Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride

The conversation opens with Joe Rogan introducing the guests' new docu-series on HBO, called Monsters of God in the transcript. It is about the reptile trade, which Rogan says "may or may not be responsible for Florida having 500,000 pythons." He had watched episode one that day, and he asked where the filmmakers find their subjects. His answer was that one of them lives in that world.

The guests treat the origin of Florida's pythons as an open question. Rogan suggests a mix of pet owners releasing snakes and "some sort of a reptile research facility or something like that." A guest adds that there are different theories, including a hurricane theory. He favors the explanation that people let their snakes go. His reason is personal: "I think the more reasonable one, because I had a Burmese python in the 70s when I was a teenager." He admits he doesn't know what happened to that snake. "But I gave my whole menagerie away to people when I went to college."

Rogan presses on the responsibility of giving away a large snake rather than a Chihuahua. A guest concedes that you worry about pythons in the Everglades eating a Chihuahua that gets loose. When Rogan describes the pythons as an invasive species destroying the ecosystem, the guest offers a wry comparison instead of a defense.

Well, they're like us, Joe. They're like us. We came here and we took over.

Asked why they chose this subject, one guest jokes that he won't let Jeremy talk and that "a lot of it starts with me, so you can blame me." The team's earlier series, Chimp Crazy, comes up as one of Rogan's favorites. The guest says episode one of the new series "is kind of setting the table."

The guest describes himself as an old guy who has kept reptiles for "60 years, you know, plus." It began when his parents gave him a tortoise at age six. He says he caught rattlesnakes in his lunchbox, along with horned lizards. He has been bitten by a rattlesnake once and says he learned his lesson after the first time.

The bite was on his foot. An emergency-room doctor told him the last rattlesnake-bite patient there had lost "his toe or something or lost his digits." The doctor said it was a good thing he hadn't been bitten on a finger, where necrosis can rot the finger away, and that a bite in the middle of the foot meant he would be okay.

He separates venom potency from danger. He calls the tiger rattlesnake the most venomous rattlesnake in the country, "But it's not the most dangerous." He names the most dangerous as "probably" the Mojave rattlesnake or the eastern diamondback, and notes that Texas has western diamondbacks. The transcript leaves the species that bit him unclear. He brings up the tiger rattlesnake right after starting "this type of rattlesnake I got bit by." Later, when Rogan's California dog is said to have been bitten by "probably Southern Pacific Rattlesnake," he says, "That's the same snake that bit me."

He says the snake carried both hemotoxin and neurotoxin, so necrosis was "less evident." The effect was "more like a cobra where I was starting to stop breathing." He describes the sequence: - First, a feeling like being jabbed with an X-Acto knife, then seeing the snake pull back into a burrow. - A metallic taste after about 10 to 15 minutes. - About an hour in, the feeling that "someone had put sandbags on my chest."

And you realize, uh-oh. This wasn't a dry bite.

He says the bite was 25 years ago and that he received a lot of antivenom. He found the treatment worse than the bite. Nearly stopping breathing on a gurney was "weirdly not that painful," even though he felt he might die. But "the serum sickness is just unbelievably intense for weeks," with an extreme fever and red blotches all over his body. He blames the antivenom of that era, which was made from horse antibodies that his body didn't like. He notes that a different antivenom is made today.

Rogan teases that maybe he shouldn't hike in Birkenstocks, and the guest corrects it to river sandals. The transcript then says, without a clear source, "They used all of the intervenom at the hospital and had to go get more from another hospital. Ran out of anti-venom after using a whopping 36 vials." The text doesn't say explicitly that this refers to his own case.

He insists his bite was unusual. "Usually people are being jerks and idiots and drunk and handling a snake and it bites them." He was hiking in the mountains a bit north of Los Angeles, bushwhacking off-trail, and was actually looking for snakes. "I didn't see the snakes. The snake saw me first."

Rogan describes a roughly 90-pound dog in California that was bitten twice. The first time, he saw the snake and heard the commotion, so he got the dog to the vet right away. Its face swelled, it got antivenom, and it was "kind of out of it for a few days" before recovering. About a year later, he brought the dog in after seeing another bite. The vet found no swelling and no puncture. Rogan's explanation is that the dog "had developed a resistance to it because he had gotten bit once," but this is his own interpretation and nobody checks it. After they got home the dog's face swelled anyway, and it went back for antivenom.

The dog was in California, not Texas, so the guest revises his guess from western diamondback to "probably Southern Pacific Rattlesnake." Rogan describes a canyon property with lots of brush and bobcats. He also tells of running a trail and realizing mid-stride that what he took for a log was the biggest rattlesnake he had ever seen in the wild. The dogs ran right over it, and so did he. Knowing they would have to come back the same way, he threw rocks to try to make it leave.

The guest says he was "a closet of reptile guy" in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. He ran a nightclub, spent time with people such as Madonna, and was friends with artists including Andy Warhol, but he rarely talked about reptiles. He recalls Warhol interviewing him for Andy Warhol TV and asking what he would do with his money: "I actually said I'm going to buy tortoises." He kept reptiles in New York anyway.

He says he traveled to Madagascar, Sulawesi and parts of South America to study reptiles, especially very rare turtles and tortoises. He then filmed public figures he knew, including Christopher Walken and Slash, holding turtles or tortoises and speaking short PSAs. He made these with the Safdie brothers (spelled "Safdi" in the transcript). He notes that Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet, was up for an Oscar. Together they made a very short film about reptiles called Trophy Hunter.

The documentary idea came from the book The Lizard King. He says he pitched it to the Safdies and had already suggested it to his friend Fisher Stevens, who "had won an Oscar for the Cove." Stevens' reaction was a warning, and the guest says he reached it from the book's material. It involves one man who went "to prison for 100 years," as the guest puts it, and another described as "the Pablo Escobar reptiles." The transcript has the guest saying "we started in 2000," but gives no other detail on the production timeline.

how are you going to do that doc without getting killed, Eric?

it's a dark world. I don't know how you're going to do this without getting killed.

Asked why the reptile world draws such people, a guest pushes back on the premise: "not all of them are scary people," and many "may be misunderstood a little bit." He makes an exception for a figure named Mario, where "there was a crossover with drugs, smuggling drugs and animals into the country." He contrasts this series with the team's earlier films. It is an industry story that "looks back at the past half century."

He gives a scale figure: "illegal wildlife trafficking represents about a $20 billion year industry." He calls it underreported and ranks it "only after guns, drugs, and human trafficking." He also says these trades converge, with wildlife trafficking involving drugs and guns. His explanation is that people who bring things in illegally "tend to be a risk-taking type." No source for the figure is given in the conversation.

Lax border controls in the past are presented as the enabling condition. Before today's customs and TSA screening, it was "very easy" to carry wildlife. Rogan recalls flying without bag checks or even ID checks. The guests describe people carrying animals in suitcases or strapped to their bodies. Reptiles in particular are portable, which a guest calls "nature with handles." Episode one shows people traveling the world to find endangered animals, packing them in suitcases, listing them on price lists and selling them to consumers. In the guest's telling, "a handful of guys, mainly guys" started a multi-billion-dollar industry, and the series follows how it changed over the years.

A guest qualifies the "multi-billion" label himself. Much of the wildlife trade is consumption rather than the exotic pet business. He cites Asian demand for turtles and snakes as food, traditional medicine, skins and plant material, along with alligator, crocodile, lizard and snake skin bags. He adds that the exotic pet market has also grown huge in Asia. China now keeps reptiles as pets as well as eating them, which he says didn't happen until 25 to 30 years ago.

They took a page out of our playbook about 25 years ago.

Rogan asks why California bans python skin if pythons aren't endangered. A guest says it depends on the species. He ties the skin trade directly to the U.S. pet market: in the 1970s, skinning operations collected eggs, incubated them and sold baby Burmese pythons to the United States and other buyers. He says he has visited python-skinning operations in Sumatra. Most of the skins there come from blood and reticulated pythons, with some Burmese. They are wild-caught ("wild cod" in the transcript) and mostly not endangered, though "they're less and less pythons out there."

Rogan suggests a fix: Florida is overrun with pythons, so use those skins. The guest says the mismatch is in fashion. The skins people want are not Burmese, the species "running rampant in Florida." His example is the gold-and-black reticulated python jacket Nicolas Cage wore in Wild at Heart. He allows that Burmese skins could be made trendy, but says they rarely are.

During the discussion, someone reads aloud a search result on California's ban. It says the ban dates to 1970 and was aimed at protecting endangered and vulnerable species, "particularly the Indian Python." Rather than targeting that species, the state "created an extraordinarily broad statute banning all Python imports." Rogan says he had thought the ban was fairly recent.

California chose to prohibit all Python products rather than distinguished by species.

The guest calls this where "the laws, I think, are really screwed up": a ban on every python because of the Indian rock python and a few other endangered species. Speaking as a California resident, he says the state is "just so overregulated with everything. Particularly wildlife." He also says Austin "rules." The other guest points to the same issue in Florida with the green iguana. He notes there are 45 types of iguana worldwide, after first saying "40." The specifics of the Florida iguana rules are not spelled out.

The segment ends on eating invasive reptiles. Rogan describes a YouTube community in South Florida that hunts iguanas and cooks them, including an iguana stir-fry over rice, teriyaki-style, that the cooks called sensational. He makes clear he doesn't know what it tastes like. A guest repeats the common line that crocodile, alligator, iguana and rattlesnake taste like chicken, and notes that people eat the tail. Rogan says years of interest in the subject have left him with "a really messed up algorithm."

The segment opens with the group watching online videos of people cooking iguanas. In one, a man marinates the lizard in a zip-lock bag, cooks it in what the transcript calls a 'commado' grill, and bastes it with a sauce of butter and spices. The commentators note that he seems to be eating the whole animal, while usually it is the back of the tail that gets eaten, 'like crocodiles.' One speaker adds that in Mexico they always see iguana tamales made from the back part of the iguana.

The case for eating them rests on second-hand evidence: the speakers say it 'apparently' tastes good, according to YouTube channels whose hosts 'are pretty honest about it' and have their families try the meat. One speaker suggests eating them may be the only real answer to how common the animals have become.

I think, you know, that might be the only way out. Because they're everywhere in Florida.

They also bring up the familiar news reports of iguanas falling out of trees when it gets cold, and note how big the animals get: some caught on hunting channels are 'like four and a half, five feet long.'

A sponsor read for OnX Off Road breaks into the conversation here. It covers trail mapping, a dispersed-camping layer, private and public land boundaries, offline maps and a 50% discount offer, and is unrelated to the interview's subject.

When the conversation picks up again, it shifts from pest control to appreciation. A speaker describes male iguanas getting 'very orange and really big,' and a guest calls them 'such a cool-looking lizard.' The guests' show features the Fiji Island iguana, which they call 'very endangered.' One guest points to a regulatory imbalance: in the United States, private individuals cannot own the species, but zoos, including the San Diego Zoo, can. The guest admits not knowing why.

I don't know why private people can't own them

A person in the show describes the animal as 'reptile magic,' and the speakers in the studio describe its appeal as 'just the sheer beauty': yellow lemon highlights, turquoise and green. They repeat that it is a very endangered iguana.

Asked whether Florida's iguana problem came entirely from released pets, a guest answers 'Probably. All of it.' The guest then turns to the central figures of their book and show: a man the transcript names as Mike Van Nostrum, and his father, Ray. The two run a business called Strictly Reptiles in Hollywood, Florida. The guest describes it as 'more of a fulfillment center for wildlife all across America' and compares it to an 'Amazon warehouse' where a customer can click and order a tortoise.