Steven Rinella
Guests: Steven Rinella
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents1 chapter
§01Transcript§01Transcript
Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Steve Vanilla. That was a long exhale. I needed one. Is this Trump's chair? He sat in that chair, yeah. I want to soak up some of the tenacity, man. He's got a lot of that. It took me a long time, man.
it took me a long time to to see it 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 and I'd always defined like in my mind toughness was being able to go through some like alder choked hell hole real fast or hike up a hill so I was like that's not tough and then later I was like oh yeah
like that kind of tough man think about what that guy went through I mean he had the entire media, the entire justice system, he had the deep state, the central intelligence agency, he had all these people conspiring to take him out. Literally an assassination attempt and then another one. In and out of the news in no time. Nobody cared.
No grace period. They waited about a day and then they started talking shit about him again. That's the thing. 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. Yeah. 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, well, when I sell my business, I'm going to crawl into a deep, dark hole. And later he's kind of back out and bought another business. And I said, what about crawling into the deep, dark hole? And he said, well, I did, but my wife was in there. He goes, I had to get back. I'm not ready yet. I got to get back out. I think that's like these sort of fictional depictions of the future. That everybody wants this future where you're just holding hands and walking off into the sunset, the golden years. It's all bullshit.
If you're alive, you're going to want to do the same things you're doing right now. 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. You're going to get depressed. Yeah, I think about it. But my wife's smart enough to worry about what would happen to us if we didn't have dragons to slay. Yeah. She feels that it might be essential. It's essential for life. You need puzzle. You need at least some sort of a very involving hobby. You need something.
I mean, you can retire from, if you have a lot of money, you could retire from your financial pursuits. But you need something that you enjoy doing. Human beings need tasks. If you don't have something, you get very dull, and that's how people get Alzheimer's. They just fucking get dementia. They just, like, sit around the house, and their brain atrophies, and then they just die. Yeah. I look at people like that, and, you know, part of looking at, well, Biden and Trump would be at that age. Like, I plan on at that age to be, like, really kicking it and just screwing around outside. Yeah, just having fun. But that just thing, like to perform to the bitter end, man.
Well, Biden is not performing. Trying to perform to the bitter end. Whatever he's doing is strange. Yeah, trying to keep at it. I think he's getting propped up. I think there's other people that are like pushing him towards the, get out there, come on. I think Jill's got her hands on his lower back. Just giving a push. Get out there. Come on, you can win again. I think I could have beaten Trump.
Yeah, it's, but it's that thing too where people, oh, one day you'll get to a certain age and you'll like, you know, I'm 57 and I used to think, oh, when I'm 57, I'll be done. I'll just, if I have some money, I'm just going to relax. Yeah. That's nonsense. I don't want to relax. How long do you think, if you had guests, how long would you do this podcast? This is the easiest thing I do. Really? Yeah, I'll do this forever. Really? It's so easy to do.
Yeah, as long as I'm actually interested in talking to the people. How hard is that? actually interested yeah but that's the only reason why i do it anyway yeah like i only talk to people i want to talk to so no one ever tells me you know have this person on your show there's there's literally zero input from anyone else so everybody i talk to i look at i go do i want to talk to that guy that might be cool that'd be interesting i want to find out what makes him dick i want to find out what why she writes those books like that i want to find out you know what what keeps him going that's like the whole the whole reason why i do it is because i enjoy it if do you picture do you picture walking away from stand up before you'd walk away from podcasts i don't know why would i do that too i have my own club now i'm 50 years old man just starting to wonder i'm starting to have all these questions yeah i think you enjoy you just stay healthy
stay healthy and do what you enjoy doing i think live in the moment i think this idea of like Like planning for the future is like silly. I really do. I think you should have goals. Like if you enjoy doing things and you're like, I would like to get to this point. I would like to do this. And something to strive towards, that's good. But this idea that like, you know, one day you're just going to like stop doing stuff. Like why? Yeah. Are you alive?
Are you enjoying doing it? Yeah. Let's shut the fuck up. Like you could be so much worse off. There's so many things to dwell on other than whether or not I want to stop doing something that I enjoy. Why would I ever even think about that? That's a good point, man. That's a good point. These are all questions I had never really thought about, but I'd be more interested in them after I crossed that threshold. But I could conceive a time where I don't want to do it anymore.
I don't want to be a public person anymore. The public aspect of it is the weirdest part. 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. I can set up a business with him. I can do this with him. I can do that with him. He can introduce me to this. I can, you know, work with him. I could do a lot of that. A lot of that that's exhausting.
A lot of these like opportunists and weirdos. Yeah. You know, those those are exhausting. 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 wish you were 10 percent less famous. But I feel like then you got 20 percent more famous. Yeah. Yeah. I fucked up. Well, I thought doing the Spotify. I was like, his direction isn't going the right way.
That was the whole reason why I took the Spotify deal. 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. Good. Let me slide off into obscurity. Because, I mean, as long as I'm making money, I was like, I just enjoy doing it. I don't care how many people, like, the people that like it will still listen, so maybe I'll have less casual fans. Like, who cares? Who cares? You know?
Yeah. There's a certain level of fame, though, that's a little unmanageable, and I'm in that level. It's very unmanageable. You know what it is? Well, if you'll allow me to tell you what it is. Okay, please do. And I observed this. I observed this. My wife, who's traveling with me right now, I observed this after we had dinner with you one time. certain individuals, you included, would be that
it's not just people that don't like you. Right? There's people that like you too much. Yeah. People that don't like you just avoid you. I know. So it's like you got to, at a certain point, you got to worry about the people that like you. Yeah. Oh, believe me, I know.
Because they like you a lot. Oh, I know. Yeah, and they also... They're like, I'd like to take, kidnap that Joe Rogan and bring him home with me. They want me to come to their house. And keep him in my basement. Yeah, I get, like, letters. People want me to come to their house. I get it, you know, especially if you don't know anyone famous. 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. It's a lot. Yeah, that thing. I mean, it comes up. It's over-observed. Tim Ferriss mentioned it to me. He's like, people think, like, they think they know you, but he's like, but they do.
They do. They do, and you don't know them. Yeah, yeah. Which is real weird. Yeah, they know what you think about stuff. They know what you think about current events. They know about your background, right? The good thing about that, though, is if, like, someone tries to pretend you're something other than you are, if, like, there's a smear campaign against you, people are like, no, I know that guy. Oh. Like, they actually know you.
They really know you. People have listened to me like 100 hours. There's no confusion. There's no guesswork. This is who I am. I'm not that complicated. It's a long charade. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Visible. You 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? Not with Visible.
On the Visible plan, it's one line of unlimited 5G data for just $25 a month. flat rate, no surprises, powered by Verizon's network so you know it's solid. And here's the kicker, they're all digital. You can manage your plan in the app or online, meaning no stores, no pushy salespeople, just you and your phone. And right now, Visible's got an insane deal. Use promo code ROGAN by January 31st, and you will get the Visible plan for just $20 a month for 25 months. That's $5 off every month for over two years. So go to visible.com slash Rogan and check it out. It's wireless made simple. Terms apply. See their website for the details. That'd be a long charade that you've played. Yeah. Imagine. Imagine you bullshitted people for that long. That's amazing. Like a hundred thousand hours, a hundred thousand hours, a hundred hours, a charade, bullshitting people. Yeah. 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, like the Ellen situation. Yeah. You know, people found out that Ellen was mean and all these people came out and said, Ellen's actually a fucking bitch. And they were like, oh, I can't believe it. And she lost everything. She fell apart, disappeared. Because people found out that this character
that she was portraying in a half an hour on a television show is not really who she was. Yeah. You know, but I hadn't already known that because I had a buddy who worked for her. like and he was like she's a fucking monster yeah i didn't have i didn't have a lot of i didn't really had a lot of awareness you probably did just from being in the business i only did because of my buddy yeah my buddy greg who was one of her writers was like she's a piece of shit yeah i didn't know enough to be surprised it's just people that um they get in those positions of power 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 there's a lot
of those folks that's what happened to castro is that it is that what happened to castro 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 things become vindictive i don't even go to canada anymore. I won't go to Canada for UFC. I don't go over there. Matt, I've spent my whole life in the northern tier states, but I've remained somewhat oblivious to political movements in Canada. Well, they don't have free speech up there. They don't have a First Amendment. They have different laws. They have hate speech laws, which are very dangerous because who defines hate speech? Yeah. You know, like, so hate speech laws in Canada, they refer to gender pronouns now. So, like, not just male, female. 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.
If you don't, that's hate speech. Like, okay, maybe that's debatable. Maybe you're being an asshole. But, no, they want, like, all 78 fake genders. Like, Z-Zer and all these fucking crazy fake ones and they-thems. Well, that's where, like, that's, I mean, isn't that conversation what spawned kind of the ascendancy of Jordan Peterson, right? 100%. Yeah, coming out of Canada. 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. Yeah.
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. so they they want to educate him on uh like what he what he talks about on social media if he wants to keep his clinical license to practice as a psychotherapist oh is that right but he doesn't want to practice anyway he makes far more money doing what they've essentially made a monster they made him way more famous than he ever would have been sure yeah they they highlighted all of canada's problems way more than would ever get highlighted without this persecution of this guy it's kind of crazy though so he's going through it he's like fuck you I'll go through it and I'll go through it publicly you guys are idiots also knowing what the outcome will be
knowing he's going to trounce them good luck debating that guy good fucking luck who do you got on your side that's going to go up against that guy shut the fuck up who on your creepy authoritarian totalitarian regime is going to stand up and make sense competing against Jordan Peterson.
Good fucking luck. I wouldn't want the job. Yeah, good luck. Good luck debating that guy. It's just the whole situation up there is just so fucked. And I don't know too much about that Pierre Polivet guy, but I hope that there's some sort of meaningful change up there. I used to love Canada. I used to say Canada is like America, but it's like 20% less douchebags. They were so friendly. They're so nice.
I used to love going to Montreal. I used to love going to Vancouver. I loved it up there. But the woke shit hit there so hard because they don't have freedom of speech. They don't have a First Amendment. So when they start clamping down on your ability to express yourself, like there's really disastrous implications. Yeah. But there will probably be a course correction now, which it seems like just generally on free speech issues, there's a radical course correction right now. Sure. Or you become Iran. Oh, yeah.
You roll that way. Yeah. I mean, course correction doesn't always work. Like, you know, we think it works because it works in America. And it works in America because we have the First Amendment and we have the Second Amendment. And those two things work together. And if we didn't have those things, we would be genuinely fucked. Because every government wants to eventually completely and totally control its population. Because it's way easier for them to make money. And that's what they like to do. Yeah.
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. And if you can't express yourself and say, hey, this is fucked up. This is crazy. Why am I doing this? Like, these studies show that you're not correct. Like, if you can't say all those things, which right now you can't do in Canada. It's not the same. Like, their ability to express themselves on the internet has been severely limited. It's real weird, man.
It's real weird. And it's happening right. You could walk there. If you wanted to, you could walk there. And it's fucked. It's like it's on the same patch of land as us. And it's fucked. It just shows you what can happen here if you don't have the right laws because people like that fuckhead Justin They pretend you guys are on first-name basis. Yeah that cocksucker they pretend that there and I don't talk this way about anybody No, I'm really surprised. I genuinely despise people like that I think it's good to say it publicly because people need to understand like what these people are doing
These people are leading you on the road to legitimate communism like he's he's leading that country in a road to legitimate communism It's very dangerous and I think most Canadians are fed up with it at this point It's just like the party the party up. There's so much control and he's been forced to resign so you know he's got to step down and Just hopefully they don't get some new slick talker to con them into the same old bullshit Hopefully someone comes along that has like real meaningful change Yeah, which is what I'm hoping is gonna happen in America, too if that Tim Walsh cocksucker if that guy got into power like if Kamala died and And Tim Walsh, Tampon Tim, was our fucking president. You know how crazy this country would be? That weirdo puts tampons in the boys' room.
And what about our joy? Like, he's a complete pathological liar. Like, a complete liar. Lied about being in Tiananmen Square. Lied about being a fucking head coach of a football team. Yeah, I thought some of that was just weird in how avoidable it was. 100% avoidable, but pathological liars. People that are habitual liars. they just lie all the time about everything but there's a way uh there's a way you can do it where it's sort of like no one's ever going to know and there's things you can fib about they're just fine you find out in five seconds so you wonder
about making the call to embellish something that a person could answer on their phone right right instantly like almost as you're saying it yeah um that's not true no this was your rank in the military oh you didn't deploy uh for for war you didn't why are you saying you deployed at war the the weapons you used in war no no no you weren't in war like oh you were a head foot no you weren't a head coach you were the water boy yeah the fuck are you talking about i thought some of that was weird well he's just a liar but that's what a lot of these people are they're just they're just actors who are ugly and they're like well i can't really make it in show business and i want a lot of attention and i want to be a special person so i'll do politics i'm good at bullshitting and most people you know they're trusting they're like oh he's saying the right things if you say the right things you know abracadabra and then next thing you know you're a governor yeah you ever gonna run for governor no i'm not running for nothing i don't want to do
nothing i don't want to do a goddamn thing i can picture down the road man you might be like i want to be governor of texas fuck that why would i do that i have the best job in the world i get to talk shit with zero responsibilities. If I get something wrong, I go, listen, I'm a moron. Why are you listening to me in the first place? No, I have no desire in any way, shape, or form to have anything to do with anything involving politics. I don't want to be in control of it. I don't even like having employees. Jamie's awesome.
But I mean, I don't like having employees. He nodded. But he's just great. He's just great. He's easy. That's why there's so few of us here. I have a friend who has a podcast, a big podcast, I see it's like fucking 13 people working for him. People running around with clipboards. I'm like, what do these people do? Why do you have so many people working for you?
This doesn't freak you out. 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. Yeah, maybe you wouldn't like being governor. Fuck that. I would hate it. I don't want to be a mayor. I don't want to be nothing. I don't want to be nothing. but i did get some not even a mayor no i don't want to be a city councilman i want to be a
i don't want to be shit i i don't like the whole thing about it it's just it's not it's not a good gig it's just a it's a creepy business it's a very creepy and prostitutional business it's just i don't like it yeah yeah part of the impetus that pushes people into it is that they want to reverse that but i think that then there's a there's a there's a magnetic pull that takes you in the direction of being perhaps what you wanted to get rid of it seems like it happens to a lot of the like really idealistic young people that get involved in it and then all of a sudden they start doing really well in the stock market and yeah they make some good bets yeah they you know they used to be making 28 000 a year now all of a sudden they're worth 12 million now they're worth 20 million and they're hanging out with a bunch of other people that are going on yachts on vacations like I'm gonna go on a yacht yeah next thing you know you know I want a Mercedes and then like they get you they slowly get you you know you know Evan Haver yeah Evan Haver had a great
saying 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 I was like oh that's so true oh I mean like ideas in psychology well being around people yeah yeah yeah yeah if you're around people that are just trying to have a good time that are nice people genuinely you lean in that direction yeah you know like i try to spread that i want everybody to have fun like let's have a good time yeah like if you're around a bunch of creeps that are just trying to climb the ladder and claw their way into power like yeah how do you maintain your sovereignty yeah that kind of psychological infection. Yeah, good luck. Good luck battling it out with 460 other creeps who show up in D.C. and lie. Yuck. Although I did get like a bizarre. I did enjoy affecting the election. Oh, I can all dude imagine I can imagine I did enjoy because I didn't want to I did I did not want to get involved in any way shape or form, but it got so weird Yeah, you'd express that publicly in the past. I was like I don't want to have nothing
I don't want to have anything to do it in the future. I don't I didn't want to I just felt sucked into it I'm like yeah, like we can't do this again We can't do it with these same people that fucked us for four years and then they're gonna like we're gonna do it differently now Like, what's going on? Did you see what's going on? Obviously, you've seen what's going on in California. 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. While it's still only 6% contained. And he did this little dance. Like, I've been talking with the governor of Hawaii about what to do. We've got some ideas.
We're going to have some meetings. Really? Oh, show it to him. Jamie. It's so creepy because it's happening while these people are, their houses have been burned, all their childhood memorabilia, all their stuff for their kids, the photos, the fucking everything they have, everything they have is gone. All heirlooms, you know, their mother's wedding ring, that kind of shit. Everything's burnt to the ground. 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. The development plans. Watch this. Play this. I was just talking to Josh Green, the governor down in Hawaii.
He had some ideas around some land use concerns he has around speculators coming in, buying up properties and the like. 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. With a big smile on his face. Look at the little wiggle he does with his shoulders. Speculator. Watch this. Talking to Josh. Look at this. Look at this little wiggle. It's excited about the possibilities of speculators coming in. And he's saying move forward. We're going to move forward on that. These people lost their homes. A lot of those people don't even have fire insurance because the fire insurance pulled out of California. I think like 69% of fire insurance pulled out of California because they're like, this is too crazy. Like, you guys aren't doing jack shit to manage this. You're not clearing the brush. The amount of money they could have saved by just clearing brush. Like filling the reservoir, that 11 million gallon reservoir was completely empty during the time of full fire season. Like, why didn't you fix that? Yeah.
Like, it's all insanely mismanaged. And then this guy is on television talking about that. Doing a dance in front of the burned down home that people used to sleep in, where their children would sleep in. Like, this is so disgusting. That's why I don't want to be governor. Oh, you know what's funny? I was going to tell you about, on the way down here, I happened to be sitting across from one of our senators from Montana. And after, when the flight was getting off, you know it's hilarious, this old-timer comes by him. And legitimately, I'm not joking, legitimately brings up to him potholes on the road. Really? On the airplane.
it's like you gotta do something about these potholes I'm outside of Belgrade and those potholes are terrible he's like okay yeah got it got it well I mean the senator can't do much about no I know but it's just like it's almost like a cliche but you know the thing with the other night guys that I grew up with you know like a
fish that was very central to our upbringing was a fish called smelt it was different kinds of smelt so we had a rainbow smelt and they were they live in the Great Lakes. And so in the spring, when the smelt run, you know, it was a big deal to go smelt dipping. And we would smelt dip them with drop nets and dip nets. It was a huge thing. And when smelt numbers were really high, you know, it was just like,
it kind of brought everybody together. A lot of my buddies used to do that in Massachusetts. The smelt run. Yeah. 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. And I was like, man, I feel like there needs to be like a article in the Constitution that the president cannot shit talk smelt, you know. But then I realized it was a different smelt.
So I cooled off once I realized it was the Delta smelt and not our beloved Rainbow smelt. Well, you can have, there's a balance, right, in terms of like being environmentally conscious, but also recognizing the needs of the human population. And I think that's been distorted in California significantly. Yeah, but I do get like my hackles get up when my hackles get up about disparaging, disparaging fishes and birds. Of course. Yeah, no, I get it. Playoffs. We're talking about playoffs. You bet we are. Get in on the action with DraftKings Sportsbook, an official sports betting partner of the NFL. Scoring touchdowns is key to winning the playoffs, and you can score big by betting on them at DraftKings, the number one place to bet touchdowns. Ready to place your bet? Try betting on something simple, like a player to score six.
Go to DraftKings Sportsbook app and make your pick. New DraftKings customers can bet $5 to get $200 in bonus bets instantly. Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app and use the code ROGAN. That's code ROGAN for new customers to get $200 in bonus bets instantly when you bet just $5. Only on DraftKings Sportsbook. The crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. In New York, call 877-8HOPENY or text HOPENY 467369. In Connecticut, help is available for problem gambling.
Call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org. Please play responsibly on behalf of Boothill Casino and Resort in Kansas. 21 and over, age and eligibility varies by jurisdiction, void in Ontario. Bonus bets expire 168 hours after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see dkng.co slash audio. I get it. That's your world. That's your world. Yeah, there's a balance, a balance to be held for sure. 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 have massive pollution. But also, I don't think we should be dependent on Saudi Arabia for all our oil. it's a mix you know one of the one of the uh kind of contradictions you encounter with stuff like
this and and i've been a little bit involved in this the last few years as i started going down to the gulf of mexico to spearfish on the oil rigs and so the oil rigs are they're imagine like a vertical coral reef you know you i don't want to call it by no means i 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 right if you're just swimming with a snorkel and mask you can swim along the surface for miles and not encounter fish i mean it's kind of where you're seeing them in front of your face right and you pull up to a rig and it's it's hung in fish i mean it's it's they're draped in thousands of fish okay so you know you grow up with this idea if you just have a passive understanding of all this stuff you grow up this idea that like oil oil exploration equals a diminishing of natural life a diminishing of wildlife and you go in uh and there there's this big debate where certain people want to pull the abandoned rigs out but you have fishermen
who are like they're here now leave them because that's where all the fish are yeah you know and And it's this very spirited debate. And different administrations will have different plans. They had a program like idle iron, which was to pull them out. There was a program called rigs to reefs, which is to tip them over so they're not navigational hazards. The shrimpers don't like them because they cause navigational obstructions. You can hang your gear up on them. But all the rod and reel fishermen and all the spear fishermen want the rigs there. 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 you know like you're creating I mean they you always hate to say it because you're supposed to you know you're supposed to be most people from the environmental movement are anti oil exploration but then you go and look and be like they created
like an accidentally created an unbelievable fishery yeah in the Gulf and there's dudes now like I got buddies that spear fish there and fish there and it's like
remember in Star Wars the original Star Wars where they go to that fucking planet and the planet's gone hey shouldn't the planet be here you know that scene I've been with buddies of mine and they got
they got GPS marks for rigs and you show up and it's like Star Wars it's like you show up and the rig's not there anymore because there's these ships out there called rig reapers that are out plucking the rigs and they're plucking them faster they can put them in but it's got all the fishermen pissed off that's an interesting situation yeah they want them there now man lake austin has a similar situation so lake austin used to be this it's still very good for bass fishing they have big bass on lake austin and um the people that live
on the lake you know the highfalutin folks didn't like all the weeds yeah so they brought in carp oh and the carp ate everything so now the the place looks like the bottom of a swimming pool yeah it's like all the vegetation is fucked and so the bass don't have a lot of places to go like you know where where i live people go to the docks like they they cast to the docks you know and they fish near people's docks because that's like the only cover that these fish have and so there's talk of like submerging like trees or you know dropping creating structures creating structures And then there's people that are opposed to that because, like, you know, you have your, you know, the wakeboarders and all the people that like to like recreation on the water. They don't want anything that could possibly fuck up their boat. Yeah. You know, but like if they already fucked it up by bringing in the carp, like and you can't get the carp out. Like, how are you going to kill the carp?
You know, Tom, you remember the writer Tom? Was it Tom Robbins or Tim? No, Tim Robbins is the actor. Right. Right. Tom Robbins. Skinny, skinny, skinny legs and all. jitterbug perfume he had a line where um you know like in hawaii they had this famous thing where they had a rat problem and then they brought in mongooses to kill the rats and then now they got a mongoose problem yeah he had some line that like um we used to have a crime problem then we brought in cops but it's uh like my first uh you're talking about political involvement
My first time I ever approached anything remotely political was on the lake I grew up on. We had an invasive seaweed, an invasive aquatic plant called Eurasian milfoil, and it grew in our lake, but it made unbelievable fish habitat. And at the time, I was not hip enough to understand the deleterious effects of non-native vegetation. 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. And they had this proposal to come in and kill all the milfoil in all the lakes. And I went down. I remember I was in high school. I went down. I remember I was the sole person there to represent like the milfoil side of the argument. And then they did it. They went in and poisoned all the milfoil out of the lakes in hopes of bringing in like the native seaweeds would take hold.
But I mean, it absolutely transformed the lake. And from a fishery perspective, from 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. Of course. You know? And it's, again, like, on one hand, you look like, well, why would you mess up with this? There's fish everywhere. And some people would be like, well, it's not a native plant. And we need to value native wildlife at the expense of what, you know, a high schooler would look at as, like, it's where the fish are. Yeah. You know? They didn't do what they did to Lake Austin. They didn't do it to Lady Bird Lake.
So if you go to Lady Bird Lake, it's just hopping with bass. Remaining the good fishery. Yeah. It's for the seaweed and all kinds of, or not seaweed, but, you know, lily pads and all kinds of shit over there. Yeah. that you don't have on Lake Austin. They didn't bring in the carp. Yeah. The other enormously destructive thing that they've done around the lakes where I grew up on is all that, so much of that life, the lake life, relies on what you call like the littoral zone, so the shoreline zone.
And most of these fish species, they like it to be dirty, meaning weeds, falling over trees. Like it creates all kinds of habitat, right, for little stuff to hide. and 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. And you just watch over the years, like over the course of my lifetime, you just watch this really like verdant, kind of like vibrant environment become increasingly like a swimming pool. And a lot of those lakes, man, it's just been depressing to watch happen. Yeah, we were talking the other day about eating freshwater fish, how much toxic chemicals are in freshwater fish.
It's fucking bananas. They have state advisories, which I've always ignored. I've always ignored. Have you ever get your blood tested? No, but you want to know, I might have told you this story, man. Did I ever tell you a story about this? Which one? Well, I'll tell it real quick. So I grew up with a guy named Ron Spring. Yes. I'll tell you the Ron Spring story.
Okay, never mind. Please do. Oh, fuck. I tell the story too many people. I don't think you told it on here. Okay. I grew up with this guy, Ron Spring, and for a living, he was a commercial bait fisherman. He would catch wigglers, minnows, he'd dig crawlers, catch leeches, and he would supply bait and tackle shops with live bait. And he had spring sporting goods where he sold his own live bait. And he would even hire women to sow what's called a spawn sack, where he'd take little
bits of salmon, pieces of salmon, row salmon eggs, and sew them into a little mesh bag for steelhead bait. He was just in the bait business, but also was a fishing fanatic and lived off fish his whole life. So he was living off Great Lakes fish his whole life. And the University of Montana started trying to track down old timers who'd eaten like enormous quantities of Great Lakes fish, Great Lakes fish to test them for heavy metals exposure. Okay. And, and, and, and other toxic things are in the environment and he'd lived his whole life like me with like a complete defiance of health advisory suggestions about fish consumption um and he goes down there and he and he would go in every month or two for these little batteries of tests and one of the things they would do with them is they would tell him they'd give him a grocery list and they'd be like hey you got to go to the store and buy like bread eggs cheese butter whatever and then he'd wait a minute and they'd say what were you supposed to buy at the store you know and he's telling me this
story and he told me i was laughing he said um steve i wouldn't have remembered that list if i never ate a piece of fish in my life so they were trying to like gauge his memory based on the amount of heavy metal yeah they were trying to they're presumably they tested his blood and found something of interest and so they were trying to figure out like what happens to a guy but uh i I lived in Seattle and right on Lake Washington, and we would catch a lot of yellow perch because people, they're full yellow perch, which are non-native. And everyone in that area in the Pacific Northwest is like a trout and salmon snob. So I had the whole fishery to myself. 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. they would tell you that perch over 12 inches you're only supposed to eat one meal a month or some shit like that but we just wouldn't keep them over 12 inches because there weren't that many
under over 12 inches anyways and we just eat them all the time i would have fish fries and when you fried fish in the great lakes there's no person in the great lakes region that i was aware of like in michigan there's no person that would even kind of give a shit about these restrictions they would be surprised to hear that there were any kind of restrictions but like the way the different sentiments and different mentalities run in seattle you'd have people that like they're like you caught it where lake washington no way right just like in a like a level of awareness from like an urban environment about those kind of toxins and and growing up where i grew up it was just not a thing that people discussed even though they're right in the fishing rigs when did it start happening like when did freshwater fish become toxic that would be something i'd be interested man i think it's like it's it's mercury it's certain industrial solvents bpas too yeah and i think that with lake washington there was a lot correct me maybe i'm wrong like i'm as i say
this i might be wrong i think there was things around um bowing plants and old solvents and stuff that went in the water uh and then but mercury which comes from you know different ways they have ways of scrubbing it now and greatly reducing the amount of mercury when you burn coal but for a long time um mercury would come from the combustion of coal and it would be distributed globally evenly everywhere so it didn't it didn't necessarily matter if you were it didn't matter if you're eating a pelagic fish i mean if you're eating like a pacivorous pelagic fish would seem to be the worst what does a pelagic mean fish that live their life up at the surface okay and then ones that eat fish that eat fish that eat fish are the worst so picture you got like a like a like a marlin right he's eating tuna tuna are eating fish that are eating fish and so they they magnify and accumulate all this stuff in their fat that's that's like globally distributed in the oceans and um they've slowed down mercury um they've slowed down how much
mercury is going out because of ways they scrub when they clean when they burn coal now but it's just it's stagnant in the environment did i ever tell you my arsenic story no i got my blood work done you know i get my blood work done pretty regularly and i went once a few years back quite a few years back 15 years ago at least um and my doctor said do you have a lot of arsenic in your blood and i go like someone's poisoning me he's like no do you eat a lot of fish oh really and i said i eat a lot of sardines he goes how how much i go four or five cans a night and he was like what he's like what the fuck are you doing i go what are you doing well i love sardines and when i'm if like i come home from the comedy club and i'm hungry it's easy to have like what i thought was like healthy food it's just sardines and olive oil what could be bad about that yeah and so he said take a few months off and then come back and let's do this again and i took a few months off and i came back no arsenic you know i was like oh man he goes it's
not enough to be concerned you know but you're you're getting arsenic in your blood from these sardines yeah i uh i work with a guy seth and and uh he he kind of had this perfect storm where we had been in hawaii so we had wahoo and and uh yellowfin tuna and he fishes in alaska so he had all his halibut and then he's got a bunch of walleye that he catches you know he's big walleye fisherman that he catches locally and um he wound up uh had like there's like kind of like a long term mercury deal and a short term mercury deal but he had he had mercury poisoning his hands went numb and stuff oh yeah and then i got to read about it and there's like various cases where um there's this other case that's kind of interesting this guy gets on a cruise ship never doesn't eat fish this guy like doesn't have fish in his diet it was a thing that was covered in the news and he gets on the cruise a cruise and they have all you can eat sushi thing so he wants to get his money's worth and so he's gorging himself on this all you can eat sushi
during the course of his cruise and generates mercury poisoning. Like a short-term version. 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. They could live off tuna, right? But they'll deliberately pace themselves keeping in mind the amount of that stuff you're getting in. And RFK Jr., I had RFK Jr. on the show, on our podcast, and he had had uh he had had mercury poisoning really you know from what canned tuna was eating too much canned tuna wow yeah so maybe i've had it i don't know i don't need i would well no i've had my blood tested i don't know but but i can't picture the sentiment i have about is a friend of
mine um who fishes flathead catfish which have they accumulate a lot of bio or not biotoxins they accumulate a lot of heavy metals. And he said, and we were talking about eating this stuff, and he said, if I can catch and eat so many big flatheads that it kills me, I win. That was his attitude on. Well, there's no cases of CWD getting into humans yet, right? No. No. But that's the big fear. Like you and I are on a text chain with Ted Nugent, and he's always like trying to— I met Ted's kid last night.
Which one? Rocco? Rocco. Yeah. Good kid. You know, Ted is always trying to dismiss the concerns of CWD. He doesn't believe in it. He thinks it's overhyped. Well, yeah. It scares the fuck out of me. Yeah.
Because it's a prion disease, right? Yeah. So if it jumps to people, and it has jumped to certain rodent species, isn't that correct? No. Right now, it's cervids. Oh, just cervids? Cervids, yeah. There hasn't been a case of it jumping to like a mole or something like that? Well, 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. Let's say you have a finding that's alarming, but you haven't done peer review yet.
right 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 right um there's a term for it where you would release these you release these like preliminary findings even though it hasn't been held up to academic rigor because it's of such importance like 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 They're like, hey, hang tight. We're not all the way there yet, but look, this is kind of alarming. 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. But when things like that happen, they tend to get a ton of media.
But then down the road, the media doesn't follow suit. like there's been cases where um there was one not longer where they were looking at people that had this rare form of dementia and they were kind of they found that of these people that had this rare form of dementia um a couple of them had were deer hunters who lived in cwd areas right so they come out with a hey everybody check this out but then it winds up being that when you do a statistical analysis on it it was it was no different than anything else there was no reason that it wasn't like they scored higher, that deer hunters scored higher, or nothing. It's just a certain percentage of people get dementia. 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. So even though they gave like a big heads up, it won't be a nothing there. But yeah, CWD, it's a highly infectious disease. It was first identified in Colorado on a research facility, not a game farm it was first identified on a cervid research facility in colorado i believe in the early 70s and then there's been a there's been a a debate like some some people feel that it was always there and wasn't detected right and that we that it wasn't like we found it the minute it came out it was just it would perhaps had been there and then we discovered that it was always there. But it does expand its range all the time, right? Even in the last few years, we've had our
first cases in Montana. And we keep every year we add, like without fail, every year we find CWD in states where it didn't previously exist or within states that have CWD, we find CWD in counties that didn't have it. Oftentimes you can look and it makes sense because it flows, But now and then you get these weird jumps, right, where something jumps a big moat of inactivity. And then all of a sudden you get like a new hotspot 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? Some of the jumps, people tie it to transporting. there's a theory that is well accepted in a lot of circles would be that that moving cervids moving deer and elk um to penned operations has facilitated the movement of cwd what what it used to mean to be is if someone was a cwd denier before it would be that they they denied that it was a thing like there is no disease called cwd there's generally it's generally accepted now that there's a disease called CWD,
but now the debate is like, is sort of does it matter or not, right? 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 gonna lead to like destruction of deer herds. Meaning if you get like, it's always fatal. And if infection rates get to a certain point,
we're going to lose deer right like if it's always fatal and you have infection rates of 50 or 60 percent and it takes a couple years to kill them like you're going to run out of big bucks because nothing can live long enough the other fear is that it jumps the barrier and becomes a human pathogen you know so people you know all the hunters i know like the question we always talk about is like do you uh do you would you eat cwd positive meat you know right even if it doesn't jump currently you know you take that risk so yanni zero yanni was recently with a guy and he's like he's eating him and his family have eaten four cwd positive deer um man uh i couldn't i i can't i like i couldn't serve it to my kids no i wouldn't eat it myself either i can't serve my kids i don't i have annoyingly eat it but here's the thing here's the rub um i've said this number before and people like that's not true but it's true i'm telling you hundreds of thousands of people have eaten cwd positive hundreds of thousands of people have
eaten cwd positive meat i would imagine that's true yeah yeah over many decades yeah right so So at what point do you get comfortable? I don't know. Dude, it's a tough one. Yeah, it's a tough one. It's a tough one. It can jump. It hasn't. It hasn't. But when you look at the history of these types of diseases, especially prion diseases like mad cow, prion disease jumped people. You know the debate between prion and prion?
No. You hear it. I used to say prion, but then I heard scientists say prion. I wanted to sound smart, so I changed it. The biologist Jim Heffelfinger. That'd be a very good guy for you to have on your show someday. 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. So then I was like, okay, I'm going to stick with prion now. It's the guy that came up with it that says prion.
Oh, so that's what it is? And not prion. He's like said, he's like, we'll call it this and we'll pronounce it this way. Okay. So it's prion. Now I'm trying to, I always try to remember which one it is. And it's, yeah, it's prion. It's scary, dude. It's scary. 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.
Because Doug's worried about that we're going to lose big bucks. And people. He likes healthy deer. He doesn't want a disease running through his deer herd. It hasn't jumped to cows or anything else. No, and that's one area where I'm going to get myself in trouble with Doug in all kinds of ways. That's the thing I think about. I'm not saying the ag world is complacent. I'm not saying they're complacent. There's a lot of interest in the agricultural community to understand CWD better. But if you look and be like, dude, a cow looks a hell of a lot more like a deer than I do.
Right. I'm just going to watch the cow. And all of a sudden these cows start getting sick. Then my ass is going to get nervous. Right. But I'm like, they're rubbing noses with these deer. Yeah. And it gets on the grass. It gets on the vegetation. Sure. And you can't kill that shit.
Yeah. I remember some politician was like, well, I'll just cook your deer meat longer. And I was like, well, I can't remember what it is. You can't cook deer meat to 1400 degrees. Yeah, you have to incinerate it. Or whatever else it becomes. But, yeah, cooking it isn't the thing. It can survive. That's why if you hunt, there's a lot of restrictions now on moving carcasses around, right? So more and more states are implementing that when you go home, they don't want you bringing the head home. They don't want you bringing the bones home.
I also fear for a time, and it would just be terrible, fear for a time where you couldn't bring anything. Like, they really restrict movement, you know? Right. Like, it's very easy to comply with not moving bones. It's easy to comply with not moving brain matter. like that's easy right yeah but picture that this gets out of hand and all of a sudden it's like you can't move venison across county lines i don't know right like no one's thrown this out there but as we look at as they look at like further and further restrictions it's scary and so from a guy like from from from i don't want to speak for nugent but from his idea of being overblown is His idea would be, like I said, I hate speaking for the guy. It would be that 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.
That would be his perspective on it. 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. 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. That's my kind of pork barrel spending. There's no way to eradicate it, right? Like, there's no way to identify the deer that have it, that haven't exhibited symptoms, and they're spreading it. Yeah, they're looking at ways to test live animals. Then there's other cockamamie ideas that one would be that some deer seem to be some deer.
Resilient? Yeah, and so that you'd move these resilient deer into other populations to try to breed in some kind of resiliency, which, you know, it's a wild animal. But is it ultimately resilient? Because like mad cow disease has, there's an incubation period, right? This is the concern. Like, I remember- That's the other thing is that we're all, like me, everybody, because I guarantee I've eaten CWD-infected meat. The other concern is we all got it. We just don't know it yet because it takes 10 years. Yeah, my buddy Rupert- But they've been tracking these dudes that went to a fire department fundraiser.
They had 100-some people that ate a bunch of CWD-infected meat at a fire department fundraiser. And they keep following up on those people and following up on those people. And they haven't got it. How long ago was this? It was over a decade ago. So that's the other thing is that we all got it, like all these hunters. 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 develop dementia. Oy. I don't it's such a I really think that I don't like to see any kind of wildlife disease. Right. Of course. I do believe.
If you look at prevalency rates and you look at the fact that it's always 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. it'll become harder to produce big deer. I worry about that. And it'd be easy to track. Just go and look at like, go and look at Boone and Crockett entries over time from all these counties. So go to like Buffalo County, Wisconsin like a famous giant whitetail producing place, right? They get high rates of
CWD prevalency. If you put a line on CWD prevalency and you put a line on Boone and Crockett entries and you're able to track this over many years because we have all this data, does it correlate? Does CWD prevalently drive down big bucks? Right. 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 the whole promise of wild meat is you you know you're getting like really healthy meat you're able to control the food chain but then all of a sudden you throw in this question of like well but it could give you a prion disease hypothetically that's gonna that's gonna dampen people's enthusiasm about deer and i'd hate to see we get to a point where when when i look at a deer i look at a deer with like great enthusiasm and love, what happens when we look at deer and we look at them like a disease vector? Right? Does it become like, do you view it like a rat? Or you see a rat and you recoil? Like, I don't want that shit in my yard.
Right. They carry disease, don't they? What if your dog could get it? Yeah, like picture down the road that deer, which are this universally loved, praised animal, this kind of symbol of the American outdoorsman, becomes like a, yeah, that shit out of my yard. Oof. When Doug talks about, they do a lot of testing in Wisconsin. A lot of testing, yeah. What's the percentage that come up positive?
Man, they have, I think that on Doug's place, I think that 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. Whoa. Yeah. It's hovering, it's like very high. And this is fairly recent. Like a decade ago, they started appearing, right? Yeah, I think that CWD goes back maybe about a decade in his area. He's in Richland County. Is he Richland County?
Yeah, Richland County, Wisconsin. Somewhere in that ballpark. And it's changed. When you were at Doug's place, remember at Doug's place, they used to have this slogan, like, nice buck next year, meaning let deer grow, let deer grow. And Doug has really changed. over the years, these changes tune and they really want to try to, the idea generally with wildlife managers is that by lowering, you'll slow spread by lowering numbers, right? That if you have, you know, 40 deer per square mile, you're going to have increased spread.
And if it was 20 deer per square mile, 30 deer per square mile, you might slow the spread. 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 um and cwd still spreads right so so there's a you wind up with this question of like how do you justify um trying to suppress deer numbers when you're not demonstrating a lot of success and slowing prevalency and the whole thing you're afraid of is lowering deer numbers but you're lowering deer numbers right but it's like a controlled it's a controlled lowering to slow spread but there hasn't been no one has an area to your point you can't go to a county i don't think if i'm wrong i'm wrong by maybe one county but i'm pretty positive i'm not wrong
and this is generally absolutely true um you can't go to a county that had infected deer that no longer has infected deer no one's gone into a population of deer and eradicated cwd Wow. No one's gotten rid of it. That's crazy. Has it jumped to moose? Yeah, I think that cervids, so primarily white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, they've had it transmit to caribou. I should know that. It's got to be because it's a cervid, so there's no way it doesn't. Lower numbers? Not from that.
Right, but I'm saying the thing about moose is they're slower numbers and they don't exist in packs. Yeah, yeah. But since it is a cervid disease, I should know this since it is. I'm assuming they've found it in there. I can't think of examples. 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. And moose have a whole host of problems right now in some areas, particularly in the lower 48. the northern states of the lower 48 between wolf depredation and a tick. Like a tick is really hammering those moose right now. Yeah, someone told me they went hunting and they got a moose and it was just covered in ticks. Yeah, there's a problem with in this long series of mild winters
that these extreme colds that would lower these tick numbers down. It hasn't been happening. So you're having animals literally dying, like a lot of moose literally dying from tick infestations. Yeah. And then Colorado's becoming like a great. Oh, here's all the. Found in moose in many state provinces. There you go. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Colorado, and Texas. That's moose? What?
Texas has moose? No, no, no. He's. Relatively small areas in the panhandle in West Texas. CWD. No. Deer in here, maybe. Yeah, that's CWD. That's cockeyed. Do they have moose in Texas? No, no.
I think it's mixing up two things. But it says it there. I know. But CWD has been found in Texas. Right. So they're not saying moose in Texas. Yeah. Just Google, are there moose in Texas? There are not. I mean, everything's in Texas in some form of capacity, but no, you're way outside. No moose in Texas.
You're way outside of moose, the native range of moose. Yeah. Yeah. Colorado is becoming like an unexpected, is blowing up for moose. Really? Yeah, yeah. Colorado becomes better. I mean, they've always had moose, but like Colorado's becoming like a premier moose state. When did that happen? They've just been kicking ass there, you know, up in the high country. They have more and more moose. It's becoming like a great moose state. And meanwhile, like Maine is really suffering as a moose state. Really? Yeah, so you know, like Maine's whole brand promise, you know, is like around moose and Colorado's going to steal it.
No, well, it's difficult to get a tag in Maine, right? That's very hard. Very hard. Yeah. It's for non-resident especially. I used to apply over there, but I don't apply anymore. Now, what's causing the moose decline in Maine? Ticks. Oh, God. Yeah, ticks. Dirty little fucking things.
Yeah. Have you ever heard the conspiracy theory about Lyme disease? Yeah. That's a weird one, right? Yeah. It is. Seems like there's some legitimate concern there, that it might have been a bioweapon that got out of hand. Well, I think after the pandemic we just went through, I think people are more open to that idea. Yeah, it was widely dismissed by people that are a little bit more skeptical about conspiracies. But RFJ Jr., he believes it. Yeah.
Yeah. 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. Yeah, it is. It's very strange. 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. Yeah, how'd that work out? That didn't really work out, did it? That has to be the story you tell to yourself. I think they just make money doing research. I think if you're a researcher, you know, like if you're a carpenter, you want to build houses.
They say, there's too many houses. He's like, ah, come on. We fucking need houses. You know, I'm a carpenter. I make houses. If you're a researcher in your field of study is diseases and viruses, you want to study them. And if the money is involved in some sort of bizarre engineering of these things, which is what they're doing, this fucking strange gain of function shit that they're doing, you do it. And if you can't do it in America, like China. OK, we'll do it over there. 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 to stop but say he'd wake up
in the morning and off in the distance and he's like someone else is doing it so uh 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. Yeah. Because you're like, well, I don't know. What are they doing over there that I, what am I missing out on? Right. You know? Yeah. If they're doing it, I want to do it. Yeah.
I don't want to be the one that looks like a fool. And there's research money. Mm-hmm. That's how you get grants. Yeah. And you know what? I bet you in some ways the pandemic spawned more of that type of research. You think so? Yeah. Because I mean, like, also now you can make the case of how important it is to understand this stuff.
yeah but you would also make the case like hey how about you fuckheads come up with a cure first yeah start with that yeah start with figuring out how to cure it yeah i can see that it's just like there's just not a lot of trust in the medical research institutions now no there's been a there's been an erosion of that for sure for a good reason yeah i mean it was a real wake-up call for people i think they're like oh there's not someone with real objective oversight of all this like we're doing a really good job of maintaining everything it's not it's not a really well maintained situation yeah i used to be a dude that um uh prior to that i was a dude that accepted a lot of uh i don't know i accepted a lot of assurances and then there was a definite like many people i mean i'm speaking for most people in the country man uh i feel like like many people i gained a new skepticism yeah me too during the pandemic yeah i joked about it in my special about government authority a new skepticism about some types of government authority and a new
skepticism about the way health information yes is spread yeah it's just one of those things where anything involving money 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 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? 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. 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. Yeah. And so they gave it to them. And then all of a sudden you're getting 72 vaccines. And you're giving children hepatitis B. Hepatitis B for babies, which is just fucking crazy. A sexually transmitted disease for babies. Like, what are you doing? Like, why are you doing that? Well, you're doing it because you can. And because the more vaccines you give kids, the more money you make. And you're not responsible. You don't have to pay off anything. You don't get sued.
Which is just you can't do that with these fucking corporations. They're just too evil. They are sociopaths. They act like sociopaths. They lie about studies. They lie about side effects. They minimize their responsibility and they profit immensely. And they continue to do so as long as they're not punished. And that's the business that they're in. Yeah, I get the frustration, but at the same time, I've been the recipient of remedies offered by Western medicine. Remedies offered by Western medicine for diseases caused by science. Possibly. You are. Yeah, you are with Lyme disease. Yeah, some things. Well, no, take a natural thing like Giardia. I don't think anyone's arguing about that. I mean, like, you get sick as shit.
Then all of a sudden you take a pill and you're quick. No one's arguing that medicine isn't amazing. I mean, medicine's amazing. But the problem with medicine is you got your scientists and your medical researchers, and then you got your money people, right? And the money people, they don't even know how to make any of this medicine. They just know to sell it. And how do I sell it? I sell it by, you know, like, that's like remdesivir. Where they were selling remdesivir during the COVID crisis. Remdesivir is fucking horrible. What is that?
I don't know that one. Kidney failure. They stopped prescribing it. Oh, no, I remember that one. Fauci was selling it to everybody. You need to take remdesivir. And everybody was dying. That's your impersonation? It's fucking horrible kidney failure. Yeah, that fucking creep. Read that book, The Real Anthony Fauci by RFK Jr.
It's a crazy book. Yeah, I have. You know, my buddy Seth was reading that book when we were out moose hunting, but I haven't read it. That book will change your opinion on a lot of shit. Yeah. That's a crazy book. And if it's not true, he would be sued. They would have sued the shit out of him. You'd have ceases and desist. Well, it's all documented. I mean, it's all backed up by rock-solid information.
It's all very well documented. What actually happened during the AIDS crisis, what actually happened during the COVID crisis, it's all legitimate. It's all easy to research. It's just scary that these people that you don't want to have to think about that stuff all the time. You want to just live your life and trust. Oh, this is the medical institution. They're here to help us. They're here to make us feel better. Yeah. But no, a lot of them are just there to make money.
But I held that sentiment. Me too. Oh. Me too. Until four years ago. A lot changed, dude. I'm fucking super skeptical now. Yeah, a lot changed. I'm also super skeptical of the herd mindset that people fall into. 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.
And that scares the shit out of me too because there's just a lot of people that are cowards and they're afraid of public humiliation, public criticism. They're afraid of getting ostracized from the community if they don't follow suit like everybody else is doing. And so then they start to try to enforce it on everybody else. It's like the people that were yelling at everybody else, where's your mask? Put your mask on. There's people – I went to a restaurant the other night. The fucking guy served me had a mask on. I'm like, I would fire this guy. I would not, like, you can't, this is nonsense. You can't be wearing a fucking mask. This is crazy.
I read an op-ed in the Free Press the other day, you know, Barry Weiss's publication. And it was about when they had rolled back, they had rolled back on masking laws. I kind of forgot all about this. Like, you used to not be able to run around with a mask on. Yeah. Because of, like, criminal activity. Yeah. So one of these dudes that pushed a person in front of a subway, it must have been premeditated to some degree because hood and mask, right? Yeah. So you can't identify them on security footage. Right.
And the dude that shot that healthcare insurance CEO, like masked, but you don't think anything of it. Right. So this person was arguing in some capacity. They were arguing that we need to move back to anti-masking rules. yeah 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 because it seems like how can you dictate to someone that you have a like a little stagecoach robber bandana on your face yeah you know i mean it's like a weird it's like a weird thing it's like can you really um can you really tell people that they can't wear a mask but this person's saying you could we did and now that you now that you now you've granted like criminals some level of
anonymity by that you can just kind of like you're cool just to walk around totally obscured well it's also you're you're dealing with people that have severe anxiety if they think that that mask is actually going to protect them it doesn't do jack shit sure especially if you're wearing the bandana the bandana is just ridiculous sure but i'm not oh yeah but yeah but i'm not looking to have a rational argument with them i'm just it was just like surprise like something i hadn't considered that you could uh have a that you could at a you know make a law telling people about wearing masks or not yeah i just forgot all about that shit because you just didn't but it would be if you went back six years ago and you saw a dude with a mask and a hood on yeah you might be like the hell is his problem yeah now you're like oh he's real scared of covid real scared still to this day i mean someone sent me a video this guy wears a mask every day and he's been pushing for masking it's like like severely mentally ill yeah well that that is overrun with anxiety just like
like advocating for masking we shall be masking and double masking and if you had a mask on and a lid on all the time you wouldn't be just 10 less famous you'd be 70 less famous i got i got spotted a lot when i had a mask with your mask on yeah with a mask on yeah yeah i kind of yeah Well, I'm short and wide. I have an odd shape. I think people are like, is that Joe Rogan? That burly little man. That little fucking chimpanzee looking dude. Bald head. Yeah. All muscle.
I wear a baseball hat, sunglasses, mask, and they're like, is that Joe Rogan? Even without seeing my tattoos, I just was getting busted. You know what it might be? Because you are known sitting in that seat and that posture. And so maybe when you're in the airport, you should try a different pose. Yeah, lean back. They might be just picking you off by your seating position. I don't know. I was just walking down the street. I was getting called out. Yeah.
I was getting with sunglasses on and a baseball hat. Yeah. You'd be 10% less famous. Yeah. That's too late. That fucking chicken just flown the coop. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's over. No one doing it now. I think you should stop masking.
I think it should be illegal. I think it's ridiculous. In New York, they made it so that if you go into a store, you have to pull your mask down. Oh. So the facial recognition will work. Really? Yeah, because they were getting so many people getting robbed. So many stores are getting robbed and you could never catch the guys. Oh, so there is, yeah, there is a movement back to that. I think it was the mayor was like proposing that. But they should just make it illegal to wear a fucking mask.
You're a psychopath. Like it doesn't work. It doesn't work and it's not protecting you. So what are we doing? You're just covering your face. Well, you can't cover your face because we live in polite society. We want to make sure that people can't commit crimes wearing a fucking bank robber mask. This is nuts. A little bit, you being a very libertarian dude, I don't know if you describe yourself that way. Pretty much, yeah. I'm a little surprised.
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. And you're like, they should totally be able to wear skirts. Yeah. Women get to wear them. Why can't men? You know, it was all said with levity. Yeah. But I was a little surprised.
Like, I could picture you as well. I could picture you as well really feeling like, how could you legislate? It's a public safety thing. Obscuring your face. Yeah. Well, we identify people for crime. There's no public safety in skirts. It's the guy that's got weird knees. I recognize those knees anywhere. No, I mean, skirts is just a choice.
I mean, if you wear shorts, why can't you wear skirts? It's crazy. No, I get it. It's public safety sentiment. What do I give a shit? If a woman wants to wear a business suit, am I mad at Ellen for wearing a business suit? Am I going to be pissed off at Hannah Gadsby for dressing up like a man? Like, come on. You should be able to wear whatever you want to wear. I don't care about that. But I care about public safety.
Like you shouldn't be able to cover your face where you can't be identified if you commit a crime. We've all agreed to that. Like that's just ridiculous. It used to be a thing that you couldn't do. You couldn't walk into a store with a bank robber mask on. It used to be if you walked to a bank with a mask on, people would freak out. And now if you – during the pandemic – They probably start shooting at you. Yeah. You walk into a bank without a mask, people get angry. Put your mask on.
It's like we lost our mind. But the thing is they should have realized it very early on that there's no science to it 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 This doctor was talking. He was a virologist. He was saying do you know how ridiculous this is? Let me show you Yeah, and he used a vape so he took a big hit of a vape He put a mask on and he blew vape smoke through them and he's like the particles in vape are so much larger Than these virus particles if you're breathing through this mask if this mask Allows you to take in air you're taking the virus if it allows you to blow out air you're blowing out the virus shut the fuck up Yeah, this is just stupid. This is just pretending and in the beginning I was like okay everybody just wants you to be a good person you wear the mask but it's It's so weird because during the the crisis we all we did UFC fights and the UFC fights
the corner men used to have to wear masks. So I'll see highlights from 2021, and you see the corner men with the masks. God, I forgot about this. It's so ridiculous. And their nose is hanging out. Cover your nose. Oh, yeah, okay. As if it matters. This really works. And you couldn't walk into a store like this.
People go, that's not good enough. This is not good enough. I forgot my mask. For sure. What do you want me to do? This is the same goddamn thing. What are we doing? Can I just buy toothpaste like this? No, you can't. You have to have an actual mask. Well, what is the difference between this and a fucking bandana?
Zero. There's no difference. It's so stupid. I went through two years needing to yell at my kids all the time because if you travel with your kids, they never got the stupid things on. But then you're not even yelling at them about if they're going to prevent them from. You're not saving them from a disease. You're saving them from being ostracized and yelled at by the flight attendants. So you spent two years being like, put your damn mask on. Put your mask on. I don't think it works. It's not about whether it works.
You just got to do it to not get in trouble. Yeah. I had a conversation with my kids. I'm like, this does not work. Just want you to know. It's not going to make you safer. They both had COVID early on. They got over it quick. So they weren't nervous about COVID at all. I go, this is just for other crazy people that are riddled with anxiety. You put this on, they feel okay.
It's not going to be forever. And we're going to look back on this. We're all going to laugh. Yeah. And that's like every now and then I'll go through like 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. I'm like, Jesus Christ. I can't believe we went through this. Yeah. We've kind of found them all and got rid of them. But I would be surprised there's one hiding somewhere.
It was one of the things that Sanjay Gupta brought up when I did that podcast with him. Like, you sell masks on your website. I go, what? You think I sell them because they're real? I sell them because people have to wear them. So if you want to wear them wear a little JRE mask Like I don't sell them because I think they're good. Yeah, like shut the fuck up I wish I wish they were illegal to sell how about that? I don't want to make a dollar You'd forego the profits. I would pay to have them illegal I'll give the government ten thousand dollars a year to make masks illegal. Fuck you. You guys are
Fucking crazy. The whole thing was crazy. It was really weird. It was like a psychology experiment on the whole It was just it was a good experiment to see, like, how many people around you are bitches who would just fall in line the moment things got weird. You know, it's a lot. There's a lot of people just have no ability to tolerate any discomfort, any weirdness, any uncertainty, any anxiety. They just immediately like there's so many people out there 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. And they don't. They don't. It's just humans, 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.
And they want to lie and distort things and gaslight the whole population. And then somehow or another, these people that are doing that are allowed to spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars on advertising and on television. And so now the television networks will never criticize them because they get all this. You know, this is like the argument about advertising for pharmaceutical drugs. You know, we're the only country other than New Zealand in the whole world that allows pharmaceutical drugs to advertise. Oh, is that right? Yeah. It's just us and New Zealand. And New Zealand's far more restrictive than us.
but our 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 comes from pharmaceutical drugs and don't you just love those ads but it's not but here's the thing it's not to sell more drugs it's so that those people will never criticize those drugs yeah I'm familiar with the argument yeah yeah the ads are great yeah it's like some it'll be always be some dude just kicking ass yeah Having a great time wakes up jogs with his buddies kicks ass all day at night He's like 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 You're like that's something that's get lucky, you know, yeah It's like ask your doctor if such-and-such you're like shit
I want to kick ass like that old guy and then they read off the side effects the side effects at the end suicidal thoughts powerful diarrhea like oh anal bleeding yeah oh christ it's a we live in a weird world man it's a weird world 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 a lot of real shady things it what frustrates me already is it's going to be impossible to um explain it like now i can't it's very hard to explain the 9-11 and terror attacks to my kids. You know? 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, like, I really want to be in the room on the edit. I want to be like, don't forget about, you know what I mean? Like, the telling of how it happened. Yeah.
Like, I would like to go into a time machine and go forward and see how it is told later. Yeah. 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? But you just picture dudes that were active during the Cuban Missile Crisis are like, no. Right? Right. There's even a term, there's a term, it's called gel syndrome. Maybe Jamie can look it up for us. What's the term about? It's the alpha, no, not the alpha gel syndrome. Alpha gal is the.
No, it's not alpha gal, it's something gel. The syndrome is this. No, amnesia. Something gel, type in gel amnesia, if you don't mind. It's killing me. Gelman. Gelman amnesia. It's that, let's say you're seeing something you have a lot of subject matter expertise in. Okay, 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. Okay, 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? Right.
And you read it, and what's probably the main thing you're going to be thinking the whole time? does this guy know what he's talking about yeah and you're gonna be like that that's totally not right that's not the conversation right right that's not what that is right you missed the point like do you notice that everything you read we know a lot about it like say let's say you read a piece of reporting and it's a reporting about the podcast industry right where it came from how it's monetized yeah mostly what you're going to feel is that's not what that is right that's incorrect right well this form of amnesia is that you forget that so then later you're reading an article about a thing you don't know well. Right. And you're like, you feel like you're getting the straight dope. Right, right, right, right.
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. Right. So you fall in the trap of the amnesia you forget 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? Well, the hope is that with AI in these large language models is that AI will be able to distribute information objectively without that. And that is the case in a lot of situations where they haven't been corrected yet. Like AI is subject to human influence, obviously. Like I'm sure you're aware of the Google Gemini situation. The Google Gemini situation is the best one because they said, you know, create images of Nazis, and they had multicultural Nazis. 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, they would be more interested in adhering to whatever particular ideology they subscribe to.
So they would flavor things through an ideology and probably gaslight you a little bit about the other side's perspective. 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. Oh man, I don't, dude, come on. Is it impossible? Oh. It's possible with some things. Yeah, the hope where it's possible, but no, I don't have, like, sure, possible. I don't picture that being the case. Well, there are some large language models that aren't fucked with, especially open source ones. The problem is they're essentially drawing from the entire internet, right?
So you would have to assess, like, where these large language models are getting their information from. And making sure that they're... So this is the thing you could kind of game that system by rigging these large language models to accentuate information that comes from more biased sources. You know, you could distort the information that people would get. And someone would be motivated to do it. Yeah, until they get so sophisticated that they would be able to discern that. and they would be able to base it entirely on objective analysis of statistics and facts and understand what these statistics are. I did this little event last night at this place here in town called Arena Hall. And the moderator of the event, it was like a Q&A or a chat. And he was asking me, like, as a writer, as an author, what are your fears about AI?
and I'm like AI is like in the very short term like AI is coming for like certain types of writing like certain types of writing are going to be made obsolete by AI yeah but the reason I have the reason I don't worry about it as of now as a writer is like it's always going to be representative of it's always going to be representative of input right like like the input has to come in from people who are out digesting real experience right right it'll get faster you know the point i use is if you earlier were talking alluded to like the assassination on attempt on trump the day before that had you 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 um you'll have 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 going to be like a big challenge um like a big challenge
as a writer but i remember coming up as a writer too in the old days and being super scared of the internet in general right and and i was like man this ain't gonna be good for a writer well you You know, they thought about that with the printing press. I'm sure. Yeah. I'm sure. Do you know what the early books, do you know what most of the early books were about? No, it was monks transcribing them, but I don't know. No, when the printing press was produced. Mathematics, maybe? Nope.
How to spot witches. Oh, really? Yeah. That was a hot topic? Yeah, it was all about witches and witchcraft. Yeah. How to spot sorcery. No, I didn't know that. Yeah, it was a lot of bullshit. You would think like, oh, it's just knowledge and information. Finally, the world's going to know the truth.
No, no, no, no. I had no idea. There's a lot of like how to spot witches. They were the most popular books. Yeah. But I think that like creators, yeah, from like a creator perspective, you got ones that run away from new, right? And you got ones that run toward it. Yeah. I used to be the run away from. I used to, something came out and I was like, this ain't good. What are you now?
i i guess i've like survived through enough changes in the media landscape that i i'm not as terrified as i once was right yeah like you know i always said like the first time i heard the word podcast was in the context of your name right and um and i remember the first podcast we did you're like what is this i don't know what the hell it was we were at the ice house it was the whole setup was ridiculous yeah you had a delayed flight i had a delayed flight yeah we started real late you're come back from something oh yeah um but anyhow uh yeah i used to be like i used to be i used to be yeah scared of incoming well most people were in especially podcasts it seemed so ridiculous most people thought it was stupid yeah and you even said that you you were doing them and thought it was stupid well i did it because i thought it was fun yeah exactly and then you know after a while i was like oh this is actually like a business you know i remember having a conversation with you about it. I was like, you should do a podcast. Like there's a
lot of money in this. Like it's real now. Yeah. And I wouldn't have done it had you said it. Well, it seemed. Or I'd have been late to the game maybe. Yeah. Well, you got on early. Well, you were such a good guest. I was like, this is like something you have to do. Like, cause it was like, you have so many opinions on things and you're so well read. It's like a perfect place for you where there's no interruption. You can just have conversations about things. That's like right up your alley. I'm glad I did. And then the other thing is it just infuses you with, uh, infuses you with so much knowledge. Yeah. Cause like you said, you get to, you get to corner people you want to corner. Oh yeah. That's the best part. Yeah. The best part is the unintended education. You just have conversations with so many people. 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? Tell me how this started. Tell me what, how do you figure that out? What is that? How'd you get
involved in this? What's the beginning of this? And then, you know, it's beneficial to everybody who listens to it's a weird new thing. You know, you know, I want to tell you about this, like this thing I'm trying to hunt down is, uh, I recently had a guy on my podcast whose name is Randy Brown. Um, and, uh, my brother Danny recommended him too, cause he works, uh, he's a fisheries biologist in Alaska. So he came on the show and what he did is in the seventies, he grew up in New Mexico and always wanted to live in the woods. Okay. Like just grew up camping in the mountains and stuff. And in the seventies, he goes up to Alaska and just goes to live in the bush along the Yukon and then did it.
I mean, for 15 years, for 15 years, he lived in the bush in Alaska, just building little cabins and lived off the land. I mean, like didn't, wasn't buying groceries, like lived off the land, trapped in Alaska. He tells me this story.
And I've been trying to put the word out about this. 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, downstream the Yukon from Canada. He's between Circle, Alaska and Eagle, Alaska on the Yukon. And him and his friends are living their lives in all these like line cabins. They got strung up and down the river. Okay. Two guys come down the river out of Canada. So, again, this is 1978. two guys come down the river out of canada on a homemade log raft
this guy in randy's circle one of his buddies um 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 one of these individuals identifies himself as john the baptist oh boy okay in the middle of the night his companion john the baptist companion gets back on his raft and scoots oh boy and abandons the dude abandons this guy in 1978 who came out of canada who identifies himself as john the baptist john the baptist becomes this incredible leech on these guys that are living in the bush, eating their food, using their stuff, taking their ammunition. He lingers long enough that it becomes, that he can't really get out of that area
because of freeze up on the river. And they keep telling him, you got to go somewhere else. And they say, you got to leave here. You can go stay at one of our other cabins. Don't touch our shit. He goes up to the other cabin. When they eventually go up to the other cabin, he had taken a bunch of their stuff. He'd taken some of their furs and made his own clothes. they,
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. But he comes up with this cockamamie plan where he's going to go to this area. They're like, you know, way can you walk to that area? Uh, he takes off into the woods. Now, when he does,
he steals this guy we had on the podcast, Randy Brown. He steals the Randy Brown snowshoes and takes off. Randy Brown gives chase, but it was a real bad snow year he tracked him for about five miles and just said never mind it's not worth it the next year he takes a different route 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 okay 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 whoa snowshoes are hanging outside starved death he said he's nothing but skin and bones wow nothing but skin and bones um they take him out and they're way out in the bush they have no money
they just live off land like they literally he literally has no money he's got no way to transport a body in the summertime to like eagle or circle alaska does he have a responsibility to do that isn't this is in the 70s man he did like he explains himself he explains himself and did well he didn't he laid that they took the body out of the sleeping bag they wanted to check it out he said it was just skin on bone and it brought up something i'm gonna talk about cannibalism in a minute but it was skin on bone and he doesn't know what to do and he's not bashful about what he did he lays out like why he had to do what he did and they kept the sleeping bag to use it because it was their sleeping bag. And they laid this body out on the tundra. Told a few people, but didn't really know what to tell them. They never caught the guy's name.
Told it to a few people. A while later, he goes back and the body was gone. Presumably been eaten by something. So after we do this interview, I can't stop thinking about this dude. And I'm like, how can it not be that someone out in the world, like someone who has a kid or a brother or an uncle, do you know what i mean yeah and they never know what happened to them yeah there's no you know he's from canada yeah came 1970s 70s calling himself john the baptist i cut yeah they do and i but i kind of felt like doing like i kind of felt and i put it out on social media we talk on the podcast i'm bringing it up here like um dude like i would love to know that someone said like oh i used to party with a dude named john the baptist in canada right yeah who is this
guy maybe this will do it i don't know maybe you talking about it like someone will reach out yeah but then you got to wonder if someone's just fabricating it because they want information oh for sure they want attention rather for sure it kind of sticks in my head and i and i said to him to randy um you know he was crazy he wound up getting an honorary doctorate 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 oh wow yeah he's like a leading authority on certain whitefish species in the Yukon this dude lived in the bush like that all that time but I told him I he says man I thought about it a lot you know I thought because maybe you'll maybe you'll figure it out I thought about it all the time for a while what happened I asked my brother Danny I'm like when I have this guy on the podcast what should I ask him about he goes ask him about the guy he found so he gives me this book he gives me this book uh and it's called uh Death in the Barren Grounds
okay and it was this he's got a he randy used the term starved out and you could tell that all the time he spent living in the bush like starving your death is very much on his mind like him and his body's even made up a sort of pact right to like hey man like if it comes down to it don't hesitate to eat my body you know which you should he gives you this book death in the barren ground 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. They're kind of north of the tree line, but they're in a timbered grove. 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. And the youngest one keeps this meticulous journal in this book. 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. he lets off at a point it's unclear when he died he had the wherewithal to put the journal in the stove and to make a sign that said look in the stove and when they found him a couple years later they were able to find this journal but uh it got so bad that they're like crushing animal bone
um which is which is a thing that's not gonna talk about this with this donner party deal i was working on is these guys are crushing animal bone and boiling it to get some kind of nutritive value out of crushed animal bone and they're eating animal hide okay like you scrape away the hair and you can boil animal skins and and eat them i've done that it just makes like a gelatin kind of tasteless like leather noodle basically um and what he's documenting as they're dying from this is um the horrible bowel obstruction and they're trying to make like in his journal he's describing this of trying to make these um these enema devices and even for a while on each other trying to perform like an operation on each other each other because that bone fragment that they're they're boiling that bone fragment and drinking it but that bone fragment in their bowel is like reforming oh into bone plugs and even when they find these guys years later a guy from the Canadian Mounted Police is like doing this very, you know, like basically a crime scene
description of what went on in here. And still laying there a couple of years later is a plate full of like solidified excrement. Oh, God. Everything else rotted away. These guys are just skeletons, but that like bone shit. Yeah. And you look at like, and I just finished this book the other day. And so you look and be like, oh, they're starving to death, starving to death. But like when you starve to death, all this stuff is actually going on. And like that had to have been fatal. 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 on the other thing is all those hair follicles um would form into dense balls that would like plug your rectum and he's just describing all this as they die it's horrible but that dude randy brown gave me that book because you could tell that in his mind man like like starving out like it stuck with him you know and he's walking around handing out a book about starving to death in the arctic you know because he knew it well but that was like in that same thing like donner party being like known for the cannibalism and all that is um all those people die and probably like a lot of the same thing eating that hide and hair and crushed bone just miserable people have a very delusional
perspective when it comes to like surviving living off the land oh how difficult it would be oh 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 he talked about the guy that struck off and the guy struck off with a 22 pistol and uh randy's like um you cannot in that environment you cannot survive with a 22 pistol like he just knows it categorically you cannot survive with a 22 pistol and the dude didn't yeah how could you yeah well you people would probably think that they're such a badass they would but he's like how many bullets do you have i don't know i don't know how many he had but he said you won't you won't make it and he made a point that 22 pistol when they found that body that 22 pistol's hanging on a peg and hanging on a peg inside the cabin where he found them i mean There's no way you'd have enough ammunition. Even with a pistol, you're limited in your range.
You're limited in your accuracy. No. They did everything with .243s in those years that he did that. And they would load like variable loads. Why variable loads? He'd make light loads and heavy loads. Oh, okay, for different animals. Yeah, they'd make little grouse loads and shit. They'd load their big game bullets, you know. All the .243. Hunting moose with a .243.
Caribou with a .243. Where's he getting all the gunpowder or is he getting they were loading their own stuff Wow So you have to go somewhere to get resupply. Yeah, they would they had a camp that one of their camps They had a reloading station that the various guys live in the bush would kind of come in there and use that reloading station And that John the Baptist who looted that reloading station Yeah, you gotta kill those guys Those guys are cause you to starve to death. Yeah, if you're in that kind of an environment and someone's a mooch no know 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 really so that's like a little bit of a confusion is yeah how would that be real yeah there's this dude there's this kid I probably told you about him this this French kid Etienne Brule that the French
brought over and like he's known as Etienne Brule and the French brought him over during the colonial era and gave them to the tribes so he'd learn their language. And eventually he gets crossways with the Huron Indians and the Huron Indians killed them and allegedly ate him. So everybody knows him as Etienne Brule, which is burnt, right? But did he get the name after or before? Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy? So you're like, well, hold on a minute. Did he just happen? like he presumably got burned to death or boiled or whatever, you know, so it's like, is he Etienne Broulet because of what happened to him or was he running around with that
moniker and then like lo and behold. So the John the Baptist thing is baffling to me. Did John the Baptist in the Bible? I'm not familiar. Did he definitely starved? Can you find it? No, people keep telling me that. Beheaded. Yeah. Oh, he's beheaded. Oh, he didn't starve.
The word on the streets is beheaded in prison. The word on the streets. Someone sent me this big passage talking about his emaciated state. Maybe he was emaciated before they cut his head off. Yeah, don't worry about it. Maybe they were saving him from a fate worse than death. Can I talk about my project? Sure, please do. Well, I'm working out with Mo, who's been on the show before. Mo and I, we did the very early meat eaters together. You probably met him that way, right, originally?
I met him that way. And then when he did Bourdain's show. Yeah. So we did very early meat eaters together and we've always kept in touch. And he went on and did all that, you know, crazy stuff with Bourdain and got heavily involved in that. And then after Bourdain's death, there was this kind of, I don't know, man, almost like this, like exodus of talent. Like all these people that worked on that great show, you know, and they went on to do other stuff. And then Mo and I got joined up on this and we've worked on it. Mo's a showrunner on it and we've worked on it together. And it's coming out January 28th and it's a show on History Channel where we look at outdoor mysteries. So I brought up, we did an episode on Donner Party.
And you might ask, well, what's the mystery about the Donner Party? But it's kind of like what happened? Could it have gone differently? Like what mistakes were made? And most of these mysteries that we do are things that I have that most people have some awareness around. Right. Like you've heard you've at least heard of it. And I think that people think about the Donner Party, for instance, just take an example. You make people make when they're making a joke about cannibalism. You'd be like, oh, Donner Party. You know, I mean, like people don't realize what happened there. But in going to that place, I think I never realized about it that that there was 90 people that got stranded in the Sierra Nevada that winter, 1846 to 1847. a thing that you never ever realize and it changes everything I've ever thought about
half of those more than half of those were kids oh my god yeah you don't think about it that way it's mostly children and you get into all this wild stuff about it like you're trying to keep your kids alive yeah so there's this sort of like I'll touch on cannibalism I'll talk about Randy Brown making that cannibalism pact
you're trying to keep your kids alive and the kids by and large the kids survived the kids survived at a much higher rate than adults and out of adults that survived parents did better parents were more likely to survive they 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 parents lived parents who had kids back at the main camp survived so it's this whole weird thing about like the psychology of why keep going on yeah you know i mean and then like you think about it from that angle like if your kids were faced with starving to death you would absolutely feed your kids human meat yeah 100 yeah right so you look at it like this american horror story but in the end like of those 90 people like half lived you know half of them survived and they just they did they always did just like what they needed to to live you know but then there's like the those families still carried a stigma of course you know like it's
terrible stigma but like getting into that like getting into that story and starting to um realize that then following that up with reading that book about like the pain and anguish of of starving to death like you wind up like having just more uh i wound up with a lot more empathy and just you know um you almost kind of want to honor those people rather than condemn them as like these like like i said it's like an american horror story you can't condemn them we would all have done the exact same thing to condemn them it's just so that it's it's a horrible way to look at it. It's a survival story. I mean, human beings, it's like those soccer players that got in the plane crash. Do you know the story of the two boats that tried to make their way across the Arctic? It was like, was it, was the terror in another boat? There's a Netflix series about it. Yeah, I do know what you're talking about, yeah. But the Netflix series is like a horror series. They bring in like a mystical monster and stuff.
and the people all resort to cannibalism. 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. And they got stuck there and then they tried to walk out and make it to the ocean and they never made it. Yeah. And they wound up having to do cannibalism.
Oh, yeah. In the Donner Party, they would have 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. They mostly ate people that died of natural causes, but at the time there was no prohibition. There was no legal prohibition on killing Indians.
They had two Indian guides with them and a guy murdered them. Wow. They murdered them to eat them and never faced any repercussions for it. It was more illegal. It was more illegal to kill someone's cow than it was to kill two Native Americans. Wow. Yeah, he just walked. Everybody knew he did it. Never faced any repercussions for it.
Murdered two people to eat them. Other than that, they were eating people that were already there. Jesus. When we were up there filming in Donner Pass, we met these people and they were saying that these guys were doing this thing about places with Christmas names. And they had thought Donner Pass. Like Donner and Blitzen? Oh, God. That's the funniest, man. That's crazy. So I spent two months traveling with Moe, maybe a little over two months traveling with Moe, working on this whole thing.
It's been fun, though, man. So what is the name of the show? It's called Hunting History. Oh. Yeah. It's not a hunting show. Hunting History. There it is. There's Miano Aero. Miano Aero Planet. My Aero Planet.
That one, that episode, oh, it's like a whole little trailer. So what is the idea of the show? It's like outdoor wilderness mysteries, outdoor mysteries. And we do some things that are decades old. We do some things that are centuries old. When I was, for instance, when I was growing up in the Great Lakes region, there's the first ship they ever built on the Great Lakes is called the Griffin. And no one's ever found that ship. That ship went missing in the Great Lakes. And people are still trying to hunt for that ship. It's kind of like, you know, it's regarded as the holy grail of Great Lakes shipwrecks. because there's still people actively searching for it.
We do one on Donner Party. What's in the ship that they're trying to get? It would be gone now. It was full of beaver pelts. It was full of about, like, six tons of beaver pelts. Wow. And there's all these different theories about the crew, mutineed, whatever. But there's a guy, this dude named Steve Libert, who came out of, like, naval intelligence, the naval intelligence world.
And this guy named Steve Libert is the latest, has the latest claim of having found the Griffin. So I went and dove that site to check out his claim of having identified this ship. Yeah? Yeah, I don't think he's got it. No? No. What do you think it is? What do you think you found? There are, it kind of blows your mind when you think about the Great Lakes,
there are literally thousands of missing ships, and then there are many, many ships that are there, but no one knows what they are. And I think he's found a very old ship, but I don't think he's found the Griffin. 6,000 and 10,000 shipwrecks. Wow. Yeah. Wow. The burden of proof on finding the Griffin is hard. You've heard of the guy LaSalle?
No. He wound up dying down in this neck of the woods. He built the first ship and he got above Niagara Falls and built a big ship. and built the first ship that ever sailed the upper great lakes 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 sends all those beaver hides back down to niagara but they go missing along the way he makes his way down he winds up being the first european to descend the mississippi to the mouth and then later he gets into like a um a mutiny of sorts um down in the lower mississippi gets in a mutiny of sorts and one of his guys shoots and kills him just kind of this whole just run of shitty luck but he lost his ship so there's all this different evidence of pointing to where
this ship might lie but it's almost certainly like um it's somewhere it's somewhere you know because stuff lasts so long like in that fresh water stuff lasts so long you go look you'll go dive down and look at ships that are 100 years old 200 years old looks like you could refurbish things. Really? You know, except the ones get broke up by ice. Yeah. So that ship's laying around. Wow. I'd like to tell you we found it. I hung out with a bunch of dudes that are looking for it. The lakes are so big. Yeah. I hung out with dudes that are looking for it. And now people are getting really good at it because all the
sophisticated sonar. That's why they're finding all this crazy shit. I don't think people understand how big the Great Lakes are. No. They're literally like oceans. Yeah. They're so big. Especially when you add them all together, you know. Yeah. And places pretty deep. But yeah, they're littered with stuff, man. And dudes, like, Like, there's just common dudes now that can buy really sophisticated sonar and underwater cameras. And people are just finding stuff like mad. Oh, now there's more sophisticated technology. Yeah, because you can just cruise around.
You can just cut grids on sonar. So you got dudes that are out there just identifying wreck after wreck after wreck right now. That's why there's a lot of enthusiasm that someone's going to turn this boat up. But it has these big cannons. It should have these big French-built cannons. And until someone finds the cannons, no one's going to buy what you're saying. Cannons? Yeah, LaSalle brought cannons from Europe and mounted them on the boat. So in case someone was trying to— He was ready. Pirates? Did they have pirates back then?
They did, but also they just would try to intimidate Native American tribes, and they'd get them into the fur trade, but also there's 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, so you got the English there, you got the Spanish to the south, just a ton of conflict, and people still trying to duke it out over who's going to control the Great Lakes. Wow. So there's this argument, too, which is crazy. Picture if we had a naval vessel that sank off France right now. It's not France's boat. Right.
Because we have all these agreements in place. It's like our boat. So they would have to hand it over to us. It's flying under our flag. It remains our vessel. There's this argument that LaSalle's ship was flying under a French flag. whoever finds that ship there's an argument that the french would be able to claim that ship 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 whoa yeah they're flying under our flag and our international treaties mean that that's our boat which would decentivize me and wanting to find yeah like fuck that imagine you go through all
that work yeah they do it for glory gold wrecks like shipwrecks and people like hunting for those things that's a fascinating it is man that's because if you get lucky and if you find one that's filled with like roman coins yeah like you we're talking about billions of dollars a lot a lot of money to be made we were we were going to do our last episode when we went and did the donner party 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, so the Atlantic side of Florida. We were going to go down with these guys that are still fighting over and finding all this stuff from all these sunken ships,
but then the hurricane, I mean, passed right over it, so we didn't get to go do that. We didn't go do that show. We did one about that wanted to become mostly a story centered around in the 70s. There's this aircraft that was carrying the Speaker of the House. So do you remember, is it Nina? No. Hey, Jamie, I hate to be treating you like a research assistant here. Cokie Roberts, that's who it was. You know the journalist Cokie Roberts from NPR and shit?
Okay, yes. Cokie Roberts' father was this guy, Hale Boggs. okay hale boggs was a democrat and he was a speaker of the house in the 70s and alaska had at that time only one alaska had a sole congressman there was an airplane that had baggage their sole congressman the speaker of the house an assistant and a pilot that went down in alaska in the 70s still no one's found that plane speaker of the house like imagine that happened now you know i mean um yeah 1972 and it makes sense in the last 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 um that it would have been that it would have been swallowed by a glacier 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 like you know i don't know 20 some years later
that glacier started to spit that plane out at the toe of the glacier. 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. Every spring the military goes to the foot of that glacier, every spring they go there, or sorry, every summer, they go to the toe of that glacier and they're still identifying, they're still identifying human remains that are moving out of that thing miles away from where that plane burrowed into that glacier yeah we went right there 1952 yeah look at that that wheel yep and on top of that glacier um we had got there after that we flew over in a helicopter they don't want you landing there but on top of that glacier is all this orange paint orange paint spots 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 wow and they're marking all those pieces. So this other glacier where most of that search focused for that Begich Boggs flight focused on this one glacier. But if you do the math on that glacier, 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. Because you can kind of track how much a glacier moves every year. So now it's kind of the idea that it was in that glacier has been kind of put to rest. Oh, here's dude searching that one. Oh, well, you could see as you move how far it travels. Wow. Yeah.
Yeah, so we went there. We went down into some of those crevasses like that, too. You climbed down into one of those things? Yeah, which is scary as shit. Fuck that. Because that stuff is alive, man. It's moving. I mean, not like literally alive, but it's like groaning and moving. Yeah, we went back down into one of those. What does it sound like? You know, it was pretty quiet that day.
It was actually more peaceful there because, you know, much that all that cold air from that ice generates so much wind. We land this helicopter there and the wind's howling. And I don't know much about aviation. I mean, I use it a lot, but the wind's so bad. I was asking at what point do you risk that your helicopter is going to blow off the glacier? 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 fucking with my head. So he tethers down his helicopter on these ice screws, you know, to like make sure the helicopter doesn't slide and go down into a crevasse. And then you, you know, I just, I was with a very experienced ice climber, but harness up and pick your way down. But anyways, it's like definitely, 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.
It just pulverizes stuff, as you see with that aircraft. But when you drop down in that crevasse and go down that sucker, it gets, like, unbelievably calm. Real calm. How far did you go down? Oh, shit, not that far. Probably 30 feet. That's far enough. Oh, it's far enough for sure. It's unnerving. It's unnerving.
It's unnerving for me just hearing you talk about it. I remember you telling me about that chamber you like to go into. Yeah. Yeah, it's not quite like that, but it's like you just all of a sudden are like. But you're also there just thinking like how you just how you could get smushed. Oh, just obliterated. You know, there's stories. I was hunting with this dude years ago and he used to he used to be involved with Outward Bound and they were doing a glacier hike. A guide was doing a glacier hike and they had a kid like a student. I think it was Outward Bound. they had a student go off to take a piss
and into one of those things never found because there's big rivers flowing underneath that stuff right so picture you like you go down so you're down there you can hear water running everywhere you can hear rivers underneath you inside that but you're you're roped up you know but even the rope you're on you're just screwing screws into the ice and then at a certain air temperature right like the screw conducts heat you know so at a certain air temperature like if you drive that screw in and that screw is conduct is pushing heat it'll melt the ice around the threads so you'll actually like drill these big holes into the glacier like a v picture picture you're coming in like a v and the two upper parts of the v are like 30 inches apart and you drill at a 45 degree angle until those holes meet. Then you snake a rope down one hole and get it snaked out the other hole and then tie a knot in that.
And that's what's holding you. Oh, fuck that. 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. Oh. So you're tied in on a little, like, yeah. You're, like, tied. He was hoping it holds on. Onto a hunk of the ice. You back down into those suckers, dude.
It's like, it's an ass pucker. Well, that's how they found the Iceman, right? He was in a crevasse. Was he in a crevasse? Wasn't he? I think he fell into a glacial crevasse. Oh, shit, I don't remember that. I think as the glacier melted, that's how they found his body. Oh, I know they found him on a melted glacier, but I didn't know that he was, I didn't know that it was supposed that he fell into a crevasse. 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.
He got shot with an arrow. Yeah, he was all tore up. Yeah. They made a movie about his last days. Did they? A fictional movie. Really? I haven't watched it. Yeah, it's a European fictional movie. Did you ever see the movie? And it sort of sets up the whole circumstance, right?
I haven't seen it yet, but it sets up the whole circumstance. This is a really dumb movie. Otzi was his name. Yeah, Otzi. They named him. I'm sure that wasn't his real name. No. he's like my fucking name he had a tattoo on his shoulder that was his wife
he had tattoos yeah he did have tattoos it was really wild thousands of years ago right there was a really dumb movie about an ice man that I think it was like the 1980s I think it's called Ice Man
no I remember that they bring a guy back to life yeah and then the wife falls in love with him oh shit I didn't know that happened that happens in there so dumb yeah the ice man
takes a liking to this guy's wife Oh, that's the plot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was more like an E.T. plot. No, no, no. Like they resuscitate him and then the scientists want to get at him. Is this it? Yeah. That's who he starts getting with? Is this the same one?
Yeah, the guy gets back to life and I think he falls in love with the lady. He's hanging out with people. And then, you know, the Iceman. That's her? Yeah, I think he winds up falling in love with her and the scientist gets real mad. That's the plot of Encino, man. Yes! like that? Yes, it is. Is that what this is? It is.
Paulie Short. Brennan Frazier. We made it. Yeah. They thaw him out and he's okay, which is fucking hilarious in and of itself. The other night we were watching, watching these old movies like this, the other night we were watching- Timothy Hutton. Temple of, Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom. Mm-hmm. And you know, the love interest, like the Indy's love interest in that movie.
I can't remember what her name is. But anyways, we're watching it with our youngest kid who really wanted to watch an Indiana Jones movie. And my wife's like, man, you just can't have teeth like that anymore in the movies. The love interest, you know? Like, you forget, like, how perfect, like, oral processes have made everybody's teeth. Oh. 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 going to fall in love with. and you look and you're like, yeah, you're right. Teeth are so perfect on everybody now. And you're looking at an old movie and you're like, oh, that was before they were able to do all that.
Right, that's funny. We were watching that stupid show on New Year's Eve, that ball dropping thing. And just every single person, even kind of involved in that whole production, has those teeth. Yeah. Well, most of those teeth are fake now. Oh, no, that's what I'm saying, man. But absurdly so. And it was just really funny to look at that and be like, you're right.
There's something that looks like you can't put your finger on it. It's like the heroin absent perfect teeth. Right. Do you remember Lauren Hutton? She had that gap between her teeth. It was kind of hot. Yeah, yeah. It was like part of her charm. She had this gap. Yeah. Nowadays, you'd feel some pressure to go tighten that up.
Yeah. Probably. They'd put some shit on your teeth and tighten it up. You want to be in the big movies, you've got to tighten that up. Tighten it up. It's funny you were talking about the beaver pelts because you were the first person to explain to me like the richest man in the world at one point in time. His business was beaver pelts. Yeah, it was America's first homegrown millionaire, John Jacob Astor. That is so crazy. Yeah, so he was a German. He came over as a young kid.
He didn't have, you know, broke, penniless. Astor comes over. Just an immigrant, right? comes to the U.S. he's trying to figure out a way to make his way in America and in New York he meets a guy in the fur business like a furrier and the guy says a lot of money being made in furs and that was like that was the commodity
for North America when you look at all the English powers coming or all the European powers coming to established colonies it's known like the Spanish come in and they get like all that Aztec gold, all that Incan gold. 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 continental U.S., you know, eventually gold did come out, but they were sort of, like, primarily, like, we need our own gold fields.
But what emerged was fur. You know, fur was our thing. Fur was, like, the thing of value. So Aster became a fur trader and, you know, helped launch these fur trapping expeditions what and became involved in what we now call the mountain man area like when you hear the term mountain men um the mountain man era so we uh in my sort of other job outside of doing my history channel show like we do audio originals and um we did one on the deer skin trade called the long hunters it was about daniel boone 1770s in the deerskin trade and right now uh we're coming out with one called meat eaters american history the mountain men and it covers that like john jacob astor era of the beaver trade 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 like that's what that was all about. Wow. Rather than you'd think when they would trap a beaver. So, you know, the revenant. How many fucking beavers were around back then? A lot. You know, more, even though we've recovered them really successfully, there were far more beavers back then than there are now. What's the estimated population
of beavers back then? I don't know. In the tens of millions. Wow. What are they now? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. No, I do know because I looked at it the other day but i forgot what it is i forgot what it is it's a they're very recovered across a big part of their range um but nowhere near what it was at the time you know the the the whole continent um was shaped by beavers like they they manipulate their landscape more than anything besides humans right um but people had always whittled away at them you know like earlier i mentioned daniel boone like his primary job was a deer skin he was in the deer skin trade and what they were using for back then you know when you see really old pictures like kings and shit they
got those kind of white pants on it's probably a buckskin pant right so our whole term with like when we say a buck something's worth a buck right that's about the equivalent value of a deer skin right so you know that's where that term came from those guys at the same time they would hunt deer skins in the summer because they wanted them real thin and then they would switch and they would hunt beaver pelts in the winter to for wool felt to create wool felt but we kind of gradually uh extirpated like wiped out beaver numbers 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 and when they come back to st louis like one of the things they report on is like holy shit like we found that the the last great stronghold of the beaver is in the rockies and that's what pushed this whole mountain man era 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 and earlier i mentioned the english up around hudson bay So you're familiar with this thing called the Hudson Bay Company from history? It was like a fur trading enterprise. 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. They didn't trap. The English weren't themselves trappers. The English were traders. And they would incentivize tribes to go trap and bring them the furs. In the Rockies, that didn't work. they couldn't get these nomadic equestrian bison hunters with the program they thought it was by and large um the sentiment was it's beneath us we're not going to give up our whole life way
everything we need comes from the buffalo we live in big family groups we follow the herds like i don't i'm not going to go trap beaver for you it's of no interest to me so then they're like well shit how are we gonna get the beaver and so they start hiring dudes they start hiring orphans and people that were under indentured servitude and ran away, whatever, 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. So go to this valley, right? Go to Jackson Hole or go to Daniel, Wyoming,
or Bear Valley, wherever, and we'll meet you in June. And you bring all the shit you caught, and we'll give you some more equipment. And that was the Mountain Man era. 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. The hide, they don't even want the leather from the hide. That was thrown away. They don't want the main guard hairs. So if you look at a pelt, you've got these silky long guard hairs, and then there's an underwool.
underneath it they don't want the silky long guard hair all they're after is the under fur on the hide to line hats but to make felt but there was so much 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 you had to ship the whole hide to europe 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. Wow. Like an Ebenezer Scrooge top hat. That's what that shit was about.
Wow. So when this dude, when LaSalle, you know, comes over and builds the griffin, like that first ship is so crazy. Like he was building that ship to transport beaver hides because traditionally they'd always done it with canoes. And he's like, I got a better idea. I'm going to build a giant ship, fill that sucker full of beaver hides, and I'll get rich. Thousands of beaver hides.
But his ship vanished. And that's what they were still up to in the Mountain Man era. And that whole industry was born in this Mountain Man project we're doing. That whole history was born. 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. and it kind of ended in 1840.
When the market collapsed. 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 you're just like, no one knows you're there, you could just go watch. Where would you go? Would you go to that time? No, I just changed my time. For a long time I knew what my time was, but I just changed my time recently. What does it mean?
I'd be happy to explain. I'd be happy to explain. What did it used to be? There used to be an idea that's existed for much of my life is about the peopling of the Americas. And sometime, maybe around 15,000 years ago, there's so much of the Earth's water was tied up in glaciers that Asia and Alaska were connected by a chunk of ground the size of Texas. The Bering Land Bridge. When people hear the Bering Land Bridge, you kind of picture this little like it's like Moses, like crossing the part, you know, the part of the Red Sea. But you would you could have lived and died on the generations were probably born and died on the Bering Land Bridge with no idea that it was a bridge. Like I said, there's a chunk of ground the size of Texas. That much water was tied up in glaciers. People crossed.
They almost certainly weren't saying like, hey, Bob, let's go to Alaska. But they were doing their thing. They were hunting and moving and they cross. 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. And eventually there was this thing called the Ice-Free Corridor opened up around like it would have spilled out around Edmonton, Alberta. And the idea was the first people 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 like spilled out onto the american great plains killing mammoths with with spears as all this new information has emerged um the dates don't line up anymore so we did a hunting history episode about this very question of how and when and who were the first people to enter the continent,
right? 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. For a while, the oldest site we knew about in the new world was a site called Monteverde down in Chile. 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? How old is it? It's somewhere around 13, 14. What about those New Mexico footprints that are 22,000 years old? Again, yeah, it's clouded in the picture. There's a lot of the dating.
Yeah. The dating on that is clouded. But anyways, it's like antiquity in America is much older than originally thought. Right. And then there's now currently the oldest site is on the Columbia River drainage. near a place called Pittsburgh Landing. There's a really old site there. And it winds up being that it doesn't line up with the idea of people entering this ice-free corridor because, like, when did the corridor, when was it open? When was it possible to pass through?
But now you have all these older dates. And then people are even starting to question the validity of the idea of, like, that this corridor opened when they thought it did. So now the fashionable idea, it seems rock solid. and we filmed much of the episode up at our fish shack, 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, enormously rich in fish resources, enormously rich in shellfish, right?
And that the first Americans were a seafaring people. 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 um just came down the coast and they knew how to survive in that marine that kelp marine environment and they went south and went south and went south and things remain remarkably similar and with like great speed with great speed all the way down the coast so all of a sudden there's people in chile Wow. by people who just followed these major rivers, these salmon runs and stuff. Coastal fishing people migrated up these rivers following fish and then turned into, over time, became these mammoth hunters and these interior grassland hunters.
But their genesis was in these seafaring people. And as people came down, they kind of filled in. So you go to the Tlingit or the Haida that live along the Alaska and coast now like that's their ancestors right they were the they were they were perhaps people living that way and those places were the first people to enter the continent so so my time machine would be whatever the hell day that was that's what it would be to see that man because picture like you know picture me the first person or the first group of people to like to see a continent yeah I mean you can't even you know what I mean yeah how do we even know that that's the case though we don't there's people
that were before that that's that there's an argument that the thing is like there's an argument there's arguments humans came from Africa right well yeah that's where the human diaspora is like anatomically like the sort of widely accepted scientific explanation is that anatomically and behaviorally modern humans um there was many waves of hominids coming out of africa but sometime around 70 000
years ago um our current human ancestors came out they came into a europe that was populated by neanderthals perhaps other hominids um they kind of won right and then and then spread around the world in 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 the last stop wow um what's wild is there's monkeys down there yeah that's what's wild but man there's always there's this there's this there's this theory called the salutrian hypothesis which is that that northern europeans came over much much like 10 you know 10 plus thousand years ago there's always these different ideas that that someone you know someone from somewhere else blew in on a raft there's always this thing but but what i'm talking about is a sort of like again the kind of like academically accepted idea the sort of mainstream idea remains and it's supported by genetic linguistic everything is that that humans came
out of um the americans that you know our native americans came out of siberia through a siberian pathway, probably in waves. You know, the people we now, if you refer to now like Northern Coastal Peoples, Eskimo Inuits, they were a later wave. They were different than what became the Athabascans to the south. It was like a later wave. So there could have been repeated waves of people coming. But I've always been interested in the first wave. Yeah. Whoever they were, the first wave. And when was that?
Are you aware of the sage wall in Montana? No. I'm aware of Montana. Really? live there. This sage wall is a recent discovery. It was on private property. And these people, it was completely covered with woods and, you know, deadfalls and everything. And they started cleaning it out and they found this thing that looks remarkably like a constructed wall. That's the sage wall in Montana. It's very, it's very strange. It's very strange. and it's a vertical wall. It goes down 13 feet under the ground and it's long and straight
and it's very confusing because it very much looks like placed stones that were cut and moved somehow in this particular way and there's a lot of debate about whether or not. That's a wild looking wall. Wild looking. 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.
Yeah, the debate is, is it natural or man-made? 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. But it's confusing. Oh, you know, I am familiar with that area. Yeah, I got it. It's real weird. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of... A lot of natural formations. Yeah, because you get fissures and rocks that are filled from volcanic activity. Sure. It's puzzling.
Maybe we'll do an episode on that. I think we will. Well, this gentleman right there, see that guy down there with the beard, Jamie? That's the guy. I think it's Wandering Wolf on, I think that's his name, on YouTube. Yeah, Wandering Wolf. He's been studying this for a while. Please ignore his nose ring. Oh, is that what that was? I couldn't tell if he had a bug or if that was a nose ring. But this is crazy.
It's crazy because they're flat and straight and they look fairly uniform and they look like they're cut into position. And there's also a bunch of these, you know, where they would grind things. There's these 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. It's very, very weird stuff. Because if that was made by people, who and when and how? Yep. Yeah. I'm going natural. but we'll do a future episode on that question. I think natural too until you look at some of them. Some of those images, go back to some of those images, Jamie.
Some of those images are like, how the fuck? They're so flat and straight. Look at that. From that angle, it's insane. From that angle, you would no doubt look and be like, that's a man-made wall. It looks very stacked. They're all cut square. What's that, Jamie? It kind of looks fake. It does look fake.
Is that a fake image or is that the real image? I can't tell. You know what? added to the picture. It doesn't look like the same stuff from the video. Okay. Well, let's see some of the images from the video. Well, that one up is that one there is real. That's legit. That looks more real. No, that's something different.
That's not the same site. It looks like... Yeah, it looks like... That's not the same site and that's not a vegetation that grows around there. That's some different goofing around shit. Yeah, so here's a video this guy walking around. It's really interesting stuff because there's so much evidence of humans, right? The, you know, with the mortal and pestle grinding holes and shit are all there. So there was some human occupation in this area.
The question is like, was this put there by humans or is this a natural feature that they found and just exploited? Have you followed that news that has come out about that boy, that Anzic One boy in Montana? No. Sounds like a Spielberg movie, don't it? Anzic One? Yeah, it does. So there is a Clovis child that they found years ago near Wilsall, Montana. It was from a Clovis hunter culture. This child had been buried with projectile points and ochre.
And they've recently done work on stable isotope work. And it was like he had a diet of woolly mammoth. Whoa. Yeah. Which people had always thought. Yeah. Right? But that's like this thing that gets always kicked around. And I have a friend, David Meltzer. I don't know if you're looking for guest suggestions, but Heffelfinger and Meltzer. You fucking love him.
But anyway, Meltzer, he's an anthropologist. And 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? and people have tried to like over the years sort of emasculate these ice age hunters being like oh they probably weren't really killing all these mammoths you know they probably found them and scavenged them you know and and and explaining away david hate me saying this but uh explaining away evidence that they were slaying mammoths and also explaining away the theory that um that they killed all the mammoths right um and they were eating like that they were eating a much more varied diet and using plant resources and they were kind of like a kinder gentler ice age hunter 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. Right. So a dude like me is going to be like, yeah, man, mammoth hunters. Right. Right. You know, and it's the more dude to be like, oh, no. You know, yeah, berry pickers. Right. Like they're they were gentle. But they they've finally just did all this work. And lo and behold, he was young, but he would he was eating mother, you know, drinking mother's milk. and it was they were mammoth eaters you know which backs up this idea that those big ass points those big ass points they made were like being used I participated in this study
me and some of the guys I work with participated in this study with Meltzer this guy named Matt and Aaron who runs an experimental archaeology lab at Kent State University and they gave us all these stone tools and we had a dead bison laying there and we just we're supposed to spend the day butchering the bison with stone flakes and also with clovis points so we're supposed to butcher half with clovis points and butcher half with stone blades they just want people who were like expert butchers to do it like you don't really know how anybody did anything but just to see because what what the problem they have
looking at the the archaeological record is the only thing left is bone and stone everything else is gone so when you find some mammoth you know you find a mammoth rib cage eroding out of a riverbank and lo and behold there's a projectile point laying there we had always said oh um someone stabbed it with that point and killed it but do you really know that right 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 Well, do you really know that? We just assume. Right. So we did this project of to butcher this whole thing, a fresh dead bison, all the stone points. And then they go. Then they went and cleaned all the bones. This guy John Hayes from Hayes Tax Lurie Studio did this way to treat the bones and clean them where you're not messing up the bones at all. So now you have a set of bones that you know what happened to them, right? And you have a set of stone tools that you know they were used for. And the idea is you're creating something to compare, you know? Like there's this famous Folsom site out of New Mexico where all these bison skulls, these Ice Age bison skulls, they look different.
Like that skull you got out in your studio. The step bison. In the inner. Big horn, you know, longer horned animal. They all got these cut marks on the bone right here inside the jaw mark, inside the jaw. And people have been like, oh, it must have been from extracting the tongue. And I even thought that. I went to SMU and looked at those skulls and held those bones in my hand. And I'm like, oh, look, they were probably getting the tongues out and made all those cut marks inside the jawbone. But what's funny in going and extracting the tongue with stone tools, I didn't do shit would have left any kind of mark like that. 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 what might have caused it.
What he wants to work on next is they want to do an ostrich. What do you think those cut marks were if they weren't extracting the tongues? Dude, I got no idea. Wow. You're looking at them right there. I don't know. 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. I don't know, but it just goes to show you look at stuff, you find a projectile point with a rib cage, and you're like, they stabbed it. Right.
But then, well, maybe we're looking at Clovis points all wrong. Maybe Clovis points were knives. Maybe that big projectile point was a Clovis knife. Or maybe it was both things. And maybe when you find a mammoth skeleton and it's got two or three broken Clovis blades, it wasn't that they had been jabbed into it necessarily. Maybe they were the butchering tools. But then what would be the killing tools? That's a great question. Yeah. I personally like me not being an academic who's invested my entire career into this question.
I do know this like I think that when people talk about oh they were finding them like I spent a lot of time outside. You just don't find all this fresh dead shit laying around everywhere. Right. Right. You can you can spend many many many many many days out wandering around the woods. You don't find like fresh dead. Right. Edible materials. Right. You find rotten shit dried up shit. You find skeletons.
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. Yeah, that seems ridiculous. And cut it up with a projectile point. Yeah. Or cut it up with a blade. They were killing mammoths. Yeah. That's my take on it. They were killing mammoths. That makes much more sense. And probably the mammoths weren't aware that they were even going to hunt them.
They probably weren't being hunted by anything. That's this idea when we're talking about that ice-free corridor deal. and you look at how fast humans 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? A mammoth has never seen a person. You just walk up and kill it. Right. 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.
well jump to the next valley yeah and find more of the ones that don't you know find more of the ones that have never seen you yeah you know like i've had occasion before to see like a elk that would have had no way to encounter a dog encounter a dog and their attitude is kind of like um the hell is that right i mean they're like curious about it they're kind of looking at it so you can imagine like these these early peoples could probably just walk up on a lot of shit and just kill it probably right yeah it's like what's this thing gonna do fuck out of here and all of a sudden like dah some bitch stabbed me so that was an idea that pushed like how fast people spread around and then they weren't fighting each other because they were all at all this there's no competition for resource they're not fighting each other and they're enjoying like very high reproductive rates because they're drowning in food and there's no conflict. I wonder what the wildlife populations were like back then too before humans,
like when humans did encounter, when they first encountered North American wildlife, I wonder what the populations were. Staggering. Must have been crazy. Just staggering. Staggering. We'll never know. We'll never know. But if you had a time machine, that's your spot. Well, they're getting closer to knowing now because now they can do crazy shit. like they can go into pond sediments.
Do you know what I mean? Like stuff shedding. You know, you're shedding cells all the time. 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? Right. Whatever. It's getting crazy.
you know it's funny like talking about indiana jones like that style like the archaeology is becoming um increasingly anthropology archaeology uh is becoming like the realm of the science like the the lab scientist you know i mean not not the field work 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 you follow me yeah and when you go on an archaeological dig you know they're always they just dig they just dig a fraction there's a knowledge now there's a knowledge now that that tomorrow we're going to know a bunch of shit we don't know so if we got a hundred squares we'll just dig one now and the impulse used to be just to come in and like destroy the whole site right and wash everything away with hoses and just look for big bones and big stone points and you'd come away with thinking that they use big stone points to kill big bones because you just washed into the ditch all of that micro evidence all of those small bones all the plant pollen you just washed
everything away because you kind of knew what you were looking for right so we probably make the same mistake now so when you go to a dig they just go like we'll just check this little square and then leave you know this is protocol now knowing that in 10 years 100 years whatever someone's going to have a way better way they'll stick some little stick down there and they'll tell him everything he needed to know, you know? Did I tell you about my friend John Reeves? Did I ever tell you about the boneyard in Alaska? Oh, yeah. No, you had him on the show. Oh, yeah. He comes on the show every year.
He was supposed to be the last guest this year, but he got pneumonia. Oh, okay. So he's coming on in February. Oh, that shit's fascinating, man. Yeah, that place is crazy. You know, it's only six acres. Is that right? Yeah. Six acres. Thousands and thousands of bones. Yeah.
And what he thinks is it's like some sort of a natural disaster took place and probably asteroid impact. There's a thick layer of carbon. Oh, yeah. Thick layer of carbon. And in the permafrost is all these bodies. And they think that it's probably just washed all these bodies into a ditch. Oh. And that's why there's so many of them there. It's at the perfect spot. Yeah, perfect spot.
They found animals that weren't even supposed to be in Alaska there. Yeah. It's like if you had La Brea tar pits to yourself, man. Yes, exactly. But it's all his property, so no one can go there. so you know you know they've they've found them in the east river now because it turns out that which museum was it jamie oh yeah no yeah they dumped some of the bones in the east river so these people have actually gone down there and found them you know in the east river now they found a bunch of bison bones and all kinds of shit in the east river which is really crazy no it is exactly where they said that they dumped these things off they found them now it's really wild.
And so, yeah, that's, that's a, yeah, you should go to visit this guy's property. I would like to do that. That would be a great episode for your show because this, this whole thing is crazy. Yeah.
You know, and they may or may not have found human remains there. Oh. They can't talk about it. I imagine not. That shit gets pretty complicated in a hurry, man. It gets a little archaeological. Yeah.
It gets a little, yeah. We, we did one on the, we did one on the, the Lost Roanoke Colony 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... Shut the fuck up. Yeah. Things get real weird. Enormously complicated. Yeah. 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, for people not familiar with the Pueblo, it'd be like, basically, you know, it's akin to a tribe, right? he works on repatriation for his tribe. Mostly focuses on remains, getting back, um, getting back the remains of his ancestors from all these museums and stuff. You know, they want them back.
Yeah. And I once, and I had said to him in this conversation, I'd said, Hey, why can't there be like a deal to be struck where you just say to the museum, like, okay, you keep one gram of that bone for your work. keep a gram of the bone and give the rest back to us he said that would never be acceptable to us be like the same way if someone went and dug your uh right you know someone dug your grandpa's
bones out of a graveyard and later you're like hey let me borrow his foot give me my grandpa back like no we're keeping it really yeah we're gonna do studies on him you know god it's so complicated So, yeah, I think that it would be finding that. And then what complicates a lot of that human remains stuff, too, especially with stuff that he's talking about, the 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 they the peoples that were there before? Because people move all the time, right?
You just look at how the Comanche moved. Look how the Sioux were in the upper Midwest and areas of Minnesota and wound up coming westward and all this movement. So when you have bones, there's always a question of, well, typically it goes like this. It's like, who was currently on the land? 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?
Right. You know, think about how much time passed. Like, are you giving them, like, is it the wrong, are you giving them to the wrong people? Right. That's a very good point. Yeah, because people moved all over the damn place. God, it's fascinating stuff. But with the Pueblos, with the Pueblos, it is not that. Like, with the Pueblos, it is, like, people that have had occupation on these places
for hundreds of years, and people just came in and hauled their ancestors out. Wow. To stick them in museums. I was at a museum with my kids over Christmas break. I was at a museum in Chicago, and we go into this exhibit and all the walls or all the displays are papered so you can't see and there was a sign that just said like we're in a there's a we're in a repatriation issue so they blocked it all wow you know that whatever i don't even know what was behind the paper whatever the display was they're in a they're in a custody battle over their display and blocked it for view and years ago i went to salta um salta and to look at those children of the corn you know
you ever hear about those children, those Incan children? They left on that mountaintop and they kind of freeze dried. 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. And when I went, it was the child that had been struck by lightning after the fact. And you just walk up and it's in a case, but you're looking at someone's baby, you know? Wow. Looking at someone's young child.
it looked like the kid looked like he could stand up and walk away. Really? Perfectly preserved. Even like the feathers are perfect. Wow. Yeah. Not quite stand up and walk away. Yeah. But, but I mean like perfect, you know,
perfect. But yeah, there's someone probably, I haven't followed that situation, but someone is probably saying, I don't want my, you know, I don't want my ancestor in your decorating your. Yeah. Understandably. New Zealand.
Yeah. I mean, wow what is it man oh here's something that he found look at this this um this had been sawed oh no shit yeah so the piece that's missing that he found that like that the piece that's missing that's cut right there that was a piece that they made uh to uh to date it oh i got it uh but the top part had been sawed huh yeah i forget how old that was no shit yeah yeah but that that's from John. That's from the Boneyard. I'm going to introduce you to him. He's coming back in February. You really need to get to know him. He's a fascinating cat. He's a fun dude, too.
Alright, Steve. So your show, Hunting History, History Channel, is it available now? Is it on now? January 28th. 10 p.m. Eastern. There it is. Hunting History. Steve Rinella. There it is. Thanks for letting me plug it, man. Always a good time. I appreciate you letting me come on and plug it. There's the mule deer that we shot together. I like that, man. 12 years ago
time flies it's your biggest animal to date isn't that crazy it's kind of crazy that was 12 years ago was it really? it doesn't seem like it yeah but it was 2012 yeah well again
appreciate your generosity especially appreciate it let me come on and plug my project anytime anytime it's always good to talk to you and if you hung out with a dude in Canada in the 70s named John the Baptist
let me know yeah let him know I gotta put it to rest I can't stop thinking about that guy alright bye everybody We'll see you next time.