, had come up from behind and swallowed him up to his fucking chest. And I said, he's like, I knew it was five meters because I looked down and I saw the shark's tail kicking up sand on the bottom because they were in about maybe five, six meters deep of water. He said the shark's head was out of the water.

with his mate's chest, his entire body up to his chest in its mouth. And all they could do was scream and basically, you know, they were freaked out. So they all, the guy was, they said they watched the shark consume him. And as they were like swimming away, there was nothing they could do. Oh, my. And I was like, I was there to make a shark film. So I wasn't about to tell the guy, man, we're heading out to, you know, off of Port Lincoln. I mean, he must have known.

That dive shop there in Port Lincoln is where everyone. goes to go cage diving at the Neptunes. But it was a pretty heavy story because, you know, it's rare for sharks to consume people. Did he finish the rest of him after that? He said it ate, it completely consumed him. And he got the tattoo and memory of his mate. And while he was telling it to me, it was like really matter of fact, it seemed like he had come to terms with it.

But, you know, there's the occasional where sharks eat people, and it always kind of like, it's not good for their PR when you're like, oh, sharks are amazing. their polite predators. And occasionally, they'll completely consume people. But again, it's so rare. But when it happens, it's pretty horrific to think about it. It's so rare. But, like, I wonder sometimes, like, is that math skewed?

Because people like to compare shark attacks fatal or not to, like, lightning strikes or car accidents. Right. But, like, you've got to, like, adjust those numbers to how many people are actually in the water. In the water. They don't do that. Because there's only, like, what percent of the... population spends that much time in the water. Yeah.

Oh, there's definitely way less than on like dry land walking around and getting struck by lightning. Like I wonder what the real probability is of like, I don't know how you would adjust the study of that, right? Like if you're, if you could basically adjust it for like how much time you spend in the water in a year. Right. And like average that out to how many people actually get bitten or killed by sharks. I wonder what that number would be. Right. You know?

Yeah, because people aren't spending more than a few hours a day in the water as opposed to, you know, most of their time on dry land. Right. I don't know. I mean, I still think it's relatively rare based on like the number of fatalities. It's generally in single digits. And the world's getting more connected. People are more, people are sharing this shit more than ever on social media. So it's.

And it's possible there were more attacks in the past that we didn't know about because of the lack of reporting or the lack of evidence or the lack of. but yeah man sometimes they just eat what they want predators and protein and you're in the wrong place wrong time like... Do you think it's ever possible

that they and I don't know how long this would take evolutionarily I'm not a scientist but like that they would ever become like adapted or do you think

it's ever possible that humans would actually go on the menu? I think about that every once in a while and I think clearly there we're not on the menu

because if we were and sharks realize that humans were a viable prey item there would be attacks every single day. They would just be waiting for, you know, you to go out for a surf because you're easy to catch. You're not expecting it. But to ever get on the menu, I think we'd have to overfish the oceans pretty heavily and to really put them in dire straits to decide like, all right,

we're going to... With that said, I think there are certain sharks out there that I know there's this theory about rogue sharks and no one likes to talk about it or think it's real. But I know there's a handful of great whites that I've interacted with over the years that every time I see them, they will try to bite me. Really? There are certain sharks that just have bad-psychotic attitudes. Yes. And we give them nicknames like psycho or bite face or scarface. Like they often, like when you see a shark that's all bruised up, scarred up, torn up, like that's the kind of shark that doesn't give a shit.

It will throw down. It wants to not want to fight, but it's not afraid to get its hands dirty, so to speak, or get its fins bloody, whatever. It's just like people that you run into on the street. If you see some dude with like bloody knuckles, a black guy and scars all over and he just looks angry. Pollyflower years? Yeah. Well, yeah. But usually like...

I only do that. We make it a sport. Yeah. I mean, usually like with the cauliflower year, I feel like the more people understand violence and more that they train, the less they want to use it. There are people that are just angry and they like to fight and compete and all that. Right. One of my best friends, he's just like has violent enemies. He follows him around everywhere.

He just went to Brazil to pick up his black belt for his son at De La Jiva, like this famous Brazilian academy. And apparently, like, he was there just recently. And he was just training and he submitted some guy like five times and two minutes. And the guy got so pissed that he like hammer-fisted my buddy. And my buddy submitted him again. And then the professor at De La Jiva, he kicked my friend out of the academy. He's like, you're not welcome back here.

You're too competitive. You're too competitive, Chris. And he's the one that got attacked after he submitted the guy. Yeah, yeah. But I don't know why it went down like that. I mean, this is the story told me. But my friend Chris is definitely, he enjoys the violence. He doesn't like to hurt people, but he's super competitive.

But yeah, cauliflower ear and all that. But I find like the more people train, the more they want to avoid violence because they know what they're capable of or what they can do, depending on who you are, I guess. Right, right. But, yeah, sharks that look gnarly and they're all scarred up, those are the ones that are. Big egos. I don't mess with. There's one called Fred in New Zealand, P-H-R-E-D.

And I remember when I first met it, I was telling my buddy, one of my best friends in New Zealand. There he is, Fred. One of my best friends in New Zealand. Oh, is this the one with his jaw pulled out of his face? No, he's pretty messed up. But that one was a Mako. The Mako with its jaw all messed up. Fred is a massive male.

What's the deal with him? Yeah, he's just got a bad attitude. He will always try to bite you if he gets. a chance, which is weird. I don't know if it's, that's another good buddy of mine, Chris Fallows. He takes all the amazing

like breaching great white shark shots. But a friend of mine, Kinnah, he's actually right now working on Gullum, you know, that new Lord of the Rings of Gullum, the crazy, my precious creature. There's a new movie being made? Ooh, maybe I shouldn't have said that. I'm pretty sure it's...

Google it. See if it's public. Public knowledge. Gollum or the story of Gullum. I'm not a big Lord of the Rings follower, so I wouldn't know anyways. But he's down there shooting it right now, but it's funny. Oh, yeah, so it's probably a hunt for Gallum. If type in this guy, Kina Skola, K-I-N-A, which means C-Eerson, then Scole, or sorry, S-C-O, yeah.

He's got dreadlocks. That's him there. You're crazy dude. One of my best friends in New Zealand, right? Uh-huh. He looks like a feral, you know, crazy feral dude. But he was attacked by a great white charles. when he was like 21 years old.

Off the, there's me and him standing by that shark cage. Oh shit. Off of the Farallon Islands. Or sorry, the Chatham Islands. Yeah. And one of my best friends, one of the gnarliest dudes,

he shot the Meg with Jason Statham. And he shoots... No way. Yeah, he was the main underwater DP with Statham. He says Statham's a naughty guy. I don't know what that means. But he says he likes to party or whatever. But so Kina was a

abalone diver slash Kina diver. Kina is a sea urchin. and they were down at this place called the Chatham Islands where he was harvesting sea urchins and they were not allowed to be, they had to free dive and he had amazing breath hold. He was really good and him and his mates were really competitive on who could hold their breath the longest, who could get the most sea urchants. And anyway, it's near the end of the day. They've already got their quota for the number of sea urchins they could get.

And while Kina was down there, he saw all these big lobster or crayfish and he said, I'm going to come back and get these when we're done. They're not allowed to take anything recreationally when they're working. But when they were finished, diving for the day, they have these little skiffs that they put their Kina into and their sea urchins. And anyway, they're all packed up. They're off this crazy rocky islands, the Chatham Islands. And he's like, I'm going to go down and get these crayfish for dinner, boys. And so he dives down and it's breath hold, goes down.

And his mates are there like, oh, wow, Kina's been down there quite a while. Kina says he swims down and he starts looking and he looks and all these crayfish that he saw earlier, these lobster, they're gone. All the fish are gone. He said everything's gone and they're all tucked way up under this ledge. And he just thought, wow, this is fucking weird. Like I was just down here 20 minutes ago and these things, this reef is full of life. Now everything's hiding.

And he didn't really think much of it until his friends on the boat are thinking, wow, like Kina's been down there a long time. This guy's got a great breath hold. So they start looking over the side of the boat thinking, is he okay? He says, sorry, his friends look down and suddenly they see Kina. Instead of surfacing, they see his body moving at full speed sideways. Oh, my God. Kina says as he was coming up, he could see the boat.

And he's like, okay, I'm getting back to the boat. and the visibility is there can be hit or miss. And he said, suddenly he just got smashed. He said, fuck, I've been hit by a whale.

He said he got hit so hard. And when this, it was a great white, basically, Great White shark, a massive Great White. It hit him from behind. And when it hit him,

it flicked its tail out in front of him. And a great white has a very cyclical tail, like a very, very almost symmetrical, giant, like, sickle-fin tail.

Right. And when Kinnah said he saw this, he got hit with such force, he saw this giant tail and he's like, fuck, I've been hit by a whale. Like a whale's just run into me. But it wasn't a whale. It was a fucking like a five plus meter great

white that had him. And Kenna was wearing like a nine on nine wet suit like an 18 millimeter like Farmer John because it's super cold down there. Next up Antarctica. It's like the near the sub-Antarctic Islands. Chatham Islands is like 800 kilometers off the coast

of New Zealand. So there's no cell phones there. Even to this day they don't have like cell phone service. We went there to make a film there. Anyway, so he gets smashed by this great white, but because he's wearing like double weight belts, he's wearing a shitload of weight to keep himself to be able to submerge with such a bunch of neoprene, the shark hit him and grab the, his bottom jaw had grabbed the weight belt and its top jaw like came around his thigh, but because of his weight belt, the shark kind of like tried to chew into him, but it hit all the lead and spit him out for a second. Ken has surfaced and his,

His friends, again, had seen him moving sideways and then noticed, wow, there's a fucking giant Great White Shark attached to him. And anyway, Kina surfaces, they've already packed up the boat. They have their little tenders on the deck of the big boat. They're trying to throw the boat back in so that they could push it to Kinnah. Because he's trying to swim back to the boat now, the shark comes back again for him, but he gets to the little skiff and to the boat just in time and, like, clambers on it. They drag him onto the boat.

He hits the deck, and he said his three mates. They're all like 21. They smoke and weed, drinking beer, like, you know, young punk kids that are making a lot of money because they're commercial divers. And he says, he lands on the boat. He looks up. All three of his friends are there. And then they all run away. They all just leave.

And he's like, what the fuck? And he says he looks over, he looks at the sky. And the first thing he thinks is like, wow, those clouds are beautiful. Look how beautiful the sky is. Like he was in complete shock. Then he said his head turned to the deck of the boat and the deck of the boat which was white was now completely red, all covered in his blood.

His friends had run into the cabin to bring out belts and flannels because the nurse on the island was always worried about them and shark attacks and she told them if anything ever happens, stuff your flannel into the wound so his mates are stuffing their flannels into his leg which is flayed open and the one starts tying a belt around his leg and Kina's like, what the fuck are you doing, mate? I'll lose my leg.

He's like, you'll lose your fucking life if I don't put this on you. And they tied it onto him. Anyway, they brought them, they got them back to the mainland. He got medevacked out back to mainland New Zealand and he survived. But it's funny for, I was friends with this guy for like a decade. And I knew that he had got attacked by Great White. I'm like, Kina, why don't you ever tell the story about getting attacked by Great White? If I got hit by Great White, I'd be telling it at every bar every time.

He's like, mate, when you think he's like, mate, when you think he's, you think you're going to fucking die for real. Like you think you're taking your last breath and you are dying and you're shitting yourself and you think this is the end. It's the last thing you want to relive. It's the last thing I want to relive. And he had finally told me the story, that whole story I just told you. And then it dawned on me, he's like, yeah, it's not a nice feeling.

I don't even like to think about it now. You know, we're American, so we're always talking about all the stuff we do and this. Like New Zealanders are a bit more subdued and a bit less. But it dawned, I mean, I'm like, wow, I never really thought about it that way. Like, if you think you're really going to die and you've got to relive that each time you tell the story. So now I tell it for him, you know? What a crazy fucking story, dude. My God.

And he still has the scars. Did he keep his leg or no? He kept his leg, the weight belt. He was wearing like a double weight belt of really thick, like lead, like really heavy lead. I don't know, 40 plus pounds or something. But it's crazy the shark even after that came back, try to. get him again. Yeah, and that's the thing. There are certain sharks, and it was funny because when I told him, hey, Ken I want to get out of the cage down here in New Zealand, he's like,

no, you don't, mate, because I guess he relives it a lot where he thinks about it because he said he's pissed at himself that when he went down there and saw all the fish gone, all the crayfish tucked away hidden, he said it should have dawned on him, fucking there's a shark around. He kind of beats himself up for not really knowing or remember. That was the vibe I got, because He just said when it all came together and he was surfacing, it wasn't until after he got hit by this whale and then realized it was just shark that he's like, I could have maybe saw it coming or something,

but at the same time, you know. Holy. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I was there. I was there when this happened, this massive Great White. What is this? We had Dickie, this crazy South African dude in this self-prepillar, this toe cage.

I filmed the drone shot of this actually. But we had him this thing called, hornet and we were towing a decoy in this massive shark that we called Air Jaws. Came out, breached on the seal decoy. They're incredible, man. They...

Look at his face. Yeah, it's nuts. These people are never going to the beach again after that. But it's funny. How long ago was this one? It says 2018. Yeah. But I distinctly remember the first time I saw Great White Shark's

breaching on TV because it was in 2001 in August and on that same I saw a great white launch out of the water as Air Jaws 1 and I was like, I had already loved sharks. I was working at that software company and I was like just about to quit to move to Cape Town and I saw

these Great White Sharks breaching out of the water and I was like dumbfounded like that guy and then the very next month on that same TV the Twin Tower is burning down because it was 2001 was the first Air Jaws and then 2001 that next month September 11th which is my son's birthday

which is coming up. September 11th, no way. Friday, right? Yeah. Dude, this Friday, two days. So I was actually supposed to go away on a shoot. But again, like, for the longest time, I just hated missing my kids' birthdays

or I never really missed them. When they were super young, I don't even know if I missed them then. I just always prided myself on being there. That's why hearing your stories about the film industry and these people that are miserable. Like, you see these Hollywood films

and you think, oh, that's the greatest job in the world. And then behind the scenes, it's just like a rat race. You know, not for everyone. So I feel so lucky to have found, like, a passion that keeps me busy. But even now, like, Shark Week's starting to, like, kind of die down. So I think YouTube is the future, bro. Yeah?

I appreciate you having me on here, man, because it's, I've been watching some of your episodes, GSP. Oh, yeah. Yeah, man. What a legend, dude. What a legend. Yeah, man. I'm pumped, bro. It's a dream job to be able to kind of, like, do what you want creatively and not have to, like,

deal with gatekeepers. Right, right. You know? Yeah, yeah. This is coming from somebody who was never able to get past the gate. So it's easy for me to say that. Oh, that's probably the best thing that could happen. You won Emmys.

So, like, you've done it all, bro. Just by luck, man. It was the greatest mistake that I ever made or the greatest accident was just, like, stumbling upon filmmaking. And my kids now, like, I kind of find out, I want to know. I ask them often what they want to be when they grow up. And when they were kids, they love sharks. And now I probably pushed it.

much that they're like, dad, I love dolphins now. Not really, but yeah, man, I think it's... Little people hate being told what to do. Yeah, they do. They do. I learn that with my kids. How many kids you got? Three. Three? And are they surfers? Are they watermen? Oh, yeah. I'm pushing them to be surfers.

I, every chance I get, I get them in the water. But like, I have friends who are the same way who have, like, really push their kids, like, really hard to, like, skate or surf, whatever. and they end up not wanting anything to do with it because, like, dad pushed it too much, you know. Yeah. That's true. You kind of need to let it figure it out yourself. Yeah. The same way you did, man. Yeah.

Yeah, man. Well, listen, bro, this has been incredible. Some of those stories are the most bat-shut-shed crazy shit I've ever heard. I hope it that would scare you away from the surfing. You have made me terrified. You restored my fear of great white sharks. As long as they're higher than tiger sharks. Yes.

Yes, yes, yes. Thanks again, bro. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Tell everyone listening and watching where they can find more of your stuff. Yeah, I'm on YouTube now. Just Andy Casagronde, or ABC4 Explorer is my handle for everything. And I think you inspired me to start my podcast. So I want to be giving you a call sometime. Anytime, brother. You're not that far. If you ever want to go shark diving or take me surfing, I'm down to do it. Yeah, let's do it, bro. We're close enough. We're on the same coast. So I appreciate your time. Thank you. We have Patreon questions. We do.

All right. We'll go do that and we'll wrap up the podcast now. Cool. Good night, folks.