The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1559 - Steven Rinella

00:00:16.000 I wish he was my friend still.

00:00:19.000 When 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.

00:00:39.000 And you brought this up because Frank Von Hippel had given us this fossilized walrus, ancient walrus, dick bone.

00:00:47.000 Pecker bone, swizzle stick.

00:00:49.000 Yeah.

00:00:50.000 A friend of mine, Clay Newcomb, he...

00:00:58.000 He saves the black bear ones and people use them as drink stirrers and stuff.

00:01:02.000 The first deer I ever killed, you gave me one and I was using it as a coffee stirrer for a while.

00:01:07.000 Oh, no, it's not like an actual bone bone in there.

00:01:10.000 Isn't there a bone bone in there?

00:01:11.000 No.

00:01:12.000 Well, you gave me one.

00:01:13.000 You might not have given me one from that.

00:01:16.000 You gave me one from something else.

00:01:17.000 Maybe a raccoon or a bear or something?

00:01:20.000 I'd have to look at it. 0.73

00:01:21.000 I don't know, but you gave me a dick bone, and I had it in my backpack for a long time. 0.98

00:01:24.000 Oh, huh. 0.99

00:01:26.000 Yeah, so... 0.99

00:01:27.000 How often do you give away dick bones that you don't even remember that? 0.98

00:01:30.000 Well, I wish I had more to share. 0.98

00:01:33.000 Yeah.

00:01:34.000 This guy, this Bob Ferris guy, we used to laugh because he looked like Bob Ferris looked exactly like Bob Dylan.

00:01:40.000 And he's got to be around still.

00:01:42.000 I remember being over at his house one day and him advising someone over the phone with an earshot of me.

00:01:47.000 I remember this guy was going out to set muskrat traps. 0.99

00:01:50.000 And I remember Bob Ferris advising him, if anybody fucks with you, shoot him. 0.98

00:01:56.000 And I was young enough that I didn't get that that was a humor thing. 0.99

00:02:01.000 You know, whatever.

00:02:02.000 Just like a thing you'd say to your buddy to have a laugh.

00:02:04.000 And I remember being like, man, these guys are serious about muskrats.

00:02:09.000 I was like, I hope I don't run into that dude in the marshes.

00:02:13.000 And now I'm like, oh yeah, I could totally see saying that to somebody and then we'd have a laugh and get off the phone.

00:02:18.000 How many animals have that bone?

00:02:19.000 Man, I wish I knew.

00:02:22.000 And I don't even know what...

00:02:25.000 Yeah.

00:02:26.000 It's not universal.

00:02:27.000 No, no.

00:02:28.000 It'd be interesting to look up.

00:02:30.000 Until right now, I never gave it any thought to what classification of things has an actual baculum, an actual pecker bone.

00:02:43.000 Chimps have it, right?

00:02:44.000 All the weasels have it.

00:02:45.000 I think chimps have it.

00:02:46.000 We don't.

00:02:47.000 Yeah.

00:02:48.000 Weasels do.

00:02:50.000 Here it goes.

00:02:52.000 It's absent human.

00:02:53.000 Ungulates.

00:02:54.000 Elephants.

00:02:55.000 What is that?

00:02:56.000 Monotremes?

00:02:57.000 Monotremes?

00:02:58.000 What is that word?

00:02:59.000 Monotremes?

00:03:00.000 Oh, the platypus.

00:03:01.000 Oh, okay.

00:03:01.000 And echidna.

00:03:03.000 Barsupials, lagomorphs, hyenas...

00:03:09.000 Binoturongs, Cyrenians, and Cetaceans, among others.

00:03:15.000 Evidence suggests that the baculum was independently evolved nine times and lost in ten separate lineages.

00:03:21.000 God, it just keeps coming up, man.

00:03:23.000 Yeah.

00:03:23.000 It just keeps coming up.

00:03:25.000 Yeah.

00:03:26.000 The need to have one of those.

00:03:28.000 The need to, yeah, a built-in hard-on.

00:03:32.000 That's a really nice one.

00:03:34.000 I like that one.

00:03:35.000 There are some that are big enough.

00:03:37.000 I don't know what they're off.

00:03:38.000 There's some that are big enough to be used as a cane.

00:03:41.000 Really?

00:03:42.000 Yeah.

00:03:42.000 What animal is that?

00:03:43.000 I thought it was like certain walrus ones.

00:03:45.000 People used to use them as canes.

00:03:46.000 Well, that's not small.

00:03:48.000 That one right there.

00:03:49.000 And it's interesting because of the fact that it's fossilized.

00:03:52.000 It's so heavy.

00:03:54.000 Imagine carrying that between your legs.

00:03:56.000 I wish I had a...

00:03:58.000 I feel like I want to challenge you on...

00:04:00.000 Look at this.

00:04:00.000 I feel like I want to challenge you on that being fossilized.

00:04:03.000 Well, he said it was fossilized.

00:04:05.000 You don't think it is?

00:04:06.000 You think by the appearance?

00:04:08.000 Because it's so light? 0.99

00:04:10.000 But doesn't it feel heavy as shit? 0.96

00:04:11.000 Yeah, I don't want to get in over my waders here, but I... I want to challenge that. 0.95

00:04:18.000 But I would need to scrape into it with a pocket knife and I don't want to do that to your baculum.

00:04:23.000 That's okay.

00:04:24.000 You can do that.

00:04:25.000 Here.

00:04:27.000 But see, don't do it, because who am I to tell?

00:04:29.000 I mean, you might scrape into it, and I don't...

00:04:33.000 Would they curve that to make that handle? 0.99

00:04:34.000 But goddamn, dude, this is so heavy. 0.99

00:04:35.000 No, there are... 0.99

00:04:37.000 That I don't know.

00:04:38.000 They might, but there are some that have a hook in them.

00:04:40.000 It keeps your mate from getting away.

00:04:43.000 Jamie, that would be a hell of a pimp stick.

00:04:45.000 You walking around with one of those?

00:04:46.000 Lil Pimp should have one of those. 1.00

00:04:48.000 Lil Pimp? 1.00

00:04:49.000 Did you hear that?

00:04:50.000 The thing with Trump?

00:04:52.000 He called Lil Pump.

00:04:53.000 There's a rapper named Lil Pump, and he called him Lil Pimp.

00:04:56.000 No, I didn't.

00:04:57.000 Yeah, he did it the other day at a rally, and everybody was upset.

00:05:01.000 Tim's new character, I was going for it.

00:05:03.000 This has got to be fossilized, man.

00:05:05.000 How else could it be that heavy?

00:05:07.000 What kind of bone would be that heavy, Steve?

00:05:10.000 That's so heavy.

00:05:12.000 Here, come on, man.

00:05:13.000 You want me to put a little...

00:05:14.000 Yeah, get in there.

00:05:15.000 You know what?

00:05:15.000 I'm going to give a little scraper down here on the end.

00:05:18.000 Scrape it.

00:05:18.000 Tell me what's up.

00:05:23.000 God, it is.

00:05:24.000 It's fossilized.

00:05:25.000 Well, now I want to say that, just like we were talking a minute ago about how bettors are betting, like, it's Trump, it's Biden.

00:05:33.000 I'm like, back to, it's fossilized.

00:05:39.000 But it's so heavy.

00:05:40.000 I'm a flip-flopper.

00:05:41.000 My convictions are weakly held.

00:05:44.000 But no, poking it with your knife makes me think that it's a...

00:05:47.000 Poking it with your knife...

00:05:49.000 But this is way outside of my area of expertise. 0.67

00:05:52.000 Poking it with your knife makes me a believer.

00:05:53.000 I think Von Hippel is a biologist, right?

00:05:59.000 He's a...

00:06:00.000 Man, you got a really good fact checker over here, man.

00:06:02.000 It's like having Doug Dern around.

00:06:04.000 Yeah, it is very similar.

00:06:07.000 Doug's a very good fact checker.

00:06:09.000 That's all he does.

00:06:10.000 He only, like when you're talking to him, he just looks at his phone.

00:06:15.000 Because he's like, no matter what you say, he's like, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh.

00:06:23.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:06:25.000 Biology?

00:06:26.000 Ecology?

00:06:26.000 Yeah.

00:06:27.000 Yeah, okay.

00:06:27.000 So there you go.

00:06:28.000 There's another one that's a physicist.

00:06:30.000 When it comes to...

00:06:31.000 The 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,

00:06:46.000 like, an antler, a deer antler, you can keep it, right?

00:06:48.000 Or if you find a chunk of bone, you can keep it.

00:06:51.000 But not an arrowhead, right?

00:06:53.000 No.

00:06:54.000 No.

00:06:55.000 Because that's an artifact.

00:06:56.000 But that's weird that you're supposed to leave it there.

00:06:59.000 Dude...

00:07:00.000 Does anybody...

00:07:01.000 That's an interesting thing I'd like to talk about because...

00:07:03.000 No.

00:07:04.000 No.

00:07:05.000 They do.

00:07:06.000 I remember...

00:07:06.000 So...

00:07:07.000 Let me finish my thing about fossilized real quick.

00:07:13.000 The reason I start to think about it is if...

00:07:17.000 You're allowed to pick up a bone.

00:07:20.000 It depends on the land designation.

00:07:21.000 Let's say you're on a national forest and you find a piece of bone, you can keep it.

00:07:23.000 If it's fossilized, you can't keep it.

00:07:27.000 I found a few buffalo skulls that are old but still bone.

00:07:34.000 Here you have this thing that could be 300 years old eroding out of a riverbed.

00:07:38.000 If it's not fossilized, You can have it and keep it if it's just bone.

00:07:45.000 The thing is, if that thing has cultural markings on it, then it becomes an artifact.

00:07:52.000 So say you found a friend of mine.

00:07:55.000 I don't know where they might have got it off.

00:07:56.000 I don't know where they got it.

00:07:57.000 They had had, like the grandfather found it.

00:08:00.000 They had a buffalo skull that had been axed open, and it was so clearly hit open with a tool to get the brain out.

00:08:09.000 Which would make it an artifact and then you can't touch it.

00:08:11.000 Or if it's fossilized, you can't touch it.

00:08:13.000 The private land is totally different.

00:08:14.000 But yeah, it would be that...

00:08:17.000 So now when I look at stuff, I'm always picking it up.

00:08:20.000 I'm always wishing I had a better sense because I don't want to grab...

00:08:23.000 I don't want to find something to bring home and then be in violation because I brought home a fossilized thing.

00:08:28.000 Are you under any obligation to report it?

00:08:30.000 Say 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.

00:08:46.000 No.

00:08:48.000 I'm virtually certain you're not under any obligation.

00:08:51.000 I did one time find a bison skull on national forest land and did a site report.

00:08:59.000 Where 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.

00:09:09.000 So I was able to supply them with a piece of information they didn't have.

00:09:12.000 And so we cooperated and did a site report.

00:09:15.000 And I had also kind of like called a little bit to make sure I wasn't in the wrong.

00:09:19.000 And this is in your book, American Buffalo, which is really good.

00:09:23.000 I listened to the audio version.

00:09:24.000 It'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.

00:09:33.000 Yeah, 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.

00:09:48.000 It's more and more valuable now.

00:09:49.000 When I sold my first couple books, a publisher would buy your book and they would buy all rights to it.

00:09:58.000 And they would then go sell the audio off for sometimes next to nothing.

00:10:02.000 And someone would buy the audio rights for a certain specified amount of time.

00:10:06.000 So my first couple books...

00:10:08.000 My publisher buys my book, and then my publisher basically turns around.

00:10:13.000 Publisher then, in this case, Random House, turned around and sold the audio rights to, I think, Brilliance Audio, whatever it is.

00:10:22.000 And they got it for 10 years.

00:10:24.000 And at first, I thought that they didn't invite me to read it because I didn't think I was like...

00:10:31.000 We're good to go.

00:10:35.000 We're good to go.

00:10:39.000 We're good to go.

00:10:53.000 And they produce an audiobook.

00:10:55.000 Working with an author, it might take four or five days to record an audiobook.

00:10:58.000 But they can just get a guy that comes in, nails it, hammers it, whatever. 0.58

00:11:01.000 I get the product, and I turn it on.

00:11:05.000 And he starts talking, and I couldn't get across the room fast enough to turn it off.

00:11:12.000 It was like watching... 1.00

00:11:16.000 It was like watching my wife have sex with another man. 1.00

00:11:20.000 To see, to hear, I'm like, that is not what that book sounds like. 0.99

00:11:26.000 Oh my God, it was a defensive.

00:11:27.000 And then 10 years goes by, because I wrote that book a decade ago.

00:11:30.000 10 years goes by, and we get the rights back.

00:11:35.000 So then, now Random House has them back, and I got to go in and record my own thing.

00:11:41.000 And I got to update some of the science and stuff, you know?

00:11:44.000 It was kind of like one of those little...

00:11:45.000 It was one of those career...

00:11:48.000 Like a little career highlight for me.

00:11:51.000 Like somebody looking from the outside in wouldn't see...

00:11:54.000 Wouldn't see it as anything.

00:11:58.000 But to me, it was richly symbolic that I had, whatever.

00:12:02.000 Got to be in a position to be like...

00:12:05.000 I want to do it.

00:12:06.000 I go in and record my book.

00:12:08.000 It's how it wants to be.

00:12:09.000 And that something could still kind of have life after...

00:12:13.000 A decade.

00:12:14.000 Yeah, 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,

00:12:32.000 the weird thought viruses that people are falling into today, like woke culture and all that kind of shit.

00:12:39.000 Can you give me another example? 0.96

00:12:42.000 Another example of...

00:12:43.000 Of a thought virus.

00:12:44.000 Well, thought virus is probably not even...

00:12:46.000 I mean, he's used that term before, but it's basically woke thinking.

00:12:50.000 Okay.

00:12:51.000 Like, 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.

00:13:06.000 Anyway, he's got a very popular podcast.

00:13:10.000 And yet they still hired somebody else to read his book.

00:13:13.000 And I was like, this is so crazy.

00:13:15.000 You have such a distinct voice. 1.00

00:13:18.000 What the fuck are they doing? 0.99

00:13:20.000 Why would they do that? 0.99

00:13:22.000 I think that it leads to a lot of listener disappointment.

00:13:26.000 At the time I did this, though, I was just a writer.

00:13:29.000 So there wasn't that.

00:13:31.000 Maybe we're moving away from that.

00:13:33.000 When you're working on something, and I'm sure...

00:13:36.000 Oh, no.

00:13:37.000 You'll know intimately well what I'm talking about.

00:13:42.000 Imagine your stand-up.

00:13:48.000 If you had to turn in a word doc...

00:13:51.000 I've had to do that before.

00:13:52.000 For someone else to do your stand-up?

00:13:54.000 I had to do that before.

00:13:55.000 Oh, not for someone else to do it, but for them to decide whether or not the things that I was saying were approvable.

00:14:01.000 Oh, I gotcha.

00:14:02.000 Without 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.

00:14:15.000 But you do get a sense of the cadence of how Yeah.

00:14:31.000 Yeah.

00:14:32.000 I don't know if this makes any sense.

00:14:33.000 It does.

00:14:34.000 This is particular to virtually nobody.

00:14:37.000 No, I think it makes a lot of sense.

00:14:38.000 I mean, particularly now, because your podcast becomes so popular, and people are used to the way you talk.

00:14:45.000 You have a very unique way of describing and discussing things.

00:14:49.000 I could imagine how offensive it would be if someone just sort of actored it.

00:14:53.000 Yeah.

00:14:54.000 Yeah, it is.

00:14:55.000 And that was...

00:14:59.000 I was at the height of my writing powers because I was just a writer.

00:15:06.000 I wasn't married.

00:15:07.000 I didn't have kids.

00:15:09.000 You were free.

00:15:10.000 I could spend a couple years just focused on something.

00:15:17.000 The fact that that book still works and people still read it...

00:15:28.000 I'm happy about that.

00:15:30.000 I look and be like, yeah, man.

00:15:31.000 I feel like that was a reasonable book.

00:15:34.000 That's an interesting way.

00:15:35.000 It's a very good book.

00:15:36.000 I really enjoyed it.

00:15:37.000 But it's an interesting way of talking about it, that you were at the height of your writing powers because you were free.

00:15:44.000 Yeah.

00:15:55.000 Almost always.

00:16:07.000 For sure, man.

00:16:08.000 I'm watching right now on Netflix.

00:16:09.000 I'm watching The Last Dance, the Jordan documentary.

00:16:14.000 And I'm not a basketball fan at all.

00:16:16.000 Most of the stuff is new information to me.

00:16:18.000 But in watching it and that study of focus and discipline.

00:16:22.000 And I wonder, in looking at him, I couldn't help but think.

00:16:28.000 Let's say there was an undecided election.

00:16:31.000 It was like a contested, undecided election.

00:16:33.000 And there's a global pandemic.

00:16:36.000 That guy would still go on that field, or on the court, sorry, and probably be just as good as he always is.

00:16:46.000 And 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.

00:17:01.000 Yeah.

00:17:03.000 Instead of the school board is voting.

00:17:06.000 Whether or not kids are going back to school full time.

00:17:09.000 And I need to pay attention to that because I have kids.

00:17:11.000 I need to pay attention.

00:17:13.000 I feel obligated to pay attention politically.

00:17:16.000 And I have other mediums that I work in now.

00:17:19.000 You just get spread out doing stuff.

00:17:25.000 I feel like maybe that doesn't happen to you.

00:17:27.000 No, it does.

00:17:28.000 Yeah, it does.

00:17:30.000 I remember you telling me you have three jobs.

00:17:31.000 Yeah, I do.

00:17:33.000 Do you jump from one to the other?

00:17:34.000 They connect, fortunately.

00:17:36.000 They help each other.

00:17:38.000 The thing about, well, you know, obviously I haven't been doing much stand-up during the pandemic.

00:17:43.000 I only did one weekend.

00:17:44.000 I 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.

00:17:52.000 Yeah.

00:17:52.000 But stand-up comedy for sure helps podcasting.

00:17:57.000 Podcasting for sure helps stand-up comedy.

00:17:59.000 You get more comfortable doing each one of them because the fact that stand-up comedy is live and then podcasting is also live, right?

00:18:06.000 There's no net.

00:18:08.000 There's no script.

00:18:08.000 And you get more comfortable expressing yourself.

00:18:12.000 In 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.

00:18:19.000 That makes UFC commentary easier. 0.96

00:18:21.000 Because when the cameras are on the UFC, I never think, oh shit, all these people are watching now. 0.94

00:18:25.000 I never think that, because people are always watching. 0.99

00:18:27.000 I don't care.

00:18:28.000 I can just express myself.

00:18:31.000 So they feed into each other.

00:18:32.000 What do you, because you get increasingly, at least from my perspective, increasingly you get scrutinized and over-scrutinized in the media.

00:18:43.000 Is it hard to tune it out?

00:18:45.000 It's easier than ever.

00:18:46.000 Really?

00:18:47.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:18:49.000 Because it's so common.

00:18:50.000 I could just shut it off.

00:18:52.000 Yeah, no, it's just, it's one of the things that happens.

00:18:56.000 You get too big.

00:18:57.000 You get too big, you get too popular.

00:18:59.000 Look, if there's 300 million people in this country, and you have 1% of them are critics, you get a million critics.

00:19:08.000 Yeah, and you're being conservative with that number.

00:19:12.000 If you're really lucky, you only have a million critics.

00:19:15.000 You really have three million critics.

00:19:17.000 Three million critics, that's a crazy number.

00:19:19.000 That's such a nutty number.

00:19:22.000 If there's 300 million people and 1% of them don't like you, you have three million people that don't like you?

00:19:28.000 Yeah.

00:19:29.000 That's insane. 1.00

00:19:30.000 Like, if you really stopped and thought about that, that'll fuck with your head. 0.98

00:19:33.000 If 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? 0.98

00:19:42.000 It's going to be high.

00:19:43.000 It's going to be a few thousand.

00:19:45.000 When I'm reading about you and what you think and how you are, and I'm sitting there thinking like, no, he's not.

00:19:53.000 Yeah.

00:19:54.000 It makes me question everything I read.

00:19:58.000 I was saying to someone the other day that there's one thing Americans like.

00:20:02.000 There's like two stories Americans like in this order. 1.00

00:20:05.000 They like a story about what an asshole a celebrity is. 0.99

00:20:09.000 And the second thing they like most, but not as much as that thing, is how great a celebrity is. 0.99

00:20:16.000 But they like the first one better.

00:20:19.000 Yeah, it's way better.

00:20:20.000 Well, it's more sellable, right?

00:20:22.000 I mean, that's why this Ellen is mean thing has gotten so much traction.

00:20:27.000 You know, Ellen's mean to her guests and she's mean to... 1.00

00:20:30.000 People are like, ooh, tell me more.

00:20:31.000 Exactly.

00:20:32.000 It's exciting when you find out how much...

00:20:33.000 When you find out Ellen has like a half a billion dollars, you're like, oh my god.

00:20:38.000 Tell me more about how mean she is. 1.00

00:20:39.000 I need to know the dirt.

00:20:42.000 It's just a common thing with people.

00:20:44.000 If someone becomes successful, you're going to get scrutinized.

00:20:49.000 And it's also different perspectives.

00:20:51.000 For some people, the way I think and the way I talk is offensive to them.

00:20:56.000 They have a very clear-cut idea of the way people should think and behave.

00:21:02.000 It's particularly on the left, which is...

00:21:05.000 It's become more and more weird because it would be much easier for people on the left to label me if I wasn't left-wing.

00:21:12.000 That's what's confusing.

00:21:13.000 It's because I do support basically every left-wing position other than Second Amendment.

00:21:20.000 And increasingly, the way they attack the First Amendment is weird.

00:21:23.000 Mm-hmm.

00:21:24.000 They 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.

00:21:32.000 The acceptance of the First Amendment.

00:21:35.000 I mean, I brought this up before, but the ACLU was founded by people that were literally supporting Nazis, like supporting actual neo-Nazi groups.

00:21:45.000 Oh, in litigation, free speech issues.

00:21:48.000 Yeah, this is important.

00:21:50.000 Even though their views are abhorrent, you have to support their ability to express themselves.

00:21:56.000 This is what the foundation of this country is about.

00:21:59.000 Free expression is the only way you find out what's right and what's wrong.

00:22:03.000 Shutting people down, stopping people from communicating is a silly, short-sighted approach to debating an issue.

00:22:11.000 And this is more and more common than ever on the left.

00:22:14.000 Because of deplatforming, because they have the ability with social media, because social media is not really protected by the First Amendment.

00:22:23.000 Social media, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or whatever, they're private companies.

00:22:26.000 And they can decide, hey, we don't want this guy on because his views don't align with ours.

00:22:31.000 And they have silenced people and kicked people off their platforms that really aren't doing anything wrong.

00:22:38.000 They're saying things that the people that own and run the social media companies don't agree with.

00:22:43.000 Yeah.

00:22:44.000 That, to me, is the weirdest aspect of the left today.

00:22:47.000 But other than that, like gay rights, women's rights, civil rights, women's right to choose, I'm with all that.

00:22:53.000 I'm with all of them.

00:22:54.000 I'm with universal basic income.

00:22:56.000 I'm with Medicare for all.

00:22:59.000 Yeah.

00:22:59.000 I'm not going to argue about that.

00:23:01.000 This is why I am.

00:23:02.000 This is why I am.

00:23:03.000 I 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.

00:23:14.000 When 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.

00:23:22.000 They were taken care of.

00:23:24.000 You could see how it would be easier to get back on track.

00:23:28.000 The 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.

00:23:38.000 I'm with you.

00:23:39.000 This is a great example of where you do need big government.

00:23:43.000 This pandemic is the best example ever.

00:23:46.000 Or at least some sort of organized charitable organization where they really know how to take care of people that run into hard times.

00:23:59.000 Especially hard times like this where it's through no fault of your own.

00:24:02.000 The real argument against universal basic income is the same argument against a lot of people who use it against welfare, that you remove incentive.

00:24:11.000 You 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.

00:24:25.000 I see that argument too.

00:24:29.000 When 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,

00:24:47.000 the fact that I was intensely motivated By just trying to find a way to pay my rent and my cell phone bill.

00:24:59.000 Intensely motivated by that.

00:25:01.000 And I do wonder if you had alleviated me from that, what path I might have gone down.

00:25:09.000 And I don't think of myself as being weird or that different.

00:25:12.000 So I wonder.

00:25:14.000 But in terms of when you're talking about The censorship and woke culture is...

00:25:21.000 There's a guy I work with, Byron, and he was kind of...

00:25:24.000 I feel like I'm sort of capturing his sentiment.

00:25:26.000 He was pondering how...

00:25:28.000 If you think about the...

00:25:30.000 In the 60s, right?

00:25:33.000 That it was like the right, you know, the right, they were the squares.

00:25:38.000 You know, they were the ones like, tsk, tsk, tsk.

00:25:40.000 Like the disapproving, you know, what are they doing now?

00:25:44.000 And he was kind of, he was noticing that how the left...

00:25:50.000 Has sort of taken over this air of disapproval.

00:25:53.000 Like, oh my goodness.

00:25:55.000 How could that young man say that?

00:25:58.000 It's like they've switched.

00:26:01.000 Someone should tell that young man to stop that.

00:26:04.000 You know what happened?

00:26:05.000 Social media.

00:26:07.000 That's what happened.

00:26:08.000 People got the ability to complain where other people are going to listen.

00:26:12.000 There's so much signal out there.

00:26:15.000 There's so much noise.

00:26:17.000 So many people have the opportunity to complain about things.

00:26:19.000 And they're also formulating their complaints in a way they hope will resonate with people that really have no dog in the fight.

00:26:27.000 So they just want to say something that people go, oh, that guy's got a good point.

00:26:31.000 Click.

00:26:31.000 I'll give him a little heartbeat for that.

00:26:33.000 You know what I wanted to ask you about, man?

00:26:36.000 I know that you've said this for as long as I've known you, that you don't pay attention to social media comments.

00:26:46.000 On a recent episode of yours, I heard you put it that you post something and run away.

00:26:51.000 Yeah.

00:26:52.000 But do you ever, late at night, sneak a peek?

00:26:56.000 So you really don't break your own rule?

00:26:58.000 No, never at night. 1.00

00:27:00.000 Imagine if you see something at night and think, fuck that guy, and then it rolls around your head. 1.00

00:27:04.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:27:06.000 It's terrible.

00:27:06.000 No, at night, I don't...

00:27:08.000 If I watch anything on my phone at night, it's super innocuous.

00:27:12.000 Like, I like watching pool.

00:27:13.000 I like watching pool games.

00:27:15.000 I like watching, like, maybe a science video or something like that.

00:27:19.000 Something very uncontroversial and innocuous.

00:27:21.000 I don't allow myself to get into conflict at night.

00:27:24.000 Yeah.

00:27:46.000 I don't mind reading it in the morning and then thinking, yeah, good point.

00:27:49.000 Yeah, I could have handled that better.

00:27:51.000 Or yeah, maybe I should have looked at it this way. 0.99

00:27:53.000 I'm not without fault, but I don't think it's good to read that shit at night. 1.00

00:27:59.000 But reading that shit at any time, look, I'm my worst fucking critic. 1.00

00:28:02.000 I hate everything I do. 0.99

00:28:03.000 So if someone is just agreeing with the perspectives that I already have about things that I should have said differently.

00:28:11.000 And the other thing is most of the things I'm criticized on It's like thinking on the fly.

00:28:16.000 Like doing this.

00:28:18.000 I don't have any idea what I'm about to say.

00:28:20.000 You don't either.

00:28:21.000 We're just talking.

00:28:22.000 So words pop in your head, ideas pop, and you try to express them.

00:28:25.000 It doesn't always work out, and sometimes you're tired.

00:28:28.000 Sometimes you're hungover.

00:28:29.000 Sometimes you're not feeling so good.

00:28:31.000 Your brain doesn't always fire at the exact same way.

00:28:34.000 My car is remarkably consistent.

00:28:36.000 You get in your car, as long as it's tuned up, you hit the gas, it responds in a way that's very consistent.

00:28:42.000 Yeah, that's a good point, man.

00:28:44.000 My brain's not that consistent. 0.99

00:28:45.000 My brain sometimes is like a six-cylinder, and sometimes it's like a fucking supercharged V8. It varies a lot, you know? 0.96

00:28:53.000 And also, sometimes subjects come up that I didn't anticipate.

00:28:59.000 Occasionally, I'll talk about something where I'm deeply studied on it.

00:29:03.000 And it'll come up and I'll go, oh, no, no, no, this is why that is.

00:29:08.000 And I get very excited and I have a very clear idea of everything that's nuanced about that particular subject.

00:29:15.000 But sometimes things come up and I'm like, oh, yeah, hmm.

00:29:18.000 And I'm in the process of talking.

00:29:20.000 I'm kind of working it out in my own head and I'm not exactly sure how I think about it.

00:29:24.000 And I have to kind of formulate opinions on the fly.

00:29:27.000 Or formulate a descriptive on the fly.

00:29:29.000 Or try to tell a story that maybe I haven't really worked out in my head.

00:29:33.000 I'm trying to tell it while I'm thinking about it.

00:29:36.000 I'm also talking.

00:29:37.000 It doesn't always work out that good.

00:29:38.000 Yeah.

00:29:42.000 There's a thing I'm thinking about that's very similar to this.

00:29:46.000 Never mind.

00:29:49.000 I'll tell you an example of a thing that someone said to me that struck me as really funny. 0.82

00:29:54.000 And then I wanted to go and tell people what they said, but then I'm like, shit, I don't know if I can tell people that they said that. 0.66

00:29:59.000 Oh, that's a weird one? 0.99

00:30:00.000 Yeah.

00:30:00.000 I get it.

00:30:01.000 Are you enjoying doing podcasts?

00:30:05.000 Man, yeah.

00:30:07.000 It has...

00:30:08.000 It's my...

00:30:11.000 Of the things I do, of the various things I do for a living, it's the thing I enjoy most actually doing it.

00:30:27.000 Having a guest on.

00:30:31.000 For instance, there's a guest we have.

00:30:34.000 I bring him up because I was thinking of him.

00:30:36.000 This guy, Jim Heffelfinger from Arizona.

00:30:39.000 I bring him up because we're talking about criticism.

00:30:42.000 I'll always read criticism that he sends.

00:30:45.000 If he listens to something and he's like, that's just not right.

00:30:50.000 It's not coming from a mean place.

00:30:51.000 It's coming from a place where he's trying to be additive to a conversation.

00:30:55.000 And he'll send me some things and be like, hey man, this is a thing you should think about and maybe want to clarify.

00:31:00.000 I'll open that email every single time.

00:31:02.000 And he gives me a lot of them.

00:31:03.000 Yeah, that's different.

00:31:04.000 It's a beautiful relationship.

00:31:06.000 And it's like...

00:31:07.000 But all criticism doesn't go that way because people want to see people bleed.

00:31:13.000 But here's this guy who doesn't want to see people bleed.

00:31:16.000 He just wants to advance the conversation.

00:31:18.000 But the time I had him on, we were having a conversation about biology, wildlife management.

00:31:25.000 And I'm just like, the whole time, I'm thrilled by what I'm hearing.

00:31:31.000 Yeah.

00:31:31.000 Like, thrilled by the presentation.

00:31:34.000 Thrilled by what I'm hearing.

00:31:35.000 It's great information.

00:31:36.000 It's delivered well.

00:31:38.000 That, if you had a joy meter in your head, like, of all the things that you actually do, that to me is...

00:31:44.000 That interaction to me is great.

00:31:49.000 Yeah, because you're getting something out of it.

00:31:51.000 You're living.

00:31:51.000 Whereas writing...

00:31:55.000 It's almost trite.

00:31:58.000 I kind of hate the actual act of doing it.

00:32:02.000 Not enjoyable.

00:32:03.000 Actually doing it is not enjoyable.

00:32:05.000 Everything that comes out of it I love.

00:32:07.000 Doing it is not enjoyable.

00:32:08.000 It's such a common thing to say.

00:32:11.000 Hunter S. Thompson famously hated writing.

00:32:14.000 That was a torturous thing to do.

00:32:16.000 I 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.

00:32:24.000 Which is like, isn't the reality.

00:32:27.000 Even like when I get a, you know, we're working on an episode, a show episode, and I get a rough cut.

00:32:33.000 I don't get a, when I open it, I open it with a sense of dread.

00:32:40.000 Not with like, oh boy, it's here!

00:32:43.000 That's not how I feel.

00:32:45.000 That's how I feel when I edit my stand-up specials.

00:32:48.000 Even if I know they were a killer.

00:32:51.000 Even if I know I killed.

00:32:52.000 I know I was there.

00:32:53.000 Standing ovation.

00:32:53.000 Everybody cheered.

00:32:54.000 Everybody laughed. 1.00

00:32:56.000 Fuck. 1.00

00:32:56.000 I sit down. 1.00

00:32:57.000 I'm like, Jesus.

00:32:58.000 And I have to go over it, you know, and try to find what's the best camera angle and how to, you know.

00:33:04.000 Yeah, but I do like it a great deal.

00:33:08.000 It's funny that you're running...

00:33:12.000 It changes conversation a little bit when you're talking to someone.

00:33:17.000 If 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.

00:33:26.000 I've always prided myself on...

00:33:29.000 Being really good at remembering what people said.

00:33:32.000 Like, if I'm fighting with my wife, and later we're fighting about the fight, and she's like, well, you said...

00:33:39.000 I said, no, no, no.

00:33:40.000 It's not what I said.

00:33:40.000 I said, quote, and you said, quote.

00:33:44.000 And I'll go to the grave with that, right?

00:33:46.000 Like, I'm very good at remembering what people said.

00:33:50.000 And 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.

00:33:56.000 I'm shocked at all the stuff I missed.

00:33:58.000 Let 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.

00:34:04.000 Well, it's also because you're in the process of not just listening to what they're saying, but you're steering the conversation.

00:34:10.000 You're trying to figure out how to respond, when to step in, when to not step in.

00:34:14.000 You have questions.

00:34:15.000 You don't know when to ask them.

00:34:16.000 Should I hold up?

00:34:17.000 Would I let this guy continue this thought?

00:34:19.000 I have to stop here because there's something weird, but I don't want to make this uncomfortable and I want to miss anything out. 0.82

00:34:25.000 So there's all this shit going on that you're sort of managing the conversation. 0.97

00:34:30.000 It's not as simple as you just sitting there talking to somebody. 0.99

00:34:32.000 You're talking to someone and you know that other people are going to listen.

00:34:35.000 And it doesn't seem like it's an art form, but it's definitely an art form.

00:34:39.000 You get better at it and you also develop a way of expressing yourself that's entertaining for people to hear.

00:34:46.000 It's not just that you're talking.

00:34:49.000 You're talking in a way where it smoothly and comfortably enters other people's brains.

00:34:55.000 Yes.

00:34:57.000 One 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.

00:35:14.000 Changes my thought pattern.

00:35:15.000 Oh, yeah, for sure.

00:35:17.000 For sure.

00:35:18.000 You do get used to it, though.

00:35:20.000 After 1,500 episodes.

00:35:22.000 I feel way less inclined to say something really indefensible.

00:35:25.000 Oh, yeah.

00:35:26.000 Well, that's the problem with the early days of my podcast is that we didn't have any thought that people were actually listening. 0.56

00:35:33.000 When 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. 0.74

00:35:43.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:35:44.000 If 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. 0.95

00:35:58.000 When you're talking to a comedian, regular things aren't as funny. 0.99

00:36:02.000 It'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.

00:36:11.000 I just saw a guy get shot in the head.

00:36:12.000 He needs more.

00:36:14.000 I need more. 0.94

00:36:14.000 I want to see an amputation. 0.94

00:36:16.000 You want to freak me out?

00:36:18.000 Show me something that's a real injury.

00:36:20.000 And that's how comedians are.

00:36:23.000 There's an unfortunate aspect to those conversations.

00:36:26.000 If you take...

00:36:27.000 Those conversations and you edit them out of context and then show it to people. 0.99

00:36:31.000 Oh my god, these guys are horrible human beings. 1.00

00:36:34.000 No, we're comedians and we're just talking shit. 1.00

00:36:37.000 You'd have to preface, if you went around saying, wouldn't it be funny if someone thought? 0.98

00:36:44.000 Right, but even then they would cut that part out.

00:36:46.000 That's what I'm saying.

00:36:47.000 But that's what a conversation is like when you're just goofing on stuff with your friends.

00:36:50.000 But you just leave out the part where you say, wouldn't it be funny if someone thought?

00:36:53.000 Yeah.

00:36:55.000 And you just say it as though it's coming from you.

00:36:57.000 But everyone, it's understood that you mean, like, wouldn't it be funny if?

00:37:00.000 Right.

00:37:00.000 Yes.

00:37:01.000 Exactly.

00:37:02.000 Yeah.

00:37:03.000 It's a weird medium, podcasts are, because it's never really existed before.

00:37:09.000 Right?

00:37:09.000 This is a new thing.

00:37:11.000 Like, my friend Adam Curry is the original podcaster.

00:37:14.000 He's the podfather.

00:37:16.000 He was the first guy to ever have a podcast.

00:37:18.000 And he was an MTV DJ host.

00:37:21.000 He actually lives here in Austin.

00:37:22.000 Oh! 0.60

00:37:23.000 You remember Adam Curry?

00:37:24.000 I never put it together that was the same person.

00:37:26.000 That's Adam Curry.

00:37:27.000 Yeah.

00:37:27.000 Beautiful, handsome man.

00:37:28.000 He had those flowing locks.

00:37:29.000 Oh, yeah.

00:37:30.000 No, I've known this, but I never like...

00:37:31.000 Yeah.

00:37:33.000 He never put it together as the same person.

00:37:35.000 He runs the No Agenda podcast.

00:37:36.000 He's actually one of the reasons I moved to Austin.

00:37:38.000 He was singing Austin's praises.

00:37:40.000 And I had been here many, many times.

00:37:41.000 He used to kind of wear like that Michael Jackson leather jacket.

00:37:44.000 Oh, yeah.

00:37:45.000 With the fold-over flaps. 0.99

00:37:46.000 Look at that handsome bastard. 0.99

00:37:47.000 Look at that. 1.00

00:37:48.000 Yeah.

00:37:49.000 Look at that hair! 0.97

00:37:51.000 That's the same dude!

00:37:52.000 Yeah, that's the same dude.

00:37:53.000 Now show a picture of him today.

00:37:55.000 Right there.

00:37:56.000 Bam.

00:37:56.000 That's him today.

00:37:58.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:37:59.000 Damn. 1.00

00:37:59.000 Yeah, he's the original. 1.00

00:38:00.000 He's the OG. Oh, yeah, but I never...

00:38:03.000 I can't think of a parallel here, but no, I'm aware of these two...

00:38:08.000 Yeah.

00:38:09.000 Right, but you hadn't put them together.

00:38:10.000 Oh, that's the same guy.

00:38:11.000 Oh, no.

00:38:11.000 It's amazing.

00:38:12.000 He's awesome.

00:38:13.000 I love that guy.

00:38:14.000 He's got a great podcast called No Agenda.

00:38:17.000 It's his podcast.

00:38:18.000 And he really had the very first one.

00:38:22.000 And I don't think that was any earlier than 2000. Jamie, what was that?

00:38:26.000 2005, maybe?

00:38:27.000 Sounds right.

00:38:28.000 Somewhere around then?

00:38:29.000 So his original podcast was four years before my first podcast, which is 2009. 2007?

00:38:36.000 Okay, so two years before mine.

00:38:37.000 So you're talking about a guy, a thing, rather, that's only been around for 13 years.

00:38:43.000 There was never a thing where you could just put something out there, sit down, talk to people, and there's no middle middle.

00:38:50.000 People think, because I have this deal with Spotify, that there's a bunch of people sitting over my shoulder.

00:38:55.000 You come in here.

00:38:56.000 You see what it's like?

00:38:57.000 There's no one here.

00:38:58.000 Like, it's a skeleton crew.

00:39:18.000 So this new form of communication, it hasn't been figured out yet.

00:39:24.000 No one exactly knows its potential.

00:39:26.000 No one knows exactly what the influence of it is.

00:39:29.000 There's a lot of mainstream media people that are really upset by it.

00:39:31.000 That's also one of the reasons why I get so criticized.

00:39:34.000 People get so mad.

00:39:34.000 They don't like the fact that I have this much influence.

00:39:36.000 They don't like the fact that so many people are paying attention.

00:39:40.000 It doesn't seem right.

00:39:42.000 This is not from the New York Times.

00:39:44.000 This is not from NBC. This is not from whatever.

00:39:47.000 But all of a sudden, all these people are watching it.

00:39:49.000 But this is a new thing.

00:39:52.000 People haven't figured this out yet. 0.99

00:39:54.000 Even though it's been around for 13 plus years, they're still going, what the fuck is this?

00:39:59.000 Four years ago, no one took podcasts seriously. 0.92

00:40:02.000 Four years ago, Howard Stern had an episode where he was mocking podcasts and saying, why don't you just yell out the window?

00:40:08.000 No one's listening.

00:40:10.000 He was like, you're wasting your time.

00:40:12.000 And he was making fun of Adam Carolla for doing it.

00:40:14.000 Oh, is that right?

00:40:15.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:40:15.000 Making fun of people for doing it.

00:40:17.000 And I think part of that was also, he's a smart guy.

00:40:20.000 And he was also in the middle of his renegotiation with Sirius Satellite Radio.

00:40:23.000 And 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.

00:40:35.000 Yeah. 0.89

00:40:36.000 Yeah.

00:40:36.000 Yeah, but I don't remember what my original point was.

00:40:40.000 Brand new.

00:40:41.000 Brand new. 0.99

00:40:41.000 This is a fucking really new thing. 0.99

00:40:44.000 Yeah. 0.97

00:40:44.000 I 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. 0.97

00:41:02.000 Yeah.

00:41:03.000 And I was like, a what?

00:41:04.000 I could go and show you where I was sitting when I heard it.

00:41:08.000 And she's like, you just need to go.

00:41:11.000 She's right.

00:41:11.000 And I was like, it's a what?

00:41:12.000 A what?

00:41:13.000 What?

00:41:15.000 That'll never work.

00:41:17.000 Well, that was a lot of people's attitude.

00:41:20.000 Even, like, people that I was really close with.

00:41:22.000 Like, there's a Comedy Store documentary that just came out.

00:41:25.000 It was a five-part documentary.

00:41:26.000 And one of the episodes, my friend Tom Segura, who was on, like, episode two or some shit.

00:41:32.000 Like, he was on early, early... 0.97

00:41:34.000 He's been on a fucking hundred-plus times. 0.97

00:41:37.000 I have no idea how many times he's been on, but... 0.91

00:41:39.000 He was there in the early days, and in the documentary, he was talking to Brian Redband, and he was saying, like, what is he doing?

00:41:48.000 Like, why is he doing this?

00:41:49.000 And Redband was like, I don't know, some people are listening.

00:41:51.000 And he's like, and you go to the list, and it's like 2,000 people?

00:41:55.000 Like, 2,000 people were watching this?

00:41:57.000 That's it? 1.00

00:41:57.000 And you're spending three hours doing this fucking stupid show for 2,000 people for no money? 1.00

00:42:02.000 Like, why are you doing this? 1.00

00:42:03.000 Yeah, but would you imagine yourself being a visionary, or do you imagine yourself being that, you know, it was lucky?

00:42:15.000 Lucky.

00:42:16.000 Yeah, no vision.

00:42:18.000 No, I've expected it to be the way it was forever.

00:42:20.000 Like, 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.

00:42:29.000 They'll make, like, when they do the story of you...

00:42:34.000 I wonder if they'll do it that you had a vision.

00:42:39.000 Let me put that to bed.

00:42:41.000 Let me put that to bed right now.

00:42:43.000 I thought it was going to be the way it was back then forever.

00:42:47.000 No one paid attention.

00:42:48.000 Very small amount of people, but fun.

00:42:50.000 It was a great way for...

00:42:52.000 Look, I loved doing morning radio.

00:42:54.000 I used to love doing it.

00:42:55.000 I hated getting up.

00:42:56.000 Oh, like the Collins to promote your shows?

00:42:58.000 Well, not Collins.

00:42:59.000 I'd go there.

00:43:00.000 Say if I was going to Phoenix.

00:43:02.000 You liked those things?

00:43:03.000 Loved it.

00:43:03.000 It was fun.

00:43:04.000 I'd get up in the morning, smoke a joint, go in there with my friends, and we'd talk shit. 0.99

00:43:09.000 And if it was a radio station... 0.99

00:43:09.000 And there'd be like the zany guy, and then you'd have his female counterpart who put him in his place. 0.99

00:43:17.000 Exactly!

00:43:18.000 And you had to go in there and do it at 7 in the morning.

00:43:21.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:43:21.000 I used to love it.

00:43:23.000 I used to love it because I would go in with Ari or Joey or someone like that and we would go and we'd have some fun.

00:43:28.000 And we'd say, hey, we're going to be the improv this weekend.

00:43:30.000 And then they would say, so, you know, what's been going on?

00:43:33.000 What are you into?

00:43:34.000 And then you have a story about this and about that.

00:43:36.000 I'm like, that is fun.

00:43:37.000 That's fun.

00:43:37.000 And you leave there and you have a good time with them.

00:43:39.000 You know, like...

00:43:40.000 Eight out of ten of them were a good time.

00:43:42.000 Two out of ten were like, this guy's gross. 0.99

00:43:45.000 Like, this show sucks. 0.98

00:43:47.000 Some people were clunky. 0.99

00:43:48.000 They're not good at it.

00:43:50.000 Oh, dude.

00:43:51.000 When I used to have to do that for books, I just thought that was the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person.

00:43:56.000 But when you're high and it's early in the morning and you went to bed like three hours ago and you just get up...

00:44:01.000 At least you deal in comedy to go and be like, well, if you go back to the Lewis and Clark expedition, you'll find...

00:44:07.000 Nothing was expected of me, right?

00:44:09.000 I was just like this silly person who hosted Fear Factor or was on a sitcom and I would come in and I would be in town to tell jokes.

00:44:16.000 And that was what it was... 0.54

00:44:18.000 So I always thought, particularly when I did...

00:44:21.000 If I did the Opie and Anthony show in New York, that was a really fun one.

00:44:25.000 Because those guys were on...

00:44:27.000 I first started doing it, it was on the regular radio too, but they were on XM. And when they were on XM, you could swear.

00:44:34.000 I was like, this is amazing.

00:44:35.000 Oh, yeah.

00:44:35.000 You could swear.

00:44:36.000 You could just go in.

00:44:37.000 And it was a hang.

00:44:38.000 You'd have four or five comedians in the room. 0.85

00:44:40.000 We'd all just be shitting on each other and laughing.

00:44:42.000 And you'd get out of there like, God, it felt so good. 0.93

00:44:45.000 It was so fun.

00:44:46.000 Then you'd go get some breakfast, take a nap, and go do your shows.

00:44:49.000 Did you used to do Stern ever?

00:44:51.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:52.000 But that was a different thing because Stern was at the helm.

00:44:56.000 He was never a hang.

00:44:57.000 It was the Howard Stern show.

00:44:59.000 It was Howard Stern asking questions, you responding to those questions.

00:45:02.000 It was very historic, that show.

00:45:05.000 He's the first guy.

00:45:08.000 If it wasn't for him...

00:45:11.000 There would be none of this.

00:45:13.000 There was guys before...

00:45:14.000 I guess Imus was one of those guys.

00:45:17.000 I was never an Imus guy.

00:45:19.000 But he was the guy who was nationally known as the man who had this outrageous radio show.

00:45:27.000 And that sort of helped the Opie and Anthony show come to fruition.

00:45:32.000 And then that...

00:45:33.000 I think the Opie and Anthony show was, in a lot of ways, the nexus.

00:45:37.000 In a lot of ways, it was the idea that led to podcasts.

00:45:41.000 But when I was doing it, there was no thought in my head like, this is going to be just like the Opie and Anthony show.

00:45:47.000 Or this is going to be just like Howard Stern.

00:45:49.000 Just you wait.

00:45:50.000 Just you wait.

00:45:51.000 There was none of that.

00:45:53.000 It was just keep showing up.

00:45:54.000 And then one day, I was at the Chicago Theater.

00:45:57.000 I did this gig at the Chicago Theater.

00:45:58.000 It's 3,700 people, right?

00:46:00.000 Sold out show.

00:46:01.000 And I go, I had a story I was going to tell.

00:46:04.000 I go, how many people listen to the podcast?

00:46:08.000 Oh, is that right? 1.00

00:46:09.000 And I went, oh, shit. 1.00

00:46:11.000 I'm putting that into my movie, man. 1.00

00:46:13.000 And I remember thinking, oh.

00:46:14.000 My movie's going to be called The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:46:16.000 Yeah.

00:46:17.000 But I remember very clearly being, oh no.

00:46:21.000 Like, almost a sense of dread. 1.00

00:46:24.000 Like, shit. 0.99

00:46:25.000 Like, this has gotten to a place where I didn't know where it was, and it's already there. 0.99

00:46:30.000 Yeah.

00:46:31.000 Because I'd been just doing it, you know, I think by that time we were doing it at the Ice House.

00:46:35.000 We had this little room off the comedy club at the Ice House.

00:46:38.000 We'd show up there and do it there.

00:46:40.000 And...

00:46:41.000 It was just bizarre.

00:46:43.000 I was like, what happened?

00:46:44.000 Because you're just doing it like this, right?

00:46:46.000 Yeah, but you know what you could say if you wanted to twist this?

00:46:49.000 I think you could say in your own defense is...

00:46:51.000 Maybe I'm wrong here.

00:46:54.000 But...

00:46:54.000 Maybe you knew something.

00:46:57.000 Maybe you knew more than you thought because you probably weren't doing ten goofy things.

00:47:03.000 How so?

00:47:04.000 What do you mean?

00:47:05.000 Meaning...

00:47:05.000 Like, let's say I... Went out and started 20 business, 20 goofy little businesses.

00:47:12.000 Right. 1.00

00:47:13.000 And then at some point, like, holy shit! 0.99

00:47:16.000 One of them took off. 0.99

00:47:18.000 Yeah.

00:47:18.000 Turns out...

00:47:20.000 My business of selling old ranch-worn leather gloves to people who wish they had that look took off and made a boatload of money.

00:47:31.000 And then later I'm like, yeah, I always knew. 0.99

00:47:33.000 But people would be like, dude, you did all kinds of stupid, nothing ever worked out for you. 0.99

00:47:38.000 Then all of a sudden this thing takes off and you want to now act like you saw it coming? 0.99

00:47:42.000 So I think that...

00:47:44.000 Probably 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.

00:47:51.000 Nope.

00:47:53.000 Definitely not.

00:47:54.000 I'm trying to help you out here, man.

00:47:55.000 Don't help me out.

00:47:56.000 I'm telling you it's not the case. 0.96

00:47:57.000 It's just dumb luck. 0.95

00:47:59.000 I have a certain amount of brain damage. 0.89

00:48:01.000 I don't know how much I have, but definitely have a little.

00:48:04.000 From getting hit in the head?

00:48:07.000 Just getting punched, for sure.

00:48:09.000 There's a certain amount.

00:48:11.000 It's inevitable.

00:48:12.000 From the time I was 15 until I was 21, I got hit a lot.

00:48:15.000 There must be some. 0.99

00:48:18.000 I think there's a certain amount of not give a fuck that comes with that. 0.99

00:48:25.000 You think that was kicked into your head? 0.99

00:48:27.000 I'm not joking.

00:48:28.000 Sam Kinison and Roseanne Barr are the perfect examples that I use.

00:48:33.000 Both of them were normal people, and then they got hit by cars.

00:48:36.000 Sam 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.

00:48:43.000 It'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.

00:48:53.000 That was the Sam Kinison that we all knew and loved.

00:48:55.000 Same thing with Roseanne. 0.86

00:48:57.000 One of the things when I was defending Roseanne when she got in big trouble and she came on the podcast...

00:49:02.000 To talk about it.

00:49:03.000 I wanted people to understand what I knew about Roseanne.

00:49:06.000 Roseanne was in a mental health institute. 1.00

00:49:09.000 She was institutionalized for nine months after a car accident.

00:49:12.000 She was hit by a car walking across the street when she was 15 years old. 0.99

00:49:15.000 And just fucking wrecked. 0.99

00:49:17.000 Like massive brain trauma. 0.99

00:49:19.000 Like really never the same again.

00:49:21.000 Couldn't count.

00:49:21.000 She was great at mathematics.

00:49:23.000 She was really an excellent student.

00:49:24.000 And then hit by a car and then just wild and impulsive.

00:49:28.000 And they locked her in a mental institution for nine months. 0.98

00:49:31.000 She was crazy. 0.99

00:49:32.000 She's like certifiably crazy. 1.00

00:49:34.000 Medicated on a whole bunch of different things. 1.00

00:49:36.000 And my take was like to make her responsible for things she said when she's been rewarded her whole life for saying outrageous shit. 1.00

00:49:43.000 And she's on Xanax. 1.00

00:49:45.000 And she's smoking pot. 1.00

00:49:46.000 And she's drunk. 0.95

00:49:47.000 And you just want to label her as this awful, horrible person when America's loved her for her whole life for being the same way. 0.83

00:49:54.000 For being wild and impulsive.

00:49:56.000 But my point is that those two people were created that way from brain trauma.

00:50:01.000 It made them wilder.

00:50:04.000 There's no doubt I have some brain damage.

00:50:07.000 There's no doubt.

00:50:09.000 And when people say, like, why aren't you worried about criticism or why don't you...

00:50:13.000 I think there's some of that there.

00:50:15.000 There'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.

00:50:26.000 God, I'm gonna have you just full out. 1.00

00:50:30.000 You think about the things that hold people back.

00:50:34.000 One of the big things that hold people back is fear.

00:50:37.000 They're worried.

00:50:38.000 They're worried about the repercussions.

00:50:40.000 They're worried about other people's reactions.

00:50:43.000 They're worried about how you'll be viewed.

00:50:45.000 They're worried about all these things.

00:50:47.000 I don't have a lot of that.

00:50:49.000 For whatever reason.

00:50:50.000 I mean, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings.

00:50:52.000 I'm a genuinely nice person.

00:50:55.000 But if someone doesn't like me, I'm like, what the fuck am I going to do? 0.75

00:50:59.000 Just keep moving. 0.89

00:51:00.000 I think...

00:51:02.000 What happened with me with podcasts is that all these people were telling me you're wasting your time.

00:51:08.000 All these people were telling me not to do it.

00:51:09.000 Like, why are you wasting your time doing this?

00:51:11.000 And all this thing is, eh, I like doing it.

00:51:13.000 I'm just going to keep doing it.

00:51:15.000 Like, I just didn't, it didn't, like, agents want, I had nothing to do.

00:51:18.000 Agents to this day that I have that could have gotten in on the podcast, could have gotten a piece, didn't want it.

00:51:25.000 Do they double back around now?

00:51:27.000 Oh, yeah!

00:51:28.000 I imagine they do.

00:51:30.000 They had a chance!

00:51:32.000 Like, I need help with ads.

00:51:33.000 Ads? 0.99

00:51:34.000 What the fuck are you doing? 1.00

00:51:35.000 You're wasting your time. 1.00

00:51:37.000 We're here doing real things.

00:51:38.000 We didn't have time for this.

00:51:40.000 They didn't want to have anything to do with it. 0.97

00:51:43.000 But I didn't have some fucking grand vision. 0.94

00:51:46.000 I just know what I like to do. 0.95

00:51:48.000 And when I like to do something, I go, oh, I like to do that.

00:51:50.000 I'm just going to keep doing that.

00:51:52.000 This is the same thing with martial arts.

00:51:53.000 It's the same thing with bow hunting. 0.99

00:51:55.000 The amount of time that I spend practicing archery is fucking preposterous. 0.98

00:51:59.000 It's ridiculous for a person who is as busy as I am. 0.99

00:52:02.000 But that's what I like.

00:52:03.000 I like doing that, so I do that.

00:52:05.000 I take weeks off every year to go in the mountains and hunt because I like doing that.

00:52:10.000 I'm just going to keep doing that.

00:52:12.000 That's what I like doing.

00:52:13.000 You know when you, earlier we were reading up on baculums, and it was saying how baculums had been invented multiple times, right?

00:52:21.000 And all these dead-end lineages.

00:52:23.000 And you look at something, you know, flight, right?

00:52:27.000 Someone could be excused for Coming and seeing things.

00:52:32.000 A dragonfly and a bird.

00:52:34.000 And imagining that there was an event that spawned these things.

00:52:42.000 But in fact, they arrived at this same place.

00:52:46.000 They arrived at the same sort of place with winged flight through completely unrelated channels.

00:52:52.000 They just got there on their own.

00:52:54.000 What's funny about podcasting is as podcasting It takes itself more seriously.

00:53:00.000 It's like you have this sort of convergent...

00:53:03.000 You know the term like divergent evolution and convergent evolution.

00:53:07.000 There's a convergent evolution with news and podcasting.

00:53:11.000 It started out as maybe somewhat of a revolt.

00:53:15.000 It was uncontrolled.

00:53:17.000 It was irresponsible. 0.91

00:53:18.000 It was goofy.

00:53:20.000 It was like a response to...

00:53:22.000 But as it's becoming, become formalized...

00:53:27.000 With 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.

00:53:46.000 Exactly.

00:53:47.000 That's where the brain damage comes in. 0.98

00:53:51.000 Because I go, get the fuck out of here. 0.99

00:53:53.000 That's where I go, get the fuck out of here. 0.99

00:53:55.000 I'm not doing that. 0.98

00:53:56.000 When people say, you can't have people like Alex Jones on the podcast.

00:54:00.000 You can't get drunk on a podcast that 10 million people are going to watch.

00:54:04.000 You can't smoke pot all the time.

00:54:06.000 You can't do it.

00:54:06.000 I'm like, yes, I can.

00:54:08.000 I've done it the whole time.

00:54:09.000 Why am I stopping now?

00:54:10.000 Well, now it's a big business.

00:54:12.000 Now you have this big deal.

00:54:13.000 Now they're writing articles about you in the New York Times.

00:54:16.000 Now you have to stop.

00:54:18.000 But that's the way it got there in the first place.

00:54:21.000 The way it got there in the first place is people are tired of seeing these pre-packaged...

00:54:25.000 Like, if you see...

00:54:26.000 Like, here's the best example.

00:54:27.000 Evening news.

00:54:28.000 Good evening!

00:54:29.000 Hi, I'm Skip... 1.00

00:54:31.000 Fuck face. 1.00

00:54:32.000 You know, there's these guys with this fake voice doing this, like, super overproduced thing where they're talking about subjects. 1.00

00:54:40.000 The banter in between stories On fake news, or on news, rather, news broadcasts, is the most fake communication known to man.

00:54:50.000 Like, the woman will say something, the guy will go, well, that's certainly a crazy story.

00:54:54.000 In other words...

00:54:55.000 We're going to go to Bob outside.

00:54:57.000 And then they go to this and that, and I find that's a terrible thing, a terrible tragedy.

00:55:02.000 Amazing, terrible.

00:55:03.000 Like, you could see...

00:55:04.000 Really inspiring.

00:55:05.000 They have these, like, weird little fake interactions.

00:55:10.000 That is the opposite of podcast.

00:55:12.000 Podcast is real. 0.89

00:55:14.000 Like, 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? 0.99

00:55:25.000 Like, you have a baby. 0.99

00:55:26.000 Like, you have kids.

00:55:27.000 You have a baby.

00:55:28.000 Like, look at my little baby.

00:55:29.000 And then your baby starts growing up, and you're like, God, I'm so proud of him.

00:55:33.000 Look at the little drawing you made.

00:55:34.000 And then it gets to the point where he's on YouTube doing backflips over Lamborghinis and landing on his head.

00:55:39.000 Like, what went wrong?

00:55:41.000 Yeah.

00:55:42.000 That's how a normal human being would talk.

00:55:44.000 But 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.

00:55:53.000 So you have executives, you have producers, you have writers, you have all these people that have a piece of the pie.

00:56:01.000 So 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?

00:56:09.000 Like a normal show that reaches the amount of people that this show does, there would be a staff of a hundred people.

00:56:16.000 And those people would all have insurance.

00:56:17.000 Oh, absolutely, man.

00:56:18.000 They'd have an enormous system of gatekeepers and legal.

00:56:21.000 Exactly.

00:56:22.000 And then the things that you were going to talk about would be heavily vetted.

00:56:25.000 You 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.

00:56:41.000 So, whether I'm good or bad, whether I'm right or wrong, at least you know it's just me.

00:56:47.000 This is the thing that we're worried about when it goes to Spotify.

00:56:50.000 Like, people are worried, oh my god, they're going to have sensors in the room.

00:56:52.000 There's going to be people telling them what to do.

00:56:54.000 What people are worried about is it becoming overproduced.

00:56:57.000 It becoming something other than what it is.

00:56:59.000 Because they know that's the natural course of progression.

00:57:01.000 Somebody 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.

00:57:08.000 But the way to make a lot of money off of podcasting is the opposite way.

00:57:12.000 It's to leave it wild.

00:57:13.000 But 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? 0.99

00:57:18.000 You 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! 0.96

00:57:31.000 Even if 99% think you're awesome, that 1 million could make a big dent in your head. 0.97

00:57:38.000 You can't pay attention to it.

00:57:39.000 I 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.

00:57:55.000 And 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.

00:58:04.000 What's Ameriseum?

00:58:05.000 It's a radioactive substance.

00:58:07.000 In 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.

00:58:20.000 Really?

00:58:22.000 So, he started buying up any and all smoke detectors that he could ever get his hands on, right?

00:58:29.000 And 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. 0.79

00:58:40.000 He would drive around with a Geiger counter on the front seat of his car past antique shops and shit, right? 0.84

00:58:46.000 Okay? 0.99

00:58:48.000 Is this a novel?

00:58:49.000 No, it was a story in Harper's Magazine called The Radioactive Boy Scout. 0.98

00:58:54.000 He 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. 0.98

00:59:03.000 How many did he have? 0.99

00:59:04.000 In barrels.

00:59:05.000 How many did he have?

00:59:06.000 I read it a long time ago.

00:59:08.000 Wow.

00:59:09.000 Okay?

00:59:10.000 Just doing his thing.

00:59:12.000 Collecting smoke.

00:59:13.000 Oh my god, look at his face!

00:59:16.000 Jesus Christ!

00:59:18.000 Yeah, hauled away his yard.

00:59:19.000 Look at his face!

00:59:20.000 Like he's got radiation poisoning on his face.

00:59:23.000 People might regard you as the radioactive Boy Scout.

00:59:27.000 Yeah.

00:59:27.000 Like at a time, you were just out getting some smoke detectors.

00:59:32.000 And then over time, you like accumulated something where people had to take notice.

00:59:38.000 There's a little bit of that.

00:59:40.000 And they would be like, dude, I understand, but you just can't put that many of those things in one spot.

00:59:47.000 Yeah.

00:59:49.000 But what's the argument against it?

00:59:51.000 The argument against it would be...

00:59:52.000 You tell me.

00:59:53.000 I don't hold that viewpoint.

00:59:54.000 I'm just saying, I like to imagine...

01:00:00.000 My brother has emerged as someone who's highly critical of my occupation.

01:00:06.000 And I like to hear him out about it.

01:00:07.000 Danny or Matt?

01:00:08.000 No, Matthew.

01:00:09.000 Why?

01:00:10.000 What's he critical of?

01:00:11.000 He is...

01:00:13.000 Well, give me the counter-argument.

01:00:15.000 What's he critical of?

01:00:16.000 Oh, why doesn't he like what I do for a living?

01:00:19.000 Because he feels that me and other individuals and lots of people that by talking about and celebrating an activity in my case,

01:00:35.000 hunting, 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.

01:00:51.000 Very valid argument, right?

01:00:53.000 So I like to hear him out on it.

01:00:57.000 I like to hear him out on it because he's smart.

01:00:59.000 He's smart.

01:01:00.000 So I like to hear him out on what he's thinking.

01:01:03.000 I'm only doing the same thing with you.

01:01:06.000 I don't hold your opinion.

01:01:09.000 I don't hold the opinion of someone, but I'm just saying it is.

01:01:12.000 Someone might say, I get it, Joe.

01:01:15.000 It was all fun.

01:01:17.000 It wasn't supposed to happen.

01:01:19.000 But they would say, but here you are.

01:01:21.000 Time to pull the plug.

01:01:22.000 Here you are.

01:01:23.000 You now have a level of power that could be dangerous.

01:01:35.000 But what could be dangerous about it?

01:01:38.000 Picture that you said something.

01:01:46.000 It's over now, and everybody was always worried about it happening during the election.

01:01:49.000 Picture 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?

01:02:00.000 Yeah.

01:02:00.000 So you...

01:02:05.000 Wield like a level of influence.

01:02:07.000 And I think that you probably now and then bite your tongue.

01:02:11.000 Well, I definitely don't tell people how to vote.

01:02:14.000 No, no, I don't mean how to vote.

01:02:16.000 I was doing a poor example of that.

01:02:19.000 But that's a good example because that would be where it could get dangerous.

01:02:22.000 Like, what if I had an idea that was really not well thought out and not good for the general public and I was...

01:02:28.000 And you threw out because it was funny.

01:02:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:02:31.000 And then I told people to go do it.

01:02:33.000 I thought it'd be a fun stunt.

01:02:34.000 Let's see how many people we can get to...

01:02:36.000 Or you're just musing.

01:02:37.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:02:38.000 I could see that.

01:02:39.000 And that alarms people, because people would do it.

01:02:42.000 Yeah, but I don't do that. 0.94

01:02:43.000 Most of what I do is talk about ideas and talk shit, and talk about things that are happening already. 0.88

01:02:49.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:02:49.000 I implored people in Missoula County, Montana, to go vote for my sister-in-law, Juanita Vero, and she won by a landslide. 0.98

01:02:58.000 But I think she was going to win anyway.

01:03:00.000 Oh, that's awesome.

01:03:01.000 That's a good thing.

01:03:02.000 She's a county commissioner.

01:03:04.000 There you go.

01:03:05.000 I got tangled up in politics there for a minute.

01:03:07.000 There's a real problem with the gatekeepers.

01:03:09.000 There's a real problem with these heavily produced television shows, heavily produced radio shows, and even now internet shows.

01:03:18.000 There's a real problem with them, is that there's inauthentic voices.

01:03:21.000 They don't resonate with people.

01:03:23.000 I know that's not a real person.

01:03:24.000 That's not a person that's unfiltered.

01:03:26.000 That'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.

01:03:34.000 And 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.

01:03:42.000 There's an interview with Donald Trump with this woman from CBS, very contentious interview, and he wound up putting the whole interview online.

01:03:52.000 Are you aware of that?

01:03:53.000 No.

01:03:54.000 This 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.

01:04:06.000 Was it 60 Minutes, Jamie?

01:04:08.000 Yeah.

01:04:08.000 They wound up using a very small piece of it.

01:04:10.000 But 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.

01:04:20.000 And he's like, what?

01:04:22.000 Huh?

01:04:22.000 And so the guy stops everything because he thinks that the flag is distracting.

01:04:27.000 Like... 1.00

01:04:27.000 No one can see the fucking flag. 1.00

01:04:29.000 It doesn't matter. 1.00

01:04:30.000 Like, what are you talking about?

01:04:31.000 But this is what happens when you get a whole crew of people. 0.94

01:04:34.000 You 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. 0.83

01:04:45.000 That to me symbolized everything that's wrong with heavily produced and overly produced television. 0.94

01:04:50.000 Or one of the things that's wrong, right?

01:04:52.000 What'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.

01:04:59.000 No one has any say.

01:05:00.000 And who my guests are.

01:05:02.000 I choose all of them.

01:05:03.000 I choose the day they come in.

01:05:05.000 I choose what we're going to talk about.

01:05:08.000 The conversations are only what I'm interested in, things I'm interested in.

01:05:12.000 So I don't have to fake anything.

01:05:14.000 Like, I love talking to you.

01:05:15.000 I was excited to talk to you today.

01:05:16.000 I got excited.

01:05:17.000 Woke up this morning, all right, Steve Rinell is going to be here.

01:05:19.000 There's no, like, oh, who do we have to talk to today? 1.00

01:05:22.000 That shit never happens. 0.99

01:05:23.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:05:24.000 That's why it resonates.

01:05:25.000 All these shows where it's heavily produced and you're just trying to get the biggest celebrities in.

01:05:32.000 There's a really disturbing video of Howard Stern from 2013 that somebody leaked.

01:05:38.000 And it's him giving some speech in front of all of his employees talking about getting the show to become more popular.

01:05:44.000 This is what we have to do.

01:05:45.000 And we have to get X amount of celebrities. 0.94

01:05:48.000 We need two A-lists and two B-lists a week.

01:05:50.000 And I was like, wow.

01:05:51.000 Oh, really? 1.00

01:05:52.000 Yeah, I was like, oof, damn. 0.99

01:05:54.000 And they're telling people to make fake Twitter profiles and tweet to celebrities. 0.99

01:05:58.000 And when you watch this, it's like, yeah.

01:06:01.000 Oh, that's too bad.

01:06:02.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:06:02.000 That was my feeling, too.

01:06:04.000 As a person who was a gigantic fan of him growing up, it's like, I never thought he thought like that.

01:06:11.000 I never thought anybody would do that.

01:06:12.000 This is...

01:06:14.000 One of the best things about podcasting, at least with the way some people do it, is just authentic.

01:06:20.000 It's just raw.

01:06:21.000 So when people hear it, stumbles and all, they know this is just two guys talking.

01:06:27.000 This is two girls talking.

01:06:29.000 That show, what is that called?

01:06:31.000 Call Her Daddy? 1.00

01:06:33.000 Yeah.

01:06:33.000 Yeah, that became real popular because it's obviously just the way these chicks are talking.

01:06:38.000 They just talk that way.

01:06:39.000 And people are like, oh my god, this is how we talk when we're with our friends.

01:06:43.000 And people, it resonates with them.

01:06:45.000 You can't get that on The View. 0.95

01:06:47.000 You 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. 1.00

01:06:57.000 That's what happens on those goddamn things. 1.00

01:06:59.000 It's weird. 0.99

01:07:00.000 People come in with notes and the producer is like, maybe we can bring up this in this episode.

01:07:04.000 I know you like to talk about this, but let's be aware that people think that and you think this.

01:07:09.000 It shows that whenever you talk about this, people tune out.

01:07:14.000 So we've got to stop talking about that. 0.99

01:07:16.000 So they show all this research and all these metrics and they fuck it. 1.00

01:07:21.000 It gets all fucked up. 0.99

01:07:22.000 What resonates with people is authentic conversations. 0.98

01:07:28.000 And you don't get authenticity when you have overly produced things with a hundred people's ideas all shoved into one person's mouth.

01:07:37.000 It doesn't work that way.

01:07:39.000 So the more these podcasts get bigger and bigger, the more they fall apart because too many people get involved.

01:07:46.000 You have too many people shift them and mold them and change them and then they become just like everything else.

01:07:50.000 All these other overproduced things.

01:07:52.000 And look, there's some overproduced things that are really good.

01:07:54.000 You know, like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

01:07:56.000 You could watch it to this day. 0.99

01:07:57.000 You're like, wow, that's a fucking really good show. 0.99

01:08:00.000 But it wouldn't work today. 0.98

01:08:01.000 It 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.

01:08:09.000 I can hear better. 0.98

01:08:10.000 If someone put that water back in your ear, you'd be like, what the fuck is that water doing in there? 0.99

01:08:14.000 I know what it's like to have no water in my ear now. 0.99

01:08:15.000 Yeah.

01:08:16.000 That's a bad analogy.

01:08:17.000 But you get what I'm saying.

01:08:19.000 I'm getting what you're saying.

01:08:20.000 People are accustomed to this thing now where there's no filter between you and that person.

01:08:28.000 You're in the room.

01:08:30.000 That's how I feel when I listen to your show.

01:08:31.000 It's you and whoever's in there with you.

01:08:34.000 That's it.

01:08:35.000 There'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.

01:08:44.000 Yeah, Michael Punk.

01:08:46.000 That's a great one.

01:08:47.000 Spelled P-U-N-K-E. Yeah, that's a great one. 1.00

01:08:50.000 I can't remember, no, I think he doesn't pronounce the E. Shit. 0.96

01:08:54.000 I don't think it's Michael Ponkey. 0.97

01:08:55.000 I think it's Punk. 0.99

01:08:57.000 Damn. 0.99

01:08:58.000 Sorry, Michael. 0.98

01:08:59.000 But 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?

01:09:08.000 What 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? 0.98

01:09:14.000 Like, what the fuck was that like? 0.92

01:09:15.000 And you're talking to him like, it's real clear. 0.99

01:09:18.000 Yeah.

01:09:19.000 This is just you and that guy and Giannis and whoever else is there.

01:09:24.000 There's no agenda.

01:09:25.000 There's no filters.

01:09:26.000 There's no producers.

01:09:27.000 So it's intriguing to a person because it resonates.

01:09:30.000 It gets in the head easy.

01:09:32.000 It slides right in there.

01:09:34.000 That story, though, is a little bit, in some ways, might have a little bit to do with a sense of...

01:09:46.000 responsibility 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,

01:10:16.000 he's really aware of how much fun you guys have with the movie.

01:10:23.000 And I was like, duh, I should probably have the guy on.

01:10:27.000 But it was because of historical inaccuracies, right?

01:10:29.000 And it was no fault of his.

01:10:31.000 And that's why I tried to make it clear.

01:10:32.000 I think what it is, I don't even think he listened.

01:10:34.000 I think he heard that we're always hacking on him.

01:10:37.000 He thought we were hacking on him.

01:10:38.000 On him.

01:10:39.000 And I was like, I'm not hacking on him!

01:10:42.000 We're hacking on the movie!

01:10:44.000 And then I wanted to get with them to be cool.

01:10:47.000 Isn'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?

01:10:55.000 An example that I always use is that movie, was it Dreamcatcher?

01:11:00.000 Was the movie Foxcatcher?

01:11:03.000 Oh yeah, the Olympic wrestling team movie.

01:11:06.000 Based 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,

01:11:22.000 he fought a famous fighter.

01:11:24.000 It's a famous fight.

01:11:25.000 It's a historical fight.

01:11:26.000 He fought as a wrestler against a guy named Big Daddy Goodrich.

01:11:30.000 Gary Goodrich was a famous fighter.

01:11:32.000 He was a famous pioneer of the sport.

01:11:33.000 In the movie...

01:11:35.000 The only fight that Mark has ever had his entire career, an MMA fight in the UFC, in the movie he fights a Russian guy, a white guy.

01:11:42.000 They change it.

01:11:44.000 It wasn't the same dude that Rocky had to fight.

01:11:46.000 No, but it wasn't the same dude.

01:11:48.000 But they took a historical event and they distorted it for no reason.

01:11:53.000 Like, you could have had him fighting Big Daddy Goodrich.

01:11:56.000 You could have had Big Daddy...

01:11:57.000 Because Big Daddy also wore a gi.

01:11:59.000 He famously would go into the octagon with a karate outfit on.

01:12:04.000 So he had his gi on. 0.99

01:12:06.000 And in the movie, there's a guy with a fucking bare shirt. 0.99

01:12:10.000 A white guy. 1.00

01:12:11.000 Or a bare chest.

01:12:12.000 It didn't make any sense.

01:12:13.000 It's like, why would you change reality?

01:12:15.000 As an MMA fan, I know what happened.

01:12:18.000 Like, it's a historic fight.

01:12:20.000 It would be like...

01:12:21.000 When Muhammad Ali fought Sonny Liston. 0.97

01:12:23.000 If instead of Sonny Liston, you had him fight some fat white guy. 0.82

01:12:26.000 Why would you do that? 0.88

01:12:28.000 When everybody knows what happened.

01:12:30.000 So that's a historic movie where someone, exactly what we're talking about with podcast, with anything else, overproduced. 0.98

01:12:38.000 Someone got their greasy little fucking fingers on it and they decided to change reality. 0.97

01:12:43.000 I think that... 1.00

01:12:45.000 It comes from a couple places, and I've been witness to it a little bit.

01:12:49.000 I think it comes from people wanting to exert creative influence.

01:12:54.000 Yeah.

01:12:55.000 And also people...

01:12:58.000 Three things.

01:13:00.000 Why do you exert creative influence?

01:13:02.000 Wishing that the truth had been different.

01:13:07.000 That doesn't make any sense in this case.

01:13:09.000 Well, yeah.

01:13:10.000 And a third one...

01:13:16.000 That's kind of like two combined with the second one.

01:13:18.000 But 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.

01:13:28.000 We were like, well, how do you do it?

01:13:30.000 How do you cut this thing up?

01:13:32.000 They'd be like, man, you could do it with a scalpel.

01:13:37.000 It's very precise.

01:13:38.000 I use a very small knife to do it.

01:13:41.000 And no joke being like, could you do it with a machete?

01:13:45.000 Because in their mind, there's not the respect for how things are done.

01:13:53.000 It's so show business that you're not in love with how someone did something.

01:13:59.000 You'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.

01:14:08.000 They can picture it.

01:14:09.000 Right.

01:14:11.000 So, why be inhibited?

01:14:13.000 Why be inhibited by the reality? 0.99

01:14:16.000 And I think a lot of people would look and be like, oh, no shit. 1.00

01:14:19.000 You could do that with a scalpel. 1.00

01:14:22.000 Right.

01:14:23.000 And they love that fact.

01:14:25.000 Yeah.

01:14:26.000 But some people don't love that fact.

01:14:28.000 Well, we're talking about those little Havalon-type knives.

01:14:32.000 When I first saw that, I go, oh, that's genius.

01:14:34.000 And then I thought, oh, of course.

01:14:35.000 It makes sense.

01:14:36.000 You're surgically cutting up parts of an animal.

01:14:39.000 It does make sense.

01:14:41.000 But the difference between that is this is a physical act that hasn't taken place yet.

01:14:45.000 You're about to do it, and you're going to film it.

01:14:47.000 What we're talking about is a historical event.

01:14:49.000 And that's where it's a real problem, especially for someone who's...

01:14:52.000 I mean, I'm kind of a martial arts historian.

01:14:55.000 You asked me about the UFC. I know a lot.

01:15:01.000 You can't lie to me.

01:15:02.000 You can't say that Mark Schultz fought some Russian guy. 0.59

01:15:05.000 That's nonsense.

01:15:06.000 It doesn't make any sense.

01:15:07.000 That is just a producer who thinks, ah, people won't know.

01:15:11.000 People won't know.

01:15:12.000 Just do it anyway.

01:15:13.000 That's some guy's ego.

01:15:14.000 Well, no, no, Gary. 1.00

01:15:15.000 Greasy-fingered motherfucker who wants to come in and ruin something because he has his own ideas of how to put his little touch in it. 1.00

01:15:23.000 He's like, I turned it into the white guy. 1.00

01:15:26.000 He's sitting in the movie theater.

01:15:27.000 This was my idea.

01:15:28.000 They wanted to give it a black guy from Canada wearing a gi.

01:15:31.000 That's who he was.

01:15:32.000 Big Daddy Goodrich is from Toronto.

01:15:34.000 I mean, Big Daddy Goodrich is famous.

01:15:38.000 That's why this is crazy.

01:15:39.000 Yeah.

01:15:39.000 Like, Mark Schultz was famous, too.

01:15:41.000 Like, 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.

01:15:52.000 It was really fascinating.

01:15:53.000 And because he was a coach for Brigham Young, I believe it was Brigham Young University, they told him he can't keep fighting.

01:16:00.000 Like, if you're going to coach wrestling, you can't do this cage fighting thing.

01:16:03.000 Because this is early UFC. No gloves.

01:16:06.000 You could wear shoes.

01:16:07.000 The rules were like real squirrely.

01:16:09.000 It was a totally different thing than it is now.

01:16:12.000 It was one weight, maybe two weight classes back then.

01:16:14.000 One or two weight classes.

01:16:16.000 That's it.

01:16:16.000 And so for them, it was like distasteful.

01:16:19.000 Whereas now, maybe they would look at that as an opportunity to get amazing publicity for the college.

01:16:25.000 Look, our head guy is a UFC champion.

01:16:28.000 Because Mark Schultz could have been a UFC champion, no doubt about it.

01:16:31.000 No one was going to stop that guy from taking him down.

01:16:34.000 I mean, he was like one of the best wrestlers to ever wrestle.

01:16:38.000 He was the one played by not Mark Ruffalo.

01:16:41.000 Mark Ruffalo is the older brother.

01:16:43.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:16:44.000 Mark Ruffalo is the older brother.

01:16:45.000 And the older brother, Dave Schultz, would get murdered by this DuPont guy.

01:16:49.000 Yeah.

01:16:50.000 It's a crazy story.

01:16:51.000 Are you familiar with the Charlton Heston movie, I believe it was from 1980, called The Mountain Men?

01:16:57.000 No.

01:16:58.000 It's a period piece about free trappers, like beaver trappers.

01:17:04.000 Based on real humans?

01:17:06.000 Just informed by a hodgepodge of actual events.

01:17:13.000 So 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.

01:17:24.000 There'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.

01:17:33.000 There it is.

01:17:34.000 They do a great job with costumes, but they're beaver trappers.

01:17:41.000 The trapping scenes are laughably bad.

01:17:52.000 And you wonder why they didn't just bring someone in to have them...

01:17:59.000 It would have been less effort to have the beaver sets they're making make sense.

01:18:05.000 But they're like, someone out there just doesn't care.

01:18:09.000 They don't care.

01:18:10.000 I had a conversation once. 1.00

01:18:11.000 It's also one of those movies where all the Native Americans are, well, except for the heroine, the Native Americans are blundering idiots. 1.00

01:18:19.000 Oh, God. 1.00

01:18:20.000 Yeah.

01:18:22.000 What year was this?

01:18:24.000 I believe it was made in 1980. Yeah, there it is.

01:18:27.000 Yeah, I had a conversation once when I was just starting to get into acting.

01:18:34.000 I 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.

01:18:44.000 They wanted to talk about me doing a martial arts movie and the interview did not go very well.

01:18:49.000 Because they were talking about things in movies, like all these wild scenes, and they were asking me what I like.

01:18:56.000 And I go, well, I like things that are realistic.

01:18:58.000 I want to see something that I know would work.

01:19:01.000 Like if a guy, you know, jumps up and split kicks two people and knocks them across the room, like that doesn't...

01:19:08.000 I don't...

01:19:09.000 I go, I want to see like realistic scenarios where a person who knows martial arts can go, oh, that's pretty badass.

01:19:17.000 Like... 0.95

01:19:18.000 Chuck Norris, give him all the shit you want, but there's a lot of Chuck Norris movies where we had real realistic fight scenes. 0.99

01:19:25.000 What was the cop movie Chuck Norris did? 0.99

01:19:30.000 Lone Wolf McQuaid?

01:19:31.000 No, that was the one we fought, David Carradine.

01:19:34.000 Is that how he fights?

01:19:36.000 They killed his dog and then he got pissed.

01:19:41.000 That was pushing it too far.

01:19:43.000 There was one movie with it where Chuck Norris did...

01:19:46.000 God, it's not the Thin Blue Line, is it?

01:19:48.000 What is it?

01:19:49.000 Code of Silence.

01:19:49.000 That's right.

01:19:50.000 That was a movie where it was a real movie.

01:19:54.000 It wasn't just a karate movie.

01:19:58.000 It was a real movie.

01:20:01.000 It was probably 1980 as well.

01:20:04.000 What year was that movie?

01:20:06.000 Here he is in a bar next to...

01:20:07.000 This speaks to you, Joe, because he's by a pool table getting ready to karate fight.

01:20:10.000 85?

01:20:11.000 Yeah, I was...

01:20:12.000 He's got everything you like.

01:20:13.000 It wasn't too outrageous.

01:20:14.000 It was like he was really fighting.

01:20:16.000 It made sense.

01:20:18.000 You could see that happening.

01:20:19.000 Maybe that's not the best example.

01:20:20.000 You know who was a good example, as weird as it sounds?

01:20:23.000 Steven Seagal's early movie.

01:20:25.000 Mm-hmm.

01:20:25.000 Above the law.

01:20:27.000 A lot of people hate saying that. 0.98

01:20:28.000 I fucking loved Above the Law. 0.99

01:20:31.000 That Steven Seagal movie, when he fucked people up in a bar, like, you believed it. 0.99

01:20:35.000 Yeah. 0.93

01:20:35.000 I'm like, he's not doing jumping, spinning wheel kicks or anything like that. 0.93

01:20:38.000 He's cracking people over the head with pool cues and breaking their arms.

01:20:41.000 It's like, all that stuff, like, okay, I buy that.

01:20:44.000 I buy that.

01:20:45.000 I would someday like you to do an analysis, a sort of director's cut style analysis of the fight scene at the end of Cannonball Run.

01:20:54.000 LAUGHTER This is Steven Seagal walking in.

01:20:59.000 Dude, this was back when he was lean and thin.

01:21:01.000 I met him in a catfish joint in Oxford, Mississippi.

01:21:05.000 A catfish place?

01:21:06.000 Yeah, he was there getting fried catfish.

01:21:07.000 Really?

01:21:07.000 Do you remember when he was a real cop on a television show?

01:21:11.000 People got mouthy with him in this movie and it's not a good move.

01:21:15.000 Bang! 1.00

01:21:16.000 He starts fucking people up. 0.99

01:21:18.000 See that? 0.99

01:21:19.000 Look at that elbow.

01:21:19.000 That upward elbow.

01:21:20.000 100% legit.

01:21:22.000 100% real move that you see in Muay Thai all the time.

01:21:25.000 That's real.

01:21:26.000 Kevin Ross could be doing that right now.

01:21:28.000 Right there.

01:21:29.000 Bam! 0.98

01:21:29.000 That's 100% legit. 0.98

01:21:31.000 Knee to the face. 0.99

01:21:33.000 All legit.

01:21:34.000 That stuff makes sense.

01:21:35.000 Look, this guy's going to swing.

01:21:36.000 Boom! 1.00

01:21:37.000 All this shit. 1.00

01:21:38.000 This is real. 1.00

01:21:39.000 This is Steven Seagal at his best.

01:21:42.000 These are like legit, believable fight scenes.

01:21:46.000 Oh, now he's going to get...

01:21:48.000 But watch this. 0.97

01:21:50.000 Steven Seagal, people talk a lot of shit about him, but Steven Seagal was a legit Aikido master. 0.97

01:21:55.000 He was one of the first, if not the first American to teach at a dojo in Japan. 0.98

01:22:01.000 He taught Aikido.

01:22:02.000 He was 100% legit.

01:22:05.000 When I met him, he was wearing some kind of robe.

01:22:09.000 He lost the script somewhere along the line. 0.98

01:22:11.000 But back then, during this movie, man, I fucking loved that guy. 0.95

01:22:14.000 And I remember bringing him up in the meeting. 0.97

01:22:17.000 And I'm bringing this scene up.

01:22:19.000 And I'm like, that's what I want to see. 0.98

01:22:21.000 I don't want to see shit that I know won't work. 0.99

01:22:23.000 And they weren't into it. 0.99

01:22:24.000 And they were like, people don't know that.

01:22:25.000 I go, but I know that.

01:22:27.000 And he goes, yeah, but how many people are you, like, you are out there.

01:22:29.000 I go, but that movie's a successful movie.

01:22:31.000 And the guy got upset at me.

01:22:33.000 He just didn't want to hear me criticizing his perspective on something that I wasn't an actual expert in.

01:22:38.000 Has GQ asked you to do one of those breakdowns?

01:22:41.000 Would you?

01:22:41.000 Of a karate scene in a movie?

01:22:42.000 Well, no.

01:22:43.000 I've done the breakdown where you watch all the hunting scenes.

01:22:46.000 Oh, have you done that?

01:22:47.000 Yeah.

01:22:48.000 It's fun.

01:22:49.000 I'd probably do that without GQ. I don't want them in the mix.

01:22:52.000 You don't need them in there?

01:22:53.000 Why would I want anybody else in there?

01:22:55.000 Then you have a producer.

01:22:56.000 Then you have a big organization behind you.

01:22:58.000 When you could just do it here.

01:23:00.000 You could just spark up a joint and go, yeah, all right.

01:23:04.000 Let's put out Lone Wolf McQueen.

01:23:05.000 Well, because they kind of like pull the...

01:23:06.000 I don't know why.

01:23:07.000 I had fun...

01:23:09.000 They get the rights to things, maybe?

01:23:12.000 Well, they kind of put it on.

01:23:13.000 I don't know.

01:23:15.000 They pulled all...

01:23:17.000 And I actually pointed out a bunch of hunting scenes and movies for them.

01:23:21.000 And then they did their homework and found a bunch more.

01:23:23.000 And they just play hunting scenes for movies.

01:23:25.000 Cameron Haynes did that with archery and movies.

01:23:27.000 That's correct.

01:23:28.000 And you know what he said to me?

01:23:29.000 He said, the best is that movie Brave.

01:23:32.000 That animated movie, Brave, he's like, the girl's form is excellent.

01:23:36.000 Is that right?

01:23:36.000 Yeah.

01:23:36.000 She does everything perfect.

01:23:38.000 Because it's animated, you don't have to teach an actor to do it.

01:23:41.000 You could just mimic a professional archer doing it.

01:23:45.000 See if you can find the archery scene in Brave.

01:23:49.000 Well, whether you do it with them or not, I feel like a good fight scene breakdown would be like a gift to society.

01:23:57.000 Eh, maybe.

01:23:59.000 But that scene in Above the Law, that's all legit.

01:24:04.000 Maybe not the flipping the guy on the ground that was holding the gun.

01:24:07.000 Let me see if we can see the girl pull the bow back. 1.00

01:24:09.000 Would it be a good parody?

01:24:10.000 Look at this.

01:24:11.000 Watch this.

01:24:11.000 Watch her.

01:24:12.000 Okay.

01:24:14.000 Her technique.

01:24:15.000 I mean, even the way she's holding the bow, it looks like a real human.

01:24:19.000 Oh, she's got some corset that's holding her back. 1.00

01:24:20.000 Look at that.

01:24:23.000 I mean, her technique looks perfect.

01:24:26.000 Oh, they must have.

01:24:27.000 Look.

01:24:28.000 I mean, that looks perfect.

01:24:30.000 Yeah, you're right.

01:24:30.000 Looks good.

01:24:31.000 What I wanted to do...

01:24:32.000 So this franchise, this GQ franchise, it's called The Breakdown.

01:24:35.000 I wanted to do a parody of The Breakdown where an expert comes in and analyzes diarrhea scenes from movies.

01:24:41.000 LAUGHTER Well, that would never actually happen because...

01:24:45.000 Like the scene from, what was the movie?

01:24:49.000 Yeah, Dumb and Dumber was a good one. 0.90

01:24:51.000 Yeah, well, that volume of excrement would never actually be generated by a human of that size. 1.00

01:24:56.000 You'd be dead. 1.00

01:24:57.000 You'd be dead. 1.00

01:24:58.000 Yeah.

01:25:00.000 But there's something about people, when you get too many people, too many minds, too much influence, you know, just get involved in things.

01:25:10.000 That point was the thing that, oh, the toilet scene?

01:25:12.000 Yeah.

01:25:13.000 So 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

01:25:43.000 like 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.

01:25:54.000 You know, you should call and double check.

01:25:56.000 And to think that, like, a thing of that level of impact would come about with just that.

01:26:07.000 I remember being really inspired by that.

01:26:09.000 That's what should happen, right?

01:26:11.000 Yeah, but that's like the amount of people that are going to go read a book.

01:26:14.000 So there you put a thing out that you feel is of influence.

01:26:16.000 Yeah.

01:26:16.000 A fraction of a fraction of what is going to hear you talk.

01:26:22.000 Yeah.

01:26:22.000 And there's not even two people in the conversation about who you're going to talk to.

01:26:27.000 Yeah, it's weird.

01:26:28.000 You've reduced it.

01:26:29.000 You've reduced it down to a single point.

01:26:32.000 But people know what to expect.

01:26:35.000 Like people that listen to the show, like I'm...

01:26:39.000 My ideas evolve.

01:26:41.000 I get interested in new things.

01:26:43.000 But I'm always me.

01:26:47.000 I'm not a product.

01:26:48.000 I'm not a thing that someone has concocted.

01:26:51.000 There's certain people that are on late night television where you hear them talk.

01:26:55.000 You go, man, I want to get that guy drunk.

01:26:57.000 I want to know what that guy's really like.

01:26:58.000 I don't buy it.

01:27:00.000 With me, if you like me or don't like me, you know exactly what I am.

01:27:04.000 And also, there's not a lot of men that are allowed to just be like a regular man on TV anymore.

01:27:10.000 Or on anything.

01:27:12.000 What are they supposed to be like? 1.00

01:27:13.000 You gotta be some fucking half-neutered thing. 1.00

01:27:17.000 Oh. 1.00

01:27:17.000 You know, you have to... 1.00

01:27:18.000 All evidence of toxic masculinity must be removed from the way you think and behave.

01:27:25.000 You can't be like a guy would be if he's just hanging out with his friends.

01:27:30.000 Like, that's problematic.

01:27:32.000 Yeah.

01:27:32.000 It's problematic to distribute mainstream.

01:27:34.000 There's so many men out there that feel like they don't have anybody that represents the way they think.

01:27:40.000 So 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.

01:27:50.000 There's a lot of people like me out there.

01:27:51.000 To your credit...

01:27:55.000 I 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.

01:28:13.000 Meaning that you'll voice something and do a good job of voicing that you're aware that there's probably more to the story.

01:28:21.000 Well, I'm not married to my ideas.

01:28:23.000 I think that's important, too.

01:28:24.000 I think there's like a subtext there.

01:28:27.000 And 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.

01:28:47.000 Right.

01:28:47.000 I see what you're saying.

01:28:48.000 Which is a little bit important.

01:28:49.000 When people are always mad about something Trump said.

01:28:51.000 Like, you go to the New York Times, you read, like, Trump said this horrible thing.

01:28:55.000 And then you go and find the video.

01:28:59.000 Exactly.

01:29:00.000 Like, 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. 0.98

01:29:11.000 Okay?

01:29:11.000 Yeah.

01:29:12.000 Everybody's all angry about it.

01:29:14.000 You know, this magnitude...

01:29:16.000 Then you go watch the video.

01:29:17.000 I'm like, the dude's making a joke.

01:29:20.000 He's funny.

01:29:21.000 It was like everything about the interaction was a joke.

01:29:26.000 That was in the interview with CBS. The same sort of thing.

01:29:30.000 The interview with CBS, the woman brought up a thing.

01:29:32.000 He's like, that's not what I said.

01:29:34.000 What I said was a joke.

01:29:35.000 I was joking.

01:29:36.000 I said it like this.

01:29:37.000 I'm joking.

01:29:38.000 I'm being sarcastic. 0.95

01:29:39.000 I'm being silly. 0.90

01:29:40.000 That's what I do. 0.94

01:29:41.000 Yeah.

01:29:41.000 Like, he was saying that, explaining to her, like, you're saying it in a different way than I said it.

01:29:46.000 That's not how I said it.

01:29:47.000 Like, she was trying to say a thing in her words, like, you said, and she says it this way.

01:29:53.000 He's like, that's not what I said.

01:29:54.000 I said it like this. 0.99

01:29:55.000 And he says it the way he said it, and you go, oh, he's fucking around. 0.99

01:29:58.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:29:59.000 But they're trying to distort what he said because it makes a better narrative, the narrative that he's an asshole. 0.95

01:30:05.000 I 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. 0.99

01:30:22.000 He's an awesome troll.

01:30:23.000 I mean, that's one of the ways he got so much attention during the 2016 election. 0.99

01:30:28.000 He would say outrageous shit knowing that the media was going to complain about it, and they were just giving him free advertising. 0.98

01:30:34.000 Because he was saying things you're not supposed to say when you're running for president. 1.00

01:30:37.000 And when he was saying it, they're like, this is outrageous.

01:30:39.000 And they thought they were sinking him.

01:30:40.000 They're like, we're going to show what a bad person he is.

01:30:44.000 And people would watch him say it, and they'd start laughing. 1.00

01:30:46.000 He played him for fools, man. 1.00

01:30:47.000 He played him for fools. 1.00

01:30:48.000 They gave him free advertising. 0.99

01:30:51.000 We're in a weird place for people that might listen to this someday.

01:30:54.000 No one knows who the president is right now.

01:30:57.000 The election went on last night, but it hasn't been decided, and it might not be decided for three or four days.

01:31:05.000 They think that Pennsylvania is the big one, and they don't know who's going to win Pennsylvania.

01:31:09.000 And if he wins Pennsylvania, apparently he wins.

01:31:13.000 Maybe if he wins one other state in Pennsylvania, he wins.

01:31:15.000 But if he loses Pennsylvania, Biden wins.

01:31:18.000 And it could be real weird.

01:31:20.000 Do you think you'll run for president someday?

01:31:23.000 Me? 1.00

01:31:23.000 No fucking chance. 1.00

01:31:25.000 That's a terrible job. 1.00

01:31:27.000 It seems like they just distort who you are.

01:31:31.000 They push a narrative.

01:31:32.000 They say things about you that are horrible.

01:31:35.000 They do ads where they're just trying to break down your character.

01:31:40.000 And it depends on who the establishment is for or against.

01:31:43.000 I mean, what they're doing with Biden has been extraordinarily weird.

01:31:47.000 Where they're ignoring all of his gaffes.

01:31:49.000 They're ignoring all of these real legitimate...

01:31:53.000 I don't think you can say they're ignoring his gaffes.

01:31:55.000 I mean, you can go watch gaffe compilations.

01:31:57.000 Yeah, but not on CBS, not on NBC, not on CNN. Not his allies.

01:32:01.000 Look, anybody who is in the news is not in the news.

01:32:05.000 You're in the business of distributing the news that you want people to see.

01:32:10.000 You don't want people to see him thinking he's running for Senate.

01:32:14.000 He's like, well, the reason why I'm running for senator!

01:32:16.000 You don't want to hear that.

01:32:18.000 So they don't show it.

01:32:19.000 They take away all the times he forgets what he's talking about.

01:32:25.000 There'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.

01:32:32.000 Forget about eight.

01:32:34.000 How much cognitive decline has this man experienced?

01:32:37.000 You don't feel that they discuss that.

01:32:38.000 Not on CNN. No.

01:32:40.000 No, they haven't.

01:32:41.000 They avoid it like the plague.

01:32:42.000 They avoided the Hunter Biden emails.

01:32:44.000 They avoided all that.

01:32:45.000 They avoid so much.

01:32:47.000 They 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.

01:33:16.000 Well, 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?

01:33:22.000 They're not covering this because they're biased and it's fake news. 0.84

01:33:26.000 And these people are criminals. 0.79

01:33:27.000 This is all legit.

01:33:28.000 This is all happening right now.

01:33:29.000 This is real stuff.

01:33:30.000 Here's Joe Biden stumbling.

01:33:32.000 Here's Joe Biden saying things that don't make any sense.

01:33:35.000 Here's Joe Biden over and over and over again.

01:33:37.000 You don't vote for me. 0.90

01:33:39.000 You ain't black. 1.00

01:33:39.000 All that crazy stuff. 1.00

01:33:40.000 They're not highlighting all that.

01:33:42.000 Super Thursday.

01:33:43.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:33:43.000 He's a madman. 1.00

01:33:44.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:33:45.000 It's weird, but it shows you that the news is not just the news.

01:33:50.000 It's the news for the left and the news for the right.

01:33:53.000 You don't just get some unbiased source.

01:33:56.000 I think that people who aren't on that are...

01:34:02.000 Either feigning ignorance.

01:34:05.000 People 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.

01:34:23.000 But it's never been this obvious, where they're just ignoring really hard...

01:34:28.000 You don't want someone to be president if they can't think right, right?

01:34:32.000 If someone's showing a real, clear sign of cognitive decline, you don't...

01:34:38.000 You're supposed to highlight that.

01:34:40.000 Like, this is part of the news. 0.99

01:34:41.000 But they had already picked him to be the guy running for the Democratic Party, and they just decided to just ignore all that shit. 0.99

01:34:48.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:34:49.000 But, like, I read the New York Times.

01:34:51.000 Something going on, Jamie?

01:34:52.000 After what you were saying, I'm reading updates now.

01:34:57.000 As of now, they've called Wisconsin for Biden.

01:35:01.000 Arizona has not officially been called, but I'm seeing that it's called.

01:35:05.000 And 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.

01:35:14.000 Oh, so Biden's going to win.

01:35:15.000 I don't know.

01:35:17.000 That's the part of like...

01:35:18.000 I 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.

01:35:32.000 So saying that like 99% or 95% as in that might not be a good accurate number to go off of.

01:35:38.000 And this is for which state?

01:35:39.000 Any of the states.

01:35:40.000 Any of the states.

01:35:40.000 Yeah, so the closest ones right now are Nevada, Michigan, and Georgia.

01:35:43.000 Wow, look how close they are.

01:35:45.000 Oh, dude, they're down to reporting, like, chunks of 3,000 votes. 1.00

01:35:48.000 It's fucking nuts, man. 0.97

01:35:52.000 And the Trump administration, I think, has said they already filed a lawsuit to stop the counting in Michigan. 0.99

01:35:57.000 What does that mean?

01:35:58.000 I don't know.

01:36:00.000 What?

01:36:00.000 I don't understand how you...

01:36:01.000 Why would you want to stop counting?

01:36:03.000 I don't understand.

01:36:04.000 Like, how can you justify the argument that you want to stop counting?

01:36:06.000 Yeah.

01:36:07.000 But they want to keep counting in Arizona.

01:36:09.000 But what's the argument?

01:36:10.000 Like...

01:36:11.000 I wish I understood.

01:36:13.000 What do they mean, stop counting?

01:36:15.000 I don't know.

01:36:17.000 So it looks like Arizona's lost.

01:36:18.000 51% to 47%.

01:36:20.000 That's a big gap.

01:36:21.000 100,000 left.

01:36:22.000 100,000 gap.

01:36:25.000 Well, it's only 84. So they have 16% of the possible vote out there.

01:36:29.000 Yeah, but what's pissing off Trump, though, is what's pissing off his team is that what they're counting are mail-ins.

01:36:36.000 And mail-ins are...

01:36:38.000 Democrats are way more likely to vote mail-in.

01:36:40.000 Yeah, right.

01:36:41.000 So that's like...

01:36:42.000 I'm sure I'm telling you something you already know.

01:36:44.000 Yeah.

01:36:45.000 That's his gripe about these things that are laying around.

01:36:47.000 And I think that he thinks they're just going to start making them up.

01:36:49.000 He tweeted earlier, like, they keep finding Biden votes in all these states.

01:36:53.000 Yeah, he's like, someone's going to find 4,000 Biden votes somewhere.

01:36:57.000 Which, I don't know.

01:36:58.000 Sure.

01:37:00.000 They also made weird rules in some states where the signature on the envelope does not have to match the actual person's signature.

01:37:09.000 Like, when you sign the envelope for a mail-in ballot.

01:37:12.000 Really?

01:37:12.000 I know.

01:37:13.000 My midterm ballot got thrown away.

01:37:15.000 Because it didn't look like your signature?

01:37:17.000 I got a note.

01:37:18.000 I was out of town.

01:37:19.000 I got a call.

01:37:20.000 There was a problem with my ballot.

01:37:21.000 By the time I got back, it was over, and I didn't get counted.

01:37:25.000 And did they say why?

01:37:26.000 Yeah, it was like I didn't sign and date it right, or didn't sign and date where I was supposed to sign and date.

01:37:32.000 I was quite pleased with democracy, the fact that they tried to call me to rectify the situation.

01:37:39.000 I would have had to do a bunch of stuff, and I think they probably knew there's no way I had enough time to do everything I needed to do.

01:37:44.000 But the fact that some dude would place a call to be like, bro, your vote's not counting.

01:37:49.000 You call back, or you've got to do X, Y, and Z in a hurry to get your vote in, and I missed.

01:37:53.000 Biden wins Wisconsin.

01:37:55.000 Fox News projects limiting Trump's chances of reaching 270 electoral votes.

01:37:59.000 Wow.

01:38:00.000 So if Biden won Wisconsin, Wisconsin's in.

01:38:03.000 So it's kind of over, right?

01:38:09.000 Man, I just lost 300 bucks.

01:38:15.000 It's interesting that Arizona went blue.

01:38:17.000 That's interesting.

01:38:19.000 I mean, California always goes blue.

01:38:20.000 Oregon always goes blue.

01:38:21.000 That all makes sense.

01:38:22.000 Washington, that makes sense.

01:38:24.000 You 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.

01:38:32.000 I think they're waiting to find out what the results are, and then they light the fuse.

01:38:37.000 They can't start the fire yet.

01:38:39.000 They might have won, like, both sides.

01:38:41.000 You know, like, the Trump people, they're like, I'm not sure if I'm mad yet.

01:38:46.000 And then, you know, the Biden people, oh, has he won?

01:38:49.000 What's happening here?

01:38:51.000 No one knows. 0.99

01:38:52.000 Once it's decided, once it goes to court, that's going to be a shit show. 0.97

01:38:55.000 Isn'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. 0.97

01:39:07.000 And get other dudes in trucks to roar around. 1.00

01:39:11.000 But that's only the Trump people.

01:39:12.000 I know.

01:39:12.000 That's one camp.

01:39:14.000 One 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.

01:39:24.000 Yeah.

01:39:25.000 Why Vanilla Isis? 1.00

01:39:27.000 Because he served and it reminded him of the Isis flags in the back of trucks. 0.66

01:39:32.000 Vanilla Isis.

01:39:33.000 That's hilarious.

01:39:34.000 That was his depiction of it.

01:39:35.000 But the other camp is that you...

01:39:37.000 In the other camp, when you're mad, you march downtown.

01:39:44.000 It's like the two sort of playbooks are just very different.

01:39:48.000 Yeah, one's in a car, one's marching.

01:39:50.000 Yeah.

01:39:51.000 One's like a display.

01:39:53.000 I don't think that anyone...

01:39:55.000 No one that's going to get mad about the Biden...

01:39:57.000 No Biden person will put a big Biden flag on their truck and drive aggressively on a highway.

01:40:03.000 No.

01:40:04.000 Here's my take on it.

01:40:05.000 And Trump people aren't going to go downtown.

01:40:07.000 No, they're not going to march.

01:40:08.000 Not without their cars.

01:40:10.000 I wonder what side is in worse shape to march. 0.99

01:40:16.000 The Biden people, the Trump people, who would have worse backs and fucked up knees? 0.99

01:40:20.000 Oh, that's impossible to say. 0.99

01:40:23.000 Right now, talking about that responsibility thing, man.

01:40:27.000 I feel like you probably don't feel this.

01:40:30.000 I, right now, am kind of grieving for America a little bit.

01:40:34.000 Not about how the election might twist, but I'm grieving for America about if the polarization is true.

01:40:43.000 And I sometimes question whether it's true or not.

01:40:46.000 Because when I go out, I just have like...

01:40:50.000 I've been talking about this all the time lately.

01:40:51.000 When I go out about in my community and elsewhere, sitting here right now, whatever, I have very positive interactions with my fellow Americans. 0.98

01:41:01.000 When I go to the gas station and go in to buy some shit, it's like I come away happy. 0.98

01:41:05.000 That's most people. 0.99

01:41:06.000 When I go talk to my neighbors, I legitimately, my neighbors around me, I have no idea who they're voting for.

01:41:12.000 I really don't know.

01:41:12.000 I kind of actually don't care.

01:41:14.000 When I go and talk to my neighbors...

01:41:18.000 There's like a love, right?

01:41:21.000 But then all I hear about is the ripping apart. 0.99

01:41:26.000 And I'm like, either I'm in the dark, and it's ripping apart, and I'm like too stupid to notice it. 0.98

01:41:31.000 But I do... 0.95

01:41:36.000 I'm a little scared.

01:41:37.000 I'm a little scared as well.

01:41:39.000 Did you watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix?

01:41:41.000 We've been in our old people with kids way watching it in 15 minute increments.

01:41:50.000 We have a TV in our bedroom but now and then when I'm home we watch 15 minutes of it on a cell phone.

01:41:56.000 I have no idea why. 0.99

01:41:57.000 My 12 year old daughter said, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. 0.99

01:42:01.000 She hated it. 0.99

01:42:02.000 We tried to make her watch it because I just wanted her to understand the dangers and the dilemmas of social media.

01:42:07.000 But to her, social media is awesome.

01:42:09.000 I like TikTok. 0.99

01:42:10.000 She's TikTok-ing and shit and hanging out with her friends. 0.99

01:42:13.000 She only sees the positive sides of it. 0.99

01:42:15.000 What I was trying to get her to see is obviously she has no interest at all in politics.

01:42:21.000 She 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,

01:42:37.000 point you towards things that piss you off and keep you in this sort of ideological bubble.

01:42:43.000 And the people were dividing further and further away from each other.

01:42:47.000 And 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.

01:42:59.000 Now, it's very divided, very divided.

01:43:01.000 And it's directly correlating with the invention of social media.

01:43:06.000 Yeah.

01:43:07.000 But if the division and hatred Is only digital.

01:43:15.000 But it spills out, obviously.

01:43:18.000 It does spill out into the real world.

01:43:19.000 No, you're correct.

01:43:20.000 You look at Portland, you look at Seattle.

01:43:21.000 You lived in Seattle for a while.

01:43:23.000 Yeah.

01:43:23.000 Could you ever have imagined that they would take over a six-block area of Seattle?

01:43:28.000 Yes.

01:43:28.000 You really did?

01:43:29.000 You thought they could?

01:43:30.000 Well, 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.

01:43:43.000 That loitering laws, camping laws were just suspended.

01:43:50.000 And they would go into an encampment.

01:43:55.000 I wish I knew the proper term for them.

01:43:57.000 They'd go into an illegal encampment or whatever.

01:44:00.000 And move everybody out.

01:44:02.000 Actually scrape the topsoil away.

01:44:05.000 Because of needles and stuff, whatever.

01:44:07.000 Scrape the topsoil away.

01:44:09.000 Pull out and then people would just move back in.

01:44:12.000 And there was a lot of tension about this.

01:44:14.000 And it was that some people were like, why can't we enforce?

01:44:17.000 Why don't we enforce the law?

01:44:19.000 And people would be like, well, it's inhumane to people who are in need.

01:44:25.000 And there was an emerging tension there.

01:44:27.000 So to have it later be that you saw that blow up on this grand national scale...

01:44:33.000 Doesn't surprise me.

01:44:35.000 After 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.

01:44:47.000 And this is pre-COVID when you were living there.

01:44:49.000 Oh yeah.

01:44:50.000 Yeah.

01:44:51.000 So, like, being witness to that and hearing the amount of griping about that, and then seeing it, no, I'm not like, wow.

01:45:02.000 No, it felt very, like, almost not at all surprising that it happened.

01:45:12.000 Yeah.

01:45:12.000 Yeah, I think there's places in this country that have legitimate, almost unfixable issues with homeless people.

01:45:19.000 Sure.

01:45:20.000 Los Angeles is not one of them.

01:45:22.000 Los Angeles, when I first moved there in 94, was nothing like this.

01:45:25.000 Nothing.

01:45:26.000 There was no tents, ever.

01:45:28.000 You never saw tents.

01:45:30.000 Now, 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.

01:45:40.000 Just nothing but tents.

01:45:42.000 It's crazy.

01:45:43.000 Like, you look at it, you're looking at thousands of tents.

01:45:46.000 Like, this is insane!

01:45:47.000 How do you put the lid on that?

01:45:49.000 How do you get those people out of there?

01:45:51.000 Where do you put them?

01:45:52.000 How do you clean that area?

01:45:53.000 I mean, it's disgusting.

01:45:54.000 And you're talking about Venice, which is like a very wealthy area.

01:45:57.000 There's a lot of money in Venice.

01:45:59.000 There's a lot of beautiful houses.

01:46:00.000 You're on the beach. 1.00

01:46:02.000 And they're fucked. 1.00

01:46:03.000 It's fucked. 1.00

01:46:03.000 I 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? 1.00

01:46:10.000 To the right, 10 tents. 1.00

01:46:12.000 Right across the street from their fucking house. 0.99

01:46:14.000 Like a small road and then homeless encampment across the street from this beautiful house. 1.00

01:46:20.000 Like, what the fuck? 0.99

01:46:21.000 And I talk to people that are there, and like, no, we have those little ring doorbell things with the videos. 1.00

01:46:27.000 Constantly seeing people stealing shit. 0.95

01:46:28.000 Constantly seeing people breaking into their yard, trying to get into their house, wandering in their backyard, trying to get into their garage. 0.99

01:46:35.000 It's like, and there's no solutions. 0.97

01:46:38.000 The government doesn't do a goddamn thing about it. 0.95

01:46:41.000 Yeah, I've got input on all kinds of things, but I'm low on input on that. 0.98

01:46:44.000 I have zero.

01:46:46.000 Our company, we did a river access park cleanup, went and picked up all kinds of garbage at a river access near where we work.

01:46:57.000 There was a homeless encampment there in the woods at the river access.

01:47:02.000 I remember being very...

01:47:03.000 I was kind of scared.

01:47:05.000 Because I was like, it's super rude to go and pick up garbage and sort of act like there aren't people camp there.

01:47:14.000 Right.

01:47:16.000 And not acknowledge these human beings like you would.

01:47:20.000 If there was people that were fishing or people that were having a picnic, you would engage. 0.98

01:47:25.000 So I'm like, why do I feel like chicken shit about engaging? 0.94

01:47:29.000 So then I go up and guys, I know it's going to seem like we're kind of like up in your business. 0.97

01:47:36.000 We're doing a cleanup project.

01:47:39.000 Just bagging up garbage and hauling away.

01:47:41.000 Dude's like, hey, give us a couple bags.

01:47:44.000 So, they take some bags, fill up some garbage, set it on the trail, we haul it away.

01:47:48.000 And, like, for a week I've been, like, plotting how I'm gonna...

01:47:51.000 And it was easy.

01:47:53.000 It's just like, it was just...

01:47:54.000 Yeah, we have this...

01:47:55.000 It was like, it was like he...

01:47:57.000 I remember there was this writer, Jeff Dyer, he wrote this book, Yoga, for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It.

01:48:03.000 Jeff Dyer.

01:48:04.000 He was a humorist.

01:48:05.000 I remember he had this essay he wrote about struggling with his desire to witness great poverty when he would travel.

01:48:16.000 He's a professional traveler, you know, and you'd go to India and he would, he struggled with why do I want to go?

01:48:25.000 Like, is it bad?

01:48:26.000 Like, what is it that I want to go witness?

01:48:31.000 Behold the spectacle of poverty.

01:48:35.000 You know?

01:48:36.000 Yeah.

01:48:37.000 Instead of like most people, don't put that in their travel itinerary.

01:48:43.000 So he would specifically do that on purpose?

01:48:46.000 Yeah.

01:48:46.000 He talks about it in his book.

01:48:48.000 Why do I like that?

01:48:50.000 It's definitely a perspective changer, right?

01:48:53.000 You start thinking you have problems and you go see people with real problems.

01:48:57.000 You're like, whoa, okay.

01:48:59.000 Yeah.

01:49:00.000 Yeah.

01:49:01.000 But homeless people in this country, it used to be a different thing.

01:49:07.000 It used to be all people that were drug addicts or all people that were mentally ill.

01:49:13.000 But I think with COVID, you've got people that just had nowhere else to go.

01:49:17.000 There's a lot of people that they might be homeless right now, but they don't want to be.

01:49:21.000 They just don't know what to do.

01:49:23.000 I think that number is bigger than it's ever been before.

01:49:26.000 And that's what makes it even scarier.

01:49:28.000 And that's one of the reasons why something like universal basic income is interesting to me.

01:49:34.000 I'm not interested in letting the government take our taxes and do things to...

01:49:41.000 You don't get a receipt for where your taxes go.

01:49:44.000 You don't know how much your taxes are going to...

01:49:48.000 Frivolous things or things that don't make any sense or things you don't agree with.

01:49:52.000 But if I knew that my taxes were going to very specific things that I agree with, I wouldn't have a problem paying more taxes.

01:49:59.000 You remember Ross Perot?

01:50:00.000 He used to make those little charts showing where your money went.

01:50:03.000 Scared the shit out of everybody.

01:50:04.000 He's the reason why Bush didn't win a second term, Herbert Walker Bush.

01:50:08.000 That was the first time, unless Trump loses, in modern history where a president didn't win a second term.

01:50:14.000 The first time, well, Carter, and then Herbert Walker Bush.

01:50:18.000 Because they saw that Ross Perot thing.

01:50:23.000 He bought a half hour of regular television back when there was no internet.

01:50:27.000 It's like, I'm going to show you what's going on here.

01:50:29.000 Here, look at this chart. 1.00

01:50:30.000 This is where your goddamn money goes. 1.00

01:50:32.000 And people were like, what the fuck? 1.00

01:50:34.000 He opened up a lot of people's eyes to what the IRS is and where your money goes and why it's dirty. 1.00

01:50:41.000 Scare the shit out of people. 0.89

01:50:45.000 It's a weird time to be alive, Steve. 0.98

01:50:50.000 I'm worried about the future of this country, too.

01:50:53.000 I'm worried about it in a way that I've never been worried before.

01:50:55.000 Yeah, I just like America so much.

01:51:01.000 I 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.

01:51:21.000 It's like, how can you be proud of that?

01:51:23.000 You were just born there.

01:51:24.000 Right.

01:51:25.000 I'm like, man, I can't really suss it out, but I feel like I have a sort of sense of pride and patriotism.

01:51:34.000 And so I worry about the country in a way, what it feels like for people.

01:51:40.000 I worry about what it feels like for people to be American.

01:51:42.000 And knowing that there are people at a point that are even challenging the idea of taking pride in that, that's a sign of something bad.

01:51:52.000 And also people who...

01:51:54.000 Conversely are taking their deep sense of pride and love and using it to leverage and diminish Other people. 0.89

01:52:04.000 A sort of like, I love it more, or I have more of a right to love it.

01:52:09.000 And 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.

01:52:19.000 Right.

01:52:19.000 I know what you're saying.

01:52:20.000 I want to know if this is true.

01:52:22.000 Because someone was saying that Google and Facebook both removed the ability to have an American flag emoji.

01:52:28.000 That cannot be true.

01:52:30.000 Yeah.

01:52:33.000 I don't know.

01:52:34.000 I just read it.

01:52:36.000 Just Google that.

01:52:37.000 I don't know.

01:52:39.000 Just Google that.

01:52:40.000 Google and Facebook remove the ability to have an American flag emoji.

01:52:45.000 Maybe it was Twitter.

01:52:47.000 Like you put a series of American flags and thumbs up?

01:52:50.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:52:51.000 Come on.

01:52:51.000 Can't do that anymore?

01:52:52.000 I don't do emojis.

01:52:53.000 I made a decision a long time ago.

01:52:54.000 I literally don't know if it's true.

01:52:56.000 I read it and I was like, what?

01:52:58.000 I was running out the door.

01:52:59.000 I was like, what?

01:53:01.000 Um...

01:53:02.000 Look, I get where people would say you had no say in being American.

01:53:06.000 Why would you be proud of that?

01:53:08.000 You should be proud of things you've accomplished.

01:53:09.000 You should be proud of things you worked hard towards.

01:53:11.000 But what America stands for, I feel super lucky to be an American.

01:53:17.000 I think America stands for an incredible amount of innovation, incredible contribution to music and art and comedy.

01:53:26.000 And just the overall impact that it's had on the culture of the world for a country that's just a little over 200 years old is phenomenal.

01:53:35.000 It's insane.

01:53:36.000 I 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.

01:53:48.000 I mean, it's an amazing place to be.

01:53:51.000 I had a conversation...

01:53:52.000 Oh, sorry.

01:53:52.000 Go ahead.

01:53:52.000 I was going to say, I just think right now people are concentrating only on the negative aspects of it.

01:53:57.000 I 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.

01:54:06.000 Highly critical of the government while simultaneously building a billion dollar business telling me he feels no patriotism. 0.99

01:54:12.000 I'm like, fucking you don't feel any patriotism! 1.00

01:54:15.000 Dude! 1.00

01:54:16.000 You can't really do anything anywhere else.

01:54:18.000 You've hacked on the government the whole time and built a successful business and you don't think there's a little magic in that?

01:54:23.000 Yeah.

01:54:23.000 To be in a place where that can go down?

01:54:26.000 That's pretty cool.

01:54:27.000 The government's not ideal.

01:54:28.000 No, but it's pretty cool to be able to...

01:54:30.000 I just feel like you'd be like, man, this place is so great.

01:54:33.000 I hacked on the government my whole career and made a bunch of money.

01:54:36.000 And no one shows up to beat me up. 0.96

01:54:38.000 If you did that in China, you'd be dead. 1.00

01:54:41.000 Damn it. 1.00

01:54:43.000 There's places in the world right now where if you did the exact same thing, they'd literally come for you and kill you. 1.00

01:54:48.000 We 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. 0.99

01:54:59.000 And the UFC tried to make a plea to the Iranian government to not kill him and they fucking killed him anyway. 0.95

01:55:07.000 They wanted to send a nice message. 0.98

01:55:09.000 This guy was a national sports hero and they wanted to send a nice message. 0.99

01:55:13.000 We don't give a fuck. 1.00

01:55:14.000 What you are, you are under us. 1.00

01:55:19.000 We are a powerful theocracy and we'll fucking kill you. 1.00

01:55:22.000 And they did. 1.00

01:55:24.000 Yeah.

01:55:26.000 Yeah, that's happening right now.

01:55:28.000 That's 2020 somewhere else.

01:55:31.000 As bad as it is here, and it's not ideal.

01:55:34.000 The government's not ideal.

01:55:35.000 This is not perfect. 0.99

01:55:37.000 When you can get an old man who can't talk, another guy who's full of shit, and they're the only people that we have to choose from. 1.00

01:55:41.000 No, that's not good. 1.00

01:55:43.000 That's not good.

01:55:44.000 And there are other choices.

01:55:46.000 I voted for Joe Jorgensen.

01:55:48.000 I voted for the libertarian candidate, even though I knew she wasn't going to win.

01:55:52.000 I mean, I voted for her in California, where she had no chance. 0.95

01:55:55.000 It was Yeah, I think that that's a very...

01:56:00.000 I'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,

01:56:16.000 and to...

01:56:19.000 Try to support, not necessarily the Libertarian Party, but try to support the idea that you'd have a viable third party of some sort.

01:56:27.000 We need multiple parties.

01:56:29.000 That it doesn't just happen.

01:56:30.000 It 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.

01:56:42.000 That's it.

01:56:42.000 That's all you got.

01:56:44.000 I thought that any effort you could lend to the idea of a third seat at the table Would, however, you know, you're pissing into the wind.

01:56:52.000 Still, man. 0.99

01:56:53.000 Yeah, you have those two schools of thought and these two schools of thought are both funded by the same fucking people. 0.98

01:56:59.000 I mean, that's what's hilarious about it all. 0.98

01:57:01.000 They're all funded by gigantic businesses.

01:57:05.000 It's not ideal.

01:57:06.000 It's not good.

01:57:07.000 And the idea of a third party candidate gets mocked.

01:57:11.000 I mean, all the way back to Ross Perot.

01:57:15.000 He's about as close as anybody has come.

01:57:17.000 He at least took some votes away from...

01:57:19.000 I don't think Gary Johnson...

01:57:22.000 I voted for him too.

01:57:23.000 Gary Johnson didn't put a dent in it.

01:57:27.000 He barely had a chance.

01:57:28.000 And I don't think Joe did either.

01:57:30.000 But it's one of those things where you got to look at it and go, do you agree with this system?

01:57:37.000 No.

01:57:37.000 Do you just keep going?

01:57:38.000 Keep going with it every four years?

01:57:40.000 Well, four years is eight, and then 12, and then next thing you know, you're dead.

01:57:45.000 It's over.

01:57:45.000 You only get 100 if you're real lucky.

01:57:48.000 And you're not even voting for most of those.

01:57:50.000 When you get to the end, what is...

01:57:54.000 When do you step up? 0.58

01:57:56.000 When do you say, I don't want to participate in this ridiculous duopoly anymore? 0.90

01:58:00.000 Because that's what it is. 0.52

01:58:02.000 And they're both in cahoots with some branch of the media. 0.86

01:58:07.000 It's gross.

01:58:09.000 And then there's so much money involved.

01:58:11.000 And so many people are saddling up to the table and influencing them and whispering in their ear.

01:58:15.000 They're making all these compromising deals.

01:58:18.000 I like that you think about how long you have left on the planet.

01:58:21.000 I think you should.

01:58:22.000 Yeah.

01:58:23.000 I wake up, I try to think about that every day.

01:58:26.000 You know, all like politicians, they'll enter our office and I'll make a clock set for like four years or whatever, and it counts down.

01:58:31.000 I need to get one of those.

01:58:32.000 For life?

01:58:33.000 For like roughly my life expectancy, and it counts down backwards.

01:58:37.000 Well, 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.

01:58:44.000 Well, yeah, well...

01:58:46.000 You had a real shot.

01:58:47.000 In a situation, like in a brush, yeah.

01:58:49.000 A real shot.

01:58:51.000 Something enough where it was scary enough that I now, now that I've studied it a fair bit, that I now know I had a mental...

01:59:01.000 I had a...

01:59:06.000 I had a near-death experience mental experience, even though I was unharmed.

01:59:13.000 But it jarred my brain.

01:59:15.000 So hard.

01:59:16.000 It 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...

01:59:28.000 It'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.

01:59:40.000 But don't you think that...

01:59:42.000 Is joggle the word?

01:59:43.000 It is now.

01:59:44.000 Don't you think that when you're in contact with an animal that's that large, I mean, a predatory animal that's...

01:59:50.000 How big was it?

01:59:51.000 10 feet?

01:59:51.000 How big was that grizzly?

01:59:53.000 Easily?

01:59:53.000 Yeah, I don't want to...

01:59:55.000 Enormous.

01:59:55.000 Like, it was like...

01:59:56.000 Struck all of us, and we've looked at a lot of bears as being like, you know, a mature brown bear.

02:00:00.000 Okay, so...

02:00:01.000 Mature Kodiak brown bear.

02:00:02.000 Yeah, that's what we wanted to talk about.

02:00:04.000 Talk about where you were at, Afognak Island, which is a place that has enormous bears.

02:00:10.000 That whole part of the world is known for some of the largest brown bears on Earth.

02:00:14.000 Yeah, I mean, it's separated from Kodiak by a narrow strait.

02:00:17.000 So the Kodiak brown bear being the world's biggest bear, it was a neighboring island.

02:00:23.000 But that specific specimen, I don't know, a mature animal.

02:00:27.000 Huge.

02:00:27.000 Just huge.

02:00:28.000 Just huge.

02:00:29.000 Yeah.

02:00:29.000 When 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.

02:00:49.000 There's just no way around it.

02:00:53.000 There's no rationalizations you can play in your mind when you're confronted with such absolute superiority.

02:01:00.000 Are you familiar with the term playing possum?

02:01:02.000 Yes.

02:01:03.000 Obviously.

02:01:04.000 So our understanding of opossums now is that they're not playing.

02:01:13.000 They conk out, right?

02:01:14.000 Yeah.

02:01:15.000 Stress.

02:01:16.000 He's not playing dead.

02:01:18.000 He hits such a stress level that he shuts off.

02:01:25.000 I'm embarrassed to admit, but I think it's instructive to point out, that I was playing possum in that moment, and I don't mean playing.

02:01:38.000 Yeah.

02:01:40.000 It possumed me out.

02:01:42.000 Let's tell everybody who doesn't know the story.

02:01:43.000 Oh, yeah.

02:01:44.000 So, real quick.

02:01:45.000 Fognac Island.

02:01:46.000 Yeah, originally we've been yapping a long time.

02:01:48.000 But we had...

02:01:49.000 We were hunting and had hung an elk up in a tree and left it for a day and a half.

02:01:54.000 All the meat hanging in a tree.

02:01:57.000 And we're camped a few miles away from there and went back to retrieve...

02:02:01.000 Went back with a few guys to retrieve the meat out of the tree.

02:02:04.000 And a bear had found it.

02:02:09.000 And...

02:02:11.000 We 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.

02:02:18.000 In fact, the carcass of the animals laying that far away was untouched. 0.96

02:02:23.000 In hindsight, there was a pile of bear shit that had been smeared. 0.98

02:02:26.000 On the ground. 0.99

02:02:28.000 And 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. 0.99

02:02:33.000 And 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. 0.99

02:02:39.000 And then stupidly, we sat down to eat lunch. 0.99

02:02:41.000 And within a couple of minutes of sitting down and eating lunch, the bear came in and its open mouth passed. 0.99

02:02:50.000 Just 18 inches from my head.

02:02:52.000 Jesus.

02:02:53.000 And I was facing away, so I was the last one to see it.

02:02:57.000 Janus, who you know, he had a pistol.

02:03:00.000 He had bear spray, but he hit it in the head with a pair of black diamond trekking poles.

02:03:09.000 He had sat down.

02:03:10.000 He's got spray and set his pistol on his pack. 0.99

02:03:15.000 But then when I talk about playing possum and all the shit that happens to you, his instinct is to smack it with a track and pull. 0.99

02:03:21.000 Wow. 0.99

02:03:23.000 You spend all your time thinking about how you're going to handle this, that, and the other thing.

02:03:30.000 And...

02:03:36.000 Sometimes it's disappointing that you don't handle stress that well.

02:03:41.000 I don't know where I went.

02:03:43.000 One of our guys got run over by a bear and rode it down the hill.

02:03:48.000 At that moment, I snapped out of whatever I was in.

02:03:52.000 But it shut me down bad.

02:03:54.000 I even noticed there's a thing that happens to people when they get really cold.

02:04:00.000 They enter a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy mentality when you start to get cold.

02:04:08.000 As 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.

02:04:24.000 And as aware of that as I am, as many times as I've experienced that, I still see it happen to me.

02:04:30.000 I still have to snap myself out of it.

02:04:35.000 You're getting cold.

02:04:35.000 You're getting lethargic.

02:04:37.000 You're getting cold.

02:04:38.000 More lethargic.

02:04:39.000 The cold's getting worse.

02:04:40.000 And I have to be like, you can step in right now and stop this.

02:04:45.000 It still doesn't come naturally.

02:04:49.000 When you talk to people who train for this kind of stuff, they have to train in a very realistic environment.

02:04:59.000 They have to train to keep your head and just make good decisions.

02:05:04.000 If you walk into an active car crash scene and there's a severed hand laying on the ground, some people are just going to see that hand.

02:05:13.000 And they're not going to see anything else.

02:05:15.000 Some people are just going to see chaos and they're not going to focus on any particular thing.

02:05:18.000 But it's like the person can come in, see the hands, see everything around them, assess all that.

02:05:24.000 It's just from exposure to that super traumatic stuff.

02:05:27.000 Not that getting cold is traumatic, but when I look at how I respond to things, I do catch that there's a mentality to practice and learn.

02:05:39.000 Yeah, it's...

02:05:41.000 It's understandable that something like a bear attack would trigger senses and trigger a response that you're just not conditioned for.

02:05:50.000 I don't know how you'd ever get conditioned to a bear attack.

02:05:53.000 I don't know.

02:05:54.000 I don't know.

02:05:55.000 On that same island, these dudes, at the same island, there were some guys, the same island, I think it was later that same year.

02:06:06.000 Some operatives, some military guys happened to be hunting there.

02:06:10.000 They got attacked by a bear and killed it.

02:06:12.000 Really?

02:06:13.000 Yeah.

02:06:14.000 One of them got messed up bad, but he killed it.

02:06:16.000 I'm like, why'd he kill it and I didn't?

02:06:19.000 Well, maybe they had their gun out, right?

02:06:21.000 You were in a weird situation, too, because if you guys were relaxed eating lunch...

02:06:26.000 Your guard's down.

02:06:27.000 You're sitting there chewing on a sandwich.

02:06:28.000 I always laugh because you know I was in the middle of saying...

02:06:30.000 What?

02:06:31.000 Like, I was in the middle of a sentence.

02:06:32.000 I'll never forget because someone was laughing about why...

02:06:35.000 We were putting some sandwiches together and someone was laughing about why my sandwich looked so much nicer than someone else's sandwich.

02:06:42.000 And I said, if you want... 0.99

02:06:44.000 I was in the middle of saying, if you want a sandwich like this, get your own fucking TV show. 1.00

02:06:49.000 But... 0.99

02:06:51.000 I was never able to finish the sentence.

02:06:53.000 Wow.

02:06:53.000 But 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.

02:07:03.000 Whoa.

02:07:04.000 Because they saw it and I didn't see it.

02:07:05.000 I was looking the other way.

02:07:08.000 And it came in running.

02:07:10.000 Oh, just...

02:07:10.000 Yeah.

02:07:13.000 That was scary, man.

02:07:14.000 And I've had a fair bit of exposure.

02:07:19.000 Yeah.

02:07:19.000 And I'm, yeah, like, I mean, relative to most, a ton of exposure to those things.

02:07:26.000 I 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.

02:07:36.000 You, yeah, you've been exposed to more than 99.999% of the population.

02:07:43.000 And for it to rattle you like that.

02:07:46.000 It was disappointing, man.

02:07:47.000 Because we're always talking about, I'm going to do this and I'll do that.

02:07:51.000 And 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. 0.98

02:08:05.000 It's like all this, like, bullshit, you know? 0.92

02:08:08.000 And all of a sudden it, like, hits and, like... 0.99

02:08:10.000 You know, swat it with a track and pull.

02:08:13.000 I've only seen one grizzly ever in the wild, up close, and it wasn't a big one.

02:08:20.000 It was like a six-foot bear.

02:08:23.000 But it looked at me in a way that another bear has never looked at me before.

02:08:28.000 I've seen black bears.

02:08:29.000 Black bears look at you like, what are you?

02:08:32.000 Who are you?

02:08:33.000 What's going on?

02:08:34.000 Can I walk by you?

02:08:36.000 Like, black bears look at people in a weird way.

02:08:38.000 Yeah, they're like denizens of the underbrush, man.

02:08:41.000 The grizzly looked at me like this.

02:08:44.000 Just locked on me. 1.00

02:08:46.000 And I was like, oh, shit. 0.99

02:08:47.000 Like, that is just a different thing. 0.99

02:08:50.000 Like, it looked at me like, am I eating you?

02:08:54.000 Am I going to eat you?

02:08:55.000 Yeah, there's a mindset probably that comes from just not being challenged.

02:09:01.000 Yeah.

02:09:03.000 And where I was at in Alberta, you can't hunt them.

02:09:09.000 So no one hunts them.

02:09:10.000 So they're bigger, they're more fierce, and they have no pressure.

02:09:16.000 You can still in Alberta.

02:09:18.000 Can you?

02:09:18.000 Yeah.

02:09:18.000 B.C. you can't anymore.

02:09:20.000 B.C. you can't, but you can hunt grizzlies in Alberta.

02:09:22.000 Yeah, I think Alberta.

02:09:24.000 I'm not saying everywhere, but I know that they still...

02:09:27.000 Some places of Alberta.

02:09:28.000 B.C. lost its grizzly hunts.

02:09:31.000 This is my friends John and Jen Rivett.

02:09:33.000 They were talking about how they're trying to get them to open up some sort of a season because they have a lot of them up there now.

02:09:40.000 Oh, okay.

02:09:40.000 And because the woods are so dense, They don't really know how many of them there are, but there's so many encounters with people.

02:09:47.000 Yeah, the B.C. shutdown was very...

02:09:50.000 Political, right?

02:09:51.000 It was a referendum issue.

02:09:54.000 Yeah, that's a weird one, right?

02:09:55.000 Because the people that are making that decision, they've never had any experience with bears.

02:09:58.000 But you talk to the people that actually live in the bush, and they'll tell you, there's a lot of grizzlies up there.

02:10:03.000 And then there was also a thriving business and industry of people that were guiding up there.

02:10:09.000 And they're constantly in contact with them.

02:10:11.000 And they're like, this is not an endangered animal.

02:10:15.000 Yeah.

02:10:16.000 People 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.

02:10:28.000 This is a good time to find this out.

02:10:30.000 What happened in Colorado with the wolves?

02:10:32.000 Oh, I mean, it had to have.

02:10:33.000 Did it pass?

02:10:35.000 Jamie could pull it up.

02:10:36.000 It had to have passed overwhelmingly.

02:10:38.000 I know it was on track, too.

02:10:39.000 I know that Utah's right to hunt and fish passed by a landslide.

02:10:42.000 Constitutional right to hunt and fish.

02:10:43.000 What does that mean?

02:10:46.000 30-some states have it now.

02:10:47.000 They're just codifying that you have a right to hunt and fish.

02:10:50.000 It doesn't usually have teeth, but it might in the future.

02:10:53.000 It would just give a way to challenge laws.

02:10:55.000 It's being used right now.

02:10:57.000 Montana has a right to hunt and fish.

02:10:59.000 You have a constitutional right to hunt and fish.

02:11:01.000 Meaning that a state has to recognize that renewable resources should be allocated to hunters and anglers.

02:11:12.000 And one might ask, well, how does it ever come into fruition?

02:11:16.000 There's a lawsuit right now in Montana.

02:11:20.000 There's a lawsuit against the governor and the state who they put a cap, they put a quota on the wolf harvest.

02:11:29.000 And they're being sued by a conservation group who's worried about the steep decline in elk numbers.

02:11:35.000 They'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.

02:11:50.000 I think people are supposed to act apologetic for the fact that they want wild game resources.

02:12:00.000 We 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.

02:12:11.000 It'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.

02:12:21.000 I'm very unapologetic about my view that I want there to be a lot of deer, elk, whatever, game.

02:12:29.000 What's most of your food, right?

02:12:30.000 Yeah, I want that to be on the landscape.

02:12:32.000 I want there to be abundant amounts of that.

02:12:35.000 And I'm not bashful about the fact that my desires there influence my feelings about predator management.

02:12:44.000 I don't view it as that bad.

02:12:47.000 Wolves kill coyotes. 0.96

02:12:50.000 Competition.

02:12:51.000 Yeah.

02:12:53.000 Let's see here.

02:12:54.000 Pass?

02:12:54.000 It says it's too close to call.

02:12:56.000 It's up $10,000. 1.00

02:12:57.000 No, shit! 0.99

02:12:58.000 Wow. 1.00

02:12:59.000 To that...

02:13:00.000 Wow, man.

02:13:01.000 I think they were predicting it was a done deal. 1.00

02:13:02.000 Holy shit. 0.99

02:13:03.000 It's only up $10,000? 0.99

02:13:04.000 Now that, to be clear, that is just...

02:13:08.000 That proposition 114 in Colorado is...

02:13:11.000 They're saying restore gravels.

02:13:13.000 What it is is making the state fish and game agency will need to craft a plan.

02:13:18.000 There's still a lot.

02:13:19.000 It's not like that passes and all of a sudden here comes a helicopter full of wolves.

02:13:24.000 It doesn't go that way.

02:13:26.000 They have to craft a plan and that plan has to be approved?

02:13:28.000 Yeah, 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.

02:13:44.000 Because 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.

02:13:51.000 But in all fairness, I hope it doesn't pass because wolves are showing up in Colorado on their own.

02:13:57.000 I think that's a better way to go.

02:13:58.000 But, you know, I think it's like less social tensions.

02:14:01.000 It'll happen slower.

02:14:02.000 It'll be like a...

02:14:03.000 You'll kind of like generate a sort of different sort of wolf that way.

02:14:08.000 So I hope it doesn't pass.

02:14:09.000 What do you mean by that?

02:14:10.000 Generate a different sort of wolf?

02:14:11.000 I mean that wolves that...

02:14:15.000 This is a little bit...

02:14:16.000 It's a little bit fuzzy, but it's like...

02:14:18.000 When 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.

02:14:31.000 It made them much more secretive, moved them into different areas, kind of pushed them out of some of the bigger riparian zones.

02:14:38.000 It just sort of changed their attitude, changed the way they interact with the landscape.

02:14:43.000 So that you're getting...

02:14:48.000 It 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.

02:15:08.000 Because there's a lot of selective pressure against wolves and against grizzlies.

02:15:13.000 A lot of selective pressure against those that are too ready to engage with man.

02:15:18.000 It'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.

02:15:26.000 It doesn't work out for those ones.

02:15:28.000 The ones that shy away from and avoid habitations, avoid livestock, that mentality in a wolf gets rewarded.

02:15:37.000 So, it could be that if we're headed down a path where it's just gonna happen, that Colorado's gonna have wolves.

02:15:48.000 And I'll say, like, absolutely it is gonna happen, because it happened.

02:15:50.000 They showed up on their own.

02:15:51.000 How many...

02:15:52.000 Do they know what the numbers are right now?

02:15:53.000 Just a handful, but they think they're having pubs.

02:15:55.000 So, the architects of this plan in Colorado would say it's just not gonna happen fast enough.

02:16:01.000 They want it to happen real fast.

02:16:03.000 And do they have a specific reason why they want it to happen faster? 0.99

02:16:07.000 They 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.

02:16:20.000 This was in the 1800s?

02:16:22.000 Yeah, 1800s, 1900s.

02:16:24.000 And that is wrong.

02:16:29.000 That's a sin against nature, and that we have an obligation to rectify that crime, that sin, and bring this animal back.

02:16:41.000 Their enthusiasms don't extend to all sorts of imperiled wildlife, but this is a highly, to them, a very symbolic one.

02:16:50.000 It's very symbolic.

02:16:52.000 Why they don't have those passions around the black-footed ferret?

02:16:59.000 I don't know.

02:17:00.000 I would love black-footed ferrets.

02:17:02.000 They don't feel that way about black-footed ferrets.

02:17:05.000 But with wolves, it's like...

02:17:07.000 It means a lot to them.

02:17:10.000 I think also that is...

02:17:12.000 Bringing wolves in is a little...

02:17:15.000 It's like also...

02:17:17.000 No one's ever going to tell you this.

02:17:19.000 I have a suspicion that.

02:17:21.000 I have a personal theory that it's kind of a way to stick it to cattle.

02:17:31.000 It's kind of a way to stick it to hunters.

02:17:33.000 There's a little bit of that that infuses it, a little bit of a cultural antagonism.

02:17:40.000 That itch isn't scratched with black-footed ferret work like it is with wolves.

02:17:47.000 It's just symbolic.

02:17:48.000 So are they like vegetarians?

02:17:52.000 They want to stick it to cattle producers because they don't want people growing cattle?

02:17:55.000 Well, I mean, to speak in very, very general terms, the cattle industry has been historically quite hostile to...

02:18:03.000 Environmental groups?

02:18:04.000 No, hostile to predators.

02:18:06.000 Right.

02:18:06.000 Hostile to wolves.

02:18:08.000 I'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.

02:18:23.000 I... I don't think we can justifiably play God and eliminate species from the planet.

02:18:39.000 That feels very deeply wrong to me.

02:18:41.000 I 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.

02:18:55.000 Like state management, there should be a stable population of wolves.

02:18:58.000 We should agree what that population looks like and they should be managed by the state as a renewable resource.

02:19:05.000 It's like what I want is pretty clear.

02:19:07.000 I'm not like an anti-wolf person.

02:19:10.000 What I am is an anti-abuse of the Endangered Species Act person.

02:19:16.000 So I'm not anti-predator at all, man.

02:19:18.000 I enjoy seeing them.

02:19:19.000 I enjoy cutting the tracks.

02:19:20.000 Do you see them in Montana a lot?

02:19:22.000 You know, I got friends that see them a lot.

02:19:24.000 I see them only very rarely and glimpses of them.

02:19:28.000 But you can go find them quite easily in certain areas.

02:19:33.000 Like in Yellowstone National Park, you can go find them.

02:19:36.000 People would run, like even before the hunting season started, you'd run into them more.

02:19:40.000 I was with Ben O'Brien in BC the first time I met Ben, and we found a carcass of a moose calf that had been torn apart by wolves.

02:19:50.000 It was wild.

02:19:52.000 It was pretty recent.

02:19:53.000 It was cool to see.

02:19:54.000 The other day, we were looking at a brand new track and a big burn area.

02:20:00.000 A brand new track and brand new powder snow and a big burn area.

02:20:07.000 And then looking around, you felt like you could see everything.

02:20:09.000 And the snow was still falling.

02:20:10.000 It was brand new.

02:20:11.000 I was like, why can't I see that thing?

02:20:13.000 And then I talked to a friend of a friend, and he was in that same area on that same day and had a couple passes and 40 yards of them.

02:20:19.000 So, you know, it happens and it doesn't.

02:20:22.000 Yeah, they're such an iconic animal for the West.

02:20:28.000 I'm glad they're around.

02:20:30.000 I'm glad they exist.

02:20:31.000 I've only seen one in the wild once, and that was in Alberta, and it was at dusk.

02:20:37.000 I barely see it run across the road. 0.99

02:20:39.000 I was like, is that a fucking dog? 1.00

02:20:40.000 What is that? 1.00

02:20:40.000 It was one of those things. 1.00

02:20:41.000 Yeah, I saw a black one this year, and all the time I saw it, I was wondering if that's what I was seeing.

02:20:51.000 The whole time I actually spent looking at it, I was like, is that what I'm seeing?

02:20:55.000 And then it was gone, and I was like, oh, that's what I saw.

02:20:59.000 So I never even appreciated...

02:21:00.000 It was so fleeting.

02:21:01.000 I never appreciated the moment.

02:21:03.000 I spent the whole moment in wondering...

02:21:06.000 What I was looking at.

02:21:07.000 I had that happen the other day where I was like, oh my god, there's a mountain lion.

02:21:10.000 I'm like, oh no, it's not.

02:21:10.000 It's the back of a bighorn sheep.

02:21:12.000 I don't know why.

02:21:12.000 My head went mountain lion.

02:21:13.000 I saw a squirrel once in Alberta and I thought for a whole second that it was a wolf.

02:21:18.000 I was like, is that a wolf? 1.00

02:21:19.000 It's a fucking squirrel. 1.00

02:21:20.000 I was like, what is wrong with you? 1.00

02:21:22.000 But it was just like in between trees and dense forest. 0.99

02:21:27.000 I couldn't tell what the fuck I was looking at. 0.81

02:21:28.000 The Arctic explorer Viljalmer Stephenson describes sneaking up on a grizzly bear that was a marmot. 0.99

02:21:38.000 And 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.

02:21:58.000 It's weird how the mind plays tricks on you like that.

02:22:00.000 Yeah.

02:22:00.000 That's why I don't trust you.

02:22:01.000 Oh, it's a walrus.

02:22:02.000 Oh, no, it's not.

02:22:03.000 It's the earth.

02:22:04.000 When 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.

02:22:16.000 She saw a big gorilla walking through the woods.

02:22:19.000 She's like, I'm looking at it.

02:22:20.000 I'm like, that's a gorilla.

02:22:22.000 And I remember, like, wow, this lady's so sincere.

02:22:24.000 I wonder what she really saw, but...

02:22:25.000 Now I'm convinced she saw a black bear that was standing on two feet. 0.99

02:22:28.000 But I bet in her mind, I'm thinking about me seeing that stupid squirrel, thinking it's a wolf. 1.00

02:22:33.000 People, your brain plays little tricks on you and then your imagination fills in the blanks. 1.00

02:22:38.000 There are these online forums.

02:22:41.000 People have found three Bigfoots on our TV show.

02:22:46.000 Because they don't realize.

02:22:49.000 That people are always, like, ducking to get out of a shot.

02:22:52.000 Oh, that's hilarious.

02:22:53.000 And 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.

02:23:04.000 They don't even know it's there.

02:23:05.000 The guys don't even know it's there, but you can see it in the bushes.

02:23:09.000 People love to find missing things, things that aren't real.

02:23:13.000 You 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.

02:23:21.000 If orcas weren't real, if orcas were a legend, people have seen this thing.

02:23:27.000 It's in the water, it's intelligent, and it's enormous, and they can sing, and they have different languages and dialects.

02:23:32.000 They might be aliens.

02:23:34.000 They might be from another planet.

02:23:35.000 Apparently, they don't even hurt people.

02:23:36.000 They help people.

02:23:37.000 They fall off boats, and they actually rescue them.

02:23:40.000 These are all things that people have said about killer whales.

02:23:43.000 But because we know killer whales are real, you seem like, oh, look! 0.99

02:23:49.000 You 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. 0.96

02:23:55.000 My 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. 0.99

02:24:06.000 Relative, right?

02:24:07.000 So you get a relative size sense.

02:24:09.000 I find myself, I probably have a hundred times my children said, That's all.

02:24:15.000 That dinosaur book is great.

02:24:16.000 Dinosaurs are great.

02:24:17.000 The biggest thing to ever live on the face of the earth is alive right now.

02:24:24.000 The biggest thing ever is alive right now.

02:24:27.000 And they're just like, yeah.

02:24:29.000 T-Rex, man.

02:24:32.000 I'm like, are you listening to me?

02:24:34.000 The biggest creature ever is now!

02:24:37.000 Now!

02:24:38.000 They're like, man, if I could only visit the dinosaur...

02:24:42.000 Like a shark.

02:24:43.000 Imagine if a shark wasn't real.

02:24:45.000 But then you could see one.

02:24:47.000 Or they thought a shark was extinct.

02:24:49.000 Everyone cares about Megalodon.

02:24:51.000 They think they might have found a Megalodon.

02:24:53.000 Megalodons might still be alive.

02:24:54.000 But nobody cares about a Great White.

02:24:57.000 That's alive for sure.

02:24:58.000 There's a lot of them. 0.99

02:24:59.000 They fucking breed up in San Francisco. 1.00

02:25:02.000 Go in the water. 1.00

02:25:03.000 They find them.

02:25:04.000 There's an amazing video of drone footage off of Malibu.

02:25:08.000 These guys are surfing.

02:25:10.000 And you follow the drone footage just a couple hundred yards from the servers and you see a great white swimming through the water.

02:25:15.000 Yeah.

02:25:15.000 Just right past these people.

02:25:17.000 It's like, Jesus Christ. 0.99

02:25:19.000 I was looking at this radio tracking shit of a great white on the East Coast. 0.98

02:25:25.000 And he'd be like hanging around the coast, you know, and also like beelines for Bermuda. 0.98

02:25:31.000 Hangs around there.

02:25:32.000 Beelines back where it came from.

02:25:35.000 Just like, yeah, they'll go over a thousand miles over this away.

02:25:39.000 Yeah.

02:25:39.000 They're incredible, man.

02:25:40.000 Yeah, they're amazing.

02:25:41.000 And they're real. 0.98

02:25:42.000 And no one gives a shit. 0.99

02:25:44.000 I mean, they care if they see it. 0.99

02:25:45.000 If you see it, like, whoa.

02:25:46.000 Yeah.

02:25:48.000 Where animals are native and non-native, it's such a strange conversation.

02:25:53.000 I really enjoyed your episode that you did with Jesse Griffiths where you were a hunting neil guy. 1.00

02:26:01.000 Texas, where we are now, is a weird place.

02:26:04.000 My wife saw an axis deer the other day.

02:26:07.000 She's like, near our house.

02:26:08.000 She's like, I saw this deer.

02:26:10.000 It was like a full-sized deer, but it had spots like a fawn.

02:26:14.000 And I go, oh, it's an axis deer.

02:26:16.000 She's like, they have those here?

02:26:17.000 I'm like, they must.

02:26:19.000 They have everything.

02:26:20.000 They have.

02:26:21.000 We're laughing, driving down the road.

02:26:22.000 Like, oh, a zebra.

02:26:24.000 It could easily be a zebra.

02:26:26.000 No, I'm not kidding.

02:26:27.000 Like, we're like, oh, a zebra.

02:26:29.000 Yeah, you saw a zebra.

02:26:30.000 And not only that, but a free-range zebra.

02:26:33.000 Wild zebra.

02:26:34.000 Yeah, I don't know that.

02:26:36.000 The one I'm talking about, I don't know.

02:26:38.000 I would imagine that happens if some amount of them get away here and there.

02:26:43.000 Us, it was just wide open, like woods in between houses.

02:26:47.000 It was an axis deer.

02:26:48.000 The zebra I'm talking about was someone's zebra, but it's still just funny.

02:26:51.000 The climate supports it.

02:26:53.000 Oh, yeah.

02:26:53.000 Yeah, so these Neil guy, I mean, you know.

02:26:56.000 They're from India? 0.96

02:26:57.000 Is that what it's from?

02:26:58.000 An antelope from an Indian subcontinent.

02:27:02.000 An antelope species.

02:27:03.000 Such a cool looking animal.

02:27:05.000 Strange looking.

02:27:06.000 Jesse's restaurant here in Austin, man.

02:27:08.000 I mean, he serves it.

02:27:09.000 Yeah, shout out to Dai Due. 1.00

02:27:11.000 It's a great place.

02:27:12.000 We're going there tonight.

02:27:13.000 I doggone him about the name of that all the time.

02:27:16.000 But it comes from this...

02:27:18.000 He'll have to explain it to you.

02:27:19.000 It's Italian for something.

02:27:20.000 Yeah, it's like to eat from both the kingdoms.

02:27:24.000 He kind of regrets naming his place that, because I was like, I don't know how to pronounce it.

02:27:29.000 But it's like, eat from the kingdom of the land and kingdom.

02:27:33.000 It's some portion of this sort of like proverb-y thing, saying like, eat from the land, eat from the sea.

02:27:39.000 Which isn't bad advice.

02:27:40.000 Is he fully open now?

02:27:42.000 Because when I went there, he just had the patio.

02:27:45.000 I don't believe so.

02:27:46.000 I believe it's some kind of limited situation.

02:27:48.000 Austin's interesting.

02:27:49.000 Some places are just open.

02:27:51.000 Just wear a mask, come on in.

02:27:53.000 And then other places, like his place, is a little bit more protective.

02:28:00.000 Like yourself, he's an exceedingly generous person.

02:28:07.000 Jesse is. 0.99

02:28:09.000 Remember we were talking all that shit about America? 0.99

02:28:12.000 Good American. 0.99

02:28:15.000 Yeah, he seems like a real nice guy.

02:28:18.000 I've only met him once, but his restaurant's amazing.

02:28:21.000 What does Neil Guy taste like?

02:28:24.000 You know, it's kind of funny the way describing Wild Game goes.

02:28:30.000 I think that...

02:28:33.000 It was described to me by people who are down there.

02:28:36.000 We were on a famous ranch called Eteria.

02:28:39.000 It'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.

02:28:47.000 The people there that have grown up on that property, grown up in cattle ranching, they view it as...

02:28:54.000 They view it as superior to beef.

02:28:57.000 Meaning like, Neil guy are for eating, cattle are for selling.

02:29:01.000 Wow.

02:29:01.000 Is the way, someone explained it.

02:29:02.000 I mean, because there's like a great monetary value, there's like a market for cattle.

02:29:05.000 There's a market for Neil guy too, but it's different and more complicated.

02:29:08.000 But it was like, this is what we eat.

02:29:11.000 We eat the Neil guy.

02:29:12.000 We sell the cattle.

02:29:14.000 It's approachable, mild, reminiscent of beef.

02:29:20.000 It's very, very popular.

02:29:23.000 There's a handful of things in the U.S. where...

02:29:27.000 We have filmed and talked about Sika deer a lot in Maryland or Delmarva Peninsula.

02:29:35.000 People in those areas, as popular as white-tailed deer are, it's like America's deer, America's meat.

02:29:40.000 People in those areas are like, screw that, man, I'm eating Sika deer. 0.99

02:29:43.000 And with people that have exposure to axis deer feel that way, and people that have exposure to neil guy are like, that's my animal.

02:29:49.000 So it's in that collection of...

02:29:53.000 Yeah, they're insane, man.

02:29:55.000 I got that Hyde Tanned by a guy here in Austin who ran the process for me. 0.87

02:30:01.000 Got it tanned and my daughter wanted it for her bedroom and there was some kind of custody battle that wound up in my boy's bedroom. 0.99

02:30:08.000 Look at that picture.

02:30:09.000 That looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book.

02:30:12.000 That doesn't look like a real animal.

02:30:13.000 The one on the right?

02:30:14.000 The big picture?

02:30:15.000 That's amazing. 0.98

02:30:15.000 No, they're crazy, man. 0.98

02:30:18.000 Aren't there vitals in a weird place too? 0.87

02:30:20.000 Very far forward.

02:30:22.000 So you almost...

02:30:23.000 Low and forward.

02:30:25.000 And how far do the lungs go back?

02:30:30.000 What do you mean the limbs go back?

02:30:31.000 Lungs?

02:30:32.000 Oh, lungs!

02:30:33.000 Oh, I'm sorry.

02:30:34.000 Not as far as if you're accustomed to...

02:30:37.000 Not as far back as if you're accustomed to deer.

02:30:39.000 You gotta aim weirdly forward and weirdly low.

02:30:44.000 I shot one and shot the top of the heart off it.

02:30:46.000 But I was aiming... 0.97

02:30:47.000 I was under instruction from a person.

02:30:49.000 A guide that we were with.

02:30:52.000 And he was, like, imploring me, like, you have to listen to me.

02:30:55.000 Like, it has to go this way or you'll lose that thing in the brush.

02:30:58.000 Wow.

02:30:59.000 Yeah.

02:31:00.000 He said, when they make it into the brush, man, you get a sinking feeling.

02:31:03.000 They, like, don't go down easy.

02:31:05.000 I shot it twice. 0.67

02:31:06.000 He's like, shoot it again, shoot it again. 0.86

02:31:07.000 I'm like, really?

02:31:07.000 I feel like I shot it again.

02:31:08.000 But they're worried about losing the strong, strong animals.

02:31:13.000 But, yeah, man, they run.

02:31:14.000 Most of them are on private land.

02:31:16.000 There are public hunting opportunities for them.

02:31:19.000 Is that an animal that gets hunted by tigers in its natural environment?

02:31:23.000 I believe so.

02:31:24.000 I believe so.

02:31:25.000 But I have no, I have zero expertise on that.

02:31:28.000 That's the thing about axis deer, apparently, was explained to me, that they do, in their natural habitat, they do get hunted by tigers. 0.96

02:31:36.000 So they're so fucking fast. 0.85

02:31:37.000 They're equipped to deal with it. 0.98

02:31:38.000 Have you hunted Axis? 0.97

02:31:40.000 Yeah, I have, yeah.

02:31:40.000 How fast are they?

02:31:41.000 Fast.

02:31:42.000 They're so fast.

02:31:42.000 But I haven't hunted them with a bow where it really comes to haunt you.

02:31:46.000 Leopards prey. 0.92

02:31:47.000 Oh, leopards.

02:31:47.000 Yeah, leopards prey.

02:31:48.000 There'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.

02:31:57.000 And it was like they, you know, the theory is they co-evolved with the American cheetah.

02:32:01.000 Yeah.

02:32:02.000 And now you look like, why does he need to be that?

02:32:05.000 Like, he doesn't have any reason to be that fast.

02:32:07.000 Yeah.

02:32:07.000 Yeah, I gotta get a hold of Dan Flores again.

02:32:11.000 Yeah.

02:32:11.000 I had him on years ago to talk about his book, American Coyote, and I lost contact with him.

02:32:17.000 Are you still talking to him?

02:32:18.000 Man, I haven't, but I feel as though if I reached out to him, he would be as warm and inviting as he always is.

02:32:26.000 He's a great guy.

02:32:27.000 He's an intellect, man.

02:32:28.000 Very, very interesting person.

02:32:30.000 When I was in graduate school, I had to take an out-of-discipline seminar or something like that, and I took his...

02:32:41.000 History writing, western history, whatever the hell class I took of his. 1.00

02:32:44.000 And he kicked my ass. 1.00

02:32:45.000 You know, kicked my ass. 1.00

02:32:46.000 It was a very hard class to take. 1.00

02:32:48.000 And I learned a tremendous amount from that guy.

02:32:50.000 He was a good professor.

02:32:53.000 I want to get him together with someone like Randall Carlson, who's an expert in the Younger Dryas impact theory.

02:33:02.000 Yeah.

02:33:02.000 Because the two of them coincide.

02:33:04.000 The mass extinction of North American mammals coincide timeline-wise With the Younger Dryas impact theory.

02:33:14.000 So, you know, Randall Carlson spent his entire life focusing on this impact theory and how it ended the Ice Age.

02:33:21.000 People talk about it being like the idea that never dies.

02:33:23.000 Yeah.

02:33:24.000 I was at the Lindenmeyer site in Colorado, a famous Folsom site, Ice Age encampment. 0.91

02:33:31.000 And it was funny because I happened to be at that site that there was a guy there...

02:33:38.000 Working 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.

02:33:52.000 And he was in there looking for these things, and the anthropologists that I was with were very dismissive of him.

02:33:57.000 It was like, ah!

02:34:00.000 You know, but they're...

02:34:02.000 Less and less so now.

02:34:04.000 Well, yeah, well, they're very invested.

02:34:06.000 They're like...

02:34:07.000 I did an interview with a guy not too long ago, and we were talking about scientists.

02:34:12.000 Oh, it was an entomologist, Justin Schmidt, I think it was.

02:34:15.000 We were talking about, like, why do young scientists always make all the discoveries?

02:34:20.000 Not all of them, but, you know, the good idea, like, some of the good ideas come from young scientists. 0.99

02:34:24.000 He said, because people my age, all we do is defend our old shit. 0.99

02:34:27.000 LAUGHTER It seems kind of true, right? 1.00

02:34:31.000 Because we're so busy defending our old theories.

02:34:33.000 Well, so many people in the anthropology side want to employ the Blitzkrieg theory, right?

02:34:40.000 No, at this point it's deader than dead.

02:34:43.000 Really?

02:34:43.000 Remember when I talked about I got an opportunity to revise my book after 10 years?

02:34:46.000 Yeah.

02:34:47.000 Yeah, I put some language in there around the Blitzkrieg hypothesis.

02:34:50.000 So what's the replacement theory?

02:34:52.000 Well, explain the Blitzkrieg theory.

02:34:55.000 Yeah, 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.

02:35:07.000 So 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. 0.89

02:35:18.000 And you'd map human migrations and you found this compelling pattern of the fact that people show up and shit goes extinct. 0.89

02:35:26.000 We did a podcast about this with a guy you should talk to sometime named David Meltzer who knows this world better than anybody. 0.92

02:35:32.000 And it's really elegant.

02:35:34.000 It's a very elegant theory.

02:35:36.000 It explains a lot very quickly.

02:35:38.000 It'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. 0.72

02:35:52.000 That they were hunting these things to extinction back then, so we can't be that bad for driving things to extinction now.

02:35:57.000 Everything about it was very packaged up and had a nice bow on it.

02:36:01.000 What 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.

02:36:21.000 And you realize that things were in steep decline anyways.

02:36:26.000 Things were changing rapidly anyways.

02:36:29.000 Maybe people came in and kind of like did the coup de grace on some of these things.

02:36:36.000 But it wasn't that they blinked out.

02:36:39.000 They faded out for a long time.

02:36:41.000 But everything, our old perspective of how we used to look at it made everything seem very compressed and very immediate.

02:36:49.000 And so it's just gotten more complicated, as we understand more, that mammoth populations were perhaps collapsing long before people showed up.

02:37:00.000 Well, mammoths have a long gestation period, right?

02:37:03.000 That 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.

02:37:21.000 There's also the problem that I remember criticism of people that used to feel this way.

02:37:26.000 The criticism used to be that they called them the bison boys, where they had this fantasy of these roving, highly effective big game hunters.

02:37:33.000 And then people point now to, why is there not more evidence of, why is there such limited evidence of humans killing mastodons and mammoths?

02:37:44.000 I mean, stuff's just gone, right?

02:37:46.000 It's been a long time ago.

02:37:47.000 But that's another thing.

02:37:49.000 When we used to do archaeology, they would throw everything away except for the big bones.

02:37:57.000 They would look for projectile points, look for big bones.

02:38:00.000 Everything else would just get washed away in sluice boxes or through sieves.

02:38:03.000 And we weren't looking at the finer picture of what people ate, what was there.

02:38:08.000 They thought that any association of human artifacts and mammoth remains meant that it could only mean one thing.

02:38:14.000 These people killed those mammoths. 0.71

02:38:16.000 Hmm.

02:38:17.000 You know, sites that are described as kill sites that now people investigate.

02:38:24.000 Like, we have no reason to believe this is a kill site.

02:38:27.000 There's a thing that came out of Mexico not long ago where they're like, oh, it was a big kill site. 1.00

02:38:32.000 They even flipped the bones over in order to do this and that to them.

02:38:36.000 Oh, yeah, I remember that.

02:38:37.000 Yeah, and then these analysts come look at it.

02:38:38.000 Like, there is no compelling reason to think that this is a kill site.

02:38:44.000 Because 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.

02:38:54.000 What happens to the bones?

02:38:57.000 You know?

02:38:58.000 And things that we used to think were kill sites are just not.

02:39:02.000 It's a long time.

02:39:03.000 Something dies.

02:39:04.000 Time goes by.

02:39:04.000 Someone goes and camps there.

02:39:06.000 Later it all gets jumbled up.

02:39:07.000 You find a projectile point in a mammoth bone.

02:39:09.000 Oh my god, he killed it!

02:39:10.000 And then other people are like, well no, now that we've analyzed it, 3,000 years separated these two occurrences.

02:39:17.000 There's only so much place on the planet. 0.99

02:39:18.000 Shit happens in the same place time and time and time again. 0.99

02:39:21.000 So it's just, it's falling apart. 0.98

02:39:23.000 For reasons Melcher would describe more eloquently than me.

02:39:26.000 It 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.

02:39:43.000 What a lot of anthropologists laugh about is that everything unexplained is always of religious significance.

02:39:50.000 How so?

02:39:51.000 Like, let's say you find a couple buffalo skulls in a circle.

02:39:55.000 Like, they're doing a dig and they find some buffalo skulls facing the same way in the circle.

02:39:59.000 Oh, I see what you're saying.

02:40:00.000 It was like a ritual.

02:40:02.000 Yeah, it was ritualistic.

02:40:03.000 Or just they just died there.

02:40:06.000 Yeah, 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.

02:40:13.000 Right.

02:40:14.000 Or whatever, things just like freakish.

02:40:16.000 But yeah, like unexplained things are always like ritualistic, symbolic.

02:40:20.000 We read stuff into stuff.

02:40:22.000 But yeah, the Blitzkrieg hypothesis, I'm sure there's probably some hanger on, but it's...

02:40:29.000 It's as dead as the mammoths.

02:40:31.000 I used to love it because it was so beautiful.

02:40:34.000 Especially because there's stuff like this, like Wrangle Island.

02:40:38.000 That's where the woolly mammoths were survivors.

02:40:40.000 They lived there until 3-4 thousand years ago.

02:40:43.000 That's crazy.

02:40:43.000 Why?

02:40:44.000 And then you'd be like, but no one ever showed up there.

02:40:48.000 They didn't get colonized by humans.

02:40:50.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:40:51.000 Why did all this big shit go extinct in Australia 40,000 years ago? 0.99

02:40:56.000 When people showed up. 1.00

02:40:58.000 It's...

02:41:00.000 You got to have that Meltzer dude on.

02:41:02.000 What's his name?

02:41:03.000 David J. Meltzer.

02:41:05.000 He's at Southern Methodist University.

02:41:06.000 When I went to visit him, you know what he showed me is the Folsom type site where they first excavated Folsom bones.

02:41:14.000 I got to hold them.

02:41:16.000 And you can see on the skulls, this is no joke.

02:41:19.000 This isn't like us making believe something's true.

02:41:21.000 These are, you know, 12, 13,000 year old Weissen skulls.

02:41:25.000 And you can see all the cut marks where they cut the tongues out.

02:41:30.000 Wow.

02:41:31.000 Yeah, you can see the knife work on the bones.

02:41:35.000 Wow.

02:41:36.000 Yeah, that dude is sharp, man.

02:41:39.000 He's written a bunch of books about this stuff.

02:41:40.000 He'd kind of blow your mind a little bit.

02:41:42.000 When we were in Nevada, when we went on that mule deer hunt for your show, I found an arrowhead and I lost it. 0.99

02:41:49.000 I don't know what the fuck happened. 0.94

02:41:50.000 Someone cleaned my office and it disappeared. 0.98

02:41:53.000 Oh.

02:41:54.000 We were going to talk about putting...

02:41:56.000 Yeah, you're supposed to...

02:41:56.000 You're supposed to leave it there.

02:41:58.000 Put it back.

02:41:59.000 Yeah, I didn't. 0.97

02:41:59.000 I was with some anthropologists one time and we were finding sweet shit up in the Brooks Range in Alaska. 0.97

02:42:04.000 And you had to leave it there? 0.89

02:42:06.000 Man, they'd photograph it and sketch it and stuff and tuck it back into the...

02:42:09.000 Oh, that seems so crazy.

02:42:12.000 Tuck it back into the tundra.

02:42:13.000 What did you find?

02:42:14.000 Oh, old stuff.

02:42:17.000 Old stuff.

02:42:18.000 These guys are...

02:42:19.000 Like what kind of stuff?

02:42:21.000 Projectile points.

02:42:22.000 Big projectile points.

02:42:24.000 Like how old?

02:42:25.000 Well, 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...

02:42:33.000 This is that kind of area.

02:42:35.000 It's mathematically the most remote area in North America, if you factor in distance from roads and settlements.

02:42:41.000 He had found this very prominent mesa where it wasn't a campsite.

02:42:46.000 It was just a place that people would sit and wait for game to come by and found hundreds of projectile points up there.

02:42:52.000 Wow.

02:42:52.000 These things are like Ice Age projectile points.

02:42:55.000 Because they had all kinds of radiocarbon dates because they built all these fires up there.

02:43:01.000 He did this whole book-type thing about it.

02:43:06.000 The academic community accepts it.

02:43:11.000 The academic consensus is that he's right.

02:43:14.000 During 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.

02:43:25.000 This guy found them.

02:43:28.000 We were doing kind of a continuation of that work of mapping out campsites, and we would find unbelievable points.

02:43:37.000 Unbelievable points. 0.97

02:43:39.000 It just seems so fucked up to leave them there. 0.99

02:43:40.000 It hasn't been picked over yet. 0.99

02:43:42.000 I know, but it seems so fucked up to leave. 0.98

02:43:44.000 Dude, Tony, man, it was like against every bit of like Michigan elbow grease I've ever had laid up in me. 0.99

02:43:50.000 I would fantasize.

02:43:52.000 I would be like, you know, you might be leaving that there, but someday I'm going to get me a helicopter.

02:43:59.000 Yeah.

02:44:02.000 It will be mine!

02:44:04.000 Just 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.

02:44:14.000 Yeah.

02:44:15.000 Bad dudes.

02:44:16.000 Yeah.

02:44:17.000 To get their food.

02:44:19.000 A lot of know-how.

02:44:20.000 They didn't know they were bad.

02:44:20.000 They thought they had cool stuff.

02:44:23.000 They're showing each other new shit. 0.99

02:44:25.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:44:25.000 I know, right? 1.00

02:44:26.000 New techniques and strategies.

02:44:28.000 They're like, check this out!

02:44:29.000 And they're like, oh, you young guys.

02:44:31.000 You know, they thought it was sweet.

02:44:33.000 Yeah, there's a lot of that out here.

02:44:35.000 There's a lot of arrowheads apparently out here on ranches.

02:44:38.000 People find them all the time.

02:44:40.000 My friend Gary Clark Jr. had a picture on his Instagram page.

02:44:43.000 You can probably find it, Jamie, of a perfect arrowhead he found on this ranch.

02:44:47.000 I mean, it's just perfect. 0.96

02:44:48.000 And 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. 0.98

02:44:58.000 Look at that. 0.99

02:44:59.000 Yeah, that's sweet.

02:45:00.000 That's so awesome.

02:45:02.000 Look at that thing. 0.92

02:45:02.000 It's perfect. 0.92

02:45:03.000 And it looks like someone just made it.

02:45:07.000 Ugh, man.

02:45:09.000 Time travel.

02:45:10.000 I know.

02:45:11.000 Could you imagine?

02:45:12.000 If 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?

02:45:21.000 20,000 years ago, Mile City, Montana.

02:45:24.000 You're so specific!

02:45:26.000 Why?

02:45:28.000 Because 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.

02:45:39.000 Wow.

02:45:40.000 Like I've seen woolly mammoths in that, in their habitat there at sort of the arrival of the first humans.

02:45:48.000 There's a guy I'm friends with online.

02:45:50.000 I don't know him in real world, but he's contacted me.

02:45:53.000 He's actually sent me some stuff from his site.

02:45:57.000 The Instagram handle is TheBoneyard in Alaska.

02:46:02.000 Do you know this guy?

02:46:04.000 No.

02:46:05.000 Let me see if I can find it.

02:46:06.000 They found it already.

02:46:07.000 There you go.

02:46:08.000 The Boneyard, Alaska.

02:46:09.000 They have this site that they found something there once, many, many years ago.

02:46:16.000 And since then, they've been pulling all these...

02:46:20.000 There's an Ice Age caribou horn.

02:46:22.000 They've been pulling all these incredible pieces out.

02:46:26.000 I mean, just over and over and over.

02:46:29.000 Did you see that one picture?

02:46:30.000 He had a bear track.

02:46:31.000 Look at that, right next to his foot.

02:46:33.000 Is that a black bear?

02:46:35.000 Or a small grizzly bear?

02:46:37.000 What is that?

02:46:38.000 Well, I'd want to see the front foot better, but the front foot's back behind his heel, and it looks like a grizzly.

02:46:43.000 Now, 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.

02:46:52.000 Oh, there's Forrest Gallant on the podcast talking about it.

02:46:55.000 But that, all the tusks they keep finding there, I mean, they've had, it's a treasure trove.

02:47:03.000 In this one area, and it's not an enormous area. 0.88

02:47:05.000 I 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. 0.60

02:47:17.000 On my first date with my wife, I took her to the La Brea Tar Pits. 1.00

02:47:23.000 At least she knew what she was getting into.

02:47:25.000 Yeah, man.

02:47:26.000 Yeah, my old stomping grounds.

02:47:28.000 I've never been, but that's...

02:47:31.000 Oh, really?

02:47:31.000 No.

02:47:32.000 She tells a story where they had like a little miniature bronze of a mammoth, and she said, oh look, a baby mammoth.

02:47:38.000 They must have found a baby mammoth. 0.98

02:47:41.000 And I was like, well, no, actually, you know, that's it. 0.99

02:47:44.000 She's like, yeah, no shit. 0.99

02:47:45.000 You know, she's like, I was like, well, little lady, let me set you straight. 0.99

02:47:53.000 That's a specific time.

02:47:54.000 So you would want to see that more than anything else?

02:47:57.000 Yeah, 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.

02:48:04.000 I would go to join Daniel Boone on his first trip over the Cumberland Gap.

02:48:11.000 That ought to be wild.

02:48:13.000 That'd be my second trip.

02:48:14.000 Didn't they eat wolves? 0.89

02:48:17.000 I don't know.

02:48:18.000 I know he's got a great story about a wolf coming into their camp and biting a guy.

02:48:24.000 And what surprised these hunters was that the wolf seemed very intent on one individual and bit this individual.

02:48:33.000 He then later developed hydrophobia.

02:48:38.000 And they were out jack-lighting for deer where they'd burn pine knots in the front of a boat and drift down rivers to shoot deer.

02:48:44.000 And he had a bout of what they called hydrophobia and went berserk.

02:48:50.000 He had...

02:48:51.000 Rabies?

02:48:52.000 Yeah, he had rabies.

02:48:53.000 So hydrophobia is...

02:48:54.000 Like that fear of water.

02:48:56.000 I don't know what it is, but people freak out.

02:48:59.000 Had a bout.

02:49:00.000 Had to be restrained.

02:49:02.000 Took him home and he died.

02:49:04.000 Wow.

02:49:05.000 Yeah.

02:49:06.000 And that was in his social circle.

02:49:09.000 So the wolf had given him rabies when it bit him.

02:49:11.000 Came into a camp.

02:49:13.000 What alarmed them was how it seemed so intent on a person and eventually bit that person and killed that guy.

02:49:19.000 Jesus Christ.

02:49:19.000 And then there's another thing that happened to Boone where Boone's kid was tortured and killed by Indians and he was hastily buried.

02:49:28.000 And Boone went back to...

02:49:32.000 Boone went back to find the bones of his son.

02:49:35.000 And the wolves had torn at the body.

02:49:42.000 And Boone, it was a rainstorm.

02:49:45.000 Boone later described how he had lifted his boy out and held him, you know, sobbing.

02:49:51.000 And then heard some sounds in the distance, and it was some Indians coming and slipped off into the night.

02:49:59.000 Wow.

02:50:00.000 And you think about that moment for that guy.

02:50:03.000 Jesus Christ.

02:50:04.000 Later in life, he would go on these long hunting trips, just him and his slave together.

02:50:17.000 We're going like...

02:50:18.000 They're like old men. 1.00

02:50:21.000 Old buddies.

02:50:23.000 Or whatever.

02:50:23.000 I don't mean to say like buddies because it was like...

02:50:26.000 But they were like...

02:50:27.000 Him and a slave would go on these long journeys hunting together.

02:50:32.000 Which I think would be like a great play.

02:50:37.000 Right?

02:50:37.000 It kind of would be.

02:50:38.000 Oh, dude.

02:50:39.000 When I retire, I'm going to work on that.

02:50:41.000 Oh.

02:50:44.000 Just imagine being those people not knowing what was out there, making their way across the country.

02:50:50.000 That's just a type of mindset.

02:50:53.000 It's a rare individual that I just don't think we grow people like that anymore.

02:50:58.000 No.

02:50:58.000 It's over-observed.

02:51:00.000 It's over-observed.

02:51:01.000 But Lewis and Clark were supposed to keep their eyes out for mammoths.

02:51:06.000 Really?

02:51:07.000 Yeah.

02:51:08.000 Wow.

02:51:09.000 I was like, oh, while you're out there, man.

02:51:11.000 There was some consideration?

02:51:12.000 Was there any stories of mammoths?

02:51:14.000 People had all the bones.

02:51:16.000 All the bones had come out of stuff.

02:51:18.000 Jefferson got really interested in some of these mammoth and mastodon bones that had come out of some of those licks. 0.98

02:51:24.000 And was like, hey, man, you know, in addition to all the other shit, keep your eyes out for a big elephant. 0.81

02:51:29.000 It must have been fascinating to see what the wildlife was like before it was molested by modern humans, you know, back in the 16, 1700s. 0.97

02:51:40.000 Dude, read Russell Osborne's Journal of a Trapper.

02:51:45.000 What year was that from?

02:51:46.000 He was in the late 30s, early 40s.

02:51:49.000 He was a meticulous journal keeper. 1.00

02:51:51.000 One of the few people that wrote a journal who wasn't full of shit. 1.00

02:51:54.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:51:56.000 It's a great depiction of what it was like.

02:51:58.000 And he was like, you know, 30 years after.

02:52:02.000 Contact in those areas.

02:52:03.000 I think I mentioned this to you before, but our idea of pre-contact, contact.

02:52:08.000 There's this Elliot West, this historian, and he describes how...

02:52:12.000 When Lewis and Clark hit the Great Plains, I might have told you this.

02:52:16.000 When Lewis and Clark hit the Great Plains, there were Indians living on the Great Plains.

02:52:19.000 So here's Lewis and Clark discovering the Great Plains, right?

02:52:22.000 Right.

02:52:22.000 There were Indians on the Great Plains who had been to Europe, met the King of France, and returned at that time.

02:52:30.000 He has this essay.

02:52:33.000 I can't remember what it's called, but it's a muddled history.

02:52:37.000 You want to put it into this neat chronology.

02:52:41.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:52:42.000 Shit, there were hundreds of years of just touch and go. 1.00

02:52:47.000 Of interaction? 1.00

02:52:48.000 Touch-and-go interactions.

02:52:49.000 Wow.

02:52:50.000 Hundreds.

02:52:50.000 You 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.

02:52:59.000 But there's, like, crazy interplay.

02:53:01.000 I had no idea that anybody back then from a Native American tribe had gone to France.

02:53:07.000 That sounds insane.

02:53:09.000 Like, how'd they even get over there?

02:53:10.000 You remember Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man?

02:53:12.000 Yes.

02:53:13.000 Kind of similar to that.

02:53:14.000 People would be brought as delegations.

02:53:19.000 We'd be trying to manipulate the governments, France, Spain, England.

02:53:25.000 We'd be trying to manipulate tribes to participate and form alliances that you would...

02:53:32.000 Let's say the French might ally with a group and that group would stop the bleed of English colonists pushing into the Appalachians.

02:53:47.000 A lot of it was self-serving too.

02:53:50.000 The tribes absolutely weren't capable of making these decisions for themselves.

02:53:54.000 They got on board with these plans.

02:53:56.000 But yeah, they were whining and dining, man.

02:53:59.000 To be like, you know, we're happy to join forces with you.

02:54:02.000 Come to see my palace.

02:54:06.000 It's funny because we're in such a historic time right now, but we're in the middle of it.

02:54:10.000 You know, one day they're going to look back on these days post this crazy election.

02:54:15.000 When people are jockeying for position, who's going to be able to control? 1.00

02:54:18.000 Oh, they'll be like, fucking podcast! 1.00

02:54:22.000 Joe Rogan. 0.99

02:54:23.000 I'm sure that's going to have a weird...

02:54:25.000 Joe Rogan had to ruin it all.

02:54:27.000 Yeah.

02:54:29.000 Or not.

02:54:30.000 Or not.

02:54:32.000 But they're going to be looking back at this time, about what a chaotic time it is.

02:54:36.000 I mean, this is a history time.

02:54:38.000 When 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.

02:54:48.000 What's this, Jamie?

02:54:50.000 Oh, there you go.

02:54:52.000 1725 group of Indians, including one, how do you say that?

02:54:55.000 Atoe?

02:54:56.000 An Osage?

02:54:58.000 Osage.

02:54:59.000 One Missouri chief, one Missouri young woman, one Illinois, one Chicago?

02:55:05.000 How do you say that?

02:55:07.000 Chicago U. Oh, Chicago.

02:55:09.000 I have no idea.

02:55:09.000 I don't know the pronunciation.

02:55:11.000 And one, uh, were sent to Paris, France.

02:55:16.000 There they met with the director of the Company of the Indies and the Duke and the Duchess of de Bourbon.

02:55:22.000 The chiefs were given a complete French outfit, which included a blue dress coat, silver ornaments, and a plumed hat trimmed in silver.

02:55:30.000 They were presented to King Louis XV, and they performed a dance at the opera.

02:55:37.000 The French king gave each of the chiefs a royal medallion, a rifle, a sword, and a watch.

02:55:43.000 Wow.

02:55:44.000 Then it goes on to name more groups.

02:55:45.000 So that's 1725. Lewis and Clark were 1804, but those were not Western.

02:55:51.000 One of the books that I read, I was listening to, I should say, on audiobook about Native Americans, maybe it was...

02:56:02.000 Black Elk.

02:56:03.000 Black Elk Speaks?

02:56:04.000 Yeah, where they talked about him going over to Europe and taking part of those Wild Bill shows that they did over there.

02:56:11.000 That 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.

02:56:22.000 It would be as though...

02:56:23.000 This isn't...

02:56:28.000 Participants in the Battle of Little Bighorn, where they defeated the 7th Cavalry under Custer and annihilated his command.

02:56:35.000 Participants in that battle would later get together.

02:56:41.000 They would get together.

02:56:42.000 Because there was other campaigns going on at the same time.

02:56:45.000 So we think about Custer getting killed, but not too far away was more soldiers that didn't.

02:56:49.000 But anyways, participants in that would later get together and play it out.

02:56:53.000 It's hard to picture that we would have Al-Qaeda fighters.

02:57:00.000 Right.

02:57:00.000 Reenacting.

02:57:01.000 Come and be like, oh yeah, I survived the global war on terror and shit. 0.99

02:57:05.000 Now we're going to show you like, no, I was sitting here when they kicked in the door. 0.99

02:57:11.000 How that happened.

02:57:13.000 Actual people from like Gettysburg would get together.

02:57:16.000 Right.

02:57:17.000 Yeah.

02:57:18.000 And pretend to...

02:57:20.000 Yeah.

02:57:21.000 Yeah.

02:57:23.000 I don't know.

02:57:24.000 Yeah, look at this.

02:57:25.000 I 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?

02:57:39.000 I feel like he might be like, yeah, no, no.

02:57:43.000 That still feels a little fresh.

02:57:44.000 Yeah, real fresh.

02:57:47.000 Yeah, I mean, and these guys were doing this not long after.

02:57:51.000 Yeah.

02:57:51.000 Dude, they weren't even old men yet.

02:57:53.000 No.

02:57:54.000 Yeah, like half a decade.

02:57:57.000 It's so...

02:57:58.000 And we're talking about the level of animosity that these people would kill each other on both sides and mutilate the bodies.

02:58:06.000 Deep, deep, deep hatred.

02:58:09.000 The likes of which is hard for us to comprehend.

02:58:12.000 Like...

02:58:14.000 The impulse to desecrate the corpse of your enemy and then get together and have a Wild West show about it.

02:58:23.000 Mutilating bodies.

02:58:24.000 You recommended Son of the Morning Star.

02:58:26.000 Have you read it?

02:58:27.000 Yeah.

02:58:28.000 It's heavy. 1.00

02:58:29.000 It's heavy shit. 1.00

02:58:30.000 The things that they did to each other. 1.00

02:58:32.000 Yeah.

02:58:33.000 And the crazy thing was that the Native Americans had no sense of... 0.82

02:58:39.000 There was no quitting.

02:58:42.000 There was no sense of turning themselves in.

02:58:45.000 There was no sense of...

02:58:46.000 If you were captured, you were murdered and mutilated.

02:58:51.000 So they would fight to the bitter end.

02:58:52.000 They knew there was no surrender.

02:58:55.000 Because if you surrendered, you would be tortured and killed.

02:58:58.000 Some 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.

02:59:06.000 When did they develop such insane cruelty?

02:59:10.000 And has this always been a part of being a human being?

02:59:12.000 Or was this exacerbated by the hard conditions of the planes?

02:59:16.000 What led them to be so vicious?

02:59:22.000 It's a great question, man.

02:59:23.000 There's things about, like, things that these Great Lakes tribes of, like, making people eat parts of themselves, you know.

02:59:34.000 But a lot of it had, you know, there's, like, things about how you, if you could handle that and not crack.

02:59:45.000 It was respected.

02:59:46.000 It was like a testing.

02:59:48.000 But I don't know what it was like to live.

02:59:50.000 I can't even begin to imagine what it was like to live with that level of stuff.

02:59:55.000 I recently read a book called Plainsman of the Yellowstone, and it was a history of the Yellowstone Basin.

03:00:02.000 This guy takes that whole...

03:00:05.000 It'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.

03:00:26.000 It just didn't really matter.

03:00:27.000 The book was written, man.

03:00:29.000 I mean, you know what I mean?

03:00:29.000 It 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.

03:00:35.000 A guy did something stupid, got some people killed, the war ground on. 0.96

03:00:39.000 It'd be like if we're imagining D-Day, right? 0.98

03:00:44.000 It'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.

03:00:54.000 And our telling of D-Day, and let's say that incident was called the whatever, the baculum incident.

03:01:02.000 Now, 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.

03:01:08.000 When we talk about Custer, we're sort of talking about D-Day as the baculum incident.

03:01:13.000 And we've lost sight of D-Day.

03:01:16.000 It was just a little blip.

03:01:17.000 It was a thing that happened that didn't matter.

03:01:21.000 The war ground on.

03:01:23.000 They beat them.

03:01:24.000 They knew they were going to beat them.

03:01:25.000 No one wondered who was going to win the war.

03:01:29.000 Some guy screwed up, got some people killed.

03:01:31.000 We subjugated the tribes.

03:01:33.000 And then it became bigger over history.

03:01:36.000 Over time it became that we like that that story got infused with all this folklore importance and symbol and it's like deeply symbolic. 0.80

03:01:46.000 I'm a sucker for it.

03:01:48.000 Yeah, I am too.

03:01:48.000 Deeply symbolic.

03:01:50.000 War was intimate then.

03:01:55.000 There was no other way.

03:01:57.000 You had to be close. 0.99

03:01:58.000 You had to be close to each other to kill each other. 0.62

03:02:01.000 It's a different world, right?

03:02:02.000 And with the Plains Indians, even more intimate because you're just dealing with bows and arrows and lances on horses. 0.97

03:02:09.000 It's a different kind of life and death.

03:02:13.000 Yeah, and flying a drone over the Middle East from Texas and then going home at night and having dinner with your family.

03:02:21.000 It's interesting how we're more and more separated from that.

03:02:26.000 And also interesting that the Plains Indians seem to take delight in it.

03:02:32.000 It was fun.

03:02:34.000 There was fun sport.

03:02:35.000 There was ever-increasing ways to be more cruel and vicious.

03:02:40.000 There was entertainment involved in it.

03:02:43.000 Yeah.

03:02:43.000 Some 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.

03:02:58.000 Yeah, expected.

03:03:00.000 I forgot to talk about your book.

03:03:02.000 Oh, no.

03:03:02.000 We don't need to talk about it at length.

03:03:04.000 I'd love it if you mentioned it.

03:03:05.000 I'm very proud of it.

03:03:06.000 Meteor Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival.

03:03:10.000 This is your...

03:03:11.000 How many...

03:03:12.000 You guys have written...

03:03:13.000 You had the two books on wild game preparation.

03:03:18.000 Yeah, we had the guide books.

03:03:19.000 Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game.

03:03:22.000 Volumes 1 and 2. Big Game and Small Game.

03:03:25.000 Then did a Wild Game book.

03:03:27.000 Wild Game cookbook.

03:03:29.000 This is a very pragmatic, practical...

03:03:32.000 It's kind of almost a response to the sort of...

03:03:47.000 I think?

03:03:55.000 And 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.

03:04:07.000 Yeah, and it comes out December 1. Pre-order now.

03:04:13.000 Oh, I got a copy of it right here, baby.

03:04:14.000 Is there going to be an audio version of this?

03:04:18.000 Man, I don't know.

03:04:19.000 We haven't talked about it.

03:04:21.000 It's illustrated.

03:04:22.000 Yeah.

03:04:23.000 That would be a problem, right?

03:04:25.000 Yeah.

03:04:25.000 And it's more meant to be like a usable manual.

03:04:29.000 Yeah.

03:04:29.000 Like a usable manual.

03:04:32.000 But I'm quite happy with it.

03:04:34.000 Thanks for bringing it up.

03:04:35.000 My pleasure.

03:04:35.000 Thanks for being here, man.

03:04:36.000 It was fun.

03:04:37.000 Thank you very much.

03:04:38.000 Always is.

03:04:38.000 I'll come back in a year or two years, whatever.

03:04:40.000 Please do.

03:04:41.000 Come back anytime.

03:04:43.000 Your podcast is the Meat Eater Podcast.

03:04:45.000 It's available everywhere.

03:04:47.000 And then the show is on Netflix.

03:04:49.000 And sometimes it's on the Sportsman's channel too, right?

03:04:51.000 Yeah, that's right.

03:04:52.000 How does that work?

03:04:53.000 It has this complex thing of first window, second window stuff.

03:04:58.000 Our episodes currently premiere on Netflix.

03:05:04.000 You can find them on Sportsman Channel, Outdoor Channel, past episodes.

03:05:08.000 But new stuff goes up on Netflix and winds up there.

03:05:11.000 We just recently put our seasons one and two just on YouTube.

03:05:15.000 You just go check them out on YouTube.

03:05:16.000 We'll be adding to that YouTube stash as well.

03:05:20.000 Beautiful.

03:05:21.000 Thanks for being here.

03:05:21.000 Thanks a lot.

03:05:22.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 05, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1559 - Steven Rinella

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