On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster joins me to talk about how he got started in comedy and politics, and why he thinks Joe Biden should go to prison. We also talk about why we should all be thankful we don't have to work as much as we do.
00:01:31.000You 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.
00:01:40.000And later he's kind of back out and bought another business.
00:01:44.000And I said, what about crawling into the deep, dark hole?
00:01:47.000And he said, well, I did, but my wife was in there.
00:06:14.000I 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.
00:06:25.000But I feel like then you got 20% more famous.
00:07:16.000My 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?
00:07:34.000There's people that like you too much.
00:08:37.000They know what you think about current events.
00:08:38.000They know about your background, right?
00:08:39.000The 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.
00:09:00.000This episode is brought to you by Visible.
00:09:02.000You know how most wireless plans feel like they're designed to confuse you with hidden fees, weird subcharges, family plans you don't even want?
00:10:06.000But, 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.
00:10:55.000It's just people that get in those positions of power.
00:10:59.000And 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.
00:11:14.000Yeah, 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.
00:12:00.000Like, 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.
00:12:10.000But no, they want, like, all 78 fake genders.
00:12:13.000Like, Zzer and all these fucking crazy fake ones and they-thems.
00:12:18.000Well, 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.
00:12:27.000Well, 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.
00:12:37.000He's going through some sort of bizarre re-education process in Canada and he's going to publicize it because it's so ludicrous.
00:12:46.000So 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.
00:14:29.000But 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.
00:15:04.000They 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.
00:15:13.000And if you can't express yourself and say, hey, this is fucked up, this is crazy, why am I doing this?
00:15:17.000Like, these studies show that you're not correct.
00:15:19.000Like, if you can't say all those things, which right now you can't do in Canada, it's not the same.
00:15:24.000Like, their ability to express themselves on the internet has been severely limited.
00:19:05.000He'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.
00:19:16.000Yeah, maybe you wouldn't like being governor.
00:20:35.000I'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.
00:21:05.000If 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?
00:21:14.000Yeah, that kind of psychological infection.
00:22:07.000Obviously, you've seen what's going on in California.
00:22:09.000But 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.
00:22:34.000It's so creepy because it's happening while these people are...
00:22:38.000Their houses have been burned, all their childhood memorabilia, all their stuff for their kids, the photos, the fucking everything they have.
00:23:04.000I was just talking to Josh Green, the governor down in Hawaii.
00:23:09.000You had some ideas about some land use concerns he has around speculators coming in, buying up properties and the like.
00:23:16.000So 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.
00:23:56.000The 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.
00:25:43.000So 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.
00:25:56.000And 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?
00:26:08.000But 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.
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00:28:04.000You 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.
00:28:25.000You 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.
00:28:39.000And so, the oil rigs are, imagine like a vertical coral reef, you know?
00:28:50.000I 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.
00:29:19.000You 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.
00:29:32.000And you go in, and there there's this big debate where certain people want to pull the abandoned rigs out.
00:29:41.000But you have fishermen who are like, they're here now, leave them.
00:29:47.000Because that's where all the fish are.
00:30:12.000But all the rod and reel fishermen and all the spear fishermen want the rigs there.
00:30:16.000So 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.
00:30:29.000Like, 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.
00:32:53.000He had some line that like, we used to have a crime problem, then we brought in cops.
00:32:59.000But it's like my first, you're talking about political involvement.
00:33:05.000My first time I ever approached anything remotely political was on the lake I grew up on.
00:33:10.000We had an invasive seaweed, an invasive aquatic plant called Eurasian milfoil, and it grew in our lake, but it made unbelievable fish habitat.
00:33:22.000And at the time, I was not hip enough to understand the deleterious effects of non-native vegetation.
00:33:30.000I 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.
00:33:35.000And they had this proposal to come in and kill all the milfoil in all the lakes.
00:33:39.000And I went down, and I remember I was in high school.
00:33:42.000I went down, and I remember I was the sole person there to represent the milfoil side of the argument.
00:33:50.000They went in and poisoned all the milfoil out of the lakes in hopes of bringing in native seaweeds would take hold.
00:33:57.000But it absolutely transformed the lake.
00:34:00.000And 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.
00:34:59.000The lake life relies on what you call the littoral zone, the shoreline zone.
00:35:06.000Most of these fish species, they like it to be dirty, meaning weeds, falling over trees.
00:35:11.000It creates all kinds of habitat for little stuff to hide.
00:35:14.000On 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.
00:35:26.000Over 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.
00:35:38.000And it's just been depressing to watch happen.
00:35:41.000Yeah, we were talking the other day about eating freshwater fish and how much toxic chemicals are in freshwater fish.
00:36:24.000He'd dig crawlers, catch leeches, and he would supply bait and tackle shops with live bait.
00:36:31.000And he had spring sporting goods where he sold his own live bait.
00:36:34.000And 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.
00:36:44.000He was just in the bait business, but also was a fishing fanatic and lived off fish his whole life.
00:36:49.000So he was living off Great Lakes fish his whole life.
00:36:52.000And 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.
00:37:09.000And he'd lived his whole life, like me, with, like, complete defiance of health advisory suggestions about fish consumption.
00:37:17.000And he goes down there, and he would go in every month or two for these little batteries of tests.
00:37:22.000And one of the things they would do with him is they would tell him, they'd give him a grocery list.
00:37:27.000And they'd be like, hey, you've got to go to the store and buy, like, bread, eggs, cheese, butter, whatever.
00:37:32.000And then he'd wait a minute, and they'd say, what were you supposed to buy at the store?
00:37:37.000You know, and he's telling me this story.
00:37:39.000And he told me, I always laugh because he said, Steve.
00:37:42.000I wouldn't have remembered that list if I never ate a piece of fish in my life.
00:37:48.000So they were trying to gauge his memory based on the amount of heavy metal inspired?
00:37:52.000Yeah, presumably they tested his blood and found something of interest, and so they were trying to figure out what happens to a guy.
00:37:59.000But I lived in Seattle, right on Lake Washington, and we would catch a lot of yellow perch.
00:38:08.000People, 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.
00:38:17.000You 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.
00:38:26.000They would tell you that perch over 12 inches, you're only supposed to eat one meal a month or some shit like that.
00:38:32.000But we just wouldn't keep them over 12 inches.
00:38:35.000Because there weren't that many over 12 inches anyways.
00:43:32.000They accumulate a lot of heavy metals.
00:43:35.000And 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.
00:43:46.000Well, there's no cases of CWD getting into humans yet, right?
00:44:37.000You 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.
00:44:54.000Let's say you have a finding that's alarming, but you haven't done peer review yet.
00:44:59.000But 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.
00:45:09.000There'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.
00:45:21.000A 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.
00:45:27.000We're not all the way there yet, but look, this is kind of alarming.
00:45:31.000They 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.
00:45:44.000But when things like that happen, they tend to get a ton of media.
00:45:48.000But then down the road, the media doesn't follow suit.
00:45:52.000There'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.
00:46:08.000So they come out with a, hey everybody, check this out.
00:46:11.000But then it winds up being that when you do a statistical analysis on it, it was...
00:46:17.000There was no reason that it wasn't like they scored higher, that deer hunters scored higher, or nothing.
00:46:23.000It's just a certain percentage of people get dementia.
00:46:24.000Yeah, 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.
00:46:33.000So even though they gave like a big heads up, it won't be a nothing there.
00:46:37.000But yeah, CWD, it's a highly infectious.
00:46:43.000It was first identified in Colorado on a research facility, not a game farm.
00:46:48.000It was first identified on a cervid research facility in Colorado, I believe in the early 70s.
00:46:53.000And then there's been a debate, like some people feel that it was always there and wasn't detected, right?
00:47:03.000And that it wasn't like we found it the minute it came out.
00:47:07.000It was just that it would perhaps had been there and then we discovered that it was always there.
00:47:14.000But it does expand its range all the time, right?
00:47:19.000Even in the last few years, we've had our first cases in Montana.
00:47:22.000We keep every year we add, like, without fail, every year we find CWD in states where it didn't previously exist.
00:47:31.000Or within states that have CWD, we find CWD in counties.
00:47:37.000Oftentimes you can look and it makes sense because it flows, but now and then you get these weird jumps, right?
00:47:43.000Where 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?
00:47:55.000Some of the jumps, people tie it to transporting.
00:47:59.000There'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.
00:48:23.000Like, 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?
00:48:33.000Our 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.
00:48:53.000Meaning if you get like, it's always fatal.
00:48:55.000And if infection rates get to a certain point, we're going to lose deer.
00:48:59.000If 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.
00:49:08.000The other fear is that it jumps the barrier and becomes a human pathogen.
00:49:15.000All the hunters I know, the question we always talk about is, would you eat CWD-positive meat?
00:50:39.000I used to say prion, but then I heard scientists say prion and I wanted to sound smart.
00:50:43.000Well, the biologist Jim Heffelfinger, that'd be a very good guy for you to have on your show someday.
00:50:52.000The 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.
00:51:03.000So then I was like, okay, I'm going to stick with Pryon now.
00:51:06.000It's the guy that came up with it says Pryon.
00:51:23.000And 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.
00:51:35.000Because Doug's worried about that we're going to lose big bucks.
00:53:16.000No one's thrown this out there, but as they look at further and further restrictions, it's scary.
00:53:22.000And 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.
00:53:38.000Here 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.
00:53:53.000My 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.
00:54:06.000I'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.
00:54:18.000That's my kind of pork barrel spending.
00:54:20.000There's no way to eradicate it, right?
00:54:23.000There's no way to identify the deer that haven't exhibited symptoms, and they're spreading it.
00:54:29.000Yeah, they're looking at ways to test live animals.
00:54:32.000Then there's other cockamamie ideas that one would be that some deer seem to be resilient.
00:54:41.000Yeah, and so that you'd move these resilient deer.
00:54:46.000Into other populations to try to breed in some kind of resiliency, which, you know, it's a wild animal.
00:55:06.000We just don't know it yet because it takes 10 years.
00:55:08.000But they've been tracking these dudes that went to a fire department fundraiser.
00:55:12.000They had 100-some people that ate a bunch of CWD-infected meat at a fire department.
00:55:19.000those 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.
00:55:49.000I 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.
00:56:39.000Does CWD prevalently drive down big bucks?
00:56:44.000I'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.
00:57:10.000You're able to control the food chain.
00:57:12.000But then all of a sudden you throw in this question of, like, well, but it could give you a prion disease, hypothetically.
00:57:19.000That's going to dampen people's enthusiasm about deer.
00:57:23.000And 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.
00:57:30.000What happens when we look at deer and we look at them like a disease vector?
00:57:45.000Yeah, 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.
00:58:10.000I 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.
00:59:09.000That if you have, you know, 40 deer per square mile, you're going to have increased spread.
00:59:14.000And if it was 20 deer per square mile, 30 deer per square mile, you might slow the spread.
00:59:18.000But 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?
00:59:34.000So you wind up with this question of how do you justify...
00:59:39.000Trying to suppress deer numbers when you're not demonstrating a lot of success and slowing prevalency.
00:59:43.000And the whole thing you're afraid of is lowering deer numbers, but you're lowering deer numbers.
01:03:46.000It'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.
01:04:00.000I 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.
01:04:52.000There 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.
01:05:02.000But instead he'd wake up in the morning and off in the distance.
01:05:06.000And he's like, someone else is doing it.
01:05:12.000So, 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.
01:06:10.000I mean, it was a real wake-up call for people.
01:06:13.000I 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.
01:06:21.000It's not a really well-maintained situation.
01:06:25.000Yeah, 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.
01:06:35.000And then there was a definite, like many people, I mean, I'm speaking for most people in the country, man, I feel like.
01:06:41.000Like many people, I gained a new skepticism.
01:06:49.000About government authority, a new skepticism about some types of government authority and a new skepticism about the way health information is spread.
01:06:59.000It's just one of those things where anything involving money.
01:07:01.000Whenever 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.
01:07:10.000And then there's also the problem of exonerating people from any responsibility, which is what happened in the 1990s or was it the 80s?
01:07:21.000Whenever they gave them because the vaccine manufacturers were saying, listen, we can't manufacture vaccines because too many people are getting injured by them.
01:07:31.000And 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.
01:12:08.000So this person was arguing in some capacity.
01:12:12.000They were arguing that we need to move back to anti-masking rules.
01:12:19.000To 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.
01:12:34.000Because it seems like, how can you dictate to someone that you have, like, a little stagecoach robber bandana on your face?
01:15:56.000I 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.
01:16:08.000And you're like, they should totally be able to wear skirts.
01:16:10.000Women get to wear them, why can't men?
01:16:11.000It was all said with levity, but I was a little surprised.
01:19:01.000I 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.
01:19:08.000But then you're not even yelling at them about if they're going to prevent them from...
01:19:13.000You're not saving them from a disease.
01:19:15.000You're saving them from being ostracized or yelled at by the flight attendants.
01:19:19.000You spent two years being like, put your damn masks on!
01:19:45.000And we're going to look back on this, and we're all going to laugh.
01:19:48.000Every 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.
01:21:07.000That 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.
01:21:21.000Just 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.
01:21:29.000And they want to lie and distort things and gaslight the whole population.
01:21:33.000And then somehow or another, these people that are doing that are allowed to spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars on advertising.
01:22:06.000The 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.
01:23:06.000It'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.
01:23:15.000What frustrates me already is it's going to be impossible to explain it.
01:23:23.000It's very hard to explain the 9-11 terror attacks to my kids.
01:23:27.000And 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.
01:23:46.000I want to be like, don't forget about, you know what I mean?
01:23:59.000You 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?
01:24:05.000But you can just picture dudes that were active during the Cuban Missile Crisis are like, no.
01:25:19.000Do 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.
01:25:29.000Mostly what you're going to feel is that's not what that is.
01:25:48.000But 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.
01:25:58.000So you fall on the trap, the amnesias you forget.
01:26:02.000And 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.
01:26:45.000But 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.
01:27:10.000So they would flavor things through an ideology and probably gaslight you a little bit about the other side's perspective.
01:27:17.000The 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.
01:28:02.000So this is a thing you could kind of game that system.
01:28:05.000By rigging these large language models to accentuate information that comes from more biased sources.
01:28:13.000You know, you could distort the information that people would get.
01:28:16.000Yeah, and someone would be motivated to do it.
01:28:20.000Yeah, until they get so sophisticated that they would be able to discern that.
01:28:25.000And they would be able to base it entirely on objective analysis of statistics and facts and understand what these statistics are.
01:28:34.000I did this little event last night at this place here in town called Arena Hall.
01:28:39.000And the moderator of the event, it was like a Q&A or a chat.
01:28:45.000And 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.
01:28:59.000Certain 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.
01:29:17.000The input has to come in from people who are out digesting real experience.
01:29:25.000The point I use is if you earlier alluded to the assassination on...
01:29:34.000asked 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.
01:34:10.000He's between Circle, Alaska, and Eagle, Alaska, on the Yukon.
01:34:14.000And him and his friends are living their lives in all these, like, line cabins.
01:34:18.000They got strung up and down the river, okay?
01:34:21.000Two guys come down the river out of Canada.
01:34:24.000So again, this is 1978. Two guys come down the river out of Canada on a homemade log raft.
01:34:33.000This 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.
01:34:46.000One of these individuals identifies himself as John the Baptist.
01:35:37.000When they eventually go up to the other cabin, he had taken a bunch of their stuff.
01:35:40.000He'd taken some of their furs and made his own clothes.
01:35:45.000They 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.
01:35:51.000But he comes up with this cockamamie plan where he's going to go to this area.
01:35:54.000They're like, no way can you walk to that area.
01:36:14.000He tracked him for about five miles and just said, never mind, it's not worth it.
01:36:18.000The 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.
01:36:30.000And 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.
01:38:42.000And I said to him, to Randy, you know, it was crazy.
01:38:46.000He wound up getting an honorary doctorate.
01:38:49.000And 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.
01:39:49.000He gives you this book, Death in the Barren Ground.
01:39:51.000It'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.
01:39:57.000And they go up in the, they're kind of north of the tree line, but they're in a timbered grove.
01:40:04.000And they go up there to trap for the winter, and their whole plan is to live off caribou, but the caribou never come through.
01:40:08.000And the youngest one keeps this meticulous journal in this book.
01:40:14.000He 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.
01:41:06.000It just makes, like, a gelatin-y, kind of tasteless, like, leather noodle, basically.
01:41:13.000And what he's documenting, as they're dying from this, is the horrible bowel obstruction.
01:41:20.000And they're trying to make, like, in his journal, he's describing this, of trying to make these enema devices.
01:41:27.000And 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.
01:42:14.000And I just finished this book the other day.
01:42:19.000So, 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.
01:42:26.000And 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.
01:42:52.000Oh, and the other thing is all those hair follicles would form into dense balls that would, like, plug your rectum.
01:43:01.000And he's just describing all this as they die.
01:43:19.000But 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.
01:43:28.000Eating that hide and hair and crushed bone.
01:45:26.000But 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.
01:45:42.000Yeah, there's this dude, there's this kid, I might tell you about him, this French kid, Etienne Brulee, that the French brought over.
01:45:50.000And, 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.
01:45:58.000And eventually he gets crossways with the Huron Indians, and the Huron Indians killed him and allegedly ate him.
01:46:06.000So everybody knows him as Etienne Brule, which is burnt, right?
01:46:11.000But did he get the name after or before?
01:46:21.000Like, he presumably got burned to death, or boiled, or whatever, you know?
01:46:25.000So 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?
01:46:31.000So the John the Baptist thing is baffling to me.
01:46:34.000Did John the Baptist in the Bible, I'm not familiar.
01:47:00.000Well, I'm working out with Mo, who's been on the show before.
01:47:08.000Mo and I... We did the very early Meat Eaters together.
01:47:14.000You probably met him that way, right, originally?
01:47:16.000Yes, I met him that way, and then when he did Bourdain's show.
01:47:20.000So 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.
01:47:30.000And 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.
01:47:41.000And they went on to do other stuff, and then Mo and I got joined up on this, and we've worked on it.
01:47:46.000Mo's a showrunner on it, and we've worked on it together.
01:47:49.000And it's coming out January 28th, and it's a show on History Channel where we look at outdoor mysteries.
01:47:55.000So I brought up, we did an episode on Donner Party.
01:47:58.000And you might ask, well, what's the mystery about the Donner Party?
01:48:00.000But it's kind of like, what happened...
01:48:26.000Like, people don't realize what happened there.
01:48:28.000And going to that place, I think I never realized about it.
01:48:35.000There 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.
01:50:18.000But, like, getting into that, like, getting into that story and starting to...
01:50:24.000Realize 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...
01:50:33.000I 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...
01:50:43.000Like I said, it's like an American horror story.
01:51:23.000And the people all resort to cannibalism.
01:51:25.000But 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.
01:51:35.000And they got stuck there and they tried to walk out and make it to the ocean and they never made it.
01:51:46.000In 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.
01:51:59.000They mostly ate people that died of natural causes, but at the time, there was no legal prohibition on killing Indians.
01:52:09.000They had two Indian guides with them, and a guy murdered them.
01:57:20.000They 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.
01:58:01.000There's this argument that LaSalle's ship was flying under a French flag.
01:58:08.000Whoever finds that ship, there's an argument that the French would be able to claim that ship.
01:58:12.000So 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.
01:58:52.000We were going to do our last episode when we went and did the Donner Party.
01:58:56.000What 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.
02:00:02.000There 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.
02:00:22.000Yeah, 1972. Yeah, but it makes sense in the last one.
02:00:26.000Oh, 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.
02:00:38.000And 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.
02:00:52.000Like, 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.
02:01:00.000Every spring, the military goes to the foot of that glacier.
02:01:07.000They 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.
02:01:37.000They 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.
02:01:47.000So this other glacier where most of that search focused, for that Begich Boggs flight, focused on this one glacier.
02:01:56.000But if you do the math on that glacier...
02:01:59.000Had 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.
02:02:07.000Because you can kind of track how much a glacier moves every year.
02:02:10.000So now the idea that it was in that glacier has been kind of put to rest.
02:02:52.000And the wind's howling, and I don't know much about aviation.
02:02:55.000I 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?
02:03:06.000And 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.
02:03:17.000So 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.
02:03:26.000And then you, you know, I was with a very experienced ice climber, but harness up and pick your way down.
02:03:32.000But 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.
02:03:40.000It just pulverizes stuff, as you see with that aircraft.
02:03:45.000But when you drop down in that, When you drop down on that crevasse and go down that sucker, it gets, like, unbelievably calm.
02:05:08.000If you drive that screw in and that screw is pushing heat, it'll melt the ice around the threads.
02:05:16.000So 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.
02:05:28.000And you drill at a 45 degree angle until those holes meet.
02:05:44.000Because 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.
02:05:56.000So you're just, you're tied in on a little like, yeah, you're like tied.
02:06:17.000I think as the glacier melted, that's how they found his body.
02:06:19.000Oh, I know they found him on a melted glacier, but I didn't know that it was supposed that he fell into a crevasse.
02:06:24.000I'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.
02:08:44.000And 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.
02:08:50.000And you look and you're like, yeah, you're right.
02:08:53.000Like, teeth are so perfect on everybody now.
02:08:57.000You know, and you're looking at an old movie and you're like, oh, it was before they were able to do all that.
02:10:36.000When 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.
02:10:47.000Other 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.
02:11:08.000So Aster became a fur trader and helped launch these fur trapping expeditions and became involved in what we now call the mountain man area.
02:11:19.000When you hear the term mountain men, The Mountain Man era.
02:11:26.000In my sort of other job outside of doing my History Channel show, we do audio originals.
02:11:33.000We did one on the deerskin trade called The Long Hunters.
02:11:36.000It was about Daniel Boone, 1770s in the deerskin trade.
02:11:41.000We'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.
02:11:49.000And 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.
02:12:58.000Like, 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.
02:13:04.000You know when you see really old pictures of, like, kings and shit, and they got those kind of white pants on?
02:13:10.000So our whole term with, like, when we say a buck, something's worth a buck, that's about the equivalent value of a deerskin.
02:13:16.000So, you know, that's where that term came from.
02:13:19.000Those guys, at the same time, they would hunt deerskins in the summer, because they wanted them real thin.
02:13:24.000And then they would switch and they would hunt beaver pelts in the winter for wool felt, to create wool felt.
02:13:30.000But we kind of gradually extirpated, like wiped out beaver numbers.
02:13:36.000And 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.
02:13:47.000And when they come back to St. Louis, like one of the things they report on is like, holy shit.
02:13:54.000Like, we found that the last great stronghold of the beaver is in the Rockies.
02:14:01.000And that's what pushed this whole Mountain Man era.
02:14:05.000So 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.
02:14:13.000And earlier I mentioned the English up around Hudson Bay.
02:14:18.000So you're familiar with this thing called the Hudson Bay Company?
02:14:23.000The 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.
02:15:12.000They start hiring orphans and people that...
02:15:14.000That were under indentured servitude and ran away, whatever.
02:15:19.000They 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.
02:15:51.000All 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.
02:15:58.000The hide, they don't even want the leather from the hide.
02:16:24.000But 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.
02:16:32.000You had to ship the whole hide to Europe.
02:16:36.000So 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.
02:17:31.000You can kind of say it was born with the Lewis and Clark Expedition and identifying this tremendous population of beavers in the Northern Rockies.
02:17:38.000And it kind of ended in 1840. When the market collapsed.
02:17:43.000If 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.
02:18:09.000There used to be an idea that's existed for much of my life about the peopling of the Americas.
02:18:18.000And 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.
02:18:36.000When people hear the Bering Land Bridge, you kind of picture this little like, it's like Moses crossing the part of the Red Sea.
02:18:43.000You 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.
02:18:50.000Like I said, it was a chunk of ground the size of Texas.
02:18:53.000That much water was tied up in glaciers.
02:19:24.000To 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.
02:19:40.000As all this new information has emerged, the dates don't line up anymore.
02:19:47.000So we did a hunting history episode about this very question of...
02:19:54.000How and when and who were the first people to enter the continent, right?
02:20:00.000And now, that was called the Ice-Free Corridor hypothesis, but it's been made more and more untenable by finding these super old sites.
02:20:09.000For a while, the oldest site we knew about in the New World was a site called Monteverde down in Chile.
02:20:15.000So if people came in at the Bering Land Bridge, why is the oldest known site of human occupation all the way down in Chile?
02:21:01.000But now you have all these older dates.
02:21:02.000And then people are even starting to question the validity of the idea of, like, that this corridor opened when they thought it did.
02:21:07.000So now the fashionable idea, it seems rock solid.
02:21:12.000We filmed much of the episode up at our fish shack.
02:21:18.000There'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.
02:21:31.000Enormously rich in fish resources, enormously rich in shellfish, right?
02:21:36.000And that the first Americans were a seafaring people.
02:21:41.000And 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.
02:21:52.000And they knew how to survive in that marine, that kelp marine environment.
02:21:55.000And 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.
02:22:05.000So all of a sudden there's people in Chile.
02:22:08.000Instead of this idea that people came into the Great Plains and then spread to the coasts, it's that people came down that route.
02:22:18.000And, 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.
02:22:33.000That they came down the coast and then the continent was populated by people who just followed these major rivers, these salmon runs and stuff.
02:22:41.000Coastal fishing people migrated up these rivers following fish and then turned into, over time, became these mammoth hunters.
02:23:48.000The 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.
02:24:22.000And 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.
02:24:39.000But man, there's this theory called the Salutrian hypothesis, which is that Northern Europeans came over 10 plus thousand years ago.
02:24:51.000There's always these different ideas that someone from somewhere else blew in on a raft.
02:24:56.000There'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.
02:25:06.000The 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.
02:25:25.000If you refer to now like Northern Coastal Peoples, Eskimo, Inuits.
02:26:40.000See 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.
02:26:47.000Yeah, the debate is, is it natural or man-made?
02:26:49.000Yeah, 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.
02:27:51.000Posts 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.
02:28:03.000Well, 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.
02:28:18.000I think natural, too, until you look at some of them.
02:28:20.000Some of those images, go back to some of those images, Jamie.
02:28:23.000Some of those images are like, how the fuck?
02:28:25.000They're so flat and straight, and look at that.
02:30:21.000But anyway, Meltzer, he's an anthropologist.
02:30:26.000He'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?
02:30:39.000And people have tried to, over the years, sort of emasculate these Ice Age hunters.
02:30:46.000Being like, oh, they probably weren't really killing all these mammoths.
02:30:50.000They probably found them and scavenged them.
02:30:53.000And explaining away, David hate me saying this, but explaining away evidence that they were slaying mammoths.
02:31:02.000And also explaining away the theory that they killed all the mammoths.
02:31:07.000And they were eating a much more varied diet and using plant resources.
02:31:13.000And they were kind of like a kinder, gentler Ice Age hunter.
02:31:16.000So 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.
02:32:09.000Me 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.
02:32:17.000And they gave us all these stone tools.
02:32:47.000So 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.
02:33:13.000So 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.
02:33:24.000This 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.
02:33:31.000So now you have a set of bones that you know what happened to them.
02:33:36.000And you have a set of stone tools that you know they were used for.
02:33:40.000And the idea is that you're creating something to compare.
02:33:45.000There's this famous Folsom site out of New Mexico.
02:33:49.000Where all these bison skulls, these Ice Age bison skulls, they look different.
02:33:53.000Like that skull you got out in your studio.
02:33:58.000Big horn, you know, longer horned animal.
02:34:00.000They all got these cut marks on the bone right here.
02:34:10.000I went to SMU and looked at those skulls and held those bones in my hand.
02:34:14.000And I'm like, oh look, they were probably getting the tongues out and made all those cut marks inside the jawbone.
02:34:19.000But 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.
02:34:27.000And 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.
02:34:53.000When 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.
02:35:01.000I 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.
02:35:22.000Maybe 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.
02:36:04.000You find rotten shit, dried up shit, You find skeletons.
02:36:08.000But 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.
02:36:25.000And probably the mammoths weren't aware that they were even going to hunt them.
02:36:28.000They probably weren't being hunted by anything.
02:36:30.000That's this idea when we're talking about that.
02:36:35.000filled 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?
02:38:27.000You know, you're shedding cells all the time.
02:38:31.000At 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?
02:39:24.000There's a knowledge now that tomorrow we're going to know a bunch of shit we don't know.
02:39:29.000So if we got a hundred squares, we'll just dig one now.
02:39:34.000And the impulse used to be just to come in and destroy the whole site, right?
02:39:38.000And wash everything away with hoses and just look for big bones and big stone points.
02:39:42.000And you'd come away with thinking that they used big stone points to kill big bones because you just washed into the ditch.
02:39:48.000All 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.
02:39:58.000So we probably make the same mistake now.
02:40:00.000So when you go to a dig, they just go like, we'll just check this little square and then leave.
02:40:05.000You know, this is protocol now, knowing that in 10 years, 100 years, whatever.
02:40:10.000Someone's gonna have a way better way.
02:40:12.000They'll stick some little stick down there, and we'll tell them everything you need to know, you know?
02:40:15.000Did I tell you about my friend John Reeves?
02:40:17.000Did I ever tell you about the Boneyard in Alaska?
02:41:56.000We did one on the lost Roanoke colony.
02:42:00.000And 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...
02:42:13.000I 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...
02:42:45.000And 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.
02:43:23.000I think that it would be finding that.
02:43:28.000What 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.
02:43:45.000You know, because people move all the time, right?
02:43:47.000You just look at, like, how the Comanche moved.
02:43:49.000Look how the Sioux were in the upper Midwest and areas of Minnesota and wound up, you know, coming westward and all this movement.
02:43:57.000So when you have bones, there's always a question of, well, typically it goes like this.
02:44:02.000It's like, who was currently on the land?
02:44:05.000But 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?
02:44:35.000With 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.
02:44:44.000I was at a museum with my kids over Christmas break.
02:45:06.000I don't even know what was behind the paper.
02:45:07.000Whatever the display was, they're in a custody battle over their display and blocked it for view.
02:45:12.000And years ago, I went to Salta to look at those children of the corn.
02:45:17.000You ever hear about those children, those Incan children?
02:45:20.000They left on that mountaintop and they kind of freeze-dried.
02:45:23.000They 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.
02:45:33.000And when I went, it was the child that had been struck by lightning after the fact.
02:45:40.000You know, you just walk up and it's in a case, but you're looking at someone's baby, you know?