Learn Australian English in this episode of the Aussie English Podcast where I talk about the recent Netflix series ‘Tiger King’.

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What is going on, guys? I thought I would do a Walking With Pete episode inside today, so I'm not outside walking. I have just nip down to the shops and done some shopping for the family, you know, grab some formula for Noah. What else did I get? Some chicken, bananas, all that jazz. You know, the stuff that we need for the next few days and a coffee for me, which is good. I normally go down to the beach and sort of enjoy my time down there to just sort of wake up, relax, do a little bit of work, some reading.

Read the book that I'm currently reading at the moment. As you know, I'm trying to sort of get much more deeply into Australian history as I love sharing that sort of stuff with you, guys. So, that's where I normally go and do my morning reading down at the beach there in the car park, sit in the car. You know, don't even get out of the car, all that. So, yeah, that's what I've been up to this morning and I thought I'd put up a request recently to ask you guys which episodes you like best of Aussie English, because I'm sort of trying to work out which ones to focus my attention on. So, we've got the expression episodes, the Goss episodes, interview episodes and then Aussie Fact episodes.

And it's interesting, seems like it's about an even spread where everyone seems to like all of them equally, or at least there are an equal proportion of people who like each of the episodes. So, thanks to all you guys on Instagram, Facebook and everything that got back to me that told me what you thought of these episodes. But yeah, it's interesting because I look at the stats on the podcast platform where I upload everything and they don't all get the same number of listens. And so it's always hard for me to know, are certain episodes listened to or downloaded more because they are more interesting because you guys enjoy them more?

Or is it because they're more complicated and you need to listen to the multiple times you need to download them multiple times in order to fully understand what's being spoken about or talked about, right? So, maybe interview episodes and the Goss episodes are good examples of that, where you listen to them multiple times, whereas the expression episode where it's just me talking or the Aussie Fact episode you listen to, you know, say once, because it's easy to understand and follow.

So, yeah, I'm always stuck between those two extremes. I can't tell, do certain episodes get downloaded less because they're easier and do other episodes get downloaded and listened to more because they're more complex? Or is it because you don't like certain episodes and you do like other episodes? So, that's the sort of position that I am stuck in. Anyway.

I think after sort of asking you guys about that, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing because it seems like people enjoy all of these episodes and for all of the reasons that I create them, right? They like the expression ones because there are the expressions that I teach you as well as I have a few little exercises in there for pronunciation. They like the Aussie English Fact episodes because they get to learn about Australian history, Australian culture and different aspects of Australia. They like the Goss episodes because they hear about current affairs and the news with my dad and I, you know, both talking as we would normally speak in a conversation.

And then they like interview episodes because they have different accents, people from different places, different countries, you know, in different areas in Australia talking about different topics. So, I guess I have a good spread currently and that you guys are enjoying them. So, I'll keep doing what I'm doing.

Aside from that today, I sort of wanted to get on here to give you guys my two cents to have a rant about Tiger King. Now, I wonder if you guys have seen the Tiger King TV series that's on Netflix at the moment. I just binge watched it. And I guess before we get too deeply into it. Spoiler alert. If you haven't seen this TV show, it's effectively about the big cat industry in America where people in America's insane, right?

You can buy tigers, you can buy lions, you can buy leopards, you can buy cougars. You can get all these animals that pretty much nowhere else in the world you can buy. And, so it's all about the big cat industry in the U.S and these eccentric, crazy characters, these these crazy people who are involved with the big cat industry one way or another. So, I'm going to talk about it. I recently binge watch the entire season. It was insane. But yeah, before we get into it, spoiler alert. If you want to go and see this, go watch it. Turn this episode off, because I'm going to be talking about what happens throughout the series.

If you want to watch it, stop this episode. Go and watch it because it's just mind blowing it. It is like a slow train wreck. It is like a slow car accident. It is disturbing, but it is fascinating. And you just can't turn it off. It's just it's just mind blowing. I tell you what, guys like I've never seen anything like it. Anyway, so let's get into it. Let's get into it.

So, there are a whole bunch of different characters here, right? I sat down the other day, we're obviously in quarantine. I'm stuck inside with my wife and with Noah. They're stuck inside with me as well and so each night we've been sort of watching different things on Netflix. Recently, we've been trying to get through Narcos, which is a really good series about the the drug war in Mexico and in Colombia, in parts of Central and South America and their interaction with the US, the United States.

And so they were effectively hunting people like what is named Felix Gallardo, I think his name is, and the other one is, you know, Pablo Escobar. You'll know about him, anyway, it's an interesting series. So, we've been watching that sort of one episode at a time and I'd been sort of keeping an eye out for something to watch next, after we finished the Narco series and so Tiger King had been coming up and getting all these really good ratings on Netflix kept being shown to me.

People kept ranting about it online. And I sort of saw a little bit and was like, you know what? I watched the trailer, I watched the trailer, and it was really interesting. And I was like, I don't want to hear anything more about this until I got a chance to watch it. Now, I sat down the other night with Kel to try and watch the first episode and she tapped out within 10 minutes. She couldn't handle it. She was like, this is too disturbing. So, I ended up watching the entire thing in, I think I probably watched one episode two nights ago and then last night I watched all of it.

So, the other six episodes or seven episodes, however many there are. And yes, so she turned off, she was like, I can't watch this because it's about the big cat industry in the US, usually the southern states, so places like Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, Miami, those sorts of states where they have very lax laws, very relaxed laws with the kinds of animals you can have, their guns, you can own all of that sort of stuff. The US, I think, generally, tends to have that kind of pattern geographically where the eastern states, I want to say, were eastern and western states are the states on the coasts like, you know, the East Coast with New York and the West Coast with California, they tend to be more conservative in terms of their views of guns and cats, you know, owning cats and pets and stuff like that, I believe.

But they're more relaxed in terms of being able to buy drugs like cannabis, where as the sort of central and southern states like Oklahoma, Florida and Texas tend to be much more conservative in terms of, say, religion and libertarian in their views of the government. And so don't want the government to tell them what they can or can't do and they can buy things like, you know, crazy guns and big cats and, you know, all sorts of stuff that you would just never see anywhere else in the world.

So, yeah, this is set, I believe it's said in Oklahoma, at least based on the primary character, the protagonist of this TV show who is named Joe Exotic. And so his surname isn't actually Exotic, but he changes it to that. And this guy is just, he's off the planet, man. He is a completely different character and it's almost like this weird oxymoron. How would you say? Like, it's a very weird juxtaposition. It's a weird situation where southern states tend to be very conservative in terms of religion and politics.

And this guy, Joe Exotic, is both, he's two sides of the same coin, right? So, he's very conservative, he's a libertarian, he owns guns, he owns big cats. He wants the government to leave him alone. He's a bit of a redneck, so a bit of a what you would call a bogan in Australia. He's got a mullet, you know, that's bleached white. But at the same time, he's a gay man. He is incredibly flamboyantly, openly gay. He has multiple husbands, so he marries these two other men. And yeah, they're just two sides of a coin you don't normally see together, right?

Like you don't normally see people living in places like Oklahoma who are gun toting, big cat owning libertarians who are also incredibly flamboyantly gay with multiple husbands. So, for one, the protagonist of this TV show, he is just a crazy, crazy character. So, he owns this huge park and animal park and he has something like, you know, 200 different tigers and lions. He's got bears, he's got apes, he's got monkeys, he's got venomous snakes. It's just insane. You know, he's got this huge park, thousands of visitors come and they can see these animals and that's how he effectively makes his business.

Now, throughout the course of the series, they show that this guy is breeding cubs and selling them to other parks. And he's involved with these other parks around the country, all over the place who are doing similar sorts of things where they have, you know, crazy animals like tigers, elephants, lions. They're breeding them, they're using them in shows, and so there are a few other characters like Bhagavan Antle was one, Doc Antel from Myrtle Beach Safari. There was another guy called, where's his name here? Tim Stark, who's from a place called Wildlife in Need.

And they just have these crazy, huge zoos and, you know, animals that you would just never imagine owning privately in places like Australia or anywhere else in the world. So, Joe Exotic is this character where he's a narcissist. He's just seems to be a bit of a psycho. Like he seems to be very full of himself, he's just...he runs for president, he ends up running for governor, he's got his own TV show on the Internet. It's just nuts.

But effectively, so he's breeding these cats up and it shows, the series kind of gives you a look behind the scenes of how these cats are traded in their lives and how the industry is kind of pretty dark in terms of breeding these cats, and then using the kittens in order to be patted or have photographs taken with customers, with people who come to the zoo to see the animals. And so there's one really disturbing scene where they have this really young cub, I guess it's a tiger cub, and they're just like Joe Exotic is walking around, putting it right next to people's faces so that they can get a quick photo.

And he's obviously charging the money for this, but he's just walking from person to person, placing the cat on the left side of the face, you know, and then photo taken and then he does it again, photo taken.

And so it is just this crazy, you know, business setup where they're really exploiting these animals to make a profit. It's just insane. And so enter this other character whose name is Carole Baskin. And her sort of side of it, she comes from a place called Big Cat Rescue, where they're sort of the opposite side of the coin. They are all about taking care of the animals, they're a sanctuary, you know, they're kind of against these people who are breeding the animals and using them to try and make a lot of money, make a profit.

They're all about sort of rescuing the animals and taking care of them, because the issue in America is they have something like between five and ten thousand tigers, which is more than there are in the wild. And a lot of these people can buy these animals. You can buy them for about $2000, which is less than my parents paid for their Labrador.

You can buy a tiger in the US, right? To grand, $2000. That's a laptop. But the people buy them. And then after six months, they don't realise how quickly these animals grow and the amount of food that they need, the enclosures they need and so they end up having to get rid of them, putting them down, giving them away or, you know, sending them to places like Big Cat Rescue. And so this woman is also off the planet.

She's totally crazy in terms of how much she loves big cats and so everything she has, like leopard pants, leopard shirts, you know, the pattern of the cats, like tiger pattern, leopard patterns on pretty much every single thing that she owns. Her bike has spots on it. It's just crazy. So, she's the complete opposite of Joe Exotic. Joe is doing this because of ego, he wants to make money, he's just this crazy character, and Carol is the complete opposite where she wants to rescue her animals and she's playing the, you know, I care about animals card. She's very I'm a humanitarian. I give a shit about these animals way more than these other people who are exploiting them.

But the interesting thing is and you know, you kind of ask yourself that question during this TV show, who's worse? You know, the people like Bhagavan Antle or Joe Exotic who are exploiting these animals for money, or the people like Carol Baskin, who also have their own zoos with these animals where people can also pay to see the animals, and she's also making a lot of money from this business and is, you know, on social media, on YouTube, making videos very much in the media's eye. So it's really interesting in terms of trying to work out who the good guys and who are the bad guys.

The other crazy thing in this story is that it just gets weirder and weirder the more you watch. Caroline Baskin marries this guy who is a multi-millionaire and like 20 years older than her. So, she meets him when she's like 20, he's like 40 something with a family, he just leaves the family and ends up running off with Carol, marrying her and setting up this this sanctuary, the Big Cat Rescue, everything like that with the many millions of dollars that this guy has.

He's involved in some shady stuff down in places like, I think, Costa Rica, where he ends up wanting to leave Carol and go and live there. But he just disappears, so without a trace, he just disappears one day. And he is just a very, very bizarre situation where people are all thinking that Carol is the one who did him in. They all think that she probably fed him to a tiger and, so characters like Joe Exotic leap on this and start, it's just insane. Joe Exotic pays guys to write music for him.

And then he makes these music videos where it's him pretending to sing the songs. And he makes one song about how Carol Baskin has fed her husband to tigers. I think he calls it 'Here, kitty, kitty', It's just insane. It's just insane. And so he just goes on these tirades, you know, attacking her, saying that she's a murderer, that they're going to find the body. He's, you know, on his TV show at one point and has this mannequin dressed up as Carol and just pulls his gun out and shoots the mannequin in the head inside a building, like with his handgun. Just insane. Just insane. So, the show just goes through all of this, all of these relationships between these people.

Joe learns from one of his idols, who is Bhagavan Antle, Doc Antle, who has this huge fortress effectively set up. He has all these houses, he has this zoo, it's all in one place. He gets all these women to work for him and he effectively treats it like a harem where he is this, you know, overweight 50, 60 year old man. And he has something like three different women, you know, wives that are, I guess, in relationships with him to varying degrees.

They interview women who have left and they're like, yeah, he pressured us to have sex with him and, you know, get involved in a relationship with him like that in order to be able to work at the park and, you know, work with these big cats. And so you see all these people who get involved with with these parks and they just seem to be the strangest kind of people. You know, they... It's just insane.

Joe Exotic really admires Doc Antle and the life that he has set up. And so copy's him, he ends up marrying two different men. One of them's called John Finley and the other one was, his first name was Travis. And it turns out that both these guys aren't actually gay, but that Joe Exotic is doing all these drugs, things like meth and cocaine and cannabis, and because he has all the money, these guys want to stay and have access to those drugs and the lifestyle with guns and big cats that they just accept being in a homosexual relationship with Joe Exotic.

And so one of them ends up running off with one of the women who work at the place and the other one ends up committing suicide, as I think, I think it was a joke. So, and it was caught on video where he was sitting there talking to one of the guys who works for Joe Exotic and pretends to put the gun to his head, saying there's no clip in the gun, so it can't go off and then shoots himself in the head and kills himself.

It's tragic. But then the crazy thing is, so Joe exotic has his heart broken, you know, his husband, one of his husbands left months before that or years before that. And then his other husband has committed suicide, whether accidentally or intentionally. And then within two months, he's married to another guy that he's found online who's incredibly young. Joe's like in his 50s and the next guy that comes along, as, you know, late teens or early 20s anyway. So, just an absolutely insane TV show that I wanted to tell you guys about and share it with any of you guys who've been watching it to see your view of the TV show.

Because it kind of ends with the sour taste in your mouth. I guess, the ending is that Joe Exotic brings these people into his park who are kind of shady criminal characters that have a lot of money. Joe's feeling the pinch because he's been taken to court by Carol. He's been ordered to pay a million dollars to Carol for breaching her copyright and, you know, doing all these malicious things to her and her brand.

He brings these guys on, he does all these things like changing his name, trying to move the business around so that he doesn't have to pay money. The ironic thing is that the only way for him to pay Carol money, and this is the woman who has the Big Cat Rescue place that is against exploitation of animals, the only way for him to pay her is to exploit animals. And so, again, it's one of these situations where you're like, who's good guy? Who's the bad guy?

Do all these people just want money and fame? Right? It's just crazy. So, he brings on all these people. He ends up losing his park and he gets involved with some of the workers there and they sort of capture him in a plot to hire one of the workers to kill Carol Baskin.

And so the FBI get involved. They do an undercover case and they end up putting him in jail for, at least, first trying to kill Carol and then they find another 20 or so offences that he's done with animals, including shooting some of his cats that got too sick and he didn't want to have to pay the bills for the vet and a bunch of other things.

And so he ends up going to jail for 22 years. Just crazy. Just crazy. So, yeah, I would get on here and tell you about this series that I've seen because there's just nothing else I've ever seen like it. It's just insane. Never seen anything like this series. And I just don't know what to make of it. You watch it, an episode after episode, you're just left thinking how much further down hill can this go? Like it's just a derailed train. It's just crazy. And then also you see all these different characters and how complex they are, you know?

Are they good? Are they bad? Are they narcissistic? Are they doing it for themselves? Are they, you know, addicted to drugs and trapped in this lifestyle? Are they doing it because they just love the animals?

It's just, it's just crazy. It's just crazy. So, I was left after this whole series, you're just left gobsmacked. You know, awe struck. You just they're kind of like, I don't know what I just saw. And I'm going to have to sit and think about and digest this series for a few days to come. So, yeah, I guess that's probably also why I wanted to make this episode and talk about it with you guys.

Yeah. I think the biggest thing that I sort of took away from it was just an overall sense of feeling sad, sad at how the animals are treated first and foremost. Sad that, you know, there are more tigers and lions in America than there are potentially in the wild, at least with regards to tigers. I don't know about lions, but definitely tigers. The lives they live are just horrible. Then all of these people who I guess they get started loving the animals. You know, we see some early videos of Joe Exotic and people like Carol Baskin and they get in there for the right reasons. They care about the animals, they want to educate, but then how much they kind of just go off the deep end and end up extremes one way or the other. And, you know, in it for themselves, wanting money, wanting fame, craving that sort of stuff.

You then get to see the people who want to work for these big cat zoo owners and how, you know, Carol Baskin has this huge army of volunteers, none of whom she really knows, and they don't get paid. And then Joe Exotic has all these people working for him for like $100 a week. You know, it was like effectively slave labour.

Again, another crazy aspect of America not having the minimum wage and people being able to be paid like $2 an hour. And yeah, you just feel sorry for all of them. You feel sorry for these women and these guys were in relationships with these, you know, eccentric, bigger than life characters who get sucked in to their lifestyle, their personalities, and just get, you know, kind of chewed up and spat out at the end.

So, it was an interesting series, guys. But yeah, I thought it would be a good chance to get on here and talk about it. Have a sort of just informal chat with you guys. Talk about a topic that I definitely have never talked about before on the podcast. Give you a chance to hear different expressions and vocab and also learn about American culture.

Some of these strange aspects of American culture and the way in which we in Australia would view those aspects, you know, gun ownership, marry multiple people, although I'm not sure that's legal in America, owning big cats, you know, private zoos, just insane. So, with that, guys, hopefully you enjoyed this episode. I'd love to know from you guys what you think. You know, put a comment somewhere. Let me know what you think of this TV show, if you've seen it. Who was the good guy? Who was the bad guy? And I will chat to you soon. Peace!