In this episode of the podcast, the boys talk about fossilized walrus, ancient walrus bones, dick bones, and the weirdest things people have in their backpacks. Also, the guys talk about their favorite things to eat and drink. And, of course, there's a quiz from Curtdizzle! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, and do not represent those of any other companies. All rights reserved. Used by permission. This episode was produced and edited by Riley Bray. We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this episode. It was produced, produced, edited, and produced in part 2 of this series. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. Have a question or suggestion for our next episode? harrison@whatiwatchedtonight.co.uk and we'll get back to you in the next episode with a new episode. Thanks again for listening and supporting the podcast. Timestamps: 5:00 - What's your favorite thing to eat? 6:30 - How many animals have a bone bone? 7:00 8:20 - What do you like to have in your back pack? 9:40 - What kind of bones do you have? 11: How many things do you need? 14: What animal do you want to have a baculum? 15:10 - Which animal have it? 16: Which animal is your favorite bone bone or something like that? 17:10 18:40 19:30 21:30 Is it heavy? 22:30 Does it have it feel lightest? 27:30 What animal is it more than another animal has it like that's more than one thing? 26: What are you like? 25:00 Do you like it more? ? 24:30 Can you have it a little bit more than a piece of wood or something? 29:00 Is it a bit bigger than another? 30:30 Do you have a better than another piece of metal? 35:00 Can you give me a cup of something like this? 31:00 More? 36
00:00:19.000When I was younger, I don't know how I came into his orbit, but there was a fur buyer And taxidermist and muskrat trapper in Muskegon County, where I grew up in Michigan, and he had amassed a very impressive collection of baculums.
00:00:39.000And you brought this up because Frank Von Hippel had given us this fossilized walrus, ancient walrus, dick bone.
00:06:31.000The reason I have become interested in things being fossilized is, you know, if you're out on national forest land, notice I'm not saying national parks, but if you're out on national forest land or BLM land, various land designations, you know, if you find,
00:06:46.000like, an antler, a deer antler, you can keep it, right?
00:06:48.000Or if you find a chunk of bone, you can keep it.
00:08:17.000So now when I look at stuff, I'm always picking it up.
00:08:20.000I'm always wishing I had a better sense because I don't want to grab...
00:08:23.000I don't want to find something to bring home and then be in violation because I brought home a fossilized thing.
00:08:28.000Are you under any obligation to report it?
00:08:30.000Say if you found a skull that had obviously been opened up by ancient Native Americans, are you under any obligation, if you can't take it, to point archaeologists, drop a pen, point archaeologists to the spot where you found it, I can't imagine.
00:08:48.000I'm virtually certain you're not under any obligation.
00:08:51.000I did one time find a bison skull on national forest land and did a site report.
00:08:59.000Where I cooperated with the forest, the administrative unit of that national forest, because I had gone and did some work on it, had a radiocarbon date.
00:09:09.000So I was able to supply them with a piece of information they didn't have.
00:09:12.000And so we cooperated and did a site report.
00:09:15.000And I had also kind of like called a little bit to make sure I wasn't in the wrong.
00:09:19.000And this is in your book, American Buffalo, which is really good.
00:09:24.000It's so nice to hear your voice that you got a chance to do it because I know the first version of it, they hired some actor to do it.
00:09:33.000Yeah, it's kind of a funny thing about the book business is Audio, as you know, because you've kind of in some ways helped be at the vanguard of pioneering this, but audio is more and more important.
00:12:14.000Yeah, my friend Gad Saad, who is a professor out of Montreal, he wrote a book, he's an evolutionary biologist, and he wrote a book called The Parasitic Mind about just very bizarre behaviors and the way people are,
00:12:32.000the weird thought viruses that people are falling into today, like woke culture and all that kind of shit.
00:12:51.000Like, what's problematic about it, how it's not very objective and not rational, and that people are expected to think and behave a certain way because the gatekeepers of social media and all these people are the ones that are forcing this on folks.
00:13:06.000Anyway, he's got a very popular podcast.
00:13:10.000And yet they still hired somebody else to read his book.
00:14:02.000Without all the delivery, I mean, I'm not trying to conflate that, like writing a book and stand-up, because delivery is vastly more important than what you do.
00:14:15.000But you do get a sense of the cadence of how Yeah.
00:16:36.000That guy would still go on that field, or on the court, sorry, and probably be just as good as he always is.
00:16:46.000And I think that a decade ago, whatever, like at that point in life when you're just like, I don't know, maybe more self-absorbed or something, I could be sitting right now in this current climate, like I'd be sitting right now just like singularly focused on this thing.
00:17:44.000I did one weekend in Houston, and I got real weirded out thinking, like, what if I caught COVID and then I gave it to somebody, particularly if I gave it to a guest.
00:18:08.000And you get more comfortable expressing yourself.
00:18:12.000In stand-up comedy, the fear of doing it in front of live audiences, you get accustomed to people paying attention to you and watching you.
00:18:32.000What do you, because you get increasingly, at least from my perspective, increasingly you get scrutinized and over-scrutinized in the media.
00:19:30.000Like, if you really stopped and thought about that, that'll fuck with your head.
00:19:33.000If you have, you know, people in the media, if you have 100,000 professional journalists that are focused on comedy, you know, what are the numbers that are not going to enjoy you?
00:21:24.000They seem to think that censorship is okay as long as you're censoring someone who disagrees with the way you think, which is a new thing in the left.
00:21:32.000The acceptance of the First Amendment.
00:21:35.000I mean, I brought this up before, but the ACLU was founded by people that were literally supporting Nazis, like supporting actual neo-Nazi groups.
00:21:45.000Oh, in litigation, free speech issues.
00:21:50.000Even though their views are abhorrent, you have to support their ability to express themselves.
00:21:56.000This is what the foundation of this country is about.
00:21:59.000Free expression is the only way you find out what's right and what's wrong.
00:22:03.000Shutting people down, stopping people from communicating is a silly, short-sighted approach to debating an issue.
00:22:11.000And this is more and more common than ever on the left.
00:22:14.000Because of deplatforming, because they have the ability with social media, because social media is not really protected by the First Amendment.
00:22:23.000Social media, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or whatever, they're private companies.
00:22:26.000And they can decide, hey, we don't want this guy on because his views don't align with ours.
00:22:31.000And they have silenced people and kicked people off their platforms that really aren't doing anything wrong.
00:22:38.000They're saying things that the people that own and run the social media companies don't agree with.
00:23:03.000I think that it's not a bad idea to have a certain amount of money where you give it to people in times like this COVID pandemic.
00:23:14.000When you look at this pandemic, if people had a certain amount of money that came to them every month, And they didn't have to worry about food, and they didn't have to worry about housing.
00:23:24.000You could see how it would be easier to get back on track.
00:23:28.000The way people are today, where more than 30 plus percent can't pay their rent, they're on the verge of eviction, and all the protections against eviction are about to run out.
00:23:39.000This is a great example of where you do need big government.
00:23:43.000This pandemic is the best example ever.
00:23:46.000Or at least some sort of organized charitable organization where they really know how to take care of people that run into hard times.
00:23:59.000Especially hard times like this where it's through no fault of your own.
00:24:02.000The real argument against universal basic income is the same argument against a lot of people who use it against welfare, that you remove incentive.
00:24:11.000You give people free money, and you remove their incentive, you remove their motivation, and then you develop a whole class of people that relies on this, and they've become accustomed to it, and it's actually terrible for them, it's terrible for everybody else.
00:24:29.000When I look at that issue, that's one of the things I think about is, I don't even want to pretend that I don't view things through my own lens, but when I look at myself at pivotal points in my life and trying to get going,
00:24:47.000the fact that I was intensely motivated By just trying to find a way to pay my rent and my cell phone bill.
00:32:16.000I remember the writer Ian Frazier saying to me that when he was young and wanted to be a writer, he imagined himself sitting at his typewriter chuckling to himself.
00:33:12.000It changes conversation a little bit when you're talking to someone.
00:33:17.000If I have someone really good on it, or someone that is laying a lot of stuff on me that I wish I retained, I'll have to go back and re-listen to it, because it's kind of amazing.
00:33:44.000And I'll go to the grave with that, right?
00:33:46.000Like, I'm very good at remembering what people said.
00:33:50.000And I'm shocked when I re-listen to a guest that I'm really excited to have on, and they're like, it's an information-heavy episode.
00:33:56.000I'm shocked at all the stuff I missed.
00:33:58.000Let me see if you're wondering, just the fact that there's a microphone and headphones, somehow I lose my ability to be a person who just locks info up.
00:34:04.000Well, it's also because you're in the process of not just listening to what they're saying, but you're steering the conversation.
00:34:10.000You're trying to figure out how to respond, when to step in, when to not step in.
00:34:57.000One of the ways I've noticed that, and I even had that problem when we were having our little preamble chit-chat here, the presence of a microphone.
00:35:26.000Well, that's the problem with the early days of my podcast is that we didn't have any thought that people were actually listening.
00:35:33.000When I did the earliest versions of the podcast, like 10 years ago, 9 years ago, we would just get barbecued and we would just talk shit as if no one was in the room.
00:35:44.000If I sat down with Joey Diaz or Ari Shafir or one of my comedian friends, we would just say the most ridiculous, preposterous shit because that's how we talk to each other when there's no one around because that's the things that we find funny.
00:35:58.000When you're talking to a comedian, regular things aren't as funny.
00:36:02.000It's like if you're going to show a boo-boo to a guy who's an ER doctor and you've got a cut on your finger, that's not impressive.
00:36:11.000I just saw a guy get shot in the head.
00:40:17.000And I think part of that was also, he's a smart guy.
00:40:20.000And he was also in the middle of his renegotiation with Sirius Satellite Radio.
00:40:23.000And he was probably mocking comparisons to what he does with this huge organization, Sirius XM. Yeah, he used to be like the lapdog of FM and then became like the lapdog of satellite.
00:40:44.000I think I tell you this every time I come on your show, but the first time I ever heard the word podcast, I'm not joking, I had never heard the word until Helen Cho told me about going on Joe Rogan's podcast.
00:42:18.000No, I've expected it to be the way it was forever.
00:42:20.000Like, someday they'll make a, if they make a movie, like The Social Network, not The Social Dilemma, but they make a movie like The Social Network, which is about, like, Zuckerberg and those guys that come up on Facebook.
00:42:29.000They'll make, like, when they do the story of you...
00:42:34.000I wonder if they'll do it that you had a vision.
00:47:44.000Probably in the, you know, probably in the back, it's good that you don't act this way, but probably in the back of your head, you probably recognize Iran, like maybe you recognize Iran to something.
00:48:28.000Sam Kinison and Roseanne Barr are the perfect examples that I use.
00:48:33.000Both of them were normal people, and then they got hit by cars.
00:48:36.000Sam Kinison got hit by a truck and his brother who talks about it in his book called Brother Sam, his brother Bill wrote a book about it.
00:48:43.000It's like there was one Sam and then Sam got hit by a car and became a totally different person because of head trauma and then became wild and impulsive and just became a maniac.
00:48:53.000That was the Sam Kinison that we all knew and loved.
00:50:15.000There's gotta be some of it where I've had enough trauma, just the right amount, just enough of these, where it doesn't bother me that much.
00:50:26.000God, I'm gonna have you just full out.
00:50:30.000You think about the things that hold people back.
00:50:34.000One of the big things that hold people back is fear.
00:53:22.000But as it's becoming, become formalized...
00:53:27.000With scrutiny, with ideas of responsibility, with ideas of making a usable, practical, respected product, there's kind of a convergent evolution of driving it back into the thing that maybe it was a response against in the first place.
00:55:14.000Like, if that was me, and you played some video about some guy who decided he was going to try to do a backflip over a Lamborghini and landed on his head, and I would be like, how the fuck does that happen?
00:55:42.000That's how a normal human being would talk.
00:55:44.000But you don't have that when you have a massively overproduced program, when you have all these people that have a vested interest in that being successful.
00:55:53.000So you have executives, you have producers, you have writers, you have all these people that have a piece of the pie.
00:56:01.000So instead of having a Jamie and a couple of other folks that are security guys out there, instead of that, I have, what, a hundred people?
00:56:09.000Like a normal show that reaches the amount of people that this show does, there would be a staff of a hundred people.
00:56:16.000And those people would all have insurance.
00:56:22.000And then the things that you were going to talk about would be heavily vetted.
00:56:25.000You would have people come in with pieces of paper, and they would talk about, okay, in the first segment, you're going to discuss whether Pennsylvania's vote is coming in, and let's be real clear that here's the information that you have to go over, and there's none of that here.
00:56:41.000So, whether I'm good or bad, whether I'm right or wrong, at least you know it's just me.
00:56:47.000This is the thing that we're worried about when it goes to Spotify.
00:56:50.000Like, people are worried, oh my god, they're going to have sensors in the room.
00:56:52.000There's going to be people telling them what to do.
00:56:54.000What people are worried about is it becoming overproduced.
00:56:57.000It becoming something other than what it is.
00:56:59.000Because they know that's the natural course of progression.
00:57:01.000Somebody gets a hold of something that's wild and untamed, and they go, we've got to harness that and make a lot of money off of it.
00:57:08.000But the way to make a lot of money off of podcasting is the opposite way.
00:57:13.000But how are you going to leave it wild, though, when all these people are paying attention to it and all these people are criticizing it?
00:57:18.000You know, as we talked about, if a million people know about your show or a hundred million people know about your show and just one percent of them are mad at you, one percent of a hundred million is a million fucking people are mad at you!
00:57:31.000Even if 99% think you're awesome, that 1 million could make a big dent in your head.
00:57:39.000I think a way that they might invite you to look at it, I'm not suggesting you do this, but I think a way they might invite you to look at it could be captured by this article I read many, many years ago called The Radioactive Boy Scout.
00:57:55.000And it was about a kid who was working on some project where He needed to find some, you know, Ameriseum or something for some Boy Scout project he was doing.
00:58:07.000In smoke alarms, when you have a smoke detector, there's like a radioactive substance in there and smoke inhibits the ability of the substance to hit a sensor.
00:58:22.000So, he started buying up any and all smoke detectors that he could ever get his hands on, right?
00:58:29.000And then got into that he could find, I can't remember what it was, like in old types of clocks, he was finding some radioactive substance, and he got himself a Geiger counter.
00:58:40.000He would drive around with a Geiger counter on the front seat of his car past antique shops and shit, right?
00:58:49.000No, it was a story in Harper's Magazine called The Radioactive Boy Scout.
00:58:54.000He winds up accumulating so much of this shit in the shed that not only like eventually when it all breaks, like not only did they haul away the shed, they hauled away like his yard.
01:00:16.000Oh, why doesn't he like what I do for a living?
01:00:19.000Because he feels that me and other individuals and lots of people that by talking about and celebrating an activity in my case,
01:00:35.000hunting, fishing that it creates that my enthusiasms become infectious and it Increases the number of people and diminishes the quality of the experience that people who've always hunted will have because of competition.
01:01:46.000It's over now, and everybody was always worried about it happening during the election.
01:01:49.000Picture that you said, like, man, I think that if you're in that county, you should go down to the polling place and do X. A lot of dudes, right?
01:03:24.000That's not a person that's unfiltered.
01:03:26.000That's a person that's getting scripts, they're wearing makeup, they have a team of people that are attending to them and telling them what to do and how to say it.
01:03:34.000And there's a lot of other people, again, behind the scenes that are all paying attention to everything you do, and they'll come in in between takes and scenes.
01:03:42.000There's an interview with Donald Trump with this woman from CBS, very contentious interview, and he wound up putting the whole interview online.
01:03:54.000This woman was criticizing him and asking him questions, and he was like, you know, the way you talk to me, you would never talk to Joe Biden like this, and 60 Minutes wound up using a very small percentage.
01:04:08.000They wound up using a very small piece of it.
01:04:10.000But during the full one that Donald Trump put out, they interrupt the conversation because one of the producers is like, the American flag is blowing in the background because of the air conditioning and it's kind of distracting.
01:04:31.000But this is what happens when you get a whole crew of people.
01:04:34.000You get so many chefs in the kitchen, and some guy just decides that he's gonna stop the conversation between the fucking President of the United States, who's getting grilled by this lady because he doesn't like the way a flag is moving.
01:04:45.000That to me symbolized everything that's wrong with heavily produced and overly produced television.
01:04:50.000Or one of the things that's wrong, right?
01:04:52.000What's really wrong is they push the agenda, they push what you're going to talk about, and they'll decide who your guests are.
01:06:47.000You can't get that on these heavily produced bullshit shows that are on television where you have a million producers and everybody cuts in between commercials and fixes people's hair and you're super self-aware.
01:06:57.000That's what happens on those goddamn things.
01:08:01.000It wouldn't because now it's like you have water in your ears and you don't know you have water in your ear and then it comes out and you're like, oh, that's what hearing is like.
01:08:35.000There's no, like, one show that I really liked, I've liked a lot of your shows, but one show that I really liked was the one we were talking with the author whose book got turned into The Revenant, the movie.
01:08:59.000But you, because you have such a great knowledge of that subject and, you know, he does as well and you're asking, what is this and what is that?
01:09:08.000What was it like for you when they, instead of doing it on the plains, they decided to do it in a rainforest in the Pacific Northwest?
01:09:34.000That story, though, is a little bit, in some ways, might have a little bit to do with a sense of...
01:09:46.000responsibility or something because I had taken so many swipes over the years at my swipes at the movie The Revenant and voiced my dissatisfaction with that movie so much that I believe it went like this I believe the author then reached out or a friend of the author reached out to say um You know,
01:10:16.000he's really aware of how much fun you guys have with the movie.
01:10:23.000And I was like, duh, I should probably have the guy on.
01:10:27.000But it was because of historical inaccuracies, right?
01:10:44.000And then I wanted to get with them to be cool.
01:10:47.000Isn't it always a problem when someone takes a movie that's based on a real historical event and they distort that historical event just for film?
01:10:55.000An example that I always use is that movie, was it Dreamcatcher?
01:11:03.000Oh yeah, the Olympic wrestling team movie.
01:11:06.000Based on a real wrestler, Mark Schultz, who fought in the UFC. And in the movie, a lot of things take place that I don't know whether or not they took place because I'm not intimately connected to the movie, but I'm intimately connected with the UFC. And when Mark fought in the UFC,
01:13:16.000That's kind of like two combined with the second one.
01:13:18.000But to tell you which things have been different, I remember actually having a conversation like this with a producer one time about filming hunting things.
01:13:41.000And no joke being like, could you do it with a machete?
01:13:45.000Because in their mind, there's not the respect for how things are done.
01:13:53.000It's so show business that you're not in love with how someone did something.
01:13:59.000You're in love with what the end product could be visualized as, meaning it's more arresting in their mind to see someone cut something up with a machete.
01:15:41.000Like, this was the first time an Olympic gold medalist in wrestling competed in the UFC. We got to see this insanely dominant wrestling, like, where he just took him down any time he wanted to and just completely controlled the fight.
01:17:06.000Just informed by a hodgepodge of actual events.
01:17:13.000So there's an element in there, a very detailed element stolen from John Coulter's life, an event that's come to be known as Coulter's Run.
01:17:24.000There's some characters that are these amalgams of different people who kind of drifted in and out of that time in the 1830s and 1840s.
01:18:11.000It's also one of those movies where all the Native Americans are, well, except for the heroine, the Native Americans are blundering idiots.
01:18:24.000I believe it was made in 1980. Yeah, there it is.
01:18:27.000Yeah, I had a conversation once when I was just starting to get into acting.
01:18:34.000I think maybe I had just been cast in the news radio and I got brought, maybe not even, I had been brought in to meet with these producers because they knew I had a martial arts background.
01:18:44.000They wanted to talk about me doing a martial arts movie and the interview did not go very well.
01:18:49.000Because they were talking about things in movies, like all these wild scenes, and they were asking me what I like.
01:18:56.000And I go, well, I like things that are realistic.
01:18:58.000I want to see something that I know would work.
01:19:01.000Like if a guy, you know, jumps up and split kicks two people and knocks them across the room, like that doesn't...
01:25:00.000But there's something about people, when you get too many people, too many minds, too much influence, you know, just get involved in things.
01:25:10.000That point was the thing that, oh, the toilet scene?
01:25:13.000So that was the thing that shocked me originally about doing books is I remember This is not to discredit my agent, but I remember having a conversation with my publisher and we kind of like over lunch one time hit on an idea for a book and she seemed to like agree with the idea and it's just two of us in a room and she had an imprint and could make that call at Random House and we're
01:25:43.000like talking and I'm like, you know, I think it'd be really cool and I left the lunch and And called my agent and said, like, I think I maybe just kind of sold a book.
01:25:54.000You know, you should call and double check.
01:25:56.000And to think that, like, a thing of that level of impact would come about with just that.
01:26:07.000I remember being really inspired by that.
01:27:32.000It's problematic to distribute mainstream.
01:27:34.000There's so many men out there that feel like they don't have anybody that represents the way they think.
01:27:40.000So one of the things I think that resonates with this show is because there's no filter, because there's no executives that tell you what to do, I could just be myself.
01:27:50.000There's a lot of people like me out there.
01:27:55.000I think that you're very, very open about the evolution of your thought, and you're very open about ideas that you're not trying on, but you're open about your thought process.
01:28:13.000Meaning that you'll voice something and do a good job of voicing that you're aware that there's probably more to the story.
01:28:27.000And I think that someone could even look at transcripts of what you say and get a false idea of it, where if they listen to you, it would carry with it the lack of certainty as you hear a new piece of information and discuss it.
01:29:00.000Like, for instance, I remember when everybody's all worked up because Trump referred to Pompeo as the Secretary of the Deep State, which I thought was funny.
01:29:59.000But they're trying to distort what he said because it makes a better narrative, the narrative that he's an asshole.
01:30:05.000I could go on all day about legitimate complaints someone might have with the administration, but the thing about him saying funny things and that making people mad, I kind of a little bit appreciate the humor sometimes.
01:32:19.000They take away all the times he forgets what he's talking about.
01:32:25.000There's no thing that they've ever had on CNN where they have a legitimate conversation on whether or not he can hang in there for four years.
01:32:47.000They avoid so many different things that would be detrimental to him because in large part because they believe they covered that stuff too much in 2016 with Hillary when it came to the emails and deleting the 30,000 emails and And then the FBI reopening the investigation right before the election and that could have cost her and they've decided their approach this time they've decided that Trump is bad and he's a danger to democracy and so they're only going to cover the news that they think is important.
01:33:16.000Well, the problem with that is then you open up the door to Fox News being able to say, why aren't these other people covering this?
01:33:22.000They're not covering this because they're biased and it's fake news.
01:34:05.000People who don't think that there is an inherent bias within news organizations, within long-term legacy news organizations, they're either feigning ignorance because it benefits them, or they're just flat-out naive.
01:34:23.000But it's never been this obvious, where they're just ignoring really hard...
01:34:28.000You don't want someone to be president if they can't think right, right?
01:34:32.000If someone's showing a real, clear sign of cognitive decline, you don't...
01:34:52.000After what you were saying, I'm reading updates now.
01:34:57.000As of now, they've called Wisconsin for Biden.
01:35:01.000Arizona has not officially been called, but I'm seeing that it's called.
01:35:05.000And if he just wins Nevada and Michigan, which he's currently up in, that's enough to give him 270. And it doesn't matter about PA. It doesn't matter about Pennsylvania at that moment.
01:35:18.000I heard last night, I think it was Karl Rove actually that was saying on Fox News that this reporting number is not accurate because they have no idea how many people voted right now and how many mail-in ballots or early ballots are sitting out there.
01:35:32.000So saying that like 99% or 95% as in that might not be a good accurate number to go off of.
01:38:24.000You know what's funny that what's not happening yet is when we set this date, Joe, we sat here and talked about that America would be on fire as we recorded this.
01:38:32.000I think they're waiting to find out what the results are, and then they light the fuse.
01:38:52.000Once it's decided, once it goes to court, that's going to be a shit show.
01:38:55.000Isn't it funny, like, the different way, the different camps, if there is, like, a court and a dispute, the different camps, like, that the one impulse is to mount a giant flag on your truck.
01:39:07.000And get other dudes in trucks to roar around.
01:39:14.000One camp would be, I have a friend who has a student who has a husband in the military and he described these rolling motorcades as vanilla ices.
01:40:23.000Right now, talking about that responsibility thing, man.
01:40:27.000I feel like you probably don't feel this.
01:40:30.000I, right now, am kind of grieving for America a little bit.
01:40:34.000Not about how the election might twist, but I'm grieving for America about if the polarization is true.
01:40:43.000And I sometimes question whether it's true or not.
01:40:46.000Because when I go out, I just have like...
01:40:50.000I've been talking about this all the time lately.
01:40:51.000When I go out about in my community and elsewhere, sitting here right now, whatever, I have very positive interactions with my fellow Americans.
01:41:01.000When I go to the gas station and go in to buy some shit, it's like I come away happy.
01:42:10.000She's TikTok-ing and shit and hanging out with her friends.
01:42:13.000She only sees the positive sides of it.
01:42:15.000What I was trying to get her to see is obviously she has no interest at all in politics.
01:42:21.000She doesn't understand the division that's happening in this country because people live in these echo chambers and they argue ideas and the way social media exacerbates this with their algorithms that point you towards things that are outrageous,
01:42:37.000point you towards things that piss you off and keep you in this sort of ideological bubble.
01:42:43.000And the people were dividing further and further away from each other.
01:42:47.000And you look at this shift in the way people view the other side, whereas there were so many more people that were sort of centrists or, you know, had, you know, a little bit of ideas from the left, a little bit of ideas from the right.
01:43:30.000Well, I felt like I could definitely see it because when I was there, there was an enormous amount of tension around the homeless crisis in Seattle.
01:43:43.000That loitering laws, camping laws were just suspended.
01:44:35.000After seeing like that level of just consternation from people who'd been there a long time about why do I have this feeling that there's like laws that I'm held to but some people are just not held to a law.
01:44:47.000And this is pre-COVID when you were living there.
01:45:30.000Now, my friend sent me a video where she was driving down in Venice, and she held her phone up out the window, and it is a mile plus of tents.
01:46:03.000I was going to a restaurant there with my wife and we stopped at a red light and there was this beautiful house to the left, probably like millions of dollars, right?
01:46:21.000And I talk to people that are there, and like, no, we have those little ring doorbell things with the videos.
01:46:27.000Constantly seeing people stealing shit.
01:46:28.000Constantly seeing people breaking into their yard, trying to get into their house, wandering in their backyard, trying to get into their garage.
01:51:01.000I was having a conversation with someone recently where they were challenging why you could feel proud about being a citizen of a country where you just were born there and you just lived there because you were born there.
01:51:21.000It's like, how can you be proud of that?
01:51:54.000Conversely are taking their deep sense of pride and love and using it to leverage and diminish Other people.
01:52:04.000A sort of like, I love it more, or I have more of a right to love it.
01:52:09.000And even the fact that to either lack patriotism or conversely to weaponize patriotism, it all makes me feel like I'm a little skittish right now, man.
01:53:36.000I mean, I think this is the greatest experiment in self-government and then getting a bunch of people to live together and then what kind of impact it has on the rest of the world ever.
01:53:52.000I was going to say, I just think right now people are concentrating only on the negative aspects of it.
01:53:57.000I had a conversation recently with someone who'd built, over the course of their life, they'd built a billion-dollar business and highly critical of the government.
01:54:06.000Highly critical of the government while simultaneously building a billion dollar business telling me he feels no patriotism.
01:54:12.000I'm like, fucking you don't feel any patriotism!
01:54:43.000There's places in the world right now where if you did the exact same thing, they'd literally come for you and kill you.
01:54:48.000We were talking yesterday on the podcast about this wrestler in Iran that is a world champion wrestler who they executed because he participated in a peaceful protest.
01:54:59.000And the UFC tried to make a plea to the Iranian government to not kill him and they fucking killed him anyway.
01:55:48.000I voted for the libertarian candidate, even though I knew she wasn't going to win.
01:55:52.000I mean, I voted for her in California, where she had no chance.
01:55:55.000It was Yeah, I think that that's a very...
01:56:00.000I'm interested to hear you did that, because I had an astonishingly similar thought process as I filled out my ballot, is to live in a state where there's not any question about where it's going to go,
01:56:30.000It doesn't have to fall into this crazy system of this collection of thoughts and this other collection of thoughts, and you pick between those two.
01:58:33.000For like roughly my life expectancy, and it counts down backwards.
01:58:37.000Well, don't you think that your life expectancy, I mean, you are one of the few people that I know that has almost been killed by a grizzly bear.
01:59:16.000It jarred the minute or the seconds that occurred, jarred my brain so hard that as I've tried to be curious about and study about what happened in my brain...
01:59:28.000It's parallels are all found and it's discussed by people who discuss near-death experiences, which might just mean I'm not as tenacious mentally as I'd like to be, but my brain got joggled.
02:00:29.000When you're around something like that where there can be no doubt that you can't get out of the way, you can't fight it off, you're helpless, it must trigger something in your mind where you come to grips with the reality of predator and prey that you almost were on the menu.
02:02:11.000We were very, very aware that this might occur and went up and investigated the area around the tree and determined that a bear hadn't found it yet.
02:02:18.000In fact, the carcass of the animals laying that far away was untouched.
02:02:23.000In hindsight, there was a pile of bear shit that had been smeared.
02:02:28.000And I remember looking at that pile of bear shit and wondering if it had been smeared by a bear's foot or smeared by a boot.
02:02:33.000And I determined that it looked like it had been smeared by a boot, which would have meant we'd smeared the shit when we were hanging the thing in the tree.
02:02:39.000And then stupidly, we sat down to eat lunch.
02:02:41.000And within a couple of minutes of sitting down and eating lunch, the bear came in and its open mouth passed.
02:03:54.000I even noticed there's a thing that happens to people when they get really cold.
02:04:00.000They enter a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy mentality when you start to get cold.
02:04:08.000As you start to get really cold, where you could be in a hypothermic situation, people stop doing the obvious things that you would do to get warm.
02:04:24.000And as aware of that as I am, as many times as I've experienced that, I still see it happen to me.
02:04:30.000I still have to snap myself out of it.
02:06:53.000But I know I was in the middle of saying that when all of a sudden the people around me erupted off the ground as though like a landmine had gone off underneath us.
02:07:19.000And I'm, yeah, like, I mean, relative to most, a ton of exposure to those things.
02:07:26.000I got to expose my 10-year-old kid to him this year a couple times, you know, hunting caribou in Alaska, and it was, like, cool to kind of see his thought process.
02:07:36.000You, yeah, you've been exposed to more than 99.999% of the population.
02:07:47.000Because we're always talking about, I'm going to do this and I'll do that.
02:07:51.000And we're always like, yeah, you know, I actually prefer the 44 over the 3 because, you know, if I can't get it done with this, 13, you know, I got 13 reasons he doesn't want to charge me with this semi-auto.
02:08:05.000It's like all this, like, bullshit, you know?
02:08:08.000And all of a sudden it, like, hits and, like...
02:08:10.000You know, swat it with a track and pull.
02:08:13.000I've only seen one grizzly ever in the wild, up close, and it wasn't a big one.
02:10:16.000People that live in proximity to things that are regarded as endangered tend to have a different perspective on the abundance than people who look at it from far away.
02:10:59.000You have a constitutional right to hunt and fish.
02:11:01.000Meaning that a state has to recognize that renewable resources should be allocated to hunters and anglers.
02:11:12.000And one might ask, well, how does it ever come into fruition?
02:11:16.000There's a lawsuit right now in Montana.
02:11:20.000There's a lawsuit against the governor and the state who they put a cap, they put a quota on the wolf harvest.
02:11:29.000And they're being sued by a conservation group who's worried about the steep decline in elk numbers.
02:11:35.000They're being sued by that conservation group that their right to hunt is being infringed upon by a reticence to control wolf numbers to the detriment of big game herds.
02:11:50.000I think people are supposed to act apologetic for the fact that they want wild game resources.
02:12:00.000We talked about this one individual that you were curious about who is very instrumental in wolf reintroductions and he refers to hunters as the recreational big game killing industry.
02:12:11.000It's kind of like a swipe at people who sort of act like it's not a legitimate perspective to want there to be deer, elk, moose, caribou to eat and use.
02:12:21.000I'm very unapologetic about my view that I want there to be a lot of deer, elk, whatever, game.
02:13:26.000They have to craft a plan and that plan has to be approved?
02:13:28.000Yeah, and it'll be like, you can imagine, it'll be like all kinds of lawsuits, all kinds of issues, a lot to be sussed out, but it's forcing the state game agency to craft a plan and take seriously what it would look like.
02:13:44.000Because the argument is like, oh, you're making it a popular vote, you're taking science out of the hands of scientists and putting it into the hands of the public.
02:13:51.000But in all fairness, I hope it doesn't pass because wolves are showing up in Colorado on their own.
02:14:16.000It's a little bit fuzzy, but it's like...
02:14:18.000When we established wolf hunting seasons and trapping seasons in Montana and Wyoming and Idaho after a long period where there were no wolf seasons, it had a really dramatic impact on how the wolves behaved.
02:14:31.000It made them much more secretive, moved them into different areas, kind of pushed them out of some of the bigger riparian zones.
02:14:38.000It just sort of changed their attitude, changed the way they interact with the landscape.
02:14:48.000It might be true that by having wolves that have this instinct of—they're already coming out of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, passing down through southern Wyoming and going to Colorado—they might have developed a finer-tuned instinct about avoiding trouble with people.
02:15:08.000Because there's a lot of selective pressure against wolves and against grizzlies.
02:15:13.000A lot of selective pressure against those that are too ready to engage with man.
02:15:18.000It's a good way to end up dead when you engage with man and spend too much time around livestock, spend too much time around developments.
02:16:03.000And do they have a specific reason why they want it to happen faster?
02:16:07.000They would say that wolves are gone because of human manipulation, because of a very intentional plan to shoot them and poison them off the face of the earth.
02:18:08.000I'm kind of like, you know, if you could work into my brain on it and sort of like just accept that what I'm telling you is kind of a true thing, like I do like wolves to be on the landscape.
02:18:23.000I... I don't think we can justifiably play God and eliminate species from the planet.
02:18:41.000I want wolves to be on the landscape, but if they're going to be on the landscape, We're going to have to set what that looks like and then open up like pressure release valves and pressure release valves will take the form of hunting and trapping.
02:18:55.000Like state management, there should be a stable population of wolves.
02:18:58.000We should agree what that population looks like and they should be managed by the state as a renewable resource.
02:19:05.000It's like what I want is pretty clear.
02:21:22.000But it was just like in between trees and dense forest.
02:21:27.000I couldn't tell what the fuck I was looking at.
02:21:28.000The Arctic explorer Viljalmer Stephenson describes sneaking up on a grizzly bear that was a marmot.
02:21:38.000And he describes seeing a walrus's head sticking out of the water and then realizing it was a hill on the land with two white snowshoots coming down these troughs in the hillside.
02:21:58.000It's weird how the mind plays tricks on you like that.
02:22:04.000When people talk about seeing Bigfoot, you know, I ran into one lady when I was doing this Bigfoot show up in Mount Rainier, and she was very adamant that she saw a gorilla.
02:22:16.000She saw a big gorilla walking through the woods.
02:22:53.000And so someone might, like, whatever, someone might be doing something and, like, realize, oh, you know, and they duck into a brush and lay down, and people are like, oh, yeah, if you go to this moment and this second, you'll see it.
02:23:05.000The guys don't even know it's there, but you can see it in the bushes.
02:23:09.000People love to find missing things, things that aren't real.
02:23:13.000You know, I've always said this, that, like, if Bigfoot was 100% real, if everybody knew there was Bigfoot, It wouldn't be nearly as interesting as orcas.
02:23:21.000If orcas weren't real, if orcas were a legend, people have seen this thing.
02:23:27.000It's in the water, it's intelligent, and it's enormous, and they can sing, and they have different languages and dialects.
02:23:37.000They fall off boats, and they actually rescue them.
02:23:40.000These are all things that people have said about killer whales.
02:23:43.000But because we know killer whales are real, you seem like, oh, look!
02:23:49.000You can put them in a fucking swimming pool and stick them in a parking lot in San Diego and people come to see them and they think it's cool.
02:23:55.000My kids, they have a lot of, we get them a lot of animal books and they like the dinosaur books, especially the ones where there's always a picture of a dinosaur and then a person.
02:28:33.000It was described to me by people who are down there.
02:28:36.000We were on a famous ranch called Eteria.
02:28:39.000It's very limited access, but just through social connections and things, we're able to hunt on this property that doesn't get hunted very heavily.
02:28:47.000The people there that have grown up on that property, grown up in cattle ranching, they view it as...
02:31:48.000There's another thing like, you know, with American pronghorn or what we popularly call antelope, they're ridiculously fast for anything they have to deal with.
02:31:57.000And it was like they, you know, the theory is they co-evolved with the American cheetah.
02:33:24.000I was at the Lindenmeyer site in Colorado, a famous Folsom site, Ice Age encampment.
02:33:31.000And it was funny because I happened to be at that site that there was a guy there...
02:33:38.000Working these certain sediment levels to find these little micro crystals, these things that were created during the impact, because you had all this radiocarbon dating that had been done around Lindenmeyer, so we knew all these ages.
02:33:52.000And he was in there looking for these things, and the anthropologists that I was with were very dismissive of him.
02:34:55.000Yeah, the Blitzkrieg hypothesis held that it was the arrival of humans that led to the extirpation and extinction of a lot of the Ice Age megafauna.
02:35:07.000So you'd look and it would be that why did mammoths go extinct in Europe 30-40,000 years ago, but they went extinct here 10,000 years ago.
02:35:18.000And you'd map human migrations and you found this compelling pattern of the fact that people show up and shit goes extinct.
02:35:26.000We did a podcast about this with a guy you should talk to sometime named David Meltzer who knows this world better than anybody.
02:35:38.000It's seductive because I think it's seductive from a cultural perspective because it allows you to fantasize that past cultures were as destructive as our own which makes you feel good.
02:35:52.000That they were hunting these things to extinction back then, so we can't be that bad for driving things to extinction now.
02:35:57.000Everything about it was very packaged up and had a nice bow on it.
02:36:01.000What started to eat away at the Blitzkrieg hypothesis is that more DNA work on remains, like more DNA work on bones, and a greater picture of effective population size Of these past populations.
02:36:21.000And you realize that things were in steep decline anyways.
02:36:41.000But everything, our old perspective of how we used to look at it made everything seem very compressed and very immediate.
02:36:49.000And so it's just gotten more complicated, as we understand more, that mammoth populations were perhaps collapsing long before people showed up.
02:37:00.000Well, mammoths have a long gestation period, right?
02:37:03.000That was the idea, too, that people coming into a valley and you would kill some females and could have, for pachyderms, these things with very low fecundity, that you could come in and kill some females and have this impact on it.
02:37:21.000There's also the problem that I remember criticism of people that used to feel this way.
02:37:26.000The criticism used to be that they called them the bison boys, where they had this fantasy of these roving, highly effective big game hunters.
02:37:33.000And then people point now to, why is there not more evidence of, why is there such limited evidence of humans killing mastodons and mammoths?
02:38:37.000Yeah, and then these analysts come look at it.
02:38:38.000Like, there is no compelling reason to think that this is a kill site.
02:38:44.000Because now, you take an elephant, a dead elephant, dump it on the ground, look at it in a month, look at it a month later, look at it a month later, look at it a month later.
02:39:23.000For reasons Melcher would describe more eloquently than me.
02:39:26.000It is fascinating when they're trying to piece together what happened based on some bones and some fossils and based on tools and just whatever evidence that they find in the ground and that they're trying to put together a comprehensive portrait of history through this.
02:39:43.000What a lot of anthropologists laugh about is that everything unexplained is always of religious significance.
02:40:06.000Yeah, I mean, you know, I might be cutting up deer and my kids come in and do something, line the hooves up in some way, stick them in the snow.
02:42:25.000Well, the guy I was with, he's retired now, a guy named Mike Kunz, he had found a thing called the Mesa site, and he had identified like...
02:43:11.000The academic consensus is that he's right.
02:43:14.000During the Ice Age, whatever it was, 12,000 some odd years ago, whatever the hell it was, 10,700, like some Ice Age date, people camped up here, made shitloads of projectile points.
02:44:04.000Just the idea of holding on to one of those, just put it in your hand and just imagine what it was like when that guy used tendons to lace it to a stick.
02:44:48.000And you just look at that arrowhead and you think, God damn, someone sent that through the lungs of a white-tailed deer probably hundreds of years ago.
02:45:12.000If there was ever a time where you could just go to view, just to be a fly on the wall of history, do you know when you think you would go?
02:45:28.000Because I just want to see how, I'd want to see, maybe not 20, whatever the hell it is, I'd want to see how woolly mammoths interacted with that landscape.
02:46:38.000Well, I'd want to see the front foot better, but the front foot's back behind his heel, and it looks like a grizzly.
02:46:43.000Now, if you scroll back to the page, Jamie, you go down, they've had a bunch of, like, look at the one in the upper right-hand corner.
02:46:52.000Oh, there's Forrest Gallant on the podcast talking about it.
02:46:55.000But that, all the tusks they keep finding there, I mean, they've had, it's a treasure trove.
02:47:03.000In this one area, and it's not an enormous area.
02:47:05.000I mean, I think it's only a few acres that they've been excavating and finding all this shit, but it's just a massive amount of dead bones and skulls and tusks in this one area.
02:47:17.000On my first date with my wife, I took her to the La Brea Tar Pits.
02:47:23.000At least she knew what she was getting into.
02:47:54.000So you would want to see that more than anything else?
02:47:57.000Yeah, if I could do a second, if I could take a second whack at it, I would go like a second setting, like Back to the Future Part 2. Yeah.
02:48:04.000I would go to join Daniel Boone on his first trip over the Cumberland Gap.
02:52:50.000You know, we had this, like, linear idea about, like, you know, that all of a sudden we sort of, like, in this organized fashion went and found these areas.
02:54:38.000When people in the future are going over the 21st century and all the different turns and trials and tribulations, this is going to be a pivotal moment.
02:56:04.000Yeah, where they talked about him going over to Europe and taking part of those Wild Bill shows that they did over there.
02:56:11.000That is one of the more fascinating things about the Wild West, was that these people that were involved in these historical battles then recreated them.
02:57:25.000I feel like if you went, like my old man fought World War II. I feel like if had you gone, I don't know, man, maybe when he's older in life, and they said like, hey, do you want to get together with some of the, you know, what you like to call krauts who were in the war and you show what happened when your buddy got killed?
02:57:39.000I feel like he might be like, yeah, no, no.
02:58:55.000Because if you surrendered, you would be tortured and killed.
02:58:58.000Some of the depictions of the tortures from that and Empire of the Summer Moon, some of the things they did to the bodies, it's just like, Jesus Christ.
02:59:06.000When did they develop such insane cruelty?
02:59:10.000And has this always been a part of being a human being?
02:59:12.000Or was this exacerbated by the hard conditions of the planes?
03:00:05.000It's sort of like an antidote to Sun of the Morning Star because He takes that Custer fight, which has become so emblematic of the West, regarded as this big turning point in the history of the Indian Wars, and he treats it like a little inconsequential thing that happened one day.
03:00:29.000It was like, everyone knows how this story's going to end, and that day didn't have any bearing on how it was going to end.
03:00:35.000A guy did something stupid, got some people killed, the war ground on.
03:00:39.000It'd be like if we're imagining D-Day, right?
03:00:44.000It'd be like, let's say we're imagining D-Day, and then we heard about some peripheral story that happened on D-Day where a weird thing happened and some soldiers got killed, and some guy made a mistake and got some people killed.
03:00:54.000And our telling of D-Day, and let's say that incident was called the whatever, the baculum incident.
03:01:02.000Now, when we conceptualize D-Day, when we talk about Custer, it's like, this isn't his analogy, but I'm presenting it this way.
03:01:08.000When we talk about Custer, we're sort of talking about D-Day as the baculum incident.
03:02:43.000Some kind of honor code that I can't even begin to try to guess at and explain, but things that would land you in jail today for war crimes were a matter of course.
03:03:55.000And then also just like how to think, how to behave, what to do, what things matter, what things don't, what risks live in your head, what risks are real.
03:04:07.000Yeah, and it comes out December 1. Pre-order now.
03:04:13.000Oh, I got a copy of it right here, baby.
03:04:14.000Is there going to be an audio version of this?