Travis Kelce Calls Taylor Swift “the Biggest and Best Thing Possible” (But He’s Also Really Into Red Pandas)

What does Travis Kelce have in common with an old-school Disney princess? For one thing, he and Cinderella both have a whole thing with shoes, but moreover, Taylor Swift’s boyfriend and all those musically gifted, mommy-deficient ladies are friends to the animal kingdom.

On this week’s episode of New Heights, the podcast Travis Kelce co-hosts with his brother Jason Kelce, published on Wednesday, Travis shared some details about his trip to Australia to see both Swift and many, many animals. Honestly, he shared more details about the animals than about Swift, though he did say that the show he caught in Sydney was “fun,” and the cameras that greeted him upon his arrival in Australia and the helicopters that swarmed the couple’s trip to the Sydney Zoo were weird, if his answer to Jason’s question of “what the hell is your life right now?” is anything to go off of.

“There were full-on helicopters just flying around. They helicoptered us!” Travis said, before remembering his personal relationship ethos of “don’t be weird” and amending, “Well, not us. Taylor.”

And you know what? He gets it. He appears to think Swift is also very cool, which is great, seeing as they’ve been publicly dating since summer 2023.

“This is all because Taylor is the biggest and the best thing possible,” he said.

But! There’s always a but, and in this case, the but is: “But I tell you what though, the kangaroos were pretty sweet, got to see a red panda up close and personal,” he continued, before really getting going on behalf of the red panda’s public image, continuing, “It looked like a friendly raccoon. You know some raccoons can look fuckin’ like—I’m not gonna fuck with that. He was friendly. You’re gonna fuck with a red panda, those things are sweet.”

Once he’d trampled the name of the common raccoon, Travis went on to ruminate about other things he liked about the red panda: He’s pretty sure, he said, that it would not have attacked him if he’d entered its enclosure. It seemed chill. He also liked that a zookeeper had warned him that it was “an escape artist.” “Brownie points,” he said.

The dreamily fond expression on his face as he discusses the creatures definitely tracks, given his known soft spot for squirrels and the way they eat. (Never forget his wistful “I made a friend that day” while remembering how a “squirle” “smashed” a piece of bread, as chronicled in his infamous and creatively spelled tweets of yesteryear.)

“What else did I feed?” he said, before sharing his mostly positive takes on several other types of wildlife he and Swift encountered, some of which they got to share snacks with.

In brief: Tigers (“Fucking sweet, I ain’t gonna lie.”), lions (he saw three and they were all fast, but “you could tell one was the big bad, I was like, ‘damn, that’s a bad man right there.’”), something that was either an emu or an ostrich, he wasn’t sure (“they got them wings but they ain’t going nowhere”), dingoes (“at least, I think they were dingoes”), capybaras (“those little, the big, enormous-sized hamsters,” as he first called them, then “athletic” upon learning their name), rhinos (lots of thoughts here, including “terrifying,” “rock solid,” “like me putting my hand on a plaster wall,” “real playful,” “majestic,” and, “You can tell how heavy those things are and it can just fuck you up. When I tell you that thing is agile.”), and koalas (“they weren’t doing anything, they were just chilling. That’s what they do, they just chill”).

He didn’t see a giraffe. Don’t even ask about giraffes. But you can, as Jason did, ask about koala breath. It does not smell like eucalyptus, Travis said.