The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2258 - Steven Rinella

00:00:00.000 the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day Steve Vanilla that was a long exhale I needed one.

00:00:17.000 Is this Trump's chair?

00:00:18.000 He sat in that chair, yeah.

00:00:21.000 I want to soak up some of the tenacity, man.

00:00:24.000 He's got a lot of that.

00:00:26.000 It took me a long time, man.

00:00:28.000 It took me a long time to...

00:00:30.000 To see it.

00:00:31.000 Like, I remember people would talk, you know, there was this thing when he emerged on the scene, it was this thing about, like, toughness.

00:00:37.000 And I'd always defined, like, in my mind, toughness was being able to go through some, like, alder-choked hellhole real fast. 1.00

00:00:43.000 Right.

00:00:43.000 Or hike up a hill.

00:00:44.000 Right.

00:00:44.000 So I was like, that's not tough.

00:00:46.000 And then later I was like, oh.

00:00:49.000 Yeah.

00:00:50.000 Mental toughness.

00:00:52.000 That kind of tough, man.

00:00:53.000 Think about what that guy went through.

00:00:55.000 I mean, he had the entire media, the entire justice system.

00:00:59.000 He had the Deep State, the Central Intelligence Agency.

00:01:04.000 He had all these people conspiring to take him out.

00:01:08.000 Literally an assassination attempt, and then another one.

00:01:11.000 In and out of the news in no time.

00:01:12.000 Nobody cared.

00:01:13.000 No grace period.

00:01:15.000 They waited about a day, and then they started talking shit about him again.

00:01:19.000 That's the thing.

00:01:19.000 When I looked at it, now that I've come to understand it better, I'm like, the fact that most people would crawl into A hole.

00:01:30.000 Yeah.

00:01:31.000 You know, I got a buddy, I don't want to say who it is, but he had sold his business and he told me, he goes, when I sell my business, I'm going to crawl into a deep, dark hole.

00:01:40.000 And later he's kind of back out and bought another business.

00:01:44.000 And I said, what about crawling into the deep, dark hole?

00:01:47.000 And he said, well, I did, but my wife was in there.

00:01:53.000 I'm not ready yet.

00:01:54.000 I gotta get back out.

00:01:57.000 People...

00:01:57.000 I think that's like these sort of fictional depictions of the future.

00:02:03.000 That, you know, everybody wants this future where, you know, you're just holding hands and walking off into the sunset, the golden years.

00:02:11.000 It's all bullshit.

00:02:12.000 If you're alive, you're going to want to do the same things you're doing right now.

00:02:16.000 Yeah.

00:02:16.000 You're not going to have some point in your life where you're going to want to do nothing and be happy that you don't have to do anything.

00:02:21.000 You're going to get depressed.

00:02:23.000 Yeah, I think about it.

00:02:24.000 But my wife's smart enough to worry about what had happened to us if we didn't have dragons to slay. 1.00

00:02:30.000 Yeah.

00:02:31.000 She feels that it might be essential.

00:02:33.000 It's essential for life.

00:02:35.000 You need at least some sort of a very involving hobby.

00:02:39.000 You need something.

00:02:41.000 I mean, you can retire from, if you have a lot of money, you could retire from your financial pursuits.

00:02:47.000 But you need something that you enjoy doing.

00:02:50.000 Human beings need tasks.

00:02:52.000 If you don't have something, you get very dull, and that's how people get Alzheimer's.

00:02:56.000 They just fucking get dementia.

00:02:58.000 They just, like, sit around the house, and their brain atrophies, and then they just die.

00:03:04.000 Yeah.

00:03:04.000 I look at people like that, and, you know, part of looking at, well, Biden and Trump would be...

00:03:14.000 At that age, like I plan on at that age to be like really kicking it.

00:03:20.000 Just screwing around outside.

00:03:22.000 Yeah, just having fun.

00:03:23.000 But that just thing, like to perform to the bitter end, man.

00:03:27.000 Well, Biden is not performing.

00:03:29.000 Trying to perform to the bitter end.

00:03:31.000 Whatever he's doing is strange.

00:03:33.000 Yeah, trying to keep at it.

00:03:34.000 I think he's getting propped up.

00:03:36.000 I think there's other people that are, like, pushing him towards the, get out there!

00:03:40.000 Come on! 0.61

00:03:41.000 I think Jill's got her hands on his lower back. 1.00

00:03:43.000 Just giving a push.

00:03:44.000 Get out there! 0.99

00:03:45.000 Come on! 0.61

00:03:45.000 You can win again! 0.61

00:03:47.000 I think I could've beaten Trump!

00:03:50.000 Yeah, it's...

00:03:51.000 But it's that thing, too, where people, oh, one day you'll get to a certain age and you'll, like, you know...

00:03:56.000 I'm 57, and I used to think, oh, when I'm 57, I'll be done.

00:04:00.000 If I have some money, I'm just gonna relax.

00:04:02.000 Yeah.

00:04:02.000 That's nonsense.

00:04:03.000 I don't want to relax.

00:04:05.000 How long do you think, if you had guests, how long would you do this podcast?

00:04:08.000 This is the easiest thing I'd do.

00:04:10.000 Really?

00:04:10.000 Yeah, I'll do this forever.

00:04:11.000 Really?

00:04:12.000 It's so easy to do.

00:04:13.000 Yeah, as long as I'm actually interested in talking to the people.

00:04:16.000 How hard is that?

00:04:18.000 Actually interested?

00:04:19.000 Yeah, but that's the only reason why I do it anyway.

00:04:21.000 Like, I only talk to people I want to talk to.

00:04:24.000 So, no one ever tells me, you know, have this person on your show.

00:04:28.000 There's literally zero input from anyone else.

00:04:31.000 So everybody I talk to, I look and I go, do I want to talk to that guy?

00:04:34.000 That might be cool.

00:04:35.000 That'd be interesting.

00:04:36.000 I want to find out what makes him tick.

00:04:38.000 I want to find out why she writes those books like that. 1.00

00:04:40.000 I want to find out what keeps him going.

00:04:43.000 That's like the whole reason why I do it is because I enjoy it.

00:04:48.000 Do you picture walking away from stand-up before you'd walk away from podcasts?

00:04:53.000 I don't know.

00:04:54.000 Why would I do that too?

00:04:55.000 I have my own club now.

00:04:56.000 I'm 50 years old, man.

00:04:58.000 I'm starting to have all these questions.

00:05:00.000 I think you just stay healthy.

00:05:02.000 Stay healthy and do what you enjoy doing.

00:05:05.000 I think live in the moment.

00:05:06.000 I think this idea of planning for the future is silly.

00:05:09.000 I really do.

00:05:10.000 I think you should have goals.

00:05:11.000 If you enjoy doing things and you're like, I would like to get to this point.

00:05:15.000 I would like to do this.

00:05:16.000 Something to strive towards.

00:05:17.000 That's good.

00:05:18.000 But this idea that one day you're just going to stop doing stuff.

00:05:23.000 Why?

00:05:24.000 Yeah.

00:05:25.000 Are you alive?

00:05:26.000 Are you enjoying doing it?

00:05:27.000 Yeah.

00:05:27.000 Shut the fuck up.

00:05:29.000 Like, you could be so much worse off.

00:05:31.000 There's so many things to dwell on other than whether or not I want to stop doing something that I enjoy.

00:05:36.000 Why would I ever even think about that?

00:05:37.000 That's a good point, man.

00:05:39.000 That's a good point.

00:05:39.000 These are all questions I had never really thought about, but I'd be more interested in them.

00:05:43.000 After I crossed that threshold, you know?

00:05:45.000 But I could conceive a time where I don't want to do it anymore.

00:05:48.000 I don't want to be a public person anymore.

00:05:49.000 The public aspect of it is the weirdest part.

00:05:52.000 The people constantly wanting your time and everybody thinking that if I can connect with this guy, that I can make a lot of money.

00:05:58.000 I can set up a business with him.

00:06:00.000 I can do this with him.

00:06:01.000 I can do that with him.

00:06:02.000 He can introduce me to this.

00:06:03.000 I can, you know, work with him.

00:06:06.000 There's a lot of that.

00:06:07.000 A lot of that that's exhausting.

00:06:08.000 A lot of these, like, opportunists and weirdos.

00:06:12.000 Yeah.

00:06:12.000 You know, those are exhausting.

00:06:14.000 I remember years ago, three, four years ago, you told me that you wished you were, we were eating barbecue, and you told me you wished you were 10% less famous.

00:06:25.000 But I feel like then you got 20% more famous.

00:06:28.000 Yeah.

00:06:29.000 Yeah, I fucked up.

00:06:30.000 Well, I thought doing the Spotify thing.

00:06:32.000 I was like, his direction isn't going the right way.

00:06:34.000 That was the whole reason why I took the Spotify deal.

00:06:37.000 I was like, good, they're going to give me a lot of money, and it'll only be on Spotify, so I'll be about 10% less famous.

00:06:42.000 Good.

00:06:43.000 Let me slide off into obscurity.

00:06:44.000 Because, I mean, as long as I'm making money, I was like, I just enjoy doing it.

00:06:49.000 I don't care how many people, like, the people that like it will still listen, so maybe I'll have less casual fans.

00:06:55.000 Like, who cares?

00:06:56.000 Who cares?

00:06:57.000 You know?

00:06:59.000 There's a certain level of fame, though, that's a little unmanageable, and I'm in that level.

00:07:04.000 It's very unmanageable.

00:07:05.000 You know what it is?

00:07:06.000 Well, if you'll allow me to tell you what it is.

00:07:10.000 Okay, please do.

00:07:11.000 And I observed this.

00:07:16.000 My wife, who's traveling with me right now, I observed this after we'd had dinner with you one time, and certain individuals, you included, would be that it's not just people that don't like you, right?

00:07:34.000 There's people that like you too much.

00:07:36.000 Yeah.

00:07:37.000 The people that don't like you just avoid you.

00:07:39.000 I know.

00:07:39.000 So it's like, at a certain point, you've got to worry about the people that like you.

00:07:44.000 Yeah.

00:07:45.000 Oh, believe me, I know.

00:07:46.000 Because they like you a lot.

00:07:47.000 Oh, I know.

00:07:48.000 Yeah, and they also...

00:07:49.000 They're like, I'd like to kidnap that Joe Rogan and bring him home with me.

00:07:54.000 They want me to come to their house.

00:07:55.000 And keep him in my basement.

00:07:56.000 Yeah, I get letters.

00:07:58.000 People want me to come to their house.

00:08:00.000 I get it, you know, especially if you don't know anyone famous.

00:08:03.000 And the thing about podcasts, too, is, like, you're so intimately connected to that person because you hear that person talk all the time.

00:08:09.000 Yeah.

00:08:09.000 I do four of these a week, so it's like they're hearing me, you know, it's fucking 12 hours a week of me talking to you.

00:08:16.000 It's a lot.

00:08:17.000 Yeah, that thing, I mean, it comes up, it's over-observed.

00:08:21.000 Tim Ferriss mentioned it to me.

00:08:23.000 He's like, people think, like, they think they know you, but he's like, But they do.

00:08:30.000 Mm-hmm.

00:08:31.000 They do.

00:08:32.000 They do, and you don't know them.

00:08:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:34.000 Which is real weird.

00:08:35.000 Yeah.

00:08:35.000 They know what you think about stuff.

00:08:37.000 They know what you think about current events.

00:08:38.000 They know about your background, right?

00:08:39.000 The good thing about that, though, is if someone tries to pretend you're something other than you are, if there's a smear campaign against you, people are like, no, I know that guy.

00:08:48.000 Oh.

00:08:49.000 They actually know you.

00:08:50.000 Yeah.

00:08:50.000 They really know you.

00:08:51.000 People have listened to me like 100 hours.

00:08:53.000 There's no confusion.

00:08:55.000 There's no guesswork.

00:08:57.000 This is who I am.

00:08:58.000 Yeah.

00:08:58.000 Not that complicated.

00:08:59.000 It's a long charade.

00:09:00.000 Yeah.

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00:09:54.000 That'd be a long charade that you've played.

00:09:56.000 Yeah.

00:09:57.000 Imagine.

00:09:57.000 Imagine you bullshitted people for that long.

00:09:59.000 That would be amazing.

00:10:01.000 Like a 100,000-hour charade.

00:10:02.000 15 years of bullshitting people.

00:10:06.000 Yeah.

00:10:06.000 But, you know, there's always that suspicion when you see someone on television that they're not really that way because there's been, like, Ellen.

00:10:14.000 Like the Ellen situation.

00:10:16.000 Yeah.

00:10:16.000 You know, people found out that Ellen was mean and all these people came out and said, Ellen's actually a fucking bitch.

00:10:20.000 And they were like, whoa.

00:10:22.000 I can't believe it.

00:10:23.000 And she lost everything.

00:10:24.000 She fell apart, disappeared.

00:10:26.000 Because people found out that this character that she was portraying in a half an hour on a television show was not really who she was.

00:10:33.000 But I hadn't already known that, because I had a buddy who worked for her.

00:10:37.000 And he was like, she's a fucking monster.

00:10:39.000 I didn't really have a lot of awareness.

00:10:44.000 You probably did just from being in the business.

00:10:46.000 I only did because of my buddy.

00:10:48.000 My buddy, Greg, who was one of her writers, was like, she's a piece of shit. 1.00

00:10:51.000 I didn't know enough to be surprised.

00:10:55.000 It's just people that get in those positions of power.

00:10:59.000 And if their whole life they've been fucked with and picked on or, you know, they've been marginalized and then all of a sudden they're in control, like, oh, now it's payback.

00:11:09.000 There's a lot of those folks.

00:11:10.000 That's what happened to Castro.

00:11:12.000 Is that it?

00:11:13.000 Is that what happened to Castro?

00:11:14.000 Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I mean, it's like the, in fact, I would talk about that a little bit in some, you know, I've discussed that in, like, various conversations around when you watch, like, certain political fortunes rise as it becomes.

00:11:27.000 Things become vindictive.

00:11:28.000 I don't even go to Canada anymore.

00:11:30.000 I won't go to Canada for a UFC. I don't go over there.

00:11:33.000 Man, I've spent my whole life in the northern tier states, but I've remained somewhat oblivious to political movements in Canada.

00:11:44.000 Well, they don't have free speech up there.

00:11:45.000 They don't have a First Amendment.

00:11:46.000 They have different laws.

00:11:48.000 They have hate speech laws, which are very dangerous, because who defines hate speech?

00:11:52.000 Yeah.

00:11:53.000 You know, like, so hate speech laws in Canada, they refer to gender pronouns now.

00:11:57.000 So, like, not just male, female.

00:12:00.000 Like, if a guy, like, if Caitlyn Jenner decides that she's a girl, like, Bruce Jenner decides he's a girl, now you have to call him Caitlyn.

00:12:06.000 If you don't, that's hate speech.

00:12:07.000 Like, okay, maybe that's debatable.

00:12:09.000 Maybe you're being an asshole.

00:12:10.000 But no, they want, like, all 78 fake genders. 0.95

00:12:13.000 Like, Zzer and all these fucking crazy fake ones and they-thems. 0.98

00:12:18.000 Well, that's where, like, that's, I mean, isn't that conversation what, Spawned kind of the ascendancy of Jordan Peterson coming out of Canada.

00:12:27.000 Well, that's how Jordan and I became friends in 2015. And then Jordan did my podcast and then Jordan became a famous guy for speaking out against this.

00:12:37.000 He's going through some sort of bizarre re-education process in Canada and he's going to publicize it because it's so ludicrous.

00:12:46.000 So they want to educate him on what he talks about on social media if he wants to keep his clinical license to practice as a psychotherapist.

00:12:57.000 Oh, is that right?

00:12:58.000 But he doesn't want to practice anyway.

00:12:59.000 He makes far more money doing what he...

00:13:00.000 They've essentially made a monster.

00:13:02.000 They made him way more famous than he ever would have been before.

00:13:05.000 Sure, yeah.

00:13:05.000 They highlighted all of Canada's problems way more than would ever get highlighted without this persecution of this guy.

00:13:13.000 It's kind of crazy, though.

00:13:15.000 So he's going through it.

00:13:16.000 He's like, fuck you.

00:13:17.000 I'll go through it, and I'll go through it publicly.

00:13:19.000 You guys are idiots.

00:13:20.000 Also, you're going to have to talk to me.

00:13:21.000 Knowing what the outcome will be.

00:13:22.000 Well, knowing he's going to trounce them.

00:13:24.000 Like, good luck debating that guy.

00:13:26.000 Good fucking luck.

00:13:28.000 Like, good luck.

00:13:28.000 Like, who do you got on your side that's going to go up against that guy?

00:13:32.000 Like, shut the fuck up. 0.96

00:13:34.000 Who on your creepy, authoritarian, totalitarian regime is going to stand up and make sense?

00:13:42.000 Competing against Jordan Peterson.

00:13:44.000 Good fucking luck.

00:13:45.000 I wouldn't want the job.

00:13:47.000 Yeah, good luck.

00:13:48.000 Good luck debating that guy.

00:13:49.000 It's just the whole situation up there is just like so fucked.

00:13:54.000 And I don't know too much about that Pierre Polivet guy, but I hope that, you know, there's some sort of meaningful change up there.

00:14:01.000 I used to love Canada.

00:14:03.000 I used to say Canada is like America with like 20% less douchebags. 0.90

00:14:07.000 They were so friendly.

00:14:09.000 They're so nice.

00:14:09.000 I used to love going to Montreal.

00:14:11.000 I used to love going to Vancouver.

00:14:12.000 I loved it up there.

00:14:14.000 But the woke shit hit there so hard because they don't have freedom of speech.

00:14:19.000 They don't have a First Amendment.

00:14:21.000 So when they start clamping down on your ability to express yourself, there's really disastrous implications.

00:14:28.000 Yeah.

00:14:29.000 But there will probably be a course correction now, which seems like just generally on free speech issues, there's a radical course correction right now.

00:14:37.000 Sure.

00:14:37.000 Or you become Iran.

00:14:39.000 Oh, yeah.

00:14:41.000 You can roll that way.

00:14:42.000 Yeah, I mean, course correction doesn't always work.

00:14:44.000 Like, you know, we think it works because it works in America.

00:14:47.000 And it works in America because we have the First Amendment and we have the Second Amendment.

00:14:50.000 And those two things work together.

00:14:52.000 And if we didn't have those things, we would be genuinely fucked.

00:14:55.000 Because every government wants to eventually completely and totally control its population because it's way easier for them to make money.

00:15:02.000 And that's what they like to do.

00:15:04.000 They like to make money, they like to be in bed with the lobbyists and the military-industrial complex and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, and they like to fucking impose their will on people.

00:15:13.000 And if you can't express yourself and say, hey, this is fucked up, this is crazy, why am I doing this? 0.78

00:15:17.000 Like, these studies show that you're not correct.

00:15:19.000 Like, if you can't say all those things, which right now you can't do in Canada, it's not the same.

00:15:24.000 Like, their ability to express themselves on the internet has been severely limited.

00:15:28.000 It's real weird, man.

00:15:30.000 It's real weird and it's happening right- you could walk there.

00:15:32.000 If you wanted to, you could walk there.

00:15:34.000 And it's fucked.

00:15:35.000 It's like it's on the same patch of land as us and it's fucked.

00:15:39.000 It just shows you what can happen here if you don't have the right laws.

00:15:42.000 Because people like that fuckhead, Justin, They pretend...

00:15:47.000 You guys are on first name basis.

00:15:49.000 Yeah, that cocksucker. 1.00

00:15:50.000 They pretend that they're...

00:15:52.000 And I don't talk this way about anybody.

00:15:54.000 No, I'm really surprised.

00:15:55.000 I genuinely despise people like that.

00:15:57.000 I think it's good to say it publicly because people need to understand what these people are doing.

00:16:01.000 These people are leading you on the road to legitimate communism.

00:16:05.000 He's leading that country on a road to legitimate communism.

00:16:09.000 It's very dangerous.

00:16:11.000 And I think most Canadians are fed up with it at this point.

00:16:14.000 It's just like the party up there has so much control.

00:16:17.000 And he's been forced to resign.

00:16:19.000 So he's got to step down.

00:16:21.000 And just hopefully they don't get some new slick talker to con them into the same old bullshit.

00:16:27.000 Hopefully someone comes along that has like real meaningful change.

00:16:30.000 Which is what I'm hoping is going to happen in America too.

00:16:33.000 If that Tim Walsh cocksucker, if that guy got into power, like if Kamala died and...

00:16:38.000 Tim Walsh, Tampon Tim, was our fucking president.

00:16:41.000 You know how crazy this country would be?

00:16:43.000 That weirdo puts tampons in the boys' room.

00:16:46.000 What about our joy?

00:16:48.000 He's a complete pathological liar.

00:16:51.000 A complete liar.

00:16:52.000 Lied about being in Tiananmen Square.

00:16:54.000 Lied about being a fucking head coach of a football team.

00:16:57.000 Yeah, I thought some of that was...

00:17:01.000 Just weird in how avoidable it was.

00:17:03.000 100% avoidable, but pathological liars.

00:17:06.000 People that are habitual liars, they just lie all the time about everything.

00:17:09.000 But there's a way you can do it where it's sort of like no one's ever going to know.

00:17:16.000 And there's things you can fib about that you find out in five seconds.

00:17:20.000 So you wonder about making the call to embellish something that a person could answer on their phone.

00:17:30.000 Right, right.

00:17:31.000 Instantly.

00:17:31.000 Like, almost as you're saying it.

00:17:33.000 Yeah.

00:17:33.000 That's not true.

00:17:34.000 No, this was your rank in the military.

00:17:36.000 Oh, you didn't deploy for war.

00:17:39.000 You didn't.

00:17:39.000 Why are you saying you deployed at war?

00:17:41.000 The weapons you used in war?

00:17:42.000 No, no, no.

00:17:42.000 You weren't in war.

00:17:44.000 Like, oh, you were a head...

00:17:45.000 No, you weren't a head coach.

00:17:46.000 You were the water boy.

00:17:47.000 Yeah.

00:17:47.000 The fuck are you talking about?

00:17:48.000 I thought some of that was weird.

00:17:49.000 Well, he's just a liar.

00:17:51.000 But that's what a lot of these people are.

00:17:53.000 They're just actors who are ugly.

00:17:56.000 And they're like, well, I can't really...

00:17:58.000 Making it show business.

00:17:59.000 I want a lot of attention.

00:18:00.000 I want to be a special person.

00:18:02.000 So I'll do politics.

00:18:03.000 I'm good at bullshitting.

00:18:05.000 And most people, you know, they're trusting.

00:18:07.000 They're like, oh, he's saying the right things.

00:18:08.000 If you say the right things...

00:18:10.000 You know?

00:18:11.000 Abracadabra.

00:18:11.000 And the next thing you know, you're a fucking governor.

00:18:13.000 Yeah.

00:18:14.000 You ever going to run for governor of Texas?

00:18:15.000 No!

00:18:16.000 No!

00:18:17.000 I'm not running for nothing.

00:18:18.000 I don't want to do nothing.

00:18:19.000 I don't want to do a goddamn thing.

00:18:21.000 I can picture down the road, man, you might be like, I want to be governor of Texas.

00:18:25.000 Fuck that.

00:18:26.000 Why would I do that?

00:18:26.000 I have the best job in the world.

00:18:28.000 I get to talk shit with zero responsibilities.

00:18:31.000 If I get something wrong, I go, listen, I'm a moron.

00:18:33.000 Why are you listening to me in the first place?

00:18:36.000 No, I have no desire in any way, shape, or form to have anything to do with anything involving politics.

00:18:41.000 I don't want to be in control of it.

00:18:43.000 I don't even like having employees.

00:18:45.000 Jamie's awesome.

00:18:46.000 But I mean, I don't like having employees.

00:18:48.000 He nodded.

00:18:48.000 But he's just great.

00:18:49.000 He's just great.

00:18:50.000 He's easy.

00:18:50.000 That's why there's so few of us here.

00:18:53.000 I have a friend who has a podcast, a big podcast, and there's like fucking 13 people working for him.

00:18:58.000 People running around with clipboards.

00:18:59.000 I'm like, what do these people do?

00:19:02.000 Why do you have so many people working for you?

00:19:04.000 This is a freaky ride.

00:19:05.000 He's always got inter-office conflicts and people are getting fired because people are fighting with each other and people are fighting over promotions and trying to get to backstabbing each other.

00:19:16.000 Yeah, maybe you wouldn't like being governor.

00:19:18.000 Fuck that.

00:19:19.000 I would hate it.

00:19:20.000 I don't want to be a mayor.

00:19:21.000 I don't want to be nothing.

00:19:22.000 I don't want to be nothing.

00:19:25.000 But I did get some sort of...

00:19:26.000 Not even a mayor?

00:19:28.000 No.

00:19:28.000 I don't want to be a city councilman.

00:19:30.000 I don't want to be shit.

00:19:32.000 I don't like...

00:19:34.000 The whole thing about it, it's just, it's not a good gig.

00:19:39.000 It's just a creepy business.

00:19:41.000 It's a very creepy and prostitutional business.

00:19:46.000 It's just, I don't like it.

00:19:47.000 Yeah.

00:19:48.000 Yeah.

00:19:49.000 Part of the impetus that pushes people into it is that they want to reverse that, but I think that then there's a...

00:19:54.000 Good luck.

00:19:55.000 There's a magnetic pull that takes you in the direction of...

00:19:58.000 Being perhaps what you wanted to get rid of.

00:20:00.000 Seems like it happens to a lot of the really idealistic young people that get involved in it.

00:20:06.000 And then all of a sudden they start doing really well in the stock market.

00:20:09.000 Yeah.

00:20:10.000 They make some good bets.

00:20:12.000 Yeah.

00:20:13.000 They used to be making $28,000 a year.

00:20:15.000 Now all of a sudden they're worth $12 million.

00:20:18.000 Now they're worth $20 million.

00:20:19.000 And they're hanging out with a bunch of other people that are going on yachts on vacations.

00:20:22.000 I'm like, I'm going to go on a yacht on vacation.

00:20:24.000 Next thing you know.

00:20:25.000 You know, I want a Mercedes.

00:20:27.000 Like, they get you.

00:20:29.000 They slowly get you, you know?

00:20:31.000 You know Evan Hafer.

00:20:33.000 Evan Hafer had a great saying.

00:20:35.000 I've been repeating it a lot, too much lately for people to listen to this podcast, but he said, psychology is more contagious than the flu.

00:20:42.000 I was like, ooh, that's so true.

00:20:45.000 Oh.

00:20:46.000 I mean like ideas in psychology.

00:20:48.000 Well, being around people.

00:20:50.000 Yeah, I'm with you.

00:20:52.000 Absorb the way they think.

00:20:53.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:54.000 If you're around people that are just trying to have a good time, that are nice people, genuinely you lean in that direction.

00:21:00.000 Yeah.

00:21:00.000 You know, like I try to spread that.

00:21:02.000 I want everybody to have fun.

00:21:03.000 Let's have a good time.

00:21:05.000 If you're around a bunch of creeps that are just trying to climb the ladder and claw their way into power, how do you maintain your sovereignty?

00:21:14.000 Yeah, that kind of psychological infection.

00:21:16.000 Yeah, good luck.

00:21:17.000 Good luck battling it out with 460 other creeps who show up in D.C. and lie.

00:21:24.000 Yuck.

00:21:28.000 Although I did get a bizarre I did enjoy affecting the election.

00:21:37.000 Oh, dude, imagine.

00:21:39.000 I can imagine.

00:21:40.000 I did enjoy because I didn't want to.

00:21:42.000 I did not want to get involved in any way, shape, or form.

00:21:45.000 But it got so weird.

00:21:46.000 It got so crazy.

00:21:48.000 You'd expressed that publicly in the past.

00:21:50.000 I was like, I don't want to have anything to do with it in the future.

00:21:52.000 I don't.

00:21:53.000 I didn't want to.

00:21:54.000 I just felt sucked into it.

00:21:55.000 I'm like, we can't do this again.

00:21:58.000 We can't do it with these same people that fucked us for four years.

00:22:02.000 And then they're like, we're going to do it differently now.

00:22:05.000 Like, what's going on?

00:22:06.000 Did you see what's going on?

00:22:07.000 Obviously, you've seen what's going on in California.

00:22:09.000 But the governor gave this creepy fucking speech where he was talking about speculators coming in and talking about what to do with the land of all these homes that have been burnt down.

00:22:21.000 While it's still only 6% contained.

00:22:23.000 And he did this little dance.

00:22:24.000 Like, I've been talking with the governor of Hawaii about what to do.

00:22:29.000 We've got some ideas.

00:22:30.000 We're speculating.

00:22:30.000 We're going to have some meetings.

00:22:31.000 Really?

00:22:32.000 Oh, show it to him, Jamie.

00:22:34.000 It's so creepy because it's happening while these people are...

00:22:38.000 Their houses have been burned, all their childhood memorabilia, all their stuff for their kids, the photos, the fucking everything they have.

00:22:47.000 Everything they have is gone.

00:22:50.000 Heirlooms, you know, their mother's wedding ring, that kind of shit.

00:22:53.000 Everything's burnt to the ground.

00:22:55.000 And this guy's, like, standing in front of all this stuff, and he's got a smile on his face, and he's talking about land use.

00:23:02.000 The development plan.

00:23:03.000 Watch this.

00:23:03.000 Play this.

00:23:04.000 I was just talking to Josh Green, the governor down in Hawaii.

00:23:09.000 You had some ideas about some land use concerns he has around speculators coming in, buying up properties and the like.

00:23:16.000 So we're already working with our legal teams to move those things forward, and we'll be presenting those in a matter of days, not just weeks.

00:23:24.000 A smile on his face.

00:23:25.000 Look at the little wiggle he does with his shoulders.

00:23:28.000 Speculator, watch this.

00:23:30.000 Look at this.

00:23:31.000 Look at this little wiggle.

00:23:32.000 It's excited about the possibilities of speculators coming in.

00:23:36.000 And he's saying, move forward.

00:23:38.000 We're going to move forward on that.

00:23:40.000 These people lost their homes.

00:23:42.000 A lot of those people don't even have fire insurance because the fire insurance pulled out of California.

00:23:46.000 I think like 69% of...

00:23:49.000 Fire insurance pulled out of California because they're like, this is too crazy.

00:23:52.000 You guys aren't doing jack shit to manage this.

00:23:55.000 You're not clearing the brush.

00:23:56.000 The amount of money they could have saved by just clearing brush, by filling the reservoir, that 11 million gallon reservoir was completely empty during the time of full fire season.

00:24:08.000 Why didn't you fix that?

00:24:10.000 It's all insanely mismanaged.

00:24:13.000 And then this guy is on...

00:24:14.000 Television, talking about...

00:24:16.000 Doing a dance.

00:24:17.000 Doing a dance in front of the burned-down home that people used to sleep in, where their children would sleep in.

00:24:23.000 Like, this is so disgusting.

00:24:25.000 You know...

00:24:26.000 That's why I don't want to be governor.

00:24:28.000 Oh, you know what's funny?

00:24:29.000 I was going to tell you about...

00:24:30.000 On the way down here, I happened to be sitting across from one of our senators from Montana.

00:24:36.000 And after...

00:24:39.000 When the flight was getting off, you know what's hilarious?

00:24:42.000 This...

00:24:43.000 This old-timer comes by him and legitimately, I'm not joking, legitimately brings up to him potholes on the road.

00:24:53.000 Really?

00:24:53.000 Like, on the airplane.

00:24:55.000 He's like, you gotta do something about these potholes.

00:24:58.000 I'm outside of Belgrade and these potholes are terrible.

00:25:01.000 He's like, okay, yep, got it, got it.

00:25:04.000 Well, I mean, the senator can't do much about the office.

00:25:07.000 No, I know, but it's almost like a cliche.

00:25:09.000 But, you know, the thing with their night...

00:25:12.000 Guys that I grew up with, you know, like a fish that was very central to our upbringing was a fish called smelt.

00:25:21.000 It was different kinds of smelt.

00:25:23.000 So we had a rainbow smelt, and they live in the Great Lakes. 0.99

00:25:26.000 And so in the spring, when the smelt run, you know, it was a big deal to go smelt dipping.

00:25:30.000 And we would smelt dip them with drop nets and dip nets.

00:25:34.000 It was a huge thing.

00:25:35.000 And when smelt numbers were really high, you know, it was just like...

00:25:38.000 It kind of brought everybody together.

00:25:40.000 A lot of my buddies used to do that in Massachusetts.

00:25:42.000 The smelt run.

00:25:42.000 Yeah.

00:25:43.000 So the other night, someone had taken out a clip where someone had taken out a chunk of an article in my friend's circle and had sent me a thing where Trump had called the Delta smelt like a basically useless fish.

00:25:56.000 And I was like, man, I feel like there needs to be like an article in the Constitution that the president cannot shit-talk smelt, you know?

00:26:08.000 But then I realized it was a different smelt, so I cooled off once I realized it was the Delta smelt, not our beloved Rainbow smelt.

00:26:15.000 Well, you can have...

00:26:16.000 There's a balance, right, in terms of being environmentally conscious, but also recognizing the needs of the human population.

00:26:24.000 And I think that's been distorted in California significantly.

00:26:28.000 Yeah, but I do get...

00:26:29.000 My hackles get up about...

00:26:32.000 Disparaging fishes and birds.

00:26:35.000 Of course.

00:26:36.000 Yeah, no, I get it.

00:26:38.000 Playoffs.

00:26:39.000 We're talking about playoffs?

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00:27:25.000 Gambling problem?

00:27:55.000 I get it.

00:27:56.000 That's your world.

00:27:57.000 That's your world.

00:27:59.000 Yeah, there's a balance.

00:28:02.000 A balance to be held, for sure.

00:28:04.000 You know, I'm not real thrilled with this idea of, like, continuing to drill for oil in the Gulf and drill for oil everywhere and knowing that occasionally these things blow up and you have massive pollution.

00:28:20.000 But...

00:28:20.000 Also, I don't think we should be dependent on Saudi Arabia for all our oil.

00:28:25.000 It's a mix.

00:28:25.000 You know, one of the kind of contradictions you encounter with stuff like this, and I've been a little bit involved in this the last few years, is I started going down to the Gulf of Mexico to spearfish on the oil rigs.

00:28:39.000 And so, the oil rigs are, imagine like a vertical coral reef, you know?

00:28:50.000 I don't want to call it, by no means I don't want to call the Gulf a desert, but I mean, you could, if you're away from the rigs, you could swim along the surface for miles, potentially.

00:28:59.000 Right?

00:28:59.000 If you're just swimming with a snorkel and mask, you can swim along the surface for miles and not encounter fish.

00:29:05.000 I mean, it's countering where you're seeing them in front of your face.

00:29:08.000 Right.

00:29:08.000 And you pull up to a rig, and it's hung in fish.

00:29:13.000 I mean, they're draped in thousands of fish.

00:29:17.000 Okay?

00:29:19.000 You know, you grow up with this idea, if you just have a passive understanding of all this stuff, you grow up with this idea that, like, oil exploration equals a diminishing of natural life, a diminishing of wildlife.

00:29:32.000 And you go in, and there there's this big debate where certain people want to pull the abandoned rigs out.

00:29:41.000 But you have fishermen who are like, they're here now, leave them. 0.78

00:29:47.000 Because that's where all the fish are.

00:29:48.000 Yeah.

00:29:49.000 And it's this very spirited debate, and different administrations will have different plans.

00:29:55.000 They had a program like Idle Iron, which was to pull them out.

00:29:59.000 There was a program called Rigs to Reefs, which is to tip them over so they're not navigational hazards.

00:30:05.000 The shrimpers don't like them because they cause navigational obstructions. 1.00

00:30:10.000 You can hang your gear up on them.

00:30:12.000 But all the rod and reel fishermen and all the spear fishermen want the rigs there.

00:30:16.000 So you wind up in a situation like that where it's this real complexity, and you can picture, you know, it puts people in a situation, and viewing it, it puts you in a situation where it's not that clean.

00:30:28.000 Yeah.

00:30:28.000 You know?

00:30:29.000 Like, you're creating, I mean, they, you almost hate to say it, because you're supposed to, you know, you're supposed to be, you know, most people from the environmental movement are anti-oil exploration, but then you go and look and be like, they created, like, Accidentally created an unbelievable fishery.

00:30:49.000 Yeah.

00:30:49.000 In the Gulf.

00:30:51.000 And there's dudes now, like, I got buddies that spearfish there and fish there.

00:30:54.000 And it's like, remember in Star Wars, the original Star Wars, where they go to that fucking planet and the planet's gone?

00:31:00.000 Hey, shouldn't the planet be here, you know?

00:31:02.000 That scene.

00:31:03.000 I've been with buddies of mine and they got GPS marks for rigs.

00:31:08.000 And you show up and it's like Star Wars.

00:31:11.000 It's like, you show up and the rig's not there anymore.

00:31:13.000 Because there's these ships out there called Rig Reapers that are out plucking the rigs.

00:31:18.000 And they're plucking them faster than they can put them in.

00:31:19.000 But it's got all the fishermen pissed off.

00:31:21.000 That's an interesting situation.

00:31:23.000 Yeah, they want them there now, man.

00:31:25.000 Lake Austin has a similar situation.

00:31:27.000 So Lake Austin used to be this...

00:31:29.000 It's still very good for bass fishing.

00:31:31.000 They have big bass on Lake Austin.

00:31:33.000 And the people that live on the lake, the highfalutin folks, didn't like all the weeds.

00:31:40.000 So they brought in carp.

00:31:43.000 And the carp ate everything.

00:31:44.000 So now the place looks like the bottom of a swimming pool.

00:31:47.000 It's like all the vegetation is fucked.

00:31:50.000 And so the bass don't have a lot of places to go.

00:31:52.000 Like, you know, where I live, people go to the docks.

00:31:55.000 Like, they cast to the docks.

00:31:58.000 You know, and they fish near people's docks.

00:32:00.000 Because that's, like, the only cover that these fish have.

00:32:03.000 And so there's talk of, like, submerging, like, trees or, you know, dropping things down.

00:32:08.000 Sure, creating structures.

00:32:09.000 Yeah, creating structures.

00:32:10.000 And then there's people that are opposed to that.

00:32:11.000 Because, like, you know, you have your, you know, the wakeboarders and all the people that like the, like, recreation on the water.

00:32:18.000 They don't want anything that could possibly fuck up their boat.

00:32:21.000 Yeah.

00:32:22.000 You know, but, like, they already fucked it up by bringing in the carp. 0.96

00:32:26.000 Like, and you can't get the carp out.

00:32:28.000 Like, how are you going to kill the carp?

00:32:29.000 You know, Tom, you remember the writer Tom, was it Tom Robbins or Tim?

00:32:33.000 No, Tim Robbins is the actor, right?

00:32:34.000 Right, right.

00:32:35.000 Tom Robbins, skinny, skinny, skinny legs and all.

00:32:39.000 Mm-hmm.

00:32:39.000 Jitterbug perfume.

00:32:41.000 He had a line where, you know, like in Hawaii they had this famous thing where they had a rat problem.

00:32:47.000 And then they brought in mongooses to kill the rats.

00:32:50.000 And then now they got a mongoose problem.

00:32:52.000 Yeah.

00:32:53.000 He had some line that like, we used to have a crime problem, then we brought in cops.

00:32:59.000 But it's like my first, you're talking about political involvement.

00:33:05.000 My first time I ever approached anything remotely political was on the lake I grew up on.

00:33:10.000 We had an invasive seaweed, an invasive aquatic plant called Eurasian milfoil, and it grew in our lake, but it made unbelievable fish habitat.

00:33:22.000 And at the time, I was not hip enough to understand the deleterious effects of non-native vegetation.

00:33:30.000 I just knew that when you wanted to catch a fish, you went to the milfoil bed, because all the fish were hiding in the milfoil.

00:33:35.000 And they had this proposal to come in and kill all the milfoil in all the lakes.

00:33:39.000 And I went down, and I remember I was in high school.

00:33:42.000 I went down, and I remember I was the sole person there to represent the milfoil side of the argument.

00:33:49.000 And then they did it.

00:33:50.000 They went in and poisoned all the milfoil out of the lakes in hopes of bringing in native seaweeds would take hold.

00:33:57.000 But it absolutely transformed the lake.

00:34:00.000 And from a fishery perspective, not a perspective of native habitat, but from a pounds of fish perspective, the pounds of fish, like the biomass of fish declined by pulling out the weeds.

00:34:15.000 Of course.

00:34:17.000 On one hand, you look like, well, why would you mess up with this?

00:34:20.000 There's fish everywhere.

00:34:21.000 And some people would be like, well, it's not a native plant.

00:34:23.000 And we need to value native wildlife at the expense of what a high schooler would look at as like...

00:34:29.000 That's where the fish are. 0.58

00:34:30.000 Yeah.

00:34:30.000 You know?

00:34:31.000 They didn't do what they did to Lake Austin.

00:34:33.000 They didn't do it to Lady Bird Lake.

00:34:35.000 So if you go to Lady Bird Lake, it's just hopping with bass.

00:34:38.000 Remained a good fishery.

00:34:39.000 Yeah.

00:34:39.000 There's seaweed and all kinds of...

00:34:41.000 Not seaweed, but, you know, lily pads and all kinds of shit over there that you don't have on Lake Austin.

00:34:46.000 They didn't bring in the carp.

00:34:48.000 Yeah.

00:34:48.000 The other enormously destructive thing that they've done around the lakes where I grew up on is all that...

00:34:57.000 So much of that...

00:34:59.000 The lake life relies on what you call the littoral zone, the shoreline zone.

00:35:06.000 Most of these fish species, they like it to be dirty, meaning weeds, falling over trees.

00:35:11.000 It creates all kinds of habitat for little stuff to hide.

00:35:14.000 On these lakes where I grew up in Michigan, there's been a tendency over the years to put roundup on your shoreline and then haul in beach sand.

00:35:25.000 You just watch over the years.

00:35:26.000 Over the course of my lifetime, You just watch this, like, really, like, verdant, kind of, like, vibrant environment become increasingly like a swimming pool in a lot of those lakes, man.

00:35:38.000 And it's just been depressing to watch happen.

00:35:41.000 Yeah, we were talking the other day about eating freshwater fish and how much toxic chemicals are in freshwater fish.

00:35:50.000 It's fucking bananas.

00:35:51.000 Well, they have state advisories, which I've always ignored.

00:35:55.000 I've always ignored.

00:35:56.000 Have you ever get your blood tested?

00:35:58.000 No.

00:35:58.000 But you want to know, I might have told you this story, man.

00:36:00.000 Did I ever tell you a story about this?

00:36:01.000 Which one?

00:36:02.000 Well, I'll tell it real quick.

00:36:04.000 So I grew up with a guy who, a guy named Ron Spring.

00:36:08.000 Yes.

00:36:09.000 I'll tell you the Ron Spring story?

00:36:10.000 Okay, never mind.

00:36:11.000 Please do.

00:36:11.000 Oh, if I tell the story too many people.

00:36:13.000 I don't think you told it on here.

00:36:14.000 Okay.

00:36:15.000 I grew up with this guy, Ron Spring, and for a living, he was a commercial bait fisherman.

00:36:19.000 He would catch wigglers, minnows. 0.98

00:36:24.000 He'd dig crawlers, catch leeches, and he would supply bait and tackle shops with live bait.

00:36:31.000 And he had spring sporting goods where he sold his own live bait.

00:36:34.000 And he would even hire women to sow what's called a spawn sack, where he'd take little pieces of salmon eggs and sew them into a little mesh bag for steelhead bait.

00:36:44.000 He was just in the bait business, but also was a fishing fanatic and lived off fish his whole life.

00:36:49.000 So he was living off Great Lakes fish his whole life.

00:36:52.000 And the University of Montana started trying to track down old-timers who'd eaten, like, enormous quantities of Great Lakes fish to test them for heavy metals exposure, okay, and other toxic things in the environment.

00:37:09.000 And he'd lived his whole life, like me, with, like, complete defiance of health advisory suggestions about fish consumption.

00:37:17.000 And he goes down there, and he would go in every month or two for these little batteries of tests.

00:37:22.000 And one of the things they would do with him is they would tell him, they'd give him a grocery list.

00:37:27.000 And they'd be like, hey, you've got to go to the store and buy, like, bread, eggs, cheese, butter, whatever.

00:37:32.000 And then he'd wait a minute, and they'd say, what were you supposed to buy at the store?

00:37:37.000 You know, and he's telling me this story.

00:37:39.000 And he told me, I always laugh because he said, Steve.

00:37:42.000 I wouldn't have remembered that list if I never ate a piece of fish in my life.

00:37:48.000 So they were trying to gauge his memory based on the amount of heavy metal inspired?

00:37:52.000 Yeah, presumably they tested his blood and found something of interest, and so they were trying to figure out what happens to a guy.

00:37:59.000 But I lived in Seattle, right on Lake Washington, and we would catch a lot of yellow perch.

00:38:08.000 People, they're full of yellow perch, which are non-native, and everyone in that area in the Pacific Northwest is like a trout and salmon snob.

00:38:14.000 So I had the whole fishery to myself.

00:38:17.000 You could go out and catch easily 100-plus yellow perch out of Lake Washington, but they had a health advisory on them, and you weren't supposed to.

00:38:26.000 They would tell you that perch over 12 inches, you're only supposed to eat one meal a month or some shit like that.

00:38:32.000 But we just wouldn't keep them over 12 inches.

00:38:35.000 Because there weren't that many over 12 inches anyways.

00:38:37.000 And we'd just eat them all the time.

00:38:38.000 I would have fish fries.

00:38:40.000 And when you fried fish in the Great Lakes, there's no person in the Great Lakes region that I was aware of.

00:38:45.000 Like in Michigan, there's no person that would even kind of give a shit about these restrictions.

00:38:51.000 They would be surprised to hear that there were any kind of restrictions.

00:38:54.000 But like the way the different sentiments and different mentalities run.

00:38:58.000 In Seattle, you'd have people that like, they're like, you caught it where?

00:39:01.000 Lake Washington?

00:39:02.000 No way.

00:39:03.000 Right?

00:39:04.000 Just like a level of awareness from an urban environment about those kind of toxins.

00:39:09.000 And growing up, where I grew up, it was just not a thing that people discussed.

00:39:14.000 Even though they're right in the fishing rigs.

00:39:16.000 When did it start happening?

00:39:18.000 Like, when did freshwater fish become toxic?

00:39:21.000 That would be something I'd be interested in.

00:39:23.000 Man, I think it's mercury, it's certain industrial solvents.

00:39:27.000 It's BPAs, too.

00:39:28.000 It's forever chemicals.

00:39:29.000 And I think that with Lake Washington, there was a lot...

00:39:32.000 Correct me, maybe I'm wrong.

00:39:34.000 As I say this, I might be wrong.

00:39:36.000 I think there was things around bowing plants and old solvents and stuff that went in the water.

00:39:43.000 But mercury, which comes from...

00:39:46.000 You know, different ways.

00:39:48.000 They have ways of scrubbing it now and greatly reducing the amount of mercury when you burn coal.

00:39:52.000 But for a long time, mercury would come from the combustion of coal, and it would be distributed globally, evenly everywhere.

00:40:00.000 So it didn't necessarily matter if you were, it didn't matter if you're eating a pelagic fish.

00:40:06.000 I mean, if you're eating like a passivorous pelagic fish, it would seem to be the worst.

00:40:11.000 What does pelagic mean?

00:40:12.000 Fish that live their life up at the surface.

00:40:14.000 And then ones that eat fish, that eat fish, that eat fish are the worst.

00:40:20.000 So picture you got like a marlin, right?

00:40:22.000 He's eating tuna.

00:40:24.000 Tuna are eating fish that are eating fish, and so they magnify and accumulate all this stuff in their fat.

00:40:31.000 That's like globally distributed in the oceans.

00:40:34.000 And they've slowed down mercury.

00:40:37.000 They've slowed down how much mercury is going out because of the ways they scrub when they burn coal now.

00:40:43.000 But it's just stagnant in the environment.

00:40:46.000 Did I ever tell you my arsenic story?

00:40:47.000 No.

00:40:48.000 I got my blood work done.

00:40:49.000 You know, I get my blood work done pretty regularly.

00:40:51.000 And I went once a few years back, quite a few years back, 15 years ago at least.

00:40:57.000 And my doctor said, do you have a lot of arsenic in your blood?

00:41:02.000 And I go, like, someone's poisoning me?

00:41:04.000 He's like, no.

00:41:05.000 Do you eat a lot of fish?

00:41:07.000 Oh, really?

00:41:07.000 And I said, I eat a lot of sardines.

00:41:10.000 He goes, how much?

00:41:11.000 I go, four or five cans a night.

00:41:13.000 And he was like, what?

00:41:15.000 He's like, what the fuck are you doing?

00:41:16.000 I go, what are you doing?

00:41:18.000 Well, I love sardines.

00:41:19.000 And if I come home from the comedy club and I'm hungry, it's easy to have what I thought was healthy food.

00:41:26.000 It's just sardines and olive oil.

00:41:28.000 What could be bad about that?

00:41:30.000 And so he said, take a few months off and then come back and let's do this again.

00:41:34.000 And I took a few months off and I came back, no arsenic.

00:41:37.000 I was like, oh man.

00:41:39.000 He goes, it's not enough to be concerned.

00:41:41.000 But you're getting arsenic in your blood from these sardines. 0.61

00:41:46.000 I work with a guy, Seth, and he kind of had this perfect storm where we had been in Hawaii, so we had wahoo and yellowfin tuna.

00:41:57.000 And he fishes in Alaska, so he had all his halibut.

00:42:00.000 And then he's got a bunch of walleye that he catches.

00:42:03.000 He's a big walleye fisherman that he catches locally.

00:42:05.000 And he wound up...

00:42:10.000 There's kind of like a long-term mercury deal and a short-term mercury deal, but he had mercury poisoning.

00:42:15.000 His hands went numb and stuff.

00:42:17.000 Oh, yeah.

00:42:17.000 And then I got to read about it, and there's various cases where there's this other case that's kind of interesting.

00:42:22.000 This guy gets on a cruise ship, doesn't eat fish.

00:42:25.000 This guy doesn't have fish in his diet.

00:42:27.000 It was a thing that was covered in the news.

00:42:29.000 And he gets on a cruise, and they have an all-you-can-eat sushi thing.

00:42:33.000 So he wants to get his money's worth, and so he's gorging himself on this all-you-can-eat sushi.

00:42:37.000 During the course of his cruise and generates mercury poisoning.

00:42:42.000 Like a short-term version.

00:42:44.000 And dudes I hang out with in Hawaii that have access to a lot of big pacivorous fish, they'll sort of deliberately pace themselves.

00:42:54.000 They could live off tuna, but they'll deliberately pace themselves keeping in mind the amount of that stuff you're getting in.

00:43:01.000 And RFK Jr., I had RFK Jr. on the show, on our podcast, and he had had He had had mercury poisoning.

00:43:09.000 Really?

00:43:10.000 From what?

00:43:11.000 Canned tuna.

00:43:12.000 Was eating too much canned tuna.

00:43:14.000 Wow.

00:43:15.000 Yeah.

00:43:16.000 So maybe I've had it.

00:43:17.000 I don't know.

00:43:19.000 Well, no, I've had my blood tested.

00:43:21.000 I don't know.

00:43:21.000 But I can't picture...

00:43:23.000 The sentiment I have about it is a friend of mine who fishes flathead catfish, which have...

00:43:29.000 They accumulate a lot of bio...

00:43:31.000 Not biotoxins.

00:43:32.000 They accumulate a lot of heavy metals.

00:43:35.000 And he said, and we were talking about eating this stuff, and he said, if I can eat, if I can catch and eat so many big flatheads that it kills me, I win.

00:43:46.000 Well, there's no cases of CWD getting into humans yet, right?

00:43:55.000 Nope.

00:43:56.000 No, but that's the big fear.

00:43:58.000 Like, you and I are on a text chain with Ted Nugent, and he's always like trying to...

00:44:01.000 I met Ted's kid last night.

00:44:02.000 Which one?

00:44:03.000 Rocco?

00:44:04.000 Yeah, good kid.

00:44:06.000 You know, Ted is always trying to dismiss the concerns of CWD. He doesn't believe in it.

00:44:13.000 He thinks it's overhyped.

00:44:15.000 Well, yeah.

00:44:17.000 It scares the fuck out of me.

00:44:18.000 Yeah.

00:44:19.000 Because it's a prion disease, right? 0.99

00:44:21.000 Yeah.

00:44:21.000 So if it jumps to people, and it has jumped to certain rodent species, isn't that correct?

00:44:27.000 No, right now it's cervids.

00:44:30.000 Oh, just cervids?

00:44:32.000 Cervids, yeah.

00:44:32.000 There hasn't been a case of it jumping to like a mole or something like that?

00:44:36.000 Well, they did.

00:44:37.000 You know when you do, I don't want to get in over my waiters here, but I'd love to talk about CWD at length, but sometimes you can do a, if someone does medical research and they'll have a finding, there's a term for it.

00:44:54.000 Let's say you have a finding that's alarming, but you haven't done peer review yet.

00:44:59.000 But let's say I just all of a sudden made some discovery that had huge implications, and people would need to become immediately aware of what I might have found out.

00:45:09.000 There's a term for it where you would release these preliminary findings, even though it hasn't been held up to academic rigor, because it's of such importance.

00:45:21.000 A lot of times you don't get to skip that step, but in cases of medical, you get to skip a step and say, hey, hang tight.

00:45:27.000 We're not all the way there yet, but look, this is kind of alarming.

00:45:31.000 They had a case, and it all corroded, but these guys had a case where they were able to infect a rhesus monkey with CWD. But then it wasn't replicable, didn't hold up.

00:45:44.000 But when things like that happen, they tend to get a ton of media.

00:45:48.000 But then down the road, the media doesn't follow suit.

00:45:52.000 There's been cases where there was one not long ago where they were looking at people that had this rare form of dementia, and they found that of these people that had this rare form of dementia, a couple of them were deer hunters who lived in CWD areas.

00:46:08.000 So they come out with a, hey everybody, check this out.

00:46:11.000 But then it winds up being that when you do a statistical analysis on it, it was...

00:46:16.000 No different than anything else.

00:46:17.000 There was no reason that it wasn't like they scored higher, that deer hunters scored higher, or nothing.

00:46:23.000 It's just a certain percentage of people get dementia.

00:46:24.000 Yeah, and so it's like a certain number of people eat dementia, a certain number of people eat venison, and statistically you're going to have some overlap if you survey enough people.

00:46:33.000 So even though they gave like a big heads up, it won't be a nothing there.

00:46:37.000 But yeah, CWD, it's a highly infectious.

00:46:43.000 It was first identified in Colorado on a research facility, not a game farm.

00:46:48.000 It was first identified on a cervid research facility in Colorado, I believe in the early 70s.

00:46:53.000 And then there's been a debate, like some people feel that it was always there and wasn't detected, right?

00:47:03.000 And that it wasn't like we found it the minute it came out.

00:47:07.000 It was just that it would perhaps had been there and then we discovered that it was always there.

00:47:14.000 But it does expand its range all the time, right?

00:47:19.000 Even in the last few years, we've had our first cases in Montana.

00:47:22.000 We keep every year we add, like, without fail, every year we find CWD in states where it didn't previously exist.

00:47:31.000 Or within states that have CWD, we find CWD in counties.

00:47:36.000 That didn't have it.

00:47:37.000 Oftentimes you can look and it makes sense because it flows, but now and then you get these weird jumps, right?

00:47:43.000 Where something jumps a big moat of inactivity and then all of a sudden you get like a new hot spot and you look and be like, well, how did, if it's an infectious disease and deer aren't flying in airplanes, how did it jump?

00:47:55.000 Some of the jumps, people tie it to transporting.

00:47:59.000 There's a theory that is well accepted in a lot of circles would be that Moving cervids, moving deer and elk to penned operations has facilitated the movement of CWD. What it used to mean to be, if someone was a CWD denier before, it would be that they denied that it was a thing.

00:48:23.000 Like, there is no disease called CWD. It's generally accepted now that there's a disease called CWD, but now the debate is sort of, does it matter or not?

00:48:32.000 Right?

00:48:33.000 Our mutual friend Doug Dern is like heavily involved in CWD, combating CWD, trying to get more money spent to understand CWD. And they look at, you're looking at, there's two risks with CWD. One risk is that ultimately it's going to lead to like destruction of deer herds.

00:48:53.000 Meaning if you get like, it's always fatal.

00:48:55.000 And if infection rates get to a certain point, we're going to lose deer.

00:48:59.000 If it's always fatal and you have infection rates of 50 or 60% and it takes a couple years to kill them, you're going to run out of big bucks because nothing can live long enough.

00:49:08.000 The other fear is that it jumps the barrier and becomes a human pathogen.

00:49:15.000 All the hunters I know, the question we always talk about is, would you eat CWD-positive meat?

00:49:25.000 You know?

00:49:26.000 Right.

00:49:26.000 Even if it doesn't jump currently, would you take that risk?

00:49:29.000 So, Yanni was recently with a guy, and he's like, he's eaten, him and his family have eaten four CWD-positive deer.

00:49:39.000 Man, I couldn't, I can't, like, I couldn't serve it to my kids.

00:49:47.000 No.

00:49:47.000 I wouldn't eat it myself, either.

00:49:49.000 I can't serve it to my kids.

00:49:50.000 No, I wouldn't serve it to my kids.

00:49:51.000 I have annoyingly eat it, but here's the thing.

00:49:52.000 Here's the rub.

00:49:55.000 I've said this number before and people are like, that's not true.

00:49:57.000 But it's true.

00:49:58.000 I'm telling you.

00:49:58.000 Hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD positive.

00:50:02.000 Hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD positive meat.

00:50:05.000 I would imagine that's true.

00:50:07.000 Yeah.

00:50:07.000 Over many decades.

00:50:09.000 Yeah.

00:50:09.000 Right?

00:50:10.000 So, at what point do you get comfortable?

00:50:17.000 I don't know.

00:50:19.000 Dude, it's a tough one.

00:50:20.000 Yeah, it's a tough one.

00:50:21.000 It's a tough one.

00:50:22.000 It can jump.

00:50:24.000 It hasn't.

00:50:25.000 It hasn't.

00:50:26.000 But when you look at the history of these types of diseases, especially prion diseases like mad cow, prion disease, jumped people. 0.68

00:50:35.000 You know the debate between prion and prion?

00:50:37.000 No.

00:50:39.000 I used to say prion, but then I heard scientists say prion and I wanted to sound smart.

00:50:43.000 Well, the biologist Jim Heffelfinger, that'd be a very good guy for you to have on your show someday.

00:50:52.000 The biologist Jim Heffelfinger sent me a Thing where the guy that named it, the guy that coined the term, spelled out phonetically how it's supposed to be pronounced.

00:51:03.000 So then I was like, okay, I'm going to stick with Pryon now. 0.98

00:51:06.000 It's the guy that came up with it says Pryon.

00:51:08.000 Oh, so that's what it is?

00:51:09.000 And not Pryon.

00:51:10.000 He's like said, he's like, we'll call it this and we'll pronounce it this way.

00:51:14.000 Okay.

00:51:15.000 So it's pre-on.

00:51:17.000 Now I always try to remember which one it is.

00:51:20.000 Yeah, it's pre-on.

00:51:21.000 It's scary, dude.

00:51:23.000 It's scary.

00:51:23.000 And Doug, I've said this a hundred times before, if I say, man, the main thing I'm worried about is people getting it, that pisses Doug off.

00:51:35.000 Because Doug's worried about that we're going to lose big bucks.

00:51:39.000 And people.

00:51:40.000 He likes healthy deer.

00:51:46.000 He doesn't want a disease running through his deer herd.

00:51:49.000 It hasn't jumped to cows or anything else.

00:51:51.000 No, and that's the...

00:51:52.000 See, that's one area where...

00:51:54.000 I'm going to get myself in trouble with Doug in all kinds of ways, because that's the thing I think about.

00:51:59.000 It's not that they're...

00:52:00.000 I'm not saying the ag world is complacent.

00:52:03.000 Right.

00:52:04.000 I'm not saying they're complacent.

00:52:05.000 Like, there's a lot of interest in the agricultural community to understand CWD better.

00:52:09.000 But if you look and be like, dude, a cow looks a hell of a lot more like a deer than I do.

00:52:13.000 Right.

00:52:13.000 I'm just going to watch the cow.

00:52:16.000 And all of a sudden, these cows start getting sick.

00:52:18.000 Then my ass is going to get nervous.

00:52:20.000 Right.

00:52:20.000 But I'm like, they're rubbing noses with these deer.

00:52:23.000 Yeah.

00:52:23.000 And it gets on the grass.

00:52:24.000 It gets on the vegetation.

00:52:25.000 And you can't kill that shit.

00:52:27.000 Yeah.

00:52:27.000 I remember some politician was like, well, I'll just cook your deer meat longer.

00:52:30.000 And I was like, well, I can't remember what it is.

00:52:32.000 You can't cook deer meat to 1,400 degrees.

00:52:35.000 Yeah, you have to incinerate it.

00:52:36.000 Or whatever else it becomes.

00:52:38.000 But yeah, cooking it isn't the thing.

00:52:41.000 It can survive.

00:52:42.000 That's why if you hunt, there's a lot of restrictions now on moving carcasses around.

00:52:47.000 Right?

00:52:47.000 So more and more states are implementing that when you go home, they don't want you bringing the head home.

00:52:52.000 They don't want you bringing the bones home.

00:52:54.000 I also fear for a time, and it'd just be terrible, fear for a time where you couldn't bring anything.

00:52:58.000 Like, they really restrict movement, you know?

00:53:01.000 Right.

00:53:01.000 Like, it's easy to, like, it's very easy to comply with not moving bones.

00:53:05.000 It's easy to comply with not moving brain matter.

00:53:07.000 Like, that's easy, right?

00:53:09.000 Yeah.

00:53:09.000 But picture that this gets out of hand and all of a sudden it's like, you can't move venison.

00:53:13.000 Across county lines.

00:53:15.000 I don't know.

00:53:16.000 No one's thrown this out there, but as they look at further and further restrictions, it's scary.

00:53:22.000 And so from a guy, I don't want to speak for Nugent, but from his idea of being overblown, his idea would be, like I said, I hate speaking for the guy.

00:53:37.000 It would be that...

00:53:38.000 Here we are making policy changes, making game management changes, making rule changes, adjusting what you can and can't do in the woods based off a thing that most people would be like, but we haven't proven there's a problem.

00:53:52.000 That would be his perspective on it.

00:53:53.000 My perspective is it's scary as shit, and as much as our government right now is trying to find a way to stop spending so much money, I support any money that can get spent on finding out if this can be a real problem or not.

00:54:06.000 I'll find other places to get the money, but I'd like to channel taxpayer dollars, billions of them, into making sure deer meat stays safe.

00:54:18.000 That's my kind of pork barrel spending.

00:54:20.000 There's no way to eradicate it, right?

00:54:23.000 There's no way to identify the deer that haven't exhibited symptoms, and they're spreading it.

00:54:29.000 Yeah, they're looking at ways to test live animals.

00:54:32.000 Then there's other cockamamie ideas that one would be that some deer seem to be resilient.

00:54:41.000 Yeah, and so that you'd move these resilient deer.

00:54:46.000 Into other populations to try to breed in some kind of resiliency, which, you know, it's a wild animal.

00:54:53.000 But is it ultimately resilient?

00:54:54.000 Because, like, mad cow disease has, there's an incubation period, right?

00:54:58.000 This is the concern.

00:54:59.000 Like, I remember...

00:55:00.000 That's the other thing, is that we're all, like, me, everybody, because I guarantee I've eaten CWD-infected meat.

00:55:04.000 The other concern is we all got it.

00:55:06.000 We just don't know it yet because it takes 10 years.

00:55:08.000 But they've been tracking these dudes that went to a fire department fundraiser.

00:55:12.000 They had 100-some people that ate a bunch of CWD-infected meat at a fire department.

00:55:19.000 those people and they haven't got it but that's the other thing is this it was over a decade ago so that's the other thing is that we all got it like all these hunters you know i don't think this is true but some people are like all these hunters they don't know it yet but it could be that all of a sudden in 10 years they all start dropping like flies or get developed dementia oh i don't it's such a i really think that um i don't like to see any kind of wildlife disease right Of course.

00:55:49.000 I do believe if you look at prevalency rates and you look at the fact that it's always fatal, whether or not removing the human question to it, I do think that you will find that it'll become harder to produce big deer.

00:56:09.000 Hmm.

00:56:10.000 I worry about that.

00:56:11.000 And it'd be easy to track.

00:56:12.000 Just go and look at Boone and Crockett entries over time from all these counties.

00:56:19.000 So go to Buffalo County, Wisconsin, a famous giant whitetail producing place.

00:56:24.000 They get high rates of CWD prevalency.

00:56:26.000 If you put a line on CWD prevalency and you put a line on Boone and Crockett entries...

00:56:35.000 And you're able to track this over many years because we have all this data.

00:56:38.000 Does it correlate?

00:56:39.000 Does CWD prevalently drive down big bucks?

00:56:44.000 I'm sure some mathematician out there has started to try to look at if it's true, but a lot of people on the ground say that you do see population-level impact from CWD. And I'm guessing there's no way it doesn't affect participation, meaning that people that would like to hunt, And the whole promise of wild meat is, you know, you're getting, like, really healthy meat.

00:57:10.000 You're able to control the food chain.

00:57:12.000 But then all of a sudden you throw in this question of, like, well, but it could give you a prion disease, hypothetically.

00:57:19.000 That's going to dampen people's enthusiasm about deer.

00:57:23.000 And I'd hate to see we get to a point where when I look at a deer, I look at a deer with, like, great enthusiasm and love.

00:57:30.000 What happens when we look at deer and we look at them like a disease vector?

00:57:34.000 Ooh.

00:57:35.000 Right.

00:57:36.000 Does it become, like, do you view it like a rat?

00:57:38.000 Or you see a rat and you, like, recoil?

00:57:40.000 Ooh.

00:57:41.000 Like, I don't want that shit in my yard.

00:57:42.000 Right, right.

00:57:43.000 They carry disease, don't they?

00:57:44.000 What if your dog could get it?

00:57:45.000 Yeah, like, picture down the road that, like, deer, which are this, like, universally loved, praised animal, this kind of, like, symbol of the American outdoorsman, becomes like a, yeah, that shit out of my yard.

00:57:58.000 Oof.

00:57:59.000 You know?

00:57:59.000 When Doug talks about, you know, they do a lot of testing in Wisconsin.

00:58:04.000 A lot of testing, yeah.

00:58:05.000 What's the percentage that come up positive?

00:58:08.000 Man, they have...

00:58:10.000 I think that on Doug's place, I think that like last year, I don't know if they got all the results from this year, but I think last year they had close to 50% of bucks.

00:58:19.000 Whoa.

00:58:20.000 Yeah.

00:58:22.000 Wow.

00:58:23.000 It's hovering.

00:58:24.000 It's like...

00:58:24.000 Very high.

00:58:25.000 And this is fairly recent, like a decade ago they started appearing, right?

00:58:29.000 Yeah, I think that CWD goes back maybe about a decade in his area.

00:58:35.000 He's in Richland County.

00:58:36.000 Is he Richland County?

00:58:38.000 Yeah, Richland County, Wisconsin.

00:58:41.000 Somewhere in that ballpark.

00:58:42.000 And it's changed.

00:58:43.000 When you were at Doug's place, remember at Doug's place, these have this...

00:58:48.000 They used to have this slogan, like, nice buck next year, meaning, you know, let deer grow, let deer grow.

00:58:53.000 And Doug has really changed over the years.

00:58:56.000 He's changed his tune, and they really want to try to...

00:58:59.000 The idea, generally, with wildlife managers, is that by lowering...

00:59:05.000 You'll slow spread by lowering numbers.

00:59:08.000 Right?

00:59:09.000 That if you have, you know, 40 deer per square mile, you're going to have increased spread.

00:59:14.000 And if it was 20 deer per square mile, 30 deer per square mile, you might slow the spread.

00:59:18.000 But no one's demonstrated a lot of success in slowing the spread of CWD, so other hunters will look at it and be like, yeah, you're out there lowering deer numbers, and so there's half as many deer on the landscape, and CWD still spreads, right?

00:59:34.000 So you wind up with this question of how do you justify...

00:59:39.000 Trying to suppress deer numbers when you're not demonstrating a lot of success and slowing prevalency.

00:59:43.000 And the whole thing you're afraid of is lowering deer numbers, but you're lowering deer numbers.

00:59:49.000 Right?

00:59:50.000 But it's like a controlled, it's a controlled lowering to slow the spread.

00:59:53.000 But there hasn't been, no one has an area, to your point, you can't go to a county.

01:00:01.000 I don't think, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong by maybe one county, but I'm pretty positive I'm not wrong.

01:00:07.000 And this is generally absolutely true.

01:00:10.000 You can't go to a county that had infected deer that no longer has infected deer.

01:00:15.000 No one's gone into a population of deer and eradicated CWD. Wow.

01:00:20.000 No one's gotten rid of it.

01:00:21.000 That's crazy.

01:00:22.000 Has it jumped to moose?

01:00:24.000 Yeah, I think that cervids, so primarily white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, they've had it transmit to caribou.

01:00:34.000 I should know that.

01:00:37.000 It's gouty because it's a cervid, so there's no way it doesn't...

01:00:40.000 Lower numbers, like, you know...

01:00:41.000 Not from that.

01:00:42.000 Right, but I'm saying, like, the thing about moose is there's lower numbers and they don't exist in, like, packs.

01:00:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:50.000 But since it is a cervid disease, I should know this since it is.

01:00:53.000 I'm assuming they've found it in there.

01:00:55.000 I can't think of examples.

01:00:56.000 I can think of mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, caribou, but I can't think of whether or not there's been a positive case of moose.

01:01:03.000 And moose have a whole host of problems.

01:01:06.000 Right now in some areas, particularly in the lower 48, the northern states of the lower 48, between wolf depredation and a tick.

01:01:17.000 Like a tick is really hammering those moose right now.

01:01:20.000 Yeah, someone told me they went hunting and they got a moose and it was just covered in ticks.

01:01:23.000 Yeah, there's a problem with, in this long series of mild winters, that these...

01:01:31.000 Extreme colds that would lower these tick numbers down.

01:01:35.000 It hasn't been happening.

01:01:36.000 So you're having animals literally dying.

01:01:38.000 A lot of moose literally dying from tick infestations.

01:01:43.000 And then Colorado's becoming a great...

01:01:46.000 It is found in moose in many state provinces.

01:01:49.000 Alberta, Saskatchewan, Colorado, and Texas has moose?

01:01:53.000 What?

01:01:55.000 Texas has moose?

01:01:57.000 No, no, no.

01:01:59.000 Relatively small areas in the panhandle in West Texas.

01:02:03.000 CWD. Yeah, that's CWD. Do they have moose in Texas?

01:02:09.000 No, no.

01:02:10.000 I think it's mixing up two things.

01:02:12.000 But it says it there.

01:02:14.000 CWD has been found in Texas.

01:02:16.000 Right, so they're not saying moose in Texas.

01:02:19.000 Just Google, are there moose in Texas?

01:02:21.000 There are not.

01:02:23.000 I mean, everything's in Texas in some...

01:02:25.000 Form of capacity, but no, you're way outside.

01:02:28.000 No moose in Texas.

01:02:28.000 You're way outside of the native range of moose.

01:02:31.000 Yeah.

01:02:32.000 Colorado is becoming like an unexpected, it's blowing up for moose.

01:02:35.000 Really?

01:02:36.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:02:36.000 Colorado becomes better.

01:02:37.000 I mean, they've always said moose, but like Colorado is becoming like a premier moose state.

01:02:41.000 When did that happen?

01:02:43.000 They've just been kicking ass there, you know, up in the high country.

01:02:46.000 They have more and more moose.

01:02:47.000 It's becoming like a great moose state.

01:02:49.000 And meanwhile, like Maine is really suffering as a moose state.

01:02:52.000 Really?

01:02:53.000 Yeah.

01:02:53.000 So, you know, like Maine's whole brand promise, you know, is like around moose and then Colorado's going to steal it.

01:02:59.000 Well, it's difficult to get a tag in Maine, right?

01:03:02.000 That's very hard.

01:03:03.000 It's very hard.

01:03:03.000 Yeah.

01:03:04.000 It's very non-resident especially.

01:03:06.000 I used to apply over there, but I don't apply anymore.

01:03:07.000 Now, what's causing the moose decline in Maine?

01:03:11.000 Ticks.

01:03:12.000 Oh, God.

01:03:14.000 Yeah, ticks.

01:03:15.000 Dirty little fucking things.

01:03:17.000 Yeah.

01:03:17.000 Have you ever heard the conspiracy theory about Lyme disease?

01:03:19.000 Yeah.

01:03:20.000 That's a weird one, right?

01:03:21.000 Yeah.

01:03:22.000 It is.

01:03:24.000 Seems like there's some legitimate concern there, that it might have been a bioweapon that got out of hand.

01:03:29.000 Well, I think after the pandemic we just went through, I think people are more open to that idea.

01:03:33.000 Yeah, it was widely dismissed by people that are a little bit more skeptical about conspiracies.

01:03:39.000 But RFJ Jr., he believes it.

01:03:43.000 Yeah.

01:03:46.000 It's very scary this idea of these fucking eggheads experimenting with diseases and making them more infectious for whatever reason without also developing a cure.

01:03:57.000 Yeah, it is.

01:03:58.000 It's very strange.

01:04:00.000 I guess the one justification you'd have is you'd be like, well by tinkering with it we'll better understand it and if it ever happens naturally we'd be able to combat it.

01:04:09.000 Yeah, how'd that work out?

01:04:11.000 That didn't really work out, did it?

01:04:12.000 That has to be the story you tell to yourself.

01:04:15.000 I think they just make money doing research.

01:04:17.000 I think if you're a researcher, you know, like if you're a carpenter, you want to build houses.

01:04:21.000 They say, there's too many houses.

01:04:22.000 Like, ah, come on.

01:04:24.000 We fucking need houses.

01:04:25.000 You know, I'm a carpenter.

01:04:27.000 I make houses.

01:04:28.000 If you're a researcher and your field of study is diseases and viruses, you want to study them.

01:04:36.000 And if the money is involved in some sort of...

01:04:40.000 Bizarre engineering of these things, which is what they're doing.

01:04:43.000 This fucking strange gain-of-function shit that they're doing.

01:04:47.000 You do it.

01:04:48.000 And if you can't do it in America, you're like, China? 0.93

01:04:50.000 Okay.

01:04:51.000 We'll do it over there.

01:04:52.000 There was a famous buffalo hide hunter, and he had talked about, during the great slaughter of the buffalo, he had talked about now and then he'd commit himself to stop.

01:05:02.000 But instead he'd wake up in the morning and off in the distance.

01:05:06.000 And he's like, someone else is doing it.

01:05:12.000 So, I think that probably with the, you know, I'm no pathologist, but as long as someone's tinkering with that shit, everybody wants to tinker with that shit.

01:05:20.000 Yeah.

01:05:21.000 Because you're like, well, I don't know, what are they doing over there that I, what am I missing out on?

01:05:26.000 Right.

01:05:26.000 You know?

01:05:27.000 Yeah.

01:05:27.000 If they're doing it, I want to do it.

01:05:29.000 Yeah.

01:05:30.000 I don't want to be the one that looks like a fool.

01:05:32.000 And there's research money.

01:05:33.000 Mm-hmm.

01:05:34.000 That's how you get grants.

01:05:35.000 Yeah.

01:05:35.000 And you know what?

01:05:36.000 I bet you in some ways the pandemic spawned more of that type of research.

01:05:39.000 You think so?

01:05:40.000 Yeah, because I mean like also now you can make the case of how important it is to understand this stuff.

01:05:47.000 Yeah, but you would also make the case like, hey, how about you fuckheads come up with a cure first? 0.99

01:05:52.000 Yeah, start with that.

01:05:53.000 Yeah, start with figuring out how to cure it.

01:05:56.000 Yeah, I can see that.

01:05:58.000 It's just like there's just not a lot of trust in the medical research institutions now.

01:06:06.000 No.

01:06:07.000 There's been an erosion of that for sure.

01:06:10.000 For a good reason.

01:06:10.000 I mean, it was a real wake-up call for people.

01:06:13.000 I think they're like, oh, there's not someone with real objective oversight of all this, like doing a really good job of maintaining everything.

01:06:21.000 It's not a really well-maintained situation.

01:06:25.000 Yeah, I used to be a dude that, prior to that, I was a dude that accepted a lot of, I don't know, I accepted a lot of assurances.

01:06:35.000 And then there was a definite, like many people, I mean, I'm speaking for most people in the country, man, I feel like.

01:06:41.000 Like many people, I gained a new skepticism.

01:06:45.000 Yeah, me too.

01:06:46.000 During the pandemic.

01:06:47.000 Yeah, I joked about it in my special.

01:06:49.000 About government authority, a new skepticism about some types of government authority and a new skepticism about the way health information is spread.

01:06:58.000 Yeah.

01:06:59.000 It's just one of those things where anything involving money.

01:07:01.000 Whenever there's an enormous amount of money involved and then there's a centralized control of information, like where there's people that have a distribution of information.

01:07:10.000 And then there's also the problem of exonerating people from any responsibility, which is what happened in the 1990s or was it the 80s?

01:07:21.000 Whenever they gave them because the vaccine manufacturers were saying, listen, we can't manufacture vaccines because too many people are getting injured by them.

01:07:31.000 And we're going to have so much liability that we're not going to be able to make manufacture vaccines anymore unless you give us immunity to prosecute it.

01:07:39.000 And so they gave it to them.

01:07:41.000 And then all of a sudden, you're getting 72 vaccines.

01:07:44.000 You're giving children hepatitis B. Hepatitis B for babies, which is just fucking crazy.

01:07:51.000 A sexually transmitted disease for babies.

01:07:53.000 Like, what are you doing?

01:07:54.000 Like, why are you doing that?

01:07:55.000 Well, you're doing it because you can.

01:07:57.000 And because the more vaccines you give kids, the more money you make.

01:08:00.000 And you're not responsible.

01:08:02.000 You don't have to pay off anything.

01:08:03.000 You don't get sued.

01:08:05.000 Which is just, you can't do that with these fucking corporations.

01:08:07.000 They're just too evil.

01:08:09.000 They're sociopaths.

01:08:11.000 They act like sociopaths.

01:08:13.000 They lie about studies.

01:08:15.000 They lie about side effects.

01:08:17.000 They minimize their responsibility.

01:08:19.000 And they profit immensely.

01:08:21.000 And they continue to do so as long as they're not punished.

01:08:24.000 And that's the business that they're in.

01:08:27.000 Yeah, I get the frustration.

01:08:28.000 But at the same time, I've been the recipient of remedies offered by Western medicine.

01:08:39.000 Remedies offered by Western medicine for diseases caused by science.

01:08:43.000 Yeah, you are.

01:08:43.000 Possibly.

01:08:44.000 You are.

01:08:45.000 Yeah, you are a Lyme disease.

01:08:47.000 Yeah, some things.

01:08:48.000 Well, no, take a natural thing like Giardia.

01:08:53.000 I don't think anyone's arguing about that, but you get sick as shit.

01:08:57.000 Then all of a sudden you take a pill and you're quick.

01:08:59.000 No one's arguing that medicine isn't amazing.

01:09:02.000 I mean, medicine's amazing.

01:09:03.000 But the problem with medicine is...

01:09:06.000 You got your scientists and your medical researchers, and then you got your money people, right?

01:09:11.000 And the money people, they don't even know how to make any of this medicine. 0.98

01:09:15.000 They just know to sell it.

01:09:16.000 And how do I sell it?

01:09:17.000 I sell it by, you know, like, that's like remdesivir, where they were selling remdesivir during the COVID crisis.

01:09:24.000 Remdesivir is fucking horrible.

01:09:25.000 What is that?

01:09:25.000 I don't know that one.

01:09:26.000 Kidney failure.

01:09:27.000 They stopped prescribing it.

01:09:28.000 Oh, no, I remember that one.

01:09:29.000 Fauci was selling it to everybody.

01:09:31.000 You need to take remdesivir.

01:09:33.000 And everybody was dying.

01:09:35.000 That's your impersonation?

01:09:36.000 That's fucking horrible kidney failure.

01:09:38.000 Yeah, that fucking creep.

01:09:41.000 Read that book, The Real Anthony Fauci, by RFK Jr. It's a crazy book.

01:09:47.000 Yeah, you know, my buddy Seth was reading that book when we were out moose hunting, but I haven't read it.

01:09:52.000 That book will change your opinion on a lot of shit.

01:09:55.000 Yeah.

01:09:55.000 That's a crazy book.

01:09:56.000 And if it's not true, he would be sued.

01:09:59.000 It's a good point.

01:10:00.000 You get a cease and desist.

01:10:02.000 Well, it's all documented.

01:10:03.000 I mean, it's all backed up by, like, rock-solid information.

01:10:08.000 It's all, like, very well documented.

01:10:10.000 What actually happened during the AIDS crisis, what actually happened during the COVID crisis, it's all legitimate. 0.94

01:10:17.000 It's all easy to research.

01:10:19.000 It's just scary that these people that you...

01:10:21.000 You don't want to have to think about that stuff all the time.

01:10:23.000 You want to just live your life and trust these...

01:10:25.000 Oh, this is the medical institution.

01:10:27.000 They're here to help us.

01:10:28.000 They're here to make us feel better.

01:10:29.000 Yeah.

01:10:30.000 But no.

01:10:31.000 A lot of them are just there to make money.

01:10:33.000 But I held that sentiment.

01:10:34.000 Me too.

01:10:35.000 Until four years ago.

01:10:37.000 A lot changed, dude.

01:10:39.000 I'm fucking super skeptical now.

01:10:41.000 Yeah, I'm also super skeptical of the herd mindset that people fall into.

01:10:47.000 Whenever there's some sort of a pandemic, when there's a high level of anxiety, a lot of people fall into this herd mindset.

01:10:54.000 And that scares the shit out of me too.

01:10:55.000 Because there's just a lot of people that are...

01:10:57.000 They're cowards.

01:10:58.000 And they're afraid of public humiliation, public criticism.

01:11:06.000 They're afraid of getting ostracized from the community if they don't follow suit like everybody else is doing.

01:11:11.000 And so then they start to try to enforce it on everybody else.

01:11:13.000 It's like the people that were yelling at everybody else, where's your mask?

01:11:16.000 Put your mask on.

01:11:18.000 I went to a restaurant the other night.

01:11:20.000 The fucking guy served me had a mask on.

01:11:22.000 I would fire this guy.

01:11:23.000 I would not...

01:11:24.000 Like, you can't...

01:11:25.000 This is nonsense.

01:11:27.000 You can't be wearing a fucking mask.

01:11:28.000 This is crazy.

01:11:29.000 I read an op-ed in the Free Press the other day.

01:11:31.000 You know, Barry Weiss's publication.

01:11:35.000 And it was about when they had rolled back...

01:11:37.000 They had rolled back on masking laws.

01:11:43.000 I kind of forgot about this.

01:11:44.000 Like, you used to not be able to run around with a mask on?

01:11:46.000 Yeah.

01:11:47.000 Because of, like, criminal activity?

01:11:48.000 Yeah.

01:11:49.000 So one of these dudes that pushed a person in front of a subway...

01:11:54.000 It must have been premeditated to some degree because hood and mask, right?

01:11:58.000 So you can't identify them on security footage.

01:12:00.000 And the dude that shot that healthcare insurance CEO masked.

01:12:06.000 But you don't think anything of it.

01:12:08.000 So this person was arguing in some capacity.

01:12:12.000 They were arguing that we need to move back to anti-masking rules.

01:12:19.000 To fight crime, which I, you know, I get the sentiment, but I also thought, like, if you had, at a time prior to the pandemic, if you had told me that there was restrictions on wearing a mask, you know, I would have thought, I would have been surprised about that.

01:12:34.000 Because it seems like, how can you dictate to someone that you have, like, a little stagecoach robber bandana on your face?

01:12:44.000 You know what I mean?

01:12:44.000 It's like a weird thing.

01:12:46.000 It's like, can you really tell people that they can't wear a mask?

01:12:52.000 But this person's saying, you could.

01:12:53.000 We did.

01:12:54.000 And now you've granted criminals some level of anonymity that you can just kind of like, you're cool just to walk around totally obscured.

01:13:03.000 Well, it's also, you're dealing with people that have severe anxiety if they think that that mask is actually going to protect them.

01:13:09.000 It doesn't do jack shit.

01:13:10.000 Sure.

01:13:10.000 Especially if you're wearing the bandana.

01:13:12.000 The bandana is just ridiculous.

01:13:14.000 Sure, but I'm not looking to have a rational argument with them.

01:13:17.000 It's just like something I hadn't considered that you could make a law telling people about wearing masks or not.

01:13:27.000 I just forgot all about that shit.

01:13:29.000 But it would be if you went back six years ago and you saw a dude with a mask and a hood on.

01:13:34.000 You might be like, the hell is his problem?

01:13:36.000 Yeah.

01:13:37.000 Now you're like, oh, he's real scared of COVID. Real scared still to this day.

01:13:41.000 I mean, someone sent me a video of this guy who wears a mask every day and he's been pushing for masking.

01:13:46.000 He's like severely mentally ill. 0.57

01:13:48.000 Yeah, well, that is.

01:13:50.000 Overrun with anxiety.

01:13:51.000 Just like advocating for masking.

01:13:53.000 We shall be masking and double masking.

01:13:56.000 If you had a mask on and a hood on all the time, you wouldn't be just 10% less famous.

01:14:00.000 You'd be 70% less famous.

01:14:02.000 I got spotted a lot when I had a mask on.

01:14:04.000 With your mask on?

01:14:04.000 Yeah, with a mask on.

01:14:06.000 Yeah.

01:14:07.000 Yeah.

01:14:10.000 Well, I'm short and wide.

01:14:12.000 You know, I have an odd shape.

01:14:14.000 You know, I think people...

01:14:16.000 Is that Joe?

01:14:16.000 That burly little man.

01:14:17.000 That little fucking chimpanzee looking dude.

01:14:22.000 Bald head.

01:14:23.000 Yeah.

01:14:23.000 I wear a baseball hat, sunglasses, mask, and they're like, is that Joe Rogan?

01:14:29.000 Even without seeing my tattoos, I just was getting busted.

01:14:35.000 You know what it might be?

01:14:35.000 Because you are known sitting in that seat and that posture.

01:14:40.000 And so maybe when you're in the airport, you should try a different pose.

01:14:45.000 Lean back.

01:14:46.000 They might be just picking you off by your seating position.

01:14:51.000 I was just walking down the street.

01:14:52.000 I was getting called out.

01:14:53.000 Yeah.

01:14:54.000 With sunglasses on and a baseball hat.

01:14:57.000 Yeah.

01:14:57.000 You'd be 10% less famous.

01:14:59.000 Yeah.

01:14:59.000 That's too late.

01:15:00.000 That fucking chicken is flowing the coop. 0.96

01:15:03.000 Mm-hmm.

01:15:04.000 Yeah.

01:15:04.000 That's over.

01:15:05.000 No one doing it now.

01:15:06.000 I think you should stop masking.

01:15:08.000 I think it should be illegal.

01:15:09.000 I think it's ridiculous.

01:15:11.000 In New York, they made it so that if you go into a store, you have to pull your mask down so that the facial recognition will work.

01:15:18.000 Really?

01:15:19.000 Yeah, because they were getting so many people getting robbed.

01:15:21.000 So many stores are getting...

01:15:23.000 Robbed and you could never catch the guys.

01:15:25.000 Yeah, there is a movement back to that.

01:15:26.000 I think it was the mayor was proposing that.

01:15:29.000 But they should just make it illegal to wear a fucking mask.

01:15:31.000 You're a psychopath.

01:15:32.000 It doesn't work.

01:15:33.000 It doesn't work and it's not protecting you.

01:15:36.000 So what are we doing?

01:15:37.000 You're just covering your face.

01:15:39.000 Well, you can't cover your face because we live in polite society.

01:15:42.000 We want to make sure that people can't commit crimes wearing a fucking bank robber mask.

01:15:45.000 This is nuts.

01:15:47.000 A little bit, you being a very libertarian dude.

01:15:52.000 I don't know if you describe yourself that way.

01:15:53.000 Pretty much, yeah.

01:15:55.000 I'm a little surprised.

01:15:56.000 I remember you were having a conversation with J.D. Vance, and J.D. Vance made a comment about, just not a serious comment, but made a comment like, you know, dudes shouldn't wear skirts or some shit like that.

01:16:08.000 And you're like, they should totally be able to wear skirts. 1.00

01:16:10.000 Women get to wear them, why can't men? 1.00

01:16:11.000 It was all said with levity, but I was a little surprised.

01:16:16.000 I could picture you as well.

01:16:19.000 I could picture you as well really feeling like, how could you legislate?

01:16:23.000 It's a public safety thing.

01:16:25.000 Obscuring your face.

01:16:26.000 Yeah.

01:16:26.000 There's no public safety in skirts.

01:16:29.000 The guy's got weird knees.

01:16:33.000 I recognize those knees anywhere.

01:16:36.000 No, I mean, skirts is just a choice. 1.00

01:16:39.000 I mean, if you wear shorts, why can't you wear skirts? 0.98

01:16:41.000 It's crazy.

01:16:43.000 If a guy wants to wear a dress, what do I give a shit?

01:16:45.000 If a woman wants to wear a business suit, am I mad at Ellen for wearing a business suit? 1.00

01:16:49.000 Am I going to be pissed off at Hannah Gadsby for dressing up like a man? 0.99

01:16:53.000 Come on.

01:16:54.000 You should be able to wear whatever you want to wear.

01:16:55.000 I don't care about that.

01:16:56.000 But I care about public safety.

01:16:58.000 You shouldn't be able to cover your face where you can't be identified if you commit a crime.

01:17:04.000 We've all agreed to that.

01:17:05.000 That's just ridiculous.

01:17:06.000 It used to be a thing that you couldn't do.

01:17:08.000 You couldn't walk into a store with a bank robber mask on.

01:17:11.000 It used to be, if you walked to a bank with a mask on, people would freak out.

01:17:15.000 And now, during the pandemic, you walk into a bank without a mask, people would get angry.

01:17:22.000 Put your mask on.

01:17:23.000 It's like, we lost our mind.

01:17:25.000 But the thing is, they should have realized it very early on, that there's no science to it.

01:17:30.000 And there was a doctor who pointed this out very early on in the pandemic, and we highlighted it, and people were very upset at us.

01:17:36.000 This doctor was talking, he was a virologist, and he was saying, do you know how ridiculous this is?

01:17:41.000 Let me show you.

01:17:42.000 And he used a vape.

01:17:44.000 So he took a big hit of a vape, he put a mask on, and he blew vape smoke through, and he's like, the particles in vape are so much larger.

01:17:53.000 Then these virus particles.

01:17:55.000 If you're breathing through this mask, if this mask allows you to take in air, you're taking the virus.

01:18:01.000 If it allows you to blow out air, you're blowing out the virus.

01:18:04.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

01:18:05.000 This is just stupid.

01:18:07.000 This is just pretending.

01:18:08.000 And in the beginning, I was like, OK, everybody just wants you to be a good person.

01:18:13.000 You wear the mask.

01:18:14.000 But it's it's so weird because during the crisis, we all we did UFC fights and the UFC fights.

01:18:22.000 The corner men used to have to wear masks.

01:18:25.000 So, like, I'll see, like, highlights from, like, 2021, and you see, like, the corner man with the mask, like, God, I forgot about this.

01:18:30.000 It's so ridiculous.

01:18:32.000 And their nose is hanging out.

01:18:34.000 It's like, cover your nose.

01:18:36.000 Oh, yeah, okay.

01:18:37.000 Like, as if it mattered.

01:18:38.000 Like, okay, this really works.

01:18:39.000 And you couldn't walk into a store like this.

01:18:41.000 People go, that's not good enough.

01:18:43.000 This is not good enough.

01:18:44.000 I forgot my mask.

01:18:45.000 What do you want me to do?

01:18:46.000 This is the same goddamn thing.

01:18:48.000 Like, what are we doing?

01:18:49.000 Can I just...

01:18:50.000 Buy toothpaste like this?

01:18:52.000 No, you can't.

01:18:53.000 You have to have an actual mask.

01:18:55.000 Well, what is the difference between this and a fucking bandana?

01:18:57.000 Zero.

01:18:57.000 There's no difference.

01:18:59.000 It's so stupid.

01:19:01.000 I went through two years needing to yell at my kids all the time because you travel with your kids and they never got the stupid things on.

01:19:08.000 But then you're not even yelling at them about if they're going to prevent them from...

01:19:13.000 You're not saving them from a disease.

01:19:15.000 You're saving them from being ostracized or yelled at by the flight attendants.

01:19:19.000 You spent two years being like, put your damn masks on!

01:19:22.000 Put your masks on!

01:19:23.000 I don't think it works.

01:19:24.000 It's not about whether it works.

01:19:26.000 You just got to do it to not get in trouble.

01:19:28.000 I had a conversation with my kids.

01:19:30.000 I'm like, this does not work.

01:19:31.000 Just want you to know.

01:19:32.000 It's not going to make you safer.

01:19:33.000 They both had COVID early on.

01:19:35.000 They got over it quick, so they weren't nervous about COVID at all.

01:19:37.000 I go, this is just for other crazy people that are riddled with anxiety.

01:19:41.000 You put this on, they feel okay.

01:19:43.000 It's not going to be forever.

01:19:45.000 And we're going to look back on this, and we're all going to laugh.

01:19:48.000 Every now and then I'll go through my closet and I'll put a jacket on that I haven't worn forever and I reach into a pocket and I pull out a fucking stupid surgical mask.

01:19:56.000 I'm like, Jesus Christ.

01:19:57.000 I can't believe we went through this.

01:19:59.000 We've kind of found them all and got rid of them.

01:20:02.000 But I would be surprised there's one hiding somewhere.

01:20:04.000 It was one of the things that Sanjay Gupta brought up when I did that podcast with him.

01:20:09.000 Like, you sell masks on your website.

01:20:11.000 I go, what?

01:20:11.000 You think I sell them because they're real?

01:20:13.000 I sell them because people have to wear them.

01:20:15.000 So if you want to wear them, wear a little JRE mask. 0.96

01:20:18.000 Like, I don't sell them because I think they're good.

01:20:22.000 Like, shut the fuck up. 0.96

01:20:23.000 I wish they were illegal to sell.

01:20:25.000 How about that?

01:20:26.000 Would I make a dollar off those fucking masks?

01:20:29.000 You'd forego the profits.

01:20:30.000 I would pay to have them illegal.

01:20:33.000 I'll give the government $10,000 a year to make masks illegal.

01:20:36.000 Fuck you.

01:20:37.000 You guys are fucking crazy.

01:20:40.000 The whole thing was crazy.

01:20:41.000 It was really weird.

01:20:42.000 It was like a psychology experiment.

01:20:44.000 It was a good experiment to see how many people around you are bitches who would just fall in line the moment things got weird. 1.00

01:20:53.000 And it's a lot.

01:20:54.000 A lot of people just have no ability to tolerate any discomfort, any weirdness, any uncertainty, any anxiety.

01:21:03.000 They just immediately...

01:21:05.000 There's so many people out there.

01:21:07.000 That have always had parents, and then bosses, and then supervisors, and they were always like following rules, always following rules, and assuming somebody has your best interest in mind.

01:21:18.000 And they don't.

01:21:19.000 They don't.

01:21:20.000 It's just humans.

01:21:21.000 Just a bunch of humans out there and a bunch of people that don't want to take responsibility for this fuck up that they've created.

01:21:29.000 And they want to lie and distort things and gaslight the whole population.

01:21:33.000 And then somehow or another, these people that are doing that are allowed to spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars on advertising.

01:21:44.000 On television.

01:21:45.000 And so now the television networks will never criticize them.

01:21:48.000 Because they get all this fucking...

01:21:50.000 You know, this is like the argument about advertising for pharmaceutical drugs.

01:21:54.000 You know, we're the only country other than New Zealand, in the whole world, that allows pharmaceutical drugs to advertise.

01:22:01.000 Oh, is that right?

01:22:02.000 Yeah.

01:22:02.000 It's just us and New Zealand.

01:22:03.000 And New Zealand's far more restrictive than us.

01:22:06.000 But...

01:22:06.000 The way our system is set up, all these television networks, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, they all rely on a giant percentage of their advertising budget.

01:22:17.000 It comes from pharmaceutical drugs.

01:22:19.000 And don't you just love those ads?

01:22:20.000 But it's not.

01:22:21.000 But here's the thing.

01:22:21.000 It's not to sell more drugs.

01:22:24.000 It's so that those people will never criticize those drugs.

01:22:27.000 Yeah, I'm familiar with the argument.

01:22:29.000 Yeah, the ads are great.

01:22:31.000 Yeah, it's like it'll always be some dude just kicking ass.

01:22:34.000 Yeah, having a great time.

01:22:35.000 Wakes up, jogs with his buddies, kicks ass all day.

01:22:39.000 At night, he's like out with his lady, you know, and he's like getting ready and it kind of ends at the end of the night.

01:22:45.000 You're like, that's something that's just getting lucky, you know?

01:22:46.000 Yeah.

01:22:47.000 And it's like, ask your doctor if such and such.

01:22:49.000 And you're like, shit, I want to kick ass like that old guy. 0.98

01:22:51.000 And then they read off the side effects.

01:22:53.000 The side effects at the end.

01:22:55.000 Suicidal thoughts.

01:22:56.000 Powerful diarrhea.

01:22:57.000 Like, oh, God.

01:22:59.000 Anal bleeding.

01:23:00.000 Oh, Christ.

01:23:03.000 We live in a weird world, man.

01:23:05.000 It's a weird world.

01:23:06.000 It's a world, you know, whenever you involve money and things, money, profit, and the ability to lie, you know, you get a lot of real shady things.

01:23:15.000 What frustrates me already is it's going to be impossible to explain it.

01:23:22.000 Like, now I can't.

01:23:23.000 It's very hard to explain the 9-11 terror attacks to my kids.

01:23:27.000 And I want to be, when they make, in 10 years, 20 years, whatever, when they make a docu-series on the COVID-19 pandemic and the social response and the government response, I really want to be in the room on the edit.

01:23:46.000 I want to be like, don't forget about, you know what I mean?

01:23:48.000 The telling of how it happened.

01:23:52.000 Like, I would like to go into a time machine and go forward and see how it is told later.

01:23:59.000 Yeah.

01:23:59.000 You know, like, we'll watch now, you know, we'll watch a documentary now, you know, you watch something about the Cuban Missile Crisis, right?

01:24:05.000 But you can just picture dudes that were active during the Cuban Missile Crisis are like, no.

01:24:11.000 Right?

01:24:12.000 Right.

01:24:12.000 There's even a term, there's a term, it's called gel syndrome syndrome.

01:24:23.000 Maybe Jamie can look it up for us.

01:24:25.000 What's the term about?

01:24:27.000 It's the alpha...

01:24:28.000 No, not alpha gel syndrome.

01:24:30.000 Alpha gal is the... 0.86

01:24:32.000 No, it's not alpha gal.

01:24:33.000 It's something gel.

01:24:34.000 The syndrome is this.

01:24:36.000 No, amnesia.

01:24:37.000 Something gel...

01:24:38.000 Type in gel amnesia, if you know mine.

01:24:41.000 It's killing me.

01:24:43.000 Gel man amnesia. 0.92

01:24:45.000 It's that...

01:24:46.000 Let's say you're seeing something you have a lot of subject matter expertise in.

01:24:51.000 So let's say you're reading, you, Joe, are reading someone's analysis explaining, like, here's what's up with mixed martial arts.

01:25:00.000 An outsider, an outside journalist who's assigned to do a piece, and they do a piece like, what's up with mixed martial arts?

01:25:07.000 And you read it, and what's probably the main thing you're going to be thinking the whole time?

01:25:11.000 Does this guy know what he's talking about?

01:25:12.000 Yeah, and you're going to be like, that's totally not.

01:25:14.000 That's not the conversation.

01:25:17.000 That's not what that is.

01:25:18.000 You missed the point.

01:25:19.000 Do you notice that everything you read where you know a lot about it, let's say you read a piece of reporting and it's a reporting about the podcast industry, where it came from, how it's monetized.

01:25:29.000 Mostly what you're going to feel is that's not what that is.

01:25:34.000 That's incorrect.

01:25:35.000 Well, this form of amnesia is that you forget that.

01:25:38.000 So then later you're reading an article about a thing you don't know well.

01:25:43.000 Right.

01:25:44.000 And you're like, you feel like you're getting the straight dope.

01:25:47.000 Right, right, right, right.

01:25:48.000 But someone somewhere who knows the world well is reading it, and they're having the same feeling you have every time you read about something you know well, which is this person has no idea what they're talking about.

01:25:58.000 Right.

01:25:58.000 So you fall on the trap, the amnesias you forget.

01:26:02.000 And you take things you're not aware of, and when you get the dope on them from someone, you're forgetting how fucked up everything is when you do know about it. 0.85

01:26:11.000 Well, the hope is...

01:26:13.000 That with AI in these large language models is that AI will be able to distribute information objectively without that.

01:26:21.000 And that is the case in a lot of situations where they haven't been corrected yet.

01:26:28.000 Like, AI is subject to human influence, obviously.

01:26:32.000 I'm sure you're aware of the Google Gemini situation.

01:26:35.000 The Google Gemini situation is the best one because they said, you know, create images of Nazis. 0.98

01:26:42.000 And they had multicultural Nazis. 0.76

01:26:45.000 But if it has to analyze information about specific things just based on just what's actually available, oftentimes it will give you a very Accurate assessment that you wouldn't get from a newspaper because the newspaper would be more interested in adhering to whatever particular ideology they subscribe to.

01:27:10.000 So they would flavor things through an ideology and probably gaslight you a little bit about the other side's perspective.

01:27:17.000 The hope is that in the future, with large language models, and especially as they become more and more sophisticated, you're going to be able to get an accurate, objective assessment of things that doesn't have any human influence.

01:27:30.000 Oh, man, I don't...

01:27:31.000 Dude, come on.

01:27:33.000 Isn't it possible?

01:27:34.000 Oh.

01:27:34.000 It's possible with some things.

01:27:35.000 Yeah, the hope or it's possible, but no, I don't have, like...

01:27:38.000 Sure, possible.

01:27:39.000 I don't picture that being the case.

01:27:42.000 Well...

01:27:43.000 There are some large language models that aren't fucked with, especially open source ones.

01:27:49.000 The problem is they're essentially drawing from the entire internet, right?

01:27:55.000 So you would have to assess, like, where these large language models are getting their information from.

01:28:01.000 Sure.

01:28:01.000 And making sure that they're...

01:28:02.000 So this is a thing you could kind of game that system.

01:28:05.000 By rigging these large language models to accentuate information that comes from more biased sources.

01:28:13.000 You know, you could distort the information that people would get.

01:28:16.000 Yeah, and someone would be motivated to do it.

01:28:20.000 Yeah, until they get so sophisticated that they would be able to discern that.

01:28:25.000 And they would be able to base it entirely on objective analysis of statistics and facts and understand what these statistics are.

01:28:34.000 I did this little event last night at this place here in town called Arena Hall.

01:28:39.000 And the moderator of the event, it was like a Q&A or a chat.

01:28:45.000 And he was asking me, as a writer, as an author, what are your fears about AI? And I'm like, in the very short term, AI is coming for certain types of writing.

01:28:59.000 Certain types of writing are going to be made obsolete by AI. The reason I don't worry about it as of now, as a writer, is it's always going to be representative of input.

01:29:17.000 The input has to come in from people who are out digesting real experience.

01:29:23.000 It'll get faster.

01:29:25.000 The point I use is if you earlier alluded to the assassination on...

01:29:34.000 asked AI about details about it it doesn't exist right like the whole thing gets fed in so if you if you remain on some level of cutting edge about thought or cutting edge about analysis or cutting edge about what's going on in the world you'll have to start being more careful about being like that your work remains at the vanguard of feeding into the system of newness right yeah and that's gonna be like A big challenge.

01:30:01.000 Like a big challenge as a writer.

01:30:03.000 But I remember coming up as a writer too in the old days and being super scared of the internet in general.

01:30:07.000 Right?

01:30:08.000 And I was like, man, this ain't gonna be good.

01:30:12.000 For a writer.

01:30:13.000 Well, you know, they thought about that with the printing press.

01:30:16.000 I'm sure.

01:30:17.000 Yeah.

01:30:17.000 Do you know what the early books, do you know what most of the early books were about?

01:30:21.000 No, it was monks transcribing them, but I don't know.

01:30:23.000 No, when the printing press was produced.

01:30:26.000 Mathematics maybe?

01:30:27.000 Nope.

01:30:27.000 How to spot witches.

01:30:28.000 Oh, really?

01:30:29.000 That was a hot topic?

01:30:30.000 Yeah, it was all about witches and witchcraft.

01:30:32.000 Yeah, how to spot sorcery. 0.94

01:30:34.000 No, I didn't know that.

01:30:34.000 Yeah, it was a lot of bullshit.

01:30:37.000 You would think, oh, it's just knowledge and information.

01:30:40.000 Finally, the world's going to know the truth.

01:30:42.000 No, no, no, no.

01:30:43.000 I had no idea.

01:30:44.000 It was a lot of how to spot witches.

01:30:45.000 They were the most popular books.

01:30:47.000 Yeah, but I think that creators, from a creator perspective, You got ones that run away from new, right?

01:30:59.000 And you got ones that run toward it.

01:31:01.000 I used to be the run away from.

01:31:05.000 Something came out and I was like, this ain't good.

01:31:07.000 What are you now?

01:31:09.000 I guess I've survived through enough changes in the media landscape that I'm not as terrified as I once was.

01:31:19.000 Right?

01:31:20.000 Yeah.

01:31:20.000 Like, you know, I always said, like, the first time I heard the word podcast was in the context of your name, right?

01:31:26.000 Yeah, I remember the first podcast we did.

01:31:28.000 You're like, what is this?

01:31:29.000 I don't know what the hell it was.

01:31:30.000 We were at the Ice House.

01:31:32.000 The whole setup was ridiculous.

01:31:34.000 Yeah, you had a delayed flight.

01:31:36.000 I had a delayed flight?

01:31:37.000 Yeah, we started real late.

01:31:38.000 You were coming back from something.

01:31:39.000 Oh, yeah.

01:31:40.000 But anyhow, yeah, I used to be, like, I used to be scared of incoming.

01:31:47.000 Well, most people were, especially podcasts, it seemed so ridiculous.

01:31:51.000 Most people thought it was stupid.

01:31:53.000 Yeah.

01:31:53.000 And you even said that you were doing them and thought it was stupid.

01:31:56.000 Well, I did it because I thought it was fun.

01:31:59.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:32:00.000 And then after a while, I was like, oh, this is actually like a business.

01:32:05.000 I remember having a conversation with you about it.

01:32:07.000 I was like, you should do a podcast.

01:32:09.000 Like, there's a lot of money in this.

01:32:10.000 Like, it's real now.

01:32:11.000 Yeah, and I wouldn't have done it had you said it.

01:32:13.000 Well, it seemed...

01:32:14.000 Or I'd have been late to the game, maybe.

01:32:15.000 Yeah.

01:32:16.000 Well, you got on early.

01:32:17.000 Well, you were such a good guest.

01:32:18.000 I was like, this is, like, something you have to do.

01:32:20.000 Like, you have so many opinions on things, and you're so well-read.

01:32:23.000 It's, like, a perfect place for you where there's no interruption.

01:32:27.000 You can just have conversations about things.

01:32:28.000 That's, like, right up your alley.

01:32:29.000 I'm glad I did.

01:32:30.000 And then the other thing is it just infuses you with...

01:32:35.000 It infuses you with so much knowledge.

01:32:36.000 Yeah.

01:32:37.000 Because like you said, you get to corner people you want to corner.

01:32:40.000 Oh, yeah.

01:32:40.000 That's the best part.

01:32:42.000 Yeah.

01:32:42.000 The best part is the unintended education.

01:32:45.000 Yeah.

01:32:45.000 You just have conversations with so many people.

01:32:47.000 And when else would you get an expert to sit down with you for three hours and put their phone aside and just look me in the eye?

01:32:54.000 Tell me how this started.

01:32:56.000 Tell me, how do you figure that out?

01:32:57.000 What is that?

01:32:58.000 How'd you get involved in this?

01:33:00.000 What's the beginning of this?

01:33:01.000 And then, you know, it's beneficial to everybody who listens, too.

01:33:04.000 It's a weird new thing.

01:33:07.000 You know what I want to tell you about?

01:33:08.000 Because it's like this thing I'm trying to hunt down.

01:33:12.000 I recently had a guy on my podcast whose name is Randy Brown.

01:33:17.000 And my brother Danny recommended him, too, because he's a fisheries biologist in Alaska.

01:33:24.000 So he came on the show, and what he did is in the 70s, he grew up in New Mexico and always wanted to live in the woods.

01:33:30.000 Just grew up camping in the mountains and stuff.

01:33:33.000 And in the 70s, he goes up to Alaska and just goes to live in the bush along the Yukon.

01:33:40.000 And then did it.

01:33:41.000 I mean, for 15 years.

01:33:43.000 For 15 years, he lived in the bush in Alaska, just building little cabins, and lived off the land.

01:33:50.000 I mean, like, wasn't buying groceries.

01:33:53.000 Like, lived off the land trap in Alaska.

01:33:56.000 He tells me this story, and I've been trying to put the word out about this.

01:34:00.000 He tells me a story where, I'll have to go check, I think it was in 78. In 1978, he's on the Yukon River, just downstream.

01:34:08.000 Downstream of the Yukon from Canada.

01:34:10.000 He's between Circle, Alaska, and Eagle, Alaska, on the Yukon.

01:34:14.000 And him and his friends are living their lives in all these, like, line cabins.

01:34:18.000 They got strung up and down the river, okay?

01:34:21.000 Two guys come down the river out of Canada.

01:34:24.000 So again, this is 1978. Two guys come down the river out of Canada on a homemade log raft.

01:34:33.000 This guy in Randy's circle, one of his buddies, he tells this whole story on the podcast, but one of his buddies has a cabin down on the river and these two guys pull in, in this homemade raft, they pull in for the night at this cabin.

01:34:46.000 One of these individuals identifies himself as John the Baptist.

01:34:51.000 Oh boy.

01:34:52.000 Okay.

01:34:55.000 In the middle of the night, his companion, John the Baptist's companion, gets back on his raft and scoots.

01:35:01.000 Oh boy.

01:35:02.000 And abandons the dude.

01:35:03.000 Abandons this guy in 1978 who came out of Canada who identifies himself as John the Baptist.

01:35:09.000 John the Baptist becomes this incredible leech.

01:35:14.000 On these guys that are living in the bush, eating their food, using their stuff, taking their ammunition.

01:35:23.000 He lingers long enough that he can't really get out of that area because it frees up on the river.

01:35:29.000 And they keep telling him, you've got to go somewhere else.

01:35:31.000 And they say, you've got to leave here.

01:35:32.000 You can go stay at one of our other cabins.

01:35:34.000 Don't touch our shit.

01:35:36.000 He goes up to the other cabin.

01:35:37.000 When they eventually go up to the other cabin, he had taken a bunch of their stuff.

01:35:40.000 He'd taken some of their furs and made his own clothes.

01:35:45.000 They boot him out and they tell him what you got to do is you got to go down to the river and go up or down, wait for a boat and go up or down.

01:35:51.000 But he comes up with this cockamamie plan where he's going to go to this area.

01:35:54.000 They're like, no way can you walk to that area.

01:35:59.000 He takes off into the woods.

01:36:02.000 Now, when he does, he steals this guy we had on the podcast, Randy Brown.

01:36:07.000 He steals Randy Brown's snowshoes and takes off.

01:36:10.000 Randy Brown gives chase.

01:36:12.000 It was a real bad snow year.

01:36:14.000 He tracked him for about five miles and just said, never mind, it's not worth it.

01:36:18.000 The next year, he takes a different route and goes into the headwaters of this river where this guy had taken off with his snowshoes, and he's canoeing down the river and sees his snowshoes hanging in a tree.

01:36:28.000 Okay?

01:36:30.000 And there's a little cabin there, a little line cabin they had out, and he goes in and here's the guy, stone dead, starved to death, in a sleeping bag.

01:36:38.000 Whoa.

01:36:38.000 Snowshoes are hanging outside.

01:36:40.000 Starved to death.

01:36:41.000 He said he's nothing but skin and bones.

01:36:42.000 Wow.

01:36:43.000 Nothing but skin and bones.

01:36:46.000 They take him out, and they're way out in the bush.

01:36:48.000 They have no money.

01:36:49.000 They just live off land.

01:36:50.000 He literally has no money.

01:36:53.000 He's got no way to transport a body in the summertime to Eagle or Circle Alaska.

01:36:59.000 Does he have a responsibility to do that?

01:37:02.000 This is in the 70s, man.

01:37:04.000 He explains himself and did...

01:37:08.000 Well, he didn't.

01:37:09.000 They took the body out of the sleeping bag.

01:37:12.000 They wanted to check it out.

01:37:13.000 He said it was just skin on bone.

01:37:16.000 And it brought up something, because I'm going to talk about cannibalism in a minute, but it was skin on bone.

01:37:23.000 And he doesn't know what to do.

01:37:26.000 And he's not bashful about what he did.

01:37:27.000 He lays out why he had to do what he did.

01:37:30.000 They kept the sleeping bag to use it because it was their sleeping bag.

01:37:34.000 And they laid this body out on the tundra.

01:37:40.000 Told a few people, but didn't really know what to tell them.

01:37:42.000 They never caught the guy's name.

01:37:43.000 Told it to a few people.

01:37:44.000 A while later, he goes back and the body was gone.

01:37:47.000 Presumably been eaten by something.

01:37:49.000 So, after we do this interview, I can't stop thinking about this dude.

01:37:53.000 And I'm like, how can it not be that someone out in the world, like someone that has a kid or a brother, Or an uncle.

01:38:02.000 Do you know what I mean?

01:38:03.000 Yeah.

01:38:03.000 And they never know what happened to them?

01:38:05.000 Yeah.

01:38:06.000 There's no...

01:38:08.000 He's from Canada.

01:38:10.000 It's the 1970s.

01:38:12.000 70s, calling himself John the Baptist.

01:38:14.000 Yeah, they do.

01:38:15.000 But I kind of felt like doing...

01:38:17.000 I kind of felt...

01:38:17.000 I put it out on social media.

01:38:19.000 We talk on the podcast.

01:38:20.000 I'm bringing it up here.

01:38:22.000 Dude, I would love to know that someone said, oh, I used to party with a dude named John the Baptist.

01:38:27.000 In Canada, right.

01:38:29.000 Who is this guy?

01:38:30.000 Maybe this will do it.

01:38:32.000 I don't know.

01:38:32.000 Maybe you talking about it, like someone will reach out.

01:38:34.000 Yeah.

01:38:35.000 But then you've got to wonder if someone's just fabricating it because they want information.

01:38:38.000 No, for sure.

01:38:39.000 Or they want attention, rather.

01:38:40.000 For sure.

01:38:41.000 It kind of sticks in my head.

01:38:42.000 And I said to him, to Randy, you know, it was crazy.

01:38:46.000 He wound up getting an honorary doctorate.

01:38:49.000 And like once he and his wife had kids, he became like a world's expert on whitefish species of the Yukon River and got like an honorary doctorate.

01:38:56.000 Oh, wow.

01:38:57.000 Yeah, he's like a leading authority on certain whitefish species in the Yukon.

01:39:00.000 This dude lived in the bush like that all that time.

01:39:02.000 Wow.

01:39:02.000 But I told him, he says, man, I thought about it a lot.

01:39:05.000 You know, I thought because maybe you'll figure it out.

01:39:07.000 I thought about it all the time for a while.

01:39:10.000 What happened?

01:39:11.000 I asked my brother Danny, I'm like, when I had this guy on the podcast, what should I ask him about?

01:39:15.000 And he goes, ask him about the guy he found.

01:39:19.000 So he gives me this book.

01:39:21.000 He gives me this book.

01:39:24.000 And it's called Death in the Barren Grounds.

01:39:28.000 And it was this, he's got a, Randy used the term starved out.

01:39:32.000 And you could tell that all the time he spent living in the bush, like starving to death is very much on his mind.

01:39:37.000 Like him and his buddies even made a sort of pact.

01:39:40.000 Right.

01:39:41.000 To like, hey man, like if it comes down to it, don't hesitate to eat my body.

01:39:45.000 You know, which you should.

01:39:49.000 He gives you this book, Death in the Barren Ground.

01:39:51.000 It's about these guys in the 20s, these three dudes in the 20s that go up on this Thelon River, which flows into the Hudson Bay.

01:39:57.000 And they go up in the, they're kind of north of the tree line, but they're in a timbered grove.

01:40:04.000 And they go up there to trap for the winter, and their whole plan is to live off caribou, but the caribou never come through.

01:40:08.000 And the youngest one keeps this meticulous journal in this book.

01:40:14.000 He keeps this meticulous journal, and he documents with painstaking detail the two people he's with starving to death and himself eventually starving to death.

01:40:27.000 He lets off at a point.

01:40:28.000 It's unclear when he died.

01:40:29.000 He had the wherewithal to put the journal in the stove.

01:40:32.000 And to make a sign that said, look in the stove.

01:40:34.000 And when they found him a couple years later, they were able to find this journal.

01:40:37.000 But it got so bad that they're, like, crushing animal bone, which is a thing.

01:40:44.000 That's not going to talk about this Donner Party deal I was working on.

01:40:48.000 These guys are crushing animal bone and boiling it to get some kind of nutritive value out of crushed animal bone.

01:40:57.000 And they're eating animal hide.

01:40:59.000 Like, you scrape away the hair, and you can boil animal skins and eat them.

01:41:05.000 I've done that.

01:41:06.000 It just makes, like, a gelatin-y, kind of tasteless, like, leather noodle, basically.

01:41:13.000 And what he's documenting, as they're dying from this, is the horrible bowel obstruction.

01:41:20.000 And they're trying to make, like, in his journal, he's describing this, of trying to make these enema devices.

01:41:27.000 And even for a while on each other, trying to perform an operation on each other, because that bone fragment, they're boiling that bone fragment and drinking it, but that bone fragment in their bowel is reforming into bone plugs.

01:41:46.000 And even when they find these guys...

01:41:49.000 Years later, a guy from the Canadian Mounted Police is doing this very...

01:41:54.000 Basically a crime scene description of what went on in here.

01:41:58.000 And still laying there a couple years later is a plate full of solidified excrement.

01:42:03.000 Oh, God.

01:42:04.000 Everything else rotted away.

01:42:05.000 These guys are just skeletons, but that bone shit.

01:42:10.000 Yeah.

01:42:12.000 And you look at...

01:42:14.000 And I just finished this book the other day.

01:42:19.000 So, you look and be like, oh, they're starving to death, starving to death, but when you starve to death, all this stuff is actually going on, and that had to have been fatal.

01:42:26.000 And we were working on, you know, Mo, who's been on the show, we've been working on this project, which I'm, you know, wanting to plug, but we did an episode on the Donner Party, who died up in the mountains in California, and the Donner Party, in addition to the cannibalism they're famous for, it was so crazy, because before I read that book, We're hearing all about that the members of the Donna Party were eating the crushed bone and eating the boiled hides.

01:42:52.000 Oh, and the other thing is all those hair follicles would form into dense balls that would, like, plug your rectum.

01:43:01.000 And he's just describing all this as they die.

01:43:03.000 It's horrible.

01:43:04.000 But that dude, Randy Brown, gave me that book because you could tell that in his mind, man, like, starving out.

01:43:11.000 Like, it stuck with him.

01:43:13.000 You know, and he's walking around handing out a book about starving to death in the Arctic, you know?

01:43:18.000 Because he'd do it well.

01:43:19.000 But that was like in that same thing, like Donner Party being like known for the cannibalism and all that, is all those people die and probably like a lot of the same thing.

01:43:28.000 Eating that hide and hair and crushed bone.

01:43:33.000 Just miserable.

01:43:34.000 People have a very delusional perspective when it comes to like surviving and living off the land.

01:43:40.000 Oh.

01:43:41.000 How difficult it would be.

01:43:42.000 Oh.

01:43:44.000 In talking to him, when he talked about that guy that struck off, like, this is after a long time he spent in the bush.

01:43:50.000 He talked about the guy that struck off, and the guy struck off with a.22 pistol.

01:43:54.000 And Randy's like, you cannot, in that environment, you cannot survive with a.22 pistol.

01:44:02.000 Like, he just knows that categorically you cannot survive with a.22 pistol.

01:44:06.000 And the dude didn't.

01:44:07.000 Yeah, how could you?

01:44:10.000 Well, people would probably think that they're such a badass, they would.

01:44:13.000 How many bullets do you have?

01:44:14.000 I don't know.

01:44:15.000 I don't know how many he had.

01:44:16.000 But he said, you won't.

01:44:16.000 You won't make it.

01:44:17.000 And he made a point.

01:44:18.000 That.22 pistol, when they found that body, that.22 pistol's hanging on a peg inside the cabin where he found them.

01:44:26.000 I mean, there's no way you'd have enough ammunition.

01:44:28.000 Even with a pistol, you're limited in your range.

01:44:31.000 You're limited in your accuracy.

01:44:33.000 No.

01:44:34.000 They did everything with.243s in those years that he did that. 0.77

01:44:39.000 And they would load, like, variable loads.

01:44:42.000 Why variable loads?

01:44:43.000 He'd make light loads and heavy loads.

01:44:45.000 Oh, okay, for different animals?

01:44:46.000 Yeah, they'd make little grouse loads and shit, and they'd load their big game bullets, you know?

01:44:50.000 All the.243. 0.76

01:44:53.000 Hunting moose for the.243, caribou for the.243.

01:44:56.000 Where's he getting all the gunpowder?

01:44:58.000 They were loading their own stuff.

01:45:00.000 Wow.

01:45:01.000 So you'd have to go somewhere to get resupply.

01:45:04.000 Yeah, they had a camp.

01:45:06.000 At one of their camps, they had a reloading station.

01:45:08.000 The various guys living in the bush would kind of come in there and use that reloading station.

01:45:12.000 And that John the Baptist dude looted that reloading station.

01:45:17.000 Yeah, you got to kill those guys.

01:45:19.000 Those guys would cause you to starve to death.

01:45:22.000 Yeah.

01:45:22.000 If you're in that kind of an environment and someone's a mooch?

01:45:25.000 No.

01:45:26.000 But you know what's weird is about it, that someone pointed out to me later, I think John the Baptist, like John the Baptist from the Bible, I think John the Baptist starved to death.

01:45:34.000 Really?

01:45:35.000 So, that's like a little bit of a confusion, is, yeah, how would that be?

01:45:41.000 Is that real?

01:45:42.000 Yeah, there's this dude, there's this kid, I might tell you about him, this French kid, Etienne Brulee, that the French brought over.

01:45:50.000 And, like, he's known as Etienne Brule, and the French brought him over during the colonial era and gave him to the tribes so he'd learn their language.

01:45:58.000 And eventually he gets crossways with the Huron Indians, and the Huron Indians killed him and allegedly ate him.

01:46:06.000 So everybody knows him as Etienne Brule, which is burnt, right?

01:46:11.000 But did he get the name after or before?

01:46:16.000 Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

01:46:18.000 Yeah, like, so you're like, well, hold on a minute.

01:46:20.000 Did he just happen?

01:46:21.000 Like, he presumably got burned to death, or boiled, or whatever, you know?

01:46:25.000 So it's like, is he Etienne Brulee because of what happened to him, or was he running around with that moniker, and then, like, lo and behold?

01:46:31.000 So the John the Baptist thing is baffling to me.

01:46:34.000 Did John the Baptist in the Bible, I'm not familiar.

01:46:36.000 Did he definitely starve?

01:46:38.000 No, people keep telling me that.

01:46:40.000 Beheaded.

01:46:41.000 Oh, he didn't starve.

01:46:43.000 The word on the streets is beheaded in prison.

01:46:45.000 The word on the streets.

01:46:47.000 Someone sent me this big passage talking about his emaciated state.

01:46:53.000 Maybe he was emaciated before they cut his head off.

01:46:55.000 Maybe they were saving him from a fate worse than death.

01:46:58.000 Can I talk about my project?

01:47:00.000 Sure, please do.

01:47:00.000 Well, I'm working out with Mo, who's been on the show before.

01:47:08.000 Mo and I... We did the very early Meat Eaters together.

01:47:14.000 You probably met him that way, right, originally?

01:47:16.000 Yes, I met him that way, and then when he did Bourdain's show.

01:47:20.000 So we did very early Meat Eaters together, and we've always kept in touch, and he went on and did all that crazy stuff with Bourdain and got heavily involved in that.

01:47:30.000 And then after Bourdain's death, there was this kind of, I don't know, man, almost like this exodus of talent, like all these people that worked on that great show.

01:47:41.000 And they went on to do other stuff, and then Mo and I got joined up on this, and we've worked on it.

01:47:46.000 Mo's a showrunner on it, and we've worked on it together.

01:47:49.000 And it's coming out January 28th, and it's a show on History Channel where we look at outdoor mysteries.

01:47:55.000 So I brought up, we did an episode on Donner Party.

01:47:58.000 And you might ask, well, what's the mystery about the Donner Party?

01:48:00.000 But it's kind of like, what happened...

01:48:04.000 Could it have gone differently?

01:48:06.000 Like, what mistakes were made?

01:48:07.000 And most of these mysteries that we do are things that I have that most people have some awareness around, right?

01:48:13.000 Like, you've at least heard of it.

01:48:15.000 And I think that people think about the Donner Party, for instance, just to take an example.

01:48:20.000 When they're making a joke about cannibalism, you'd be like, oh, the Donner Party.

01:48:25.000 You know what I mean?

01:48:26.000 Like, people don't realize what happened there.

01:48:28.000 And going to that place, I think I never realized about it.

01:48:35.000 There was 90 people that got stranded in the Sierra Nevada that winter, 1846 to 1847. A thing that you never, ever realize and that changes everything I've ever thought about, half of those, more than half of those were kids.

01:48:48.000 Oh, my God.

01:48:50.000 Yeah, you don't think about it that way, right?

01:48:52.000 It's mostly children.

01:48:54.000 And you get into all this wild stuff about it, like, you're trying to keep your kids alive.

01:49:00.000 Yeah.

01:49:00.000 Right?

01:49:01.000 So there's this sort of like, earlier I said, I'll touch on cannibalism.

01:49:05.000 I was talking about Randy Brown making that cannibalism pact.

01:49:09.000 You try to keep your kids alive.

01:49:12.000 And the kids, by and large, the kids survived.

01:49:15.000 The kids survived at a much higher rate than adults.

01:49:18.000 And out of adults that survived, parents did better.

01:49:25.000 Parents were more likely to survive.

01:49:27.000 When they sent a little subgroup off to try to go get help, a lot of the people died on the way of trying to get help.

01:49:33.000 Parents lived.

01:49:34.000 Parents who had kids back at the main camp survived.

01:49:38.000 So it's this whole weird thing about the psychology of why keep going on.

01:49:42.000 You know what I mean?

01:49:43.000 And then you think about it from that angle.

01:49:45.000 If your kids were faced with starving to death, you would absolutely feed your kids human meat.

01:49:52.000 Yeah.

01:49:54.000 100%.

01:49:54.000 Yeah.

01:49:55.000 Right?

01:49:55.000 So, you look at it like this American horror story, but in the end, like, of those 90 people, like, half lived.

01:50:02.000 You know?

01:50:02.000 Half of them survived.

01:50:04.000 And they just, they did, they always did just, like, what they needed to to live.

01:50:10.000 You know?

01:50:11.000 But then there's, like, those families still carried a stigma.

01:50:15.000 Of course.

01:50:16.000 You know?

01:50:17.000 Like, it's terrible stigma.

01:50:18.000 But, like, getting into that, like, getting into that story and starting to...

01:50:24.000 Realize that, and then following that up with reading that book about the pain and anguish of starving to death, you wind up having just more...

01:50:33.000 I wind up with a lot more empathy, and just, you know, you almost kind of want to honor those people, rather than condemn them as these...

01:50:43.000 Like I said, it's like an American horror story.

01:50:45.000 You can't condemn them.

01:50:47.000 We would all have done the exact same thing.

01:50:48.000 To condemn them is just so...

01:50:51.000 It's a horrible way.

01:50:53.000 To look at it.

01:50:55.000 It's a survival story.

01:50:57.000 I mean, human beings, it's like those soccer players that got in the plane crash.

01:51:03.000 Do you know the story of the two boats that tried to make their way across the Arctic?

01:51:08.000 It was like, was it the terror in another boat?

01:51:13.000 There's a Netflix.

01:51:15.000 Yeah, I do know what you're talking about, yeah.

01:51:16.000 But the Netflix series is like a horror series.

01:51:20.000 They bring in like a mystical monster and stuff.

01:51:23.000 Got it.

01:51:23.000 And the people all resort to cannibalism.

01:51:25.000 But they tried to make it across this path and they got frozen in in their boats and they were waiting in the spring for the ice to thaw and it never thawed.

01:51:35.000 And they got stuck there and they tried to walk out and make it to the ocean and they never made it.

01:51:42.000 Yeah.

01:51:43.000 And they wound up having to do cannibalism. 0.96

01:51:46.000 Oh, yeah.

01:51:46.000 In the Donner Party, they would, at times, in some of these cases, they had a little system where you would keep the carcasses separate so that people didn't have to eat their own kin, eat their own relatives.

01:51:59.000 They mostly ate people that died of natural causes, but at the time, there was no legal prohibition on killing Indians.

01:52:09.000 They had two Indian guides with them, and a guy murdered them.

01:52:12.000 Wow.

01:52:13.000 They murdered them to eat them.

01:52:15.000 And never faced any repercussions for it.

01:52:18.000 It was more illegal.

01:52:20.000 It was more illegal to kill someone's cow than it was to kill two Native Americans.

01:52:24.000 Wow.

01:52:25.000 Yeah, he just walked.

01:52:28.000 Everybody knew he did it.

01:52:29.000 Never faced any repercussions for it.

01:52:31.000 Murdered two people to eat them.

01:52:32.000 Other than that, they were eating people that were already there.

01:52:35.000 Jesus.

01:52:36.000 When we were up there filming in Donner Pass.

01:52:39.000 We met these people and they were saying that these guys were doing this thing about places with Christmas names.

01:52:46.000 And they had thought Donner...

01:52:47.000 Like Donner and Blitzen?

01:52:50.000 Oh, God.

01:52:53.000 That's the funniest, man.

01:52:54.000 That's crazy.

01:52:55.000 So I spent two months traveling with Moe.

01:53:01.000 Maybe a little over two months traveling with Moe working on this whole thing.

01:53:04.000 It's been fun, my man.

01:53:06.000 So what is the name of the show?

01:53:08.000 It's called Hunting History.

01:53:09.000 Oh.

01:53:10.000 Yeah.

01:53:10.000 It's not a hunting show.

01:53:11.000 Hunting History.

01:53:12.000 There it is.

01:53:12.000 Me on a Arrow.

01:53:13.000 Me on a Arrow plane.

01:53:15.000 That one, that episode, oh, it's like a whole little trailer.

01:53:19.000 So what is the idea of the show?

01:53:22.000 It's like outdoor, wilderness mysteries, outdoor mysteries.

01:53:25.000 And we do some things that are decades old.

01:53:27.000 We do some things that are centuries old.

01:53:30.000 When I was, for instance, when I was growing up in the Great Lakes region, there's a...

01:53:36.000 The first ship they ever built on the Great Lakes is called the Griffin, and no one's ever found that ship.

01:53:42.000 That ship went missing in the Great Lakes, and people are still trying to hunt for that ship.

01:53:46.000 It's regarded as the holy grail of Great Lakes shipwrecks.

01:53:50.000 There's still people actively searching for it.

01:53:51.000 We do one on Donner Party.

01:53:53.000 What's in the ship that they're trying to get?

01:53:55.000 It would be gone now.

01:53:56.000 It was full of beaver pelts.

01:53:57.000 It was full of about six tons of beaver pelts.

01:54:01.000 And there's all these different theories about the crew, mutineed, whatever.

01:54:05.000 But there's a guy, this dude named Steve Libert, who came out of naval intelligence, the naval intelligence world.

01:54:14.000 And this guy named Steve Libert has the latest claim of having found the griffin.

01:54:20.000 So I went and dove that site to check out his claim of having identified this ship.

01:54:29.000 Yeah, I don't think he's got it.

01:54:30.000 No?

01:54:30.000 No.

01:54:31.000 What do you think it is?

01:54:32.000 What do you think you found?

01:54:35.000 There are...

01:54:36.000 It kind of blows your mind when you think about the Great Lakes.

01:54:39.000 There are literally thousands of missing ships, and then there are many, many ships that are there, but no one knows what they are.

01:54:49.000 And I think he's found a very old ship, but I don't think he's found the Griffin.

01:54:53.000 6,000 and 10,000 shipwrecks.

01:54:56.000 Wow.

01:54:57.000 Yeah.

01:54:59.000 Wow.

01:55:00.000 The burden of proof on finding the griffin is hard.

01:55:04.000 You've heard of the guy LaSalle?

01:55:06.000 No.

01:55:07.000 He wound up dying down in this neck of the woods.

01:55:10.000 He built the first ship and he got above Niagara Falls and built a big ship.

01:55:15.000 And built the first ship that ever sailed the Upper Great Lakes.

01:55:17.000 So he went all through the Upper Great Lakes, went to Green Bay, filled it full of beaver hides to get himself out of debt.

01:55:24.000 Sends all those beaver hides back down to Niagara.

01:55:27.000 But they go missing along the way.

01:55:29.000 He makes his way down.

01:55:31.000 He winds up being the first European to descend the Mississippi to the mouth. 0.70

01:55:36.000 And then later he gets into like a mutiny of sorts down in the lower Mississippi.

01:55:44.000 Gets in a mutiny of sorts and one of his guys shoots and kills him.

01:55:46.000 Just kind of this whole run of shitty luck.

01:55:49.000 But he lost his ship.

01:55:52.000 There's all this different evidence of pointing to where this ship might lie.

01:55:56.000 But it's almost certainly like it's somewhere.

01:56:02.000 It's somewhere.

01:56:03.000 Because stuff lasts so long.

01:56:05.000 Like in that fresh water, stuff lasts so long.

01:56:07.000 You'll go dive down and look at ships that are 100 years old, 200 years old.

01:56:11.000 It looks like you could refurbish things.

01:56:13.000 Really?

01:56:13.000 Except for the ones that get broke up by ice.

01:56:16.000 So that ship's laying around.

01:56:17.000 Wow.

01:56:18.000 I'd like to tell you we found it.

01:56:20.000 I hung out with a bunch of dudes that were looking for it.

01:56:22.000 The lakes are so big.

01:56:24.000 Yeah, I hung out with dudes that were looking for it.

01:56:26.000 And now people are getting really good at it because of all the sophisticated sonar.

01:56:29.000 That's why they're finding all this crazy shit.

01:56:31.000 I don't think people understand how big the Great Lakes are.

01:56:33.000 No.

01:56:34.000 They're literally like oceans.

01:56:36.000 They're so big.

01:56:37.000 Especially when you add them all together, you know?

01:56:38.000 And the place is pretty deep.

01:56:39.000 But yeah, they're littered with stuff, man.

01:56:41.000 And dudes, like, there's just common dudes now that can buy really sophisticated sonar and underwater cameras.

01:56:48.000 And people are just finding stuff, like, mad.

01:56:50.000 Oh, now there's more sophisticated technology.

01:56:53.000 Yeah, because you can just cruise around.

01:56:54.000 You can just cut grids on sonar.

01:56:55.000 So you got dudes that are out there just identifying wreck after wreck after wreck right now.

01:56:59.000 That's why there's a lot of enthusiasm that someone's going to turn this boat up.

01:57:02.000 But it has these big cannons.

01:57:04.000 It should have these big French-built cannons. 0.96

01:57:06.000 And until someone finds the cannons, no one's going to buy what you're saying.

01:57:12.000 Cannons?

01:57:12.000 Yeah, LaSalle brought cannons from Europe and mounted them on the boat.

01:57:16.000 So, like, in case someone was trying to have pirates?

01:57:19.000 Did they have pirates back then?

01:57:20.000 They did, but also they just would, you know, try to intimidate Native American tribes, and, you know, they'd get them into the fur trade, but also there's, like, rogue people, and you're also, at that time, the French are duking it out with English had a big toehold up in Hudson Bay.

01:57:34.000 So you got the English there.

01:57:36.000 You got the Spanish to the south. 1.00

01:57:37.000 Just a ton of conflict.

01:57:38.000 And people still trying to duke it out over who's going to control the Great Lakes.

01:57:42.000 Wow.

01:57:42.000 So there's this argument, too, which is crazy.

01:57:44.000 Picture if we had a naval vessel that sank off France right now.

01:57:49.000 It's not France's boat.

01:57:54.000 Right.

01:57:54.000 Because we have all these agreements in place.

01:57:56.000 It's like our boat.

01:57:57.000 So they would have to hand it over to us.

01:57:59.000 It's flying under our flag.

01:58:00.000 It remains our vessel.

01:58:01.000 There's this argument that LaSalle's ship was flying under a French flag.

01:58:08.000 Whoever finds that ship, there's an argument that the French would be able to claim that ship.

01:58:12.000 So even if some dude, like some freelancer, was to find it and find those cannons and shit and finds this ship, there's an argument that the French could say, we'll take it from here, son.

01:58:21.000 Whoa.

01:58:22.000 Yeah.

01:58:23.000 It's flying under our flag, and our international treaties mean that that's our boat.

01:58:27.000 Hmm.

01:58:28.000 Which would de-centivize me in wanting to find it.

01:58:30.000 Yeah, like, fuck that.

01:58:32.000 Imagine you go through all that work.

01:58:33.000 Yeah, they do it for glory.

01:58:35.000 Gold wrecks, like, shipwrecks and people, like, hunting for those things, that's a fascinating world.

01:58:40.000 It is, man.

01:58:41.000 Because if you get lucky, and if you find one that's filled with, like, Roman coins...

01:58:46.000 Yeah.

01:58:47.000 Like, you...

01:58:48.000 We were talking about...

01:58:49.000 Billions of dollars.

01:58:51.000 A lot of money to be made.

01:58:52.000 We were going to do our last episode when we went and did the Donner Party.

01:58:56.000 What we were supposed to be doing is we were supposed to be hanging out with guys that are still this whole fleet of Spanish vessels that went down off the east coast of Florida.

01:59:06.000 So the Atlantic side of Florida.

01:59:08.000 We were going to go down with these guys that are still fighting over and finding all this stuff from all these sunken ships.

01:59:15.000 But then the hurricane passed right over it.

01:59:19.000 So we didn't get to go do that.

01:59:20.000 We didn't go do that show.

01:59:23.000 We did one about that wanted to become mostly a story that centered around in the 70s.

01:59:31.000 There's this aircraft that was carrying the Speaker of the House.

01:59:35.000 Do you remember...

01:59:37.000 Is it Nina?

01:59:39.000 No.

01:59:40.000 Hey, Jamie, I hate to be treating you like a research assistant here.

01:59:45.000 Cokie Roberts.

01:59:46.000 You know the journalist Cokie Roberts from NPR and shit?

01:59:49.000 Okay, yes.

01:59:50.000 Cokie Roberts' father was this guy Hale Boggs.

01:59:54.000 Hale Boggs was a Democrat and he was a Speaker of the House in the 70s.

01:59:58.000 And Alaska had, at that time, only one.

02:00:00.000 Alaska had a sole congressman.

02:00:02.000 There was an airplane that had Begich, their sole congressman, the Speaker of the House, an assistant and a pilot that went down in Alaska in the 70s.

02:00:13.000 Still no one's found that plane.

02:00:16.000 Speaker of the House.

02:00:18.000 Like, imagine that happened now.

02:00:19.000 You know what I mean?

02:00:22.000 Yeah, 1972. Yeah, but it makes sense in the last one.

02:00:26.000 Oh, it does, but then you get into the huge number of all these missing aircraft and, like, all that search centered around this glacier that it would have been swallowed by a glacier.

02:00:38.000 And we went to this other site where this military transport plane years ago did go down in a glacier, and the glacier swallowed it, and I think it was, I don't know, 20-some years later, that glacier started to spit that plane out at the toe of the glacier.

02:00:52.000 Like, it carried it, I don't know, what it is, 13 miles under the ice and then started to spit out human remains and plane parts.

02:01:00.000 Every spring, the military goes to the foot of that glacier.

02:01:03.000 Every spring, they go there.

02:01:05.000 Or, sorry, every summer.

02:01:07.000 They go to the top of that glacier, and they're still identifying human remains that are moving out of that thing miles away from where that plane burrowed into that glacier.

02:01:19.000 Wow.

02:01:20.000 Yeah, we went right there.

02:01:23.000 1952. Yeah.

02:01:24.000 Wow, look at that wheel.

02:01:26.000 Yep.

02:01:27.000 And on top of that glacier, we had got there after that.

02:01:30.000 We flew over it in a helicopter.

02:01:32.000 They don't want you landing there.

02:01:33.000 But on top of that glacier is all this orange paint.

02:01:35.000 Orange paint spots.

02:01:37.000 They weren't working there anymore, but you can tell they were in there marking everything that you could see coming out of that as that glacier recedes.

02:01:45.000 Wow.

02:01:46.000 And they're marking all those pieces.

02:01:47.000 So this other glacier where most of that search focused, for that Begich Boggs flight, focused on this one glacier.

02:01:56.000 But if you do the math on that glacier...

02:01:59.000 Had it gone into that glacier, where they had spent a ton of time looking into a crevasse in that glacier, had it gone into that glacier, the glacier would have spit it out by now.

02:02:07.000 Because you can kind of track how much a glacier moves every year.

02:02:10.000 So now the idea that it was in that glacier has been kind of put to rest.

02:02:14.000 Well, here's dude searching that one.

02:02:16.000 Well, you could see as you move how far it travels.

02:02:20.000 Wow.

02:02:22.000 Yeah.

02:02:23.000 Yeah, so we went there.

02:02:23.000 We went down into some of those crevasses like that, too.

02:02:26.000 Do you climb down into one of those things?

02:02:28.000 Yeah, which is scary as shit.

02:02:29.000 Fuck that.

02:02:30.000 Because that stuff is alive, man.

02:02:33.000 It's moving.

02:02:33.000 I mean, not like literally alive, but it's like groaning and moving.

02:02:38.000 Yeah, we went back down into one of those.

02:02:41.000 What does it sound like?

02:02:41.000 You know, it was pretty quiet that day.

02:02:43.000 It was actually more peaceful there because you know how much all that cold air from that ice generates so much wind?

02:02:50.000 We land this helicopter there.

02:02:52.000 And the wind's howling, and I don't know much about aviation.

02:02:55.000 I mean, I use it a lot, but the wind's so bad, I was asking the guy, at what point do you risk that your helicopter's gonna blow off the glacier?

02:03:06.000 And a couple minutes later, he's a very experienced pilot, but a couple minutes later, he winds up tethering down his helicopter, because he's like, now you're like, fuck it with my head.

02:03:17.000 So he tethers down his helicopter on these ice screws, you know, to make sure the helicopter doesn't slide and go down into a crevasse.

02:03:26.000 And then you, you know, I was with a very experienced ice climber, but harness up and pick your way down.

02:03:32.000 But anyways, it's like so loud, and you hear a lot of the, you know, the noise of all that ice moving, because it's moving all those rocks and everything.

02:03:40.000 It just pulverizes stuff, as you see with that aircraft.

02:03:45.000 But when you drop down in that, When you drop down on that crevasse and go down that sucker, it gets, like, unbelievably calm.

02:03:53.000 Real calm.

02:03:54.000 How far did you go down?

02:03:56.000 Oh, shit, not that far.

02:03:57.000 Probably 30 feet.

02:03:58.000 That's far enough.

02:03:59.000 Oh, it's far enough for sure.

02:04:00.000 It's unnerving.

02:04:01.000 It's unnerving for me just hearing you talk about it.

02:04:04.000 I remember you telling me about that chamber you like to go into?

02:04:08.000 Yeah.

02:04:09.000 Yeah.

02:04:09.000 It's not quite like that, but it's like you just all of a sudden are like...

02:04:14.000 But you're also in there just thinking how you could get...

02:04:17.000 Smushed?

02:04:18.000 Oh, just obliterated.

02:04:20.000 There's stories.

02:04:21.000 I was talking with this dude years ago, and he used to be involved with Outward Bound, and they were doing a glacier hike.

02:04:28.000 A guide was doing a glacier hike, and they had a kid, like a student.

02:04:32.000 I think it was Outward Bound.

02:04:34.000 They had a student go off to take a piss into one of those things.

02:04:40.000 Never found.

02:04:41.000 Because there's big rivers flowing underneath that stuff.

02:04:43.000 Oh, God.

02:04:44.000 Right?

02:04:45.000 So picture you, like, you go down.

02:04:47.000 So you're down there, you can hear water running everywhere.

02:04:49.000 You can hear rivers underneath you, inside that.

02:04:52.000 But you're roped up, you know?

02:04:54.000 But even the rope you're on, you're just screwing screws into the ice.

02:04:59.000 And then, at a certain air temperature, right, like, the screw conducts heat, you know?

02:05:06.000 So at a certain air temperature...

02:05:08.000 If you drive that screw in and that screw is pushing heat, it'll melt the ice around the threads.

02:05:16.000 So you'll actually drill these big holes into the glacier like a V. Picture you're coming in like a V and the two upper parts of the V are like 30 inches apart.

02:05:28.000 And you drill at a 45 degree angle until those holes meet.

02:05:33.000 Then you snake a rope down one hole.

02:05:36.000 And get it snaked out the other hole. 0.89

02:05:40.000 And then tie a knot in that.

02:05:41.000 And that's what's holding you.

02:05:43.000 Oh, fuck that.

02:05:44.000 Because if you put that screw in there, at a certain temperature, the threads of the screw are moving like solar heat and atmospheric heat down the threads and can melt the thread out.

02:05:56.000 So you're just, you're tied in on a little like, yeah, you're like tied.

02:06:02.000 Hoping it holds on.

02:06:03.000 Onto a hunk of the ice.

02:06:04.000 You back down into those suckers, dude.

02:06:06.000 It's like, it's an ass pucker.

02:06:08.000 Well, that's how they found the Iceman, right?

02:06:09.000 He was in a crevasse.

02:06:11.000 Was he in a crevasse?

02:06:12.000 Wasn't he?

02:06:13.000 I think he fell into a glacial crevasse.

02:06:16.000 I don't remember that.

02:06:17.000 I think as the glacier melted, that's how they found his body.

02:06:19.000 Oh, I know they found him on a melted glacier, but I didn't know that it was supposed that he fell into a crevasse.

02:06:24.000 I'm not sure, but I think that was the story, that they feel like he fell, like he was involved in some sort of mortal combat with someone.

02:06:33.000 He got shot with an arrow.

02:06:34.000 Yeah, he was all tore up.

02:06:36.000 Yeah.

02:06:36.000 They made a movie about his last days.

02:06:38.000 Did they?

02:06:39.000 A fictional movie.

02:06:40.000 Really?

02:06:40.000 Yeah, it's a European fictional movie.

02:06:42.000 And it sort of sets up the whole circumstance.

02:06:45.000 Right.

02:06:46.000 I haven't seen it yet, but it sets up the whole circumstance.

02:06:49.000 This is a really dumb movie.

02:06:51.000 Otzi was his name.

02:06:52.000 Yeah, Otzi.

02:06:52.000 They named him.

02:06:53.000 I'm sure that wasn't his real name.

02:06:54.000 No.

02:06:55.000 He had a tattoo.

02:06:56.000 He had a tattoo on his shoulder.

02:06:58.000 That was his wife.

02:06:59.000 He had tattoos.

02:07:00.000 Yeah, he did have tattoos.

02:07:01.000 It was just really wild.

02:07:01.000 That was thousands of years ago, right?

02:07:03.000 There was a really dumb movie about an Iceman that, I think it was like the 1980s.

02:07:09.000 I think it's called Iceman.

02:07:10.000 No, I remember that.

02:07:10.000 They bring a guy back to life.

02:07:12.000 Yeah, and then the wife falls in love with him.

02:07:15.000 Oh shit, I didn't know that happened.

02:07:16.000 That happens in there?

02:07:18.000 So dumb.

02:07:19.000 Yeah, the Iceman takes a liking to this guy's wife. 1.00

02:07:23.000 Oh, that's the plot?

02:07:25.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:07:25.000 I thought it was more like an E.T. plot.

02:07:27.000 No, no, no.

02:07:28.000 Like they resuscitate him and then the scientists want to get at him.

02:07:31.000 Is this it?

02:07:33.000 Yeah.

02:07:33.000 That's who he starts getting with?

02:07:34.000 Is this the same one?

02:07:35.000 Yeah, the guy gets back to life and I think he falls in love with the lady.

02:07:40.000 He's hanging out with people.

02:07:42.000 And then, you know, the Iceman...

02:07:45.000 That's her? 0.97

02:07:46.000 Yeah, I think he winds up falling in love with her and the scientist gets real mad.

02:07:50.000 That's also the plot of Encino, man.

02:07:51.000 Yes!

02:07:52.000 Is that what this is?

02:07:53.000 It's probably short.

02:07:55.000 Brennan Frazier.

02:07:59.000 Yeah, they thaw him out and he's okay, which is fucking hilarious in and of itself.

02:08:04.000 The other night we were watching these old movies like this.

02:08:08.000 The other night we were watching Timothy Hutton.

02:08:11.000 Temple of Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom.

02:08:14.000 And, you know, the love interest, like the Indy's love interest in that movie.

02:08:20.000 I can't remember what her name is.

02:08:21.000 But anyways, we're watching it with our youngest kid who really wanted to watch an Anna Jones movie.

02:08:29.000 And my wife's like, man, you just can't have teeth like that anymore in the movies. 1.00

02:08:35.000 The love interest, you know?

02:08:36.000 Like, you forget, like, how perfect...

02:08:39.000 Like, oral processes have made everybody's teeth.

02:08:43.000 Oh.

02:08:44.000 And so here's, like, this woman who's like, Job is like, you know, she's like the hot woman in the movie that everyone's gonna fall in love with. 1.00

02:08:50.000 And you look and you're like, yeah, you're right.

02:08:53.000 Like, teeth are so perfect on everybody now.

02:08:57.000 You know, and you're looking at an old movie and you're like, oh, it was before they were able to do all that.

02:09:01.000 Right.

02:09:01.000 That's funny.

02:09:02.000 We were watching that stupid show on New Year's Eve, you know, that ball dropping.

02:09:08.000 Mm-hmm.

02:09:09.000 Yeah.

02:09:10.000 And just every single person, even kind of involved in that whole production, has those teeth.

02:09:16.000 Yeah.

02:09:18.000 Well, most of those teeth are fake now.

02:09:19.000 Oh, no, that's what I'm saying, man.

02:09:21.000 But absurdly so.

02:09:22.000 And it was just really funny to look at that and be like, you're right.

02:09:25.000 There's something that looks like you can't put your finger on it.

02:09:27.000 It's like the heroin, absent, perfect teeth.

02:09:32.000 Right.

02:09:33.000 Do you remember Lauren Hutton?

02:09:34.000 She had that gap between her teeth. 1.00

02:09:35.000 It was kind of hot.

02:09:36.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:09:37.000 It was like part of her charm.

02:09:39.000 She had this gap. 0.60

02:09:40.000 Yeah, nowadays you'd feel some pressure to go tighten that up.

02:09:43.000 Yeah, probably.

02:09:45.000 They'd put some shit on your teeth and tighten it up. 0.97

02:09:46.000 You want to be in the big movies, you've got to tighten that up.

02:09:48.000 Tighten it up.

02:09:49.000 It's funny you were talking about the beaver pelts.

02:09:51.000 Because you were the first person to explain to me the richest man in the world at one point in time.

02:09:57.000 His business was beaver pelts.

02:09:58.000 Yeah, it was America's first homegrown millionaire, John Jacob Astor.

02:10:03.000 That is so crazy.

02:10:04.000 Yeah, so he was a German.

02:10:05.000 He came over as a young kid.

02:10:08.000 He didn't have, you know, broke, penniless.

02:10:12.000 Aster comes over. 0.88

02:10:14.000 Just an immigrant, right? 1.00

02:10:18.000 Comes to the U.S. He's trying to figure out a way to make his way in America.

02:10:22.000 And in New York, he meets a guy in the fur business, like a furrier.

02:10:25.000 And the guy says, a lot of money being made in furs.

02:10:28.000 And that was, like, that was the commodity.

02:10:34.000 For North America.

02:10:36.000 When you look at all the English powers coming or all the European powers coming to establish colonies, you know, it's known like the Spanish come in and they get like all that Aztec gold, all that Incan gold.

02:10:47.000 Other European powers were like jealous about the wealth Spain was pulling out and mineral wealth and they always thought that in our area up in what's now the continent like US, you know, eventually gold did come out but they were sort of like primarily like we need our own gold fields.

02:11:02.000 But what emerged was fur.

02:11:05.000 Fur was our thing.

02:11:06.000 Fur was the thing of value.

02:11:08.000 So Aster became a fur trader and helped launch these fur trapping expeditions and became involved in what we now call the mountain man area.

02:11:19.000 When you hear the term mountain men, The Mountain Man era.

02:11:26.000 In my sort of other job outside of doing my History Channel show, we do audio originals.

02:11:33.000 We did one on the deerskin trade called The Long Hunters. 0.86

02:11:36.000 It was about Daniel Boone, 1770s in the deerskin trade.

02:11:40.000 Right now...

02:11:41.000 We're coming out with one called Meat Eaters of American History, The Mountain Men, and it covers that like John Jacob Astor era of the beaver trade.

02:11:49.000 And what all those dudes, so when you hear about Jim Bridger, John Coulter, Jed Smith, what they were producing, they were producing a material that would be used to make felt hats.

02:12:01.000 Like, that's what that was all about.

02:12:04.000 Wow.

02:12:05.000 Rather than, you'd think, when they would trap a beaver, How many fucking beavers were around back then?

02:12:14.000 A lot.

02:12:16.000 Even though we've recovered them really successfully, there were far more beavers back then than there are now.

02:12:21.000 What's the estimated population of beavers back then?

02:12:24.000 In the tens of millions.

02:12:27.000 What are they now?

02:12:29.000 I don't know.

02:12:30.000 I do know, because I looked at it the other day, but I forgot what it is.

02:12:36.000 They're very recovered across a big part of their range.

02:12:39.000 But nowhere near what it was at the time.

02:12:43.000 The whole continent was shaped by beavers.

02:12:49.000 They manipulate their landscape more than anything besides humans.

02:12:54.000 But people had always whittled away at them.

02:12:58.000 You know?

02:12:58.000 Like, earlier I mentioned Daniel Boone, like, his primary job was a deerskin, he was in the deerskin trade, and what they were using for back then.

02:13:04.000 You know when you see really old pictures of, like, kings and shit, and they got those kind of white pants on?

02:13:08.000 It's probably a buckskin pant, right?

02:13:10.000 So our whole term with, like, when we say a buck, something's worth a buck, that's about the equivalent value of a deerskin.

02:13:16.000 So, you know, that's where that term came from.

02:13:19.000 Those guys, at the same time, they would hunt deerskins in the summer, because they wanted them real thin.

02:13:24.000 And then they would switch and they would hunt beaver pelts in the winter for wool felt, to create wool felt.

02:13:30.000 But we kind of gradually extirpated, like wiped out beaver numbers.

02:13:36.000 And then when you get to 1804 and the Lewis and Clark expedition, Lewis and Clark push into the interior, into the northern Rockies and around the headwaters of the Missouri.

02:13:47.000 And when they come back to St. Louis, like one of the things they report on is like, holy shit.

02:13:54.000 Like, we found that the last great stronghold of the beaver is in the Rockies.

02:14:01.000 And that's what pushed this whole Mountain Man era.

02:14:05.000 So when you watch the Revenant, like Hugh Glass, you know, get mauled by the Grizzly, those guys were all, like, their thing was they were beaver trappers.

02:14:13.000 And earlier I mentioned the English up around Hudson Bay.

02:14:18.000 So you're familiar with this thing called the Hudson Bay Company?

02:14:20.000 From history?

02:14:21.000 Yes.

02:14:22.000 It was like a fur trading enterprise.

02:14:23.000 The Hudson Bay Company and the English always had this model of the fur trade where they would build posts and then incentivize Indians to hunt fur or trap fur.

02:14:33.000 They didn't trap.

02:14:34.000 The English weren't themselves trappers.

02:14:38.000 The English were traders.

02:14:39.000 And they would incentivize tribes to go trap and bring them the furs. 0.96

02:14:43.000 In the Rockies, that didn't work.

02:14:45.000 They couldn't get these nomadic...

02:14:49.000 Equestrian bison hunters with the program.

02:14:53.000 They thought it was, by and large, the sentiment was, it's beneath us.

02:14:57.000 We're not going to give up our whole life away.

02:14:59.000 Everything we need comes from the buffalo.

02:15:01.000 We live in big family groups.

02:15:03.000 We follow the herds.

02:15:04.000 I'm not going to go trap beaver for you.

02:15:06.000 It's of no interest to me.

02:15:08.000 So then they're like, well, shit, how are we going to get the beaver?

02:15:10.000 And so they start hiring dudes.

02:15:12.000 They start hiring orphans and people that...

02:15:14.000 That were under indentured servitude and ran away, whatever.

02:15:19.000 They hired these big groups of Americans out of the colonies, the former colonies, because at the time of the United States, they hired these guys and say, you're going to go out and live for years at a time in the Rockies and trap beaver, and here's where to meet us on such and such date every year.

02:15:37.000 So go to this valley.

02:15:39.000 Right?

02:15:39.000 Go to Jackson Hole, or go to Daniel, Wyoming, or Bear Valley, wherever, and we'll meet you in June.

02:15:45.000 And you bring all the shit you caught, and we'll give you some more equipment.

02:15:49.000 And that was the Mountain Man era.

02:15:51.000 All that stuff, when they caught those beavers, there's no need, they didn't want the meat, they could eat the meat, but there's no value in the meat.

02:15:58.000 The hide, they don't even want the leather from the hide.

02:16:02.000 That was thrown away.

02:16:04.000 They don't want the main guard hairs.

02:16:07.000 So if you look at a pelt, You got these silky long guard hairs and then there's an underwool underneath it.

02:16:13.000 They don't want the silky long guard hair.

02:16:16.000 All they're after is the under fur on the hide.

02:16:21.000 To line hats.

02:16:22.000 To make felt.

02:16:24.000 But there was so much conning and scamming of people taking shit that wasn't beaver wool and trying to pass it off as beaver wool.

02:16:32.000 You had to ship the whole hide to Europe.

02:16:36.000 So they could confirm that it was in fact a beaver hide at which they would hire people to pick the guard hair off, shave that underwool off, throw the guard hair away, throw the leather away, take that underwool and turn it into a felt to make a hat.

02:16:53.000 Wow.

02:16:53.000 Like an Ebenezer Scrooge top hat.

02:16:56.000 That's what that shit was about.

02:16:58.000 Wow.

02:16:58.000 So when this dude, when LaSalle...

02:17:00.000 You know, comes over and builds the griffin.

02:17:04.000 Like, that first ship is so crazy.

02:17:05.000 Like, he was building that ship to transport beaver hides because traditionally they'd always done it with canoes.

02:17:11.000 And he's like, I got a better idea.

02:17:12.000 I'm going to build a giant ship, fill that sucker full of beaver hides, and I'll get rich.

02:17:15.000 Thousands of beaver hides.

02:17:17.000 But, yeah, his ship vanished.

02:17:19.000 And that's what they were still up to in the Mountain Man era.

02:17:22.000 And that whole industry was born in this Mountain Man project we're doing.

02:17:28.000 Like, that whole history was born.

02:17:31.000 You can kind of say it was born with the Lewis and Clark Expedition and identifying this tremendous population of beavers in the Northern Rockies.

02:17:38.000 And it kind of ended in 1840. When the market collapsed.

02:17:43.000 If there's a time where you could go back in history and just observe, like they could put you in like a fucking bulletproof bubble and just like, no one knows you're there.

02:17:53.000 You could just go watch.

02:17:56.000 Where would you go?

02:17:56.000 Would you go to that time?

02:17:57.000 No, I just changed my time.

02:17:59.000 For a long time I knew what my time was, but I just changed my time recently.

02:18:03.000 What does it mean?

02:18:04.000 I'll be happy to explain.

02:18:06.000 What did it used to be?

02:18:09.000 There used to be an idea that's existed for much of my life about the peopling of the Americas.

02:18:18.000 And sometime, maybe around 15,000 years ago, there was so much of the Earth's water was tied up in glaciers Asia and Alaska were connected by a chunk of ground the size of Texas.

02:18:35.000 The Bering Land Bridge.

02:18:36.000 When people hear the Bering Land Bridge, you kind of picture this little like, it's like Moses crossing the part of the Red Sea.

02:18:43.000 You could have lived and died on the, you know, generations were probably born and died on the Bering Land Bridge with no idea that it was a bridge.

02:18:50.000 Like I said, it was a chunk of ground the size of Texas.

02:18:53.000 That much water was tied up in glaciers.

02:18:57.000 People crossed.

02:18:58.000 They almost certainly weren't saying like, hey, Bob, let's go to Alaska.

02:19:02.000 But they were doing their thing.

02:19:04.000 They were hunting and moving and they crossed.

02:19:06.000 And then because of all that ice, once they moved into what's now Alaska, the theory held that they were trapped there by glacial ice.

02:19:15.000 And eventually there was this thing called the Ice-Free Corridor opened up around like it would have spilled out around Edmonton, Alberta.

02:19:22.000 And the idea was the first people.

02:19:24.000 To lay eyes on the continental U.S. When that corridor opened up, when that little gap through the glaciers opened up, the first Americans spilled out onto the American Great Plains, killing mammoths with spears. 0.71

02:19:40.000 As all this new information has emerged, the dates don't line up anymore.

02:19:47.000 So we did a hunting history episode about this very question of...

02:19:54.000 How and when and who were the first people to enter the continent, right?

02:20:00.000 And now, that was called the Ice-Free Corridor hypothesis, but it's been made more and more untenable by finding these super old sites.

02:20:09.000 For a while, the oldest site we knew about in the New World was a site called Monteverde down in Chile.

02:20:15.000 So if people came in at the Bering Land Bridge, why is the oldest known site of human occupation all the way down in Chile?

02:20:23.000 How old is it?

02:20:24.000 Somewhere around 13, 14. What about those New Mexico footprints that are 22,000 years old?

02:20:30.000 Again, yeah, it's clouded in the picture.

02:20:32.000 There's a lot of the dating.

02:20:34.000 The dating on that is clouded.

02:20:36.000 But anyways, it's like antiquity in America is much older than originally thought.

02:20:39.000 Right.

02:20:40.000 And now currently the oldest site is on the Columbia River drainage near a place called Pittsburgh Landing.

02:20:50.000 There's a really old site there.

02:20:51.000 And it winds up being that it doesn't line up with the idea of people entering this ice-free corridor.

02:20:57.000 Because, like, when did the corridor, when was it open?

02:20:59.000 When was it possible to pass through?

02:21:01.000 But now you have all these older dates.

02:21:02.000 And then people are even starting to question the validity of the idea of, like, that this corridor opened when they thought it did.

02:21:07.000 So now the fashionable idea, it seems rock solid.

02:21:12.000 We filmed much of the episode up at our fish shack.

02:21:18.000 There's this theory now called the Kelp Highway, that you had this pretty stable environment all along the Pacific Coast, and it was defined by kelp beds.

02:21:31.000 Enormously rich in fish resources, enormously rich in shellfish, right?

02:21:36.000 And that the first Americans were a seafaring people.

02:21:41.000 And all that shit about what glaciers are melted and not melted and when this and that corridor and land bridges open was a moot point because these were people that just came down the coast.

02:21:52.000 And they knew how to survive in that marine, that kelp marine environment.

02:21:55.000 And they went south and went south and went south and things remained remarkably similar and with like great speed, with great speed all the way down the coast.

02:22:05.000 So all of a sudden there's people in Chile.

02:22:07.000 Wow.

02:22:08.000 Instead of this idea that people came into the Great Plains and then spread to the coasts, it's that people came down that route.

02:22:18.000 And, you know, that really old site, the currently oldest, the currently oldest, like, ironclad, absolutely accepted, academic consensus accepted site is that Snake River site.

02:22:31.000 Or on the Columbia drainage.

02:22:33.000 That they came down the coast and then the continent was populated by people who just followed these major rivers, these salmon runs and stuff.

02:22:41.000 Coastal fishing people migrated up these rivers following fish and then turned into, over time, became these mammoth hunters.

02:22:51.000 These interior grassland hunters.

02:22:54.000 But their genesis was in these seafaring people.

02:22:56.000 And as people came down, they kind of filled in.

02:22:59.000 So you go to the Tlingit or the Haida that live along the Alaskan coast now.

02:23:08.000 That's their ancestors, right?

02:23:09.000 They were perhaps people living that way, and those places were the first people to enter the continent.

02:23:15.000 So my time machine would be whatever the hell day that was.

02:23:18.000 That's what it would be.

02:23:19.000 To see that, man.

02:23:21.000 Because picture, like, you know, picture being the first person or the first group of people to see a continent.

02:23:32.000 Yeah.

02:23:34.000 I mean, you can't even, you know what I mean?

02:23:35.000 Yeah.

02:23:36.000 How do we even know that that's the case, though?

02:23:38.000 We don't.

02:23:39.000 What if there's people that were before that?

02:23:41.000 There's an argument.

02:23:42.000 The thing is, like...

02:23:43.000 There's an argument.

02:23:44.000 Humans came from Africa, right?

02:23:47.000 Well, yeah.

02:23:48.000 The human diaspora is like anatomically, like the sort of widely accepted scientific explanation is that anatomically and behaviorally modern humans, there was many waves of hominids coming out of Africa, but sometime around 70,000 years ago.

02:24:10.000 Our current human ancestors came out.

02:24:12.000 They came into a Europe that was populated by Neanderthals, perhaps other hominids. 0.94

02:24:18.000 They kind of won, right?

02:24:20.000 And then spread around the world.

02:24:22.000 And the last continent outside of Antarctica, which was never, you know, the last continent to be occupied by humans outside of Antarctica, which arguably was never occupied by humans, would have been South America, was the last stop.

02:24:34.000 Wow.

02:24:35.000 And what's wild is there's monkeys down there.

02:24:37.000 Yeah.

02:24:38.000 That's what's wild.

02:24:39.000 But man, there's this theory called the Salutrian hypothesis, which is that Northern Europeans came over 10 plus thousand years ago.

02:24:51.000 There's always these different ideas that someone from somewhere else blew in on a raft.

02:24:56.000 There's always this thing, but what I'm talking about is a sort of like, again, the kind of like academically accepted idea, the sort of mainstream.

02:25:06.000 The idea remains, and it's supported by genetic, linguistic, everything, is that humans came out of the Americans, our Native Americans came out of Siberia through a Siberian pathway, probably in waves.

02:25:25.000 If you refer to now like Northern Coastal Peoples, Eskimo, Inuits.

02:25:32.000 They were a later wave.

02:25:33.000 They were different than what became the Athabascans to the south.

02:25:37.000 It was like a later wave.

02:25:38.000 So there could have been repeated waves of people coming.

02:25:41.000 But I've always been interested in the first wave.

02:25:44.000 Whoever they were, the first wave. 0.76

02:25:45.000 And when was that?

02:25:47.000 Are you aware of the Sage Wall in Montana?

02:25:49.000 No.

02:25:50.000 I'm aware of Montana.

02:25:52.000 You live there.

02:25:53.000 The Sage Wall is a recent discovery.

02:25:57.000 It was on private property.

02:26:00.000 These people, it was completely covered with woods and, you know, deadfalls and everything.

02:26:05.000 And they started cleaning it out and they found this thing that looks remarkably like a constructed wall.

02:26:13.000 That's the Sage Wall in Montana.

02:26:15.000 Oh, wow.

02:26:15.000 It's very strange.

02:26:17.000 It's very strange.

02:26:17.000 And it's a vertical wall.

02:26:19.000 It goes down 13 feet under the ground and it's long and straight.

02:26:24.000 And it's very confusing because it very much looks like placed stones that were cut and moved somehow in this particular way.

02:26:34.000 And there's a lot of...

02:26:36.000 Oh, yeah, man.

02:26:37.000 That's a wild-looking wall.

02:26:39.000 Wild-looking.

02:26:40.000 See if you can find the overhead of it, Jamie, because when you look at the overhead, you're like, Jesus Christ, this looks like people put this there.

02:26:47.000 Yeah, the debate is, is it natural or man-made?

02:26:49.000 Yeah, well, there is some people that think it's man-made, and there's some people that think it's natural, but it's leaning much more towards man-made.

02:26:59.000 But it's confusing.

02:27:00.000 Oh, you know, I am familiar with that area.

02:27:03.000 It's real weird.

02:27:05.000 Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of...

02:27:09.000 A lot of natural formations.

02:27:11.000 Yeah, because you get fissures and rocks that are filled from volcanic activity.

02:27:14.000 Sure.

02:27:15.000 It's puzzling.

02:27:16.000 Maybe we'll do an episode on that.

02:27:18.000 I think we will.

02:27:19.000 Well, this gentleman right there, see that guy down there with the beard, Jamie?

02:27:22.000 That's the guy.

02:27:23.000 I think it's Wandering Wolf on...

02:27:25.000 I think that's his name.

02:27:28.000 On YouTube.

02:27:29.000 Yeah, Wandering Wolf.

02:27:31.000 He's been studying this for a while.

02:27:33.000 Please ignore his nose ring.

02:27:34.000 Oh, is that what that was?

02:27:34.000 I couldn't tell if he had a bug or if that was a nose ring.

02:27:37.000 But, like, this is crazy.

02:27:39.000 It's crazy because they're flat and straight and they look fairly uniform and they look like they're cut into position.

02:27:45.000 And there's also a bunch of these, you know, where they would grind things.

02:27:50.000 There's these...

02:27:51.000 Posts that sit out that look like they're carved outside that are similar to a lot of stuff they find in South America, Machu Picchu and stuff like that.

02:28:00.000 It's very, very weird stuff.

02:28:03.000 Well, because if that was made by people who and when and how Yep, yeah, my god I've I'm going natural, but we'll do a future episode on that question.

02:28:18.000 I think natural, too, until you look at some of them.

02:28:20.000 Some of those images, go back to some of those images, Jamie.

02:28:23.000 Some of those images are like, how the fuck?

02:28:25.000 They're so flat and straight, and look at that.

02:28:29.000 From that angle, it's insane.

02:28:32.000 From that angle, you would no doubt look and be like, that's a man-made wall.

02:28:35.000 It looks very stacked.

02:28:37.000 They're all cut square.

02:28:38.000 What's that, Jamie?

02:28:39.000 It does look fake, but it's real.

02:28:41.000 Is that a fake image, or is that the real image?

02:28:42.000 I can't tell.

02:28:43.000 You know what?

02:28:44.000 It's added to the picture.

02:28:46.000 It doesn't look like the same stuff from the video.

02:28:48.000 Okay.

02:28:49.000 Well, let's see some of the images from the video.

02:28:51.000 Well, that one there is real.

02:28:54.000 That's legit.

02:28:56.000 That looks more real.

02:28:58.000 No, that's something different.

02:29:00.000 That's not the same sight.

02:29:03.000 Yeah, that looks like AI. That's not the same site and that's not a vegetation that grows around there.

02:29:09.000 That's some different goofing around shit.

02:29:12.000 Yeah, so here's a video of this guy walking around.

02:29:15.000 It's really interesting stuff because there's so much evidence of humans.

02:29:19.000 The mortal and pestle grinding holes and shit are all there.

02:29:25.000 So there was some human occupation in this area.

02:29:27.000 The question is, was this...

02:29:33.000 Have you followed that news that has come out about that boy, that Anzic One boy in Montana?

02:29:39.000 No.

02:29:40.000 Sounds like a Spielberg movie, don't it?

02:29:41.000 Yeah, it does.

02:29:42.000 So, there is a Clovis child that they found years ago near Wilsall, Montana.

02:29:51.000 It was from a Clovis hunter culture.

02:29:53.000 This child had been buried with projectile points and ochre.

02:29:59.000 And they've recently done work on like stable isotope work.

02:30:02.000 And it was like he had a diet of woolly mammoth.

02:30:07.000 Whoa.

02:30:07.000 Yeah.

02:30:08.000 Which people had always thought.

02:30:09.000 Yeah.

02:30:10.000 Right?

02:30:10.000 But that's like this thing that gets always kicked around.

02:30:14.000 And I have a friend, David Meltzer.

02:30:16.000 I don't know if you're looking for guest suggestions, but Heffelfinger and Meltzer.

02:30:20.000 Okay.

02:30:20.000 You fucking love him.

02:30:21.000 But anyway, Meltzer, he's an anthropologist.

02:30:26.000 He's always been involved in this debate about where these Clovis hunters and these Ice Age Americans, to what degree were they really these northern wild men killing mammoths with spears and shit, right?

02:30:39.000 And people have tried to, over the years, sort of emasculate these Ice Age hunters. 0.76

02:30:46.000 Being like, oh, they probably weren't really killing all these mammoths.

02:30:50.000 They probably found them and scavenged them.

02:30:53.000 And explaining away, David hate me saying this, but explaining away evidence that they were slaying mammoths.

02:31:02.000 And also explaining away the theory that they killed all the mammoths.

02:31:06.000 Right?

02:31:07.000 And they were eating a much more varied diet and using plant resources.

02:31:13.000 And they were kind of like a kinder, gentler Ice Age hunter.

02:31:16.000 So it's funny that out of this, as this debate is always waged on, it'd be like this accusation that in creating our idea of these Ice Age hunters, you create the kind you wish was there.

02:31:30.000 Right?

02:31:31.000 So a dude like me is going to be like, yeah, man, mammoth hunters.

02:31:34.000 Right, right.

02:31:35.000 And some other dude would be like, oh, no.

02:31:38.000 Berry pickers.

02:31:39.000 Yeah, berry pickers, right? 1.00

02:31:40.000 They were gentle.

02:31:42.000 But they finally just did all this work, and lo and behold, he was young, but he was drinking mother's milk.

02:31:54.000 And they were mammoth eaters. 0.80

02:31:57.000 Wow.

02:31:58.000 Which backs up this idea that those big-ass points...

02:32:03.000 Those big-ass points they made were, like, being used.

02:32:06.000 I participated in this study.

02:32:09.000 Me and some of the guys I work with participated in this study with Meltzer, this guy named Metten Aaron, who runs an experimental archaeology lab at Kent State University.

02:32:17.000 And they gave us all these stone tools.

02:32:20.000 And we had a dead bison laying there.

02:32:22.000 And we were supposed to just spend the day butchering the bison with stone flakes and also with Clovis points.

02:32:29.000 So we were supposed to butcher half with Clovis points.

02:32:32.000 And butcher half with stone blades.

02:32:34.000 They just wanted people who were expert butchers to do it.

02:32:36.000 You don't really know how anybody did anything, but just to see.

02:32:39.000 Because the problem they have in looking at the archaeological record is the only thing left is bone and stone.

02:32:46.000 Everything else is gone.

02:32:47.000 So when you find a mammoth ribcage eroding out of a riverbank, and lo and behold, there's a projectile point laying there, we had always said, oh, someone stabbed it with that point and killed it.

02:33:00.000 But do you really know that?

02:33:03.000 You'll see a mark on a rib, and you're like, oh, see, they shot it in the rib, and that's why it's got a scratch on its rib.

02:33:09.000 Well, do you really know that?

02:33:12.000 We just assume.

02:33:13.000 So we did this project to butcher this whole thing, a fresh dead bison, all the stone points, and then they went and cleaned all the bones.

02:33:24.000 This guy John Hayes from Hayes Tax Energy Studio did this way to treat the bones and clean them where you're not messing up the bones at all.

02:33:31.000 So now you have a set of bones that you know what happened to them.

02:33:36.000 And you have a set of stone tools that you know they were used for.

02:33:40.000 And the idea is that you're creating something to compare.

02:33:45.000 There's this famous Folsom site out of New Mexico.

02:33:49.000 Where all these bison skulls, these Ice Age bison skulls, they look different. 0.87

02:33:53.000 Like that skull you got out in your studio.

02:33:58.000 Big horn, you know, longer horned animal.

02:34:00.000 They all got these cut marks on the bone right here.

02:34:03.000 Inside the jaw mark.

02:34:05.000 Inside the jaw.

02:34:06.000 And people have been like, oh, it must have been from extracting the tongue.

02:34:09.000 And I even thought that.

02:34:10.000 I went to SMU and looked at those skulls and held those bones in my hand.

02:34:14.000 And I'm like, oh look, they were probably getting the tongues out and made all those cut marks inside the jawbone.

02:34:19.000 But what's funny, in going and extracting the tongue with stone tools, I didn't do shit what would have left any kind of mark like that.

02:34:27.000 And again, you don't know how they did what they did, but it creates an interesting data set so that when you do look at cut marks on bones, you can start putting together.

02:34:39.000 What might have caused it?

02:34:40.000 What he wants to work on next is they want to do an ostrich.

02:34:44.000 What do you think those cut marks were if they weren't extracting the tongues?

02:34:48.000 Dude, I got no idea.

02:34:50.000 Wow.

02:34:50.000 You're looking at them right there.

02:34:52.000 I don't know.

02:34:53.000 When I extracted the tongue with the stone, I extracted the tongue with stolen tools and I didn't have any need to go anywhere near that thing like that.

02:35:01.000 I don't know, but it just goes to show you look at stuff, you find a projectile point with a ribcage, and you're like, They stabbed it.

02:35:09.000 Right.

02:35:09.000 But then, well, maybe we're looking at Clovis points all wrong.

02:35:14.000 Maybe Clovis points were knives.

02:35:18.000 Maybe that big projectile point was a Clovis knife.

02:35:21.000 Or maybe it was both things.

02:35:22.000 Maybe when you find a mammoth skeleton that's got two or three broken Clovis blades, it wasn't that they had been jabbed into it, necessarily.

02:35:31.000 Maybe they were the butchering tools.

02:35:33.000 But then what would be the killing tools?

02:35:36.000 That's a great question.

02:35:37.000 Yeah.

02:35:38.000 I personally, me not being an academic who's invested my entire career into this question, I do know this.

02:35:45.000 I think that when people talk about, oh, they were finding them, I spent a lot of time outside.

02:35:50.000 You just don't find all this fresh dead shit laying around everywhere.

02:35:55.000 Right?

02:35:55.000 Right.

02:35:56.000 You could spend many, many, many, many, many days out wandering around the woods and you don't find fresh dead edible materials.

02:36:04.000 Right.

02:36:04.000 You find rotten shit, dried up shit, You find skeletons.

02:36:08.000 But I have a hard time swallowing the idea that all these mammoth kill sites were just where they happened to stumble across a fresh dead mammoth.

02:36:16.000 Yeah, that seems ridiculous.

02:36:17.000 And cut it up with a projectile point.

02:36:19.000 Or cut it up with a blade.

02:36:20.000 They were killing mammoths.

02:36:21.000 That's my take on it.

02:36:23.000 That makes much more sense.

02:36:25.000 And probably the mammoths weren't aware that they were even going to hunt them.

02:36:28.000 They probably weren't being hunted by anything.

02:36:30.000 That's this idea when we're talking about that.

02:36:35.000 filled up the North and South America, like a sort of motivational driver for that really quick spread would be that, let's say you pop out in the Great Plains and the animals have never seen a person, right?

02:36:50.000 A mammoth has never seen a person.

02:36:53.000 You just walk up and kill it.

02:36:55.000 And you do that for a couple months in some valley and then everything gets like, oh shit, it's one of them things and runs away.

02:37:01.000 Well, jump to the next valley.

02:37:04.000 Yeah.

02:37:05.000 And find more of the ones that don't, you know, find more of the ones that have never seen you.

02:37:10.000 Yeah.

02:37:11.000 You know, like, I've had occasion before to see, like, an elk that would have had no way to encounter a dog.

02:37:19.000 Encounter a dog.

02:37:21.000 And their attitude is kind of like, what the hell is that?

02:37:24.000 You know what I mean?

02:37:25.000 They're, like, curious about it.

02:37:26.000 They're kind of looking at it.

02:37:27.000 So you can imagine, like, these early peoples could probably just walk up on a lot of shit and just kill it.

02:37:32.000 Probably, right?

02:37:33.000 Yeah, it's like, what's this thing going to do?

02:37:36.000 Fuck out of here.

02:37:37.000 And all of a sudden, like, dah!

02:37:40.000 Some bitch stabbed me. 1.00

02:37:42.000 So that was an idea that pushed how fast people spread around.

02:37:45.000 And then they weren't fighting each other, because there's no competition for resource.

02:37:50.000 They're not fighting each other, and they're enjoying very high reproductive rates.

02:37:55.000 Because they're drowning in food.

02:37:57.000 And there's no conflict.

02:37:58.000 I wonder what the wildlife populations were like back then, too, before humans...

02:38:04.000 Like, when humans did encounter...

02:38:07.000 When they first encountered North American wildlife, I wonder what the populations were.

02:38:11.000 Staggering.

02:38:11.000 Must have been crazy.

02:38:13.000 Just staggering.

02:38:14.000 Staggering.

02:38:15.000 Wow.

02:38:16.000 We'll never know.

02:38:17.000 We'll never know.

02:38:18.000 But if you had a time machine, that's your spot.

02:38:20.000 Well, they're getting closer to knowing now, because now they can do crazy shit.

02:38:23.000 Like, they can go into...

02:38:24.000 Pond sediments.

02:38:25.000 Do you know what I mean?

02:38:27.000 Like, stuff's shedding.

02:38:27.000 You know, you're shedding cells all the time.

02:38:31.000 At some point, you'll go down 10 feet into some pond and pull a little bit of sediment out and lay that sediment out and do some analysis and be like, oh, there's skin cells from six mammoths, a short-faced bear, right?

02:38:47.000 Right.

02:38:48.000 Whatever.

02:38:49.000 It's getting crazy.

02:38:50.000 You know?

02:38:52.000 It's funny, like, talking about Indiana Jones, like, that style.

02:38:54.000 Like, archaeology is becoming increasingly, anthropology, archaeology is becoming, like, the realm of the science.

02:39:03.000 Like, the lab scientist, you know what I mean?

02:39:06.000 Not the field work.

02:39:07.000 Like, it's so much more, it's such a Richard field of inquiry now to analyze stuff we already have than it is to go find new stuff.

02:39:16.000 You follow me?

02:39:17.000 Yeah.

02:39:17.000 And when you go on an archaeological dig, you know, they're always, they just...

02:39:20.000 They just dig a fraction.

02:39:22.000 There's a knowledge now.

02:39:24.000 There's a knowledge now that tomorrow we're going to know a bunch of shit we don't know.

02:39:29.000 So if we got a hundred squares, we'll just dig one now.

02:39:34.000 And the impulse used to be just to come in and destroy the whole site, right?

02:39:38.000 And wash everything away with hoses and just look for big bones and big stone points.

02:39:42.000 And you'd come away with thinking that they used big stone points to kill big bones because you just washed into the ditch.

02:39:48.000 All of that micro evidence, all of those small bones, all of the plant pollen, you just washed everything away because you kind of knew what you were looking for.

02:39:58.000 So we probably make the same mistake now.

02:40:00.000 So when you go to a dig, they just go like, we'll just check this little square and then leave.

02:40:05.000 You know, this is protocol now, knowing that in 10 years, 100 years, whatever.

02:40:10.000 Someone's gonna have a way better way.

02:40:12.000 They'll stick some little stick down there, and we'll tell them everything you need to know, you know?

02:40:15.000 Did I tell you about my friend John Reeves?

02:40:17.000 Did I ever tell you about the Boneyard in Alaska?

02:40:19.000 Oh, yeah.

02:40:20.000 No, you had him on the show.

02:40:21.000 Oh, yeah.

02:40:21.000 He comes on the show every year.

02:40:23.000 He was supposed to be the last guest this year, but he got pneumonia.

02:40:25.000 Oh, okay.

02:40:26.000 So he's coming on in February.

02:40:27.000 Oh, that shit's fascinating, man.

02:40:28.000 Yeah, that place is crazy.

02:40:30.000 You know, it's only six acres.

02:40:32.000 Is that right?

02:40:33.000 Yeah.

02:40:33.000 Six acres.

02:40:34.000 Thousands and thousands of bones.

02:40:36.000 And what he thinks is it's like some sort of a natural disaster took place and probably asteroid impact.

02:40:44.000 There's a thick layer of carbon.

02:40:46.000 Thick layer of carbon.

02:40:48.000 And in the permafrost is all these bodies.

02:40:50.000 And they think that it's probably just washed all these bodies into a ditch.

02:40:55.000 And that's why there's so many of them there.

02:40:57.000 It's at the perfect spot.

02:40:58.000 Yeah, perfect spot.

02:40:59.000 They found animals that weren't even supposed to be in Alaska there.

02:41:01.000 It's like if you had La Brea Tar Pits to yourself.

02:41:05.000 Yes, exactly.

02:41:06.000 But it's all his property, so no one can go there.

02:41:10.000 So, you know, they've found them in the East River now because it turns out that – which museum was it, Jamie?

02:41:16.000 Oh, yeah.

02:41:18.000 They dumped some of the bones in the East River.

02:41:21.000 So these people have actually gone down there and found them in the East River now.

02:41:24.000 They found a bunch of bison bones and all kinds of shit in the East River, which is really crazy.

02:41:29.000 Oh, it is.

02:41:30.000 Because exactly where they said that they dumped these things off, they found them now.

02:41:34.000 It's really wild.

02:41:36.000 You should go to visit this guy's property.

02:41:40.000 I would like to do that.

02:41:40.000 That would be a great episode for your show because this whole thing is crazy.

02:41:44.000 And they may or may not have found human remains there.

02:41:48.000 They can't talk about it.

02:41:50.000 I imagine not.

02:41:51.000 That shit gets pretty complicated in a hurry, man.

02:41:53.000 It gets a little archaeological.

02:41:56.000 We did one on the lost Roanoke colony.

02:42:00.000 And there's archaeologists working on what happened at the Lost Roanoke Colony, and the minute you bring up, like, human remain conversations, people, it's just like...

02:42:09.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

02:42:10.000 Yeah.

02:42:11.000 Things get real weird.

02:42:12.000 Enormously complicated.

02:42:13.000 Yeah.

02:42:13.000 I recently met a guy that does, he's Puebloan, so he's from one of the Pueblos in New Mexico, and his whole focus is on, he does repatriation for his Pueblo, like, you know, people not familiar with the Pueblo would be like, basically, you know, it's...

02:42:29.000 Akin to a tribe, right?

02:42:30.000 He works on repatriation for his tribe.

02:42:33.000 Mostly focuses on remains.

02:42:35.000 Getting back the remains of his ancestors from all these museums and stuff.

02:42:44.000 They want them back.

02:42:45.000 And I had said to him in this conversation, I'd said, hey, why can't there be a deal to be struck where you just say to the museum, okay, you keep one gram of that bone.

02:42:58.000 For your work.

02:42:59.000 Keep a gram of the bone and give the rest back to us.

02:43:02.000 He said that would never be acceptable to us.

02:43:05.000 It'd be like the same way if someone went and dug your...

02:43:08.000 Someone dug your grandpa's bones out of a graveyard and later you're like, hey, give me my grandpa back.

02:43:16.000 I'm like, no, we're keeping it.

02:43:17.000 Really?

02:43:18.000 We're going to do studies on him.

02:43:21.000 God, it's so complicated.

02:43:23.000 I think that it would be finding that.

02:43:28.000 What complicates a lot of that human remains stuff, too, especially with stuff that he's talking about, that stuff he has is as old as it did, is there's a little bit of a question, like, the groups that are there now, peoples that are there now, were the peoples that were there before.

02:43:44.000 Right.

02:43:45.000 You know, because people move all the time, right?

02:43:47.000 You just look at, like, how the Comanche moved. 1.00

02:43:49.000 Look how the Sioux were in the upper Midwest and areas of Minnesota and wound up, you know, coming westward and all this movement.

02:43:57.000 So when you have bones, there's always a question of, well, typically it goes like this.

02:44:02.000 It's like, who was currently on the land?

02:44:05.000 But when you're talking about bones that are 10, 11, 12,000 years old, there's like a little bit of a, in my mind, there's a little bit of a question of like, well, who do you, how do you know that that person's direct descendants aren't in New Mexico?

02:44:22.000 Think about how much time passed.

02:44:23.000 Are you giving them to the wrong people?

02:44:27.000 Right.

02:44:28.000 That's a very good point.

02:44:29.000 Yeah, because people moved all over the damn place.

02:44:30.000 God.

02:44:32.000 It's fascinating stuff.

02:44:32.000 But with the Pueblos, it is not that.

02:44:35.000 With the Pueblos, it is people that have had occupation on these places for hundreds of years, and people just came in and hauled their ancestors out to stick them in museums. 0.93

02:44:44.000 I was at a museum with my kids over Christmas break.

02:44:46.000 I was at a museum in Chicago.

02:44:49.000 And we go into this exhibit and all the walls, all the displays are papered.

02:44:54.000 So you can't see.

02:44:55.000 And there was a sign that just said, like, we're in a repatriation issue.

02:45:02.000 So they blocked it all.

02:45:05.000 Wow.

02:45:06.000 I don't even know what was behind the paper.

02:45:07.000 Whatever the display was, they're in a custody battle over their display and blocked it for view.

02:45:12.000 And years ago, I went to Salta to look at those children of the corn.

02:45:17.000 You ever hear about those children, those Incan children? 1.00

02:45:20.000 They left on that mountaintop and they kind of freeze-dried.

02:45:23.000 They have three of these children they found, but whatever the deal they made with the Incan, the contemporary Incan peoples, the deal they made is they'll only display one at a time.

02:45:33.000 And when I went, it was the child that had been struck by lightning after the fact.

02:45:40.000 You know, you just walk up and it's in a case, but you're looking at someone's baby, you know?

02:45:44.000 Wow.

02:45:44.000 Looking at someone's young child.

02:45:46.000 It looked like the kid looked like you could stand up and walk away.

02:45:48.000 Really?

02:45:49.000 Perfectly preserved.

02:45:50.000 Even, like, the feathers are perfect.

02:45:52.000 Wow.

02:45:53.000 Yeah.

02:45:54.000 Not quite stand up and walk away.

02:45:55.000 Yeah.

02:45:56.000 But, I mean, like, perfect, you know?

02:45:58.000 Perfect.

02:45:59.000 But, yeah, there's someone probably, and I haven't followed that situation, but someone is probably saying, I don't want my...

02:46:08.000 You know, I don't want my ancestor in your decorating your museum.

02:46:12.000 Yeah, understandably so.

02:46:13.000 Yeah, I mean, wow.

02:46:17.000 What is it, man?

02:46:17.000 Oh, here's something that he found.

02:46:19.000 Look at this.

02:46:20.000 This had been sawed.

02:46:22.000 Oh, no shit.

02:46:23.000 Yeah.

02:46:24.000 So the piece that's missing...

02:46:25.000 He found that like that?

02:46:26.000 Mm-hmm.

02:46:27.000 The piece that's missing that's cut right there, that was the piece that they made to date it.

02:46:32.000 Oh, I got it.

02:46:33.000 But the top part had been sawed.

02:46:36.000 Huh.

02:46:37.000 Yeah.

02:46:37.000 I forget how old that was.

02:46:38.000 No shit.

02:46:39.000 Yeah.

02:46:40.000 Yeah, but that's from John.

02:46:42.000 That's from the Boneyard.

02:46:44.000 I'm going to introduce you to him.

02:46:46.000 He's coming back in February.

02:46:47.000 You really need to get to know him.

02:46:49.000 He's a fascinating cat.

02:46:50.000 I would definitely like to.

02:46:51.000 He's a fun dude, too.

02:46:53.000 All right, Steve.

02:46:53.000 So your show, Hunting History, History Channel, is it available now?

02:46:57.000 Is it on now?

02:46:57.000 January 28th.

02:46:58.000 January 28th.

02:46:59.000 Okay.

02:46:59.000 10 p.m.

02:47:00.000 Eastern.

02:47:00.000 There it is.

02:47:01.000 Hunting History.

02:47:02.000 Steve Rinella.

02:47:03.000 There it is.

02:47:03.000 All right.

02:47:04.000 Thanks for letting me plug it, man.

02:47:05.000 Oh, always a good time.

02:47:06.000 No, I appreciate you letting me come on and plug it.

02:47:08.000 There's the mule deer that we shot together.

02:47:10.000 No, no, I like that, man.

02:47:11.000 12 years ago.

02:47:12.000 Yeah.

02:47:13.000 Time flies.

02:47:14.000 Yeah, it's your biggest animal to date.

02:47:15.000 Isn't that crazy?

02:47:17.000 It's kind of crazy.

02:47:18.000 That was 12 years ago.

02:47:19.000 Was it really?

02:47:20.000 It doesn't seem like it.

02:47:20.000 Yeah, but it was.

02:47:21.000 2012. Yeah.

02:47:23.000 Well, again, appreciate your generosity and especially appreciate it.

02:47:25.000 Let me come on and plug my project.

02:47:28.000 Anytime.

02:47:29.000 Anytime.

02:47:29.000 It's always good to talk to you.

02:47:30.000 And if you hung out with a dude in Canada in the 70s named John the Baptist, let me know.

02:47:34.000 Yeah, let him know.

02:47:34.000 I got to put it to rest.

02:47:36.000 I can't stop thinking about that guy.

02:47:37.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 16, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2258 - Steven Rinella

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