The Pomp Podcast - 291: Phil Demers Is The Walrus Whisperer

Episode Date: May 9, 2020

Philip Demers is a former professional marine mammal trainer at Marineland of Canada in Niagara Falls, Ontario. He is best known for his relationship with a captive walrus named Smooshi. In this conversation, Phil tells Smooshi's story, explains the animal cruelty that happens at various entertainment facilities, and highlights why animal ownership is such a big business. This episode was a fun one to record and if you find Phil's story compelling, please go support him and Smooshi at www.savesmooshi.com ===============================  Blockset by BRD is your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more: blockset.com =============================== Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link http://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today.  ===============================  Pomp writes a daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at www.pompletter.com

This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Philip Demers is a former professional marine mammal trainer at Marineland of Canada in Niagara Falls, Ontario. He is best known for his relationship with a captive walrus named Smooshy. In this conversation, Phil tells Smooshy's story, he explains the animal cruelty that happens at various entertainment facilities, and highlights why animal ownership is such a big business. This episode was a fun one to record, and if you find Phil's story compelling, please go support him and Smoochie at www.savesmoochie.com.

Before we get into the episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is Blockset by BRD. They're a hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions accurate and near real-time portfolio

management solutions auditing platforms commercial block explorers and much more go check them out at blockset.com again blockset.com the next sponsor is crypto.com they are an only all-in-one platform that allows you to buy sell store earn loan and invest crypto all from one place you can join over 1 million users currently using the crypto.com app you can download it and earn 50 us dollars using my code pop 2020 or use the link in the description again you can buy sell store earn loan or invest crypto all from one place at the crypto.com mobile app when you sign up you can also get one of their metal cards today head on over to crypto.com or go download their mobile app lastly don't forget that i write a daily letter to over 45 000 investors about

business technology finance and bitcoin i break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com, again, pompletter.com, or go click the link in the description. All right, let's get into this episode with Phil. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek digital, or more concrete capital management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy,

but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm super excited about this. Got Phil here. Thanks for doing this, man. Oh, my pleasure. It's an honor to be here. So I'm the one who's appreciative. Yeah. This is going to be a little bit of a different episode because we're not going to spend so much time on finance or business-related stuff, but you just have a really cool story, and I think that we can make some people get excited about walruses. So maybe let's start with your background specifically, and then we'll get into kind of the fun stuff. But just like, Where'd you grow up and kind of what was early life like?

I'm from a small Southern Ontario city called Welland in Canada and not a particularly well-known city other than maybe stands out for being a rough little, little rough. So, you know, I sort of got my lumps there and eventually graduated to the medium size city tourist trap of Niagara Falls, which is where I would I would eventually find my my employment at what was regarded as one of the more noted tourism places called Marineland and I don't know maybe we should if we want to back it up a little bit I suppose I can speak to what it is that led me to my employment at Marineland but

uh there's really not much to say i i was sort of one of these uh i don't know i guess i didn't really know what it is that i wanted to do some people are born and they know they want to be chiropractors i was born and i just knew i'd like to be outside and run around and you know sort of be a bit of a shit disturber and whatnot so you know in all of my sort of uh in my in my lost state of being i sort of fell ass backwards into this job that's uh you know back then you looked in the want ads and so i was looking in the want ads and i found a marine mammals assistant trainer's job i thought you know it'd be a probably an impossible job to get but uh you know i did go to school for at the time it was one of these six month programs um audio engineering

and multimedia post-production it was called back then and in 2000 cost me a lot of money and about eight months later it was a free download on the internet all of the software that i learned on but uh nonetheless marine land found that attractive on my resume so you know whereas i thought i was not qualified for such a job they thought you know we can we can use you in-house to do some of the music production and work on the equipment and then you know you seem to like animals so this would be a fit and you know that was back in 2000 and if we fast forward a little bit in 2012 i quit um you know it's a long time to to work at marine land of course there's you know i did love animals tough job to to leave but uh fast forward then some and here

we are 2020 and i'm still being sued for 1.5 million dollars for plotting to steal a walrus and go all right so hold on a second give us an understanding for those that don't know uh what marine land is help people just understand kind of you know what is the organization and then what does it actually look like on the ground so um you know marine land's been around a long time in canada it's actually one of its uh success stories uh an immigrant had come to canada with a little more than a shirt on his back and uh by the name of john holder uh was his was the founder's name he recently passed away a couple years ago but nonetheless he built this place from the ground up um you know with little or no help from anybody it's it's really quite an

it's quite a success story uh the unfortunate fact uh matter of fact is the this style of business that he uh created is not one that is you know in 2000 it doesn't have a place in 2020 so the man started with a with a welding a cage and bringing in some sea lions and then eventually that graduated to uh larger land animals he's he he began to expand his business uh he basically had a massive zoo and then he found his his niche which were uh whales and so much like sea world in the states it's uh marine land is just a place where you pay money to go watch whales and dolphins and walruses and sea lions perform uh to music and and in 2012 and quite frankly up until or in 2000 and up until 2012 this was a celebrated industry you know it really

was it was a thriving burgeoning uh business but you know not so much today for sure and so while you were there like what did you see um and was this like immediate from from when you got started or did it take some time for you to kind of get a lay of the land um and what did you see that just kind of you know really put you off i guess so i would say the first thing the first day that i showed up i was completely put off i couldn't believe what i was seeing i mean i found the facilities to be awful and i mean frankly i thought the animals were sad but then i didn't want to be uh anthropomorphic i mean i didn't know nothing about whales um so i didn't want to just attribute uh these emotions to what appeared to be sadness to me but you know these

people that i was learning from seemed to have a grip of what was going on they seemed to know that you know a thing or two about this and this was a celebrated industry so i didn't i didn't want to question much especially in my like earliest of 10 years you know earliest of days i was just a 22 year old kid i'm not going to chime in i mean sure i had questions but it was evident that people weren't there the people there weren't asking a lot of questions so on day one it was kind of tough day two day three day four day five you become yourself desensitized to you to your environment year six year seven you become an apologist for rather you you rather you uh you even defend it um but then year eight nine ten as you climb the the ladder and you

become closer to the decision makers and you yourself uh are supposed to lend your thoughts and experience the decision making i was always in the corner of the animals and uh so my clash came with management and for me the bewilderment came when you know things that seemed so obvious were just being refuted in in in lieu of things that were more profitable or perhaps just not someone else's idea it the thing about marine land is it really is a place that is unique onto itself and how it was managed it's kind of micromanaged by its founder not a lot of things happened without him having to know and the problem with that is you know if he's not available and something is you need some imminent attention whether it be mechanical failures or

or animal and animals in distress it could make for a very stressful environment like what would be an example where you're saying you know hey look the the trade-off was uh in your opinion obvious but maybe they didn't agree well for instance i found that uh you can get a lot more out of an animal if you can train them over a long period of time establish their trust and that would require a lot more time with the animal uh like hands-on a lot more staff and whatnot let's uh let's use a medical training uh medical uh procedures as an example rather than then drop an entire pool of water down to inches and have say uh 13 to 20 beluga whales on their stomach bouncing and thrashing and cutting themselves up and bleeding profusely and and trainers getting

injured because we're trying to do injections or trying to draw blood why not train those animals to voluntarily voluntarily do so which is totally possible this would be an example of class for me so I would say to management look it would just take me some time and investment but we can do this and it's going to be you know it's going to have less impact on both trainers and animals and they saw it as well we can get it all done in an hour and cost us maybe some monies in medication and whatnot but you know they just things of that nature things of that nature got it and then uh at what point does uh smushy come into uh come into the picture so suddenly there's rumor that we're gonna get these wild walruses in that marine land we never

had walruses before but you never knew what was coming i mean there was just days where you'd show up to work and you'd have some new wild caught dolphins in your possession i mean this was you just never knew so uh the rumors proved uh proved fact and one day we we received two baby walruses uh it wasn't in fact smooshy yet but these were our first two and uh then came uh multiple shipments of multiple more uh some would die fairly immediately and then be replaced um where are they coming from are they coming like people are capturing them in the wild they're being captured in russia everything you read in the news with work with regards to marine mammals uh and whale captures uh it's coming out of russia there's a there's

a burgeoning market in china and russia is trying to fuel that market so in china they're erecting new uh facilities left right and center and they're buying these wild caught uh orcas and beluga whales and and walruses in fact from uh russian brokers you may have of of uh saw in the news last year there was a massive whale rescue where uh you know in excess of 100 belugas and and orcas were were forced to be released by the russian government after activists um sort of uh revealed that they were staying in this crazy prison so you know for a while it was it was global news so um you know it was it was quite an impactful uh impactful time but nonetheless the relationship that we had with the russians is that if we got beluga whales or uh or walruses if

one were to die within i don't know the period of time it would just i just recognized it as pattern another would come back as replacements it's kind of a strange weird thing in fact i mean i'll keep the story short but i did i first quit my job over a baby walrus that was imported and i i saw this baby walrus and i thought jesus this has this animal has no we should not be in possession of this animal it's uh it's half dead it's scared out of its mind every time we go near it to try to treat it medically it looks like it's damn you're gonna die from shock i was just i was just so disillusioned by it so i quit then the next day i felt just absolutely awful for having abandoned my teammates uh because you know you form bonds in these weird uh environments

with the people you work with and so i came back and uh and volunteered in fact to to uh do the necropsy on the baby walrus and so the veterinarian said i'm sorry oh what's a necropsy that's it's the same as a as an autopsy for a human you're just gonna you're gonna you know you're gonna find you're gonna go through the the organs and draw blood and different you know get samples of different things and so what the veterinarian wanted was just just a sample of the baby walrus's brain and so there i was with a chisel and hammer and i felt like look i'll volunteer myself for this because sort of a sign of i don't know i guess a form of weird punishment but i felt like you know what if i'm i should do this and so i did and it was you know weird and

awful things but nonetheless i we went off topic as far as smooshy is concerned so so suddenly this this walrus comes in to our possession and uh one day you know every time we get uh green animals as we call them so wild caught they're just untrained because they don't voluntarily present their tails or whatnot to draw blood from you have to physically uh sort of sort of manhandle them and tackle them to get blood so that you can do an initial health assessment and so in the process of doing that we were sort of wrestling down uh one walrus well smooshy was was just had become frantic and and you know walruses are just are protected by nature she's trying to protect the other walrus that we were trying to get the blood from and so she was so disruptive that i i just

decided to break away from the group and try to get her out of there she was you know she was about 200 pounds at the time which may not seem like yeah it's you know it's a it's a hell of a thing to wrestle so i was trying to wrestle her away but something happened in that moment between the interaction of smushi and i that scientists have described it as an imprinting so her brain circuitry opened suddenly everything that i am is now tattooed on her brain much like in the wild when a herd animal so let's use walruses as an example are amongst thousands the mother and and calf are able to identify each other amongst all the noise and chaos because of an imprinting so all of my senses everything that i am so my smell the sound of my voice everything it imprinted on

her so she recognized me suddenly as her mother so you can imagine the how conflicting this would be for someone like me who you know while i like the job i also as you know things as things become more and more difficult find myself in a situation where i've got a relationship with an animal that is it's just gonna sound crazy but you know i have a maternal like relationship it's a very powerful thing and it's a strange thing for me to have to describe but she sees me as her mother and consequently you know i sort of i raised her in ways and we had a level of communication that is unique to human and animals we communicate differently she she's like uh she's family to me it's it's a strange thing to say i know but you have to understand where i'm coming from

explain what you mean by that right when people hear that they're going to be like that's crazy but like what like actually explain when you say that the way that you communicate with an animal when you have that close bond like what exactly does that mean she understands my sense of humor i've had other animals that understand me in my in sort of my mannerisms and you know if i elevate my voice then they think okay it's like a heightened state of emotion there's a response from an animal in smooshy's case she knows when i'm kidding she knows just something that happens when an animal is protective of you as well like uh the best i guess a good example would be how much do you love your dog for those who who have dogs that

are really really really those loyal and protective ones they become family members well in the case of smooshy it was more than that she actually saw me as her mom like a natural phenomenon just by virtue of that it just does something so yeah we just have a greater level of communication and understanding she we we understand each other better i know it sounds crazy it's non-verbal of course i'm not saying when she says oof oof i'm like see that means mommy i'm saying like you know you can understand an animal's level of uh you know any animals that experience that we perceive experience emotion i mean it's a tough place to venture into but i mean i lean more towards there's no question about it when they're heightened you understand

it and you know you can appreciate whether they're experiencing fear or whether they're experiencing excitement whatnot it was smooshy it just was so much more acute for sure and i guess as um as you were kind of going through this and building this bond um is it something where like you're in charge of just this one animal or are you still caring for uh multiple animals not just walruses but other types of species as well and it was just this one you had the close bond with right so what i what i did fail to mention in that is when when i was mentioned earlier that walruses were coming in in various states of health smooshy came in and wasn't well and so my first maybe month or so was dedicated to her because she had imprinted on me my days were spent

quite literally sleeping next to her while she was resting and getting her medication and just getting her strength up and whatnot so initially i did spend a lot of time um but of course i got to stretch myself a little bit thin too because i've got literally another hundred animals to work with and you know you work in an environment where we're already stretched thin especially in the winter where marine land is actually closed to the public so you know staffing gets reduced and whatnot but uh you know it's doesn't always go over well with the co-workers one guy gets to sleep all day and the other one's got a scrubbed shit off bars so i mean it is what it is we got through it is this not would it be fair to say like a lot of people have probably watched uh

tiger king the the recent netflix documentary and in that there's a number of scenes where uh they have the tiger cubs and there's a human taking care of it and obviously that uh tiger cub learns to recognize that human uh kind of understands that hey they took care of me and and I'll call it, they're kind of friends to some degree. And as they get bigger and bigger, next thing you know, you know, you got a tiger that's 400 pounds and it's still treating this human as if, you know, Hey, this is my friend, right. Doesn't attack it. It kind of plays with it. It's responsive to it, et cetera.

It sounds like a lot of what you're talking about here is that early bond that you have then translates to kind of the walrus version of that relationship. right no the difference between my relationship with smooshy and that of an animal that a wild animal is just familiar with the language of training which is you do good i feed you i mean that's a symbiotic relationship as long as you don't turn your back on these animals over time it should you know you should keep all your limbs but no smooshy that imprint is a completely different thing that's where if she's not literally beside me i mean at this moment right now she's thinking about me I know it sounds crazy but she is it's a it's a level of obsession that I've never

known and now I actually was able or rather than I was able to relate to the other animals because now I better understood what it meant for them to be torn apart from their family members and taken into captivity because I recognize the inherent fear and the thing that made animals in captivity different than those of the wild but with smooshy because by virtue of being close to me in proximity she didn't have that same sort of you know because i was i filled the void of that missing uh uh mother and that bond that this world sort of became normal to her it's a weird thing to explain but yeah it's uh it's not the same uh relationship as uh as someone that feeds an animal or works with an animal a lot it's uh well beyond that it's almost inexplicable it's

she she genuinely thinks i'm her mom yeah that's crazy um and so at what point uh do you kind of get fed up uh on the marine land side and you're like hey i gotta make a change here so i was conscious enough that the relationship with smooshy was such that if i were to leave it was going to compromise her health so i did my best in at least the last year or so to try to wean off her dependence uh from me because there was a there was a dependence but you know we did work that off and i was always conscious of not leaving until that was something that i was comfortable with it's kind of you know i was always balancing that but then in 2012 at the end of our operating season so let's call it august there was a there

was a breakdown of the water disinfection unit a ozone generator is what the the machine's called it generates ozone and ozone when worked in conjunction with chlorine mitigates chlorine's use you don't have to use so much and so the idea is in conjunction you keep your water clean you don't have to use so much chlorine the animals don't have the adverse effects because chlorine is as i'm sure you can relate you know anytime you've ever jumped into a pool that was shocked and you didn't know you know it can be awful so animals living in that 24 7 it's it's an awful thing so you know we started to call the founding you know the the owner john holer and would say listen the uh ozone generator's broken water's gone green uh we got to get something done here

i i can't rationalize his decision making but i'll assume that you know because the season was closing it was was you know it wrapped up in september that uh or rather in october that uh this was something that could be put off because the park would be closed for a number of months and it could just be addressed then the problem with that was the water had gotten so bad i mean it was it was evident i mean the water had gone completely green and i mean we can go into the details that you know there there is some evidence on the internet i encourage everyone as usual to do some some research but um he just wasn't gonna fix it it just we couldn't get him you know i would see him at local tim horton's coffee shops and i've got animals whose eyes are bleeding

and uh his only answer the answer rather was to increase chlorine use over the months that we were closed and uh it was awful it was awful the the effects were awful and is that a financial is that a financial decision or is it being driven by something else i'll say it's financial in addition to the fact that some people can't be told what to do and when too many people are emphatically trying to tell someone what to do just some people just elect to not do that I can't explain why all I know is the complacency was unjustifiable and so two weeks prior to the following season's opening day I said I ain't I'm not I'm not doing this I'm not I'm not I'm not part of marine land anymore I don't go on that

stage I don't bring animals in this condition oh I don't do this no more I'm fucking done and so i insisted on an exit meeting and uh you know we exchanged unpleasantries and pleasantries but i wouldn't have quit without the uh the firm agreement that i was to remain in smooshy's life if she needed me which historically she had marine land agreed so much so that even one week later because after i quit marine lands owner after the exit meeting he very frantically dumped the water actually delayed the opening of the park but uh he got the message when i left um he called me back in to treat a dolphin because the dolphin stopped you as soon as you change a wild animal or captive animals environment they get a little bit spooked they stop eating so uh he had he like

the owner specifically had me come in uh to give a a dolphin valium and valium in the zoological settings so at least with marine mammals will stimulate appetite and so we we administered devalium and you know she she was bouncing back i saw smooshy i was certain not to let smooshy actually see me because i you know i'd been gone in in excess of a week now and it's a pretty long time so i didn't want to disrupt whatever progress they were having with her but i did see her uh and i left but uh it was about a month later that uh you know i wasn't in the best place frankly i mean i should emphasize that when i quit it was also in the interest of my of my mental health i wasn't in the best of shape either but uh a month later i just decided you

know what it's been a month now i'm gonna go see smooshy and when i tried to get back into the park for some reason the security guard wouldn't let me in it was the strangest thing because shit man i was like family over there so uh stroke of luck the owner's son who's a good friend of mine happened to see the interaction with me in the security guard and uh you know he escorted me in well while i was coming into the park one of the veterinarians drove around the back and she she you know she met up with me so she already got she'd been tipped off that i was there i said what the hell's going on and she said you're not gonna like what you what you're gonna see i said let's go so she took me to the back in what's called the warehouse or the barn and uh

took me immediately to go see smooshy and there she was emaciated uh you know bone dry there was no fresh water there was no ice on her deck i mean it looked awful so you know as soon as she recognized me she perks up i said to the vet imagine this i say go get meds so she's running now we're filling fish with you know various meds we start feeding her the meds get her drink some water whatnot and as i'm leaving and i said to the vet the fuck happened why didn't you call me evidently the last time i was brought in to feed the dolphin it irked one of the new managers he didn't like that the uh that the owner had gone over his head and called me specifically so it's quite political but nonetheless it was determined that yeah phil

doesn't come here anymore here's the new chain of command of who calls phil and it was just sort of decided that phil wasn't going to be called anymore and so i saw that and uh what i didn't mention is at the time some newspapers had been calling me because you know back in 2008 when smooshy showed up there was quite a bit of media attention around she and i's relationship there was a fluff story that came out on uh on valentine's day and it was picked up by a bunch of media in fact i was on like jimmy kimmel show inside edition it went crazy at the time when viral was yet to you know was yet a thing i was becoming my space viral let's say so uh you know by virtue of having had that attention and now quitting much of the media was

like, you know, where's the walrus guy going? What the fuck's happened? I was actually quoted in the 2008 article saying, if I ever quit, I'm going to take this walrus with me, which, uh, you know, Maryland has yet to present as evidence in court, but nonetheless, if I can help their case and their, their non-existing case, I mean, but, uh, yeah, they started to call me and ask me why I quit and everything. And, you know, because my relationship with Maryland was still firm and I intended to keep it as such i didn't talk but after seeing smooshy in the condition that she was

you know i picked up the phone i said you put my fucking name my face on every fucking newspaper and i could hear the print machines going back okay phil let's fucking go buckle up okay let's do this and so you know massive expose happened to drop on the owner's birthday um you know things just got really ugly so they sued me and so in that expose like what were the main allegations or uh or kind of claims if you will well of note i wasn't the only whistleblower there were seven of us initially that grew to 15 and then it grew in excess of many of which elected to speak anonymously because for fear of legal reprisal because marine land is litigious just by they have a long litigious history so you know it described everything from lack of staff issues

to uh you know the water breakdown uh there was incidences where the owner was shooting neighbors dogs i mean it really quite just became an expose around just a lot of uh animal abuse sort of revelations and whatnot just i mean marine land's always had a history but you know 2013 2014 with things like twitter and whatnot it just the landscape changed for a little guy and so whereas they were accustomed to just absolutely chopping everyone down you know here i am just luckily sustaining but you know they just they they they employed their strong arm their corporate strong arm and they sued me with a slap suit uh and a slap suit for those who don't who aren't familiar uh the slap acronym stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation

basically they sue me to shut me up so that the public doesn't get interested in what the hell it is i have to say and the change and the imminent change that would come with it and so i'm assuming that you thought that this might happen but do you remember when you first heard that the lawsuit had actually been filed like what your reaction was this was great uh i thought it could happen but I'd had enough people in my corner naively telling me that, well, if you're telling the truth, you can't be sued. Well, that's not necessarily true. You were unlikely to get any type of verdict against you,

but you could certainly be sued. So I had the sense that maybe they would, but I wasn't yet convinced. but uh suddenly i started getting um calls from a friend of mine saying let's look man they're gonna serve me they're threatening i just got you know i got served with this cease and desist i got all this stuff they're gonna sue me tomorrow and he's calling me and telling me all this stuff i'm like what like that's crazy man the next day they sued me fuckers and i found out by watching the news my friend literally texted me it's not me it's you in capital letters i look what the hell and then i see that i'd missed a couple calls from a from a journalist the funny thing is you know

you learn a thing or two about journalism and all of this as well in journalism at least back then super corporate friendly journalism you know you take a lawsuit and you take a you you create all the greatest headlines from it that you can because a lawsuit is literally a legal means to defame the shit out of somebody because all you have to do is you know i sue you for anything and the newspaper could grab it run with the headlines to just say you know and these allegations have yet to be proven in court so corporate friendly media will take uh will take something that's been handed to them before i'm even served imagine that take the uh sort of take the details of it probably tip on what on on what aspects to point to and they call me one time let it ring twice

hang up phil was unavailable at time for comment all they have to do is send you an email and if you don't respond to that email within two minutes and they do that one call with two rings it was it was absolutely ridiculous i found out i was being sued in the media i was learning about it on the news it's crazy and so at what point are you like all right i should go steal a walrus so the allegations of my plotting to steal a walrus uh were in the lawsuit i will say that they were there basically to make me look like a crazy idiot and that they could run with stupid headlines because back in maybe the 90s that would work maybe in the 80s that would let's say the 80s it would definitely work uh but in 2012 it just wasn't going to take so the the idea that

i would ever have plotted to steal a walrus is absurd but i should mention that by virtue of being sued for millions of dollars and now having sustained many years of litigation uh through public support and and uh whatnot because you know there's a number of campaigns here people that you know you might not necessarily be an animal lover but you might be like you know fuck the man you might be like you know what give this you know keep this guy fighting because i don't know it's nice to have a lot of support there's certainly a lot of reasons to keep this thing going as best and as long as we can but that lawsuit they they fucked up and the problem is with lawsuits is there's settlements and uh

you know there's a good and evil aspect to this but there's also an asshole versus asshole aspect and you know there was there was a big asshole in all this and then there's there's me who is who might wind up being the bigger asshole because i'm a hard negotiator is the only there's only one thing i want so you can call it plotting to steal a walrus or not but i didn't sue myself but if they want if they want to get away from this lawsuit there's only one way give me the fuck a walrus i know it sounds crazy give me the fuck a walrus all right hold on hold so the only way that you want to settle this is if they give you smooshy what the hell are you going to do with the walrus i have a place that's going to build a facility will be ready in a

matter of months that is local that will have two other walruses uh young females so there's no uh no concern for for aggression or or mating and whatnot and they have uh they've declared themselves interested and so marine land has i mean the unfortunate part about lawsuits litigation and settlement talks is you know there's an element of good faith in negotiations but let's just say uh i can't make it easier for marine land so it just becomes a question you know smushi is the last surviving walrus i should mention in the last two years well now now two and a little uh four have died i mean whatever is happening at marine land right now and and it has forever but it's just been exacerbated the animals are dying off very quickly it's very concerning

marine land's conscious choice to keep smooshy at the park is a conscious choice to keep her in a state of torture as far as i'm concerned and so i'm trying to make it as easy as possible for marine land and uh you know by virtue of it's gonna be it's gonna it's been costing them and this is my emphasis to them is whereas they say something to the effect of well walruses are very valuable i say well not a walrus is costing you tens of millions of dollars i can with confidence say that over the eight years i've been removed tens of millions and so like part of what i don't understand right is like the math and business behind all of this so what i mean by that is like when that walrus shows up uh as a baby walrus uh to marine land like how much are they paying for

it and then what is the ongoing cost uh just to feed it shelter it and kind of take care of it so i don't know the cost of a wild walrus i can't even necessarily i can't even offer what wild dolphins or or belugas cost i just i don't want to be wrong about it and i don't i just don't know but the care is on a ballpark basis are we talking uh a couple thousand dollars or like half a million dollars per animal if you had to guess if i had to guess i think if you're dealing with one beluga you're in the near six figure range but if you're dealing with multiple then you're it may reduce the price a little bit so you know with marine land we would get like six to twelve per shipment uh i think four or five times we've got them maybe more a couple

times before i'd gotten there uh and dolphins we'd received uh three times if i'm not mistaken walruses four times often accompanied with other shipments uh so i don't know because we're talking about like combo platters so i don't know um and i'm assuming that drives a lot of the big business in russia and china as well right is they're grabbing these uh animals out of the oceans in the wild and then turning around and selling them for tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in a market obviously there's a huge profit margin there um and so uh i'm assuming that they're not putting them in the equivalent of marine land or sea world in china maybe they are uh but but i've got to imagine that that's more food-based type um

you know financial activity rather than here in the u.s a lot of that's going into i'm trying to build a business around hey i buy this animal i take care of it and then i actually bring people into the park uh and have them uh kind of watch shows and things like that right the idea at least with marine land their tried tested business model and remember the owner uh was very was an older man i mean we're talking about an old school dude who's this was his baby so you can imagine why he wouldn't want to necessarily adopt any type of positive change or evolve much he almost he almost took the stance and even ramped up his purchasing of wild animals but uh yeah they just it used to be a draw the door if you had an orca in a pool you were going

to make a lot of money so it was worth paying at least a lot of money in medication you'll notice you know facilities in north america haven't changed by the way if you take a look at sea worlds you take a look at marine land and you never notice that the pool you don't hear of new large expanses you just never do new ride yes new this but you know it's an old school idea with no place in 2020 if we if today we were going to start and build much like china is these facilities i don't know that like imagine if we were to start from scratch we're gonna say hey i've got this marvel idea i'm gonna take that majestic animal put in the cage everyone be like no that's not happening it's just absolutely absurd a case couldn't be made for it and yet

today and yet these facilities are they still exist they're all like 30 and 40 years old but the pools haven't changed anything so you know they're still stuck in the idea that you fill the pools you fill the stands but you know legislation is catching up to them as well um canada very proudly what's that sorry do you think we'll see them shut down like marine land sea world do you think eventually they get shut down and outlawed or uh do you think that they'll just kind of morph what they look like so what you'll see is they do have a shelf life just by virtue of animals having a shelf life uh whatever whatever laws come around so let's use in canada for example uh breeding import and export of whales dolphins and porpoises have been

outlawed it's banned it's a new law that was passed only a few months ago um i'd like to thank marine land for their help in in helping me pass that law by the way uh and uh so by example uh marine land now has to care for the fucking animals because they can't get anymore and so the same thing you can imagine is going to happen i believe new york state has some laws california has done the same um i imagine maybe at the at the federal level and the states i i i mean it's all going to catch up but you know people vote with their dollars that's the bottom line and no wants to really go to these places if you notice these facilities are really suffering i mean everyone's suffering right now but backing up even just a mere mere months ago see uh ceos are

it's a rotating door at sea world ceo because no one can come up with an idea to keep these things going and any new ideas are immediately rejected because there's just an old guard that is unbreakable with this particular business and like you know you mentioned tiger king earlier because who doesn't but you know these these owners are really eccentric people they just really are it's across the board i'm gonna say it i'm gonna generalize the whole load of them zoo owners and aquarium owners are some of the wackiest people i've ever come across i have to say so uh you know nothing surprises me with the way with all the you know hearing all the stories of litigation and targeting and everything else it's like yeah exactly of course yeah it's uh it's

pretty crazy man when you start to see some of this stuff uh one last thing i want to talk about is um you've done a number of really interesting uh kind of fundraisers and things to uh not only one fuel, the litigation that you're engaged in, but also on top of that, to really bring awareness to a lot of these issues. And obviously, smooshy is one piece of that, but a broader issue as well. Maybe talk a little bit about just how you've thought through kind of, you know, the critical thinking and outside the box thinking that's required to, you know, really kind of rise above the noise in a lot of these situations. So I will just go back to the day I decided to speak out. i was laying on my bed rocking back and forth in a fetal position and i said to myself

how am i supposed to live the remainder of my life if i don't do something here what does the rest of my life look like and how do i live with myself i i just couldn't i couldn't conceive not not doing something and so by virtue of like i the way i say it is i i gave myself up to the universe what i said was you know no one stands a chance in this fight me included so if i've got nothing to lose and i should mention that at the time i had just won uh fifty thousand dollars it sounds crazy i uh everything i say sounds crazy i went on this this reality tv show called white boat you may be familiar you remember the big red balls and all that stuff well there was a there was a short uh lived version canadian version and i was on it

the premiere episode because i was the walrus mom and i won so when i got that 50k you know i got it because the walrus in my mind i kept saying to myself well i wish i'd said to myself buy bitcoin but i said to myself you know it's not really my money like it's uh it's an easy thing to say hey go go buy yourself something fancy or whatnot but you know i was just in such a state of sort of uh distress and everything was just sort of precarious situations at marine land i thought you know i gonna hold on to this for a rainy day so i at least at the onset of the lawsuits and everything else and the decision making that went forward i thought i've got 50k this is my money to get out of the gates we'll see how long this lasts and if i can keep going then i'll keep going and so i

i started with the 50 and then you know launched some uh various uh uh go fund me uh campaigns and whatnot to sustain throughout and you know i still have one uh my oh by the way just to back up my decision moving forward and my state of mind of thinking outside the box was was this in every which possible decision presented be the most costly and pain in the ass for marine land that i can be in every which way and the unfortunate part of that is that i have to give myself away often i always have to play the role of this bravado guy while my while i'm filling my pants but you know I just I just decided do the exact thing that scares the shit out of you the most and it's exactly what I've done and I have I have been I've gone broke three times I've been

on the edge of absolute disaster I've gone still maybe crazy but still sustaining and somehow and It is truly in the belief that, you know, if I just keep fighting, I mean, I've got nothing to lose anymore anyway. So I do have a website, a fundraising website. It's at savesmooshy.com. I'll spell it out, S-A-V-E-S-M-O-O-S-H-I.com. There's a trailer on there to a documentary that's coming out. I've been followed for the last in excess of two years, both, you know, fighting for this legislation in Canada and my fight for smooshy and whatnot. So, you know, and that's coming out on May 28th in Canada on the CBC, which is our national broadcaster.

And that's only because it was selected for the Hot Dogs International Documentary Film Festival. But, you know, it's been delayed and whatnot. So, you know, CBC partnered with Hot Docs. So they're actually going to premiere it in Canada, but it is geolocked to Canada. But thereafter, I believe the plan is a theatrical run maybe in the U.S. and then U.S. distribution via, you know, whatever it is. So, you know, look out for that.

What do we put the odds at right now that, let's say, by the end of 2021, you have Smoochie? What's the probability of that? there was a i was at one percent when i quit if that i was on the i was just on a and right now in my gut i think i mean it's a question of her staying alive but if she stays alive if she stays alive she will see me i'm giving that a 99 percenter will i get her i'm going to

give it 51 in the next in the next six months i'll know now we are you got a shot we are oh shit yeah we got a shot i we're in a part of litigation right now that they don't want to be it so they have some really hard decisions to make i'm trying to make it as easy as possible but if they want to continue to embarrass themselves and cost themselves down the road then i'm i'm here to i'm here for that like i love it so do you think that anyone's told smooshy yet if i told you about my ayahuasca journey i told her i visited her i breathed life into those nostrils i squeezed that heart but i told her she knows i love it because of it i love it um all right so for those that want to uh to figure out more

about smooshy learn more about kind of the uh the bigger picture here of just it really just comes down to animal cruelty and and a lot of things that are uh you know becoming more apparent and obvious that they're inhumane um in the treatment of some of these animals uh you can go to save smooshy.com and it's a save and then s-m-o-o-s-h-i correct correct.com and also friends don't let friends go to marine land and sea world so spread the word friends don't let friends go to sea world or marine land i love it yeah man oh yeah and i think the next court appearance you know like the marine lines lawyer will be listening to this and he will take issue so whether i wear it or not we'll see you know much of what I do is again just being a pain in the ass but I got

this new shirt I'm making called lawyer destroyer I'm gonna wear it under my butt shirt at some point or I'm not or I'm not we'll see if you go into a courtroom and you wear a shirt that says lawyer destroyer there better be a video it's my attire has been complained about in court before anyways much of what i do gets complained about in court but it's not getting them very far i love it i love it all right phil listen i appreciate you taking the time to do this uh you obviously have a uh a very different but um but pretty crazy and uh an impressive story so um i think that more people hopefully will uh will kind of look into this and uh here in the united states it's very obvious that uh there's a lot of kind of animal cruelty at um at these uh

you know, organizations, and some of it's being addressed, some of it's not, but there's very few people who are willing to kind of dedicate their time and energy to this, so for all the people who love animals, thank you. Well, and I'm just appreciative for all the support, man, I got the best seat in the house, so I thank everyone, and you especially, man, every opportunity to spread word like this is, you know, it's all I've got, you know, it really is, this is, it's me against, I'm against the machine, so I appreciate that there is a machine for me to fall back on. the lawyer destroyer strikes again yeah man all right thanks phil my pleasure man anytime