Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 851 is my conversation with Chris Gillette — Gator Boy Chris from Animal Planet's Gator Boys — a professional alligator handler, wildlife educator, and shark-tourism operator out of South Florida. We get into how he reads an animal's telegraphed movements the way a martial artist reads an opponent, the real differences between alligators and crocodiles, Florida's Burmese python crisis, his shark-diving operation, and the gator ponds he is building up north to keep growing his mission of changing how people see these predators.
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Chris Gillette, known as Gator Boy Chris, is a professional alligator handler, wildlife educator, and shark-tourism operator from South Florida who became known through Animal Planet's Gator Boys. He has years of hands-on experience working with alligators, crocodiles, snakes, and sharks, and he uses that platform to change how people understand and coexist with these predators. He is currently building his own gator ponds up north as the next phase of his mission.
Chris compares it to combat sports. When he trains a new handler, he asks whether they have any martial-arts background, because anyone who has done it long enough learns to read how a person telegraphs a strike or a kick before it happens. Handling a gator is the same skill applied to an animal — reading the body language and forecasting behavior so you know when it is, and is not, a good time to make a move.
Chris explains that crocodiles are considerably more aggressive and less forgiving than alligators. Alligators tend to be more predictable and will usually retreat when given space, while crocodiles are more territorial and far less tolerant of mistakes. The two also differ physically, including in snout shape, but the practical difference that matters to a handler is temperament and how much margin for error each animal allows.
Very. Chris describes the Burmese python invasion as one of the most damaging ecological problems in Florida, with these giant constrictors hammering native mammal populations across the Everglades. They have no natural predators in Florida and are extremely difficult to find in millions of acres of wetlands, which is why the population keeps growing despite hunting and removal efforts.
Beyond gators, Chris runs shark experiences for groups who want to see them in the water. He explains that if he has a group that wants a near-guaranteed encounter, there are specific spots he relies on. He also notes the legal realities — in many clear-enough areas inside national parks there are rules against approaching the animals within a set distance, and FWC has told him there is no legal workaround unless you are on private property and own the animal.
Chris uses his platform to raise awareness about nuisance alligators and to change how people relate to them — including letting people get in the water with gators under his supervision to break down fear and replace it with understanding. He believes that if you can actually have a conversation and understand where someone is coming from, you can educate them, and that education is more powerful than fear.
Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 851 with Chris Gillette is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. The video version is embedded at the top of this page — press play to watch.
I have been fascinated by Florida's wildlife my whole life, but I have zero interest in actually wrestling a gator or handling a crocodile — which is exactly why I wanted Chris on. So many of the people who listen to this show love the Everglades, the fishing and the creatures both, and Chris lives in a part of that world most of us only watch from a safe distance. What I respect about him is that it is not about proving how tough he is; it is about understanding these animals. Press play in the YouTube player above to hear it.
The most interesting thing Chris said is that handling a gator is a reading skill, not a strength contest. He trains new handlers by asking about martial-arts experience, because reading how an animal telegraphs its next move is the same instinct that lets a fighter see a strike coming. He explains how long it takes to get comfortable forecasting behavior, and why knowing when not to go for an animal is the whole game. Listen to that in the episode.
Chris is clear that crocodiles operate on a different level than alligators — more aggressive, more territorial, and far less forgiving of a mistake. Gators will usually give you a way out; crocodiles will not. He walks through what that difference feels like in practice and why it changes everything about how he approaches each animal. Watch that section in the YouTube player above.
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For anyone who loves the Everglades, this part is sobering. Chris describes how Burmese pythons have decimated native mammal populations, why they are nearly impossible to find across millions of acres, and why the population keeps growing with no natural predators to check it. It is one of the worst ecological stories in the state, and he is right in the middle of it. Listen to him lay it out.
Chris does not only handle gators — he runs shark experiences too, with go-to spots for near-guaranteed encounters when he has a group that wants to see them. He also gets into the legal maze: national-park approach rules, distance limits, and FWC telling him there is no legal workaround unless you own the animal on private property. Hear how he navigates it in the episode.
Chris's mission with nuisance gators is to replace fear with understanding, and part of that is supervised experiences that put people in the water with these animals. His belief is that a real conversation — actually understanding where someone is coming from — educates far better than fear ever could. He is also building his own gator ponds up north to expand that work, currently driving six hours each way every weekend to keep it going. Listen to that part of the conversation.
The day after this one, what stuck with me was the martial-arts framing — that the whole skill is reading an animal's intent before it acts, not overpowering it. That applies to a lot more than gators.
The python story is the part every Everglades angler needs to sit with. The ecosystem most of us love is being rewritten by an animal almost nobody sees, and people like Chris are some of the few actually engaging with it.
Watch the whole thing in the player above. It is one of the wilder conversations I have had on the show.
The Tom Rowland Podcast brings you long-form conversations with the most accomplished anglers, hunters, conservationists, and outdoor professionals in the game. Listen to every full-length Tom Rowland Podcast interview.
Chris Gillette, known as Gator Boy Chris, is a professional alligator handler, wildlife educator, and shark-tourism operator based in South Florida who rose to prominence on Animal Planet's Gator Boys. With years of hands-on experience working with alligators, crocodiles, snakes, and sharks, he focuses on education and changing public perception of apex predators, including supervised experiences that put people in the water with alligators to replace fear with understanding. He is actively engaged with Florida's invasive-species and nuisance-wildlife challenges and is building his own gator ponds to expand his conservation and education work.
Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 851: Gator Boy Chris and Nature's Craziest Predators, with Chris Gillette.
Tom Rowland: Chris, what's going on?
Chris Gillette: Good. Thanks for having me.
Tom Rowland: I'm really happy to have you on here. We were going to get started an hour ago, but you had some animals going crazy. What kind of thing did you have going on this morning? I'd imagine it's something all the time.
Chris Gillette: Yeah, it's pretty much nonstop. Last night it got down to about 37 out here, so I had to move a bunch of animals around and put them inside, and then this morning I've got to put them back out.
Tom Rowland: So you have to move things around. What's the temperature where you really start having trouble?
Chris Gillette: Let me back up for a second. I lived in South Florida for the last twenty years or so, and I just recently bought a 40-acre property up in North Florida, only about eight months ago. We moved our entire rescue up here, and North and South Florida might as well be different states, honestly. Down here it gets down into the thirties sometimes, and in South Florida that almost never happens, so we're having to make a lot of adjustments for our animals.
Tom Rowland: We've had all kinds of fish kills and different things in South Florida when it gets really cold. What's the temperature that really could affect your animals?
Chris Gillette: I've got a lot of variety, all kinds of different animals. Some of them can't handle lower than 50 degrees. Others are a lot more hardy — it depends what we're talking about. But up here it can get down into the teens. It's just crazy.
Tom Rowland: You know so much about alligators and crocodiles — is it true that an alligator can survive very cold temperatures, even being iced in? I think I saw something on Instagram, just the nose sticking up through the ice around an alligator. Tell me how that works.
Chris Gillette: Yeah, that's only alligators. They're the most cold-tolerant crocodilian — they range all the way up to North Carolina naturally, and that far north the ponds they live in will freeze over, and they'll have their nose sticking up out of the ice so they can still breathe. To give you a really crazy example, I know an old-timer up in Buffalo, New York who kept alligators, and he'd bring them in every winter because obviously it's Buffalo — super cold, they'd die otherwise. Well, he had one he couldn't catch one year, and it survived multiple winters outside in Buffalo, New York. He never found it — figured it was dead under the snow and ice — and then come the spring thaw, it's swimming around. That's anecdotal, but I've known the guy for years and I believe him. It's pretty wild — that's the kind of thing modern science isn't even fully aware of, as far as I know.
Tom Rowland: So what was the decision like to move from South Florida to North Florida, especially with the temperatures and all the different animals you have?
Chris Gillette: About 90% financial, to be honest with you. I got 40 acres up here for less than a single-family home with a sidewalk would cost in South Florida. It's insane, the price difference.
Tom Rowland: Is this the area you're putting out most of your social media content with that super clear water, where you're swimming with Casper?
Chris Gillette: No — that's at the Everglades Outpost in Homestead. Until I get my gator ponds dug and finished up here, what I'm doing right now is driving six hours each way, every weekend, to go hang out with Casper, run my tours, do some videos, and then drive all the way back. It's a twelve-hour commute on top of my workday.
Tom Rowland: When do you think you'll have it all complete?
Chris Gillette: Fingers crossed — next week we're supposed to concrete the ponds I've already dug. Then we have to go through the permitting process with FWC, which can be difficult. Best case, maybe within a month. Worst case, they're supposed to process permits within ninety days, but I've heard that's not always the case.
Tom Rowland: So what's your vision for this new place?
Chris Gillette: There's a lot going on up here. We run a wildlife rescue, an exotic animal rescue, so we end up with things I never thought I'd have. Right now I've got five coatis, which are like a South American raccoon — I never thought I'd have even one of those. Running a rescue means very weird, unexpected stuff comes up. My vision is really focusing on alligators and crocodiles, but when you're doing rescue work, it's kind of wherever the call comes from.
Tom Rowland: So with the coatis, was someone trying to keep those as pets? Do you get collectors and people trying to keep crazy things, or how does it work?
Chris Gillette: One of them, we actually caught ourselves — we got a call early one morning that there was a coati in someone's garage, out near Gainesville. We drove over, and sure enough, there it was. I don't know if it was an escaped or released pet, but it was full feral and not nice, and one of its claws was actually curled all the way back into its own palm, so whoever had it originally wasn't taking good care of it. The other four are surrenders from people who did have them as pets. I'm not permitted for everything, but I've told FWC — if you ever need a hand, let me know, I'll help you catch literally anything.
Tom Rowland: Alright, before we get too far into the podcast, I want to do the hot seat questions with you — either-or questions, answer as quick as you can. You ready?
Chris Gillette: Let's do it.
Tom Rowland: iPhone or Android?
Chris Gillette: iPhone.
Tom Rowland: Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube?
Chris Gillette: Instagram.
Tom Rowland: Something that scares you.
Chris Gillette: Exams. That's the honest answer — I still have bad dreams about college exams.
Tom Rowland: Me too. Sharks or crocodiles?
Chris Gillette: That's so hard to pick. I guess crocodiles.
Tom Rowland: Mountains or beaches for vacation?
Chris Gillette: I'm always on beaches, always diving — so if I was going to go somewhere I don't normally go, maybe mountains.
Tom Rowland: Alligators or crocodiles?
Chris Gillette: You're killing me with these. I guess I'd go with crocs — I love the crocs.
Tom Rowland: Drive or fly?
Chris Gillette: I hate flying, but you get there faster.
Tom Rowland: Venomous or nonvenomous snakes?
Chris Gillette: Venomous are just so much cooler — cobras especially. Oh my god.
Tom Rowland: That's what Kevin says — you've been doing a lot of work with them. Sea or land?
Chris Gillette: Honestly, sea.
Tom Rowland: A million now or ten million later?
Chris Gillette: I'd do the later.
Tom Rowland: Coffee, energy drink, or nothing?
Chris Gillette: I don't usually do either.
Tom Rowland: TV show, or your own YouTube and social?
Chris Gillette: That's literally the crossroads I'm at right now. I've got producers talking to me all the time, and I'm thinking a successful social media path is probably better.
Tom Rowland: Something that makes you laugh.
Chris Gillette: The comments I get on the internet.
Tom Rowland: Something you've changed your mind on in the last three years.
Chris Gillette: I don't have one off the top of my head, but maybe the TV stuff — I used to be all about doing TV, and now I'm pretty anti-TV.
Tom Rowland: Interesting, we'll get to that. Best advice you remember being given?
Chris Gillette: Remember that you are always replaceable. I think that's very humbling, and a lot of people need to keep that in mind — people get way too big for their britches and forget that.
Tom Rowland: One piece of advice you've passed on more than once.
Chris Gillette: I've taught a lot of people how to handle alligators and crocodiles, and one of my favorite things I tell people is that when you're working with dangerous animals, the animal doesn't care who you are or what you've done — it's about who you are in that moment and whether you can walk the walk. Keeping that humility in mind, because that thing will reduce you to a literal turd if you mess up.
Tom Rowland: Any of them — even Casper?
Chris Gillette: Oh yeah, that's a big one. I'm always preaching that.
Tom Rowland: I like that about some of your videos with Casper — you say this animal, I love him, but he doesn't love me, and you have to assume you're going to get bit and handle yourself accordingly. I'm definitely not a wildlife handler — I can handle fish with teeth, but I don't have any experience with snakes or crocodiles. But I think that's why so many people like what you do — it's super interesting, and most people think, "I would never want to do that," but you're so calm and comfortable doing it, or at least you look like it.
Chris Gillette: No, I really am calm doing it. A good way to put it is everybody's got a plan till they get punched in the face, and it's the same with this. We can talk all day — people constantly ask me what my plan is for this or that — and I do have plans, don't get me wrong. But the real question is what's your plan when you actually get nailed, because that's where your brain needs to be. People think they're going to be able to avoid the animal actually trying to get them. Especially with Casper, since I run tours with him and people forget I'm running a business — of course I promote him as the calm one, because I want people to come do my tour. But people think I only work with one mellow alligator. Dude, that's a professional alligator wrestler with a decade of experience — I know how to handle a completely wild alligator too. When I'm with Casper, people ask what I'll do if he tries to bite me. He's tried to bite me a thousand times. I'll handle it.
Tom Rowland: Do you think at this point, with all your alligator wrestling experience, you can feel the tension in the animal — kind of like handling a big kingfish or a wahoo or a barracuda, where you can feel it's about to go?
Chris Gillette: Absolutely, you can feel it.
Tom Rowland: How long does it take for you, or somebody you're training, to get comfortable enough to really start forecasting behavior — to know it's not a good time to go for a particular one?
Chris Gillette: It's a mix of experience with the animal and being someone who can pick up on minor differences. When I'm training somebody new, I always ask if they have any martial arts experience, because that's usually one of the best things to have — even if you don't realize it, martial arts teaches you to read how people telegraph a strike or a kick, and that skill translates directly to reading animals, because everything telegraphs. With Kevin, for example, I taught him to handle alligators even though he had no martial arts background — but he was a cheerleader, which turned out to help just as much, because it's about knowing your body and reading someone else's movement.
Tom Rowland: What's your own martial arts background?
Chris Gillette: I'm not a pro by any means. I did karate all through high school into college, then aikido in college, and after college I trained MMA with a guy who'd fought in the UFC.
Tom Rowland: I've got some friends in the UFC too, like Clay Guida — he's fought something like 50 times, a Hall of Famer, and he loves to fish. You'd love this guy.
Tom Rowland: Specifically, I wanted to ask about alligators and crocodiles, since we've got a lot of listeners who love the Everglades, and you also do a lot of shark diving — another Everglades creature, for sure. Where do you do the shark stuff you like to do?
Chris Gillette: The majority of it is off the coast of Jupiter — that's the main place I take tour groups, since it's pretty much a guaranteed spot to see them. I also do a lot of international diving for my own photography and video work — a lot of shark diving in Mexico, mostly on the Pacific side. Offshore islands like Guadalupe for the great whites, Socorro, which is an amazing dive site, and Playa del Carmen for whale sharks.
Tom Rowland: Where did you grow up?
Chris Gillette: Palm Bay, Florida — born and raised. As soon as I was out of high school I went down to Miami for FIU.
Tom Rowland: When did diving come into the picture? Reading your bio, it sounded like you were out in the woods a lot as a kid finding creatures, snakes, and lizards.
Chris Gillette: My grandparents had a timeshare down in Marathon, and every summer we'd go down there. Before I can even remember, my dad would take me out snorkeling — I'd be clutched to his back like a little monkey, and he'd shove me underwater to look at stuff. That's where my love of diving came from.
Tom Rowland: Do you remember the first time you encountered a shark, and what you thought of it as a kid?
Chris Gillette: We were swimming from one of the small keys near Marathon over to Money Key — my dad and me, with me holding onto him. Once you're right next to the Keys you can see the bottom and the reef, it's beautiful, but out in the middle there's a stretch of open water where you can't see anything down below. I looked down and saw this shadow — I don't know exactly what it was, but it had to be something like a 20-foot shark that went right underneath us. I couldn't even see its skin, just this massive shadow passing under. I was a little kid, I couldn't even swim on my own, and I remember being terrified, thinking we were going to die — but fascinated at the same time.
Tom Rowland: So how does it go from being terrified and fascinated to that being your life's passion? Where did the switch flip?
Chris Gillette: This is my personal theory, but I think humans are innately obsessed with predatory animals. It doesn't matter who you are or how little you know about animals — if you see a video of someone getting attacked by a crocodile, you stop scrolling and watch it. We're instinctually wired that way, because somewhere in the back of your monkey-lizard brain, it's registering, "this might happen to you one day" — even though realistically it won't happen to most people anymore. It's the same reason other primates behave the way they do: if a monkey gets nailed by a croc, the others are all watching and reacting, trying to learn what went wrong so it doesn't happen to them. For me, that fascination meant I consumed every bit of media I could get my hands on about these animals as a kid. The more I learned, the more I noticed that what people — even some people on TV — were saying was often just wrong. And the more I learned about the animals themselves, the more I realized they're not really "that bad." They're dangerous, don't get me wrong, but they're amazing, and they deserve our admiration, respect, and protection.
Tom Rowland: Specifically sharks, or alligators and crocodiles too? What comes to mind from when you were a kid noticing the wrong information out there?
Chris Gillette: Probably sharks is the biggest one, because people have this perception that they're just completely out to get you. Nowadays I'll be out there freediving, literally surrounded by fifty bull sharks, holding my breath sixty feet deep, perfectly calm — people hear "bull sharks" and panic, but they're not what people think. Now, I'm always the first person to say, don't get me wrong, they do kill people occasionally if you do things the wrong way. They're real predators, but they're not mindless — they're actually really smart, and if you do things the right way, you can be fine.
Tom Rowland: How long have you been doing that — the shark diving, especially with people? I'd guess on your own first, and then guiding people or running charters.
Chris Gillette: Let me tell you about the first time I ever went, because it's a really funny story, and I almost got killed. I'd seen a few sharks snorkeling before, just in the distance — exciting, but you don't really know much about them yet. Then a friend who was big into spearfishing said every time he went chumming he got tons of sharks, so we should go out and see some. I was maybe 25 at the time — full testosterone, no brains. It was just the four of us. We went out, started chumming, and pulled in maybe 30 or 40 sharks — silky sharks, dusky sharks, sandbars — it was pelagic season out there, and it was awesome. Everything was calm and going great, but we didn't actually know what we were doing; it was just working out. Then we all popped up in the water off the boat, with nobody left on board, and looked up to see a huge storm rolling in. The wind was blowing one way, the current another, and before we knew it we were losing the boat. We started swimming hard to catch up, but I only had little snorkel fins while the other three guys had big freedive fins — I'd never done freediving at that point. They left me in the dust, we got separated, and everybody started panicking and splashing, which is exactly the wrong thing to do around sharks. As soon as I was separated from the group and panicking, all the sharks fixated on me. One tried to bite my leg, and I turned and pushed it off — but the more I flailed and threw big explosive punches, the more interested they got, because it looked like something in distress. I had a moment of clarity, not fear so much as anger — I'd already been working with alligators for years and understood animals, even though sharks were new to me, and I knew I was screwing up even if I didn't know exactly how. I kept pushing them off, one hitting me here, another there, genuinely thinking I was going to lose a big chunk of myself, if not get killed outright. Thankfully one of my buddies noticed and swam back to me, and as soon as he was with me again, the sharks backed off — they want to single out an individual, not a group. My other friends got back to the boat, brought it around, and we were fine. But it was that close.
Tom Rowland: When you hear a story like that, most people say "I will never do this again," but some say "this is exactly what I want to do, just not that way again." Do you remember which one you were, once you were safely on the boat?
Chris Gillette: The big realization once I was on the boat was just how many levels of things we'd screwed up — why didn't we have someone stay on the boat, why didn't I have the right gear, why weren't we with someone who actually knew shark behavior well? We were just fishermen who didn't really understand sharks. So many stupid decisions compounded to nearly get me severely hurt or killed. It was a wake-up call: if you're going to be around an animal like that, you need to know what you're doing, or be with someone who does — not just wing it in a situation that can go south so fast.
Tom Rowland: That's interesting context for what you do with Casper — inviting people to come swim with this ten-foot alligator, which is how you make some of your money now. I do notice there's a net involved. What's it like for people getting into that enclosure with Casper?
Chris Gillette: Let me tell you how I came up with the idea, because it'll give you a lot of clarity. I go out and dive with wild alligators to photograph and film them — really cool, really fun, and also really dangerous. People constantly ask me to take them out into the wild with me, and I always say no. For one, it's legitimately dangerous. For two, it's not even legal — you're not allowed to run tours diving with wild alligators; in the areas clear enough to even attempt it, usually inside national parks, there are rules against approaching within fifteen feet, and it's illegal to feed wild alligators, which is really the only way to keep them calm and hanging around. Even setting the legality aside, it just doesn't work as a tour — 99% of the time, wild gators are afraid of you and take off, and if they don't take off, they're hunting you.
The turning point was when I took a National Geographic photographer out to dive with wild gators. Five minutes in, we're swimming along and a gator beelines straight for his head — he never saw it coming. I had him positioned in front so we could get shots from behind him, and I saw it coming right for him. I was able to grab the gator just before it reached him, but it happened in literal seconds. If I'd looked away for a second — "oh look, there's a bird" — he would have been killed. To explain why: there are something like 1,800,000 alligators in Florida, and they don't typically see humans as prey; we're too big, and if they wanted people, you'd have people dying every single day. But that changes when you're swimming, because a gator's eye sits only about an inch above the surface, so looking across the water, all it sees of a swimmer is the top of the head and moving arms — which reads as a small animal it can absolutely kill. Even a five-foot alligator, which seems like nothing, will still come after that shape, and at that size it can grab your head, shake, and break your neck.
After that scare with the Nat Geo photographer, I said never again — I couldn't keep taking people out with truly wild alligators. So many people had been asking how to monetize something like this, and I thought, well, I work with alligators, and I've got one that's essentially a trained partner. Why not bring people in with a captive, trained animal instead? When I first started the tour, we actually had fifteen alligators in the pond with no net at all — nobody had ever done this before, so there was no law against it, and I made the format up as I went. People signed waivers and got in with me. We ran it that way for a year or two, but it became chaos, so once it started getting more popular we brought the numbers down to five or six alligators at a time. Eventually FWC caught wind of what we were doing and put out a memo saying we had to have a barrier, which is when we set up the net.
Tom Rowland: Do you remember the first person you ever let in there with you?
Chris Gillette: Really wild story — somehow I connected with some very wealthy guys from Mexico, who I'm pretty sure were cartel-connected. They'd fly over in their own private planes, get in the water with me for the day, take some pictures, and fly back home. It was wild.
Tom Rowland: I noticed on your Instagram that part of your mission is raising awareness about nuisance gators, and that letting people get in and swim is part of that. How does that connect?
Chris Gillette: A couple of things. First, people tend to think in extremes — this is our politics, this is everything — you're in this camp or that camp, and people struggle with nuanced reality. With any dangerous animal, it's either "bloodthirsty killing machine" or "perfectly tame, won't hurt you," and I end up fighting with both camps. I'm a huge shark advocate, and I still get people telling me sharks are basically puppies that don't bite — and I have to say, you can't tell me a giant predatory animal doesn't see people as food sometimes. But say that out loud and other people twist it into "kill the sharks, they're mindless killing machines." Reality is in the middle. If you have half a brain cell and learn a little about these animals, you can avoid becoming a statistic. Same with alligators — there's over a million of them in the state, and if they wanted to get people, you'd have people dying every day. They're really not interested in us, but they're also not puppy dogs, and we're living alongside an animal whose ancestors literally ate dinosaurs. That deserves some respect and some education.
The other piece: Florida gets something like a thousand new people a day, and most of them know nothing about alligators. They arrive, see one, assume it's a bloodthirsty killing machine — and then, once it doesn't do anything to them, swing all the way to "oh, it's basically a puppy, not dangerous at all." It's so hard to get people to sit in that middle ground. The three big rules I always give people: don't feed them, don't let kids or pets near the water's edge, and don't go swimming in their habitat. If everyone who moved here knew those three things, we'd avoid the majority of these problems.
Tom Rowland: It's interesting — that's not being in one camp or the other, and I think that's where most people should land: they're not bloodthirsty killers, they're not puppy dogs, they're somewhere in the middle, and if you do your part, you're probably not going to have a problem.
Tom Rowland: There's also a lot of debate — as fishermen, the shark situation in Florida is something a lot of people talk about. Have you seen an increase in the number of sharks in the areas where you dive, and in Florida generally?
Chris Gillette: Before I get to that, I really want to emphasize how politicized everything gets — if you try to hold the middle ground, both sides think you're wrong and on the other team, and it's almost impossible to have a meaningful conversation without someone politicizing it.
Tom Rowland: Unless you have a podcast where you can talk at length, instead of a tiny soundbite that gets twisted into "so you think we should just kill them all."
Chris Gillette: Exactly — and part of the problem is attention spans. I watch the analytics on my own social videos, and most people don't make it past thirty seconds. How do you even begin to approach a subject like this in a minute and a half?
As for the actual population question, my big thing is talking about shifting baselines. The idea is that we form our sense of "normal" based on our own short lifespans. Say we use thirty or forty years ago as our reference point — that also happens to be right after the environmental revolution of the seventies, the Endangered Species Act, all of that. It takes time for regulations to catch up, so thirty or forty years ago was actually close to the lowest point for a lot of wildlife populations, maybe 80% below where they'd have been before European settlement. Once real protections kicked in, populations started to rebound, but very slowly at first, because predatory animals reproduce slowly — it might take ten or fifteen years to reach sexual maturity, and then those animals need to have their own offspring. So you get an exponential climb: twenty becomes forty becomes eighty, and it can look like it happened almost overnight within a human lifetime, even though the real number might still be, say, 50% below the pre-European baseline instead of 80% below it. People look at that curve and think, "there's more than ever, we have to do something," without realizing "more than ever" only means more than the worst point in recorded memory.
We can't really picture the true historical baseline, because it's outside living memory — but old writings describe whale populations so thick you could supposedly walk across their backs as far as you could see, or bird flocks so dense they blocked out the sun like dusk. That was normal once, and it doesn't exist anymore. We know shark populations have plummeted the same way, even if we don't have hard numbers, because the ocean is so vast and so much of shark biology — where they breed, their full migratory range — is still a mystery, and a lot of it happens outside our own protected waters.
Tom Rowland: I follow that, but there's a whole other camp that won't even entertain the idea that in certain specific areas — like where you're diving, or the Keys — there really are more sharks than there used to be, even if the global population overall is trending down. It's a big ocean; you can have more sharks in some areas and fewer in others at the same time, and that seems obviously possible to me, but some people won't even have that conversation.
Chris Gillette: Right, it's totally politicized. And that's the other part of it — Jupiter, for example, is a known migration and aggregation point. It's kind of like walking into a packed club and going, "why are there so many of these people here, we should kill some of them," without realizing you walked into the one place they all gather. Or a football game — pack 100,000 people into a stadium and act surprised there are so many. That's their spot. We're also seeing a rebound in marine mammals along the Eastern Seaboard, which is feeding a growing great white population there. But going back to the whale example — we wiped out so much across the board that we're in what's genuinely a sixth mass extinction caused by humans. So when protections do work and we see a population bump within a single generation, it feels like an explosion, when it's actually still far below what existed before people were ever here.
Tom Rowland: It's a difficult conversation without the data from three hundred years ago, but I appreciate your take on it. What about the TV side of things — that seems to be where you're at a crossroads?
Chris Gillette: I've done a lot of TV — Nat Geo, Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, Travel Channel, CNN, NBC, E!, History, Fox, the Weather Channel, you name it. Some of it was genuinely fun, but most of my experiences were not good. Most of it is fake, and a lot of it is abusive — to the animals and to the people.
Tom Rowland: Abusive to the animals and the people?
Chris Gillette: On the people side, they just straight-up lie to you constantly. I've been on shows where, through call after call of pre-interviews, they tell you over and over, "this is your show, you're the star" — and you start thinking, why do they keep saying that so much? Then you get there and realize it's because you're not the star — some other guy is, and they're deliberately pitting the two of you against each other so there's manufactured tension over whose show it "really" is. I saw it coming on one shoot, thankfully, and made a point of looking straight into the camera so they couldn't use the reaction, basically calling it out on the spot.
On another show, one of the other guys said something factually wrong about an animal, and I corrected him — it's actually this instead. The producer jumped in and said, "no, we're saying it because it sounds better," specifically because the line was something like "this animal will kill a dozen people." I said, no, it really doesn't. He said, and I'll never forget this — "the effing people will effing eat what I effing feed them" — meaning he didn't care about accuracy, only what sells. That was a guy from Animal Planet.
Then there was a "survival" show where I made a very clear point, multiple times, that I'm vegetarian and an animal lover, and that we were not going to kill anything just for the sake of filming — if we were genuinely surviving, sure, I'd do what's necessary, but this was purely for TV. The producers agreed, and then they brought in a live pig for us to kill on camera to fake a survival moment. It wasn't even a wild animal — a fully domesticated pig, brought in purely so people could watch it get killed on TV for ratings while pretending we were surviving. I got right up in the producer's face and told him I wasn't doing it, and that he was lucky I wasn't giving him worse than that.
On the animal side, almost everything on TV is staged. It's the same as I'd imagine fishing shows sometimes are — a guy hidden in the bushes releasing a snake right on cue so it looks like a wild discovery. I've been that guy myself, as a kid, on multiple shows. Looking back now, I can spot it immediately: that alligator is a captive animal, it shows signs of metabolic bone disease you only see in captivity, its teeth are shaped completely differently from a wild gator's — little details you'd only notice if you actually know the animals. They fake all of it.
Tom Rowland: I've been doing fishing shows for twenty years, and we've never had a diver good enough to hook a fish for us to reel in on camera — believe me, if we could do that we'd catch a lot bigger fish than we actually do.
Chris Gillette: I've got one for you from the reptile side. I was working on a show — contracts mean I can't say which one — trying to catch a big crocodilian, a real one, for real this time, since I've seen how fake a lot of these shows are. I was hanging out over the water from a tree, maybe twenty feet up, with a rope and bait, luring in a twelve-foot crocodilian. It's smart — you don't get that big being stupid — so it took its time, hour after hour, while the whole camera crew waited in the bushes. This is normal for me; I'll stay out there all night if I have to. About six hours in, it was maybe twenty feet away, right on the edge of happening — and the entire camera crew just turned on all their lights, stood up, and started talking. I asked what they were doing, and they said, "union time, we're done." We were in another country specifically for that one animal, with a twenty-person crew there for it, and we blew the entire opportunity. It never came back.
Tom Rowland: I haven't run into "union time," but I know how important it is who you hire for that kind of work — the moment you put the camera down is exactly when it happens, in my business too.
Tom Rowland: Before we finish, tell me about David Blaine — what have you been doing with him?
Chris Gillette: I've worked with him a few times over the years, and he's one of the coolest guys I've ever met. I've worked with a handful of celebrities, and a lot of them turn out to be less cool than you'd think — never meet your heroes, as they say. But David Blaine is the real deal; I can't speak highly enough of him. The first time I met him, I was hired out in Beverly Hills as a consultant on a gator project — he was holding his breath inside a glass orb with an alligator, and I was there essentially as the safety guy. Everything went fine; he knows what he's doing. Afterward, having just met him, he offered for me to stay at his place — a mansion with plenty of rooms — and even offered his motorcycle if I wanted to go out on the town. He'd known me for maybe ten minutes.
I ended up working with him on a few different projects. People assume that because he does card tricks and illusions, his big stunts must have some hidden trick too — they don't. The stunts are completely real; he's basically superhuman in his mental capacity and his ability to push through pain.
Tom Rowland: One thing I wanted to ask — he held his breath for seventeen minutes at one point, and it looked completely legitimate, like he really trained hard for it. How do you even hold your breath that long?
Chris Gillette: That's on oxygen assist, though — you breathe pure O2 beforehand, which doesn't take away from how amazing it is. For comparison, I do freediving myself, and my personal best is five minutes on regular air. David's regular-air breath hold, without any special prep, was around seven minutes, from what I understand — two minutes better than mine. The oxygen-assisted version is what lets you go a lot longer. It's still incredible, even with the assist.
Tom Rowland: That'd be pretty dangerous too, breathing pure oxygen straight into your lungs — you'd have to really know what you're doing. That's what impresses me about him; it seems like whatever he takes on, he studies it obsessively until he's the best in the world at it.
Chris Gillette: Exactly — he hires the best of the best to teach him. When I was working for him in Vegas for his residency show, he had the alligator segment where he'd hold his breath in the glass door with the gator, and I was there both for the alligator and as a safety diver. Being on that set, I expected the usual — on most TV sets I've worked, half the crew are people you wonder how they even got the job. But on David's set in Vegas, I realized everyone around me was the absolute top of their field — the guy running the balloon rig, the guy who choreographs Marvel stunt flying sequences, everyone. That's how he trusts his life to these people: he pulls in the best from every discipline.
Tom Rowland: That's super interesting. And with a Vegas budget, packing the theater every week, he can hire whoever he needs.
Chris Gillette: It was so cool being on stage for it. To back up — the breath hold in the show itself isn't the record attempt; he trains separately for that. For the actual live show, he was doing so many other things too — jumping something like seventy feet, flying on a balloon rig, sewing his mouth shut for real, putting an ice pick through his arm. For the breath hold in the show, he wasn't even specifically training for it and still did about ten minutes with the oxygen assist. I was right there with him the whole time as the safety guy, and afterward I helped pull him out of the water — he could barely move, completely limp — and helped hold him up and hold the mic while he got his bearings on stage. Looking out at the crowd, it was surreal: there's Eminem, there's Woody Harrelson, there's Edward Norton. It's nuts.
Tom Rowland: Have you seen that Instagram account of the guy who calls himself Mister Ten Minutes? I don't know exactly what he does, but he can apparently hold his breath for ten minutes basically on demand, doing videos in a pool. It's wild that people can train themselves that far, and then you look at the actual world record — something like twenty-three or twenty-four minutes.
Chris Gillette: That's definitely oxygen-assisted too. Basically you're fully oxygenating your blood beforehand, and that's what gives you the longer hold.
Tom Rowland: Tell me about the cobra work — Kevin told me you've been working with cobras.
Chris Gillette: I have, for a long time. Back when I first moved down to South Florida, my first job while I was in college was doing venomous snake shows — handling cobras, pit vipers, rattlesnakes, all of it, in front of audiences of five or six hundred people. I was 19 or 20, kind of an idiot, and there I am handling a cobra in front of six hundred people thinking, this is wild.
More recently — and this was supposed to stay secret, but David Blaine just said it himself on Joe Rogan's podcast, so I can talk about it now — David kissed a king cobra as one of his stunts, and I was the one who helped train him to do it. That snake was the real thing: a genuine, fully venomous, wild-caught king cobra, not defanged, not tranquilized in any way. It would absolutely kill you. A lot of performers will use a trained, calm animal and let people assume it's wild — this was not that. This was a real, adult, wild king cobra. When David first called me about it, I honestly didn't know if I wanted to take the job — I spent about two weeks deciding, because I didn't want to be responsible for his life if things went wrong, and even if we did everything right, there was still a real chance he could get killed. Professional snake handlers in Southeast Asia do stunts like this regularly, and they don't have a great life expectancy doing it. But he pulled it off, for real.
Tom Rowland: There are videos of a guy walking into a room full of cobras, calmly sorting through them, smacking one on the head when it rises up — do you know what's going on in something like that?
Chris Gillette: I don't know the specific background of that video, but it could be a venom lab, where they house a lot of them together to milk venom. If it is, I really hope they handle them better than that in practice, because what's shown there isn't good technique. The cobra hooding up is a defensive posture, not an attack — and smacking it on the head, right where its brain is, can easily cause a fracture or brain damage. That's not okay for the animal. Some of that could also be snakes that have had their mouths sewn shut, which sadly a lot of snake-show operators do — or they'll pull the fangs, which isn't even fully safe either, by the way. People still get bitten and killed doing that; it's abusive to the animal and doesn't fully solve the danger. In some of those overseas operations, the turnover of handlers who get hurt or killed is just treated as an accepted cost of doing business. It's a very different mentality.
Tom Rowland: That is a very different mentality than what David Blaine is doing. I want to be respectful of your time, since you've already got an animal situation going on behind you. I really appreciate you coming on — you told some incredible stories, and it's great getting to know you a little. I'd love to come see your North Florida facility once it's finished, or the South Florida one. My daughter actually saw your videos of people swimming with the alligators and said it looked pretty good — she's 20.
Chris Gillette: I was just making sure — the age limit is 16, so she's fine. Come do it. Right now we're still running it every Saturday down at the Everglades Outpost in Homestead, and once I get built up here in North Florida, I'll be running tours up here too.
Tom Rowland: For people who want to find you and follow your content, how do they do that?
Chris Gillette: On Instagram it's Gator Boyz Chris. On Facebook, Chris Gillette with the verification badge, or my backup account, Gator Chris. On TikTok, Gator Chris One — I really need to make all of these the same handle. On YouTube I've got a channel called Florida's Wildest that I run with my girlfriend, and another one called Geeter Chris, which is more of a podcast-style channel where I just talk and go deep on topics. My tour website is Crocodile Chris, and I've also got a photography website. I need to hire someone who actually knows the internet to make all of this consistent.
Tom Rowland: There's a job for somebody who loves snakes and sharks and crocodiles and also knows the internet. Well, Chris, I appreciate you coming on — great to get to know you, and a great conversation.
Chris Gillette: Awesome, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it.
Tom Rowland: Don't get bit.
Chris Gillette: Yeah, don't get bit.
Tom Rowland: Alright, see you.
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