The United States has more species of turtles and tortoises than any other country in the world, with 51 species, making it a prime target for wildlife traffickers exporting to Asia.
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At 2:13:10 · chapter starts 2:10:50
Eric Goode has spent two decades trying to save the plowshare tortoise, an animal so rare and beautiful that specimens trade for up to $100,000 on the black market and poachers target even the defaced specimens his organization tried to protect by Dremeling identifying marks into their shells.[1] He did a 60 Minutes piece with Lesley Stahl, a New Yorker article, attempted anti-poaching programs including Dremeling to reduce black market value — and still watched the tortoise go functionally extinct in Madagascar, its only native habitat. Then, right as the documentary was wrapping, the team achieved what no institution in the Western world had managed: a successful captive hatchling. The birth made it into the series finale, providing a rare note of genuine hope in an otherwise relentlessly dark story. Eric is now working to return captive-bred specimens to Madagascar — a symbolic act he acknowledges will require ongoing anti-poaching security funding, and may only work long-term if the tortoise is made available through legal captive breeding to reduce black-market demand, drawing a direct analogy to drug legalization.
The illegal wildlife trade has flipped. Native American turtles — wood turtles, spotted turtles, box turtles — are now being collected across the Midwest and shipped to China and Taiwan, where they fetch thousands of dollars each as exotic pets. A recent confiscation was valued at half a million dollars once the turtles reached the Chinese market.
A recent US Fish and Wildlife confiscation of box turtles being smuggled to China was estimated to be worth approximately $500,000 once they reached Chinese markets.
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Only about 3% of FDA-approved drugs have genuinely unclear mechanisms of action, making an unknown mechanism a meaningful early red flag for any compound.
Even compounds that clear preclinical testing often fail in humans: 30 to 50% of drugs entering phase 1 trials do not advance to phase 2, frequently because human behavior differs from animal models.
More than 80% of published BPC-157 research comes from a single academic group whose researchers have IP and commercial interests connected to the molecule, limiting independent replication.
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The scientist who discovered BPC-157 refused to disclose the screening method used to identify the compound and has never fully published the parent protein sequence — what Peter Attia calls 'scientific trust me, bro.'
The brain's visual, auditory, and motor cortices light up nearly identically whether an experience is real or imagined, making visualization a form of actual neural training.
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