The Jordan Harbinger Show - 545: Rachel Nuwer | Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

Rachel Nuwer (@RachelNuwer) is an award-winning freelance journalist who reports about science, travel, food, and adventure for The New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, and more. Her multi-award-winning first book, Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking, is out now. What We Discuss with Rachel Nuwer: What drives the global demand for resources cruelly derived from endangered wildlife. Why poachers and smugglers are willing to risk their own lives to meet this demand. The pros and cons of solutions proposed to stem the tide of this illicit trade -- from legalizing it for sustainable sourcing to synthesizing alternatives. Why governments are shy to throw the book at the worst offenders, and how the most clever, wealthy, and well-connected usually (but don't always) bypass legal repercussions for their trafficking transgressions. What we can do here and now to promote policies for preserving these species before they vanish forever. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/545 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. There was actually this guy a few years ago in China. He was like some big Chinese medicine guy, like head of whatever organization. In some speech, he was like, oh, you know, the bears don't mind it. It's like a tickle for them. It feels good. And then there was just like this crazy, like amazing social media backfire.

Like, you know, memes of him getting like fucked in the ass by a bear saying, like, it tickles. People who are like with it get it, like obviously. but I think there's just willful ignorance about the state of these animals. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional organized crime figure,

national security director or rocket scientist. And each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we've got episode starter packs. These are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash starts to get started or to help somebody else get started. Of course, I always appreciate it when you share the show here. Today on the show, sea horses, pangolin scales, rhino horn, elephant tusks, cacti, bear gallbladers, tree frogs,

just a small sample of the wildlife items bought and sold on the black market every day across the planet. My guest, Rachel Neuer, went undercover to see it all firsthand. Today we'll take an inside look at who is killing endangered species for a meal, a bullshit health cure, or just for decoration or even sport. We'll see just how truly bizarre the illicit wildlife trade is, how damaging it can be and what's being done about it. And fair warning, this episode is pretty depressing. So if you want to listen to another episode of this show that's possibly a little bit less

of a downer, maybe the one about forced human organ harvesting, or maybe an episode that's merely about a hitman or some terrorism. Because this episode, this one is dark. Yeah, but seriously, if you love animals, this is going to be a heartbreaker, maybe no kids in the car for this one. If you're wondering how I manage to book all the great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Rachel Neuer. So cacti and frogs are now seemingly as valuable or more valuable than gold, eh? You know, we're getting there. It depends on the gold, I guess, and the cactus. Yeah, but it sounds like tree frogs are the next Bitcoin, basically.

Don't tell anybody that. I don't want a tree frog rush. that's actually a really good point. Like, all jokes aside, when I read the book, and by the way, I'm fully ready for this to be like the most depressing episode that I've done. Yeah. The details we're about to discuss. They're horrific.

And I did an episode on human organ harvesting from live people done by like the Chinese Communist Party run hospitals. And so like, but this is even worse. I'm telling you, like if you have a soul and you like animals at all, this episode is going to be kind of rough. I want to apologize to listeners in advance. Yeah, it is kind of like that, right? Like economic development drives things like logging, environmental damage, pollution.

There's no surprise there. We've been learning about that since kindergarten, and that's if you're 40, right, or 50. But what's seemingly worse is this menagerie or buffet of topics, pun intended, I guess, that we're going to talk about here today. because in many places in Asia, for example, eating endangered species is a status symbol, in large part, because it's rare. Can you tell us about this? Because that makes this whole thing even worse somehow because it's not like, oh, I need this because it's cancer medicine and you're like, eh, you're wrong. It's like, no, no, there are two of these and you're eating one of them. And you're like, what?

And they're like, yeah, you're welcome. Welcome to our corner of the world. Yeah, I mean, that's really one of the saddest parts of this whole illegal wildlife trade thing. really is for a lot of people about rarity. I mean, I guess in the same way you think of things here, like, oh, you have this, like, really expensive car that only a few people can have or, like, this really rare, I don't know, record, whatever. If it's rare, that means other people don't have it and other people don't have it,

that makes you special. Yeah, like the guy who bought the Wu-Tang album and he's the only one. And it was like Farmer Bro who bought it. Oh, my God, that guy. Right. Oh, that guy is awful. Anyway. He's in prison for being a horrible person.

Yeah. But we can't really, and part of what your work talks about is we can't even put the people in prison who are hunting pangolins because it's just this whole industry and it's this whole food chain literally or pyramid of people, some of whom are just trying to survive in many ways and others who are just have no morals and aren't going to care until they're dead. They're going to eat this stuff, whether we like it or not. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the people who are being put in prison are the guy hunting the pangolin, but, you know, that's not who we. We need to be targeting. We need to be targeting the people who are running the business and especially the people who are driving that demand

by paying a lot of money for that pangolin. So finding wildlife restaurants in Vietnam and China, you talk about this in the book, and there are stories like this. I even ate a cobra in Vietnam a long time ago, which was, I'll tell you about that in a second. It was gross. And I kind of like have nightmares about it.

But how open slash overt is this? Mine was in early 2000s. We had to drive really far to get there because there weren't. It wasn't your Saigon or Hoechaman City. It wasn't something that you could get at a stall on the side of the road. You know, it was kind of like this really specialty place. And they had snakes. They didn't have pangolin, at least nothing on the menu looked like that.

Interesting. Well, you know, I got to say, I think you were taken on a ride, so to speak, because if you know where to look, it's, like, really easy to find this stuff right in the city. Yeah, I mean, I don't know who, like, booked the trip for you. but maybe they just wanted to... Yeah, it was one of those, hey, let's ask the taxi driver where we can get a cobra

and then 40 minutes later we're probably three blocks away from our hotel, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, in Vietnam especially if you know where to look, you can get anything, especially if you know who to call.

You know, I had a friend of mine call ahead to all these fancy restaurants to ask about a pangolin and they're all like, yeah, we can get you a pangolin, but, you need to come in so we can like see you and you put a deposit down

and things like that. Yeah, because there's, like $700 each, right? Yeah, they're super expensive. And I mean, it is super illegal. So, you know, they want to see who they're working with. She said these guys sounded pretty frightening, but we went to one of those restaurants together that she had called. And yeah, well, we didn't order a pangolin. It was just like a typical restaurant. Like there were, you know, families there. There were people on dates. It felt not threatening at all. So it's not like this is some like dark alley kind of thing, which is what I had in mind before I went to these

restaurants. It's really just like openly done at nice looking places. It makes sense that it would be at nice restaurants though, 2020 hindsight, right? Because if I'm a rich guy who's going to spend $1,500 in a country where that's half your annual income, I don't want to eat it in a basement of a restaurant where there's like cockroaches running around or the chef's chasing mice out of the kitchen and chopping up a live fish in front of me. I guess maybe that doesn't bother some people. but like I want to eat it in the nice place that has a view of the river where I'm going with my family and my business partners. Exactly. You know, I just, I don't want to go somewhere disgusting.

I'm paying for the ambiance as well as the, as the pangolin, unfortunately. Exactly. The place where I went in Vietnam, again, 20 years ago, Gross wouldn't do it again. But they didn't want to let us in, which was like, oh, this is legit. They don't want to let us in. And the taxi driver was like, no, no, no, hey, da-da-da-da. They, I caught, you know, they asked me about this, and I've been driving them around all day. They're just idiots from America and the Netherlands.

That's what I assume he said. My Vietnamese is a little rusty. But, you know, he knew we were legit because we were young, and we were just like, dumb asses singing Backstreet Boys tunes in the back of his taxi with this driver and stuff like that and drinking. And I remember they brought the snake out for us. And it was a big ass cobra. They put it on the floor. And there's a guy in like flip-flops and shorts holding. it by the tail, which this guy has stones I've never, like I've never seen. And then this Japanese

guy comes over and tells us, you know, he's the only guy who speaks English like in the whole restaurant. And he's like, this is a good cobra because it's aggressive. That's what he said. Oh my God. He would know for sure. I mean, yeah, right? But he's, dude. Yeah, thanks, man. It looks, I mean, it looked pissed and aggressive. And we were like, oh, and then we instantly felt kind of bad because we're like, this is a big snake. You know, this is a big snake that they caught in the jungle. Yeah, totally. When we were hiking through the jungle, we saw the snakes in cages, and I'd say, why do they have the snake in the cage? And they would say, oh, either they're going to eat it and or they let it run in the house and catch mice and then they put it back in the cage.

It wasn't always a cobra in the cage, but we saw them like on these. It's like the cat of Asia. Yeah, I think so. Like we would be walking on these jungle paths in the middle of the jungle and they'd be like these elevated wooden planks so you can hike on because it's really moist and you don't want to step on the jungle floor because of all kinds of critters. and they'd have snakes like in these cages near a lot of the houses or even cages full to the brim with rats. Right. Yeah. Definitely sell those rats. That was weird, right? Like a cage with 50 rats in it and you're just thinking, why are you catching these? And they'd say, oh, they're going to feed them to snakes, which I guess they raise and breed them.

I actually, I ate a rat in Vietnam. So it's pretty tasty, I got to say. Really? I'm surprised because you think, when I think rats, I think the rats that are around where you live in Brooklyn, you wouldn't eat. Those. Yeah, exactly. I don't think I would, yeah, those aren't like free range organic rats. No, no, they're eating like plastic cups. This is like country rat. Exactly. So I told my friend, by the way, at the end of this meal, because they caught the snake, put in a bag, weighed it, and then they brought out different pieces of it. And like, you described this in your book, but they will take the heart out while it's alive. Again, this is why this episode is disgusting. They take the heart out while it's alive. They pour blood from the snake into this bottle of vodka. Yep. They take the heart and they put it in a shot glass and then they pour the blood vodka in the

shot glass and they say, quick, who's the oldest male, which was me? And they say, do this shot of snake heart vodka. I did it. I did it. Yeah. It's disgusting. I'm judging you. Well, you should be.

And honestly, I remember telling my friend at the end of the meal, I'm like, if karma is real, I'm going to get some weird-ass tropical disease that I'll have for the rest of my life from like the angry snake spirit that I just ingested after killing it like brutally. And now I'm a podcaster. So this punishment is real. Karma is real. Nice. The podcast parasites.

Yeah. I've got the bug. But it really is like only more barbaric from there if that's even possible. You know, traditional Chinese medicine, the more rare and wild, the more valuable. Correct me if I'm wrong, right? But this is traditional Chinese medicine or at least this sort of like eating a cobra for virality, rhino horn, all these things that we'll talk about, there's no science here. So yeah, there's almost across the board. There's no, like, medical efficacy that's been proved for these things.

There's a few weird exceptions, like bear bile actually does have some properties that is really helpful, but you can actually just synthesize the active component of bear bile. Like, you don't need to, you know, stick a catheter into a bear's bile and, like, milk its bile. You can just make it in a lab. I suppose good to know. Yeah, it's good to know if, yeah, if you're open to using it. unfortunately so many people like want the the real deal yeah i mean there's that sort of bias that natural things are better right and yeah because sometimes they are natural and natural things are like more potent and powerful i mean in the case of the bear that i would argue against that because you know you're working with like a diseased animal you're going to be getting like pus in your bear bile and cancer

cells and you know sick bear bile yeah yeah especially the way they treat the bear and we'll talk about that towards the the bottom of the show sure rhino horn is kind of where this all seems to start, right? They make knives out of it. It's supposed to cure cancer. It's supposed to cure hangovers. But the rhino horn is just made out of keratin, like our fingernails, right?

Yeah, exactly. So, rhino horn, you know, the primary ingredient is keratin. So, you know, you might as well just chew your nails and then you can get the same effect from it. It has been used for thousands of years. So in Yemen, it's, like, made into these dagger handles.

But in China, it was shaped into these cups and, like, kings or whoever would put, their liquids in the cup and supposedly it would like fizzle if there was poison in the cup. So it was used as like a poison detecting agent. Traditionally it's also used as what's called a cooling agent. So if a kid has a fever or something, you can give them rhino horn and it's supposed to bring down their fever. Again, though, just there's no medical efficacy for any of this stuff.

And the whole like cancer thing and hangover thing, those are newfangled uses for rhino horn. So things that probably just like smart marketers have made up like, oh, hey, like it'll cure your dying relative of cancer, just basically like being a predator and going after people who are most desperate or targeting people with the biggest egos, you know, like bring rhino horn to your party with your business guys and, you know, show off how rich and wealthy and powerful you are for having this super illegal, expensive stuff. And it'll cure your hangover. These guys have not discovered cocaine apparently. You want to show off to your rich friends. Well, they actually give a shit about cocaine. You know, you'll get executed if you have cocaine. Nobody cares if you, you know, have some rhino horn. Yeah, that's an unfortunate twist, right? It's like, don't do this thing that in many ways doesn't hurt if you use it in moderation

that's on the black market that we could probably control a lot more. Use this thing that requires us to kill animals that are endangered and smuggle them illicitly across the border. All the same harms of cocaine except no real end use at all and much harder to obtain and requires more, somehow even more suffering. Yeah, I mean, it's a real shame just that there's been so much value placed on species. You know, why? Countries front, like they're doing something about this, but it seems like they're really not.

Can you take us through that a little bit? Tell me about that because it sort of sounds like there's all these conventions and things, laws, and then when it comes down to enforcement or implementation, it's just kind of like, nah, we just wanted to go to Geneva. Nice. Yeah, it's really piecemeal. You know, like some countries do things. Like, the U.S. is good about it, but it's like, it's good, but there's so much more that, you know, we could be doing, you know, it's like a few million here and there for a problem that's, you know, threatening the continuation of thousands of species. Then there's other countries

that say they're doing things and they just really aren't. So it's all across the spectrum. So there's this convention. It's called CITES. And it's convention on the international trade of endangered species of floren fauna. So basically, it's a treaty to regulate trade of endangered plants and animals. Almost every nation on earth is a signatory to it, but it's really a trade treaty. It's about like what can be traded. It's not a conservation treaty. It's not like, you know, protecting species. It's more like, can we like sell these things or trade them sustainably? And a lot of people that have sway over CITES are in the industry. You know, it's not just like scientists. It's people like in the ivory industry or whatever. So there's a lot of conflicting

interest. There's a lot of like backroom deals that go on at these conventions about what will and won't be listed. And then there's just like people who, you know, make up like fake passes to have species traded on fake permits. There's tons and tons of corruption. And corruption really is what greases the wheels of the illegal wildlife trade. So yeah, like CITES is good on paper, but in actuality, like it's far, far, far from perfect. There's an obvious conflict of interest for having the officials who are responsible for combating the trade actively using the product themselves or having to keep superstitious rural dwellers and rich people happy in their country. It also reminds me of there's this UN body and it has something to do with transportation.

I forget the name. But basically they're responsible for like seaway transport. And so whenever they get together to discuss like, hey, these ships are using a ton of petroleum and they're polluting a ton and they like have no, there's nothing on the smoke exhaust to make the pollution less damaging. They're like, oh, yeah, we need to commission a study that by 2050 fully evaluates the scope of how much pollution we are actually doing. And then they're like, in 10 years, we'll convene a committee to select how we're going to do that. Yeah, it's just bullshit. Exactly. Yeah, it freaking sucks. I mean, CITES is the same. It just moves super slowly because it's

just a bunch of bureaucrats, you know, things don't get done. Like, bureaucrats that have a vested interest in making sure that nothing ever actually happens, but then they can go to the UN and go, look, we got so much done last week. See you in five years, right? Yeah, definitely. I mean, when I was reporting my book, I heard from several sources who I trust that the Vietnamese CITES delegation, members of that actually use Rhino Horn and believe that it works. So, you know, like, how are you going to get anywhere when that's the situation? Yeah, it's almost like somebody who's a drug dealer saying, yeah, we definitely need to clamp down on this stuff. as they like go into their stash and rip a line at the meeting.

Totally. These stories of you grinding up the rhino horn and drinking it when you were doing the undercover work, just doing it at the table, it sounds so nonchalant. And I'm just imagining what the reaction would be if I'm at a bar or a restaurant. And I'm like, you know,

I'm a little tired and I just sprinkle out a line of cocaine. And I'm like, right? And I'll ignore that. Yeah. Literally like the, I couldn't believe when this happened. So yeah,

I'm sitting in this restaurant in Hanoi and this guy like, whips out his rhino horn in a cookie tent of all things and is just like grinding it up in front of all the customers in front of the waitress and that really brought it into focus for me like good god like just the impunity with which this stuff happens in places like vietnam like how are we ever going to win you know it's sort of like trying to ban smoking in a country where everyone smokes and they don't believe it's bad for you because they tell you that it's healthy for your spirit animal or whatever. It reminds me of a long time ago,

I think maybe a decade or so, Montenegro was the first country in Europe to ban smoking. And I've been to Montenegro, and I'm thinking like, I met 14, 12-year-old kids that were smoking in Montenegro. Yeah. And I remember them telling me that when they were in school, they could smoke,

depending on the teacher, in Montenegro. I'm like, and they banned smoking. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe they did, but I just can't wrap my mind around that being the first country to ban smoke. Wow. That's like a really good

jeopardy question actually. Yeah. Would not have known that. No, it's a random place. It's kind of like the last place you'd expect. I wonder how the smoking ban's doing now. I do too.

Like maybe it worked. Maybe they were just like, hey, stop this. It's disgusting. The rules are the rules. The rules are the rules. But Montenegro is not of the rules kind of place.

Yeah, I mean, neither is Vietnam, I'll tell you. We talked about this a bit earlier about making rhino horn or pangolin skills synthetically. I know we kind of can't really do it yet, but it also occurred to me that maybe we can't solve a pseudo-scientific problem, like a superstition problem or a belief with science.

Because it's all based on belief, right? If we can't really make something and say, I guess you can say it's just as effective as the real thing because it has no effect whatsoever, but if we believe that this comes from the animal and then it's not necessarily the material, but like the spirit of the animal is in the rhino horn, you can't just say this is synthetic.

They made a synthetic spirit in there because the whole thing is bullshit. and belief-based in any case, right? So you can't kind of like fake your way through that. Yeah, I mean, it's such a complicated thing. So where to even begin? Yeah, first of all, people assign value to the animal itself, to the wild animals. So, like, that's the first thing you need to know.

Like, people don't want a fake product. Even if it's, like, genetically the same, they want a product that comes from a wild animal. Like, that's, you just got to know that getting into this. So second thing is that there actually already are lots of fake rhino-horns. over there. They're water buffalo horns. And that's like what 90% of the market is in Vietnam. It's actually just water buffalo horns that people buy as rhino horns. But the people who have the money and the power, they get their real thing. So they're commissioning people to like take a photo of the dead animal and like bring back what they call wet horns, which is a horn like with flesh still

stuck to it. So they know it wasn't like some like BS lab horn or like water buffalo horn. So yeah, there's already fake things over there. People have talked about creating like synthetic rhino horn and flooding the market. But again, it just like, if people want the real thing, they're going to get the real thing. And that's just going to confuse law enforcement. So instead of like encouraging this by making fake things and like legitimizing this practice by being like, here, you know, here's this other thing you can use that still doesn't work because none of this stuff works. It's better to just try to ban it and to change people's minds. So it sounds like you're saying legal trade might actually increase demand. Exactly. You know, it's kind of like confirming like, oh, this works. You know,

must work because the government just legalized it. They're assigning value to it. So it's better to just try to get into people's heads and change the zeitgeist of like how people assign values to things and what they believe in. Let's talk about exotic pets as well. This is something that we've seen in movies and like I assume Tiger King has made this worse as well now that we've seen that you can have baby tigers for two months until they get too big and they kill you. Yeah, exactly. Who's getting rare pets besides Mike Tyson? Oh, yeah,

and Joe Exotic? Right. Yeah, like weird collectors. And I got to, unfortunately, I have to stereotype here because it's true. It's mostly guys. Well, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, there's like, you know, there'll be like a reptile guy or an insect guy or, you know, a bird person. And, you know, people kind of stick within their little niche. And some people just get completely obsessed with collecting and hoarding, like, certain types of animals. So this is actually unlike the, like, wild meat and traditional medicine thing, this is a big, big problem here in the U.S., also in Europe, in Japan, and it is becoming more popular in places like China and Thailand and South Korea as wealth goes up. What type of pets are we talking about, right? There's tigers, of course,

but what else? You mentioned birds, snakes, and reptiles. Are these dangerous ones, or are they just random people who collect like they have every type of turtle. It really just depends. You know, it's hard to like generalize because everybody's different, but it kind of comes back to the thing we talked about earlier where it's like when you're a super hardcore pet person, the rarity becomes like the appeal. So, you know, you want like the rarest snake or you want like that lizard that was like just discovered in a tiny like island off the coast of Vietnam. So it's really about having like the coolest of the cool, like the rarest of the rare and showing off that way and like being special through the animals you own. With the tiger stuff, it's kind of interesting

because there also is like this strange element of like macho and that comes in, especially for men. You know, like, oh yeah, you know, I've got this big tiger and I can like subdue it and therefore like I'm powerful because I'm like the owner, the master of this big beast. Except they totally can't. Like Mike Tyson famously kept his in a car sometimes and it would like wreck the whole car because it's a freaking tiger yeah exactly it's like a predatory killing machine like honed by evolution to yeah exactly yeah it would he said it would shred the leather in the car i'm going off memory here but it would like shred the leather in the car of course and he said sometimes it could just literally take the roof off the car from the inside of the car that sounds like a

lot but like yeah i mean depending on the car maybe yeah i mean it's some luxury vehicle he was driving like a convertible or something. I don't know, those pretty damn strong animals, I guess. If you break the window and then you could probably, I don't know, I don't know how strong a tiger is, but it's wild. So I guess I understand the appeal there, but it also seems totally psycho to have this. Then again, most of the people that you kind of famously see with tigers and alligators and things like that are like drug cartel type of people who are heavy-duty machismo guys.

Exactly. It's just a way of like showing might and showing power. And there was a policeman I interviewed about the tiger thing. He specializes in all things exotic animals. And yeah, he said oftentimes he would be like going and do a drug bust. And then it's like, holy shit, there's like an alligator in the basement or a tiger in the bathroom. It's like definitely something associated with like mafia drug types. How do we stop the importation of these types of pets?

Because this seems trickier. I can fly with a lizard and no one's going to go, wait a minute. Is that the new one they just discovered on the gal? Lapagos Islands. I'm just going to say no, it's a nude. I bought it for my kid, right? Yeah, totally. I mean, that's a huge problem. So, yeah, like the U.S. has laws. Again, we're a signatory of CITES. So anything CITES regulated, we're supposed to have a permit for. Then the U.S. also has the Endangered Species Act. You know, anything on that needs to be regulated. We also have something called the Lacey Act, which basically means that we respect the laws of other countries. So if a lizard

is illegal or protected in Indonesia, you can't bring it into the U.S. even if the U.S. US doesn't have laws. So that all like sounds great on paper, but then you got to think that, you know, we only have a handful of fish and wildlife agents who are the ones like in charge of inspecting all these shipments and like imports. And, you know, they can't be expected to know like every single species in the world. So yeah, it is really easy to smuggle animals in or to label them one thing when they're another thing or, you know, to like strap them to your body and fly with them. So it's a big problem. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Rachel Neuer.

We'll be right back. And now back to Rachel Neuer on the Jordan Harbinger show. I vaguely remember reading about like passengers called the security on the man because they heard birds chirping or they like a snake crawl out of his leg pant on the plane. Yes, I love those stories. I mean, it's horrific. Like thinking about the suffering, those animals go through. But like those stories are so freaking ridiculous.

But yeah, people will have like snakes in their pants or like bird eggs and like these crazy contraptions on their chest. I can't imagine flying with like 400 snails in my underwear and back or like birds, live birds strapped to me that are like muffled or like you said snakes where they're like duct taped to the guy and I'm thinking like oh my God for like a 14 hour Vietnam LAX flight. I know right. Like those flights are already long enough without having to like worry about the snakes in your pants. Good Lord. Especially like, like even if it's not a poisonous snake, it's gross. But imagine you're like, wow, this is, I've got like a coral snake taped to my anger. Exactly.

I mean, but it just goes to show like how much money is to be made in this illegal trade. Like that's why people are going through all this trouble. They can make money. Reporting on wildlife smuggling like we're doing right now supposedly can increase demand. So I was almost on the fence about doing this because it seems like, Tiger King increased the demand for tigers, unfortunately, because they kind of glossed over the whole thing where it was like, hey, they are miserable

and the reason they tear people's arms off, one, it's their nature, but two, they've been imprisoned by these people. And, like, Joe Exotic kind of, there's a lot of well-founded suspicion that he just kills them when they get too old if he can't sell them, you know? For sure.

I mean, yeah, he was prosecuted for killing three tigers, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. So does reporting on things, things like this actually increase i mean you report on this too so i assume you've come to the decision that reporting on it increasing awareness is better than letting it go undiscussed yeah i mean i feel like people are going to find out things anyway like you can't hide information like you can find out the value of rhino horn like when rhino horn's first started being a thing a bunch of NGOs were like oh we're not going to say how much rhino horn's worth but it's like okay well you can just google it and it

pops up so you might as well just say it so that people can see like how significant an issue of this is that said there is certain types of information you really don't want to get out there. So a lot of times poachers and like traffickers or whatever will go through the scientific literature for new species that were discovered and they will like find out through what scientists report like where to go to poach that animal.

So like scientists have had to get a lot more cautious about not revealing the location of where they found some new species and you know I would never do that myself just to avoid that. Wow. So the poachers are literally going through scientific journals and going, oh, this uninhabited island off the coast of, like you said before, Vietnam, they found a new species of bird there. Let's go charter a boat and kill these and then bring them back, or bring them back alive. 100%. Yeah, 100% like that happens. It's happened multiple times, like tipped off by the scientists. It's really sad. Yeah, because if you're a scientist,

you're not probably think, you're just like, oh my gosh, look, we went to this tiny place. You'd never believe what we found there. This is amazing. You're not thinking, oh, people are going to go murder as many of these as possible to make money. Exactly. Yeah. But unfortunately, that's the world we live in. And, you know, good Lord. So this isn't quite depressing enough yet. I want to talk about the hunting of elephants. A long time ago, a buddy whose parents were Serbian diplomats. And I think like Kenya showed me his Tusk collection, which was really hard to look at in person. And really, it was impressive in the literal sense of the word where you just go, oh my God, this thing is huge. It was so big you could, he had to carry it with both hands.

You couldn't carry it for a really long time. I mean, it probably weighed like 40 pounds, just one tusk. It was enormous. And he had a bunch. And this is just a kid who was like bored and decided to collect these things. So I can imagine how freely available these must have been in the, I guess, 90s or early 2000s. Dear Lord. I mean, and still are.

Technically, like, he shouldn't have been able to collect those in the 90s. Because international trade of ivory was banned in 1989. So, yeah, you might want to ask your friend about this. Well, again, diplomats, right? So that no one's inspecting anything that he's shipping. Right. He can buy it wherever. And he's got diplomatic immunity.

Go ahead, arrest me for buying this. Screw you out, diplomatic immunity. Whatever, right? Sounds like a really, really nice guy. Yeah, I mean. Charming, right? Yeah, that is a big problem. Like, there's been all these cases of, like, North Korean diplomats and Chinese diplomats

caught with all this ivory. And again, like you said, it's just like, come at me, bro. Yeah. When I say friend, by the way, I mean a guy I met in Serbia. I don't mean a guy that I'm still in touch with. A dude, yeah. And furthermore, when he showed me this, he was probably 20 and had it for 10 years. So it's not like he went out and bought it. His stupid parents probably got it for him. Yeah. Or it was a gift, you know, is it like, hey, your son might want this really cool thing that's endangered that he can't do anything with. Like an elephant tooth. Hurrah. Right. Yeah. So in 10 years. is over half of Africa's elephants have disappeared,

and it took forever to get this ivory ban, and then they're trying to make it sustainable. What percentage of elephants are just gone now? I mean, it depends on, like, where you start from in time, but like a good statistic that I like to cite because it brings it into focus for modern audiences is between 2007 and 2015, 30% of Savannah elephants, so the iconic big elephants we think of disappeared.

And poaching was a major driver of that, of course. We're looking at, I suck at numbers off the top of my head, but I believe about 400,000 elephants remaining on Africa, Savannah elephants. Wow. I mean, it sounds like a lot and not a lot at the same time, right, when you think about the whole concept. Yeah, I mean, we think about, yeah, and also considering that, you know, there used to be millions and now this is what we're left with and they're, yeah, dwindling. Why are people still investing in things like ivory? I mean, they're not snorting it or putting it on their weiner or whatever they're doing with rhino horn, why is ivory still seen as like an auspicious investment?

Yeah, great question. I mean, it's just like something that has been valued culturally for a really long time in Asia, you know, just like we like gold or diamonds, you know, it's a beautiful material. I mean, ivory is really lovely when it's carved and, you know, there's a whole carving industry there, like artists who have their entire livelihood about like making these crazy carvings out of ivory. But yeah, it's just a material. Like we can use something else. There's fake ivory or there's, you know, anything else, basically. Yeah, it seems like this is sort of a, the problem with it, I think also, one of the reasons we can't stop it, I would guess is there's probably not a ton of jobs for young people in many African countries, right?

So if you can just get a rifle from your friend that you can rent or buy, you can now start shooting elephants and essentially sawing the tusk off, which is kind of like there are animals that grow, a giant tusk of cocaine out of their face times two in an area where there's no jobs or little jobs and all you have to do is run around the countryside. It's like hunting is sort of a, if you don't mind the whole animal killing thing, it's kind of like probably a nice activity that you enjoy, right? You're hanging out outside, you can camp, then you step into the illegal protected environment, which is probably a little sketchy and dangerous. You shoot an animal, you saw the tusks off and you raised back home

and now you've made like your annual income or at least several months of income off of this and it seems like there's no way we can stop this at the route. Yeah, exactly. I mean, well, one thing to clarify a lot of the people who are doing the poaching in Africa are part of like organized criminal gangs

so it's not like, you know, some like nice young man just like gets an idea and like pulls us off by himself because you've got to know like who to traffic it to and things. There's a surplus of like desperate young people in Africa. That's totally right. You know, there's not enough jobs. There's not enough money. And it is like things like rhino and elephants are walking around with like gold or cocaine or whatever on their face. So, you know, people aren't going to be all sentimental. Like, oh, these sweet

animals. Like also like elephants kind of suck like to live with. They are mean. They will kill you. They'll literally kill you. They'll work your house down. They'll like mess up your crops that you've been growing for a year. So these aren't easy animals to live with to begin with. So yeah, not a lot of sentimentality there. But yes, also true that, you know, we're never going to run out of people who are desperate enough to risk their lives and their freedom to go out and poach an animal. So again, this is why we need to really go after the big bosses, the criminals running these enterprises and making this happen at an international level and just change people's minds because if people stop paying money for this stuff, like people wouldn't bother going to kill

rhinos and elephants and everything else. Is there any sort of political will to prosecute, let's say rhino or elephant hunting like are there prosecutors working on this and what kind of job are they doing yeah i mean it it really depends on the country you know every country is different like shanonia has prosecuted what's called uh the ivory queen was this like chinese lady who was running like this huge trafficking ring and um like shipping things back to china i think she just went through an appeal and she's still in jail on the other hand places like kenya there's been like major traffickers who have gotten out of jail and gotten out of, you know, being really prosecuted and in trouble because they just have so many connections and, you know, you can like just pay your way

out of things. Same in Thailand. Like there was a guy named Boon Chai Bok who was arrested a couple years ago and everyone's like, yay, like this horrible person's finally arrested and then he just got out. On the other hand, there's, there was this guy, uh, Kroma. He is like a, he was arrested in Uganda. He's like a big ivory trafficker and rhino trafficker. And he was actually extradited to the U.S. And he's now here in New York awaiting trial because they also got him on drug trafficking charges and money laundering. And now that he's here in the U.S., like you can bet he's going to be prosecuted.

That's kind of a good, I mean, I suppose that's good news, although it seems almost like it's like Al Chapo, right, where he just walks out of prison four times. And finally, despite the biggest protestations of the Mexican government, they extradite him finally. And it's like, oh, now he's really in jail. And it just took like a decade longer. 30,000 extra people had to die before this guy was finally caught. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, yeah, it's like not every trafficker in the world can be extradited to the US. That's not going to work. But at least this is like progress in the right direction. U.S. and African authorities working together to actually get this done. Why doesn't the UN sanction the biggest defenders, right? I mean, if we know which countries are just letting people walk out of jail, why aren't they like, hey, now you can't do something, you can't participate in this,

So you can't import other things that you actually do care about if you're just, you know, let people slaughter animals wholesale against international conventions. Totally. I mean, societies does have the ability to, like, sanction countries. So Laos, for example, has had sanctions against it because it's just like a shit show over there. There was like threat of sanctions against Thailand and then they actually like freaked out and like cleaned up their ivory market because of it. But, you know, again, there's just like a ton of politics going on. So nobody's going to threat into sanction China because, because. everybody is like relying on China for money or connections or whatever. So, you know, if you're like a big enough player, you can avoid punishment, whether you're a trafficker or whether you're a country. That makes sense, right. And we know from trying to enforce international conventions against big countries like China and the U.S. for that matter, it's kind of like, oh, hey, you can't do this. Oh, well, then we're just, you know what? We're maybe we're not going to invest in your tech sector now. Exactly. Good luck with that. And they're like, oh, fine. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, especially like with the world being so globalized, everyone's just inextricably linked. But yeah, it's too bad. I mean, luckily China is kind of like getting around to certain things.

You know, they banned ivory domestic trade. It was the beginning of 2018 following the U.S.'s example. So, you know, they're slowly moving in the right direction, but definitely the situation's not perfect. What about farming exotic wildlife? What if we grow, this is horrible in a way, but what if we like have a snail farm for the rare snails that they want. I love that you keep going to snails. I go to snails because it's horrifying for me to think that we would grow an elephant for slaughter or a rhino for slaughter, but we could have a snake farm. You like rare snakes? Fine. This dude is going to breed snakes and you can sell them. Right. Or we grow the rhinos and then we, if it's even possible, to humanely remove the horn or part of the horn, you can have that horn instead of just killing this thing and letting it bleed to death

in the middle of a wildlife protector because you want the whole thing. Right. Going back to that thing, I said earlier, that, People really want wild animals. People see farmed animals in people in Asia, I mean, as like these docile, weak, like, soft things that have been, like, spoon-fed their whole life. They haven't, like, been out in nature, like, having to, like, eat out a living and, like, fight for survival. So, therefore, you're not getting that, like, wild, powerful essence of that creature. So farmed animals automatically are, like, they're not as desirable as the wild thing. There's also economics involved. So it's oftentimes cheaper to just go out and, like, hunt an animal and get it from the

forest and having to raise it, you know, from an egg or from a baby and feed it and take care of it. So there are things like tiger farms and bear farms and, you know, snake farms across Asia, but these places are notorious for just bringing in wild animals that have been poached, then passing them off as farmed and just continuing to drive demand for these animals. That makes sense, right. So they, what it does is then gives them a legit cover to say that it's, oh, no, this is a legal one. Here's a slip of paper. Yeah, no, I totally like raised this from a baby.

that it has like clear signs of being from the wild with like scars and parasites or whatever. That makes sense. So it just makes it harder to find. It's like human trafficking. One of the arguments against legalizing sex work in a lot of ways is, hey, look, now how are we going to tell who's legitimate and who's not? If there's a legitimate place and it has three illegal people in it, now we have no way to enforce it where instead the whole thing is banned. We just find any evidence of it is illegal. Right. This proxy hunting thing is kind of unique. I never heard this before. Tell us about this. This is kind of a weird way that people have circumvented some of these regulations. Oh, you mean like the Asian hunters who were like getting the trophy

hunting exports? Yeah, there was like these check hunters then that the prostitutes got involved. That was such a weird story. So this is kind of like 2010's 2015. But yeah, so trophy hunting is legal in a lot of countries in Africa and you have to like pay big money for it. You have to like go through all this paperwork. And people realize, though, that, like, you can then legally export the trophy. So whether that's, like, the tusks or the horn of the rhino. And this really started to happen with Vietnamese and Thai criminal syndicates. They figured out that, yeah, we can do this. And then we can just export the horn back to Vietnam. But the issue was they were operating in South Africa. And in South Africa, you can only hunt one rhino a year. So you need to, like, find more, like, quote

unquote hunters to come and shoot the rhino to get the horn out. And for a while, they were bringing in like poor Vietnamese guys from like villages to do this. But that was kind of a pain. And because and then they realized that, oh, you know, instead of like importing like Vietnamese quote unquote hunters, we can just use Southeast Asian prostitutes from around like Pretoria and Johannesburg and pretend like these like tiny women are hunters and get the horns out that way. So like this was going on for a while. Then this Thai guy got caught and prosecuted for it and sentenced to 40 years in prison in South Africa. So that kind of like shut down the Asian side of the syndicates.

But yeah, then it was just taken up again by a lot of Czech hunters and Eastern Europeans. To be honest, I don't know that it's really happening as much anymore, but it was a huge problem a few years ago. With poachers, I know one of the problems, one of the main problems with poaching, is that a lot of the poachers are corrupt wildlife officials. So the people who are supposed to be enforcing the poaching bans are the same people who are doing the poaching or tipping off the poachers to tell them where the animals are in the reserve.

But there are plenty of, it seems like, I've actually met a couple of people who are like these ex-veterans who just kind of go and protect animals. And some of these guys are like special forces, sharpshooters and things like that. And there's a lot of kind of amazing people you wouldn't want to be on their bad side protecting animals.

Have you run into, any of these folks? Yeah, I definitely know those guys. They're great. Yeah, a lot of the people like that, they go into protecting wildlife because it's kind of therapeutic for them. You know, after doing like, you know,

all this killing or whatever in the Middle East, it's kind of redemptive, I think. That's my understanding from speaking with a few of them. Why can't we just, this might sound callous, but oh, well, I think you'll understand where I'm coming from. Why can't we just shoot poachers when we see them? Like, what's, there's due process and things like that for a reason, but also if I see somebody on a wildlife reserve with a rifle that doesn't work for me and I'm

part of the people protecting the reserve, why do I need to go and try to arrest these guys? Why can't I use my sniper skills from the Marine Corps to just end these guys? Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of people in the West do call for that, but ultimately, like, it's pretty bad optics because it tends to be like white, rich Americans calling for us to kill poor black people in Africa. Yeah, that's not a good luck. Yeah, it's not good. Not a good look at all. You know, there's quite a few reasons why it's just not a great idea.

First of all, there are countries in which there's shoot to kill, like, shoot-onsight policies. Like Botswana has this, but it has not stopped coaching. People find a way. And it winds up landing people in really, like, icky situations. You know, like, there's a poor indigenous guy who's like, oh, he wanted to the National Park to, like, gather some twigs. And then he's shot. It's just like, There's too much room for error in just, like, shooting people. Also, like, you know, do we really want to be executing people for trying to hunt wildlife? These are ultimately human beings. Like, where do we draw the line?

Right. Do we start, like, executing people who, like, rob Walmart or whatever? Sure. I mean, no. Yeah. Sure. Awesome. But, I mean, ultimately, it also comes down to, like, you know, these are desperate people.

Like, they have no other option. Like, we all would probably do the same thing if we were in their place. Like instead of like killing poor Africans, like maybe we should figure out ways to like help alleviate poverty and figure out like developmental situations for them, you know, put our resources in that way and also put our resources into stopping the criminal bosses at the top. I know a lot of the Rangers, they don't have handcuffs, they don't have weapons, they don't have proper clothing. Like there's stories in your book about where they get killed because they're simply outguned, right?

They've got like one rifle, no handcuffs, two bullets or a handful of bullets and they're up against people with like long range modern weaponry? You know, again, it just depends on the country and the place, but there are a lot of rangers who just like, yeah, they're like really inadequately funded and adequately trained and adequately supported. And they're trying to do their jobs, but they wind up getting murdered on the job. So it's really, really sad. And yes, like, there are tons of like poor desperate poachers, but there's also poaching gangs that are like way like better equipped than them because of all the money from the trade because their bosses are supplying them. with those that equipment. What about dehorning rhinos to protect them? This is an interesting solution

that you had written a little bit about where they simply dehorn the rhino and then it's, there's no point in poaching them because they don't have a horn at all. Right. So yeah, you would think that would be like a really easy solution because rhino horn can be like trimmed off like fingernails, but you can't like trim the entire thing off, like just like you can't trim your entire nail off. Like you'd have to like slice into the flesh and bone. Right. So oftentimes like poachers will go and they'll track a rhino all night. and they'll finally find it. And if it doesn't have a horn, like, they're going to be so pissed off that they're just

going to shoot it anyway. So they don't, like, go down this, like, wild goose chase after this hornless rhino. And then they'll often just hack off, like, that little nub because there's still some horn there again. So you can make money even if it's just a little bit. Oh, man. All right. Well.

There's no easy answers. I know there's some private rhino collectors that are often good at keeping them alive, right? Because instead of a national park that's, like, defunded and just there for appearances so that when they go to the UN meeting, they can say we have a giant National Reserve, you got some private collector who owns a significant number, and they're like, hey, these are mine. I'm going to have like a team of 20 guys out there with cameras and drones and stuff, and they're going to be more effective at making sure you don't get in. Right. Yeah. So rhino farmers or owners, whatever you want to call them in South Africa are actually kind of responsible for bringing rhinos back from

the brink of extinction. Like decades ago, rhinos, were like down to like some abysmal number. I can't, again, I don't remember numbers off the top of my head, like very low number. And then South Africa decided like, okay, you know what? We're going to privatize wildlife so you can like own wildlife as a resource. Unlike say Kenya where all animals belong to the state. So, you know, if there's like an elephant eating your crops, like too bad, it belongs to the state. You can't do anything.

So yeah, there's these rhino farmers who now have more rhinos in like private collections than there are in the wild. Yeah, some of them are pretty wealthy. They do it out of love for the rhino or whatever, and they can pay for better protections. But like the biggest rhino farmer there, he's starting to run out of money because you can't do much with these rhinos. You can't sell their horns.

You can't, I don't know, make a ton of money from them. And you're paying like a million dollars a year to protect these animals because of this crazy new poaching threat, and it's just not sustainable. Right. There's not like a rhino milk market. Yeah, exactly. they're mammals. Yeah, I was going to say, maybe you popularize that.

And it's like, oh, man, these things are worth way more alive than they are. Yeah, rhino milk, everybody, get on it. Rino milk, double your protein. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Rachel Neuer. We'll be right back. Thanks so much for listening to the show. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to what we create here for you. To learn more and get links to the discounts you hear on the show,

all those promo codes and everything, those are all in one place. just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. No need to write anything down or remember. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support us. Don't forget, we have worksheets for many episodes. If you want some of the drills and the exercises talked about during many episodes of this show,

those are also in one easy place. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, for the conclusion of our episode with Rachel Neuer. What's a rhino go for these days? Like if I'm a rhino officiado in South Africa and I'm like, oh, I want a rhino my giant yard to protect it. What do you think they go for? So I haven't been rhino shopping recently. So I can't, yeah, I can't tell you.

But I know that like back when I was reporting my book, the price had just plummeted because nobody wants these things. They're like a huge liability. It's like just having like a target walking around your property. Yeah, I suppose that security costs are a major factor, right? Yeah, exactly. Like some of these guys have like, you know, a helicopter. her out every night. That's extremely expensive. Yeah, you kind of have,

this is a habit for the casual billionaire, or the guy who has $100 million and, like, his kids are grown and he's just bored, right? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, a lot of these guys, though, are, like, actual legitimate, like, wildlife lovers. You know, they have, like, property and they have, like, the menagerie of animals,

like, running free out there. And, you know, they just like rhinos. Yeah, yeah, good for them. I can't imagine, though, that there's a ton of them. Let's talk about bear bile. This is somehow, like, even worse than everything else we've discussed so far. Bear ball bad, yeah, this is a bad one. I saw bear gallbladders for sale all over North Korea, and they were really expensive.

Oh, my God, you were in North Korea? Yeah, yeah, I went, uh, I used to run tours there and things like that, and they do sell, oh, wow. They sell bear paws. Like, you can go to a restaurant. That's not even like a nice restaurant by any stretch, but I guess it's maybe it's nice for there, but you go in and there's like a display case at the, reception area and they'll have like,

oh man, souvenirs and trinkets, but they'll also have like a bear gallbladder that's dehydrated or like a whole paw just in like a box. Yeah. Yeah, I mean,

that checks out because it's actually the North Koreans who taught the Chinese how to farm bears. So I guess it's just like a North Korean thing. What is bear, bear bile farming?

This is like the most disgusting part of the show. So if you have kids in the car, this is the part where you turn it off. Okay, so there's like two different types of bear farms, but basically like,

all bear farms tend to have these bears in like these tiny like I call them like crush cages. It's like basically like terrible metal bars and you just like can barely even move. So these animals are kept in there their entire life. Oh, and they're also usually poached from the wild when they were cubs. And you know, they get like they break their teeth off like chewing on the bars. They get like these huge like deformed like nail growths from not get being able to walk. They get obese. They rub their fur off.

It's really like the worst existence. you can imagine possible. Now, on top of that, you know, they're being kept for their bile, and, you know, you have to get the bile out of the bear. So there's two ways to do that. The Chinese way, which came from North Korea, is to embed a permanent catheter into the gallbladder that you can literally, like, turn on and off like a tap. So you can, quote unquote, milk the bile. It's absolutely disgusting. Like, the catheter area gets infected. The other way that's more common in Vietnam is to get, like this very long needle and just kind of like

stab around and the bear farmer walls often like lick the end of the needle because he can tell if he got the bile by whether or not it tastes like bile. Either way it's just absolutely horrendous and disgusting and you know the bile is like polluted by like pus

and cancer cells and like whatever else these really sick unhealthy bears are dealing with and you know it's supposed to be like this all around health tonic and to cure all these ailments. And there are some scientific studies showing that bear bile does have some properties. But again, you can synthesize this and have it come out in like a much cleaner, standardized way than,

you know, torturing animals. It's really gross and horrible to even think about it. You write about this in the book where I think you had seen bear farms with your own eyes. So this is not like urban legend bullshit, right? This is like. No, I mean, I didn't go to one of the. like industrial-scale ones. Like in China, they have these giant bear farms

with like hundreds of bears in this horrific condition. In Vietnam, it's more like a mom-and-pop thing. And Vietnam actually outlawed bear bile and bear farming a few years ago, but people still do it. So yeah, like, I went to a mom-and-pop one. I'm like at some guy's house

and basically he takes me through his kitchen to his backyard. And then there's these like three or four bears in these horrible cages. And it's just like stinking and like, it was disgusting. It's just got to be, I can't imagine even growing up around something like that. I can't really imagine dealing with it.

Like, look, people get desensitized to eating chicken and they kill the chicken themselves and it's like kind of gross. But to have something alive that you know is in pain, that is always in pain, just right behind your house. Yeah. I can't quite wrap my head around. The really messed up thing about this whole thing is like a lot of times the farmers say that like their bears are like their family members.

They're like, oh yeah, we're friends. like, yeah, we love each other. They're like my kids. You know, I said Vietnam banned bear farming, and there's a group called Animals Asia that runs Bear Sanctuaries, but they can't just, like, go seize people's bears. The people have to, like, voluntarily turn them over.

But oftentimes when they go to get these bears, the people are voluntarily turning over, they'll be, like, crying. Like, it's like they're giving up their dog or something. So I think there's just, like, a complete disconnect that these animals are suffering and, like, are sentient, and can feel pain and aren't freaking happy living in the backyard in a cage.

I just can't get there mentally. Like, unless you have like a sociopath brain or something like that. You just, you know that this me stabbing your liver and accidentally with a needle until I hit your gallbladder and then shoving a tube in there for five years while you can't move the entire time ever. That's disgusting. Like you know that that is stuff. You just know, you fucking know it.

It's like, it's a lie to say that you don't, unless you are dysfunctional. Willful ignorance. I don't know. There was actually this guy a few years ago in China. He was like some like big Chinese medicine guy like head of whatever organization. And he was coming under fire because, you know, there's actually a lot of people in Vietnam and China and other countries there that are like pro animals. They're super into animal welfare and they're like, this is horrendous. We need to stop this. So he was coming under fire. And in some speech, he was like, oh, you know, the bears don't mind it. It's like a tickle for them. It feels good. And then there was just like this crazy. like amazing social media backfire like you know memes of him getting like fucked in the ass by a bearer saying like it tickles so yeah I mean people people who are like with it get it like obviously but they're I think there's just willful ignorance

about the state of these animals yeah I mean I suppose have you ever seen that movie thank you for smoking yes so it's like the guy who's like gets kidnapped by those activists and they stick a thousand nicotine patches on him and he's basically going to die but he somehow pulls through and he's like smoking saved my life. And then he has this, you know, he knows that he's full of shit.

It's just his job to lobby and lie for the tobacco company. It sounds like that. I would love to hear, let's lighten it up a little, but also we can't really too much because it's still so horrifying. But I want to hear about the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone because this is like the laugh cry portion of your book where it's still so horrible, but your situation and circumstances are ridiculous. Yeah. So the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos is as freaking weird as it sounds.

There are these special economic zones all over the country, which basically means like you're in Laos, but you're actually like in a place operated by China. They've like leased out the land so that China can just like run casinos there and Laos can make money off of it. And most of these places are just dens of crime. You know, like the State Department issued like a, or sorry, Interpol issued like a wanted. Red notice. Yeah, thank you. the guy who runs the one I visited in Laos shortly after I was there. You know, it's like basically just like a drug laundering operation, like where you go for like child prostitutes and where you go for wildlife things. So I wanted to go to one of these places just to like see what's up for the book. There was supposed to be a tiger farm there. I wanted to visit. But somebody told me, someone who had done an investigation there, that there's only like two kinds of Western women there. There's either backpackers or prostitutes, sex workers. And I was just like, someone who had done an investigation there that there's only like two kinds of Western women there. There's either backpackers or prostitutes, sex workers. And I was just, like, huh, okay, well, I don't really want to dress up like a backpacker because I'm kind of old and

I've done that and it doesn't sound very fun. So I'm going to dress up like a sex worker. I feel like you have more access though also as a sex worker. Like if you're a backpacker, don't show where the other, yeah. Yeah, they're like, she doesn't have any money. She's a backpacker. Yeah. So yeah, I like I got all these skimpy clothes. Most of them, to be honest, already had. Yeah, you got them out of the closet. Yeah, exactly. I just went to my closet. I bought a spy watch, which was super cool. It was like this blinged out like rhinestone watch. that functioned as a watch, but was actually like a hidden camera and recording device. It was very cool. And I recruited my husband and our gay best friend to come with me. And they dressed as like

these sleazy looking, like, douche guys and like these like wife beaters with like gold chains. Like we were just, we were really ridiculous looking. But, you know, we were there and nobody really like paid us any attention. We got to walk around. I was afraid like people would be like following us and shit. But people just didn't care. We went to the tiger farm. It was really sad. It was like, it looked like a jail for tigers. Like, just imagine like long cages and just like animals crammed into these cages, like yowling in frustration. There was some bears there that were like equally sad. Everywhere we went, there was just ivory, rhino horn, panglin scales all just openly for sale. Like you didn't have to ask or go

into some room. It's just like out there. Kind of like what you were saying for North Korea. We did go to a restaurant because I wanted to see if we could get like tiger meat. There was tiger bone wine for sale, but they finally put their foot down and we're like, no, we're not like showing you white people are like special menu. But, you know, while we were there, there was like a bear paw that was walked out to another table. So it was definitely, definitely happening. What was the bear paw like? I mean, seeing that, I assume it wasn't just a dehydrated one in the box like I saw.

I mean, it literally just looked like a freaking bear paw, like on a plate, like a big platter with like some juice around. it. Like, honestly, like, it was so obviously a bear paw, like, there was just, I don't think the fur was still attached, but it might as well have been because it was just like, oh, that's a bear paw. That's really, did you smell it or anything? I mean, was it cooked, right? It was cooked. Yeah, I don't remember a smell, but I'm sure there was like a smell. That restaurant was disgusting, too. Like, the food was not good. Yeah, I would have, oh, gosh, wow. This special economics so and it was interesting, right? Because it was in Laos, but wasn't, you mentioned like they only accepted Chinese currency, which is really weird. Yeah, exactly. I mean, every, like, the

clocks were set to Chinese time, even though we're in Laos. The currency was all Chinese. Like, everybody was Chinese. Like, it was this ridiculous situation where I had hired a Lao translator, so he spoke English and Lao. But then I had to hire another translator who spoke Lao in Chinese. So it was like this ridiculous telephone game where I'd asked my translator, Then he'd say it in Lao, then the Lao guy would say it in Chinese. It was like this like three-step process to ask anybody anything because nobody there spoke Lao. Everybody is Chinese.

So Lao's into different times on than China. I didn't know that. Yeah. Wow. So people just pop over from China and they're basically still in China. They're just still in China, but like there's no rules. So you can go there and like hook up with a 13-year-old or like go gamble or like get a bunch of meth or, you know, eat a pangolin. What kind of people were there?

So weirdly, like, there weren't that many people. I was, like, expecting it to be, like, bustling. Yeah. It wasn't. It was, like, kind of sad. It was almost like a ghost town. That's good, though, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's good, but I feel like maybe we were just there in a lull, because a photographer went later and said there was a lot more people. We went into the casino, which was super weird because they didn't serve alcohol there. Like, I'm like, guys, like, get the memo. Yeah, this is the, your silver pangle in, but you won't have let us drink while with, like, some freaking whiskey. Yeah, exactly. And that was the other thing.

There was no poker. There were no slot machines. They were only playing one game called like Tiger Dragon or something. It was like the most disappointing casino ever. But anyway, there was a bunch of guys in the casino, like kind of single guys, chain smoking. I saw a couple families, but really that was about it. That's such a strange place. Are there these special economic zones?

Are they, is it only that one? You said they were elsewhere. But where? How do you find them? In Laos. I mean, there's another one in Laos, called Botan. This one was called Kings Romans or the Golden Triangle. Yeah, they're just, they're just there, so you can just go. Do they advertise these like Indian casinos do in United States?

Or they're like, hey, come to Soaring Eagle and like hang out. There's like a really weird commercial for, yeah, the one I went to and it like makes it look like this like fun like family, luxurious like theme park with like a beautiful zoo and like you can like go to the animals or go to the pool, but it's, yeah, the advertisement is not accurate. This is so weird. So you think it's primarily money laundering because that would explain how it's empty but still there. I mean, it definitely is. Like, that's why Interpol and the State Department and stuff are after this guy. Like, the dude who runs, the one I visited is, he's from, like, Northern China, but he had a bunch of, like, connections and made all these investments in Macau.

But now he just, like, has this, like, seedy, cedey place in Laos and, like, a bunch of, like, drug deals with, like, Thailand and shit. So it's kind of apt that they call it Golden Triangle, Because isn't that the name of the area in Afghanistan where they farm poppies and sell heroin? I don't know if that's in, I mean, there probably is one in Afghanistan, but there's definitely one that's like literally where this place is, like Laos, Thailand, like that Southern China area. Oh, okay, you're right. That is the most famous one in Southeast Asia. Yeah. Yeah, but I'm sure there's more than one. Yeah, it seems like there's a few Golden Triangle. Oh, yeah, there's a lot. Okay. There's a lot. Golden Triangle Southeast Asia named for its open. production, Golden Triangle, Yangtze China, named for rapid economic development.

Golden Triangle in India, Golden Triangle, which is just like a tourist thing, some cities. Jakarta, Business District, Kuala Lumpur, it looks like a commercial quarter. There's a few, geez, there's a bunch even in Europe. Okay, so this is like a super common name. Wow, okay. All right. Well, I went to, like, the original Golden Child Triangle. I don't know.

I feel like the one in Southeast Asia is like the most notorious or classic one. Anyway. Yeah. It sounds like most of these. are just like places where you get good food in the UK, but there is one in Mexico that's controlled by the Sinaloa cartel. Oh, cool. All right. Noted. So it's kind of one of those names where you roll the dice

and maybe people will take it to mean something prosperous for a good reason and other times it's... Right, right, right. Yeah. So, wow. This is so fascinating, the sort of crime angle to it, but of course it's all sort of predicated upon human suffering, animal suffering, money laundering, trafficking of all things. I mean, what a lot of people, I think, don't realize, and we did a show on

money laundering early a few years ago in this show, all of these trafficking networks for animals and, let's say, drugs, they're the same trafficking networks that are used to smuggle the 12-year-old person that ends up being a sex slave in the Golden Triangle Casino. Like... Exactly. And I mean, it's the same with wildlife products, like agents regularly find, like rhino horn mixed in with like the heroin or coke or whatever yeah yeah you find cocaine and then you go and find the people who are doing this and suddenly you find you know 12 missing people right as well exactly exactly yeah so dismantling one network can help dismantle the rest and so that's why this is a lot of people who go hey look we have bigger fish to fry i kind of understand that when you're

talking about something that might be solved like look okay the snails you know jordan get off the snails. But like you're, all right, fine, snakes. Who cares? They're not endangered. They're just a yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's like, wait a minute. If we dismant, if we sniff that lead because we can find those people and they're doing something where they know they're going to get a misdemeanor or fine, if you pull that thread, you're going to find other criminals. Exactly. And you're going to find other crimes. Like that guy might be a snake mule or a snail mule or a bird mule on the plane, but his boss is trafficking drugs and weapons and kids, right? Exactly, yeah.

I mean, criminals just want to make money. Like, they don't care like what it is. And wildlife just happens to be one of the easier ways because nobody's looking for it. Do you think that the younger generation in countries like Asia or Africa might be, or the United States for that matter, I'm sure that it exists here,

do you think that the younger generation might be getting over? You mentioned there's wildlife groups and things like that. Are they getting over some of these traditions that say, hey, I need to snort rhino horn, or is it alive as ever? Yeah, there's definitely evidence that, like, younger people generally are moving away from this, which is super heartening. The question is, like, do we have enough time to, like, we can't just, like, wait, you know, for people to grow up. You know, things are, like, disappearing now. You know, there are exceptions. Like, I met this architect who was, like, my age, maybe a couple years younger when I

met home. You know, a super educated dude, like went to college, lived in a nice house, really sweet guy, but also like did rhino horn and tiger bone because like his doctor said it was good for him and he just was deferential being like well my doctor says yes so yeah i think it just depends on the person but generally yes like younger people are moving away from this this is more of like an older generation thing thank you very much this is fascinating like i said horribly depressing is there anything that we can close on that gives us like some hope or a positive outlook or is it just like go to bed sad now Thanks for listening. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, it's easy to feel despondent and despair over this stuff.

But like, you know, like vote for people who give a shit about it. You know, our representatives can like help do things about it by, you know, funneling money and resources where it needs to go. You know, like let your voice be heard. Share information about it. We can only actually fix the problem if we know the problem exists in the first place. Thank you very much for coming on the show and for reliving some of these sort of horrifying experiences. We'll link to the book and the show notes as well. Awesome.

Thank you. Yeah, and thanks for your work. It must have been interesting and kind of scary going undercover as a sex worker because you don't, I mean, what if they're just like, you can't leave now? We need a white girl. Yeah, exactly. It was, yeah, that one was nerve-wracking for me. I was definitely having nightmares ahead of time, but it worked out. Thank God.

Yeah, I would imagine it's like the kind of thing where you get out of there and you're in the car and they're just like crying while you change out of your hoe clothes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. My hoe clothes, which I still have. Yeah, well, you got to, I mean, look, they come in handy, apparently. Yeah, Brooklyn for sure, or in Laos. Yeah, two places have more in common than we might think, I suppose. Exactly. It's a small world.

Thank you very much. Now, I've got some thoughts on this episode, as usual. But before I get into that, you're about to hear a preview of my interview with the world's best counterfeiter. How long does it take to print $250 million? Five months. It needs to be worthwhile. It's going to need to be perfect. 12,500 kilos or over eight Toyota Camrys or six Ford F-150s.

That is multiple metric tons of cash. You must have been f-and-stoked, man, because you knew you were going to put $20 bills all over all of that and then just never work again. Yes. By design, there are people specifically looking for you all the time. This is all they do. you can tell them whatever you want. They're not dummies.

I mean, this is as high as a go. This is the stuff of the line. For more on how Frank Barasa printed his own fortune and got away with it, check out episode 488 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. So, I told you this one was dark. The thing with the animals, man, it always, it just, it really gets to me. You know, who doesn't care about animals, right? Who doesn't love animals?

Well, I'll tell you, the people probably who go to Africa and saw off a rhino horn while the thing is still alive use poison or rip out fetuses for the tiny horns. This happens. It's so sick. It's so sad. And I asked her earlier why we can't just shoot poachers on site. The problem is that many poachers are actually corrupt wildlife officials. So some of the same police that are going after the crime are the ones committing the crime. It's just really, really a horrendous situation with almost no end in sight. A lot of the Rangers who do actually care, they don't even have handcuffs, they don't have the right clothing, they don't have any weapons, they get murdered all the time

because they're unarmed a lot of the time, it's just a horrific situation. And can we dehorn rhinos to protect them? I touched on that during the show as well. Maybe we could legalize it and satisfy demand. And this is something that is being batted around, but there's something called the reverse stigma effect, which is that legalizing something can actually grow demand

because then the thing is not frowned upon anymore, that activity, right? So you really don't know if you're going to end up increasing demand. Whenever you legalize something that was previously illegal, not only do you reverse the stigma in many cases, but also we can't evaluate the real demand. And I'm going back to Econ 101 102 here from university days. But if something is illegal, demand is largely restricted by that illegality. Right. So since people know it's illegal, they don't want to buy it.

If you decriminalize something or do you make something legal, you can actually increase or at least allow the demand to grow. So the demand can be a lot bigger and we just don't know. You won't find out until supply meets demand. Remember those graphs you saw in Econ 101? Until supply meets demand, and those lines could intersect well after the rhinos are extinct because of that rising demand, right? So if demand is restricted because of illegality and then you remove the illegality,

sometimes demand shoots up to where the demand for rhino horn actually outstrips the number of rhinos. And that's what people are worried about. You know, yes, maybe it'll make it easier to police. Maybe it will make it harder, but certainly we don't know if it could make the whole problem so much worse. So in conclusion, don't buy the ivory. Don't get the tiger selfie in Thailand or Oklahoma, for that matter, because when you do, you're contributing to the problem. And by the way, yes, I know I made a lot of cocaine references to illustrate some of the points here in this episode.

No, don't worry. I don't have a problem. I can stop anytime I want. Now, really, though, thank you so much for listening to this episode and making it through. I know it was dark. The book is called poached. We'll link it in the show notes. Please use our website links if you buy books from any guests that help support the show. Worksheets for the episodes are always in the show notes. Transcripts. In the show notes, there's a video of this interview that goes up on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. There's also a brand new Clips channel with cuts that don't make it to the show, highlights from the interviews you can't see anywhere else. Jordan Harbinger.com slash clips. That's where you can find it. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or you can hit me

on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig that well before you get thirsty. I'll teach you how to do it. And most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, so come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jay Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in wildlife, hunting, poaching, conservation,

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