Switched on Pop - The (murder) Ballad of Joe Exotic “Tiger King” (with Robert Moor)

Episode Date: April 5, 2020

Scandal and intrigue surround Joe Exotic, the central character of the new Netflix documentary Tiger King. Among the many bizarre traits of this zoo keeper, Exotic tries his hand at country music. Interspersed throughout the series, Joe sings about his love of big cats as well as his hatred for his nemesis in a gruesome murder ballad. But it turns out that amongst his many lies, Exotic’s country career may be yet another fabrication. Charlie speaks with journalist Robert Moor, host of the podcast Joe Exotic: Tiger King about who’s really behind the music.  Songs Discussed Joe Exotic - I Saw A Tiger Vince Johnson Band - He’s Loving You Jake Owen - Down To The Honkytonk  Lonestar - My Front Porch Looking In Joe Exotic - Here Kitty Kitty Spindrift - Speak To The Wind Johnny Cash - Long Black Veil Joe Exotic - This Is My Life George Straight - Living For The Night Sean Watkins - I Saw A Tiger More Robert Moor’s Twitter Thread on what Tiger King left out NY Mag: Tiger King Joe Exotic and His American Animals  Podcast: Joe Exotic: Tiger King Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to a bonus episode of Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. One of the things that I feel like is bringing us together right now are the programs that we're watching apart, but we have this shared experience of. And right now, that has got to be the Netflix documentary, Tiger King, about the very strange person, zookeeper, reality star,

and country singer Joe Exotic. It's got some very bizarre music. And when I heard these songs that he sings in the documentary, it brought back a rush of memories. I'm at this Shabbat dinner with friends years ago, around a table, and I'm seated next to this guy who I don't know. He's a journalist, and he's telling me the absolute stranger, about this very singer, Joe Exotic.

My name's Robert Moore. I'm the reporter and host of season two. of over my dead body, Joe Exotic, which is now called just Joe Exotic Tiger King. About five years ago, I met you at a dinner party, and you brought to me this very strange quandary. What was that?

There was this guy named Joe Exotic, who I had been reporting on, and I had heard these rumors that Joe was not actually singing his country songs, that he claimed to be singing. But I couldn't actually... At that point, I had no way of verifying that. That was still just a rumor,

And so I was hoping for someone to do like a sonic analysis of these songs side by side with the band that I suspected was singing the songs, which was the Clinton Johnson band. And I think I asked you to do that, right, to make a comparison. Yeah, so I think you sent me some videos, Joe Exotic songs, and the Clinton Johnson band. Nate and I listened to them and were like, these are pretty boring, derivative country songs. And Robert, you're absolutely mad. I don't know why you're pursuing this. Joe Exotic is a very strange figure, and I think that this is a waste of everybody's time.

Five years later, here we are. So here I am. Yep. Here we are. We're in a post-Joe Exotic world now. So now Joe Exotic is this entire phenomenon. Who is he? How did this happen?

Well, okay. Who is he? He is a tiger-breeding zoo-owning, self-described gay gun-toting redneck with a mullet who ended up in a feud with a woman in Florida named Carol Baskin.

I discovered Joe before he ever hired a hitman or ran for president or ran for governor before any of that stuff. You know, at the time I was a magazine journalist, a freelancer, and I'm always looking around for quirky stories. And so I saw a headline in the LA Times that said Michael Jackson's

Alligators burned alive an animal park fire. Oh, my gosh. And I thought, well, that's an odd combination of words. And so I clicked on the story. And then I scroll down and it says the zoo is owned by this guy named Joe Exotic. And I was like, Joe Exotic. And so I Google Joe Exotic and suddenly all this stuff comes up.

I mean, if you've ever run a Google image search on Joe Exotic, instantly just flooded with the most bizarre images of this guy with this bleach blonde mullet and his two husbands and he's covered in tattoos and you know bullet bleeding bullet wounds in his chest and he's got all these piercings including this this eyebrow ring that seems to be barely holding on for dear life hanging from his his eyebrow and he's just bizarre and and so i i read up on him and i pitched the story to a magazine and they sent me down there and so i spent a week that first time in 2015 living at joe zoo living in a trailer that he gave me and uh just followed him around like morning till night for five full days.

There's so much here. There's murder, there's tigers, there are like postmodern Dickensian characters that just can't possibly exist in real life, and yet they do. I feel like amongst all of the discussion about Joe Exotic, one of the things that is too often overlooked is his music.

It's in the Netflix documentary briefly. It makes it into your podcast. but I feel like neither answers the fundamental quandary that you brought to me, which is about who wrote this music. But more importantly, why did Joe do it and what is it trying to communicate? So I want to do that today. And I feel like there's no better place to start than with his song, I Saw Tiger. Tell all the hunters to lay down their gun.

Tell them that the tiger. Okay, so what is this song? Okay, so for a bit of context, Joe writes, it doesn't write it, but he comes up with the idea for this song after the Zanesville Zoo Massacre, right? Which is Terry Thompson, this guy in Ohio, you've probably read about it. It was written up in a lot of different magazines. He let all of his animals loose and he killed himself. And this sparks off this big debate about whether or not, you know, there should be bands on people owning tigers and lions. And Joe was very much against those bands.

And so he wanted a kind of anthem, which would wrap together the themes of conservation in the wild, but also preserving what he saw as preserving the species here in America. So the first verse is about protecting the jungles and whatnot. And then later, you know, there's a one line where he says, you know, when all the tigers are killed in the Holocaust. That's painful loss When they kill all the tigers In the hall

That line often pulls people up short Yeah What he's talking about is they would They believed, and this was a sort of A conspiracy theory, was that they were going to round up All the Tigers in America and euthanize them And they referred to that as the Holocaust Oh my gosh.

This is a spectacle. It's an utterly bizarre song And it's an utterly bizarre video and it's kind of fitting, I guess, that it's become the anthem of Joe Exotic. I can't tell you how many radio shows I've gone on in the last week, and people say, you know, say what you about Joe,

like, that song kind of slaps. If I recall correctly, this was the song that you had originally sent me to investigate whether or not this is Joe. And I think there's a lot of clues that show that this is almost like a piece of, like, branded content that he hired somebody else to make. And I think we can tell that it's not Joe

when we listen to the music. When I originally heard it, I would just like kind of pass it off too quickly. But upon second listen, it's really obvious that this is somebody else. The first thing I noticed was when we hear the chorus come in. There's harmonies here, and I'm pretty sure that they're not the same. person singing on top of each other. They could be, but it sounds like there's two distinct voices, which all of a sudden puts a doubt that this is one guy singing the song. So I caught Joe out in this line, and I asked him about it, and he said, well, I had a, sometimes I had a backing track, because he's still to this day insists that he sung those songs. He said, I had a backing

track, and I would sing over that, but he said lots of singers do that. That's true. All pop musicians do that. I was just singing over the top of it. And that may differ from song to song. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that, but that, no, this is, I mean, most of the time it's just one guy singing and it's clearly not Joe. We know it's not Joe because if you hear Joe's voice on its own, it is not a baritone. It is a very whiny tenor. Here's Joe. This is my way of living and nobody's going to tell me any otherwise. That's Joe in his normal voice and I thought, well, what if we just took that and tuned it down into a baritone and see if it matches it all with I Saw Tiger?

way of living and nobody's going to tell me any otherwise. When he goes down into that baritone voice, it's not the same person at all. So you propose that this is the Vince Johnson band with Danny Clinton singing. And if we listen to their song, he loves you, I think you can tell that it's clearly the same person singing, I saw a tiger. Whole life's been turned around. My world's up in my way. Tell all the hunters. to lay down their guns.

That's the same baritone as we hear and I saw a tiger. Like that is not Joe's voice. You know, this would actually, this could deepen the mystery is if you want to play a Danny Clinton song alongside a Vince Johnson song. We could actually figure out

which one of these two people because I had originally gotten a phone call from Vince Johnson. Yeah. Because Joe stiffed him. He didn't pay him. And he told me that actually Vince, you know, said,

I sang all those songs. I wrote and sang all those songs. Now, I later got a tweet, a DM from Danny Clinton's son, incensed saying, actually, no, Danny sang those songs. Vince didn't sing those songs. He's taking credit for it. So to be honest, I don't quite know which one of the two of them sang those songs. It's either Vince Johnson or Danny Clinton, but definitely not Joe Exotic.

I think that much is clear, yeah. Why is Joe even writing these country songs? What is he trying to accomplish? By this point in his life, Joe is pretty much doing anything he could do to get attention, to make him larger than life. So he was a magician. He was into like professional wrestling for a little while, like not professional, but like low, low rent kind of local wrestling. He was singing these country songs. He was making a reality show. Then he started running for president. He started running for governor. He was doing anything he could do just to get eyeballs on him. And I think that he

thought that being a country singer was a good route to that. Now, what's funny is when I talked to him, he didn't seem to particularly love country music all that much. When he was young, he said he loved Cindy Lopper. Like he was into like 80s pop and New Wave. He wasn't really a country guy growing up, but he sort of adopted that persona. And yet it kind of makes sense that he pursues country music because country of all genres is particularly narrative.

And I feel like throughout his most popular songs, there are some very clear stories that he's trying to tell. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And one of the things I've always found so interesting, about country music, because I listen to a lot of country, and I have for a long time, is that it's often about mythologizing the American experience and sort of taking the everyday experience of living in the suburbs. You know, there's one song called, From My Front Porch Looking In, and it's just about, like, his wife and his kid and living in the suburbs, and sort of raising

the banality of that experience up to something that feels almost mythic, because it's in a song. There's one song that I think really typical. this by by Jake Owen, which is called Down to the Honky Tonk, where he says, I might not end up in the Hall of Fame with a star on a sidewalk with my name or a statue in my and the whole song is about how he'll never be famous, but at the honky tonk, he'll be famous. He's a kind of a bar room celebrity. He feels like a hero in his own life. And I think that's a really powerful thing that country music does for people. It's about taking the almost a stereotypical American experience and middle class suburban or rural experience and elevating that to something

that feels larger than life. Now, what Joe's doing is totally different. Joe is taking something that is outside of the norm. You know, a lot of his songs are about being gay. A lot of his songs are about his love of tigers. Some of them are about odd subjects like the death of Carol Baskin's husband. None of this is what you'd expect to hear lyrically from a country artist, I don't think. Yeah, let's listen to that song. It's called Here. Kiddy Kiddy. Everything was fine, just as sweetest wine, but her husband went and disappeared. And it got a little crazy, you got a little hazy, and the cops said there's something wrong here.

Yeah, this is by far his strangest, sort of most controversial song. This is a song he makes directly aimed at getting back at Carol Baskin, running down the reputation of Carol Baskin. Who is his nemesis and the tiger breeder based in Florida who tries to take him down over many years? Exactly, yeah. For people who haven't seen the documentary or heard the podcast, she was his arch rival. You know, he had impersonated her at one point. She sued him.

She won a million dollars. He tried to get out of paying that money. And in that escalating feud kept growing, this hatred for her, kept growing and growing, especially because he believed she had killed her husband. And that hypocrisy that she had killed her husband, inherited his money, and then started this menagerie at first, you know, this breeding facility, which then later turned into a sanctuary, drove Joe to distraction. He couldn't stand it. And so this song was one of his many, many ways that he went about this sort of ongoing PR war to take down Carroll. If you notice, I mean, you know, his songs were always geared kind of with a music video in mind.

And this music video is probably his most, I mean, in some ways, is most successful. He has a very believable Carol Baskin lookalike playing Carol Baskin. You know, he's got a lot of big cats. This is the one that he was most proud of, I think. In the song, Carol Baskin has allegedly murder her husband, which the show and your podcast both establish as a potential outcome and that she has fed him to the tiger. So Here Kitty Kitty Kitty is a really grotesque way of Joe trying to make that story come to life through country music.

And he does it with these sort of tribal-esque tom-tom beat going on the background, this Western tremolo sort of spaghetti western guitar. It reminds me of this band The Spin Drifts and their songs Speak to the Wind. The sounds that he's drawing from are really menacing, and yet you point to this sort of tension in which he's using the language of country to tell a story which is actually grander than the kinds of narratives that country tell. He also, I think, gets a lot wrong. Like the songs are cheesy. Like the lyrics are bad. He uses this rhyme scheme where he's like, you know, her husband went and disappeared. and then rhymes that with the police said there's something wrong, here.

It's like he lost the rhyme, so he had to throw in the rhyme. And then the chorus is here, kitty, kitty. But then it got a little crazy. You got a little hazy. And the cops said there's something wrong here. Oh, here, kid, kitty. It kind of flubs the rhyme and then stumbles into the chorus using the same words. I think the cheesiest moment for me where the song really doesn't work and I can't take it too seriously as a country effort is at the end of the second verse.

But you can't prosecute. There's just no use. There's nothing left but Tiger Tratt. Nothing left but Tiger Tract. It's just terrible. Yeah, I don't get the sense that the songwriters were trying too hard. I don't think Joe is paying them a lot. You can hear they're just doing the bare minimum to create a song that sounds like viable. Yeah, I saw that Vanity Fair reported they actually didn't get paid at all. I mean, I also think it's interesting to point out that this song in the tradition of country is actually maybe one of the most traditional countries. Songs in a sense because there is this rich tradition of country songs about murder. Murder ballads.

Yeah, exactly. Murder ballads. You know, thunder rolls or long black veil. There were few at the scene. But they all agreed that the slayer who ran looked a lot like me. There's lots and lots of songs about jilted lovers killing one another. And this one just has the added element of feeding the body to the tigers. There's just so much cognitive dissonance because this song is so bad.

The video is so ridiculous. The content feels like it's a caricature. Like this doesn't feel like it's real life at all, and yet going back to what you said, you spent time with Joe and he actually made these threats and spoke to you on the record about them. Well, this is the thing about all of it, is it all, everything about Joe and to a certain degree about Carol has that quality where it feels like this is so off the wall, it can't be true. So even when Joe was saying things like, I'm going to kill Carol Baskin and telling me how he dreamed of seeing her brains on a wall and describing how he was going to mute. her bodies, horrible, horrific things he was saying. When he was saying them, the people around him were laughing, like laughing hysterically at the way, as if he were a kind of a shock jock, you know?

And I think that there's something about Joe, and this is one of the really interesting themes of this whole story, is there's something about Joe that speaks to a larger tendency in our society to gravitate to these people who are shocking and seem unencumbered. Right. And actually to perceive them as honest. And this is something that I think resonates with our current president is that when someone says things that are so just offensive constantly and oftentimes so stupid, you think, oh, he must be telling the truth. What could he possibly be lying about? He's just wearing his heart on his sleeve.

That's the way it felt with Joe. Oh, he just speaks his mind. He says whatever's in his head. When in fact, Joe was lying about everything. I mean, Joe lied to me about having cancer. He told me he had bone marrow cancer. He was raising money from people for his expenses. Obviously, he lied about fire at the alligator house.

He lied about his country music. He lied about so many things in his life. But people perceived him as really honest and really genuine. In thinking about, like, what's the role of the music? So often the role of a good country song is it can take an ordinary story and make it seem extraordinary. And here, he's making extraordinary songs through more ordinary music. and I guess we don't really know what is true, what's fiction, how the two blend together to create the best narrative.

And that he put these same threats into music makes me feel more uncertain and inconclusive as to what's actually going on here. I mean, especially around the whole murder plot and Carol Baskin and all these things that lead to Joe eventually going to prison. Well, and that's, that was one of the really fascinating things. things about being at the trial was he was his you know joe's attorney tried to almost use all of these threats and and these songs and all of this is evidence that joe hadn't done it because who would be so

stupid as to publicly make threats like this for years and then go and hire a hitman that he would be the first person everyone would come looking for not only did he make songs about them but he actually didn't write songs about them he hired somebody else to write songs so it would be safe to assume that these songs are, in large part, penned by somebody else through the story of Joe Exotic, then being transmitted via Joe's channel. I mean, there's so many people in the process. In that way, it actually feels very much like contemporary country songwriting, where oftentimes it is a collaborative effort between songwriter, producer, and artist.

And Joe here is the role of the artist, except he's sort of millie-vanilliing this thing and not actually is even singing. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, the other thing, it's interesting, is Joe listened to these songs, his own songs, obsessively. He had them playing in his gift shop on a 24-hour loop.

He had them playing in his car all the time. He was only ever really listening to his own music. I never heard him listen to another country song. Like, never. In my presence, he only ever listened to his own music. So I don't know if he had a sense of whether they were good or bad. And I don't know if anyone who was at that zoo did either. I mean, when I hear them,

I can't hear them as good or bad because they're like seared into my brain. I've heard each one of those songs so many times that I can't even hear it clearly anymore. It just kind of gives me this creepy feeling of being in that zoo and being around Joe. But yeah, it's interesting to talk to you and hear someone who's actually able to analyze these songs. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast.

called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app.

Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly Democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminals. aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE.

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Well, I think we should listen to just one more briefly, which really captures it all. This song, This is My Life. This is my life. Put down on the world. Those lines right there say it all for me. This is my life put into words, put down on paper, what's so absurd, all that I've done. This is the anthem of Joe's life.

There's another part where he talks about being gays, is my true loves were men, but I'm just like you. My true loves were men, but I'm just like you. And that's actually one of the few phrasings and melodies that I think is actually really lovely that Joe has in his music, you know, supposedly his music. This is actually a love ballad that he had written

to his husband, John Finley, who had just left him. So a bit of backstory, this is a kind of a breakup song. Joe's husband John Finley had just gone off with a girl who worked in the gift shop and he and she had had a child together

and Joe was heartbroken. And so he, started pretending to have cancer in order to lure John Finley back. And so the two things he's singing about in this song, and it's really disjunctive and strange when you see the music video. One is John Finley leaving him, and the other is, I'm dying of cancer. And there's even footage in there of him telling his mother that he's dying of cancer, and she's weeping. And that's real. That actually happened. It is a perverse and strange song. And at once seemingly so deeply sincere, but then also so insincere.

Speaking of sort of sincerity and toying with the truth, I was just sort of searching around for other country songs that you used the same core progression and had a similar sort of feel. And I found George Straits living for the night, another song about lamenting a breakup. Every day's a lifetime without you. Hard to get through since you've gone.

It sounds like he didn't listen to other country, music, as you said, so I don't mean to imply that he's stealing from this, but I think it shows that the music is derivative of the larger form, just done twisted. I hear, yeah, I mean, the thing is that the, as always, Joe's version sounds over the top, right? It always sounds like an overly, it's overly sappy, it's lacking in any subtlety. And country music is not an art form typically known for its subtlety, but Joe's, it's all of that is stripped away. It's all just, surface. I think you're right. One of the tricks in good songwriting is that you want to find interesting turns of phrases and rhyme schemes which sound as natural as possible,

but are obviously some form of poetry in the case of Joe's music. It's a zoo. The thing is, it is absurd and even in his most sincere moments, it's impossible to really tell what's going on. I think that's part of our fascination with it, that both his narrative, but also the way in which he constructs this music, there's so much cognitive dissonance that it actually draws us in further rather than pushes us away. One of the things that made Joe among some circles so beloved

was that he was such a out and proud gay man in this very rural part of Oklahoma. There were not many other gay people, certainly not openly gay people. And in the same way, I mean, I can't think of a single person. single openly gay male country singer. There's a, there's a few gay and bisexual women who sing country, but I can't think of one who's a gay man. And that's, you know, we even, we have gay rappers now.

I mean, obviously there's, there's plenty of gay, you know, rock and roll singers dating back to the 70s and, you know, earlier. But country's one of the last bastions where that's, that's something where you don't see a lot of gay men singing. And so in some ways, it endeared me to Joe that he was so fearlessly who he was in this environment. And, and when I watch those videos, I'll be honest. as a gay man myself, when I hear that this is my life song, there's a part of me that's like, good for you, Joe, you know, like you do your thing. You got to kind of commend him because I'm sure there were people saying terrible things about him. In fact, I know there were, I heard someone who was arrested and was in the Winnie Wood Police Department, the police station, and he

overheard the police referring to Joe's zoo as the faggot farm. Oh my God. You know, they were, he faced a lot of discrimination and a lot of abuse, bullying. And in spite of that he, you know, never really hid who he was in this sense. In fact, he kind of tended to use it to his advantage. And now when you see all these people online rallying behind Joe and saying things like Free the Tiger King, I think that's part of it. I think that if Joe weren't out and proud the way he is, he wouldn't have quite the same charm. I'm really curious about how his charm and the fallout of all of this chaotic story has perhaps brought attention to his music. Do you have any idea how his music has fared since these massive media releases?

Well, I mean, you, so you can tell me, look at YouTube right now. I think I think you're Kitty Kitty and I saw a tiger each around a million views or higher on YouTube. I can tell you they were anywhere near that three months ago. I think they were probably a quarter of that. So I think those songs are seeing a lot of attention. I know they're being played. I've been interviewed by, I don't even know how many radio stations in the last couple of days, and they all play, I Saw a Tiger. And people say they have it stuck in their heads. Clearly, this music is penetrating into the public unconscious in some way. One joyful thing that certainly has come from all of this is that there have been some exceptional covers of the song, my absolute favorite,

it that actually might have even convinced me that Joe's music is good, was a song that I was just sort of scrolling through Instagram, and I saw the songwriter Sean Watkins. He's of the group, Nickel Creek, and he is a great country and bluegrass player on guitar. He starts strumming this thing. Like, that's a really great song. What is it?

He was obviously playing, I Saw a Tiger. That first line, tell all those hunters lay down their guns, this almost sounds like, I'm like, wow, this is like a country song, which is like an anti-gun PSA.

And then as soon as the tiger's coming, I'm like, wait a minute, okay, this is not what I expect. Wait, what's happening? Oh my gosh,

this is the Joe Exotic cover. Yeah, I got to tell you, Joe would be loving this. If he could hear all this right now, he would just be loving the fact that he has been memeified in this way, because he was not someone

who, had any problem with ironic adoration, so long as he was being paid attention to and people were talking about him, whether it was good or bad. And he told me that many times, whether people are saying good things about you or saying bad things about you.

All that matters is that people are talking about you. Yeah. So, yeah, I think he'd love all of those versions. Oh, man. Given that Joe is such a complex figure with many issues, I'm not sure I want to be shining too bright of a spotlight here.

I'm kind of more interested in the way in which these songs, which have been written by somebody else, have been then translated and becomes something of their own by listeners and viewers who make their own versions, which is fun.

It does bring me back to the question that brought us together, which is about authorship. Who actually does own this music? Why do you think the documentarians left that question out of the series? You know, I really don't, know because Eric and Rebecca must have known that he wasn't singing those songs. The amount of

access that they had, they must have known, I mean, there's two plausible explanations. One is there's just too much stuff. And that might well be, because there really is so much fascinating stuff in this story that structurally it becomes a nightmare. I mean, I wrote a 10,000 word article and I left out so many things that I loved. That might be it, but I think more than that, I think they were trying to build up the mythos of Joe Exotic, you know, is this larger than life figure. And when you reveal that he's not singing those songs, it kind of deflates that a little bit. And I've seen that reaction on my Twitter feed. You know, if people go to my Twitter at Robert Moore, M-O-O-O-R underscore, they can see I created this long thread of all the things that the documentary

left out. And the thing that grabs people's attention the most and people seem really disappointed by is that Joe didn't sing those songs. It seems to reveal him in some fundamental way to be, you know, a fraud. And when that's the case, it's a lot harder to root for him. And I think that that's kind of what the documentarians wanted you to do, to root for this kind of anti-hero. Well, they definitely have captured

people's attention. That's for certain. And if they're rooting for him as an anti-hero, I think given our conversation and our little musical investigation, it might not be totally appropriate to root for him as the country star. Maybe Danny Clinton

and Vince Johnson deserve some credit that have, well, they weren't paid, that kind of got screwed. Fascinating story. Rob, thank you. If people want to listen to your podcast and find more of your work, where can they find that? You can find the podcast anywhere. You listen to podcasts. It's in iTunes. It's on Stitcher, Spotify. It's now called Joe Exotic Tiger King. It used to be called Over My Dead Body Season 2. They've re-released it now is Joe Exotic Tiger King. If people want to binge the whole thing right now, just go to my Twitter feed. I have a special offer code for you so you can get a month for free.

And if you want to find that story, you know, similarly, just go to my Twitter page or my website, and it will lead you to it. It's called American Animals. We'll link to your Twitter article and podcast in our show notes. Rob, I'm so glad that you brought this question to me at that dinner party originally. And I can't believe what this has all become. It really is. It is so surreal to watch this thing that's just been like my kind of cocktail party story for years, suddenly be brought out into the national consciousness like this.

It's so strange. Like, now people get my references, and they know the thing I've been soaking in for so long. Of course, now I kind of want to get out of it. I want to, like, wash my brain of this. So now I'm writing a book about trees just to sort of cleanse myself, move on, go about as far away from the story as I can get. That sounds really lovely. You know, that's got to be our cue.

I think we ought to head out, close this. this, cleanse ourselves from this conversation and this music. Thanks, Rob. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, thank you. This was fun. I hope you all thought this was fun and a little bit different. I had a good time, and I think we're going to probably do a couple more of these in the coming weeks intersection between the things we're watching and the music that's happening in them. In any case, thanks for listening. I'm Charlie Harding. This show is produced by Nate Sloan, Bridget Armstrong, Megan Lubin, for Mix, Master, and Engineer by Brandon McFarlane, social media by Abby Barr and illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, our executive producers,

Arnaz Chirwa and Liz Nelson, were a member of the Box Media Podcast Network. Please chat with me and Nate on Twitter and Instagram at SwitchDun Pop. We'll be back on Tuesday with another really fun episode with a truly exciting band. Until then, thanks for listening.