The Joe Rogan Experience - #425 - Phil Demers

Episode Date: December 4, 2013

Phil Demers is a former Marineland employee turned truther, also known as the Walrus Whisperer.

Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. So the young man I'm talking to right now, Phil Demers, I heard about you on Twitter, on the internet. People were contacting me about your situation where you're an animal trainer, right? I was an animal trainer. You were an animal trainer.

Why don't you tell us your story? Tell us what got you to this point of controversy. That could take a while. Like how, where do you want to delve? Wherever's interesting. Oh, shit. Well, off the hop, let's just talk about how I became an animal trainer,

I suppose. 22 years old. I actually went to school for broadcast engineering. I had aspirations of recording bands and touring with bands, whatever it be. As any confused 22-year-old punk boy would be. And then sure as shit one day, my dad and I were cruising around, and he's giving me the old, you got to get a job, son. I'm like, shit. Cause I paid a lot of money for my education, which ultimately became a free download about six months later. Like we're talking 2000, right? So,

and, uh, I saw an article in the paper, you want to be a marine mammal trainers assistant. And I thought that's, that sounds like a great job. I can scrub buckets or do whatever it is to the people who are, you know, training these animals. But I didn't think I could get the job. Um, applied for the gig and, uh, you know, what size boot do you wear? Boom, nine, got this job. And I wasn't, you know, getting that marine mammals trainer's assistant job wasn't, you know, you're going to go scrub buckets and everything. I mean, obviously it encompassed all that. But I started training animals really quickly. Like right off the hop.

Right off the hop they're teaching you how to do it? They're teaching you how to do it, yeah. Now, is there a science to training these things? Or is there like nice methods or more cruel methods? Because I've heard of some of the methods they use to train orcas. And it's kind of disturbing. You know, they lock them in pens together and get them really tightly grouped up where they can't do anything. And they don't feed them unless they do their tricks.

Yeah, that exists in just about every application of animal training. But that's not the perspective that you exercise or that they train you. When they train you to train animals, it's about positive reinforcement. So if an animal does something that's a desired behavior, for instance, you reward them for that. In that, there's the subtle nuances of if they're not doing what it is you're asking, you don't reward them. So that's where the... and then there's negative punishment. I mean, there is all of that. All of that existed in training historically,

but trainers now and the art of training, of training animals, is more positive reinforcement based. So you learn all of that off the hop. But at the end of the day, there's one, you know, there's one variable and that's fish. So it's either reinforcement

or ultimately deprivation. And it was all things that you learn and are effective tools. So you need both to train like an orca? You develop a relationship with the orcas. The orcas learn really quickly, I want to do this because I'm being reinforced for doing so. It's as simple as that. So you sort of run with that.

You develop that language. There becomes an understanding between, especially over the years, as you grow this, this relationship, the animals know. And the animals, the animals I worked with, every one of them, I'd never met a single animal that wasn't incredibly like good natured. Just really good and really wanted to please. So it's not very difficult to train an orca, especially when applying the positive reinforcement. So if that's the case, then how does it happen that you hear stories about these animals being corralled up in small cages or small pens with a bunch of them stuck right next to each other

and how they deprive them of food for punishment? Is that bullshit? No, no, that's absolutely not bullshit. So how does that happen? I think what we're talking about is something that happened a lot, like a long time ago, rather. Is that what it is? The system amalgamated or turned into, you know, the more of the positive reinforcement

aspect. But when you look at that, you're trying to suggest the negative reinforcement aspect of it where, hey, you're being bad, so I'm going to shove you over here. This would be more of a circumstance where you can't positively reinforce an animal for doing something because they're not doing anything that is desired by design of the positive reinforcement technique. So whatever's going on here, you're avoiding. Inadvertently by avoiding, you're not rewarding.

You're not feeding. You're withholding food. So this is a lot of talk. Hold on a second. This is a lot of talk to try to answer one simple question. Why did they put them in a pen, like smushed all next to each other? I'm really confused. Well, in what situation would they be?

I mean, at any facility. So are you saying they don't do that anymore? Because what I've read about them treating, like one of the big things that people were complaining about was that they would pack all these animals into these pens and put them next to each other in these tanks. And they really had no room to move and they wanted biting each other sometimes. Oh, tiny tanks. I mean, all facilities have different size tanks or options to mix or divide animals or whatever.

And that they would deprive them of food. If you were depriving the animal of food, that would work in the sense that if you had animals in one environment and you wanted them to go in another, a place where the animal didn't want to go, you can't reinforce that animal if it's not going through that gate. So the idea is you're going to try to coax that animal through positive sort of short, short

steps, you know, these, these approximations and you reinforce each approximation. Eventually they go in, you're reinforcing them. You're giving them that reward for going through. But if they're not going through in. You're reinforcing them. You're giving them that reward for going through, but if they're not going through, you can't reinforce them. So it's actually, it's deprivation in that sense. What does it feel like to train something that you know is probably misunderstood and really smart? Like a killer whale or an orca, they're probably pretty misunderstood by most people, don't you think? Absolutely. A hundred percent. They're super intelligent creatures, right?

Like it's hard to, I don't like to, it's hard to call them an animal just because, you know, there's definition, whatever that is of animal. And there's a stark contrast between humans and animals in whatever it is, whatever that definition is. When it comes to sentient and intelligent beings, there's no contrast between humans and, and I want to say animals as a whole, because they have best interests. They have, you know, they have objectives. I'm not sure that they're as conscious of those objectives. Maybe they are. How do we know? Well, we know about brain size and we know about how much activity is going on.

I see what you're saying to a certain extent about some animals, but look into a rat's eyes and tell me he's thinking about poetry. If you look into a dolphin's eyes, there's a big difference. There's a big difference between making eye contact with a marine mammal. There's something weird about them. They're very smart. They're very smart. They're very smart in a weird way, where it's like, what's going on in there?

That seems almost like a person in a weird outfit you know spiritual way for sure is that the most fucked up aspect about places where they they have them in tanks because it seems to me that that's like we're going to watch slavery we're going to watch slavery of an animal that we don't we don't understand what they're saying so we think it's okay to just lock them up that's a perspective that you're capable of exercising but when people are sitting there in front of their TV and they watch that jingle come on or whatever and, you know, SeaWorld jingle or Atlantic Canada jingle. Hey, that's fun. They go there. They block out a lot of things. They paid a lot of money to be there.

They're there to be entertained. They're there to be happy. They shut their brains off to a lot of things. You know, maybe there's an inclination for a second. That's messed up right there. But I think that at the end of the day, they're looking to be entertained and they get that music and the splish splash. You got wet. Hey, I'm happy. I'm going home. Happy. My kid's happy. Well, there's something weird about wanting animals to do our bidding. There's something weird about those dog shows. Those dog shows aren't just about how cute

your dog is. Those dog shows about your dog being just on fucking point, listening to you every step of the way, being completely trained, stop when you stop, prancing when you tell it to prance, all that stupid shit that doesn't mean anything, like bears bouncing a fucking ball on the tip of their nose. That doesn't mean anything either. But if you can get me a bear that can ride a bike and bounce a ball up on his head, I'm going to make you a millionaire. There's a bunch of assholes out there that want to see this stupid fucking bear do some

shit that any normal person can do. It's weird, right? It's an affinity for almost, for that dominance, to exert your dominance on something. And people do it to humans every single day as well, but certainly with animals when, I mean, animals don't speak English. They don't speak any other language for that matter, but they do speak their own, and they can't express to us like, hey, like, maybe let me out of here. Well, they're speaking a language and that's something that is really hard for people to understand there's a difference between some sounds that animals make that would indicate that there's some sort of communication going on

and a pure language dolphins whales orcas they have a language like it's not as small as a few grunts and it's so complex and weird and it's so sound based we can't even decipher it we we have ideas that they're saying the same thing but there's dialects that from different areas where they do it like it's so complex that it's like our human language just we don't it, and we can't crack it. So because of that, because we can't hear their screams, we just put them in these fucking tanks. It's really dark because we don't consider them to be intelligent because they can't manipulate things with their fingers because they can't build houses.

They can't just walk out. They can't walk out. They can't get out. But in their world, in the world of the ocean, you don't need thumbs. You don't need any of that. In fact, we would be terribly designed for the ocean. If we were forced to become marine animals, things would change radically and quickly. The placement of our air hole is a fucking stupid place.

The way your mouth works is stupid. You can't really close it good. Can't be fat. You can't be fat. You can't be fat. You can't be fat. You can't be lazy. You can't be lazy. You got to move 24 hours a day. You barely, you don't even really sleep, right?

Well, they sleep while they're in motion. You almost wonder if just the pure instinct to survive and maybe limiting oneself's language or species language isn't more genius than having such an elaborate language. Because you almost wonder if we don't communicate as effectively as we could because we know too many damn words. Like, you know how much language is expressed in, in how, how you see each other and how we,

you know, well, then all the things that we've invented that we have to name. And then the interaction of those things in places that we've invented, like cities and airplanes and cars, all those things that we've invented all take on a whole new school of vocabulary on their own. Yeah, it's fucking ridiculous.

John Lennon said, like, imagine a world with no borders, no nothing. I think he's imagining the land of the orcas, really. Not really say the land of, but essentially he's envisioning an ocean. Yeah, but he also married Yoko Ono. That dude was a silly bitch. You know, a lot of people are big John Lennon fans. They don't want to admit that, but

come on, son. You gotta look at everything that guy says with a grain of salt. I showed my girlfriend, like, a video of people are big John Lennon fans. They don't want to admit that, but come on, son. You got to look at everything that guy says with a grain of salt. I showed my girlfriend, like, a video of Yoko Ono. She's like, I didn't even know Yoko Ono does that. The whole, like, la-la-la-la-dee-dee. Oh, the screaming? Yeah, yeah. She's like, oh, what's this? I'm like, that's Yoko Ono.

She's strange. Yeah, that's not good. But the sound of orcas is probably, you know, for a lot of people, it sounds like Yoko Ono underwater. It's pretty ironically. It kind of does. Maybe John Lennon was onto something. No, I don't think he was.

I think he just had a weakness. There it was. We all have weakness. So do you think that there's going to come a point in time where they will be able to decipher dolphin language and realize what you're doing is imprisoning humans. It's essentially just as bad as if we found a group of blue people. They were people, but they were blue.

Put them in a cage. We couldn't understand a word they said. They would talk like dolphins. Like, make crazy noises that we couldn't decipher, but clearly talking to each other. And we just decided to put them in blue People World. You'd be rich quick? Yeah, I mean, we would do that. Of course. That would be a little harder to sell because they look closer to us because

of fingers and shit, but if you could just realize that a dolphin is probably just like the mind of a person, or maybe even weirder, maybe even more intense in a lot of ways. More emotional. The cerebral cortex. More emotional.

The basis of their language and their being, they're such a social animal. And they have such long and deep social structures, social dynamics, family bonds. So deep that at the end of the day, it's like these guys, you almost have to wonder if they're by far more intelligent and more

sympathetic than we are. Because that's what we lack, is we're dicks. Dolphins are not dicks. One of the interesting things is that dolphins don't really kill people except in captivity. I read something online, somebody wrote, but it turned out to be total bullshit, but it was kind of funny, that a guy said that dolphins used to kill

people up until World War II because in World War II, the fighter pilots started using, not dolphins but orcas, started using orcas as target practice. And the orcas realized, all right, we better not fuck with people. Oh, they got the understanding. The word got out, and now they don't kill people anymore. It sounds hilarious, but it turned out to be bullshit. But it's fascinating if it was true.

But they're that smart. The point is, like, they actually could do that. If they found out that people were shooting people, they would probably tell each other. They'd be like, hey, man, you hear that sound? Peace treaty. Dive. Go under.

The, I mean, the relationship that we have with them is very bizarre. And we're going to be incredibly embarrassed if we find out what they're actually saying one day. We realize what we've done. all these people go into slave world you're going to slave world you're going to watch slaves do flips i've been privy to like probably some messages that i know would be beating the shit out of even more than the shit kicking i've already taken since having you you know, left that gig. So, yeah. What do you mean? Well, the idea that if you're listening to it, if we decipher what the dolphin's saying, I mean, I've had to do some, I've had to do some things with dolphins.

Like, you know, let's speak hypothetically just for a second. Okay. On my lawyer's advice. So let's assume that a green dolphin comes in and let's call it an elderly dolphin, a real old male dolphin comes in. So he's just been captured, you know, via. Just been captured. Just been captured. Who knows a month before. So he was out in the wild his whole life. His whole life. An old man, wise old man comes in with a group of about six, seven others, mostly young, really aesthetically

pleasing animals. And this one just is not prepared to stomach the life of captivity. And so what do you resort to? You start force feeding them, right? So again, just hypothetics. Dropping a pool, the water's down to nothing. Again, shit ton of dolphins, green. So they're not trained. They're swimming around like crazy.

And you're having to go down there, grab a towel, wrap it around its rostrum, which is the end of their nose there, that face, open it up and start cramming frozen fish in there. Oh, my God. Well, what message do you think that dolphin was probably trying to tell me? Oh, my God. So imagine if I could, I just imagine a point,

just to go back to what you said about deciphering the language. I can't imagine what I'd be processing if they were able to communicate language to language understanding with humans. Yeah, that's dark shit. That's part of your life. That was part of my life, of course. Everybody does it. If you're a trainer,

that is something you're going to have to do someday. That's not even the worst of days. That's just part of your life. Part of your life is you take a towel, you wrap it around the dolphin's face, you open it up, and you stuff frozen fish in there. Try to keep them alive. Start injecting them right in the back.

Injections. No one ever says, hey, maybe we should let this guy go. Well, when you're in Niagara Falls, Canada, there's literally nowhere that you can let them go. I mean, I'm not really near any... Are they Pacific animals? The animals that we brought in were from the Black Sea. Where's the Black Sea? In Russia.

Russia's where there's a lot of trade in Russia. I mean, as we speak, they have some wild-caught orcas that they caught in the last month or two. Two of which, in fact, are being sent to Moscow to be on display during the Sochi Olympics. What the fuck? Wild-caught. Yeah. Horrible. Dude.

Those are slaves. Those are slaves. They really are. They're slaves that will do tricks. That have to do tricks if they want to live. I mean, I don't want to say if they want to live, but yeah, that's what it boils down to. You're tapping into their survival mode. I read this thing about orcas

that their cerebral cortex is 40% larger than a human being's. Like, that's, something's going on in there. You know, whether it's what we like to think of as consciousness or whether it's some sort of an alternate state that they only can appreciate because they live underwater but whatever it is there's intelligence and it seems really fucking cruel and short-sighted that we lock them up there's a scene in blackfish where you see a group of about a pot of about five orcas, six orcas, and they're

hunting a seal. And in it, this woman named Lori Marino, who's a neuroscientist, she's saying it's conceivable or what we've, what we've come to learn is that they're able to exercise a mind as, as one, let's get this, a singular consciousness between the group. And in the scene, the seal sitting sitting on a little ice floe, a little tiny ice pad. The orcas come in, all five, and simultaneously, ba-boom, like this, dunk this side of the iceberg,

and then the wave sort of goes over, and they shoot the seal over. I mean, you're talking some serious intelligence when you start talking collective conscious as a singular conscious. Now you're talking some... That's some deep shit right there. They plan that out in a way that a lot of people would never figure out.

Simultaneously as one, and it appears as though one is leading the show. The rest are on system shutdown and they're just going in as like an army of one. Yeah, and they're communicating while they're doing this. They're organizing this and communicating. I couldn't watch that.

I had to shut it off, man. I had to shut it off as soon as they were talking about their dorsal fins collapsing because they don't use them because they're not out there fucking using them and swimming. They're just upright. So, I mean, all that weight of that cartilage is just going to, over time, is going to peel that sucker right over. It's fucked up. I used to scratch candy.

We had a big male. This was a massive animal. Smaller than Tilikum, the one that's profiled in blackfish, but I used to scratch right underneath that sort of curvature and just peel off the dead skin for him and he'd be just shaking like, yeah, man, I'd be hitting it hard, pulling out like handfuls of dead skin.

Wow. Pretty raw. Pretty raw under there. Wow. That's crazy. But how would they normally get that? Would they rub it off on rocks and shit? They wouldn't accumulate that dead skin.

I mean, they're constantly swimming, constantly moving, so the weight of the water, the pressure of the water would keep that dorsal fin nice and erect, right? It's because all that surface resting. There's nowhere for them to swim. The pools are never deep enough. It doesn't properly accommodate them. Now, the people that work in these facilities,

how do they rationalize this? How do they. The first thing that needs to be stressed is these are not bad people. People, these are people that go into these situations, assuming that this is not only like a socially acceptable thing. This isn't a, this isn't just accepted. This is encouraged and, and, and celebrated. I mean, SeaWorld was celebrated by the masses, if you will, up until the release of Blackfish. Prior to that, they controlled the message. So people see that and they're just like, oh my God, that's amazing. That's beautiful and amazing. So when you're a 22-year-old punk boy kid, you're thinking, hey, I want to go get a gig doing that.

That's the cat's ass job right there. You get the gig and now you're working for someone. Well, you're 22 years old, you need a paycheck and your parents have been pounding you down for your lifetime that you got to go out there and, you know, get a good job and work as hard as you can and everything else. So you're working for someone who owns this facility and you believe you're doing what's in the best interest of the animals. You're there to care for the animals. So you don't see the shitty part. You don't think, wow, I'm doing this.

I never put the animal there. The animal's there. It's not just there. It's great that it's there. People love that it's there. This is a job that people really want to get. Get the gig. Try to do the right thing.

So it's not bad people. So the rationalizing doesn't come until you're there for a really long time. When you have to really start rationalizing some of the decisions that are made, once you get closer to the upper echelon, closer to the brass, and you see the decisions that are being made,

you're like, Jesus, but shouldn't we be doing this instead? That's when you start questioning shit. And I guess it takes a really good person at that point or the better part of the people, because we never managed to keep people at our facility either. I mean, we were going through a lot of good people.

That door was revolving in and out, in and out. Do you think that part of that is like we never managed to keep people at our facility either. I mean, we were going through a lot of good people. That door was revolving in and out, in and out. Do you think that part of that is like being disenchanted? Part of it is like realizing what you're doing? Part of it is if you're there for the right reasons, you really give a shit about those animals and it beats the shit out of you that the decisions that are being made and you're the muscle of that

decision. The decision being made, you're the muscle to execute it. You're just like, whoa, wait a second. We don't have to do that. So who's making the decisions? Well, in my experience... We don't have to say names, just like the positions. I mean, I worked for a facility that was micromanaged by one man who's been

who's owned it now for 52 years. Oh, so he owns it? He owns it. So he owns the slave plantation? I can't say that. I just said that. He'll launch a $1.25 million suit against me if I say that. If you said that. I'm going to get a lawsuit for saying that I think it's slavery. I should have brought you a disclaimer.

I don't think I should get sued for saying it's slavery. I think you should have to prove that it's not. Well, if you're super intelligent animals locked up in swimming pools, what are you doing? Sounds like slavery. If you got the money to see this process through the court, then you can then impose that on him. But if you don't have the money to defend, then? Sounds like slavery. If you got the money to see this process through to court, then you can then impose that on him. But if you don't have the money to defend,

then you're like me and you're in a shit place. Well, you're getting attacked. So it's basically one person's decisions, and then all the people that really care about the animals are... He owns the joint. He has all the cash. He pays you, which gets you the beer, the food. But he makes the decisions. And does

he make decisions? Like, does he have a background in marine biology? Like, does he make educated decisions or these financial decisions or like how to, how to like the, the crueler aspects of the job manifests itself? The problem with, or I say the problem, but with me, it's, it's, I worked at a very unique place. There are very few facilities where it's like one guy who owns it, who's been doing this as long as he has. It's hard to rationalize his decision-making. I'm going to put a big asterisk next to his name. Maybe other people, I don't know.

But at the end of the day, obviously there's a financial aspect to the decision-making. Dude, that story about that dolphin opening up his mouth and forcefully, that's the stuff of nightmares. We had to treat harbor seals like that. Just think of what it must be like to be that animal, to be sucked out of your world at an elderly age and stuffed into this tank where you know you're never getting out. There's no escape hatch.

You're not going to 007 your way out of this and fucking figure out how to unjammy the door and make your way down the dock and jump in the water and swim to freedom. Especially in Niagara Falls, man. You're pretty landlocked aside from some freshwater, but dolphins aren't going to last long there.

Yeah. I try to rationalize it now. It really was only until after I left, when I quit my job, I come out and the first thing I did was I started petitioning the Ontario government. We need rules and regulations so that these animals can live at least in an environment

that's, that is more accommodating to them. I wanted more greater animal protection laws. This is, this was the, this was the avenue I went because still, I was still disillusioned to the fact that, Hey, wait a sec. If you delve deeper to the day, one of them landing in the pool or being in that, in your possession, there's a history there.

Go back there and see what's, what's happened there. And suddenly the more I think about that, that's a history there. Go back there and see what's, what's happened there. And suddenly the more I think about that, that's when you start taking the real shit kicking. Cause you're like, holy, holy shit. Like this animal has been through a lot. It's been through a freaking lot. Protecting it in captivity.

That's not really serving this animal a lot of like, you're not doing this animal a big service. Like you need, you need to abolish this altogether. So I would say the campaign has changed, especially with blackfish coming out. Cause people know now like this, it's not, not only not fun, it's just not fun. It's just disgustingly cruel.

Like that's a whole lifetime of shit for an animal. That's again, if you, if you could relate to it instead of separate yourself from it, stop looking at it as an object, be that animal for a second. Now try to be that animal for a lot longer than a second. All of a sudden you start feeling pretty bad. And wonder why we would expect compassion from aliens.

Think about what we can do to some of the most obvious intelligent animals on our planet that we're different from. Well, guess what? The idea of something coming from another fucking planet that has fingers and eyes and a nose in front of its face and looks just like you. That's a fucking stretch. Most likely, it's going to be just as bizarre to you as an orca is to you. And so if you look at the way we treat orcas, why the fuck would we ever expect anybody to be nice to us? I used to exercise the analogy of aliens with the younger trainers all the time. I'd say, look, we're aliens to these animals. You need to make this animal's environment

as comfortable as possible, bearing in mind always we are aliens. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's part of relating to the animals. Once you start thinking like that, you're just like, wait a second. I got to start being nicer because if an alien

comes down, I don't want that. I don't want to be that. It's a stupid thing to say. It's one of those things, oh, you're talking about aliens again. People automatically go goofy with it. But the reality is it's actually the right analogy because we really are aliens in their world, and we're obviously supposedly intelligent.

We're obviously intelligent enough to figure out how to get them. We're intelligent enough to figure out how to get them. We're intelligent enough to figure out how to train them, put them in tents, put them in tanks, rather, have all these people come to see them. We're obviously intelligent enough to film them. They can tell there's a lot of shit going on that they don't do. But they've got to be like, God, you guys are dicks.

Like, why are you holding on to me? Like, we don't hold on to you. We don't do that. We kill things, but we don't hold on to them. I think't, we don't, we don't, we don't do that. I think we kill things, but we don't hold on to them. I think that's when the frustration level start boiling for these animals. Cause when they're first there, when they first arrive to you as a green animal, if they're, I mean,

the bottom line is it depends if they're a good candidate for captivity, but they learn real fast that, okay, that's the hand that feeds me. Like I want to, I want to, I want to develop this relationship, if you will, which is a relationship of like abiding by this person's rules. Right? And again, good-willed animals.

And the other ones that are just like, the same for me, they're cutting out and there's nothing you can do. I mean, you pull blood from them. You check that blood. There's nothing wrong with them. This animal's not sick. Why isn't it eating? And then days later, why is this animal dead? Did not want to be in captivity.

They just starve themselves to death. I've seen it so many times. Wow. it eating and then days later, why is this animal dead? Did not want to be in captivity. They just starved themselves to death. I've seen it so many times. Wow. The will to live loss. And you're like, that was always the most frustrating thing for me. You're going to make me fucking cry. Every time I ever watched an animal lose its will, that was the most, that destroyed me.

That destroyed me. It's like, it's over. The will is gone. You're not going to find a cause of death here. They just stopped eating. Now, how does the main guy deal with all this? How does the guy owns these joints? Let's hypothetically, okay, let's not even talk about any one person in particular, but there's a bunch of these things out there. There's these sea world type places all over the world, right? Like I said before. Marine animal places, whatever you want to call them. The most difficult thing you can try to do is rationalize, especially in my particular experience,

is the decision making that's going on up there. You just can't. Anything that you think is a good idea is a bad one. Do you come in direct communication with the people that own the place? I did eventually. Of course, I was there 12 years. So, I mean, I was by all means up there and have you ever been there when these ideas are expressed have you ever been in front of like any people

that own these places and say hey you know what we're doing is really fucked up i don't have a job no more because it was the slamming of the fist that was going on when these decisions were being made that ultimately led to me being like... The slamming of the fist. What do you mean? That decision's being made. You got to do this. Okay, so this is what we do. This is how we train them.

Get out of my office. Say no, lose your job. Wow. I was that... I was the asshole who was going to get fired real soon. It's a fucking... It's a children's movie. It's like a movie.

Yeah. Yeah, it's like... You know what I mean? It's like some Whoville type shit where, you know, you see this evil thing being perpetrated by someone who's just in it for money and not thinking about

the humanity of the whole thing. It's funny you mention that. We had a Christmas show we were putting together, and there's these brothers that do these animated shorts in Canada. They're pretty well known. Anyways, they had produced this video and they gave it to us. And, you know, the colleagues were like, yeah, this would be great to show during the Christmas show.

Okay, put it in. The cartoon was of this old man who went and stole a wild baby walrus from its mother. And you don't want to know exactly how that gets done. Of course, the cartoon was, you know, less graphic. But then he grabs a polar bear and his idea is he's going to have these two things duel and fight it out. Then basically the mother walrus comes back

and the mother polar bear and they get the bad guy. But we showed that video during a Christmas show. I'm watching this going, shit, that reminds me of someone, hypothetically. Hypothetically. Yeah. It's very sad that we don't have laws stopping this. I think.

That's what this fight's about. I mean, that's the stink I started a while back. I think there's something about the zoo, too. I wrote a piece a long time ago about the zoo, about it being animal prison. I ate a pot cookie and went to the zoo once. Eddie Bravo, my friend Eddie, he ate five grams of mushrooms, allegedly, and went to the zoo once. And he said it was the most depressing thing he's ever seen in his life. He said it was so sad.

Like the reality of what the zoo is just was inescapable, the sadness of it all. He had to get out of there. And I felt like that after I ate a pot cookie. I ate a pot cookie and I went to the zoo and I sat there. There's a bench across from the chimpanzee enclosure at the la zoo and i sat for like a half hour 40 minutes just staring at this one chimp just trying to think about what his life is like what is where it's the the wonder of the natural the natural world living in the jungle living the land, doing what they've done for a fucking million years or whatever the chimpanzees have been around, the freedom and laughter

and they would run around fucking each other and grabbing bananas and shit. I mean, they live ultimately in almost an Adam and Eve type paradise. It's utopia, man. It is. For chimpanzees, it's utopia. I mean, yeah, there's dangers. Sure, there's jaguars that can eat them. Who are we to

suddenly start protecting animals from other animals? Well, not only that, we have that same problem. There's a fucking mountain lion they just photographed in the Hollywood Hills this week. Jesus Christ. It's got a big tail. Yeah, what's with the collar? They caught it at one point in time. Yeah, we're cute. We catch fucking giant monsters and

we release them. We're like, be free, monster. We're in your neighborhood and we respect that. You have to wonder, like, it took your buddy like five grams of shrooms and you had one of your pot cakes to be able to exercise that perspective of sort of like liberating yourself from all the bullshit, like the flashing lights, the neon disasters, everything else. And I think that's why people rationalize, because they're always inundated with everything so much

that they can't just for a second sit down and stare at that animal's eyes just for a second. And if it scares you, don't turn away because that's the first thing people that are just – the first thing they want to do is, I just exercised too much attention there. Well, it's also – there's the issue of it being there already. And when it's there already and it's sanctioned and you see adults walking back and forth pushing strollers it seems like it's okay and i look i'm a hypocrite because i take my kids to the zoo they love the zoo then they're young and they enjoy looking at animals and it's fascinating to be there live and see a giraffe like whoa and to feed the giraffe i get it you know i get it but it's it's probably better if we didn't have it it's it seems like a fucked up thing and this is coming from a deer hunter

you know i like hunting animals i like eating animals i've been a meat eater my whole life but i don't think you should lock them up i think they should be free i think the wild animals you know they're they are there's some there's something magical and special about seeing something in the wild something that's moving around, living its life. There's something inherently sad about seeing something we took from the wild and then made it live in a city. It doesn't replicate that experience in any capacity.

Now it's not replicated. We don't give a fuck. We're just saying. I know what you like, but get in there. I want to say we used to not give a fuck, though. Do you think people are more aware now? I don't doubt that for a second. There's a huge paradigm shift.

People are not interested in seeing that no more. With everything. A lot of things. I think with life itself. I think what we're experiencing now because of the internet is a reality that never existed before. A way of communicating that never existed before

and I think the amount that it's changing us is happening so rapidly and it's so deep that we have a hard time understanding what's really going on. I think we're in the middle of a hurricane of information and it's changing every single aspect. It's changing things for the good and for the bad. It's changing things in weird ways.

There's a lot of confirmation bias because of it. A lot of people are grouping up online and finding like-minded morons who believe the Earth is hollow and that there's fucking a certain group of people that live in the middle of it. You can find a message board where those people believe you and they'll go with you. So there's weird aspects to this.

But it's like the inevitable aberrations and this fucking rolling tsunami of ones and zeros and information that's coming our way. I think on a whole, the larger demographic of people, not the tiny pockets, but there's probably some relativity between the tiny pockets and the masses, are pretty sick of it. I don't think they think about it for the most part. That's what I was going to say. Because it's there, because the zoo is already there, you don't think about it. Because SeaWorld is already there. You don't think about it.

It's there. Adults are running it. Hi, how are you? Welcome to the zoo. You assume there's rules. You assume there's rules and there's regulations. And like, oh, they must be doing something right because, look, it's being celebrated. Like, holy shit, that looks kind of small.

But they must know something we don't, so it must be perfectly accommodating. Look, the SeaWorld guy, the director, he's so friendly. He's waving at everybody. He wouldn't be mean to the dolphins to get them to jump. Well, you're not mean to the dolphin though. This is the difficult, like, this is the thing. When you're there, you don't think you're being mean. You're being mean by plucking them out.

That's really fucking mean. But asking them to do the jump and training them to do the jump, you don't exercise that perspective that you're being mean. So I worked with a lot of the SeaWorld brass that are in Blackfish, and it isn't until after you see what they're saying in court, some of the things they're doing, you're just like, that guy was awesome.

He was a nice guy, man. That guy's a dick. What kind of things in court are you talking about? Well, lies, of course. Lies. Allegedly lies. Allegedly lies. Let's say, let's pretend these people aren't even real people. There are two tarantulas that are on trial. What are they guilty of and what are they claiming?

These tarantulas that aren't even people. At the end of the day, they're trying to keep their business very viable. Keep the rules out. The tarantulas have an ant business. They run. They train ants. They get these ants to do flips. Well, they pay people very little money to train them.

They pay people very little money to train ants and they get these ants to do flips. Well, they pay people very little money to train them. They pay people very little money to train ants. And they convince those people who are legitimately good in animal caring, you know, people that care for animals, they're going to convince them that what they're doing is good, pay them very little. You know, there's a system of oppression there where, like I said before, that hammer, that fist comes down and you're now, you're the muscle. The idea is here, you don't like the idea, but

you're the muscle to execute it. Are these profitable businesses? Oh, shit. If you knew what I was up against in Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls is not a big place. If you knew what I was up against in Niagara Falls, you'd be like, is it profitable? Do they yield a lot of influence at every level of government and everything else? Yeah, maybe.

What did you do that you got in trouble for? What happened? So I quit my job, and I didn't get in trouble for that. Why'd you quit? Couldn't do it. You couldn't do it anymore? You just hit a breaking point? I hit a breaking point long before I quit.

And so the quitting was like amidst what was like the craziness after you go beyond that threshold of a breaking point. So yeah, I got out. So before you quit, you were making a stink. Big stinks. What were you doing? I was trying to keep from, keep what was going on from happening, from continuing.

I was trying to stop. I was trying to fix an otherwise really big problem. Like a glaringly evident, that problem that everyone is seeing. Like we got a big problem here. Who's going to, who's going to fight to change this? You start looking around and that's not happening. This avenue is not exercising it. This one pretends to be ready to exercise something, but.

So then you got to, you just say. It's very difficult for you to communicate this because of the fact that you have a lawsuit going on, so you're dancing around stuff a little bit. I gotta dance a little bit. Do you wanna watch the trailer? Yeah, yeah, let's watch the trailer. Okay. What is this trailer for?

A Blackfish official trailer. This shit depresses the fuck out of me, dude. When you look into their eyes you know somebody is home they're an animal that possesses great spiritual power not to be meddled with orange county sheriff office we need so to respond for a dead person at SeaWorld. A whale has eaten one of the trainers. Tilikum, though, is the one that went after her.

Don is the senior trainer here at Shamu Stadium. She captured what it means to be a SeaWorld trainer. It made me realize what happened to her really could have happened to anyone. I've been expecting somebody to be killed by a Tilikum. We weren't told much about it other than it was trainer error. It didn't just happen. It's not a singular event. You have to go back to understand this. The speedboat herded them in and they could just pick

out the young ones this is the worst thing that i've ever done when tilikum arrived at sea world he was twice as large as the next animal we stored these whales in what we call a module which was 20 feet across and 30 feet deep, and the lights were all turned out. Probably led to what I think is a psychosis. All whales in captivity are all psychologically traumatized. It's not just telecom. If you were in a bathtub for 25 years,

don't you think you'd get a little psychotic? Dawn would tell you that it was her mistake. They blamed her. It's just a bold-faced lie. I was just instructed to get rid of the tape. The industry has a vested interest in spinning these. That sells a lot of Shamu dolls. It sells a lot of tickets at the gate. There's no record of an orca doing any harm in the wild.

You should just watch that. They should play that for the judge, and the judge should go, stop. This fucking case is over. This thing's not going to court. It's a slap suit. It's a strategic lawsuit against public participation. He wants me broke. He wants me to not be able to get through this judicial process, which right off the hop is really expensive. Well, when you see something like Blackfish come out, that's got to support your cause tremendously. To think I'm in a can't lose situation. Like this thing has been building the craziest momentum off the hop.

I mean, that's a scary endeavor. Doing what we did, being where we are. That's scary shit. What does that mean? Doing what we did. What did you do? A newspaper called. They found out the walrus guy quit his job.

They want to know why. You were the walrus trainer. The walrus trainer. Among other things. Among other things. They want to know why. You were the Walrus trainer. The Walrus, the Walrus trainer. Among other things. Among other things. They want to know why. You pick up that phone and you're amidst

the scariest, the scarier parts of depression and you're not touching that. You're not touching that. I got, I got things to process. Like I'm,

I'm not touching that. Then a situation, a scenario unfolds where suddenly you realize you have to touch that. Someone has to. And so you pick up the phone. And then 14 other people, for that matter, wind up picking up the phone as, you know, these stories start to, as this investigation continues. as this investigation continues.

The decision I made, different than other people, for instance, and I can understand and appreciate why, they have their reasons, I do mine, is to not use your face and image. I said, go ahead. It's Phil Demers. It's Phil Demers who's talking to this newspaper right now.

Go ahead. Something has to be done. Newspaper prints, front page, shit gets crazy. It doesn't just last for a day or two. And what was the allegations? What did you accuse him of? Or what was the big revelation? Well, the facility that I worked at, animals were suffering.

Simple as that. Simple as that. Just basic reality. The reality of those facilities. Every animal suffers in those places. They suffer from a lack of freedom, period, right? Yes. This one, this is an exceptional case.

We had serious short staffing issues over the years. I mean, I watched that department go like this. Went from experienced staff to like, what's going on here? Like, what are we, what are we down to? And then there was like a mechanical breakdown in the water disinfection units. A big one. The water was nasty.

And instead of dumping the water, instead of addressing the issue over the course of the off season, remember we closed, you know, we were only in operation for like five months out of the year. And then thereafter we're close to the public. Cause it's so cold. Cause it's so cold. So cold.

So then we're, so amidst that, you know, the water disinfection unit breaks in, let's say August or September, we closed in like October. Well, now we're in November, December, January. We're opening in May. This is bad. And the resolve, just a little history, as far as the water disinfection unit goes, we're talking about an ozone machine.

Ozone, the way it works, it works in conjunction with chlorine. It allows for you to use less chlorine to disinfect the water. Ozone's out. Well, how are you going to treat the water? In a less than rational person, thinking person's mind, you may think it's a

good idea to put a shit ton of chlorine in and a lot and repeatedly in really scary doses when employees aren't around overnight, for instance. And this went on and this continued to go on. And that's when I couldn't do it no more. I can't do this. So you knew these animals were basically being poisoned by all the chlorine and the terrible water.

Some serious damage done. Fuck. Lots of serious damage done. Is there a movement at all to outlaw these things now after something like blackfish? So I petitioned the Ontario government to enact or to create stronger animal protection laws, which they just announced. They're throwing five and a half million dollars a year instead of half a million dollars to the OSPCA to correct this issue. The OSPCA is the agency that, well, I don't have a lot of good things to say about them.

I think we'll leave it at that for now. But I hate that there's an animal protection thing and that they handle orcas and dolphins. Well, they don't, though. They should. I mean, they shouldn't. It should be like, it should be the Department of Humanity. You know, people should be able to get together, take a look at one of those things, get close to them and go,

okay, what are we doing here? This is where my efforts went from animal protection and regulations and standards of care to abolishment. It's got to go. Right. In Canada, you can't capture any whales in your own water.

Can't do it. Can't get a permit. It's not going to exist. You can buy from Russia. You can buy capture any whales in your own water. Can't do it. Can't get a permit. It's not going to exist. You can buy from Russia. You could buy from Japan. Any of these drive hunts, similar to the orcas that are shipped to Russia, you can catch them in the wild, bring them in, just ship them down. I'm trying to have that outlawed. You should not be able to do that in Canada no more.

And I've been working my ass off, made a big stink, and we're still only this far there, this far being around the world. Anytime people are listening, you're like, not very far. Well, it doesn't take long for a government, someone else to step in and say, what are we talking about? We've got to talk about

jobs. And then you're gone. You're in the backseat of the bus again, way at the back, and you're like, okay, I've got to sort of claw my way back up. How am I going to make a stink again? And then something like Blackfish comes out. I saw this dude when Tilikum, is that his name? Tilikum. When Tilikum killed that lady, the trainer, I saw this guy freaking out about it.

Like, this disgusting beast. They should kill this thing. It was fascinating. I don't know where he was from. He was from another country. But he was talking to his friend about it, and it was interesting to watch it. It's like some people's perspectives are so off.

It's so off. Like this is some piranha in there that's eating people. Like that thing is, look into a fish's eyes, like a piranha's eyes. You might as well be looking at a Budweiser bottle. They're fucking idiots. Everyone in Blackfish said the same thing.

Like Tilikum was the nicest orca ever. I knew Candu, Big Male. I knew Ike. Tilikum's son. We had Tilikum's son until SeaWorld actually successfully sued Marineland to have him removed. And. Oh, God.

How do they do that? They know what they know. How do they do that? How do they separate them from their children? Ike was an amazingly beautiful animal. Good natured. He was going to kill someone. He was going was an amazingly beautiful animal. Good natured. He was going to kill someone. He was going to kill someone.

Wow. Now, is there like regulation on how small the tanks can be? We got nothing in Canada. If you... Oh, man. Hey, listen. If you're ever hard up, let's say tomorrow you're like, shit, I need a really high paying gig.

Just come to Ontario, dig a hole. I know a couple of guys with a backhoe. We'll dig a hole. We'll fill it with whatever you want. I got the contacts in Russia. You'll call them. You'll buy a couple of dolphins. We'll throw them in there.

Boom. Your money's made and you don't have to worry about anything. There's no regulatory bodies. There's no import laws. There is nothing. It's the wild, wild west. Is there like, that's incredible. Is there, are there new ones that are being made now?

Like, are they making like a new dolphin world? Well, in Toronto, they actually just opened the Ripley's Aquarium. They have sharks. They've got other. Sharks, I don't give a fuck about sharks. Well, they've got animals. Well, you have to sort of wonder like what the environmental impact is of actually getting those sharks. You start thinking there, you're like, well, that seems pretty shitty.

Yeah. Well, no doubt we're fucking the ocean up. There's no doubt about that. And I'm with you on that. And I'm even with you on the idea of, like, I don't think, I don't really have a problem with sharks at an aquarium. I don't. I see them swimming around. They get fed. I think they're stupid.

I think they're dumb killing machines and it doesn't really bother me. My problem is with things that are thinking. But that exact perspective that you're exercising right now, we may very well find out otherwise in 50 years and be like, holy shit, look what we were doing to sharks. They're mad geniuses. We may find something. Who knows, right?

Yeah, maybe, but it doesn't seem like there's any natural advantage to them being intelligent. They're basically just swimming, eating machines. That's all they're doing. I mean, obviously, I'm joking around. I don't think we should make sharks extinct. And I do think that the impact that we're having on all marine life is pretty profound. It's very disturbing and not that discussed.

I mean, occasionally you'll see an article online about the garbage patch in the Pacific and then the several other patches that they found all over the world where these whirlpools generate these areas where there's just massive condensed garbage and plastic. These gyres, they're called. Huge. These big plastic gyres.

Just Texas-sized areas that are filled with shit. Anyone decides to start reading up on that, then what happens is the right-wing media sort of comes in and is just like, no, no, no. These guys are all activists. Exactly. I've heard that, and I've actually had conversations online with people about that.

They're like, look, it's not that big a deal. It's not that big. You've got to realize the perspective. The ocean's enormous. It's the size of Texas, man. There's an area the size of Texas that has little pieces of plastic floating around inside of it. Everyone's an expert, right? And it's like goop, apparently.

It's like a lot of the plastic sort of dissolves this weird consistency, and animals wind up eating it. They're opening up these animals and seeing plastic figurines, like army figurines in them. Like, that's pretty crazy. Albatrosses. A lot of their mother, the mother albatross doesn't know what the plastic is and thinks it's some kind of food. So she feeds it to the babies. And there was this one island that is uninhabited by people,

but it's a major island for these albatrosses. And this photographer went over there and took all these photographs of albatrosses. You can hear that, obviously. All these photographs of albatrosses with plastic inside of their bodies yeah i saw that in the nests like so fucked man so weird but if you're not there and you're not the person that sees this and if you don't look away immediately as it scares you or causes concern then how are you going to know you just let it go you don't care well it's also the same thing as the zoo it's it's always been there you, there's always been garbage in the ocean,

whatever, whatever. It's not my responsibility to fix this. Someone out there is a real grown-up. Someone out there is older than me and wiser and has the role of the head of the department of fucking keeping fish alive, and he's gonna keep it together. That's the perspective

that's exercised the second anyone even thinks about going to these places. Oh, we're going to that place where the people who know what they're doing are doing that thing that we all love and that is awesome. Let them do their job, Phil. The guys are trying to keep... If it wasn't for them, no one would even give a fuck about orcas. The Japanese would be killing

them and making sandwiches with dolphins. They got away with that for a long time. They controlled the message. Now all of a sudden, like you say, the binary digits, the information, the information superhighway, we're all learning. Yeah, we're all learning. So what happened with you? So you get out of there, you do this story, you tell everybody what the fuck's going on. When does the lawsuit happen and what is the lawsuit? The lawsuit doesn't happen for a bit. The first thing they do is they make it very difficult for, they allegedly, I mean, it's an allegation,

but they allegedly make things very difficult for my girlfriend who's been working there for 12 years as well. She's actually Kiska, the lone orca's head trainer. And things start becoming really difficult for her. She still worked there? No, in the off-season they fired her fast. They had to.

It was costing them a lot of money for information to continue to be leaked. I assume that they probably thought it was coming from her, but there were a lot of people talking at this time because the story wasn't just one story that come out when I had spoken to the media. This thing went on for like six, eight months, a year. They're still talking about it. There's still stories coming out of this thing.

Since the lawsuits, former employees and certainly current employees are not talking. So first thing they did was made things exceptionally difficult for her. And then they fired her. And then they sued her. Then they waited a while. They sued her for defamation because there was a video that was provided to the newspaper. And in the video, the orca's tail is bleeding. It's bleeding.

And in the news article, she, as a former employee who had just been fired, said, I'm concerned for the killer whale because she's bleeding. And so they're suing her for defamation. Again, it's called a slap suit. They're not intent. They can sue you for saying that you're concerned when you're a trainer?

They can sue me for anything that you're concerned when you're a trainer? They can sue me for anything. It doesn't matter. The lawsuit is, they're slap suits. Again, they don't have any real, like, there's nothing tangible there. They could write a fiction story about you. You got to get a lawyer, retain one. That's 5K off the hop, if you're lucky. Then you got to submit a statement of defense.

That's another couple of thousand dollars. Do you have got to submit a statement of defense. That's another couple of thousand dollars. Do you have a Kickstarter? I got an Indiegogo. I'm on my fourth Indiegogo fundraising campaign right now. How do I know this is not an elaborate scheme between you and the owner of that place to just make Indiegogo money? Can you look up the video?

Is that possible? You guys are pretending that you're at war? Maybe. Can you just suck saps into paying Indiegogo money? Just go on YouTube and put up, like, Marineland animals suffering. We'll go to the video. No, listen, I'm just fucking around.

I know, I know. No, but it might be worth the watch anyway. I don't know that you've seen it. I mean, you don't want to see Blackfish. I don't want to see it. Honestly, I don't want to see any more. It is pretty brutal. It's all very depressing.

Don't pull up any of that shit. I don't want to see it. I know what's going on, and I think now the real conversation isn't like repeating the same images and watching the same videos. We don't need to go there. I think what we need to do now is figure out how we're going to stop these things from being legal. This is what I'm doing, in Ontario at least, right? Yeah, I think it needs to be done. I think the people that own these places,

I know that they've made a living doing this for a long time, and I believe some of them probably do have a real love for these animals. But people need to stop. Everyone needs to stop. The trainers need to stop. They need to stop. It's dark. It's just too fucked up.

You're enslaving intelligent animals. It's tough to get to the trainers. They're young people who are going to get a kick-ass gig. That's the gig. I mean, again, paradigm shift up until a year ago, this was the case. Now, you know, with the Toronto Star investigation in the marine land with blackfish,

people are now just like, whoa, like what? That commercial said it was awesome. Remember that jingle? Like, that was awesome. Why is this job shitty? Why are these animals being tortured? Yeah. Now they know.

Again, the industry controlled the information for so long. So Russia's still ganking them out of the water. We don't do that anymore? The states don't. You need a permit to import from anywhere. And because what happens is to apply for a permit, there's a period of like public opinion or whatever they sort of write in. And basically these agencies get the shit kicked out of them. to apply for a permit, there's a period of public opinion or whatever they sort of write in.

And basically these agencies get the shit kicked out of them. Someone really needs to make a movie where a human gets kidnapped and taken to an alien fucking human world. That would be a fascinating movie. Where you get taken to some alien version of SeaWorld and humans are doing fucking cartwheels and shit. It'd be the right time. That could totally be like some crazy Avatar-type movie where they would have meetings to decide

when a human is allowed to be transferred to another facility, remove them from their families. Are you going to have an incest scene? Because that's what goes on in a lot of these facilities. Really? With the trainers? Not with the trainers, no. What are you saying? The animals.

With the animals, of course. Because there's not enough natural selection, right? There's not enough out there. You've got to get more killer whales. It's difficult to bring them in. So they just want to fuck in their daughters and stuff? They don't want to, but if you get them at the right time and they're frustrated enough, I imagine. I mean, I can't rationalize why hypothetically Candy would do that to Neosha, but that conceivably happens.

That's so dark. That's so dark. Yeah, that was a tough one. That's so dark. That's so dark. Yeah, that was a tough one. That's so dark. It's just fucking torture all around. It's so crazy that no one recognizes that. And it's because they've been extracting money from this. This being sanctioned for a long time

has generated a tremendous amount of money, and they've gotten addicted to that money, and they can't find another way to make money. They can't open up a barbecue shop. They can't fucking sell hats. I'm going to sell cowboy boots. Fuck this dolphin training. No.

Everybody keeps doing the same thing over and over again because it's always been a viable job. They reinvested the money in government lobbying. They reinvested the money in controlling the message through the media. They reinvested the money, you know, making the right friends. And man, if you saw, if you knew, especially in the small community of Niagara Falls and Ontario, what the angles and the things that are happening, it's like, are you kidding me? Like I assumed I was up against something tough. I knew it was going to be difficult to try to

get these laws. I knew it was not going to be easy. I mean, who passes laws? Who lobbies to pass laws? These laws that are coming out are jokes, man. They're jokes. They don't address what was the big stink a year ago when these stories come out.

Like what? Well, there's, oh, the laws that basically the Ontario government just celebrated the announcement because again, this was a big stink about, you know, when we, when we had come out, we had petitioned the Ontario government. They made a law or rather they said, we're going to create standards of care for marine mammals.

We're going to enhance our animal protection. Sounds good. They announced, the only thing they announced thus far is another announcement of standards of care to come, which are going to be weighed against the impact of communities. So suddenly taking care of a dolphin has something to do with whether or not Joe Schmo

down the street gets a job from the facility around the corner. Like there's a relation, that's relative somehow. Bullshit, but that's apparently coming. And again, we've been waiting the corner. Like there's, there's, there's a relate, there's that's relative somehow bullshit, but that's apparently coming. And again, we've been waiting a long time for these freaking, you know, it's always announcements of announcements. Then they announced an influx of cash to the

OSPCA, 5 million extra dollars a year to protect animals. OSPCA bunged this thing up. The owner, allegedly the owner of Marineland bought the land that the OSPCA operates out of. And I recall in my history seeing, quite frequently, the OSPCA agents coming in. And we're talking like-

What does that stand for? Ontario Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Okay. So if there's animal cruelty happening, you would assume that these are the people that are going to come in and say, hey, stop that now. Right.

And write a fine or something. Right. But, well, when their office is in the building on the land that was donated by the owner of the park, that becomes a bit of a conflict of interest because I don't know that that individual is being paid 10 bones an hour to drive around from facility to facility, if that

job should ever come, is going to turn around and be like, hey man, we're shutting you down. Right. Because that chlorine that's causing animals' eyes to bleed, skin to flake off, ulcers, everything else, that's cruel. It's very thin. The rules are not there. The other thing about the Ontario SPC- So you're saying the offices are on SeaWorld property?

Is that what you're saying? No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying in my case, or hypothetically, the owner of my, not hypothetically, matter of factly, the owner of my facility that I worked at bought the land and donated it to the OSPCA, of which their office, of which they operate

out of. That's hilarious. It doesn't stop. It doesn't end there, man. It doesn't end there. Where does it end? Well, it ends with me fighting a lawsuit. Right, right, right. When you say it doesn't end there. Where does it end? Well, it ends with me fighting a lawsuit. Right, right, right. But when you say it doesn't end there, like what else, what other, that's hilarious. I mean, that's like heroin dealers

donating money to the cops. Like, here, we're going to buy your fucking police station. Let us keep dealing heroin, please. So what happened with me is, so basically the newspaper outlet, the media outlet that took our story and ran with it,

really, really beat the shit and exposed a lot of things. Okay? Marineland hires this gentleman by the name of John Beattie. He's the former McGinty senior advisor. McGinty was the, uh, was the prime minister or rather the premier of Ontario. This guy, the owner of Marineland hire, or rather, rather Marineland, the corporation hires John Beattie, former advisor to the liberal government, uh,

gentleman by the name of, uh, shit, I'm drawing a blank, but anyways, uh, hires this senior, uh, you know what I'm talking about, consultant, whatever. Uh-huh. So this guy comes out with a shit ton of spins, videos, and everything else, and then he starts shaking the hands of all

the friends in the liberal government, so when the announcement of these new rules come out, you're like, of course nothing's coming out. You just hired the premier's ex-chief advisor. He knows all the freaking people. What are you talking about? Then you start looking at the local level of all the government. Well, the Ministry of Environment, the minister,

is a friend of the owners as well. There's a great deal of history everywhere here, everywhere. So everything one by one, because remember a lot of agencies went in there to investigate. They took a really long time sort of releasing their findings and everything sort of went by the wayside slowly, but surely.

They're throwing lawsuits around like candy at Halloween, but everything else is just sort of, because, you know, the stink sort of mellowed out, didn't it? You know, you make a stink now in a year, well, a lot of things are in the news now that are different. For that matter, McGinty dropped, like, had stepped down, so I lost that. Here I had this premiere that was going to,

yeah, I'm going to do something. I'm real sad about this. Then he bails out. I'm like, okay, what happened to those laws we were working on? Cause you know, I was, I was going traveling back and forth to Queens park. I was speaking with the minister of community safety. You know, she's the one responsible for the OSPCA act. She's going to change things. And I'm talking to her. We're going to change things. And I think we are, I really believe this. I can't believe I'm making a change in the world here. I get sued for doing that. I'm getting sued now. I'm in a

lawsuit. Oh shit. Well, she can't talk to me. Oh, that's in the courts now. Can't talk no more. And then everything's falling by the wayside. I'm like, holy shit. Like, turns out, like, defending animals is a really scary thing to do. Well, it's not really just defending animals. What you're doing is you're going up against a machine.

You're going up against a machine that generates money and has a bunch of people that are profiting from it, right? Is that what's happening? Big machine. Big. And at the end of the day, ititing from it, right? Is that what's happening? Big machine. And at the end of the day, it comes down to the monies. It comes down to the monies. And these police facilities generate a lot of monies. When did your situation start and when was Blackface? Blackface was only released like a month ago or two, right? On CNN like a month and change ago, yeah.

And when did your scenario, when did you get fired and when did it all come to pass? August 15th of last year was the day that our story come out and again it wasn't just me we were like eight or nine people at that point and it kept building because more stories would come out like and more people would come out until the lawsuits started dropping right that's when people like what and you you don't plan on suing them back oh i'm suing them back what are you suing them back for Oh, I'm suing them back. What are you suing them back for? Well, defamation, number one, they released a video of me calling me an animal liberation army leading, like they turned around and made me-

Do you eat meat? I used to eat meat. I used to exclusively, I was a meat and potato guy, pound it all day. Now I'm having a real tough time. I'll eat meat, but when I do, I feel guilt.

So it makes it less appetizing. I can't get off cheese. I'm off milk. You know, eating a hell of a lot healthier, exercising more, you know, different things are happening. And you try to clear your mind when processing this. I have a friend who's a vegetarian. He eats eggs because eggs come from chickens.

They just lay them. They're not, we have this idea that eggs are going to become a chick. They're not. Chickens lay eggs every day. And he'll eat meat if somebody he knows killed it, if it's hunted. But he won't buy any factory-bought meat. He said, I don't want to participate in that system. He's like, you don't have to.

You can get organic eggs. There's nothing wrong with those eggs. And you can get your protein from that. He just won't participate in the cheeseburger system. He won't participate in the cheeseburger system. He won't participate in the factory farming system. And it's basically the broad spectrum of human behavior, the fact that we can be almost saintly and beautiful and people can pick people up off the side of the road

and help them along their way. And then on the other hand, we could be the type of person that stuffs 1,000 chickens into a fucking 10-foot square room and has them stacked on top of each other, shitting on each other's heads and then just pull them out and cut their heads off. And, you know, they can't walk because we've engineered them to have these gigantic fucking breasts within a, you know, a year of being born.

I don't think a lot of people know that though. It's when you turn your, when you open your eye to that, if you're, if again, it comes back to there's the truth, how much you want to delve into it, as soon as it gets scary, people tuck tail and run. But it's just, we've got to figure out what the fuck makes the difference in the spectrum. What makes a person that goes out of their way not to step on a bug, and what makes a person who

has zero problem with stuffing a thousand chickens into a fucking closet? What's the difference between those two individuals, and how do you bridge that gap? How do you make it so that everybody who's walking around, like, number one, the number one thing that they're thinking of is don't be cruel. Don't be evil and nasty. Don't do something that would ultimately be looked on in horror if it was made public. That's essentially what a lot of factory farming is.

It depends what perspective you're exercising. Are you exercising the perspective of a person whose objective is to make a lot of money? No, the objective of a person whose objective is to understand where their food comes from. Well, then most people are not going to eat factory farmed meats, no question. Yeah, most people have zero idea how dark the whole situation is. The more I know, the less I eat.

I went to a butchering house, a slaughterhouse, I guess, once for a Fear Factor stunt. And, dude, when I—I mean, I'm not like a fucking woo-woo kind of guy. I think a lot of woo-woo stuff is bullshit. But I felt that—that place felt sad. You can feel it for sure. It felt sad. Like, the air felt sad. Like, feel it for sure. It felt sad. Like the air felt sad. Like it was a big pocket of death.

My buddy worked for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and he had to go in there. He's a vegetarian. I guess you'd call him a vegan at this point. He walked in. He started telling me about hot dogs, the bags that are collecting the stuff to make hot dogs.

And I'm like, they're so delicious though. Too bad. Sauerkraut, a little mustard. I'm like, I can't imagine that you would do this. He's like, how to do it? How to go in there, how to see it. What's it was just checking how disgusting it was. That was his job was just go in there and inspect it. I mean, whatever their regulations are for the canine food inspection agency was going in and taking a look at their operation and deciding whether or not this was acceptable practices and whatever parameters that he's trying to, you know, determine.

So hot dogs are like all like kneecaps. It's pretty gross. Dicks and assholes and stuff all ground up together. It's pretty shitty. I can think of tastier things that are less sort of disgusting. But when you get them really good ones, gourmet hot dogs, they suck too. Like when you get those really nice ones that snap when you bite into them. I'm not going to turn around and try to be the guy, get sued by the hot dog industry as well.

That's the last thing I need now too. Those fucking hot dogs in New York, man. Those dirty water hot dogs as Joey Diaz calls them. Those just setting up shop on a corner, boiling some water. I watched the guy and I dared him eat five like Toronto dogs like this.

I couldn't believe he could do it. I think shortly after we actually put a cracker out to his mouth and opened it and waited because we thought maybe a worm would come up because this was not right. This is not a big guy. He pounded those things. Couldn't do it. I think shortly after we actually put a cracker out to his mouth and opened it and waited because we thought maybe a worm would come up because this was not right. This is not a big guy. He pounded those things. Couldn't believe it.

Well, that Kobayashi guy, the guy who wins those eating contests, he's not a big guy. I had to pay for those hot dogs. Well, it's only five hot dogs, dude.

He had to pay with his shits and farts. Yeah, that's right. Imagine what his asshole must have felt like in an hour and a half. He's clenching it tight. His asshole's like

a marathon runner in the last couple of miles. He did from it get a pretty legendary story. Not that good. It's not a good story. You Canadians are much more, you're much kinder in what you judge to be a good story. That story sucked.

We're so kind. It's a story about a guy who ate hot dogs. Who gives a fuck? We're so kind. We open pits up, fill it up with whatever you want to call it, if you want to call it water. Hey, everybody does that, right? That's the problem. Yeah, well, we open pits up, fill it up with whatever you want to call it, if you want to call it water. Well, hey, everybody does that, right?

That's the problem. Yeah, well, especially out in Europe right now and other places. I mean, not the UK. They basically, they enacted standards of care that were so difficult to abide by that it eradicated the entire industry. In the UK.

In the UK, yeah. Possible UK. And this is what I tried to hope, this is what I tried to get done here too. It's like, listen, a dolphin can't exist in captivity if you can't give it a 200-foot pool. It's not economically viable or really probably possible to dig a pit that big.

So guess what? If you can't abide by it, you can't have dolphins. This was the aspirations. These were my aspirations. Doesn't look like it's going to happen, but I don't want to give up hope. I mean. It should be illegal.

I mean, we can't really discuss it any further without repeating ourselves over and over and over and over again. The bottom line is they're smart. We should talk about how illegal my lawsuit should be too. Like right now, the fact that we're talking now, it's conceivable that I come home to, I mean, I know I'm going to come home to a great deal of really angry worded letters. Because of you talking on this podcast?

Oh, yeah. Oh, man. You should see the shit that goes on. Now who's saying it sends you these angry letters? Well, my lawyer deals with it. So he doesn't really tell me, he just says. These are from the people in the opposition. Lawyer versus lawyer, camp versus camp.

What do they think? They think that they can just keep doing this and just scare people away? Trying to make me broke. Yeah. I mean, it's working. It costs me, like when I get my bills, they're not small.

These are like really big, scary bills. Like these are, I could, I could have bought half a house at this point, but instead pumping this money into defending against plotting to steal a walrus. I mean, that's a peculiar thing to, to, to defend against, but it doesn't matter what I'm defending against. What, what did, is that something they're accusing you of? Oh yeah. Were you actually plotting to steal a walrus? Well, if you and I sat here and said, oh, man, we should steal that walrus, what do you think? Is that plotting to steal a walrus? I would say that's plotting to steal a walrus.

Then maybe I'm guilty. But what they won't be able to produce is a refrigerated airplane, cargo plane, a beachfront or house in the Arctic for her to live in, this and that. Plotting to steal a walrus is a bit of a stretch. Okay.

Um, so you were caught having conversations where you're talking? No, no, no, no, no,

no, no, not in the least. can you talk about this? Oh, I can talk about this. Absolutely. Okay.

I think I can. Oh, there's smooshy there. I mean, if you want to go, if you want to back things up, look at that man. How fucked is that picture?

That picture, walrus is sitting on a concrete floor with her arm through. It's a her, right? Yeah. With her arm through a fucking prison cage. That's so dark, man. So the story of Smooshy is, you know, she come in from like wild caught, 18 months of age, 200 pounds. She's this big.

She's a big pillow. Beautiful. She's a baby. She's a baby. She didn't come in alone. She comes with some other animals. Walruses. Where do they catch them?

Russia. In the Black Sea. So she comes in and we start, now we got to get blood from them. We got to see if these animals are healthy. So the way you do it with an untrained animal, you throw a big net on them, physically jump, grab them,

vet sticks a needle in there, vet or trainer, someone, and they go to take on them, physically jump, grab them, vet sticks a needle in there, vet or trainer, someone, and they go to take the blood out. Well, during this procedure, there was another walrus there that we were doing the procedure on and here's Smushi who's, you know, climbing up on the other walrus. It's making things very difficult.

You might, as you can imagine, these guys are like linebackers. So all I do is I put my hands in front of her face like this and she opened up her nostrils. And I, I remember this vividly. She took a big breath.

She started to follow me after that. I started to back up. This animal followed me, big eyes staring at me, following me. I'd never seen anything like this before. I thought it was like, this is going to be just a one-time thing.

She's just following me because this just made her nervous. What had happened at 18 months of age and at that specific time was I had imprinted on her. That's what happens in the wild. You're a mother walrus. You, you shit out a calf. That animal is going to tattoo to its brain, your smell, your sight, the sound, everything

so that you can be identified in, you know, heard of hundreds. This happened at 18 months of age. So she imprinted on you just because you imprinted on her because she was panicking. I think it has to have been, it was at that moment. No question because I know it.

She was just a baby while this was all going down. And you can imagine the stress of being caught only maybe months before separated from your mother or witnessing your mother die in a harvest of sorts. Oh, Jesus Christ. So this happens.

So this animal, I imprinted on her. This is an anomaly. This doesn't happen. This isn't, hey, here's food. We're like best friends now. Great. This is, you're my mommy. That's the relationship we have.

It's crazy. Wow. Yeah, that's crazy. Wow. Yeah, that's intense. So then when you start factoring in the fact that she's in the pool with a lot of crazy chlorine values and she's getting chemical burns and everything else. And I'm like. So you almost have a paternal relationship with this walrus. I definitely have a paternal relationship with this walrus. You definitely have a paternal relationship. Wow.

That's crazy. And all because of the fact they're not cleaning the water, she's getting sick. Well, there's more to it than that. Well, she came in at 2004, so she's probably 10, a little over 10 years old now. This relationship also turned into, created some problems. It manifested in, like, you know,

physical manifestations of stress. She developed this uncontrollable, regurgitating issue. to created some problems. It manifested in like, you know, physical manifestations of stress. She developed this uncontrollable regurgitating issue where she doesn't keep her fish down. She pukes it up and it's from anxiety, from separation anxiety. I'm fast forwarding a bit from that moment of the imprint to now or prior to now, of course.

So there was, there was a lot of challenges that that relationship posed. So you try to train. Well, so I developed this, this system where the animal consumes fish and thereafter consumed jello. I would teach her to eat the jello and play with the jello. So try to keep her from throwing up the nutrients that are keeping her from gaining weight and being healthy. Right.

So I tried to train all the other people on this, you know, tried to wean myself out a number of times, but again, so the relationship was a blessing in the fact that this is, this is amazing. This is crazy. And it was also, and more so now like an absolute curse because giving a shit about an animal in that, at that level, like what you're saying, that, that parental relationship, that bond,

that's tough, man, to see what she's going through. And then you start realizing, I don't know what I can do to save her because she's going to die. Wow. And she's back there at the same place where you used to work still? I can't be 100% positive she's still there at the same place where you used to work still. I can't be a hundred percent positive.

She's still alive right now. I did see a couple of videos in the summer and those videos were tough to watch because she's still doing the same thing. They don't really use her in the show. She's well hidden in the back. No one sees her. They'll use her in the show sporadically, but it's difficult to use her because all she's doing is looking for me. That's all she ever does.

She comes out and she looks for me. Here was this video that come out in the summer. Sure. Shit. I'm seeing it. She's skinnier. Fuck. Like what,

what can I do? There's another thing that's important to remember. When I quit Marine land, we had an understanding. I was to remain in this animal's life. I live a football throw away from this facility. I gave my two weeks. It's very clear understanding.

She needs me. Vets have expressed it. Everyone knows it. She needs me. That's the only way we could treat her medically is if I'm there for her to follow me out of the water to go over to do whatever various treatments we were able to do with her on account of that relationship. So we had this understanding. And then I was actually called in a couple of days after I had quit to treat a dolphin because it was not a lot of experience that was remaining at the park to deal with this. So the relationship seemed legit.

Okay, I can move on as long as I can keep her from dying. I don't want her to die. Then I had a conversation with a guy. He had worked at Marine Land for like 30 plus years. He was like, he was up here to me. This guy was one of the nicest men I know. And he was like, Phil, you just got to let go. Like, you know, just take her ease.

I was feeling a lot of anxiety about this whole thing. Then I'd resolve, you know what? I'm going to go. We ended the relationship amicably, Marine Lion and I. I'm going to go visit Smooshy. It's been a month. The longest I'd ever not been in her life

since her arrival in 2004 was 10 days. She lost 30 pounds over that 10 days. This was a month now. I'm going to see Smooshy. So I show up to the park. I get to the security gate. The gate that I walked through for 12 years every day. No one bats an eye, of course.

Family here. I'm being rejected at the door. Like, can't come in. I'm like, what do you mean I can't come in? years every day. No one bats an eye, of course. Family here. I'm being rejected at the door like, can't come in. I'm like, what do you mean I can't come in? We have that understanding. We have, like, I'm still taking care of Smooshy. Okay, whatever. So I call my girlfriend who's working at the

time in the park. Can you bring me one of my free passes? I gotta pay to get in. And the owner's son sees me. He grabs me by the shoulder and says, no, no, Phil, you're like family here got to pay to get in. And the owner's son sees me. He grabs me by the shoulder and says, no, no, Phil, you're like family here. Now you can come in. Well, unbeknownst to him, there's been some,

something had happened at the administrative end where Phil can't come in no more. It's time to, there was a lot of concern when I quit. It was not good circumstances. That you might like go on a podcast? I'm going to get sued for so much more. Nonetheless, I get in and people are really nervous.

So I know what's going on. I run back to go see Smushi to the back. I say I run. That'll be better for the movie. I don't think I ran, but I'm trying to stay nonchalant, but walk back like where's Smushi? Right. I go see her, and she's lying on the pavement, bone dry.

Walruses need water. In the heat, they need ice. There's no ice in sight, and she's lost. This has been 30 days that I've been gone. She's lost maybe hundreds of pounds. She's really emaciated. Whoa. I'm looking at this like, are you fucking kidding me? How much does she weigh total? maybe hundreds of pounds. She's really emaciated. Wow. I'm looking at this,

like, are you fucking kidding me? How much does she weigh total? Well, she should weigh in at around 2,000 pounds now, but she, at the time, she weighed maybe 12. Again, she was a smaller animal. Difficult to keep the weight on

because of that regurgitation issue. She was weighing in real thin at this point. I couldn't believe it when I saw her. I'm like, so first thing the vet does, go get meds. She'll respond to me.

So we give her her appetite stimulants and antibiotic, everything else. I'm trying to keep that straight face, like, huh, walk out like, yeah, everything's cool, right? That night, my girlfriend comes home and she's like, you know when you get hurt? You know when you're hurt?

You're hurt by something, but you know what it is. So you know that you're in a shitty place. The real pain is when you're hurt you're hurt by something but you know what it is so you know that you're in a shitty place the real pain is when you're hurting so much that you don't know that you're hurting you're just sort of milling you're just sort of off the you know you're not you're not you're not processing that she come home and she's like, what's up? Nothing's up, right? Guzzling a few beers, whatever. It wasn't until the next day that I was like, wow. She's going to die. I have to come to terms with this reality.

This is fucked up. That's when the resolve for me said, I was like, fuck it. Use my name. Use my face. Get the story out now. If I can get eyes on Smooshy, they got to take better care of her. They got to do something.

They can't not. People are going to be paying attention now. That's what you think. All eyes on Smooshy. If I got all eyes on Smooshy, they can't let her die. But will she just die without you? I mean, if she's imprinted to you

and you're her mother, if she doesn't see you, she just die without you? I mean, if she's imprinted to you and you're her mother, if she doesn't see you, will she die without you? That separation anxiety, again, I'd only ever been apart from her for 10 days. She lost 30 pounds. Is this her? That's her. That's an Inside Edition piece that was done years ago.

She's enormous. She's tiny. That's a tiny walrus right there. Well, even a tiny walrus is enormous. God, they're so big. This was a fluff piece that Inside Edition did. Look at the size of her. My God. What a strange animal.

And these are all from the Black Sea? She's from the Black Sea, yeah. Where else do they live? Walruses? Oh, I don't know. They had them in the St. Lawrence in Ontario for a long while, but they were hunted out, so I don't know. Unfortunately, I only ever played a marine mammal expert in life. People eat them?

Yeah, people eat them. Wow. Walrus. Yeah, walruses. That's so strange, man. The whole story is so sad and disheartening. It's so much more elaborate. There's so many little details that

continue to go on like it's just so this is her following me she's calling for me here so i'm hiding around the corner and you can see she's actually favoring her left flipper that's where she had the chemical burn this is just prior to my quitting really like just months but she had a chemical burn on her leg that was so bad it made her limp yeah she's limping there because the chemical wow oh look at that she'll follow me anywhere that animal got to experience a semblance of normality in the sense that i could take her out walk her anywhere walk around the park she got to go she's got she got to go in the snow right these walruses captive walruses especially in indoor facilities they're

never going to see the snow unless you bring in a shovel full of snow in the last 15 minutes. So is it only Russia that's ganking these animals out of the water right now? That I know of. Again, I can't pretend to be an expert. I was only ever an expert in pretend world for 12 years while I worked at Marine Land and propagated the messages that I was fed. Now I can admittedly say that I know absolutely

very little about animals. Between blackfish and the cove and, you know, things that are starting to shed light on the treatment of these animals. How much of an impact, do you know how much of an impact the cove has had on the Japanese? There's the heightened awareness, which you, I guess you can measure as impact, of course, but

politically there's a lot, there's a lot of posturing going on there. Japan wants to say that it's part of their culture. They don't want to touch that, but there's gotta be some financial gain there or something. I don't know. I don't want, I can't weigh into that.

As far as black shit, black shit, black fish and everything here, like, yeah, that awareness between the star investigation, black fish, everything else.

Yeah. People are starting to give a shit. Now, granted, it's nice to, it's nice to experience in the high levels of, you know, hey, we're riding a high. I'm on the Joe Rogan show.

This is great. Hey, people are contributing to my Indiegogo fund. Hey, that's great. Like, we're going to get through this thing. There's a lot of shitty freaking lows. So this Blackfish one, you want to say, this is going to make for changes.

Everything's going to be eradicated. SeaWorld's done. Look, problem solved. It ain't that easy. In six months, no one's talking about this. After it wins, maybe a freaking Oscar. Who knows? But, and SeaWorld's done. Look, problem solved. It ain't that easy. In six months, no one's talking about this. After it wins maybe a freaking Oscar. Who knows? And then that's it.

I think it'll be out there for quite a while. I think it'll be one of those documentaries that gets passed around on Netflix or what have you. As long as it makes its way on the internet in a downloadable form. That's a pretty disturbing documentary, man. This thing's a right hook. I mean, just like that Star Investigation of the Marine Line. It's a right hook. So you know that it's a right hook. I mean, just like that Star Investigation of Marine Life, it's a right hook. So you know that it's going to have some sustained influence

and change, some power. There's enough of this going on right now that I think that people are going to have to come to grips. I was hoping that about factory farming too, and I still am for the future. I think there's got to become a point in time where there's so much information out there that we can get a hold of in relation to how how our food is being raised how animals are being treated and how

again the animals that i don't want to talk about as animals the these these marine wizards these orcas and dolphins there's something different they're not just a regular animal there's some weird super intelligent thing i think you'd find the same with a lot of animals That were slaughtering in slaughterhouses too But again I don't want to pretend that I'm an expert Pigs and cows and stuff Pigs especially, really smart, really intelligent Pigs eat people You know a guy got whacked off

Not whacked off, whacked out What is it called? In Sicily Somewhere in Italy I don't know if it was Sicily But they threw him in a fucking pen. The pigs ate them alive. Something happened out west in Canada.

Same thing. They found a farm. That was in Vancouver, right? The serial killer that was throwing the hookers to the pigs? Feeding them, yeah. Yeah, they had to find little pieces of this and pieces of that. And like, hmm. They're thorough when they eat.

Yeah. Hmm. Doesn't mean you've got to turn around and hate them and like pound bacon. Bacon sandwich. Bacon is delicious. And pigs are not going to live forever. I haven't eaten bacon in a long time. Bacon was definitely the thing that I wanted to wrap everything in.

Can't do it. I wrapped ice cream with bacon. That's delicious. Try it. Ice cream and bacon? Wrapped. I took an Eggo waffle. I put, I suppose you don't have to, it doesn't have to be an Eggo waffle.

I put a waffle down. I put ice cream, bacon,go waffle. I put, I suppose it doesn't have to be an Eggo waffle. I put a waffle down. I put ice cream, bacon, another waffle. This is when I didn't have any. You know what you're doing by this story by not being a fat guy? You're fat shaming. Oh, shit. Here we go. That's what I feel.

I feel he's fat shaming. By being able to say this, I can eat this. What about you, you fat fuck with the shitty metabolism? Just put one slice of bacon instead of the eight I put. And I put the maple syrup, you know, and then I put a little, I can't remember, like whipped cream or something. I pounded this thing.

I'm like, wow, bacon and ice cream. But now you're done. No more bacon. Can't do it. You just can't eat pigs because they're intelligent? Once you see what's going on there, you can't unsee it. You can pretend to unsee it, but at night it reminds you. Well, especially pigs that are in captivity.

They're so sweet. Pigs in captivity are like really gentle souls. Pigs are strange animals, man. They, you know, I recently found out that pigs and wild boars are essentially the same animal. Exact same animal, according to this guy, Steve Rinella, who knows a lot more about animals than I ever will. But he was saying that it's just we... I know what that is. What is it? I've heard that before.

It's off his funding page. It's the video that... This one is not difficult to watch. It might be worth a watch, though. But what I was saying is that pigs, like wild pigs and domestic pigs are essentially the same animal. One of the weirdest things about pigs is when you take a pig, a domestic pig,

when they're released into the wild, within three weeks they start to morph. They start to physically change. Their tusks grow longer. Their nose, their snout grows longer. Their hair changes. It gets thicker and coarser. They adapt fast. Yeah.

Within three weeks they start the metamorphosis. And they become like wild boars. It starts to bother me when the conversation comes in and the scientists, at least those that are, you know, sponsored by, or they're paid for by big money, start saying, oh, it's really difficult. You can't re-amalgamate an animal with its family. You know, you can't put an orca back in the wild.

They're used to this. They can't do it. Listen, orca is a kinetic, amazing machine. Well, here's the real question. Have they ever tried? They did try. They tried with Keiko, a free willy orca.

And it was successful. This animal was taken into a sea pen and then it was eventually off on its own and it lived for a long time. And he foraged for food. He interacted with other orcas. He got intimidated by those orcas.

I mean, it was probably a little bit of a lonely journey. But you got to learn a great deal of his life in the wild. His reintegration. And it was a glaring success. He did eventually die, but nonetheless, I mean... Don't all orcas eventually die? Well, they all die.

A lot of people, like your sea-willed people are going to be like, well, he died. He died over there. Well, how long did he live? I can't remember exactly. Again, I can't pretend to be an expert. I read this. I'll propagate this. I'll tell you things.

But I don't think it has to do with the longevity of how long you live, as much as the quality of life. But that does sound like a scapegoat way of saying, well, he died early or soon after. Look, the wild is fucking harsh, man. It's harsh for everything. Very few animals. You know, I was talking about deer earlier. When you find a deer that's five years old, that's a fucking old deer. It's very rare that a deer gets to be five years old.

And it's not just because of hunters. It's because of predators and freezing to death. Freezing to death is like the number one cause of death for mule deer, deers that live in Montana. They fucking freeze to death, man, before the coyotes get them, before anything happens. Like, shit is cold as fuck, and they're not going to make it. So they have to fuck like crazy and shoot as many of them out there as possible,

and hopefully a couple of them will make it to next year, and then they fuck like crazy and keep going. That's the only way. Orcas are different, man. I would imagine the ocean to be a pure utopia. Pure utopia. I would imagine it, right? I mean, especially if they're in, like, Alaska.

They're the top, man. Or somewhere. They're top cheese. They don't top, man. They're top cheese. They don't worry about anything. They eat dolphins. They'll eat anything. They do kill dolphins. It's kind of fucked up.

Fuck the orcas. They kill dolphins. Well, it's kind of fucked up. I mean, it's really kind of, that's one of the weird things about life is that it's one of the major reasons why even Stephen Hawking has said that if there were some sort of an alien invasion from an intelligent species from another galaxy or what have you, we really should be concerned. Because if we just look at the way we treat animals that are lesser than us, that we can control, and look at the way every other animal from chimpanzees to monkeys to everything finds things and either fucks it or eats it. Everything's slower or dumber than it. It imprisons, it fucks it or eats it. Everything's slower or dumber than it.

It imprisons, it fucks, or it eats. And that's what we've done. That's what chimpanzees do. That's what dolphins do. Dolphins kill baby dolphins on a regular basis. I don't know about that. Yes, they do. They do.

Come on, man. Oh, the males. Oh, wait, the males try to displace the calves for the females. They get them pregnant. Yeah, yeah. Super common, right? They're really horny, though. These are like peak times of horniness, right? It males try to displace the calves for the females. They get them pregnant. Yeah, yeah. Super common, right? They're really horny, though. These are like peak times of horniness, right?

It's okay to kill babies. I'm saying there's a brief period where they're like, well, I mean, orcas in captivity are banging their daughters, right? Right, yeah. That's that peak of supreme horniness that maybe we don't know. That's a big difference between that. We're talking about in the wild. That's one of the reasons why female dolphin promiscuity is such a high rate.

I think we have to get worried if orcas grow legs because they're the ones that are going to motherfuck us for sure. I'm sure, right? If they grew fingers and legs, they figured out how to get out of the water. Yeah, we're done. Oh, my God. Hopefully I'm on their good side. Smart and enormous.

If they could live in Seattle where it rains all the time, just run through the streets. Every time there's a rainstorm, you've got to bolt down your doors because orcas are going to be running through the streets looking to fuck people up. Orcas are nice, though. I think that you could probably, like...

That's the new Sharknado. It's like the new Godzilla, like baby Godzillas. Orca running. Yeah, every time it's raining, everybody has to fucking bolt their door down because orcas...

They only need, like, six inches of water. And they start running. They just need to be wet. They don't even need any water. They just need to be wet. They develop paws. They figure out how to run.

Their arms stretch out. They just go into cocoons and They develop paws. They figure out how to run. Their arms stretch out. They just go into cocoons and then they pop out with arms and legs. Better learn how to do backflips for whatever you like to eat. Yeah. But we have guns and shit. I think it would be a slaughter. They would run down the street. We'd just tag them off. How many of them are there, really?

We don't know what's going on. Come bring it, bitch. We don't know what's going on in the depths of the ocean. We got jets, son. We got jets. We can fly. We don't know what's going on. Come bring it, bitch. We don't know what's going on. Come to America in the depths of the ocean. Yeah, we got jets, son. We got jets. We can fly. We can fly and shoot hellfire missiles down at them. They're working on a factory down there, too, man. Tell them to come bring it.

Come bring it, Orcus. They find a way to mental fuck us the whole time, though. All of a sudden, we're like putting guns on ourselves. They probably are by being super sweet. That's how they're mentally fucking us, by making us look like what piece of shits we really are. We all give a shit now. They're onto something.

They know what they're doing. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, as we said before, I think the more the information gets out, the more the reality of the situation becomes into focus and not just for the protected few that knew before but couldn't do anything because you were financially beholden to the one person or people that own whatever organization contains these animals and imprisons them. And the reality of the situation as it becomes more and more aware to you, as you go from being this kid who's got this great idea, like, wow, I can't believe I'm here.

Jumping off killer whales, like on TV. This is amazing. Wow, what a dream. To years later, like, holy shit, I'm a part of an animal prison. Or not even an animal. I'm a part of an animal prison Or not even an animal I'm a part of an intelligent things prison I can't feel a lot of guilt For being there

I didn't pluck them out of the ocean So I feel like Maybe I'm atoning for that guilt Of like shit man But doing a really good job In the facility and trying to care for the animals It's hard to feel guilt for doing that Well I don't think you should feel guilt

But you are a part of something I mean the people who are a hard to feel guilt for doing that. Well, I don't think you should feel guilt. I don't think guilt does anybody any good. But you are part of something, right? I mean, the people who are part of something are the ones that are paying at the gate. That's what needs to stop. Yes. The only thing that guilt helps, guilt helps you realize you're doing something wrong, getting a bad feeling. You realize you're doing something wrong and hopefully correct it. That's the only thing that guilt really does. Other than that, you know, you having guilt for working there, especially coming into it not knowing, being a young guy who had these idealistic visions

of what it was like to work at a marine animal facility and train killer whales and shit, and then you get there and you realize the reality of it, that's just a part of you realizing the world is complicated. It's just that's your version of it. The overwhelming guilt was that I'm not doing anything to stop this. It wasn't I'm participating in this. It's I got to do something.

Who's going to do something? Who's going to do something? Okay, fuck it. Use my name. Use my face. Sue me for millions. Get my girlfriend fired. We're going to live in cardboard boxes soon.

Great. Did you, what's like when you went into this, what was like, what's the worst case scenario? Did you just think about it? Did you think what's like when you went into this, what was like, what's the worst case scenario? Did you think about it? Did you think about it? Like, did you like say, okay, what's the worst that this can do to me? Will you wind up in jail? Will you wind up imprisoned?

Will you wind up in debt? Obviously. You wonder. Yeah. I guess the anxiety was like subsided a great deal once the resolve was there, but that was only because I saw Smushi. Like take that out of the equation. I don't know that necessarily I would have

at least had as much a hand in like allowing myself to, to, you know, be a part of that investigation and how to use the name and face of course. But that, that guilt and everything else, that fog, you don't think rationally like, well, maybe I should just back away and not try to, to change the status quo because,

Hey, this could be a great risk of me. Of course, you know, you're going to take a shit kicking, you know, you know, you know, there's going to be a recourse. I don't care. I don't want smooshy to die. Right. You know, you got to put yourself in those shoes. It's like, what are you willing to do for this animal?

And I hate to call it animal, but this being that you share this bond with. What lengths are you willing to go? I decided I'm willing to stick my neck out. Well, that's very admirable, man. It really is. You know, the whole, I mean, you're doing what the hero does in the story, right? And confronted with an inescapable truth, you act.

And, you know, and especially emotionally, in your case, you being so attached to this one animal, you know, literally its mom to it. It's got to be a really strange time, you know, to know that you're right and know that your instincts are correct and you're acting on the best interest of the animal, but facing this intense amount of opposition. I mean, it's a classic hero story. I mean, I'm just trying to get the happy ending, man. You're obviously the good guy. I'm the good guy. In every one of those stories,

I mean, in that classic story, you're obviously the good guy. I don't know whether, I mean, you might be crazy. You might have made most of this up. No, fuck no, man. We're going to go there. You're not letting me play the video.

You're going to tell me this shit. No, we're going to play the video, man. Relax. It's pacing, man. There's an art to this. This is Hollywood, man. What do I know we're going to play the video, man. Okay, relax. It's pacing, man. You got to, there's an art to this. This is Hollywood, man. What do I know? This is not Hollywood.

This is fucking Canoga Park, son. This is nowhere near Hollywood. It's a long ways from Chippewa and Niagara Falls. Well, because it's warm out, it's just a bunch of people, dude. You Canadians got to get over that shit. Scary place, the States, man. I mean, all of a sudden you come in and you guys got like big roads and stuff. Is that what it is? The big roads? Yeah, the sun's coming out, come in and you guys got like big roads and stuff. Is that what it is?

The big roads? Yeah, the sun's coming out, big roads. Car books and big words and stuff. The cars are shiny. They're not rusty either. It's amazing. I'm looking around going, wait, where's the rust? Because you're used to people that are driving around with salt.

I had a Jeep. Imagine that. Yeah, when I lived in Boston, every car had fucking big rust holes in the quarter panels. You could poke your finger through right where the wheel went. Yeah. Yeah, don't buy a Jeep if you're in Canada. What was the thing that I heard about Jeeps recently? There was some sort of

an issue about recalls. Did you hear about this? I didn't, no. I was lucky to sell mine, actually. I made a deal with a guy. He was like, 3K certified. I'm like, yeah, no problem. I'll get certified for sure. I take it to the shop. Guy's like, okay, hole here, hole here, this, that, 4,000 to fix. I'm like, oh man, I'm in deep shit now.

Yeah, there's a fuel tank recall for Jeeps, Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and Nissans. They're all being made by the same place? No. No, obviously not, right? This is what's confusing. The widespread recall,

Jeeps to Lamborghinis. That's a serious range. Maybe it was the same tank or something like that. I mean, the type of tank, I could see. You don't need a high-end tank to be in a Lamborghini, although it would be a very different shape. There are different shapes for different calls. Somebody had brought this up, and I wasn't aware of it. Some sort of a recall.

Chrysler says the trailer hitches will protect the gas tanks, which are mounted behind the rear axle and are vulnerable to rear impacts. Although Chrysler told the agency that a trailer hitch cannot and will not mitigate the risk of high-energy rear collisions, but would incrementally improve the performance in certain types of low-speed impacts. Boy, that doesn't make me feel comfortable. The most hilarious shit, though, is those Teslas.

You know, those Tesla S's. One of the drivers is like a big dolphin advocate. Elon Musk, the guy who created it? No, she's a woman actually. Leilani Munter. There's a lot of people that own them now. They're pretty common, but they've had three of them burst into flames. I heard about that. Yeah. Apparently, I mean, it's a brilliant car. It's won many car of the years.

It's like environmentally friendly. Well, sort of. Well, I think they're pushing that sort of thing. Sort of. Here's the issue. They're all, there's conflict minerals in every lithium ion battery. When you're getting lithium ion batteries, unless you absolutely are completely sure of where that lithium was sourced, you're getting lithium from Afghanistan.

You're getting lithium from the Congo. You're getting lithium from some really dark places where there's a lot of people that are running the show that are cunts. And, you know, it's one of the things about cell phones, one of the darkest things about computers. The very minerals that are used to run your computer and your cell phones, those are being pulled out of the ground in certain places by essentially slaves. They're being pulled out by little kids in some way. I mean, maybe they've cleaned that up in some places because this stuff has been exposed. But the Congo is notorious for being like a really terrible place when it comes to human rights.

Vice Magazine has done several pieces on the Congo and how it runs down there. I think I saw like a tourism piece of Vice Magazine. Actually, Vice Magazine wrote an article on Marineland and that still is the best damn article. They're the shit, man. Oh, yeah.

They're awesome. Oh, by the way, Eddie Wong and Shane Smith are coming back on together on the 18th. It's going to be a party in here and we're told

to bring booze so we'll see what happens. But Eddie Wong and Shane Smith together, shit could be epic. Yeah, they go everywhere and expose everything and you know that's what's beautiful about vice is that they have here's another one this is my favorite one though the electric cars uh they the fisker karma those fisker you know what those things are those are those really beautiful ones they have a solar

panel on the roof so the solar panel actually charges up your radio and your dashboard and your display and everything like that. It's like a supplemental charge. Sure. Well, they're a really cool-looking car, but they parked them on the docks, and during the hurricane, they fucking burst into flames when they got wet. Are you serious? Yes. Yes. Yeah. They fucking burst into flames. You'd wet. Are you serious? Yes. Yes. Yeah.

They fucking burst into flames, man. You'd think you'd have at least that tested. Like, what happens when it's wet? Yeah. I don't know. That's not good, though. What happened to that Porsche, you know, the one that Brian, or that guy from the movies, died in the other day? Oh, the Carrera GT that Paul Walker died in.

That's a very dangerous car. Isn't it? Yeah, it's a slippery car. Walter Roll, who is a world-famous race car driver, like he's been the head test driver for Porsche forever. You could see Walter Roll. You could see his videos of him driving all over YouTube. The guy is just super talented and is incredibly good at driving race cars.

And he got out of the Carrera GT and he was like, that car scared me. This is a scary car. Too much power? Too weird with its handling. I mean, it's a mid-engine car. It's very dynamic, incredibly powerful, 500 horsepower, very, very light. And he felt like at the limit, he couldn't figure out. He said they drove it in the wet one of the first times he drove it and he felt like at the limit he couldn't figure out he said they drove in the wet one of the first times he drove it and he was terrified he said that the button the car needed two buttons one for the wet and one for the dry there's been a quite a few accidents in that car

including Jay Leno spun his out at Talladega he has a he has a Carrera GT he has like you know 100 fucking cars but he had this Carrera GT spin out on him. Jay Leno knows how to drive fucking cars. Maybe this is the next flying car. As does this guy who is driving the car that Paul Walker died in. The guy was a race car driver. He wasn't just like a regular schmo. He really knew how to drive cars. So

I think it's one of those cars that's just super powerful and you have to really mind it. You have to be really careful of it There's you know there's certain cars that They probably shouldn't exist like the Mustang has a car out now Shelby GT 500 it has six hundred and seventy fucking horsepower It's insane and I don't even think it has 11 inch wide tires

I mean that they're not that wide. And this fucking thing, I had the GT500 from the previous years. It had 550 horsepower. It was ridiculous. I couldn't imagine that someone had that thing and said, you know what this fucking thing needs? Another 110, 120 horsepower. See, the problem I have with these cars and these bikes is, like, if you could, like, change the unused horsepower, the horsepower that you'll never

use, into value, these vehicles that are priced way the hell up here are really only worth you could pay $12,000 for a Mustang because the rest of the power that you'll never be able to use or explore doesn't exist. Take it out of the equation. You know? Yeah, but who the fuck thinks

like that? One of the cool things about those cars is that you have that power, son. Yeah, but you can't go there. Yes, you can. You get on the on-ramp and you... And you accelerate to 60 miles an hour legally in three seconds. Well, that's what I'm saying. That's legal.

Okay, so within those three seconds, then there's value. But there's still so much unused potential there. You're thinking like an accountant, and that's not what these cars are all about, especially muscle cars. Muscle cars are all about emotion. It's not what these cars are all about, especially muscle cars. Muscle cars are all about emotion. It's all about the sound of the rumble of the engine, even if you're not going fast. If you buy an old muscle car, those things are terrible. They drive like shit.

They fucking handle horrible. Every corner you go around, there's no aerodynamics. The brakes are dog shit. Unless you upgrade everything to modern standards, you're dealing with a fucking disaster. But it'll put a big, fat, stupid smile on your face when you drive one of those things. What about these crotch rockets, though? I mean, you're in first gear.

You're a half twist on the wrist, and you're already, like, don't go through a school zone. I mean, you can't even start this thing through a school zone without getting up on the back tire. Well, yeah, I mean, they're ridiculous. The amount of power is ridiculous. Nobody needs it. But people like it.

They like it. California. It's even scarier. The bikes are even scarier than the cars because they're so light. It's such a small object, and it's hurling. I remember going through a school zone, and it was like, I'm just, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. I'm one of these, I forget if it was like a Gixxer 900 or something,

bop, bop, bop, bop. I looked down. It's like 70 clicks, kilometers an hour in Canada. Holy shit. Like, I'd lose my license if I'm caught doing this. I'm just going, bop, bop. I'm trying to if I'm caught doing this. I'm just going bump. I'm trying to be as nice as possible. Yeah, they're so fast.

And you're so tuned in when you drive something that's that fast all the time. You're so tuned in to speed. You're so tuned in to all that crazy shit that you do in your head. Take the car becomes one. It becomes one. It becomes an extension of your body once you're in the zone, right? You got to know your shit, though. Is that Jay Leno spinning?

Yeah, Jay Leno spinning. Did he hit the wall? No, it looks like he's... Looks like he hit something, man. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he hit. Yeah, he definitely hit something. Holy shit.

Ow. Yeah, those are... Hitting about 190, Jay's car spins five full rotations. What caused the spin? Look at this. They're fucking tricky cars, man. Just like that, just let it go.

Yeah, well, he was obviously turning. You can see he's turning. It's to see if Leno hit the turning. You can see he's turning. Just to see if Leno hit the wall. Jane heads back to the pits. When you're driving a car like that, he's okay,

he didn't hit the wall, is that what it's saying? No, I guess not. It's a half a million dollar car, too, by the way. I was going to say, they're probably worried about the car, too, right?

Well, when you're driving a car like that, the amount of traction that you have, there's so much power, and you're dealing with, the tires have to keep up with what the engine can do. That makes sense. And you have to mitigate that.

You have to be able to balance that out. And a good race car driver knows where the limits of the tires are. And also when you get onto a track, the tires aren't at their peak immediately. You might need five, six laps to warm up the tires. The temperature of the tires is very critical to performance, especially when you're dealing with cup tires and these fat slicks that a lot of these race car drivers drive around on. So the whole deal is about putting heat into those tires.

And until you have that, or if the conditions are bad, or if it's rained within the last 48 hours, all those have big factors on the amount of traction that you have on that track. That's a lot to think about when getting behind a... That's the nice thing about the Jeep. Fuck yeah, it is. The nice thing about the Jeep is just bop, bop, bop. Yeah.

Bop, bop, bop. I mean, obviously, we're just talking about race cars. Most cars, these things don't come into factor. But what does come into play is that the lessons learned from these cars, these cars going really fast around race tracks, people think it's ridiculous. But why would you need that? Why do you... You don't.

You're right. Absolutely. However, it's a sport. It's for shits and giggles. It's a hobby. It's a pastime. But the lessons learned from these races are exactly why today's cars are so safe. Today's cars handle so well.

They're so aerodynamically sound. They're 0 to 60 times have dropped steadily every year. It's all because of the improvements they've made because of motorsports. If you look at, like, Porsche has they have a Panamera. You know what that is? They have a four-door car. They have a big, it's like a big

Mercedes-looking thing, big spaceship-looking thing. I've seen, like, they've got almost an SUV looking like Porsche. Yeah, that's a Cayenne. They have that, too. Those cars that they have now, they've got almost an SUV looking like Porsche. That's a Cayenne. They have that too. Those cars that they have now, they fucking defy physics. These things are insane. When you drive one of them, the engineering involved in these 500 plus horsepower,

twin turbo, 5,000 pound vehicles or whatever the fuck they weigh. It's well over 4,000 pounds. It's shocking when you drive. You can't believe how they handle. All that's from motorsports. All that's from the lessons they learned in engineering and trying things out, doing things like 24-hour races, the Le Mans races, and all the GT races that Porsche gets involved in.

They learn all that. They learn from those mistakes and how to improve those fast cars, and then they apply those lessons to their regular cars, their consumer cars. They also apply it more so, or at least a great deal, on the shits and giggles factor, because that's where they're getting off. I mean, making these things big doesn't address a lot of people's, I'm never going to drive one of these things. Yeah, it's awesome that that guy could. I can't drive that freaking thing.

Well, they're getting into insane levels. Why not just put wings on these things? They're flying. Well, they can't. That's not legal yet. But when you start talking about performance levels, like 0 to 60 levels, like just 10, 20 years ago, if you get a car to 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, it would be crazy.

Like, wow, 0 to 60 in 4 seconds. You could get that in a Mustang GT. It costs $35,000. I mean, a regular car that you buy, a Mustang GT almost does 0-60 in 4 seconds. It might be like 4-5 at the most, half a second slower. It's crazy, the performance. They've got a Porsche, the Turbo S,

the 911 Turbo S, the new one, goes 0-60 in 2.7 seconds. Where do you have to be to take 2.7 seconds to get... I mean, that's great for firemen. I don't want to say police necessarily. Well, you can't. Obviously, it's tough to get fire gear in a Porsche 911. But what's going to happen in 100 years from now?

Is it going to be 0 to 60 instantly? Are we going to warp through wormholes? I think there's going to be a different means of transportation altogether. Really? Like what? Yeah, wormholes, like you say. I don't know what. Transponders. Beep, beep. Gone. Yeah, wormholes, like you say. I don't know what. Transponders. Beep, beep.

Gone. Yeah, I guess if we never saw the internet coming, we're not going to see the next thing coming either. You know, evolution. Everything's evolving. Wormholes in your car. You're going to press a button. You're going to show up in the office.

Right now, the fastest way to get somewhere is to keep shit at home, though. Okay, I work from home now. Boom. Zero to 60. I think the fact that you could send files through the mail, through email,

you could send files through online. And drones are now going to start dropping shit off? You're not going to have to go to that many places anymore. I think actually physically

going places, I think we're going to be trapped at home looking at monitors all day, talking to each other face to face through these things. 99% of my friends already.

Where do you think this whole controversy and lawsuit, where do you think this takes you? Do you have like an end game here? Do you have like an escape clause? Do you have like a way that you can get out of this? It's a slap suit. It's a strategic lawsuit against public participation. The idea is he launches the suit.

I shut the hell up. The suit goes nowhere. He either backs it the hell off or he bleeds me dry. I'm boned. I got, I'm out of funds. I don't got a choice in the matter. I signed a piece of paper saying I'm not going to bother you no more.

I'm never going to talk about you again. And if somebody wants to Google your, whatever it is, a go-go, what is it? SaveSmooshy.com. SaveSmooshy.com. How do you spell smooshy? You should probably spell smooshy. S-M-O-O-S-H-I.

So this is the fourth campaign that I've launched. I've basically raised about $40,000. And then there was that Billy challenge that I think you spoke to Les Stroud about. Yes. Les speaks very highly of you, which is why you're here. Thanks, Les. Les is a great guy. He's an awesome guy.

He's my homeboy. Les went a long ways to try to help us. We won, through Les, we won $32,000 Canadian. One day I'm sitting there talking about initiating payment with the guy, like, okay, we're flying this guy or this guy's being flown down, we're going to have a big presentation. Les is going to be there because, you know, Les was the celebrity that was sponsored to our

charity. And then a week later, I'm reading that this Billy challenge is belly up and simple as that, but by no money. What? Like 32,000 bucks. I'm trying to support three lawsuits right now. Mine, my girlfriend.

I'm confused. What happened? They disappeared. They don't exist. There's a website, thebilly.com. You hit it. They've suspended operation. We're not getting paid. Oh, so they quit. They went under. They bailed, yeah thebilly.com. You hit it. They've suspended operation. We're not getting paid.

Oh, so they quit. They went under. They bailed, yeah. Something happened. Okay. We don't know what, but I tell you that's a shitty day when you wake up. I mean, the emotion where you're like,

shit, we're being supported big time. Right. We just won $32,000. That's going to see me till next summer. Beautiful. Because the longer I can sustain this battle, in these lawsuits, especially with the counter suits,

there comes a point where the power swings. They're trying to beat the snot out of us in every which way they can using money. If we have that money and we last so long, suddenly they have to start disclosing files in their lawsuits that they do not want to disclose. The objective is bleed them dry, drop the suit. They've done it historically.

That's the function of a slap suit. If I got the monies and I bleed them dry, drop the suit. They've done it historically. Right. That's the, that's the function of a slap suit. If I got the monies and I get so far, uh-oh, uh-oh. Blackfish, the movie, everything that was revealed in there was from the OSHA versus SeaWorld trials. All the stuff that SeaWorld had to give,

they had to provide video of orcas beating the snot out of trainers, you know, a bunch, all these things come out. It's the same thing with, with, with Marineland. They're going to have to open up files about the killer whales health. They're going to have to open up files

about a lot of things, exonerating us. They're gonna have to show the water log histories. The, the, the, the newspaper already has that, but nonetheless, they're going to have to disclose these things. They don't want to do that. Their objective is sue the shit out of

us, make us broke, drop the suit, go. That was the way of the 90s, 80s, 70s, whatever. It's a new day and age. Suddenly there's a Streisand effect. You sue me to shut me up. Blows up the whole thing. It blows it right up.

Everyone's listening. People give a shit. I wind up getting enough money to see this thing through. He can't drop it. I got the countersuit. Well, let's start opening books. You want to have a look inside?

Let's start opening books. Opening financial books see, you want to have a look inside? Let's start opening books. You know, and it doesn't. Opening financial books, finding out how much is profiting. Medical records, water log history. How much did you pay for those dolphins? Let's find out. Like whatever.

I mean, there's a bunch of things that apply to the lawsuit. But moreover, there's also the question of, hey, if you're a person that's going to turn around and say, I don't think animal abuse is cool and you wind up being sued, made broke, wiped out. That's not a good precedence to send for people out there.

It's not good for the human race. It's not good. That's precisely it. It's less about, I mean, it's about animals primarily, initially. This is social justice now. So what you're essentially doing is reaching more people than the people who have influence can reach. With their money and their influence, they've collected a bunch of people that are controlling the regulations

and enforcing the laws, and they figured out a way to keep these people under their wing. But what you're doing by getting on this podcast, by starting your Indiegogo account and fucking being one of the go-go girls or whatever, what you're doing is spreading that past their reach of control.

He's got money? They only have a little bit of money, though. They don't have that much money. How much money does he have? He's got a billion? He's got a hell of a lot more than me. There's a money? They only have a little bit of money, though. They don't have that much money. How much money does he have? He's got a billion? He's got a hell of a lot more than me. There's a fucking 300 million people in this country. If you let a million of those people find out,

how much money does he have, really? And by the way, if you start fucking organizing a boycott of his property, that money goes away ultra fast. Well, the numbers are down bad. Of course. They fucking should be, man. It's a prison colony.

We get the monies. I sleep easy again. I took this thing on. This wasn't, hey, for the next 80 hours every fucking week, you're going to go petition the shit out of trying to get people's money. That sucks. Asking for people for money really sucks. What the hell else am I supposed to do? I've been pinned.

I've been backed into a corner. I'm coming out swinging. I got to do what I can. It. I've been backed into a corner. I'm coming out swinging. I gotta do what I can. It seems to be working. We're getting somewhere. That anti-slap legislation that was announced in Ontario, that's coming. If that anti-slap comes sooner than later, we're in a race right now.

Anti-slap meaning that it stops these kind of lawsuits? Illegal lawsuits. That's happening. I think it's in its second reading in Ontario legislation. And this is all because of the lawsuits that were launched against us. There's a lot of attention. So suddenly they're getting nervous. So they're really pushing this agenda.

They're trying to get me to pony up for this motion to strike out everything in our defense, everything in our counterclaim. Lawyers are telling us 15,000 bucks a pop. I got three lawyers. I'm trying to support mine, my case, my girlfriends, and this nice man who worked for 12 years who spoke about the time the owner

shot two pets golden retrievers on his property, on Marineland property they went and sued him for telling them wait a minute, what did he do? it's deep, he allegedly and I was there that day, I can attest that a lot of things that happened

these dogs come running in, these two pets golden Golden retrievers. Golden labs, golden retrievers. Well, he doesn't want them there no more. They're running up and down the fence. They're bothering the deer. He shot the dogs? I hear two shots. I come into work. Someone's out there doing his thing. Phone rings. What's this guy's name? John Holder. He's the one who shot these two golden retrievers? Allegedly. Whoa.

So the guy who was very brave to say that and of other stories where he had to do some really, had to do some really tough things is being sued as well. Whose dogs were these? The neighbors.

One of the, like two houses down. So the dogs just got out of the yard or something like that? Got out of the yard, darted into the dogs just got out of the yard or something like that? Got out of the yard, darted into the parking lot because right across the street is the deer park. Gates open. Dogs dart in. Shit, my dogs are gone.

Boom, boom. There's witnesses. Whoa. Yeah, well. Had these dogs attacked the deer or were they just? No. Well, I mean, I don't know. I wasn't there for that.

But nonetheless, I mean. Fuck. Don't you just call the OSPCA? Come get these fucking dogs. They're fucking golden labs. You come grab them. You go, but nonetheless, I mean. Fuck. Don't you just call the OSPCA? Come get these fucking dogs. They're fucking Golden Labs. You come grab them. You go, come here, buddy. They're the sweetest dogs on earth.

I told you off the hop. Don't try to rationalize his thinking. Everything that's a good idea is a bad. Dude, Golden Labs are the sweetest dogs ever. I've never met a single mean one in my life. That story's out there. The videos are out there. I've met shitty poodles.

Every Golden Lab I've met wants to give you a kiss when you get close to it. Those things are gems. They're beautiful dogs. That's Star Investigation. If you go to the Toronto Star website and just look up Marineland, there's probably three dozen stories, and that's in there. Yeah, boom.

Dude, that's harsh, man. You navigate that web well. That's harsh. Shot neighbors' dogs. Yeah. Wow. Oh, my God. That hurts.

These stories, there's a shit ton. And it wasn't just the three of us that are being sued. It's a bunch of people. He's suing an activist for $1.5 million. This guy come out of nowhere. There's the dogs there. There's the dogs. Oh my God.

There's actually video of the dogs. Very playful, beautiful freaking dogs. They're fucking pets. Well, now they're dirt. Oh God. What an asshole. So what happened out of this? Did he get sued?

Buddy got sued. Yeah, Buddy's getting sued. He's getting sued. So then I was out of pocket $5,000. Someone's got to retain a lawyer for this man. Who's going to do it? I'm looking around. Shit.

Your buddy. You're not talking about John Hoare. You're talking about your friend who got in trouble for this. I'm talking about the guy who came out about this and then he got in trouble. Started to sleep easy at night. Decided to say, look, because he quit about six months before I did amidst really, I mean, if you think the marine mammals got it tough, you should see the land animals at this place. It's real tough.

Some really shitty things going on. What do you mean land animals? Marine land has land animals? Marine land is its own entity, man. What do they have? Bears. What? Oh, yeah.

They have bears. You should read about the bears. That's a shitty story i fucking hate bear captivity man there's a video brian i want you to pull this up bear kills man in like eight seconds there's a video that i i refer to whenever anybody talks to me about bears being trained and people training bears and pull up the video brian of uh bear uh kills man in fucking seven seconds or whatever it was it was the bear from uh a movie i forget the move i want to say the longest yard but it wasn't the longest yard it was like first in town or some fucking

football movie or something like that there was a bear in that movie a trained bear his bear had worked in hollywood and many films and TV shows. His cousin or brother or something, he's having the guy stand there while he's training the bear. This happens for real? And the bear just attacks the guy out of nowhere for no reason. He's a bear, that's the reason. Exactly. Launches itself. This is it right here.

This is terrible. I can tell you right now, looking at that bear, I can tell you there's trouble brewing. The guy's standing there and he's just doing nothing and the bear just decides to fuck him up. And that's it. The guy's standing there, and he's just doing nothing, and the bear just decides to fuck him up. And that's it. Turn away. Turn away, Brian.

I don't want to see anymore. That's the end. He ripped the guy's throat out. The guy was dead in seconds. You can't fuck with bears, man. They do what they want. They're bears. Same as killer whales, man.

Same as any animal. They're wild. It's not a golden lab. A golden lab is not a wild animal by any stretch of the imagination. Two shotgun shots all took. Man, the details in those stories. You know, when Jim quit, the day that those dogs got shot, I actually got pissed at Jim because I was in the office with the vet. The vet gets a call.

She's like, what? Oh, my God. Puts the phone down. She's like, fuck. The owner just shot two retrievers or golden labs. I'm like, what? Oh my God. Puts the phone down. She's like, fuck. The owner just shot two retrievers or golden lions. I'm like, fuck. They're like, well, you know, Jim wanted to do this, but he didn't. I was like,

fuck, man. So I was pissed at Jim in my mind. I'm like, Jim quit shortly after. Jim was in a real tough spot. Jim speaks. Brave as hell, man. I'm so proud of this man. He's the nicest gentleman you've ever met. Boom. He slapped with a fucking lawsuit. So, well, who's going to pony up?

I was out of pocket. I start fundraising. Out of pocket, start fundraising. But that's the idea. They keep launching suits. We can't keep up. But at some point, man, can't keep launching them. Ontario government paid attention.

Can't do it no more. Anti-slap legislation. It's coming, but we're in a race. We're in a race because they're pushing these different things. There's an activist, as I was saying, his name's Mike Garrett. He read the Star articles in the newspaper about everything that's going on. He's like, what the fuck? Starts holding a sign out there. Then he

brings out a bullhorn. Then he starts interacting with the owner. There's a video out there that's amazing. You want to see the owner of Marine Land? He, uh, he starts like, he actually threatens to stab the guy on video, which is crazy. And they fucking sues him. He sues him for a bunch of shit that never happened. It's all bullshit.

It's a slap suit. It's just, hey, if you keep talking and telling the truth about us, we're going to sue you to shut you up. Well, that's, now that's more so what I'm advocating for. This is a social justice issue now, you know? So I keep making a stink. But at the end of the line, there's always smooshy. I still have dreams, man. I still want to see with that animal. I know what she's going through. Of course I keep making a sting. But at the end of the line, there's always smooshy. I still have dreams, man. I still want to see with that animal.

Of course. I know what she's going through. Of course I need to see her. So is this what's turning you into a vegetarian? No, it's, you know what it is? So on Twitter, on Facebook, like people are following me and they're always, you know, I follow people or I got shit on Facebook and

there's always these freaking images and I'm like, right? Keep seeing them. Keep seeing them. You can't, like I said, you can't unsee. You don't, it doesn't take long. You only got to watch 30 seconds of one video and be like, off, off? Keep seeing them, keep seeing them. You can't, like I said, you can't unsee. You know, it doesn't take long. You only got to watch 30 seconds of one video and be like, off, off, I don't eat that no more.

That's, that's out. I like cheese. I have a real tough time getting away from cheese. Like really old, thin sliced cheddar. Cows don't die for cheese. They suffer like you would not imagine at the end they do die. To get cheese?

In the worst ways. Milk, milk is hard. I'm off milk. Wait a minute. But what about natural organic milk where they just go in and milk the cow? I'd have to see it. I'm off milk. Wait a minute. But what about natural organic milk where they just go in and milk the cow? I'd have to see it to know, but I know the milk that I was drinking

in the gallons is done. I'm out milk. I see what you're saying. So the factory farmed milk, the way they get it on the standard- I don't know what percentage of what you buy at the store, but a great deal of it is cruel that you cannot imagine.

Oh, dude, why are you bumming me out? Pat, welcome to my world. Every time I log into Facebook, boom, milk cows, shitty. Especially now that you're connected to that. Well, all these people have befriended. They're all supporting, and they're all doing their cause. I want to help. I want to see.

Big mistake. It's what we were talking about earlier, about the broad spectrum of human behavior, that people can be kind and sweet and people can be fucking murderous cunts. There's a spectrum. And unfortunately, that manifests itself in business as well and the way we treat animals as far as factory farming and as far as running these marine animal facilities or zoos. Even moreover, the people that are working at these places, they've got to earn, man.

Of course. And not only that, they probably, like you, went into it with good intentions and along the way realized what it actually was. You start when you, I mean, you got to pry open that third eye. You got to sort of get yourself out of the element itself and look from a different perspective altogether. Eat a pot cookie and go to the zoo. I would definitely advocate for that. Let's play that video and I got to take a leak.

So let's play that video and I'll come back while it's on. Do you still have it? No, why would you? You're gonna do the dog video? The video that he was gonna play earlier. Oh, this one. The only way really to do Marineland or to do a story like Marineland is to have an insider

or somebody who's just left and worked inside a long time and I never thought that I would be able to get somebody and then when I did I thought that the story would probably I would be on it a couple of weeks maybe a month it would be some digging and we're almost a year later it just kept growing into different stories. And as different government departments got involved, it just went on and on. I mean, there was a period where either myself or with another photographer or with Liam Casey, we lived on the road between here and Niagara Falls.

In May of 2012, I got a phone call from someone who said that there was a lawyer who was talking to somebody who had worked at Marineland and thought this person had some issues with Marineland and wondered if I wanted to talk to them. It was really difficult and finally in the end he decided he would talk to us and that was Phil Demers, the first whistleblower. Over the course of my tenure at Marineland I was witness to things that people would never imagine a place like Marineland to be capable of. In the end we were working

with 15 whistleblowers and it was their feeling that problems that had existed with the water, not being able to get the levels right, had caused health problems in the animals and also short staffing had caused problems. Because we didn't have the resources, we didn't have the people to get the animals to do certain husbandry behaviors that we would otherwise want them to do. The first line of defense was to give them drugs. I saw things that resulted in death. You're basically heading your head against the wall, trying to make changes for the better for the animals.

And one day I walked in and walked out, just said, that's enough. Oh, there was a huge reaction from the public. I mean, a massive reaction. My email was jammed. I think we got something like 270,000 views on the video on the first day. The OSPCA issued orders against Marineland on a number of things. Marineland completed all orders from the OSPCA. But what was also interesting is that the government reacted. The Minister, Medlin

Mayer, is bringing in a program. One, it's her hope to license zoos and aquariums in Ontario because they're not at this time. The second thing will be special standards of care for marine mammals because there's nothing. And the third will be greater powers, more money and greater responsibility and also hopefully more transparency for the OSPCA. Three of the trainers who spoke to me have been sued. These are generally slap suits which are basically to to shut them down but still the suits are for I think a million one. They haven't gone to Discovery or anything yet

and I know they have a lot of supporters. When I did these stories and Liam and I worked together, we were writing about the animals. We had no desire and have no desire to shut Marineland down or anything that Mr. Holder has been saying about us. All we wanted to do is tell people we went to Marineland, we talked to people, we interviewed people who worked there, we've looked at records, we've looked at video and here's what's happening. That's all. And I hope that they're able to make a much better Marineland. Yeah he sued the Toronto Stars too. Really? Yeah, amazing. What are you suing them for? Um, I don't know exactly. They're sort of tight-lipped at that end. They don't, you know,

they're not going to reveal too much. But the matter of fact is, Toronto Star or any media, you know, they get a suit. They, you know, normally these places demand an apology if there's been a mistake. Sometimes they just, you know,

there's a little money paid out, something else. The Star's fighting this completely. They're like, yeah, let's go. Let's do this. Well, we tweeted it. I just tweeted it about 10 minutes ago. And I'll tweet it again

and we'll promote it on this podcast and try to get some people to contribute some money and help out your legal defense. My thing is, I don't need a lot from you. I need a lot of you. I just need a lot of people. Throw me five bones, man. We can get through this thing. And the other thing is, you know, there's reality

TV out there and people obsess over they can't believe that this scripted bullshit i mean you know about it i know about it i was on the tv show wipeout i know about sort of the scripting and things you were on wipeout i was on wipeout it's my friend's show matt kunitz i was gonna say because i think it was shortly after uh fear factor that they went with the wipeout yeah he created it yeah itemol. Yeah. They created it while Fear Factor was going on. Right. Yeah. Yeah, we've been over there many times, like that place where they film it.

In Argentina or in LA? No, the LA one. Right. The one out in Simi. I did the Canadian version. They basically sent us to Argentina. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah, they do it all over the world now, right? In a bunch of different countries. They all go to Argentina. I think the States is the only one that has a really amazing course. That course is awesome. It's evolved quite a bit. The one in Argentina is pretty badass. Jump over cows.

Donkey Kong and shit. Just metal rods everywhere. That's real. That's nasty. It's a foul course. So you got mistreated much like the animals get mistreated. That's the theme here on this show. I won, though. That was all right. Oh,'s the theme here on this show. I won though.

Oh, congratulations. Thanks. That's awesome. That's badass. I owe it all to Smooshy. That's the only reason I was ever on the video, right? You were doing it to try to earn some money? No, just back in 2008 there was like a media shitstorm that took off like Jimmy Kimmel did a piece, like Inside Edition did a piece. It was like a fluff piece of Smooshy and I's relationship, but it took off.

It was on the cover of CNN for a while. And so I just sort of pieced all that together and applied to White Boat and was like, hey, I'm this guy. And they were like, hey, you're on. So okay, so I'll go do that and try to win money. Wow. Well, listen, man, I hope we help.

I hope we helped raise awareness. I think you did a great job of representing your position and representing the idea behind what you're trying to do and the situation that you found yourself in. I think it's very admirable, and I think you're going to get a lot of support. I hope so, man. I really appreciate your letting me come out here. It was fascinating, man. It was really interesting.

I really appreciate you having the balls to do it. Well, balls, idiocy, craziness, call it what it is. That's part of being a person, man. In the future, they'll look back on it and say it's balls. But right now, whatever. You're just doing your thing, man. Tweet that shit, man. I tweeted it already.

Thanks, man. And we'll tweet it more in the upcoming weeks. And just get in contact with me. And if you have more things you need to promote, we'll be happy. And we're happy to have you come on again. And give us an update in a few months. tell us where things are at like i was saying reality tv or pay for this i mean this it's developing it's staying on the front pages so well you could get a reality tv show just because of this interview that's in the lawsuit i can't

you can't well in the lawsuit in the lawsuit they're alleging i'm really pissed off because why couldn't you get a reality show a couple of reality shows were proposed to me after Wipeout. Right. And in the lawsuit, they're saying, oh, these reality shows, that's why he's really mad and making up these lies. And they went and threw all this shit out. That's how I became the Kanye West of animal training.

They say that, but don't say that. Stop. You're just Phil Demers. Stop this Kanye West bullshit. That's got to stop. Yeah, it's got to stop. It's stupid. But what I'm confused about is how could they stop you from doing a reality show?

How could they prevent you from earning a living? How could they stop you from expressing yourself in any way that you choose to see fit? I think more so it's the sense that with all these lawsuits, no one wants to touch it. No one wants to touch anything right now. I think that's nonsense. People in America, I guarantee you, will touch it. We had an article that was going on a very big magazine. A very big magazine was coming out.

It was going to tell the Phil and Smooshy story. This thing was going to be, I mean, this was godsend. They managed to quash that. It's gone. They won't do it because of the lawsuits. There's dudes scrambling right now writing your name down. Trust me. In America, here's what matters on reality shows.

Ratings. How many people are watching? If a lot of people are watching, it gets on TV. It's that simple. If the money generated doesn't support a lawsuit, then what? I watching. If a lot of people are watching, it gets on TV. It's that simple. Yeah, but if the money generated doesn't support a lawsuit, then what? I suppose Canada's a different story. What are you talking about? If the money generated from what?

Well, from a reality TV show. If it doesn't support a lawsuit, in what way? Well, I don't know. If a TV company turns on and talks to me, hey, we want to do a show about you fighting a Marine land, Marine land, you just immediately sue them. Immediately sue them. So that TV's going's coming like think that like universal pictures or something like that is afraid of well i haven't got the call from them but if they call i suppose maybe

they won't but a lot of people have been scared a lot of people have been scared so you allege that they've been scared off of doing other reality shows there were two say that there were two listen not yeah maybe that's probably not a good thing well we know that it's slap litigation so it's all bullshit anyways. Okay. I'm pretty sure they're done. What's not bullshit is the cause. It's a great cause, and I think this and the movie Blackfish has highlighted a real problem that we have.

There's a real disconnect with the way we view these animal parks, and I think they're fucked up. Awareness, man. Yeah, awareness is important, and the conversation is important, and I'm glad you fucked up. Awareness, man. Yeah, awareness is important and the conversation is important and I'm glad you got it out there. We lost that $32,000, but on the flip side, boom, I'm on the Joe Rogan Show and Blackfish come out. I'll trade that all day. There you go.

Boom, bitches. Respect. All right, thank you to our sponsors. Thanks to audible.com. Go to audible.com forward slash Joe and get yourself a free audio book and 30 free days of audible service. Thanks also to stamps.com forward slash Joe and get yourself a free audio book and 30 free days of Audible service. Thanks also to stamps.com.

Use the offer code JRE. When you click on the old schoolie microphone in the upper right hand corner of the page, the offer code JRE gives you a no risk trial and $110 bonus offer, which includes a digital scale and up to $55 of free postage. Thanks also to onnit.com. That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name Rogan and save yourself 10% off any and all supplements. We'll be back next week.

We've got a lot of people coming up next week, including Mike Birbigula and Cliffy B in the same fucking day. Will your dick not explode? We've got a lot of other people. We got a few stand-up comedians I got working in. And we should have a good time. And then next weekend, I will see you guys at the Crest Theater in Sacramento

with the lovely and talented Tony Hinchcliffe. I'll be at the Laugh Factory tonight at the Dom Irere Show. And Friday night I'll be at Thunder Pussy at the Ice House which is a show where I guess

how's it going again? You get on stage people from the audience yell out a topic and you just try to do stand up about that topic on the spot. Son I've been doing that

since the 80s. I know you're going to be a professional. That's called being stoned on stage. That's fucking par for the course. Alright thank you Phil

and if people want to reach you online Phil Demers on Twitter D-E-M-E. Twitter is Walrus Whisperer. I kept the moniker. So, at Walrus Whisperer. Walrus Whisperer.

Facebook, find me, I suppose, if you want to go there. Phil Demers, D-E-M-U-R-S. D-E-M-E-R-S. M-E-R-S. And SaveSmushy.com. D-E-M-E-R-S. Phil, D-E-M-E-R-S. And SaveSmushy.com.

Yes, sir. Thank you, brother. Really appreciate you being on. Thank you, man. Thank you. being on. Thank you, man. Thank you. All right, we'll see you soon, freaks. Big kiss. Mwah.