Rick Prado recounts his traumatic childhood in Cuba, where his parents were executed by the Castro regime before the family fled to Miami. He details surviving a shark attack that severed his foot fin and a rattlesnake bite requiring finger amputation, linking rising apex predator populations to biblical prophecy about the "Pale Rider." Prado argues that conservation laws inadvertently increased dangerous wildlife encounters, challenging modern environmentalism while asserting humanity's divine right to harvest resources rather than worshiping animals. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Dad, Felix, and the CIA00:14:44
It's an honor to have you back.
Your tridents have been on display on this podcast for almost 200 episodes since you were here the first time.
And I'm a huge fan of you and your work and your artwork.
So thanks for being back.
Okay.
Oh, thank you.
On the first podcast that we did, we talked a lot about the wildlife stuff you did, the jackass, the wild boys, all that stuff, kind of like your rise to fame, so to speak.
But we didn't really cover your childhood and your early life in Cuba and your family and all that stuff.
So I want to talk about that a little bit today.
Well, my memory goes back to the age of four.
I remember people telling me, you're four years old.
As far as wildlife in Cuba, I would go in the backyard, look on a crab hole.
I would put my arm in there and grab a huge land crab by the elbow, and I would try to pull him out, and the crab would actually drag me.
And then my dad would come find me, grab my back feet, and pull me out of it.
Out of the hole, pulled me back, and we pulled the crab right out of the hole.
So I used to hand catch crabs at the age of four, like that.
So I was already getting into picking up lizards, into wildlife.
I used to watch movies like Sea Hunt in Cuba when I was a kid.
That's the fact.
My dad was cool.
We were living in Cuba.
The whole communism thing came in there.
Castro took over.
How long?
So when you were a kid growing up with your parents, how long did you guys live under Batista before that whole Cuban revolution?
What year were you born?
I was born in 1954.
54, okay.
So the Cuban Revolution came in 1959, so I was just a kid.
I mean, when I was a kid, I didn't think about Batista or any of that.
You know, that's just, children don't think about any of that.
They just, life was normal for us, you know.
I noticed changes once Acastro took over, like the properties, the rancheries to go play in, like we had a national forest, all of a sudden it became, we couldn't go there no more.
The government confiscated it.
And all the properties were taken, and a lot of bad things were happening.
I had no clue what was going on, but in the meantime, my dad joined up with the CIA to fight against Castro.
And later on, he got infiltrated into Cuba.
So, what happened to him when he got recruited by the CIA?
What was specifically going on with your dad?
What was he doing?
Well, our whole life was being uprooted.
I mean, I was a kid, so I'm not paying attention, but the adults saw that we were losing our freedom in Cuba.
You know, money was being confiscated, property, just huge changes and very, you know, like no respect for law.
He was just doing whatever they wanted to do.
And, you know, a hardline communist dictatorship was taking effect.
What did your parents do for work?
My dad was a salesman.
My mother came, he was a salesman for Bacardi.
Oh, no way.
Yeah.
My mother came from a very wealthy family in Cuba.
Her great-grandfather was like foreign minister, minister exterior for Cuba.
He was in all these ministers of education.
He was all those in Cuba one time or another.
He's a big time politician.
He owned 54,000 acres in Pinal del Rio.
It was my favorite place when I was a little kid to go play in Cuba.
They had horses there.
They had mountains, forests, deer everywhere.
Beautiful property.
He also had a beach house.
He had a big house in Havana.
So he's a very well known politician.
To this day, if you go to the ranch, The entrance says Hacienda Cortina.
So, since he was such an unknown figure in Cuba, even though the Castro regime still kept his name on the ranch.
Really?
And that was so that was your grandfather?
Great grandfather.
My mother's grandfather.
Oh, wow.
What part of Cuba were you guys living in again?
In Havana.
You were in Havana, okay.
But the Rancho Sempinal del Rio, which is the western end of Cuba, the Oregon Mountains, the whole entire range was there.
And to this day, tourists go to Cuba.
That's where they go.
Tourists go visit a place that's one of the natural wonders of Cuba.
There's a beautiful property.
They got mountains and a river that goes through caves.
They got lights in there.
So it's like a spectacular place to go see.
So when you were growing up with your dad, like what kind of.
What kind of you were always just like roaming around, looking for wildlife, swimming in the ocean, fishing, doing that kind of stuff?
In Cuba, I went on a couple fishing trips with my dad.
My dad liked nature, but you know, he had a family to worry about other things.
My dad was also an Olympic athlete, he had represented Cuba on rowing.
Rowing is very popular in Cuba, so his team won like a bronze medal in London, I believe, in the 1948 Olympics.
Oh, wow!
Uh, they, uh, him and his brother, his uh, brother in law.
And several of those guys, they all came and they won, you know, and they didn't win a gold medal, but they got a bronze medal.
But they were like champions in Cuba, very famous.
A lot of newspaper articles about them.
So he's very much into being an athlete.
He also played football for the University of Ana, American football.
Oh, okay.
They used to play the American universities.
They always got slaughtered by the American teams.
That's what my mother told me.
The Cuban team didn't stand a chance in football against like Georgia Tech and universities like that they played against.
Right.
They would get annihilated.
Supposedly, everybody would get drunk before the game to take all the pain.
Those are the stories I heard, anyways.
Oh, that's hilarious.
So, he was working for, he was a big salesman for Bacardi.
So, when Castro took over, what happened with Bacardi?
Well, they left.
They left Cuba completely.
Yeah, they moved over here.
They opened up Bacardi room in Puerto Rico.
I think it was their base, but they had people in Miami and everything.
But they were friends of the family.
At one time, they sent me to a boarding school, and it was the Bacardi family that paid for it.
No shit.
Where was that at?
Tampa, Florida.
It was the type of school that you live in and everything.
They thought it was good for me to stay in a school like that.
You know, after my mother had a real hard time because when my father was captured, he was executed.
Well, we're jumping a little far ahead.
Yeah, I'm jumping a little ahead.
So your father went from working for Bacardi, obviously the revolution, the Castro's rebels scoured the land in Cuba and basically took over all the businesses.
Well, communism.
Under communism, you're not allowed to own private property.
You're not allowed to have wealth.
You're not allowed to have money.
You're not allowed to do, you know, you all have to be equally poor.
That is their method.
That's what people in this country are not being educated what communism really is.
Most of these young kids have no idea what communism is.
They read a few books and they think they have an attitude, a chip on the shoulder, whatever it is.
And they think they've been taught that communism is good.
No, communism is not good for anybody.
It's evil.
And And usually they'll take people who are unqualified to do a job and take the qualified one and have him do something that he's not meant to do.
They rearrange everything.
And you, Cubans, I mean, the people, former Cubans like you or Cuban born people like yourself who were part of that revolution are the people that are the most outspoken about that.
They're the.
Well, if you're a Cuban and you believe in communism, you know, you can stay in Cuba.
Right.
I mean, that's perfectly normal.
That's what I would say.
But that's an interesting thing, too.
When Castro took over Cuba, he never mentioned communism once.
No.
But it was Che Guevara who was with him, who was a Marxist.
Is that what it was?
Yeah, Che Guevara was a Marxist, and his brother Raul was a Marxist.
Castro, supposedly an opportunist.
I mean, he's a crooked guy, but.
Opportunist, yeah.
Opportunistic guy.
And so he tied up with the Soviet Union to get protection from the United States.
Right.
That was much later.
That came much later.
So I'm curious about your father, though.
So, like, just let's say in this beginning part of the revolution, like right after it happened in 59, what was like your father?
You guys all stayed in Cuba, obviously.
You survived the revolution.
I was in Cuba.
Well, we thought the revolution, I was a kid and all the propaganda was out there.
I thought Fido was a really cool guy.
Right.
People were asking a lot of Americans.
Oh, yeah.
No, the people going down the street, hey, Fidel's coming down from the mountains.
He's great.
What do you mean?
Who are they?
And all the ladies and the nannies, everybody's excited about Fidel.
I had no idea.
I thought he was a great guy to my mother.
When I kept saying, when's dad coming home?
My mother turned around and told me he's not coming home.
That was me and my three sisters.
She told us that.
And she goes, Fidel is not a good guy.
You know, he said he just he killed your father.
That was like, so I went from thinking it was a good guy to all of a sudden shock.
And your mom just you asked your mom randomly one day, when's dad coming home?
And she that's how she dropped it on you.
Yeah, well, time was coming by.
She had to tell us sooner or later.
But we have no notion of time.
My mother was arrested also.
She was locked up.
They caught her.
When they arrested my dad, they arrested her.
There were several women arrested, but the Cuban government did not kill the women.
And later on, I think the U.S. negotiated their release, kind of like with the Bay of Pigs people.
Right.
They did a deal like that.
But the CIA guys, like my dad and the other men that were captured that day, including the head, CIA guy in Cuba, Sorin Marin, they were all tried in a kangaroo court.
You know, the people cracking jokes and throwing little paper balls around and laughing and everything.
It's like a big party.
And then they were all executed the next day.
So, your dad was recruited by CIA right after the revolution.
And how was he?
He was obviously recruited in Cuba.
And what specifically, do you know what he was doing for them?
Or like, was he an infiltration team?
He was a team of guys like Felix Rodriguez.
They were going to be in Escombrai.
Felix told me a story years later, but he went actually.
He went to they were training in Nicaragua at the time.
That's what CIA took him to.
Okay, that's what I that's.
I mean, of course, I'm a kid, I'm not aware of any of that.
This is I found out this later on as years went by.
My mother told me some more stories before she died.
So, your dad went with Felix to Nicaragua to train.
They were down there, all the CIA guys, they were all they were all part of the same team.
Okay, then later on, he meets Surin Marin, and Surin Marin invited him to go into Havana.
And Havana was the hotbed.
You know, that's where the Castro soldiers were thick everywhere.
And they were searching houses one after another.
And somebody ran out of one house and ran into a house where they were all hiding.
And then all of a sudden they walked in.
They recognized Surin Marin.
And they go, we got the big fish.
And all of a sudden everybody got surrounded.
Everybody got arrested.
So they caught him accidentally.
But either way, I mean, it was a hotbed.
This is days before the Bay of Pigs.
A couple days.
Oh, really?
So it's all going down at the same time.
So a couple days later, I believe after the Bay of Pigs invasion, they were all executed.
The six guys in firing squad.
A lot of people were killed in Cuba in the firing squad in those days.
It was nonstop.
Years later, Castro even put his own top guys in firing squad.
He executed his number one general.
He executed his two top guys, the LaGuardia brothers.
So he killed Abrantes.
Killed them or they put them in a prison where they weren't going to come out alive, you know.
So he got he cleaned house, all the people are top dogs in there.
Most communist dictators do that, they kill the top brass.
So, how old were you when you guys found out that Castro executed your father?
I was five years old.
You were five years old.
God.
But after that, we were able to go to Miami.
So right after that, you went to Miami?
Sometime after that, my mother got released.
We were able to get out because I was a military age.
Military age guys were not allowed to leave.
They had to join the Cuban military.
So we got out.
My mother came back to bury my father, and she almost never got out.
She had to go to her grandfather's political rival.
Who was a communist and asked him to help her get out of Cuba, and then he helped her get out of Cuba.
As you know, him and the grandfather went way back, you know, political rivals, but they knew each other, right?
So they still went to dinners and stuff and had cocktail parties, yeah, yeah.
They're rivals, but they had cocktail parties together, whatever.
Yeah, so when you got out, where did your sisters come with you?
Come to us with you?
All of us came here, we were kids.
My mother was like, you know, they no money or anything, they took everything, so we were political refugees.
Did your sorry to interrupt.
Did your dad know Rick Prado?
No.
Rick's way younger.
Yeah, he would have been my age.
Yeah, exactly.
He would have been five or six years old at the time.
That's stupid, yeah.
He knew Felix.
Your dad was friends with Felix because they trained in Nicaragua.
Right, right.
Felix liked my dad a lot.
He came by to visit my mom sometime before she died.
Yeah.
He came by the house and all that.
Did you ever talk to Felix?
Yes.
When did you first meet Felix?
I met him a few times that I was at a Miami eating a restaurant and he approached me and he goes, I'm Felix.
And he introduced himself to me.
And we talked.
I was doing a TV show not too long ago and I ran into him on a TV show.
I was talking about sharks and he was talking about Cuba and politics.
You know, both on a topic.
We were on Spanish TV.
We were both guests that day.
And then I saw him and I go, man, it's Felix.
And I started talking to him.
He's getting older.
I could tell, you know, he's got a lot of years on him now.
Did he have any cool, I mean, did he tell you a lot of things about your father that you didn't know?
Not as much to me.
He said to a friend of mine that was, they used to go to my friend's house and he told him that he really admired my father.
That's what he told one of the people he admired the most.
So, I mean, I never met anybody say anything bad about my father.
You know, good or bad, I never heard anybody.
Everybody, he was a very likable, very popular guy.
Right.
Plus, I'm being an athlete, you know, famous athlete in Cuba at the time.
But the new generation doesn't know anything about that.
This is all in the past.
As a new people coming up.
You know their history has been erased in many cases.
Sharks, Alligators, and High School00:15:15
I got into.
I was always interested in the wildlife, but once I got into Florida, the first thing they told me there are venomous snakes in Florida.
So be careful when you're how old?
I was six years old, six years old in Miami, and my friends had a ranch, and later on, when I was a young teenager, they would take me to the ranch with them.
Their, their families are friends, from families from Cuba, And in that ranch, I came in contact with alligators, venomous snakes, things like that.
But by the time I was in high school, I was already bit by rattlesnake.
I was already hand-catching large alligators.
And I was picking up, of course, venomous snakes left and right.
I was diving, spearfishing, and all that.
Did you go to school when you were in Miami?
I went to school in Miami, elementary school.
Okay.
And then for high school, I went to a private school for junior high.
And then in for high school, I went to Gainesville High, Gainesville, Florida.
And that exposed me to a lot of the woods, a lot of venomous snakes.
That's where I got bit by a venomous snake over there, and alligators.
I would go after school, walk around the edge of lakes, see alligators sneak up and dive on them and handcatch them.
So I was already handcatching large alligators.
I was weightlifting.
I was their state champion weightlifter in high school.
Wow.
Yeah, you were jacked back in the day, man.
Yeah.
We can find some pictures of him, like old school Manny Puig photos.
You were ripped.
Walking around wearing a Speedo.
Yeah, yeah.
I did all that.
The alligator stuff, once I learned, Techniques is more about knowing and understanding the alligator than strength.
How to interact with an alligator.
Right.
And a lot of how to hold your breath a long time.
You know, different techniques you pick up over the years for diving, spearfishing.
I spend a lot of time.
Look at that one on the left.
Dude, you're like Zeus.
How old were you there?
My 40s.
Right about 44, 45.
I got, yeah, that was probably some of my best years.
Really?
In my 40s.
That's when I started doing more of the TV stuff.
Yeah.
I learned more about the sharks and alligators.
I started interacting.
Before that, I did a lot of, notice I got a spear gun in my hand that did a lot of commercial spear fishing.
So let's go back real quick to when you were in high school.
You went to high school in Gainesville, you said?
Yes.
And you were just like, there was a lot of wildlife around there, a lot of woods and a lot of lakes and a lot of, obviously, the golf is there.
Yes.
What were you doing when you were in high school?
Like, you obviously went to school, but so just you spent all your spare time just hunting and fishing and catching alligators?
That kind of stuff.
I would do things like, okay, tell my friends, I'm going to skip school, drop me off in the woods over here and pick me up in three days.
Now I would be out in the woods by myself, you know, eating whatever I caught, surviving out there, drinking water right out of the swamp.
I was doing this is 17 years old.
I was doing stupid stuff like that.
You didn't know anybody else doing the same shit you were doing.
You just wanted to go do it by yourself.
I did it by myself.
Then later on, I talked to friends of mine to come out with me.
So I would go with some friends sometimes and do it.
By that time, I wasn't by myself.
And we'd go out and camp out and all that.
Later on, my friends bring a tent, sleeping bags, things I didn't bring the first time.
What was it that made you want to go do that?
Spend three days in the wilderness just like hunting and catching and eating whatever you caught and being alone.
And like, was there no fear of anything?
What were you like?
I was attracted to it.
Look, I didn't like fast cars, I didn't like baseball.
I didn't care for football.
I didn't care for any of that.
I care for, I wanted to live off the land.
I wanted to live like Tarzan, like the Native Americans, you know, off the land hunting and fishing.
And I used to watch sea hunt going on the water.
So I got into spearfishing a lot where I made a living spearfishing for many years.
That put me in contact with sharks.
And one of my first shark encounters was in the Bahamas.
I had a shark bite a fin off my foot when I was 18 years old before I even saw the shark.
The only thing I've ever seen in my life at that time was a nurse shark.
How did you get to the Bahamas when you were 18?
There was this boat captain out of Miami.
He used to lobster fish in the Bahamas.
Back then it was legal as long as you're 12 miles offshore.
So my uncle said, Hey, you want to go to the Bahamas and get your job on this boat?
And I was like, Sure, I want to go out there.
So I wanted to dive.
So I'd be picking up traps all day long, but I was looking at the water.
I just couldn't wait to get in there.
But, you know, we were working like crazy.
The work was brutal.
Lobster trapping is brutal.
And these are Cuban guys who are like, Move it!
You're slow, work hard.
You know, they were yelling at you all day long like that.
Were you allowed to spear them or dig them?
No, you were in the Bahamas.
I mean, you know, they used to hook them and put them in, but we weren't divers.
The guys I went with were trappers.
They were not divers.
Okay.
So what I.
So they'd put crab traps down there and they'd put lobster traps and they'd pull them in with a winch all day long and you stack them, clean them, and bait them and put them back again.
You know, I was exhausted every day.
But the guy goes, Okay, I want to eat grouper tonight.
And they go, Manny, go in the water and spear grouper so we can eat it tonight.
So I jumped in, shot a grouper, and a shark came from behind me and bit.
Next thing you know, I thought it was one of the guys that was playing a joke on me.
Wait a minute.
Because the fin came flying right off my foot.
I turned around, I saw a blur of a shark leaving at a million miles an hour.
The fin floated.
I let go of the grouper I just speared.
Let go of that.
The grouper took off his spearing and all, went into the bottom, went into a cave.
They threw a rope over the front of the boat.
One of the guys saw him hit me.
So I climbed up the rope right up the highest side of the boat and got in there.
And they put a small boat in the water.
They picked up the fin.
It was a floating fin.
And they could see the jacket where all the.
He had missed my toes by that much.
You could see the entire cut.
Oh my God.
Where the shark had bit on my fin.
What kind of shark was it, do you know?
I'm not sure to this day.
I think it might have been a lemon.
I can remember seeing a yellowish color.
So it could have been a lemon shark.
It was so fast.
I didn't know my sharks very well at that time.
I didn't have any experience with them.
Wow.
18 years old was your first shark.
And then the guy, the captain asked me, can you go back and get the spear gun?
And back then I was like, you know, I was kind of scared.
But as you know, with those guys, you can't show.
You know, you got to be macho all the way.
So I jumped in, went down, swam down, looking every which way.
Pull a group out, went to the surface and he goes, can you get another one?
I couldn't shoot another fish every time I was going to aim at a fish.
I look this way, look that way.
I couldn't.
Now, years later, little that I know i'd be hand feeding the sharks and riding them right.
I got bit gosh.
That was my fin.
Later on in my life I got bit by four different types of shark.
I got bit by mako my finger while hand feeding.
I got bit by Caribbean reef shark in my leg and I got bit by a nurse shark in this leg.
And I got bit by lemon in my fingers right.
So I took some shark bites.
So When you're 18, you're working for the commercial fishing company, you're catching lobsters.
What, how long did you work for this company, commercial fishing in the Bahamas?
That was just in the summer, just during the summers.
Well, summer month, I was out 36 days one time, and I went one more time out, and I was out like 20 something days, and I never went out again.
Wasn't for you, no?
Then later on, I did, I got my own lobster license, and I would swim under the bridges and the keys, catch lobsters, and go sell them.
I had all you needed was a $50 license, I could catch as many lobsters as I wanted.
So, really.
But the lobsters were, you know, hard to get and hard to find.
I didn't have a boat.
I was swimming around with a dive flag.
And, you know, and there was a lot of current down there.
So I would get a slight tide.
You'd make the best of it.
But half the time, I'd be kicking against the current and swimming down and grabbing lobsters and put them in a bag.
So it was brutal, brutal work.
At the end of the day, we'd just pull into the fish house.
They used to pay you in cash right there.
You just put your lobsters.
It was a great life.
Put your lobsters on a scale and they pay you in cash.
And you were how old doing this?
That I was in early 20s.
Early 20s.
By that time doing that.
And that's just how you made all your money was just doing that.
I did that for a while and later on I got into some more people.
You know, when I got into heavy duty commercial spearfishing, I had one guy, we used to go down there catching a fish every day, pay for dinner, the hotel room, and go do it the next day all over again.
But later on I met some people in the keys who were doing it more professional.
We'd go out on trips, make more money, catch a large amount of lobsters with boats.
People knew where we were going and how to be able to harvest more fish.
Like long lines?
No, no.
Spearfishing.
All spearfishing.
We would do the Goliath.
Like, I remember one trip we came back, I think we made like $1,400 worth of Goliath grouper each.
You know, after we paid for the gas, we paid for the food, paid for everything, and a third part for the boat, we divided up.
You know, that's a good paycheck.
Other days I make $400, $500.
This is a long time ago, though.
So it was more money back then.
We would spear grouper, snapper, hogfish, also did tropicals for a while.
And in lobster season, I would do lobsters, but whatever we found that was worth money, we'd shoot, including the sharks.
Really?
I used to shoot the sharks before I started making the movies.
What kind of sharks did you shoot the most?
What we shot down there was Lemon, Bull, and Great Hammerhead.
God.
Occasionally, we would shoot a recruitment reef shark and black tip.
And you weren't hunting the sharks.
They would just show up looking for your fish and then you would just.
They were, but we would all.
They got it from me.
First thing we'd do, we'd shoot a barracuda and tie it to a stringer.
Like our guy would drop you off in the middle of the ocean.
And pick you up later, or you'd have to swim a couple miles to where the boat was anchored and work your way that way.
So we'd be dragging fish with us, and when a shark would show up, we'd pop it and we'd sell the shark.
We used to sell the fins, sell the meat, cut the jaws out, take pictures of the shark, hang up the jaws on the wall.
We did all that.
Then later on, when we started making money from being in the water interacting with sharks, there's more profit in that than killing the shark.
So, a shark was more valuable to us alive.
So, at that time, I was like, hey, you know, they're killing too many sharks.
At that time, we would have a hard time finding them, you know.
So, it wasn't, you could spearfish all day long without ever seeing a shark.
Sharks were being commercialized.
Then everybody got into commercial long lining for sharks and they got depleted.
It was really hard to find sharks.
What year?
They were getting wiped out.
What year, roughly, did commercial long lining for sharks start to kick up?
I would be.
Probably 30 years ago, I would think.
I'm trying to keep.
Okay, I was in.
It's like the early 90s?
My 40s.
I would be in my 40s.
Yeah, I would say early 90s and all that.
It started picking up.
Once they started protecting certain types of shark, like they put a ban on catching sandbar shark.
Once a sandbar shark was protected, the commercial guys, there was no reason to go long-langing for shark anymore.
You couldn't make any money.
What is that shark?
What kind of shark is that?
Is that a Mako?
That's a Mako.
Okay, yeah, that's not my shark.
That's Mark the Shark's uh, uh, Mako.
Okay, uh, he just came over with us with a scientist, Dr. Castro, to look at the shark, and uh, so he got a picture with me.
You know, he showed where'd you guys get where did he catch that?
Miami.
Oh, Miami.
Okay, you're not allowed to get him anymore, but he's got permits, he's still out there catching sharks.
Is he really?
Oh, yeah, yeah, he's you should bring him on the show if you want.
Yeah, he's bombastic and he'll talk about.
Oh, is he?
That's a big ass Mako.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it was 10 feet.
I remember.
I've encountered maples that big in Louisiana.
As a matter of fact, for Shark Week, I was riding a big maple, anything bigger than that one.
Riding it?
Yeah.
Well, hand feeding it, riding it, everything.
I did a lot of stuff with maples.
I really liked the maple.
Makles are a good shark to work with, very dangerous.
But the open ocean sharks will come at you quicker because there's less food out there.
Right.
It's like a desert.
Yeah.
So they're more aggressive.
Yeah.
Which is.
It's perfect.
That's a Mako shark.
I love baby Mako.
That was a Mako I carved out of Bruns.
Oh, you carved it?
Yeah, that's Bruns.
Whoa.
You can't click on it?
That's okay.
Look at that, Manny.
That's a bronze.
I'm an artist, so I sculpted that.
That's all bronze right there.
That weighs about 85 pounds.
It's hollow, but it's still 85 pounds.
But it looks like a real Mako.
It looks exactly like a real Mako.
It looks like one of those taxidermy ones.
Yeah, yeah.
No, but I did a hammerhead and an alligator and a Goliath grouper.
So when you started doing this commercial spearfishing in your early 20s, What was it that made you?
Did you just like have this inner sort of desire to push the limits farther than anybody else?
Like, did you feel like that was kind of what you were destined to do?
Like, you wanted to kind of outdo everybody else, dive deeper than everybody else, find like catch these fish more primitively than anybody else was?
Like, what was it in you that made you?
At first, I wanted to make a living instead of jobs that I didn't like.
I wanted to spearfish for a living because I don't want to have a job.
I like the idea of going out there with a challenge of catching fish.
Then later on, I was always attracted to catching fish instead of with a spear with my hands.
And I had fantasies of catching sharks with my hands.
So later on, that'll happen, just like catching alligators by hand.
In high school, I was catching alligators by hand.
But I'm saying, like, what was it?
What was it in you that made you have this?
This desire to do this?
Like, what made you want to push all these limits and do all these things that nobody else has ever done?
I wanted to do what my fantasies were when I was a child.
I want to do what Tarzan did in movies.
It wasn't real.
I want to do it for real.
And I said, I may not be the deepest diver in the world or the best spearfish in the world, but when it came to hand fishing and all this stuff, yeah, I took off with that.
Well, people wouldn't think of that.
It didn't cross their mind to try to catch a giant Goliath or To catch a shark with their hands and things like that, that all started kicking into me.
As the more I learned, I started studying them and looking at them, and I would pick up.
Catching Barracudas with a Knife00:02:17
I can get close to them.
I can do this.
I start seeing ideas like that, like catching a barracuda with a knife.
I saw how close a barracuda came to me, and the son told me, Pull out your knife and get one.
And I did.
But I literally hit them with my hands first.
So I said, If I can touch them as they were attacking the fish I had in my hand, if I can touch them, I can get one with a knife.
And I stuck.
And then grab them by the neck real quick.
That's the only coot I ever caught with a knife.
If I would have slipped, the cooter probably bit me right here.
I had them right here like this.
Yeah, barracudas are terrifying fish.
Even when I'm diving and spearfishing, I'm almost more afraid of barracudas than I've seen a shark.
Do you feel the same way?
No, I'm not.
I mean, you're not afraid of any of them.
I'm not afraid of.
I shot a lot of barracudas to feed the sharks and for me to eat.
But I've shot so many cooters, I could never count them.
Big ones, small ones.
Type in Manny Pwig after Barracuda and find some of the photos.
I know a lot of people have been hurt by Barracudas real bad.
Yeah, and they get humongous.
They get bigger than some sharks, too.
The biggest coot I've ever read about was long, six feet, nine inches.
So walk me through how you caught that Barracuda.
What was going on?
There was a spearfishing competition.
Omer, they were holding it.
They invited me there.
They used to sponsor me, so I went up there.
And it was in North Carolina.
They were in the Outer Banks.
So the bunch of groups were there.
So, I wasn't participating.
I was just hanging out.
So, I could go with any crew I wanted that day.
And I went with Eric Salado and Luis Pereira.
These are a doctor and an engineer.
Both of them are fanatical spear fishermen from Cuba.
And they're very classy guys, but you look at them, you couldn't believe how good these guys can dive.
But they go to all these competitions.
So, those guys were in the water diving.
They're getting the fish they need for the competition.
Free diving or scuba diving?
Free diving.
It's all free diving.
So, it's in deep water.
They're going probably halfway down, whatever.
It's 150 to the bottom.
And the guy in the boat says, Manny, can you get me a spadefish or a sheep head?
Free Diving for Competition Fish00:02:50
You know, I want to take it home to eat.
The mate in the boat asked me, I said, no problem.
So I took the pulse here.
The spadefish swim like mid-water.
So I went down and shot a spadefish.
In no time, there were like 20 barracudas on top attacking me.
And they were biting at the spadefish.
They were really ready to bite my hands.
And I was literally pushing them away.
I couldn't keep them off of me.
So it occurred to me to pull the knife out, stick it.
So I stuck with the knife and grabbed it by the gills immediately.
When I stabbed them, he bit harder on the piece of fish, and that gave me the break.
To grab him real quick, if not, he got to turn on me.
Then I brought him back.
A bull shark came up, he wanted to eat it, but I wanted a picture with that kuda.
I never caught one with a knife, I'm not going to catch another one, so I wanted to boat it and get a picture with it.
So I wouldn't let the bull shark have it.
Oh, so what did you do to get the bull shark not to eat it?
I pulled away from him, charged him, I got aggressive.
Charged the bull shark when you're being attacked by shark.
If you show aggression, that's usually a good way to save you most of the time, not always.
It'll work.
You want to stay safe from sharks?
There's nothing better than trusting the Lord thy God because they're his creatures.
He said me from them many times.
Let's put it this way.
How did you know that?
How did you know to charge them yet?
Had you been in that situation before?
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NAD Molecules and Shark Adventures00:15:27
Back to the show.
Yeah, you got to fight back, or else if you run from them, I did that experiment.
I saw a shark.
Okay, I'm going to swim as fast as I can to the boat to get away, right?
I turned around.
The shark was on me immediately.
I did it again.
He attacked me again.
So I figured out, okay, if I go after him, He runs the other way.
But if you start panicking, trying to get away, he attacks.
If he's hungry.
Or, like when you're freediving, you'll go down.
And as you're coming up for air, sometimes you look down and you see a shark following you because he thinks you're running away from him and you really need to get up for air.
But it looks like you're on the run, so you're acting like prey.
Right.
He is a predator.
Predator attacks prey.
If you act like a predator, you scare him away because he thinks you're going to, sharks attack each other.
He thinks you're going to take a chunk out of him.
Like a bullshark will get attacked by a large great hammerhead, for example.
Right.
So he's going to, if you show aggression, his natural instinct is to run from you.
So, you can bluff them.
Wow.
Doesn't always work.
You were able to scare the bull shark away and you got that barracuda in the boat.
I've had to fight off bull sharks a million times in my life as a spear fisherman.
And also, I used to create shark feeding frenzies to interact for the shows and stuff.
So, you can probably, there's videos on YouTube of spear fishermen literally chumming up bull sharks and then chasing the bull sharks to shoot cobia off of their backs.
And it is like a thing people do still on the East Coast where, because these giant bull sharks, these like 12, 15 foot long bull sharks will just be cruising and there'll be these huge cobia that just swim like alongside them.
They attract the shark by pulling the rubber bands on their speargun and popping them.
Then the bull shark thinks you're shooting fish.
He runs up, or they take a plastic bottle and make a sound with it, a crackling sound.
So when he comes up, the guys will go.
That one on the very right, top right, yeah.
Yeah, those are following a tiger.
See, they also follow the rays, see?
But what happens is, every once in a while, the shark is actually very hungry.
So there are videos of those cobia actually swimming on top of the bull sharks and they shoot the cobia?
They follow them from behind.
When they shoot them, sometimes the shark will turn around and attack.
I know divers have been demolished by doing that by a bull shark.
After they shoot the cobia, the shark turns around and instead of going after the cobia, it goes after the diver.
And tears them apart.
That seems like a bad idea.
It's a great adventure.
These guys are gutsy.
It's a great adventure.
It's an awesome way to catch a fish, but it's a bad idea because you're going to get killed sooner or later.
Right.
So, have you ever done this?
No, but I've done other things.
I've shot fish when I'm running out of bait.
I'll shoot fish right there to attract the sharks and everything.
I've done everything you can imagine to attract.
Look at this.
Look at this.
There you go.
See?
Yeah, full screen this if you can, Steven.
Yeah, there's bull sharks you see everywhere there.
So look, they're surrounded by bull sharks.
Yeah, well, a lot of guys get hurt doing that.
They may get away with one thing.
Oh, not another day.
There's like a hundred bull sharks all around them.
Yeah, they're looking for cobia following one of them.
There's your cobia right there.
See?
Shoots the cobia.
No sharks are chasing him.
Well, sometimes the shark is not hungry.
He's got to be hungry for that to happen.
If that shark wanted to, couldn't he just turn around and eat that cobia?
They do sometimes.
Sometimes they'll eat the cobia.
Other times they'll eat the.
I'm saying, like, before they shoot it.
Before, like, even if the.
No.
Look, see, there's a bullshark on the attack right there.
See how the guy fended him off?
No, no.
Rewind that by like 30 seconds?
Yeah, yeah.
He knew what he was doing.
Okay.
All right.
Let's see what's going on.
He shot the cobia.
He's swimming back to the surface.
Here comes a bullshark.
It's a bullshark attack.
Okay.
See.
Oh, he just pointed the thing at him.
If he turned around and tried to get to a boat, that bullshark would have killed him.
They're getting fired up now.
Oh, God.
See?
Yeah, look at that.
See how they're under attack?
And there's blood everywhere and everything.
Okay, get out of the water.
Get out.
Now, where does a bull shark rank as far as dangerous sharks?
Probably the world's most dangerous shark.
Why is that?
Okay, this is how clear that water is.
Imagine being attacked like that, and you're in the intracoastal with zero visibility.
You won't see them coming.
Right.
They go upriver, they go on the beaches, and they attack people.
It's a coastal shark, and he's got a hilarious temper.
On top of that, he is a man killer, a man eater.
And he's got a halocious temper.
And his bite is lethal.
His teeth are razor sharp.
You can shave your arms with them.
And they can bite three times harder than a great white shark.
Three times harder.
Yeah.
They're smaller, but they're deadlier.
So how would you compare?
How is that?
Their bite is harder than a great white.
But why isn't a great white?
So if you were hypothetically, we put you in a swimming pool with a great white and a bull shark.
How would the great white be, or how would the bull shark be deadlier?
Because it would just be more aggressive to eat you?
There's more of them in the water.
They're very shy, but they're very explosive in their attacks.
And great whites are picky eaters.
The bull is not as picky.
Oh, okay.
Like a tiger usually eats a person because he's not his picky eater.
His diet is very rarid.
But a tiger shark doesn't have a bad temper, neither does a great white like a bull shark does.
Okay.
Bull shark and lemons have bad tempers.
They have high levels of testosterone.
If you spear them, And he's on the end of the line, he'll come after you.
If you catch him on a rod and reel, you get into water with him, usually he'll come after you.
Yeah, these guys are still shooting these cobia surrounded by these bull sharks.
There might be different days put together, but yeah, a lot of guys have been bit doing that.
So, this is just normal for when you were spearfishing doing these competitions.
It was just normal to see these bull sharks.
You just kind of got to be cognizant of it.
For a while, there's a lot of bull sharks out there right now.
For many years, there was no sharks.
The commercial long lining have decimated them.
And there was hardly any sharks around.
So, you know, so they passed all the conservation laws.
Now they're back.
What year did they pass those conservation laws?
I'm not sure.
They came little by little.
You know, understand I was out of commercial spearfishing for quite a while.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But they started, no, one species after another started being stopped.
You know, you weren't allowed to kill the dusky, the longfin mako, a whale shark.
Great white shark is protected.
That's why there's more and more of them now, right now.
So, of course, when you protect something, they come back.
The Glath grouper was hunted.
To oblivion.
Now it's coming back.
You start seeing more and more of them.
The sharks are everywhere.
There's a disbalance out there.
Every once in a while, a good shark tournament to balance things out might be a good idea.
I like the spearing because you could target the type of shark they need to be targeted.
Instead of the real rare species, you don't want to catch it on bycatch.
So my idea was a spearing tournament.
That's my idea.
Nobody's ever going to agree with me, but to go out and have a tournament and let the guy shoot several sharks every so often to kind of like.
Level out the fish and shark population to a balance.
Because it's, if you talk to divers and fishermen, they can't get a fish in the boat half of the time.
So, do you think there's a problem with there being, you said there's way too many sharks out there right now, and then people see them everywhere.
Do you think there's a problem with there being too many sharks?
If you're like a biologist, he says, wow, it's a healthy ocean, it's full of dangerous sharks.
But if you're just a human being, what's going on in the water?
It's a bad idea.
You know, it's a balance because it depends how you look at it.
Yeah, the healthy ocean is a dangerous ocean, but I believe that God gave us a right to fish, hunt, and grow crops, harvest food, harvest lumber, whatever we need from the earth, the earth provides.
So we don't worship the sharks.
The shark, yeah, they're in the ocean, but we're caretakers.
But it ain't like, oh, it belongs to them.
They're the gods of the sea.
No, they're not.
There's a God that made them, but they're not the gods of the sea.
Manny Pig's the god of the sea.
No, no, no.
If there's any human that's closest to Poseidon, it's you.
No, keep it humble.
I believe in Jesus Christ.
He's my Lord and Savior, and I keep it at that.
That's His creation.
That's His ocean.
So His creation has been my adventure.
He kept me alive because He can let those animals tear you apart.
To keep me humble, every once in a while you get things like this.
Oh, yeah.
Hold it up on this side.
Man, He's got the perma shocker.
This is a rattlesnake bite.
That's the second rattlesnake bite I got.
I got bitten in high school on this thumb.
I came out okay from that one.
This is a Western Diamondback in Texas.
And that was a bad bite.
Yeah, we're gonna.
I want to get to that.
I want to stay on the sharks for a little bit though.
And I got bit by sharks.
I got bit by an alligator in the back.
Came out good from that one.
I came out good from everything except maybe this one.
I got gored by a boar on this farm too.
There's more and more stories popping up every day about people being attacked by sharks.
It seems like it's, I don't know, like it's hard to understand, to really know if it's just the media blowing shit out of proportion or if this stuff happens all the time and it's not always reported.
It's increasing.
It's increasing because there's more sharks out there and there's more people in the water.
So when you put a lot of people and a lot of sharks in the water, You're going to get more incidents.
Wildlife is making a comeback around the world in many places, and there is a lot of wildlife attacking people as far as bears, tigers, lions, things like that.
Do you know any of the numbers as far as shark populations now compared to 30 years ago?
A whole lot more.
A whole lot more.
Worldwide.
Not worldwide.
U.S. waters.
U.S. waters.
Now, worldwide, yeah, we talk about tiger population is growing in India, for example.
Leopards in Africa, yeah, it's.
It's growing tremendously.
Mountain lions in North America, yeah, including Florida, yeah, they're increasing.
Bears are increasing.
A few places, wildlife, certain wildlife is very endangered.
You know, Sumatran tiger, he's in trouble.
You know, a few species like that.
Gorillas are thriving.
Lowland gorilla.
Mountain gorilla, maybe not so.
But the lowland, this part in the Congo, where there's hundreds, a couple hundred thousand of them.
And why are these animals, like, why is their population growing so fast?
Protection laws.
And I also believe as end time, God might be multiplying the animals for the end time because they're going to attack people.
Can you explain your belief in that?
The Pale Rider in the Bible kills one fourth of the world's population through war, hunger, disease, pestilence, and by the beasts of the earth, wild animals.
The Pale Rider.
It's a symbol of death, destruction.
That's a biblical thing.
Apart from all I know about wildlife, I believe the Bible word for word.
And so it's fitting in the pattern.
You got more wildlife, more attacks.
The wolf populations are growing around the world.
And there's more.
Now, do I like wildlife?
Yeah, I'm a fanatic about all.
I'm fascinated with bears, sharks, alligators, all kinds of fish, all kinds of wildlife.
I'm a fanatic of all that.
But I'm aware that these attacks have been increasing more and more.
Like the snakes kill 100,000, 100,000 people a year.
Mm hmm.
Venomous snakes, they used to kill a lot less than that.
It's just, it's growing.
How many people do sharks kill a year?
You know, not as many as like maybe crocodiles and all that, they don't really know.
Oh, look at this great white shark population is booming.
Researchers say, What this is posted literally last month.
Okay, the result a little bit the result of that is it's real simple you can't kill seals, which is what they eat, and you can't kill them.
So, we've made this world this design, it's a great white shark haven right there.
A summer begins, the as summer begins, uh, and people spend more time in the ocean.
Researchers are on the verge of learning more about the mysterious apex predator.
That swims beneath the surface.
On the research ship, the Atlantic, in the Atlantic Ocean, 12 miles off the coast of North Carolina, a group of scientists has been studying and tracking great white sharks.
We're seeing an ocean that's teeming with life like we haven't seen since the 40s or 50s, Chris Fisher, founder of the research organization OSERCH, told CBS News OSERCH has been studying and tagging great whites for the last decade.
In that time, Fisher has observed an increase in the number of white sharks.
Okay.
Wow.
So.
You believe me now?
Oh, yeah.
I never doubted you.
Okay.
When I was doing my spearfishing, I never once encountered a tiger shark on the Atlantic.
Not one time.
Now the guys see them all the time.
They have been wiped out.
There were no tiger sharks left.
In the 50s, there were.
But after that, gone.
Now, when I found my first tigers, we were 100 miles in the Gulf of Mexico with a 500-pound Sakura ripping them apart.
Hour after hour after hour.
We had a couple hundred sharks around us before the tigers finally showed up.
Those were my first tigers.
Wow.
And I was hands-on right away.
How are you chumming them up?
With what?
Barracuda.
Barracuda.
We went out there.
We speared cuda after cuda after cuda after cuda.
Every cuda you spear potentially can bite you.
But that was like normal every day.
Especially filming the sharks, you got to feed them or they're not coming.
So, you know, you don't buy bait.
They're like fresh.
So to get fresh food, you got to get it right there.
We would spear barracudas to feed them.
When I went to Hawaii, they brought me fresh skipjack tuna.
And that's what I fed the tigers over there.
So you were saying a minute ago, we kind of got off track, but you were saying that the sound of popping the bands on a spear gun attracts the sharks now.
Because sharks?
How recent is that?
Sharks are very smart.
They learn.
Yeah.
They, certain places where they know when the fishermen are pulling up with the boat and they drop anchor and he's going to start fishing, they pull up because they know he's going to catch fish and going to steal them.
Sharks are not stupid.
They're smart.
Alligators are not stupid.
They're smart.
Right.
But Florida, we have alligator attacks and shark attacks.
I know in U.S. waters they're big because they're protected.
Now, if you go to maybe South China Sea, they might be getting exterminated over there.
I'm not sure.
Like China's just about wiped out the Chinese tiger.
Really?
Yeah.
They have Manchurian tiger, which borders Russia because that's really a Russian protected.
There have been two 10 12 foot tiger sharks that have been caught right off the beach right here in the last week.
Yeah.
20 years ago, you weren't here.
Killer Whales and Tiger Sharks Return00:15:14
That was unheard of.
Right.
The tigers are back.
Have you, you, let's pull up that video of that guy in Egypt who got eaten by the tiger shark.
Now, I told you this on the phone.
I was like freaked out when I saw this because I have never, I already pulled a tablet for you.
I have never heard other than like open ocean shipwrecks with like, you know, way out in the middle of the ocean where like the oceanic white tips will devour and eat the people because there's nothing else to eat.
It's like a desert out there.
But I've never heard.
Of a story of somebody near the beach getting fully devoured by a shark.
Like, I've heard, like, obviously, you hear the bites.
Well, there was a girl killed in shallow water in the Bahamas in front of her parents by three tiger sharks ate her in front of her family recently.
There's no video of it, but they killed her.
The parents saw it.
Three of them.
Three tiger sharks gang up on the daughter on Hog Island, right there where the hogs go swimming.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
In the shallow water, she was in there swimming.
What?
And they got her there.
There's a lot of there's a tiger beach in the Bahamas.
There's a lot of tigers there and they you know when these things are hungry They're not docile they can pick up speed and they're devastating predators Do you think there's a let's watch this video.
Yeah full screen that video and the Red Sea The Red Sea yeah has When you're off the shore just a little distance it drops to incredible depth.
Oh, really?
So you could be on the beach and you could see an oceanic white tip Because you swim 100 feet from shore in some places and it drops thousands of feet.
So you have these ocean sharks that come in here.
There were three attacks in the Red Sea not too long ago by Mako shark and oceanic white tip.
The Mako, they caught him later on with human remains in his belly.
And because you go off, there were divers, you go off the reef, you know, 100 feet or so, and you're ready in the middle of the ocean.
So the pelagic sharks can visit you right there.
But the Red Sea has tigers, Makos, and oceanic white tips.
Yeah, I think this was like the third tiger shark fatality in like the last two years off of this same beach in Egypt.
Yeah, it's definitely.
So, what's going on here?
It's not full screening?
What the frick?
There you go.
There it goes.
Right there.
Not full screening?
That's okay.
It doesn't matter because we're not going to see it anyways.
So, what is the shark doing to him right there?
Cutting him to pieces.
They recovered his body the next day.
He's screaming.
He screamed for help, but it might have bit a leg off already.
Oh my god!
This is horrible.
There he goes.
Oh my god!
Look at it.
Understand that he's attacking like there's a turtle.
He's barely moving.
Okay, a tiger shark's teeth.
Oh my god, what is this?
Look.
Oh my god!
Okay, you can pause it.
A tiger shark's teeth look like this they aim this way, and then they also aim the other way.
So, what it does is designed for cutting.
Turtle shells in half.
So he saws back and forth.
They can slide through bones and everything like this.
That's what a teeth saw is not just like a giant saw.
One after another goes like this.
So he does this.
And then they'll either keep sawing until they cut a piece of turtle shell.
They eat the sea turtles.
So it's a tiger shark is designed.
It's a devastating predator.
Yeah.
And I guess this was actually a pregnant, from what I read, this was a pregnant female that was like roaming around.
They had footage of the shark actually on Twitter swimming like around the docks very slowly.
And they saw it like up to an hour before this happened.
Looking for food.
Sometimes, you know, they don't find fish to eat the person.
So, what do you do?
What would you do in this situation?
Well, if you were this kid out there, don't go into water.
If it's clear water, which it is out there, don't go into water without a mask, snorkel, and fins and bring a shark, Billy, with you to push a shark off, to discourage his attack.
You know, make him go somewhere else.
Fight him, something to fight him with.
But if you don't have any of that, like if you're just swimming with no fins, no mats.
Don't do it.
But I'm saying, if you already are, what the hell do you do?
Nothing.
You can't do anything about it.
That guy, no, he's a sitting duck.
He can't do anything about it.
That's in, you know, pray.
Pray to God that he changes, sends the sharks on a miracle.
Only a miracle can save him at that time.
What about, like, if hypothetically you're in that situation, do you try to charge it?
Do you try to swim towards it?
What do you try to do?
Grab its gills?
If he's in shallow water and you can run up to it and see him, you can kick him when he comes near you or something like that.
The water's like this deep.
But if you're over your head and everything, he comes from below.
You don't know where he's coming from.
You don't have a mask on.
You have no idea.
You're.
You're sitting in the blind.
You're sitting duck.
You're totally helpless.
But a skilled diver like those guys are hunting the cobias or myself, whatever, you can fight them off.
I've had to fight off sharks many, many times on the attacks.
I mean, super intense attacks.
If you're on the beach watching this, what were you doing?
I was too comfortable out there doing this kind of stuff.
Way, way, way too comfortable.
All my life, it was like a second nature to me.
To be in the middle of a shark feeding frenzy, it's like being in a party.
It was just, I enjoyed every minute of it.
But that's part of it too, though, because you're so calm.
The sharks don't sense any sort of fear.
Well, if you get excited, sometimes they back away.
It can affect them in different ways.
But the whole idea was for me to get the sharks fired up so they would come in aggressively to get footage.
They're often at distance.
You're not getting anything.
So you want the sharks on you.
Now, what that does, it puts everybody who's ever working with you in severe danger.
Right.
And people start to get scared too.
Well, if you have people with you that are not scared, they'll be right there with you.
There are people that are like that kind of stuff, and they'll stay right there.
Not everybody is willing to do that, but I give people a false sense of security when I was a little bit older.
Yeah, Steve O was talking about that.
Yeah.
Steve O was saying whenever they were in the water with you, he wasn't as scared because you were there.
He felt protected.
Yeah, he wouldn't pay attention.
I call it a false insecurity, but it works.
You get that, you know, he's more comfortable there.
I put him in bad stuff on a surfboard with a bunch of sharks, biting fish around a surfboard.
Didn't you tell me that he or Chris Pontius wanted to?
Be trolled through Boca Grande in a tarpon suit?
They told, I'm trying to remember everything they did.
They came up with a bunch of ideas that I didn't do all of the ideas they had.
I noticed one thing, we did troll Chris through a pack of killer whales in Alaska, which is probably the worst thing ever.
Everybody thinks killer whales are just, no, no, killer whales are dangerous.
They're dangerous.
The thing about it, I can bluff a shark, I can defend myself.
You believe most of those guys can, but killer whales are after you.
Then you're gonna be able to do anything.
I've never heard of a killer whale attacking a human being, have you?
Well, and in SeaWorld, one killed three people, right?
Yeah, that one murdered three people because of what they did to it.
They put it in prison.
What about if a killer whale in the ocean decides it doesn't like you or it feels like he doesn't have any laws, he doesn't have a rule book?
Okay, I'm not supposed to bother people.
Where does that he can just like any animal?
Listen, a horse can come up and kick you and bite you, right?
Okay, a dog will bite you sometimes, sometimes they won't.
Killer whales have different personalities.
Don't they like hunt great whites?
They kill great whites.
They know they're smart.
They know how to kill everything out there.
Just, you know, like if I'm going to catch a fish, strategically, you figure it out how to do it.
They strategically figure out, okay, that whale is bigger than us.
Well, we're going to gang up on it.
We're going to attack it this way.
They figure out how to do their hunt and how to get it.
Yeah.
So when you were, oh, yeah, and they beach themselves too.
They literally freaking swim up on the beach and eat shit, eat seals and stuff.
Look at that.
God.
Those things are crazy.
The wild world is a dangerous place.
You swam with orcas, right?
Yeah, in Alaska.
Walk me through that day and what you were doing and what made you decide to jump off the boat with a bunch of orcas.
We're making a show.
We need action.
We're doing Wild Boys and we went out whale watching.
So I put on my suit.
They go, okay, there's a pot of killer whales coming this way.
And I told the captain, okay, they're heading that way.
Take your boat, pull up in front, drop me off in their path so they'll intercept me.
And that's how we did that.
And they came real close to me.
The water was very dirty, so I could only see them when they were very, very close to me.
What visibility was like, what, four or five feet?
I don't think I could see you.
Wow.
That's how dirty it was.
God.
But I could see their fins and all that coming up.
And then finally, two of them approached me.
I could see the black and white on them real close up to me like that.
They stared at me up close, investigating me.
But all they got to do is just bite you.
That's it.
They're done.
They just grab on you and just drag you down.
Yeah, but when your adrenaline's running or doing a show, It's like the pressure is on.
Let's make things happen.
You want to do the best of what you want your job to be the best.
What was going through your head when those orcas were swimming right towards you?
Were you scared?
Were you comfortable?
Were you just full of adrenaline?
I wasn't.
I was full of adrenaline, but I shouldn't be comfortable.
I shouldn't do that again.
But at that time, the water was very dirty.
People did it later on in clear water, but I did it in dirty water.
And some people think everything, nothing is fine.
You feel like for a while, okay, we're okay.
We're fine.
They didn't hurt anybody.
We're fine.
Keep going.
Okay, we got what we want.
Let's just get out of here.
Enough is enough.
Oh, what is that?
Oh, is that an orca attacking a human at SeaWorld?
Yeah.
Jeez.
Yeah, that's brutal, man.
See, everything's okay one minute.
You don't know what a killer whale is thinking sometimes.
That's an intelligent animal.
Every animal, every alligator, we haven't talked much about alligators.
I spent many years among the alligators daytime, nighttime, diving with them at all hours, everything big ones, small ones, hand catching, riding, levitating.
Tonic and mobility, you name it.
Well, let's go into that.
I want to watch that video of you with the Makos real quick.
Okay.
That's one of the tabs where he's.
That's the one right there.
So, what were you guys doing this day?
This was filming for.
We're looking.
We're on the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
You can full screen this one, I think.
Yeah, in the Pacific Ocean.
And all the time they're asking me to talk about it.
I don't want to talk about it until it happens.
I don't know what's going to happen.
Is this off the coast of California?
Yeah, see, that's in Mako right there.
But you see, I hand feed and I put my hand underneath them and I lift up on them.
Okay, that's a smaller mako.
We had six makos and three blue sharks that day.
So you guys are chumming up barracuda and these fish in here.
Yeah, they actually chumming up here.
But what really does it, see that fish right there?
Yeah.
I'm going to take my knife and work it.
Right.
See what I'm doing right there?
That's what makes it happen.
That's what draws the sharks in.
Okay.
The knife is the secret for all that.
That's a small mako.
Okay.
So, yeah, that was the first one that showed up.
And you guys are just, you guys are literally surrounded by a chum tornado.
I grab this one and another one.
And then I flip a big one on his back.
This one, I lift him out of the water and I show him to everybody.
It is the fastest shark in the world.
The Mako.
Yeah, so you don't want to move fast.
So you want to let him get comfortable, like right there.
You want him to go slow, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
See, you just got to take it easy and don't move fast.
Let him come around you.
You don't want to scare him.
This one bites the float.
They get feisty.
Mako is very dangerous, but see, this Mako is never going to see another human being again.
He lives in the middle of the ocean.
Right, right.
So I like working with them because people say, well, Manny, you're working these sharks around the beach.
No, the Blues and Makos are not coming ashore.
I've worked coastal sharks before, but it's been a long time and I won't work them again.
If I do sharks again, it'll be open ocean.
That way, whatever I do with them, they don't learn, they don't pick up customs, they won't attack people on the beach.
They stay out in the ocean.
So people are safe.
You don't want them getting comfortable with humans.
Oh, yeah, you flipped it on its back.
Wow.
Yeah, those little teeth will make it.
Feeding this little Mako, and he's just shredding this fish right out of your hands.
That is wild.
So, yeah, that's the fear, right?
That's the fear when you interact with all these sharks all the time and you're swimming with them and spearfishing with them all the time.
They get used to human beings.
They're not afraid anymore.
If you're spearfishing, you're worse off because you're busy struggling with the Fish when the shark comes from behind and gets you.
The shark's an attack from behind when you don't see him.
Look at that thing.
What's that, like a 10 footer?
Probably about eight.
That's a nice size mako.
Always exaggerating on the shore.
We're not sure in the size, but it's probably about 300 pounds.
They're very heavy, a lot heavier than they look.
They're dense.
They're very muscular.
Were you ever close to being bit that day?
Or did they try to bite you?
One blue shark almost bit the producer.
A blue shark almost bit me in the stomach.
There's a scene in there where I'm pushing off a blue shark off my stomach as I'm feeding a Mako, and the blue comes in to bite both at the same time.
Okay, there's a blue shark.
Oh, what is that?
A blue shark, yeah.
We got three blue sharks.
What is the story with blue sharks?
They're deadly.
As deadly as Makos?
They're different.
They're both very dangerous, but a blue shark, if you offer him your hand, he'll take it.
Go here.
Are you going to bite this?
Just come up and he'll grab it.
Yeah, they're weird looking.
I'm hand feeding them right there.
So, you did this with Steve O and those guys too?
We did not this part.
What I did with them is I put them on a surfboard one time in the Gulf of Mexico.
We put a bunch of fish on them.
We had about 25 silky sharks and eight huge tuskies showed up.
I had them there.
I also had them with a Mako and a Hammerhead and Mako.
I put them with a Hammerhead and Mako in Louisiana also.
I did two in Louisiana and also put them before with a lemon shark in shallow water swimming around them.
So, I've had them about three different times.
With good, good shark stuff.
The make almost bit his leg off.
Hand Feeding Silky Sharks00:15:18
That was a classic.
Is that when you got bit by the lemon shark?
No, I got bit by a lemon shark when we used to dive on him from the boat.
Oh, okay.
At what point were you riding those great hammerheads?
That was, I sat one day and I looked at our footage and I said, I can ride these things.
And people said, You're not, no, you're not going to build it.
They're not going to let you do that.
And I went out planning on doing it and I did it.
Where were you?
In the keys.
In the keys.
So after that, I just rode plenty of hammerheads.
He doesn't have a bad temper.
I discovered that.
I rode a bull shark and I rode a short distance, and when I let go of that bull shark, bull shark went after me with everything he had.
Really?
I had to fight him off.
What did you have to fight him off?
My kicking him, punching him, everything you can imagine.
You didn't have a spear gun or anything, a knife or anything?
No.
That time, because we had pole spears for getting bait.
But a lot of times we'd drop everything and we were in there with our hands, you know.
But we were getting bait.
We had some stingrays that we had killed down there, and they devoured stingrays the whole time.
A bunch of bull sharks showed up that devoured it.
The water was very dirty too.
And I went down and I caught a ride on one of them.
It was a huge one.
And I knew that not to stay on it very long.
Do a very short ride or he's going to come and get you.
Same thing with the lemon.
Right.
He'll come back and get you.
Can you find footage of him riding the hammerheads?
Because that footage is wild.
Because the hammerheads are interesting too.
Would you, like the hammerheads, they never bite humans, do they?
They'll never attack a human on the beach.
I've never heard of a hammerhead.
Yeah, the hammerhead will attack.
They will?
Yeah, yeah.
All right, so we wanted to.
We were just looking at, we were trying to find the footage of you riding the hammerhead, but you rode a Mako.
So this is footage of you riding a Mako.
Hand catching.
It's hand catching a Mako.
You're hand catching a Mako shark.
Holy shit.
Yeah, take it from the first.
It shows you how I grab them at first.
So if you rewind like a little bit, maybe a minute.
Okay, look at that thing.
How big is that Mako shark right there?
That Mako is about, I'd say five and a half feet, about a hundred and something pounds.
This is a very strong shark.
It looks much bigger than five and a half feet.
It might be.
It might be.
It's very, I understand it, very dense.
It could be 180 pounds.
See how I, he just hugs me.
He just hugs me.
He just hugs me.
Yeah.
Because there he goes.
He's like, what the fuck is happening to me?
Yeah.
So, this is how you handcatch a mako shark.
He's not trying to bite you at all.
If you give him the chance, he will.
Manny, that is the most insane thing I've ever seen.
People that are just listening, Manny is hugging this.
Six foot Mako shark, and the thing is swimming full speed, and Manny is not letting go of it.
I'm going to let go when I get back.
I told the guy I'm going to end up back at the boat.
If I didn't have a camera with me or something I needed to eat, we would have kept him instead of letting him.
I'm going to let him.
There's a producer at the back.
Okay, now his mouth's open.
Yeah, I'm going to let him go.
But I would have tried to keep him.
But, you know, we got the footage.
You know that Mako stayed with us the rest of the day.
Did he really?
After you did that to him?
He hung out the rest of the day.
All the Makos stayed with us.
He's like, hey, Manny, come back.
I want seconds.
No, they don't really care.
This is another one that showed up.
They kept getting bigger ones and bigger ones.
That's a blue.
The blues are kind of goofy looking.
They're like little torpedoes.
Yeah, yeah, they are.
You know what else is a weird looking shark?
The thresher shark.
They're kind of goofy looking.
I've never seen one.
They can hit you with a tail.
That's what they do.
Yeah, they have a massive tail.
This is a classic shark, though.
This is like for fishermen when it's hooked, it'll jump 20 feet in the air, land in the boat, bite the fisherman.
The Mako?
Oh, yeah, they'll jump right into the boat.
Yeah, there's that girl, what's her name?
Ocean Ramsey.
I think she rides great whites.
Like she'll be like holding on to this great white riding it in Mexico.
I think it's in Hawaii.
Oh, that's in Hawaii.
There's great whites in Hawaii, really?
Yeah.
I think that some of those sharks, if they're well fed and all that, they're not hungry.
You can put your whole family on there.
You know, they're not going to do anything.
Her videos on Instagram are absurd.
She is swimming and like kissing these 20 foot tiger sharks on the mouth, like on the nose.
And they're like.
There's a lot of people doing that right now.
I was in Hawaii messing with them 20 something years ago before they were.
And she picked up where Jimmy Hall left off and everything, those guys.
But I was out.
I opened the door for the tigers.
Click that top one.
So, you can't do this unless you know for a fact that shark is well fed, right?
Like, you don't, you can.
They show the docile side.
I would fire the sharks up.
So, I did it different.
Right, right.
But still, to ride a great white.
You can ride one tomorrow.
If you get the wrong one the wrong time, it might not come out as well.
So they have like different personalities, each one.
Well, the shark is not being aggressive, it's not being hungry.
It's none of that.
He's just cruising.
Yeah.
She dives down and she grabs this great white by the dorsal fin.
At that point, if he wants to kill you, he can.
Oh my God.
At that point, it's like.
Jesus.
At that point, it's like riding a whale shark.
How big is that thing, Manny?
That's about as big as they get.
15 foot?
16, maybe.
More.
I think the biggest one ever taken was 19 and a half feet in Cuba.
It was long line when they were hunting for the liver.
Sharks were depleted back in 1945 completely.
The ocean was wiped out.
Then they came back.
Then they were depleted again.
And now they're back again.
So it's always been depending on the harvesting.
There's been a bunch of tiger sharks.
Attacking people in, I think in Hawaii recently.
There was that, you saw the video, the tiger shark attacking the guy in the kayak.
Yeah.
The thing just like torpedoes and grabs his kayak.
Hawaii in the old days, they've always had shark attacks there.
They have a higher tiger shark population than other areas.
They don't have bull sharks in Hawaii to compete with them.
This is it, yeah.
But that's crazy for a tiger shark to do that to a kayak.
Look at this.
You just had a full screen.
See, when that shark is acting like that, I've had them before where they attack the lower unit of the boat, they attack the cameraman.
Oh!
See, if you jump in with that shark at that moment, it may not be as docile.
If that shark sneaks upon you, it's not going to be pretty.
Right.
See the speed at which it comes?
You got to know, people who know, they know who to play with, who not to.
Right.
There was that.
There was a.
I told you another story recently.
There was this film crew that was out off one of the outer islands off of Oahu, and they were like scouting for a film shoot or whatever.
And they had one of those inflatable motor.
What is it called?
What are the inflatable boats called with the motors on them?
Oh, yeah.
Zodiac.
Yeah, the Zodiac.
They were in a Zodiac, and a tiger shark bit the Zodiac like a bunch of times, and the thing was deflating.
So they had to like haul ass back to shore.
They were like 300 yards or something off the beach.
So they had to like take the Zodiac.
Full speed back to the beach.
They got back just in time.
The tiger followed them all the way back to the beach.
These tiger sharks, these animals, they have behaviors that humans have never seen before.
When people think they know everything, they don't know anything.
They're going to do something you've never seen them do before.
They seem hungrier than they've ever been, though.
They seem like they're fucking with us more and more.
Well, if there's more sharks, they're going to wipe out their food supply.
Right, right.
And, you know, it's just like normal.
So there's more.
The more sharks there are, the less fish there are to go around.
Something like that.
In Brazil, there was.
People, it was a slaughterhouse.
They used to throw all the leftovers from the cows into the ocean, and the bull sharks would come and eat them.
They shut down the slaughterhouse, so the sharks moved on to the beach and started attacking people.
So that's another result of that.
We've always fed animals.
It's just in the last few years, people say, oh, it's bad to feed you all that.
But men, for hundreds of years, have fed wild animals.
We've always have.
Right.
We fed bears, we fed alligators, we fed deer.
Everything is out there.
Then in In my lifetime, I saw when all of a sudden, oh, that's a bad idea.
It became like a political thing.
Illegal to feed animals is bad.
They're getting accustomed to this, accustomed to that.
Back in the days, that's like, yeah, people went to Yellowstone to feed the bears.
They went to the Keys to feed the key deer and the Everglades National Park and fed the alligators.
That was normal behavior for humans to do.
It's a political thing because everybody is so against killing the sharks.
Like, don't fuck with the sharks.
Before they wanted to kill them all.
That's politics.
Now they don't want to kill them.
When everybody was killing them, when I was trying to film them, I'd say, guys, I told my friends, you know, we're going to fish them.
Don't kill them over here because they're trying to get footage.
You know, if they're dead, we can't film them.
You know, right.
Yeah, we need more.
I need sharks, you know, to, you know, it's like go get them somewhere else, you know.
That was my mentality.
I'd find a honey hole.
Okay, leave this spot alone for me and let me work this area where I can find them.
Because we'd go out time after time, we couldn't find them.
And I was an expert at drawing in sharks.
So there's a shark 10 miles away.
You're chumming them up, you couldn't find them.
And I'm an expert.
I was the best shark chummer on the planet.
Right.
I mean, I'm stupid at many things, but I was good at that.
So, if the president of the United States came to you, if President Joe Biden said, Manny Pwig, I want you to be in charge of all of the fisheries around the world.
You're in charge of conservation of all the sea life.
What would you make the rules for sharks?
I would do the smartest thing to do.
I don't want any species going extinct.
I would divide them up according to numbers and say, we can take this, we can't take this, so many of this, so many of that.
And I would encourage harpooning so people don't get the wrong type of shark.
Spirit fishing and harpooning.
Spirit fishing, harpooning.
Target exactly what you want.
Target exactly what you want.
A lot of people, you know, I'm not going to go against rotten real guys and everything, but, you know, some of the sharks they catch when they let them go, they're going to die anyways.
They've ran into death anyways.
But, you know, you kill one shark, another one's born to take its place.
None of the species that I know have people made extinct.
We didn't make the hammerhead go extinct.
We didn't make the lemon go extinct.
The bulls are not extinct.
The great whites didn't go extinct.
As a matter of fact, they come back.
So we haven't hunted a species in Florida into extinction.
The only thing we ran to extinction in Florida was the black wolf, the gray wolf, and the red wolf.
We wiped those out.
Now we got coyotes.
Now we got coyotes in Florida.
Now we got coyotes.
But our bear is still here in good numbers.
Lots of them.
Our Florida panther is coming back, which is a Florida mountain lion.
That's what it is.
Those animals are widespread over North America, including Florida.
But everything else, yeah, the boars were probably the Spaniards 500 years ago.
The boars?
Yeah.
They're good, the hogs.
They're good because that's what a panther eats.
If you get rid of them, the panther's going to eat the farmer's cow.
They're going to eat the deer.
The hunter's going to get pissed off at them because they're killing all the deer.
So don't wipe out the boars.
I don't want the panthers extinct either way.
So don't wipe them out.
I see everything as a renewable resource and a game animal.
If you cut a tree, another tree will grow.
But you don't abuse anything.
But you can harvest so many pounds of fish, so many pounds of this as food.
The ocean is not a natural park.
You know, God made us so we could catch fish and eat.
You know, I have my views.
This planet is not overpopulated.
We can have dense populations in one place like Miami.
Maybe there's a lot of people there, but overall, the entire planet, we're not overpopulated.
You know, that's fallacy.
We have a lot of wildlife.
We have a lot of good land.
A lot of this planet produces a lot of food and properly managed.
We got room for double what we have, triple what we have as far as human beings.
I was reading something recently.
There was like a study.
Or, uh, there was a statistic that if you took all the human beings on earth shoulder to shoulder, you could fit them all inside the city of Los Angeles.
That's how few humans there are.
Yeah, that's like nine billion.
Yeah, you can.
Population has dropped the last 10 years or so.
We're losing people.
Yeah.
It's a lot to do with like the plastics and shit.
That's why we drink this, the water out of cans, not plastic.
The phthalates and the plastics and like all the chemicals.
It's a lot, it's a culture.
You know, people are not having kids.
Yeah.
And some people, yeah, they're bent on wars.
You know, probably in Russia, Ukraine, it's about a quarter of a million dead people, both sides there.
Easy.
You know, so yeah, that's a lot of people that would have been alive.
It wasn't for the war.
You know, you get a war, people die.
You know that tiger shark that killed that guy?
That was a Russian guy.
And there was footage of him when he was right before he got eaten by that tiger shark.
I guess he was palling around in a kayak like 10 minutes before that.
And he was talking shit about Ukrainians.
And then he gets eaten by a tiger shark.
Yeah, you know, people, in all reality, I don't know.
I respect human life.
I'm a Christian.
I do animals, you can kill them for food.
I don't believe in abusing animals, torturing or anything like that.
But yeah, hunting for food, growing cows for food is fine.
Growing crops, harvesting lumber, it'll slow down the fires.
Trees grow back.
Recycling a forest makes everything.
Humans are not just damaging.
When you clear land, let's say for cattle in Florida, that brings more grass.
When you got more grass, you got more deer, more hogs.
Then you got more panther, more bobcat.
When you have a very virgin forest, it has less wildlife.
We go in the ocean, we sink a wreck.
Fish come and live there.
Right.
So a lot of what we do helps out.
We dig a canal, there's a drought, the fish go in the canal.
If not, a lot of the fish would have died.
So, not everything, the deer, there's more deer around the farm than in the middle of the forest because the farm has got sources of food.
So, for every deer we had in North America now, we got 30 more than in a time when the European settlers first got here.
But Papalangia deer has grown 30 times over.
For every one they had, we got 30 now.
That's how much deer we have because.
Woods and farm, woods and farm, woods and farm.
Yeah, one of the biggest, one of the most controversial topics surrounding this debate is the Amazon rainforest in like down in Brazil and in the Amazon.
It's a bunch of baloney.
Farm Deer vs. Forest Animals00:06:06
When I was a little boy, you know, I can go back.
The Amazon was going to be gone in 10 years.
So it's completely destroyed.
They were cutting and burning it like you could see from outer space.
I was like, I was, oh, wow, they're going to wipe out the Amazon.
That's terrible.
They're going to be no animals left.
They're going to do it.
This is me back then.
When you were 10?
Yeah.
Now the Amazon is the same.
If anything, it's bigger.
There's animals like crazy.
Look at Pantanalis.
Every 10 feet is a jaguar nowadays.
Well, they wiped out all the Cayman.
So the jaguars started tagging the cows and they shot the jaguars.
Now the Cayman are back.
The jaguars are laying off the cows mostly and eating the Cayman in Pantanal.
But the jaguars, have you seen the footage?
It's just like this.
They're like 20 feet away from the guys.
No, it happens.
Oh, yeah.
Look at my phone every day.
So there's my buddy Paul Rosalie.
He wrote that Mother of God book.
He moved down to the Amazon like when he was in his late teens and he started living down there.
And he's been like following what's been going on.
And it's crazy how many more roads there are now, 20 years later, and how many people are coming in.
Like the Chinese are coming in and contracting all the locals there to cut down all the trees and sell them off.
Well, they're going on Indian land, which that land belongs to, you know, if you own a ranch, it's your ranch.
If the Indians have a plot of land, you know, that's your ranch.
You know, private property.
Yeah, they're just stepping on, well, they're burning the Chinese, this communism kicking in there again.
They're going to wreck the place.
But yeah, but all those roads, guess what?
The jungle will grow over that in 10 minutes, you will leave it alone.
Right.
The wildlife will come back.
Right, but they're not going to be clear.
Well, sooner or later, something will happen.
They'll leave it alone.
If you clear a forest.
Something will happen, like our species will get wiped out.
If you clear a forest, like in the Amazon, when the grass starts to grow, all the animals of the forest will be there eating that.
So when you, yeah.
In Florida, when you burn a field, you burn it down, you go back.
Three, six months and all the deer and hogs are there.
They're eating the new grass growing.
So the forest has to be recycled.
So when you do that, in certain parts of the Amazon they get burnt, they get cut down.
When it starts to grow back, that's where all the animals go.
The the pure Pure, Virgin forest doesn't support that much wildlife in Russia.
Yeah, it doesn't.
They go to where the people in Russia when they started cutting down all the trees to sell them.
Oh wow, they're destroying the taiga forest.
There's more grass.
Yeah, the stag population exploded, so then the wolf population went up to 200 000.
Because that was so much stag.
Wow.
In other words, if there's a lot of fish out there, you're going to get a lot of sharks.
If there's a lot of hogs in the woods, you're going to get panthers.
You know, it's an area with a lot of fish and game, you're going to get alligators.
The animals or the deer, if you have a cornfield in the middle of a forest, all the deer are going to be there.
Right.
And they're going to grow bigger eating that corn.
Right.
So whatever will, like the Native Americans that lived in the East, They didn't have to go in the woods to get a deer.
They grew corn.
So all they had to do was wait on the edge of the cornfield and bore an arrow and they could get all the deer they wanted.
Right.
Because they were going to come there.
Nobody ever thought of that.
But that's typical.
If it's like that now, it was like that back then.
Nothing has changed.
Right.
That's interesting.
People have a lot of fallacy about everything, about the wildlife and what to do about it and how to manage it and this and that.
They go from extreme to extreme.
They go from exterminate everything to overprotect everything.
They don't seem to do things properly.
The way it should be done.
Over the years i've taken a lot of interest and that kind of stuff is.
I've been watching it all my life and I kept track.
When I was a kid there were 8 000 polar bears.
I was into it back then.
I looked it up.
Now there's between 30 and 50 000.
When I was a kid, by the time I was in high school, the leopard population in Africa Sub-sahara was about 50 000.
They were getting wiped out for the skins.
Now there's about 700 000 leopards.
The tiger population was down to 2 000 last year, went up to 3 000 overnight one year In India.
The Jala tiger, when I was a kid around, completely extinct.
So a few areas, they were completely annihilated, but other areas, grizzly bear populations, 120,000 worldwide, including 6,000 in Japan.
Most people don't know that.
There's 6,000 grizzlies live in Japan.
Whoa.
Does anybody talk about it?
No.
Are people worried about grizzlies being endangered?
They were back then.
The Mexican grizzly was wiped out.
When I was a kid, there were still some there.
I kept track of that.
A lot of different species like that.
Mexican wolf, I think it was completely wiped out.
They're trying to bring it back.
Jaguars in North America, there's a few in Arizona.
They used to be in Texas.
There's no Cayman up there in some of these areas.
There's a few alligators, but they're eating cattle, so the ranchers shot them all.
So there's none, except a few in Arizona.
They're crossing the border from Mexico.
Mountain lion is found from Canada to Argentina.
Patagonia, southern Argentina, through the Amazon deserts, every type of terrain you can find near their mountains, lowlands, everything.
Wow.
Yeah, it's crazy how much different information you can find when you try to search for this kind of stuff.
It's just like it's really hard to find the information.
You got to go to all over the place.
You got to go to old, old information from the old days so they don't change it and go to the archives because somebody will grab the book and rearrange it.
Right.
So I go back to what I knew back then.
I'm a history fanatic.
Most people don't know that.
But I like to read the history.
I like to read my Bible.
I'm a firm believer in Jesus Christ.
And Definitely.
History, Faith, and Fisheries Management00:15:23
We're supposed to manage the fisheries, the forest, food, and all that, not to destroy it, not to wipe it out, or not to treat it like a god where you can't.
Some people want to make the entire ocean to a national park.
It's like, what are we going to eat?
Do they really?
Some people do, yeah.
They want to save everything.
They think the humans are a scourge of the earth and they need to get rid of the world population and get rid of people because they're bad.
As a Christian, I don't believe that.
Mm hmm.
But people who don't, you know.
Well, I mean, it's.
I can see their perspective for sure.
I mean, we are kind of like a cancer on the earth.
We're just eating up the earth.
And our history, look at what we've done, like with the way we devour everything.
Because we're sinful.
We're sinful.
We kill each other.
Never mind what we do.
We do wild animals.
We're killing each other.
We have.
People need to respect other people, respect life in general.
And.
But no, wildlife is.
Is a renewable resource and certain areas need to be protected, other areas need to be open and back and forth.
Yeah, but there's nothing wrong with raising cattle, there's nothing wrong with growing rice, there's nothing wrong with fishing.
I used to commercial fish myself and we sold the fish.
So back then, everybody, oh, meat is bad for you, so everybody's eating fish, and then they're complaining, oh, they're eating all the fish.
But before, there was fish everywhere, nobody liked fish, everybody wanted beef.
Then they started telling, beef is bad for you, became a little thing, you gotta eat fish, it's healthy.
So the next thing you know, everybody, the commercial guys on the ocean, then they ravish, wipe out the sea.
And everybody goes, whoa, you guys said you stop eating beef and start eating fish.
Now they're complaining about it.
You know, see the insanity of the whole thing.
Yeah, it really is insanity.
Do people really eat barracuda?
Yeah.
How many people?
Because I've never.
Cubans.
It's a Cuban thing.
I've eaten a lot of barracuda in my time.
It's one of my favorite fish.
You said it tastes good.
It's really good fish.
But what about sigilterra poisoning?
That's the problem.
Now, why do they have cigotera and what is cigotera poison?
Cigotera is a toxin passed up the food chain.
It starts with little fish eating it off the coral and then a barracuda.
The older the fish gets, the bigger he is and older, the more of that toxin he accumulates.
When he has too much of that toxin in his body, it becomes poisonous to human consumption.
It doesn't hurt the fish.
It looks perfectly fine.
But if you eat it, you'll get real sick.
And why do barracudas have it?
It ain't just barracudas, grouper, snapper, amberjack, kingfish.
They all have it.
Any big predatory fish in the tropics can have it.
It's called tropical fish poisoning.
It grows in the tropics.
The further north, the less likely you'll get to see what they're on unless a barracuda swam from the Bahamas to North Carolina.
Right, right.
Which it could happen.
And then somebody caught a nadir over there and he got sick as all get out.
But if they're up in that area, none of that grows there.
So it's less likely they'll get it there.
But eat at your own risk.
But it seems like people associate.
With barracudas more than anything.
It's like it's politics.
It's just a reputation.
Yeah, yeah.
A lot of people never got it from a barracuda.
They got it from a grouper.
I never got it from a barracuda.
I got it from a grouper.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
What is it like when you have it?
What were your symptoms?
Diarrhea, nonstop.
Things that are cold feel hot.
It affects your nerves.
It's really messed up, and it takes a long time to get over it.
How long?
It could be years to finally get over it, you know.
And if you eat another fish that has a little bit on it, you'll get their symptoms right back.
Really?
So you got to stay off of fish for a long, long time.
I was eating freshwater fish for a very long time.
What does barracuda taste like?
It tastes like.
I'll compare to snook.
Really good, huh?
Better than kingfish.
Oh, way better.
That's wild.
No, it's a great fish.
In certain places, like in Central America, I talked to some people with Siwatera.
I never heard of that.
They ate all the barracudas they caught.
There are places that people eat them and they don't know.
Siwatera doesn't grow everywhere, it's only in certain areas.
So if you catch one in the Carolinas or in Florida, a small one, you should be fine?
You should be fine.
You should be, but.
I'm not responsible for it.
Right.
You don't condone it, right?
I don't know.
You can do it.
I just don't.
Like I tell people, you want to swim with sharks is a great idea, but they're dangerous.
If they bite you, I'm giving you a heads up warning.
Well, you told me it was fine.
No, no.
I'm telling you right now, swimming with alligators or sharks is deadly.
Picking up venomous snakes is deadly.
All that free diving for spearfishing, you can black out.
You can get attacked by sharks.
Sharks are not misunderstood.
Put this in your head.
It's a very dangerous predatory animal.
You know, it makes it the sea unsafe.
Simple as that.
Do I like sharks?
Yeah, I think they're magnificent, whatever, but they are dangerous.
And same thing with alligators.
They're magnificent, all that, but they're dangerous.
Now, alligators are very well managed in Florida.
They're not protected?
They are protected unless you get your license.
When season comes around, you get a tag, you get your license, you can hunt it.
So they don't let you just squat and fill up a truck with them.
You know, you got to have follow the rules and regulations, which is, Orchestrated to protect the alligator as a natural resource and a game animal in Florida.
You know, his big money in gator hunting and gator farming and the whole nine yards is a valuable resource, but he's also a very dangerous resource.
The alligators, 400 years ago, when the French naturalist came to Florida, he couldn't cross St. John's River in a canoe without getting attacked by alligators.
They attacked the Indians in broad daylight.
They're very aggressive, very dangerous.
After 400 years of people shooting them, They tend to shy away from people.
When I was a kid, alligators didn't attack people.
You could read in a book, they don't attack people.
As soon as they were protected and their numbers started coming back and it started getting more abundant, attacks started happening left and right.
So alligators do attack people.
Look at the history.
They did, when they came back, they started doing it again.
So then they started hunting again to slow down the attacks.
But for a while there, they were attacking people left and right.
Now they got a nuisance control that if he's in the city, He's in your swimming pool or in your canal in your backyard, whatever.
They remove him before he attacks somebody, kills your dog or your kid or you.
You know, just last month, somebody got devoured by an alligator, arm ripped off.
I saw that there's video of it.
Yeah, there's all kinds of people getting attacked all the time.
I've been attacked a bunch of times by gators.
I spent more time in the early days with the alligators and even the sharks.
Really?
I encountered sharks, I started working hunting sharks at 25.
In my 40s, I started interacting with sharks.
But I was hand catching alligators since high school, all the way until the later years.
Now, what is your process if you're, you know, one weekend you feel the urge to go catch an alligator in the wild in some lake in Florida?
How, what is the process in going about catching a gator by hand?
Well, back in the day, I would dive on them, have somebody hold the light on them.
I come running and dive on them at night, tackle them, hold them any way, any way I could.
Suicide attack, basically.
Now, I levitate the alligator, I back away from them, grab them, back away from them.
And when he tires a little bit, then I take him down.
So, only at night though?
No, I can do it in the daytime.
Underwater now, I can go get an alligator underwater.
Okay.
Anytime I want.
Do I do it nowadays?
Not really.
I haven't done it since TV shows.
I've avoided it.
I'm an artist.
You know, I already lost a finger to a rattlesnake.
I got bit by an alligator in the back.
The good Lord told me, enough is enough.
I was swimming down a canal.
I got ambushed.
So, I got bit by a rattlesnake.
I got bit by an alligator and caught by a hog all within a couple of years towards the end of my time doing all this kind of stuff.
It's sometimes okay, the Lord does something, keep you humble, slow down.
I got a family now, so I got more responsibility, so I focus more on my artwork.
Pull up one of those videos of Manny levitating a giant alligator.
Was that the canal monster?
I think there might not be.
Canal monster is one of my biggest.
I have a tab pulled up for the canal monster, I believe.
I got the two biggest gators one is in North Florida, and this one is.
In South Florida, okay.
Can you give us a little bit of volume?
Yeah, he's already gone under, so I'm gonna.
So, you okay?
So, you are just this canal is full hydrilla on the bottom.
Yeah, I seen him from the van, I encountered him twice.
Carefully watching for any signs of the monster, and then, like a ghost, he begins to materialize.
He has left the bank and is facing directly at us.
On the surface.
Yeah.
I like the voiceover.
Is he really arching his back?
Yeah.
This thing is literally swimming right towards you.
Right.
But if he's going to attack you, he's not going to just be chilling on the surface like that, is he?
He's going under now.
Oh, now he's going under.
As he sinks below the surface, I dive all the way to the bottom.
Get below him and grab him by the shin.
Oh my god.
You just grabbed him by his neck fat.
Skin of his neck.
That's like a what?
15 footer?
13 plus.
They haven't seen a 15 foot alligator, I think, in Florida.
Oh, really?
The record is 14 foot and a half around there.
Not much bigger than that.
So, if you move it forward, I'm going to run him out of there, but I'm still killing time.
But he goes into a hydrilla and I levitate him one more time all the way to the surface.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, just move it a little bit.
So he's hiding in a little cove right now in the mangroves.
Yeah, no, he's going to go.
I can't get to him, so I'm going to try to get him out of there.
I can't even.
I can pick up an alligator by the scoot just when he's so big, I can't.
Oh, my God.
And he's not even doing anything.
Even though you're fucking with him, he's just laying there.
Yeah.
Alligators that big are great to work with and very deadly.
If he bites you, he will crush everything in your body.
That thing will kill a horse or a cow.
That will drag a whole cow in the water.
An alligator that big will.
Oh, he's trying to escape.
He's trying to run away.
Yeah, I'm going to run him out of there.
See, I'll pick him up.
God, things are Goliath.
I'll pick him up once or two or three times and no more because then he'll attack you.
Still trying to escape on the very bottom.
Well, no, he goes into the hydrilla.
Now I got to go find him in the hydrilla.
He's like, Manny, please just leave me alone, bro.
I'm just trying to take a nap.
How long can they hold their breath for?
The whole day, one that big forever.
How long?
Hours after hours, they can hold their breath.
A big one like that.
That's incredible.
Are there any other animals that can hold their breath for that long?
Uh, sperm whale.
Oh, yeah, whales, obviously.
Yeah, they go one hour on the bottom a mile deep to find squid.
Look at this.
You just got him right out of the hydrilla.
See, when I put the head straight up, he goes into tonic immobility, just like a shark.
So, when you put his head vertically like that.
He's like sort of in a trance.
Yeah.
He gets it for a few seconds.
He's out of it.
But see, once I hit the surface, he exploded.
Right.
But you can see the size of him as he has spun around him.
Oh, my God.
But I've done this so many times over the years.
I had so much time with the alligators.
Now he's gone.
No, he's cruising.
Yeah, producer's running.
He's got the camera on him right now, he's chasing him.
Looking at him.
He's talking about it.
See?
Do you think that you're more.
By the time I told Quid, no, no, no more.
Leave him.
Back off.
Right, right, right.
He's pissed now.
Do I think what?
I'm saying, are humans more vulnerable in the water with a gator or like right next to the shore?
In the water, probably.
Because on shore, you can jump back or do something.
You're more clumsy in the water.
The alligator is very agile in the water.
You know, he can catch fish underwater, he's super fast.
But they can run extremely fast, can't they?
Short, no, just a short burst from here to here.
Just a short burst.
He's not going to catch you.
If you see him coming down the road at you, just run the other way.
He's not going to catch you.
Really?
Everyone, I've always heard that if you run in zigzags, they can't make sharp turns.
Run straight.
If you're behind a tree or something or a post, you get behind him.
He's got to get around it so you can always get around it.
He can't get around it, you know.
Levy's here.
He's got to attack this way.
He's got to back way so you can get on this side.
So you're going to be around the post.
All day long.
Oh, okay.
Like a telephone pole.
He can't get you.
No, if you use your brain, he can't bite you.
Right.
If you get behind the telephone pole, it goes this way, you go this way, you go this way.
Right, right, right, right.
He can't get you.
And what happened when you actually got bit by one?
I felt like somebody hit me with a baseball bat across my back.
I was swimming down a canal and I was looking for fish to hand catch.
I already levitated a couple alligators that day and I got lazy.
Didn't look behind me.
You're supposed to look behind you in case one is sneaking up on you.
And sure enough, one came behind me and bit me in the back.
I felt like a bomb went off on my back.
He didn't get a good grip on me.
If he would have got hold of my arm, he would have ripped it off.
But he kind of like slipped away from my wetsuit, pulled away with it.
And he put 12 scratches on my back and a bruise here.
He didn't get a good grip on me.
And I was able to get away from him, and I came out pretty good from that one.
I went after him, chased him off.
Oh, you charged him?
Cotton Mouths and Canal Crocodiles00:03:36
Yeah, come from the bottom.
Right after he did that?
Yeah, grabbed him by the neck and all that and went with him to the bottom, and then he took off.
What?
Well, in order to turn around over so he doesn't come after me again.
And then I was able to get on the airboat, and I said, if I could get an airboat, You know, kick up on the side, I might be okay when I pull my wetsuit back.
They took a picture.
Okay, it's not that bad.
But I said, I got to get in and put bleach on it and everything's.
Because they can infect you.
Yeah.
But when I saw it wasn't that bad, it came out very good out of it.
They just poured some liquor on it and you were good?
Yeah, it came out very good from that one.
Good Lord.
Now, what about crocodiles?
What's the difference between crocodiles?
And have you ever fucked with a crocodile before?
Crocodiles are faster, but they don't have the endurance of an alligator.
That's what I know about them.
Hmm.
The alligators, a guy from a fishing wallet told me a long time ago when they use a caption for tagging and all that, the alligators fight twice as hard.
Really?
That's fascinating.
I know in like Costa Rica, the crocs are a big problem.
Even when you surf near the river mouths, like they chill out there on the beach.
It's the same crocs we have here.
I've never seen a croc here.
They're here.
I've seen them.
Really?
Oh, God.
Not on the beaches, though.
I've seen them underwater and Key Largo, the mangroves, Flamingo, it's a good place to see them.
Okay.
Yeah, they're all over Turkey Point, Key Biscayne, Coral Gables.
There's a lot of them around Coral Gables and all that Miami and the canals.
Right.
And Biscayne Bay, Florida Bay, all that area has got all the way in the Keys, all the way to Big Pine, all those crocodiles all through there.
Right.
They just can't handle it.
They swam over from Cuba, so it's invasive.
Right, right.
Listen, everything's invasive.
Everything is, yeah.
Yeah, either we brought them or they came on their own.
Coyotes came on their own, manatees came on their own, and crocodiles came on their own.
They all came from Cuba.
Yeah.
And they're in what a coincidence.
They're found in South Florida, Cuba, and Jamaica.
What does that tell you?
In Haiti.
Right.
American crocs, and in Costa Rica.
And both sides of the Pacific.
So, but it's the same crocodile.
The acutest American crocodile.
It's a very big crocodile, by the way.
What is, are there a lot of deadly snakes in Florida, like rattlesnakes and stuff like that?
Where is the biggest population of Maine killer snakes?
In Florida?
Or in just the U.S. in general?
Probably California's got a lot of rattlesnakes.
Really?
They got the Southern Pacific rattlesnake.
I've played with those before.
That thing bites you, you're going to be bleeding out of your eyes, nose, and ears, and everything.
It dissolves your brain.
It's horrific.
Those are in California?
Yeah, Southern Pacific rattlesnake.
Now, in Florida, we have the biggest rattlesnake, the Eastern Diamondback.
It's a dangerous rattlesnake.
It's found here.
We have the cottonmouth, and we have the coral snake, and we have the pygmy rattlesnake, the smallest, the biggest.
And then in North Florida, you get a few copperheads and a timber rattlesnake, which is a canebrake in North Florida.
But in South Florida, it's only four species.
Okay.
Two types of rattlesnakes.
Coral snake and cotton mouth and water moccasin is the same animal.
Yeah, those things are swimming around in the lakes and stuff.
Yeah, now if a cotton mouth bites you, it'll rot your way.
Snake Venom and Hospital Runs00:07:51
A rattlesnake, if you get bit by Eastern Diamondback, you don't go to the hospital, you're going to die.
Simple as that.
You get bit by any venomous snake.
Just go to the hospital.
But what?
If you don't die, you may lose a hand or an arm or who knows what.
So, a cotton mouth.
If you get bit by a cotton mouth, there's no saving you?
Yeah, go to the hospital.
Go to the hospital, you could potentially be saved.
Yeah, yeah.
It'll save you.
Survive it.
You may get permanent damage in your hand or your leg.
Is there any snake that if it bites you, there's no chance, even if you do go to the hospital?
If you have everything right there ready to go, you'll survive.
By a cobra in the jungles of India, you don't have anything to save it, you're going to die.
A coral snake, it'll kill you unless you get any venom or get in a respirator because it paralyzes your lungs.
Coral snake is like the same venom as a cobra.
What kind of snake did you get bit by when you lost your finger?
Western Diamondback, which is like the second biggest rattlesnake.
And you were.
Where was that?
Texas?
Texas.
What was going through your mind when that rattlesnake bit you?
When that rattlesnake bit me, I said, I messed up.
I'm calm, but it's like depressing.
Okay, your trip is over.
All the plans you had are over.
You're in big trouble.
Right.
If you look at the video, when it shows me getting bit, real wild, yeah.
It shows me getting bit.
I look real calm.
I'm holding that rattlesnake in my hand.
I told the producer, hey, got me.
And he goes, You're kidding.
No.
I kind of like, I didn't want to tell him, but you know, I got to tell him.
I was like embarrassed to tell him that it got me, you know?
That's it right there.
That's the one?
Yeah.
It was very tight into the snake.
The snake filled the entire frame.
And as he reaches in to pin its head.
He got me to see it.
It was so lightning fast.
It was so powerful that everything just went crazy.
And I could see Manny did get control of it.
But my heart was racing, and I was really hoping that he hadn't been bit.
But I couldn't really tell.
He had no clue.
You can see it here.
Oh no, I missed it.
Well, you had that little camera in there.
Yeah.
Turn the volume up a little bit.
Oh.
That snake just started moving and twisting, and it was such a powerful animal.
And I knew that Manny was in trouble.
I just didn't want to believe it.
Oh my god.
For him to come up and say, Okay, here's the snake and bring it up.
And instead, I heard him say, I got hit, and it just, my heart sank to my stomach.
When we came upon the snake, look at that guy.
That's Mark Mendel.
He's famous.
He's got a great beard.
He's a professional.
I mean, he never misses a click.
So, as I watched him, his methods and his techniques, I knew he was going to be able to get it done.
So, as he went for the grab, the snake was so huge, he got the grab perfect.
I mean, the snake's head was this big.
And the grab was perfect, but the snake was so.
That wasn't perfect.
I needed to be closer.
See right there?
Oh, yeah.
That second time, this was going to be a fight for his life because the snake was just giant and the venom amounts were just huge.
I mean, it had to pump everything it had into him.
And he calmly looks me in the eye and says, You got me?
You're smiling.
And a chill ran down my spine.
It was like being kicked in the chest.
And I knew what Manny was in for.
He was in serious trouble.
And we are a long way from a hospital.
We're 50, 60 miles from the hospital.
You got that?
Yeah.
From that moment on, I knew it was critical that.
What is that sound?
He's going to die.
I mean, this wasn't a little snake bite that when you're dove hunting or just out walking around, he gets you, you know, because that's just a quick strike and the amount of venom is just enough to kill like a small rat or a rabbit.
This was a huge fang viper that injected everything he had into Manny.
Give me the tongs.
Give me the snake tongs.
Okay, we got a new family.
Once we realized what had happened, our main concern, the entire crew, was.
Get managed to the hospital as quickly as possible.
Every second counts.
So, what was going on right here with your hand?
How did it feel?
So, the pain is an unbearable pain.
Just like, you know, you want to shoot yourself, but pain is so bad.
So, you're immediately after that, you're rinsing your hand with water.
They're all getting you to the car, and it's just unbearable pain in your hand.
Unbearable pain.
Then go to the hospital, and then the pain lasted for months and months, just wouldn't go away.
So, right away, what did you do?
Did you have a tourniquet around your arm, or what did you do?
No, you're not supposed to do anything.
Really?
I put a cold chicken on it, but not even supposed to do that.
You're supposed to leave it alone.
No tourniquet?
You're supposed to leave it alone.
No tourniquet.
No tourniquet will rot you out even more.
Really?
Yeah.
So you just let it roll.
You just sit there?
Let it roll until your body can fight it.
And how long was the car ride back to the hospital?
They did it pretty fast.
They were going 110 miles an hour.
They did, I was like 70 miles away, but they got me there in like, I don't know, real quick.
Oh my God.
It was about 45 minutes or an hour before they started getting the venom in me, probably about an hour.
I was sitting around, come on.
Could you imagine having to get to the emergency room?
Like, oh, yeah, sure, take a number, wait in line.
Yeah, they were like, real relaxed to the hospital.
Guys, I need about a 55 gallon drum of antivenom.
Like, now.
I'm going to be dead in like 15 minutes.
We need you to hurry up.
So they went in there to put antivenom in you.
And then what happened after that?
Then I stayed there for several days, four days.
Buck took me to his house.
I was in his house.
I couldn't get on an airplane and go home.
I was in so much pain.
So two weeks later, I went home.
And my brother in law saw me cleaning my finger and he saw a finger and he said, You need to go to the hospital.
I took him to the hospital and then the doctor said, You got to take that finger off.
It's rotting away.
How long after was it?
Probably about a month.
It was rotting away.
So it was just all black where you got bit?
Yeah.
You can take them off if you want.
My ear is hurting.
No, it's okay.
We can take them off.
So you went to the hospital.
Yeah.
What was that?
What did they do?
The same day you went in, they amputated it?
No, no.
Oh, when I went to amputate it?
Yeah, they kept me overnight.
Come a little closer.
They kept me overnight and they amputated the finger.
And I told the doctor, well, do it as quick as you can so I can get over this, you know.
And I said, he goes, well, I can take the whole bone out and make it look better.
No, I don't care.
How is the hand more efficient?
I don't care what it looks like.
He goes, if the finger does survive, it's going to be like a hook.
You're going to get in a traffic accident when you're driving.
So to make your hand more useful.
You got to take it off.
So that was it.
And how long did the pain last after they amputated it?
When I levitated a large alligator, I was already missing the finger.
Wow.
But was like the sharp pain there for a while after they did the amputation?
Month after month after month.
I forgot how long it was.
It was just a never ending pain.
The hand was swollen forever.
It was swollen every morning and try to stretch it.
The pain was unbearable.
It was just like I couldn't pick up a cup of coffee and it would fall out of my hand.
My hand was so weak.
Good Lord.
No more of that.
You're retired.
Trident Art and Missing Fingers00:07:02
You're officially retired from catching snakes and alligators and sharks.
And you're just focusing on your art now.
Focusing on my art, sticking with that.
That's a gift that God gave me.
I was an artist since I was a little boy.
I was always in school.
I had terrible grades except for art class.
I was always the number one student in the art class.
So I was into art, wild animals.
That's what I like.
I wasn't into sports, you know, basketball, baseball, or any of that.
I mean, it's great.
I like it.
Athletes are great and all that.
I'm happy for them, but it was never my thing.
I'm not into it.
The wild, the sea, and the forest was always my thing.
Now, do you ever just like want to go out and just catch a fish on a rod and reel?
Traditionally, or is that just too boring for you?
Sometimes, like, I go out with my friend sometimes gigging tilapia at night from the airboat, throwing a trident at him.
And that's like, okay, we go out and have a great time with the guys, catch a bunch of tilapia, take them home, fillet them, and eat fresh fish.
That's more like my idea of hunting nowadays.
Right.
I don't want to get big fish anymore.
I want to get medium sized fish, just stuff to take home to eat.
My idea before was the action for the video, but I've done so much of it that why am I going to do anymore?
I'm not going to top what I've already done.
Right.
Pretty much.
So I've done it.
Everybody's out there messing with the sharks and everything right now, but I was doing that 20 something years ago.
So I was ahead of the game and all that.
I mean, God bless them all, and they're all into it now, but it's, yeah, it's a dangerous thing.
But everybody wants, but there's so many people doing it.
It's kind of like you want to do what nobody else is doing.
At the time I was doing it, nobody was really into that kind of thing to the point that I was doing it.
What made you want to specifically design these tridents?
Like, what is the tactical advantage of having a trident, these three pronged?
People that don't know what it is, once you grab that trident you just made me for me and show and pull it up so people can see it.
This is a trident.
This is one of my specialties of work that I do.
I make this out of 316 stainless.
These were done to catch fish, to hunt.
The first trident I designed, big one, was to hunt wild boar.
Because when you throw it, instead of one point, you got three points coming out.
And that's like that giant one on the wall back there that you made me.
That's for catching a wild boar.
Wild boar, alligators.
Yeah, that one's probably got alligators before.
That one's heavy as shit.
I can barely hold that thing.
Well, you use that weight and momentum for a hunter.
I caught alligators by hand, but when we took out, you know, I guided take out alligator hunters, these guys, okay, they want to get an alligator, a trophy gator, whatever.
They can use a gun or they can use a trident on private land.
And a lot of them would use the trident.
They would mount the gator, pack the meat, take the skin or meat home with them.
And then a lot of times they bought the trident.
Now, when you hit a gator with a trident like that or like This, do you have to like aim for a specific part of their head?
No, if you hit them in the head, it'll bounce off.
Oh, you can't hit them in the head, no, in the body, so it'll hold them.
And then you got to cut the vertebrae here with a knife or an axe.
So, when you hit them in the body with the trident, you like in the back or something, yeah, it's got a rope on it and you hold it, it's got a rope, and they take off.
No, they don't take off with a trident, they take off with a harpoon tip, and then you got to follow them for a while.
When you hit them with a trident, they stay in the same place and they just spin around and twist.
It uh, they don't maneuver well, it does it quicker.
Oh, okay.
The trident actually, the harpoon they use doesn't actually kill them.
The trident does.
So after you hit them with the trident, they twist around and they tire out, and then you have to jump on them and you have to.
Well, pull them out and have the guy.
You know, this is a guy who's hunting.
He wants to go on a primitive hunt.
He could have used his rifle, he can use a bone arrow, he can use a trident.
We left the option for him to do, if we want to do a primitive hunt with a trident.
And, you know, a lot of times they do.
But I like medieval stuff.
I like history.
I like ancient weapons.
I mean,.
Tridents were used for fishing.
That was originally what they were for.
But the Roman gladiators decided to use them on each other.
So, you see that in the arena, gladiators are fighting each other with these things, which isn't, you know, it's a horrible thing to do, but to attack another human being, you know, having each other for entertainment and going at it, you know.
Right.
I guess some people still like that kind of stuff.
They haven't changed.
There was a gladiator event and they were fighting each other.
I don't want to see it.
No.
I'm at that point in my life.
No, I'm not interested in seeing two people go at it with this.
Right.
You know, that's ancient Rome mentality.
No.
So, once I hit the gator with this, say hypothetically, if I'm going to go try this, and I hit the gator with it, it needs Twisting around, how do I go in there and like actually like you pull him and his life?
You pull him and use, usually, I have an extra trident, extra harpoon, stick it in the other one.
It's a process, and then pull him out.
And then another, it's just like three tools and a hatchet to hit him in the back of the head, which I also make.
But I have a harpoon that you can once he's there, you stick the harpoon to double secure him.
This will usually hold him, okay?
But in case he gets, if you hit him in the back, if you hit him on the side, the skin closes in around this so it doesn't come out.
You hit him in the back, it can come out the same hole because the skin on the back doesn't contract.
It's like stays the same, so it can pull out sometimes.
Ah, okay.
Out of the middle of the back.
But the tridents, they hit the side here.
Once you get off the scoots, the skin will wrap around this and it'll hold it.
It won't come out.
Oh, wow.
Sometimes you have to surgically move it out of there.
So that's the reason this is barbed, it's really to catch a fish.
So when you're catching an alligator, you're catching a large fish.
You know, it would probably, if you're in the shallows, you could probably throw it at a shark.
Or a barracuda.
Well, that might be too wide for a barracuda, huh?
No, that would work for a fat barracuda.
Yeah, it depends.
Anything will work on anything.
That other one.
That little one over there?
That'll work on a barracuda very well.
But, like, if I hit something like that with a shark or whatever, I'm afraid it would take off and I would have to dive in after it and go get the fucking.
I want a little one on my trident.
No, no.
You put a.
See this hole back here?
That's for a rope.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You put a strong rope and you just tie that to something.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And that's.
Yeah, you tie that to.
It depends where you're going to get.
Yeah, I mean, if you're in the flats, you can get a shark with this.
No problem.
Mm hmm.
You hit him from the boat, yeah.
It'll, you put a buoy on it, yeah.
He's not going over, you're gonna get him, you know, right.
But if he gets off, you got a line and everything on it, so you pull your trident back up, you know.
This is pretty strong, you know.
I mean, yeah, I think this is hard, yeah.
It's industrial strength, yeah.
Industrial.
This is three, this one here is three quarters thick, solid stainless.
It's got a tail that goes to here.
This is crunched, smashed in here.
All this, I do it, dig this out by hand with a handheld grinder.
That's why I do all that.
And you make these to order for people?
Like, if they hit you up and you want to try them?
Yeah, I can get them, the fish and try them, which is more like the one you got over there, or this one.
Those are the two that I'm making.
So they pick, they tell me what they want, and we'll take care of it.
Hyperventilation and Oxygen Blackouts00:04:46
How long can you hold your breath?
I used to do five and a half minutes, 535 to be exact.
Now I haven't done it in a long time, so I seriously doubt I'm going to hold my breath that long.
How long do you go right now?
Not much long at all.
I haven't trained for it, you know.
How do you train to hold your breath longer?
You train a little bit, but a lot of it is technique, it's preparing.
When you're out of shape, you got to prepare better.
When you're in good shape, you can get there quicker.
You know, it's your deep, slow breathing, but that's what also gets you to pass out on the water and die.
But, like, how would you, like, before you go out in, like, a spearfishing competition, like, a freediving competition in a tournament or something like that, how would you actually prepare to do that, to hold your breath longer?
Well, you exercise, you train, you go and do underwater laps, you do sitting still, you know, people spotting you, you hold your breath as long as you can without moving.
You do your breathing exercises and everything.
And then I had a method I do when I was going to be underwater a long time 40 breaths.