Episode 105 - Cattle College

Hello, my name's Cornelia Butterworth and I used to own a dairy farm.

The dairy farm has been in the Butterworth family for generations.

When my father tragically passed away, it was thought that my brother would follow in his footsteps.

However, it wasn't to be.

He had another calling.

He's always been a big fan of role play and medieval reenactments

and we've lost him to LARPing.

I don't want to say that it is a sex thing, but I also might not, you know, necessarily say that it's not.

Sadly, I've not seen Jeremy for months now.

I think the last I saw of him, he was

he didn't answer the door, so I peered through the window and an image that I'll never be able to get out of my head was him

pressed up against the wall,

being sort of pinned down in a medieval costume,

having his face snogged off by a goblin.

Because we'd all always thought that Jeremy would take over the dairy farm, I did not know the first thing about dairy farming, as it turned out.

So as a matter of urgency, you know, I took out an advert on Gumtree, advertised for the position.

I had an email from a chap named Alan.

who had studied in America.

They absolutely love milk over there.

They drink more of it than water.

Alan turned up for his first day on the job and it became very apparent very quickly that Alan did not know the first thing about dairy farming.

Alarm bells rang for me when he asked me where the saddles were to ride the cows into the milking quarter.

I turn my back for all of three seconds and I turn back round, and Alan is feeding them red grapes out of his pocket.

Now, I do not know much about dairy farming, but even I know you do not give a cow a grape.

There were some red flags, sure, but

you know, maybe, you know, let's allow for some first-day nerves.

So, I went back to my office and I let him get on with it.

About an hour later, I hear the sound of 90s dance music coming from the yard.

So I charge out of the house.

I see Alan, boom box on shoulder, playing rhythm as a dancer at the absolute max volume it would go, and the cows have absolutely lost their minds, you know, not in a good way.

To say they didn't take to the 90s dance music was an understatement.

They were leaping over the fences in the direction of the motorway.

That was the last I ever saw of those cows.

And after 450 years of my family running a cattle farm, that was where it ended.

Alan told me he had trained.

I was questioning, you know, my own part in this, so I went back to look at the original email he sent and I thought, you know, good God, where did this man train?

I opened up his C V

and there it was, the Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet.

Support for Cattle College comes from the Buck P.

Mitchell Foundation, efficiently avoiding tax since 1974.

This program began with a voicemail.

I was in the office booking guests for the Beef and Dairy Network podcast, the number one podcast for those involved, or just interested, in the production of beef animals and dairy herds, when I looked at my telephone and realised that I'd missed a call.

You have a new voice message.

It was from friend of the show, Professor of Beef History, James Harkam.

This is Professor James Harkam,

formerly of the Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet.

Things have come to a head.

I have information.

Information that is going to blow this whole thing wide open.

James sounded panicked and out of breath.

He normally sounds a bit like that, but this was different.

He told me that he had information about his former employers, the Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet, that the world needed to hear.

They are not right.

They are not like any academics I have ever worked with before.

We need to blow the goddamn lid off this turkey nest.

Call me.

The next day, I called Professor Harkam, and he agreed to come into the studio.

When he arrived, he was obviously nervous, sweating, his hands shaking.

When I gave him a cup of yogurt, he poured it all down his trousers.

I've got information.

The world needs to hear this.

I'm here to tell you the truth.

You see yourself as a kind of whistleblower.

Think of it this way:

I can't do this alone.

I need somebody to help get the truth out there.

I'm the whistle, and I'm asking you to blow me.

The Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet began as an online-only offer, an e-portal through which people could learn about raising beef.

But in 2019, they opened an in-person campus and James was recruited by the two men who he told me seemed to be in charge, Brad and Chad.

I began by talking to him about the early days at the college and how it was that he came to work there.

They got in touch,

they'd seen some of my lectures that had gone viral on daily motion.

James's views are quite controversial in academia.

He has spent his entire professional life pushing his view that the role of horses has been massively overstated in history, obscuring the contribution of cows.

In fact, he goes as far as to claim that horses didn't actually exist until the 1960s.

Over the past decade or so, James has regularly released videos of his lectures on his daily motion account.

They were created in a lab in Japan.

They used a mix of dolphin semen and genetic material taken from some lively rabbits and the rest, I would say, isn't history

i was very flattered when uh the guys at wyoming got in touch um i was i was out in the cold i was not welcome at the dining tables of uh british academic society or in the car parks uh of many british pubs james was delighted to be working again and to begin with enjoyed life at the college the early stages were a kind of a blur of publicity of

good times champagne receptions, chocolate cake for breakfast, Golden Graham's for dinner.

It was impressive.

You know, they'd thought of everything.

Nothing was too good.

I was put up in three-star hotels, given monogrammed towels, not with my initials on, but like you could tell they were good towels.

I wanted to understand more about the history of the Cattle College, and so I spoke to Beef and Dairy Network archivist Alex Neon.

The story of beef education really starts and ends in Wyoming because that was where you went to learn to be a rancher in the old-fashioned way.

Big expansive land, loads of cattle.

This is high cow country.

This is summer grazing country.

Some of the best in the west.

This is the country of big beef herds and vast ranches.

So I think this idea of it's quite a romantic idea of the rancher, you know, like being in charge of all his cattle.

That is a message that spreads all around the world.

So people are traveling from everywhere to set up in Wyoming, learn how to look after cattle and make a living there, and then maybe take what they've learned there and go to somewhere else in the world or stay there.

But it's absolutely the epicenter of beef education for about 50 or 60 years.

It is the native ground of the cattle industry.

When winter snows retreat to the peaks and streams run bank full, there's new life in the cattle business.

The warming rays of the spring sun are a portent of a delightful summer on the range.

By the 1990s, things had begun to change.

The 80s had seen the establishment of beef universities right across Europe.

By the 90s, these were very successful, and it just made what was happening in Wyoming seem really old-fashioned by comparison.

One state is proud of its heritage as the beef state and isn't bashful about promoting its leading product.

So, Wyoming needed to modernize, and a key figure in all this was an old rancher called Vivian Buster Piper.

Hi there, I'm Vivian Buster Piper, a master rancher out here in the great state of Wyoming.

Isn't she beautiful?

The story goes that his son spoke to him about the possibilities of the internet, and he was fascinated by this and decided to set up the first online cattle college.

Hence, in 1995, we have the opening of the Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet.

Everyone will remember the TV advert where he looks straight down the lens and he says, welcome to the Harvard University of Beef.

Now, I don't understand the internet in fact i always say i don't understand anything that i can't shoot but i've been working with my effeminate son glenn and he has somehow created the wyoming cattle college of the internet now you can learn how to ranch under the big skies of wyoming from the comfort of your office chair suddenly pretty much overnight wyoming was back on the cutting edge of beef education and it was the place to be the adverts looked incredible with these stunning views and all these cows and things like that.

And

people signed up in their thousands.

Simply join us at http:

forward slash forward slash www.wyoming cattle college of the internet.com forward slash courses forward slash one forward slash lesson forward slash module one

slash a slash aaa slash one dot html.

He was tapping into that

image of Wyoming, that romantic notion that saw people, you know, a hundred years previously, travel across the world to come and spend time on a Wyoming ranch.

This time, they didn't even need to travel.

So whether you live in Tallahassee or Timbuktu, come on down.

If you have an internet connection, you can join me from any country in the world that isn't one of America's enemies.

I also won't admit anyone from Colorado.

Welcome to the Harvard University of Beef.

So I've actually got the archived website of the very first

Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet course.

So when did that come out?

That was 95.

1995.

I can get onto it now.

You know, I can click through it now.

So go to the website straight up before you see anything, Dancing Baby.

I mean, that's so.

Dancing baby gif, dancing baby gif.

What that was at the time was a sign to people that said, We use gifs, and that was quite important at the time, you know, like you.

This guy, Vivian Buster Piper, dancing baby, we use gifs.

Let's go.

That is a sign that this is technologically, he's on a different page, he's on a completely different page for everyone else.

So, click through the dancing baby, straight away, the midi starts playing.

So, you know, someone means business.

It was very much, you know,

he's put a lot into the presentation here to know that, because you're spending a lot of money on this course.

You've given him thousands of pounds.

You want to make sure that, you know, it looks decent.

But compared to, let's think about this, compared to moving your life across the world, packing up your house, selling it, buying a homestead in Wyoming, you know, compare that to just the simple act of typing in, what is it, http://slash www.wyoming cattle college of the internet dot com forward slash courses forward slash one forward slash lesson one forward slash module one slash a slash aaa slash one

walkabesia

hello my name is kirsten braithwaite i'm from melbourne australia and i attended the wyoming cattle college of the internet in 2019 kirsten enrolled at the newly opened in-person learning version of the Wyoming Cattle College.

Hi, I'm Vivian Buster Piper, and I've provided the world's best online ranching training for over 20 years.

But now, it's time for a change.

I want to shake you by the hand and look you in the eye.

I want to arm wrestle with you in a river.

I want to weep with you under the stars.

I want you to join me here in Wyoming, where you can learn at my knee.

And now, it's possible.

The Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet has opened a state-of-the-art physical campus where you can come and become the best rancher you can, the Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet.

After a legal challenge, we're no longer allowed to call ourselves the Harvard University of Beef.

Despite living in suburban Melbourne, Kirsten became interested in ranching when she visited a theme park with her school.

My class actually took a trip to the Gold Coast, which is in Queensland.

There's a theme park called Movie World, and one of the main attractions at Movie World is a ride called the Wild West.

And my God, I found myself right at home there.

I'd line up for that ride, and they'd strap me in.

And

we would ascend through the Wild West and around those rivers, and then down that large drop.

Oh my gosh.

And off I'd go again.

I'd line up.

Days, days.

I would buy more tickets.

Kirsten found herself in a loop of constantly riding the Wild West ride.

It became something quite habitual.

I didn't sleep, I didn't eat.

She estimates that she rode the ride over 60 times in that one weekend.

The physical toll that took on my body was immense.

However, there was one thing on the ride that kept drawing her back.

On one of my rides up, I noticed this sort of fiberglass prospector and he tipped his hat to us as we went past and there was this glint in his eye, it looked familiar, it looked like he was winking and saying, Kirsten, welcome.

You've found me.

I've been waiting for 18 years, and my God, here you are.

Father, I said, thank you, thank you so much.

He couldn't hear me by that point, we'd already gone down the drop, but I lined up again and I saw him every time.

And

I would try and sort of get to know know him as best I could.

It sounds as if you sort of viewed that fiberglass prospector almost as a kind of father figure by that point.

Did you have a father at home back in Melbourne?

A father, yes.

Maybe not a dad.

My father, he, you know,

he does what he can.

He paid the bills, he

gave us love, but he didn't give me understanding.

And he certainly didn't understand when I told him I wanted to move to Wyoming.

You say your father didn't understand.

How did the rest of your friends and family react when you told them about your decision?

Look, they were quite disappointed.

My family,

you may have already heard of them, the Braithwaites, they own the Big Potato.

It's a quite large potato in Peran, in the outer suburbs of Melbourne.

So it's not in those remote areas like the Big Pineapple or the Big Koala, but it is still a really great tourist attraction and you really should check it out.

But they sell baked potatoes and that has been the trade for the last 175 years.

Every single Braithwaite has gone into that industry.

Every single Braithwaite has found happiness, has found a future, except me.

On that personal quest for happiness, Kirsten boarded a plane to Chicago.

The Cattle College had told her that from there she would be taken to Wyoming.

A car was waiting for her at arrivals, but she began to become suspicious when the length of the journey didn't correspond with the 17 hours it would take to drive to Wyoming.

We were only in the car for

19, maybe 20 minutes.

And when she got out of the car, the campus wasn't what she had expected.

I arrived at the campus, and campus to me sort of,

I don't know, I don't want to be ungrateful, but it just evokes more sort of extensive grounds, multiple buildings.

This was more of a warehouse.

Everything was wet and it hadn't been raining.

I don't know what

it was.

There was a man sitting behind a stall and the sign read, I will tattoo your dog.

It certainly didn't evoke Wyoming to me.

The main thing you need to know about the Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet is that it is not in Wyoming.

Professor James Harkom had a similar reaction to Kirsten when he saw the campus.

The experience that I'd anticipated was broad open spaces,

the thrill of the wild.

Many of us grew up watching wonderful depictions in films like City Slickers 2, The Hunt for Curly's Gold.

I would have wanted to see some of that, but

we were next to a vending machine repair centre.

And they had the bigger office space.

It was more of a wasteland, more apocalyptic than what I'd seen on the website.

Everyone seemed quite certain we were in Wyoming, all of the staff.

We were constantly told that we were in Wyoming.

We were greeted by a man, I assume a third-year student in a bison costume, who was shouting, Wyoming, Wyoming, isn't it nice to be in Wyoming?

Every morning you'd go in, you'd take a seat at your desk, and written above, they'd printed it out on individual A4 sheets and then spelled it out

along the ceiling joist and just said, remember,

you are in Wyoming.

And I thought,

I'm not.

I've

passed some of the filming locations for the Blues brothers here.

And at the time, I was eating a deep dish pizza, replaying the memories of watching the Chicago Bulls only the night before.

And yet there was an insistence that if you were on the phone, if you were even meeting students face to face, you would always have to insist, this is Wyoming, we're out here on the ranch, life is good.

Not only was the Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet not in Wyoming, and in fact in a grotty suburb of Chicago, James also wanted to call into question the standard of teaching at the college.

I became increasingly aware that

there were almost no other teaching staff.

So obviously you were teaching beef history, but your students were probably also doing ranching courses, fence mending, all that kind of stuff, hay baling.

Who's teaching them that?

Often these are people that Chad and Brad had met on a night out the night before.

They are people they have roped in.

There are guys from the vending machine repair workshop just getting in a couple of extra hours.

Hello, my name is Jerry and I'm a vending machine repair man.

While James and Kirsten were at the Cattle College, Jerry worked at Vendulike, the vending machine repair facility in the adjacent warehouse.

Some of the best parts of being a vending machine repairman, you know, doesn't seem like glamorous work, but you can eat pretty much anything that's in there.

There's some of the stuff, some of the stuff is a no.

The thing to know about Jerry is that he really loves being a vending machine repair man.

Some of the higher priced items in there, your

beef jerky, your shelf-stable pies that might be in there, that's a big no.

And you like just can't, can't even think about it.

But Rhode 3 and below, that's always good stuff.

So you can eat pretty much, you can get pretty full actually with some of that stuff.

I actually have a medical condition.

I was recently at my doctor and

I think it's because I eat a lot of Doritos.

They've diagnosed me with a rare respiratory disease called Doritolung.

And they're still looking into it.

They don't know for sure that it's that I'm eating all these Doritos.

I am the sort of leading skeptic on this.

I'm like, there got to be another, there's got to be another reason.

But they keep implying it's that I'm eating non-stop just Doritos, right?

And so I'm like, okay, well, which ones?

The Cool Ranch, the Salsa Verde, the taco, the nacho cheesier, 3D,

the baked Doritos, the tapatillo Doritos, flaming hot Doritos.

And they can't even tell me which flavor is at the root of it.

And I would think that if you're a doctor, you would know.

So I can't really trust the input of the medical community at this point,

especially not these quacks.

And so I'm going to try to go get a second opinion.

But I've gone to several different clinics and they're always like, you have Cheeto dust on your fingers.

They call it a significant staining of my fingertips and that the crevices of my fingerprints have been, quote, filled in.

So, you know, I guess I'm having a lot of, according to them, Dorito-related problems, but I think I'm doing just fine.

Jerry told me that back in 2019, he was approached by the college to teach the students, despite having no ranching experience whatsoever.

This guy comes over from this warehouse next door.

I didn't get a good vibe from him.

I didn't like how he, he, he kind of came up on me and he, he said he was from the Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet.

And he he was asking me if what I did and, you know,

if I liked working

in the warehouse there.

And I was like, oh, yeah, this is like, this is my, this is my everything.

He's like, okay, well, we're looking for teachers.

Jerry, thinking that this man was an absolute wanker, turned down the offer.

He wouldn't take no for an answer.

And I just knew something was off.

I just knew that if they're trying to hire someone like me, a proud vending machine repairman to work at their college.

I don't think they're on the up and up.

As I learned more and more about the Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet, it's not only the teaching personnel that raises eyebrows, it's also the unconventional teaching methods.

We were taught by two men, Brad and Chad, always together, never apart.

That was what they used to sing, and it was true.

We never saw them separated.

They used to teach us with a series of gifts, animated GIFs,

on a projector screen, hours at a time.

Just different GIFs.

Sometimes they were of cows, other times they were sort of just gifts of moments from popular culture, moments from the office, some from The Simpsons.

So this is really the one thing that I can say hand on heart.

They got absolutely spot on.

Gifs are an extraordinarily powerful teaching method.

The use of GIFs to communicate information has a fascinating history.

This is archivist Alex Neon again.

To understand the GIF, you've got to understand the flipbook.

That's the earliest gif.

You know a flipbook, right?

Each page is a slightly different image, and when you flick through it quickly, it creates an animation.

When was the first flipbook?

It's hard to say.

We think in the Middle Ages, monks may have known about the GIF.

In the corners of the pages of old Bibles and other religious texts from that time, you will often see small drawings by monks.

And if you flip through them quickly, you'll often see an animation, usually something baudy, like a man with five cocks wanking into a vase.

Is that a flipbook?

Is that the earliest gift?

It's very hard to tell, but certainly, when you flick through an ancient manuscript, you do get the impression that there's a monk here

who has really wasted his life in the pursuit of animation.

And

I think if you talk to animators today, they'd really see something of themselves in that.

So when one of our listeners maybe is, I don't know, posting a GIF of Rue Paul saying, yas girl, you slay, or whatever, onto onto WhatsApp, what they're doing is they're continuing a tradition that began with monks.

Began with monks, that's right.

And very often, in those early flip books, there would be a comment underneath that would be the, I suppose, the sort of 14th century equivalent of

Yas Girl.

It would normally be something that stated their affection for the Pope, or the opposite.

But there's definitely a line can be drawn there between Pope Gregory IV and RuPaul.

The Rosetta Stone, the most valued and hotly debated artifact in the British Museum, the key to ancient language.

What are those, that litany of hieroglyphics, other than gifts?

Pure, beautiful, honest gifts, the most direct form of expression known to man,

the highest form of art, the most beautiful, transcendent form of literature.

Gifts.

Scientists in the 80s began some serious research into these old flipbooks and realized that this was an incredibly efficient way of communicating information.

It was almost like when you watched information delivered in this way, it almost bypassed the brain.

That sort of knowledge goes straight into the nervous system.

Scientists started to call it spine learning.

When the scientists' research was published in the early 90s, it was leapt on by computer scientists who were fascinated by it and immediately began work on the modern flipbook, which, of course, these days we know as the GIF.

Now, whether GIFs alone are an appropriate form of teaching at an agricultural college or not, we here at the Beef and Dairy Network would like to publicly thank those early computer scientists for developing the GIF.

Thank you.

Steve Wilhite, the inventor of the GIF, became the first computer scientist to win the Nobel Prize, and then the first person to have it taken away due to his staunch and overzealous defense of how to pronounce it.

So you say it as GIF and I've been saying it as GIF and I think we all know that's not how you pronounce it.

We all know that it's pronounced GLAF.

Sorry, GLAF?

GLAF, yeah, yeah.

The G is

what's known in the phonetic world as a glasive.

So it's glaf.

So glaf.

That's what I'm saying.

What about the R though?

There's no, where's the A coming?

The r sound.

Where's that coming from?

Oh, there's that.

When um when an i and an f are together in certain European languages, then that that's an aft

sound.

So okay,

so what language is is glaf in?

So the first half is in Esperanto, and then the second half is in ancient Esperanto.

Okay, so that's glaf.

Glaf.

Glaf.

Glaf.

Well, and

by the way, it's not

actually

gif.

It's from the Greek, so it's more of a

shif.

Yeah.

Okay.

But the

sound should be silent.

The whole sound?

But you say, so you'll say you pronounce it shif,

but ideally, you

only aspirate on the

first moment and at the end.

Ultimately, though, the lessons just started to become really helping Brad and Chad set up their eBay store.

They were selling sort of painted shells and various knick-knacks.

They just needed some help working out the finance and to whose account the money goes into.

There was a little bit of confusion as to how they would get paid for their work.

Both Brad and Chad had been banned from PayPal.

We'd never found out why.

More after this.

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I'm working in the warehouse.

I'm working on this kind of new vending machine.

It's one of those cupcake vending machines.

Unlike many of his co-workers, Jerry turned down all attempts to get him to become a teacher.

But then one day, he did agree to help at the college.

So the guy from the cattle college comes back over and he's like, big news.

We're starting our bull unit.

And I'm like, what?

What is a bull unit?

And he's like, oh, we're at the point in college that we're going to start teaching the students about bulls.

What's he bothering me for about this?

So I say, we don't have any bulls here.

I don't have one.

I don't have a pet bull.

And I don't even know where to get one.

There's no such thing as a vending machine that dispenses bulls, all right?

Because if there had been,

I would have worked on it already.

I would have seen it.

And he said, well, I know you don't have one, but I see that you have a forklift in here.

We have this sort of like tarp that looks like a bull hide.

Could we maybe tarp the

forklift and you could drive it around the parking lot so we can demonstrate to the students what a bull is and how to experience, how to experience being near a bull, what to do.

and I was just like, you know what?

Yeah,

sure,

whatever, fine, okay,

I'll do it.

Whatever gets this guy out of my hair faster, right?

I'm trying to get back into this cupcake vending machine.

So we do it, and

it's actually

kind of fun until it wasn't right.

The day finally came, we were very excited.

We were going to work with the bulls for the first time.

It became quite clear instantly, really, that actually they weren't bulls.

They were forklifts being driven by the workers at the warehouse next door that were repairing vending machines.

I'm driving this thing.

I'm under this tarp.

I can barely see.

It was less of a lesson and more of sort of, you know, the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

It felt dangerous.

There was nowhere to run.

You sort of just had to hope it wasn't going to be you and hope that you weren't wearing red.

But again, I don't think that would have mattered.

They weren't bulls.

It was just men driving forklifts with tarpaulin over their eyes.

Right, and I'm going over what I think are

speed bumps and those little parking bumps to denote where to stop your car.

You know, when you hear the front of your car scrape on one of those things, you're like, oh, good, I parked.

It really became quite messy, to be honest.

Well, I actually hit a kid.

A classmate was impaled in front of me by the forklift.

Using, I guess, bull language,

I suppose I gored him, is what

the paramedics said.

He looked at me as he was dying and he said,

I'm not sure that we're in Wyoming.

And then he he died.

All of a sudden, I'm in handcuffs.

And

luckily, the police in general have a really hard time with me, but in this instance, they couldn't prove it was me because I didn't leave any fingerprints on the wheel or anything like that because my fingers are filled with Cheeto dust.

So I don't have fingerprints.

What I wanted to know was, where was Vivian Buster Piper in all this?

The man who set up the college in the first place.

Hi, I'm Vivian Buster Piper.

I asked Kirsten if she'd ever met him.

We assumed and were told really that we would be taught by Vivian.

There was sort of a large effigy of him in the middle of the warehouse that we would eat our supper around.

It turned out that we actually never met him.

As I stared up at the effigy of Vivian Buster Piper,

each morning I thought, I've seen this face before.

I know this man, I know that glint in his eye.

I think it was the same man that was on the Wild West ride at the Gold Coast theme park.

I think it was the prospector.

I started to think, oh my god, maybe this man's been with me all my life.

I looked closer and I thought, if I just took off that Stetson

and I replaced it with a chef's hat and I surrounded him with baked potato,

that's my grandfather.

And of course I don't mean the same man, I just mean that Vivian Buster Piper has taken many forms over my life.

in many figures of great importance.

I was desperate to meet him in the flesh.

I have to meet this man.

I have to meet him now.

Why haven't I been taught by him?

Where is he?

I screamed.

I screamed.

I banged on the door.

I said, Brad and Chad, let me see Buster.

Eventually, Brad and Chad let me into the office and they said, of course, Kirsten, come this way.

Buster is right through here.

They were giggling.

It turns out that inside there was just a stuffed dog with Vivian Buster Piper written across its little collar in felt.

That was their little joke.

Buster was a dog.

Buster was

a stuffed dog.

But not just any dog.

The rumor was that he'd served in the American Civil War, not on the politically correct side, and that he had ejaculated

onto

Abraham Lincoln as he sort of fell from from his theatre box at Ford's Theatre

as he was assassinated, and it was the final humiliation, if you will, as he'd just been assassinated.

He got hampered by a dog.

Yeah, John Wilkes Booth

escaped, as we know,

on a Jersey cow.

And yeah, this dog ran up to the front

as they're trying to tend to the president and just they didn't spay him in those days and

just went to town on

old Abe's stovepipe hat, shagged it senseless.

So what is the real story of Vivian Buster Piper?

James isn't sure.

I mean it's certainly possible that the real Vivian Buster Piper died many years ago or even that he never existed.

Vivian Buster Piper is real to me, but in a very real sense for everyone else, no, he's not real.

They just made him up.

I left that office and I thought, I've had it.

Mate.

You don't drag me all the way from my family home, away from my baked potato to lie to my face.

You know, the more I went out and about, the more I realized we were never in Wyoming.

This is absolutely Chicago.

I tried to tell the others, I tried to wake them from their trance, but they were obsessed.

They would dance around the effigy of Buster and sing and sing and sing.

I said, guys,

we are not where you think you are.

What have you learned?

I grabbed one girl, Julie.

I grabbed her by the shoulders and I shook her really hard.

And I said, What do you think you're doing here?

What have you gained?

And she said, I have gained so much experience in the e-commerce world.

I have made thousands of dollars on those painted shelves.

And she looked at me and she said, You wish you had my sales record.

I've seen yours.

And she spat.

And I said, You fool.

I wrote home to her parents that night and I said, she's gone.

She's lost.

I ran an experiment myself where I sort of, I looked away whenever they would show us the animated GIFs.

And suddenly everything became clearer.

Food started tasting like it should again.

Music became pleasurable once more.

I think maybe there was something in the GIFs.

I think...

I think maybe that it was part of the mind control.

Oh, and just to add, it's actually not pronounced GIF, it's pronounced Guy.

Guife.

It's Geif.

Right.

Guy.

I decided to abandon my studies completely.

I wanted to get to the heart of this now.

I will fight this, and I will expose the truth of this institution.

I started screaming, take me to Wyoming, take me to Wyoming.

I was pounding on the door.

That wasn't working.

Eventually, I asked the dog tattooist to tattoo, take me to Wyoming now or else, across my chest.

And I just stood there, completely naked, morning, noon, and night, until they got their act together.

Eventually, one morning over my oatmeal, Brad and Chad appeared.

They said, you want to go to Wyoming so bad, huh?

And I said, yeah.

They went, well, come with us.

So Brad and Chad from the Cattle College, I don't like these guys.

They're dicks.

They have bad attitudes.

They're always bragging about how much money they're making selling shells on eBay.

And so I don't like these guys at all.

But every time they ask me to do something, I don't know what it is.

I say yes.

They took me out to a bus.

They cut to the chase and they say, we need you to drive a bus.

from Chicago to Wyoming.

What I say is sure, okay.

I'll drive a bus from Chicago to Wyoming.

Fine.

So I'm saying yes.

And as I'm saying it, I'm like, Jerry, why are you saying yes?

You don't like these guys.

They basically made me murder somebody that I couldn't, that nobody could prove, of course, but I have, I have that experience, right?

I lived through taking a life while driving a makeshift bull in a parking lot.

And so they're asking me to do this.

And I'm like, God, why am I, why am I saying yes?

But for some reason I say yes and I just

do it.

So I get in the bus and I see that there's

one student on the bus and I'm like, okay.

So I'm just driving a bus for one person.

The exciting thing was there were mini screens in the back of the heads, in the headrests.

And the guys tell me to press this button here on the dashboard when we get on the highway.

And I'm like,

sure.

And then I'm also thinking, why do you keep saying, why do you keep saying yes?

And I push the button and a movie comes on

on the TVs back there.

Every seat has a TV.

It was just sort of GIFs.

I faded out.

I tried to look away, but every single headrest had a GIF on it, a different one.

And I fell into a trance.

Something's happening because she's just staring at it like mouth agape.

eyes going crazy.

I lost hours.

I don't know how many.

Jerry drove Kirsten all the way to Wyoming without stopping.

I didn't ask him what route he took, but I think it was probably the I-88 out of Chicago, then joining the I-80, which takes you all the way to Wyoming.

But there's also the option of leaving Chicago northwards on I-90 and then joining Route 20.

There are pros and cons with each route, and I'm not here to tell you which way you should go.

In life, there are many paths, and only you can choose which one to take.

But whatever you do, don't become a magician.

So I get off the bus and I just do a big piss, right?

Like a ginormous piss.

I didn't stop for the entire drive.

It was like 17 hours.

So I had a lot of piss.

Jerry had a lot of piss.

I had a lot of piss because I was just chugging Mountain Dew the whole drive, right?

And not just the regular one.

I was doing code red.

I was doing the orange one.

I was drinking all of them.

I even had a personal jug of the Taco Bell Baja Blast because you can't get it in stores.

It's at Taco Bell only.

So I was just chugging Mountain Dew the whole time because also I needed the sugar to stay awake.

So I needed to do a big, big time piss.

I would say maybe like the third biggest piss in my life.

And I'm doing that.

The student's kind of just like, you know, hanging out by the bus, not really sure what's going on.

Just sort of like, she was in a very deep trance for a long time.

So she's sort of doing, you know, rubbing her eyes, sort of like blinking a lot, just trying to be like, what the heck?

When I came to, it was twilight.

It was muggy.

I opened my eyes and I sat up and it was just crops, just crops, as far as the eye could see, fields and fields of crops.

So I'm walking back over to the bus and the student's just sitting there.

And then she says,

piss long enough?

And I I was like, Okay, whoa, I drove the whole way.

I was kind of actually surprised she didn't have to.

I would have, you know, it's kind of, I think it's maybe more of a concern that she didn't.

And that it's not like it's not bad that I did a big one.

It's like actually like normal and really healthy.

I mean, it wasn't like a good piss.

It was, I just did it for a long time.

It was, you know, I didn't drink any water, so it had no clarity whatsoever.

It was like a dark, dark brown.

I'm for sure sure going to have to go, I guess, see a doctor because that's what you're supposed to do.

But I don't, you know, it sucks.

It just sucks that when you can't trust doctors and you have to go to one and there's not another option.

That's all I'm saying.

I just wish there was another option for me.

But while I'm thinking of what to say to the student for commenting on my, I guess, piss that was too long.

I thought it was just normal for, you know, the amount of piss I had.

I get an alert on my phone, and Brad has DM'd me on Instagram, and Brad has sent me a GIF.

And, you know, it's actually not pronounced GIF, it's pronounced GWIF.

And I open it, it's not moving, so I have to tap it so that it moves.

And then the next thing I know, I had no idea how much time had passed.

I had no idea what was going on.

All I know is that I

felt as if I was like awake and asleep at the same time, that that I was like experiencing a dream.

Apparently, somebody said it was four days.

I turned around and the bus driver was stood right behind me casting a twilight shadow.

He said, it's time to get to work.

He told me I had to harvest all of the fields by hand.

There was so much grain, fields and fields of grain.

It turned to night.

I was getting quite cold.

I said, can we please stop for a couple hours?

He said no,

the loaves must be made.

I was there for about four days and four nights, non-stop.

It was back-breaking work.

My body transformed into a sort of creature.

Anytime I came across a rogue piece of metal and I'd catch my reflection, I wouldn't understand.

How could a face look so gaunt?

My fingers had dissolved and formed what I could only describe as a large spoon.

A large spoon on each hand.

You can't imagine what it's like trying to harvest grain with two spoons, just these inert paddles slapping at the soil, trying as best they could to pick up anything they could, but the spoons weren't even really functional.

They were flat.

I was sobbing silently, but the sobs sounded melodic.

I felt like I was evolving backwards.

I couldn't understand my own speech anymore.

All that was behind it was grief, misery, pain.

I hobbled and hobbled to the next spot to try and go again, but as I'd slap down on the soil, it would splash back in my face.

I'd hiss, but then my teeth would fall out.

I'd been going for too long.

How can this happen in four days?

On the fourth night, there was a lightning storm.

I thought, that's all I need.

It was terrifying, but I continued my work.

There was slanting rain.

The rain was pulling in my spoon hands.

I turned to ask the bus driver for shelter in the bus.

The bus was gone, and the bus driver had been struck by lightning.

He said, I'm sorry, as he smoldered away.

His burning carcass at least provided me with some warmth.

I huddled around it, of course.

I looked up toward the hill.

Between the lightning flashes, I could see a form, a figure.

A lightning flash again, and I could see the eyes.

And those eyes were familiar.

They were the eyes of my grandfather, the baked potato merchant.

They were the eyes of the fiberglass prospector from the Wild West ride at Movie World Gold Coast.

They were the eyes of Vivian Boster Piper.

No,

they were the eyes of the actor Ted Danson.

And so

I was in a trance for four days, and I guess what got me out of it was I was struck by lightning and, you know, I was relieved because I was out of the trance, right?

That's a win.

But being struck by lightning hurts really bad.

Did not feel good.

Did not like that at all, right?

I can't confirm this, but I thought I saw my skeleton.

On the plus side, Everybody at

the hospital here over there in Wyoming was really nice and they were they were they took really good care of me there and they said that the only reason I survived the the lightning shock

was that I was so unhealthy anyway that like the lightning couldn't damage anything good

well what my doctor basically said

it's a mess in there and I was like yeah I know the Dorito lung right all the mountain dew there was so much junk in there that the junk absorbed the brunt of the damage.

Yeah, and they're saying all this stuff that

if I start eating green vegetables and drinking water now, I might live till I'm 45.

And I don't believe them because

I think when I gored that kid and killed him in the in the bull accident that um that I think I absorbed some of his life force and it sort of reverse aged me in a way.

I think I absorbed this college student's essence and I don't know, became young again, became young in a different way.

You know, I do sort of now feel like I am, you know, connecting more with people younger than me.

And I get what's going on.

You know, I like Olivia Rodrigo, right?

If you take that into account, you take into the account of the fact that I even survived a lightning strike, I think

it's entirely possible and probable.

I'm gonna live to be about 150 years old, and that's actually really exciting for me because that's just so much opportunity to learn and to see what comes next in the

vending machine canon.

You know, what else can we do, right?

I feel like in many ways we perfected it, but I've been proven wrong time and time again.

There's always a new interesting vending machine, and I think that ultimately is, I'm gonna get to see a lot of that.

That's really exciting to me.

Professor Harkam, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with me and

having the bravery to come forward and talk about this.

Thank you.

Thank you for acknowledging my bravery,

my courage, and my dignity, because right now those are the only things that I've got left.

And I just think that if what I've done, what I've said here today, if that can save one student

a wasted four years and £275,000 of debt, then maybe it's all been worth it.

Oh, thank you, James.

No worries.

And just to

check how much am I getting paid for this?

Oh,

well,

there's a well nothing, really.

I mean,

there's a bit of an ethical issue, isn't there, with a whistleblower being paid.

That's not how it works, really.

Are you pulling my pisser?

Sorry, James,

we're not paying you for this.

I thought there'd be, look, I've given you, I've given you a motion.

This thing is a fucking roller coaster.

I have kicked the doors off here.

I've laid bare my soul, my professional reputation, which has at certain points been not inconsiderable.

I need some reassurance that this was for something.

I'm not going to be left dangling in the wind like yesterday's fucking dick rappers.

This is an absolute travesty.

This is content.

We live in an age of goddamn content.

Life is insane.

Cattle College featured Beth Granville, Linnea Sage, Mike Shepherd, Gareth Quinn, Maddie Savage, and Matt Apodaka.

From the twisted minds that brought you the Adventure Zone, balance and amnesty and graduation and ethercy and steeplechase and uotra space and all the other ones, the McElroy Brothers and Dad are proud to reveal a bold vision for the future of actual play podcasting.

It's um

it's called the adventure zone versus Dracula.

Yeah, we're gonna kill Dracula's ass.

Well, we're gonna attempt, we haven't recorded all of it yet.

We will attempt to kill Dracula's ass.

The Adventure Zone versus Dracula.

Yes, a season I will be running using the DD Fifth Vision rule set.

And there's two episodes out for you to listen to right now.

We hope you will join us.

Same bat time, same bat channel.

From bats.

I see what you did there.

People say not to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree.

Which is why here on Just the Zoo of Us, we judge them by so much more.

We rate animals out of 10 in the categories of effectiveness, ingenuity, and aesthetics, taking into consideration each animal's true strengths, like a pigeon's ability to tell a Monet from a Picasso or a polar bear's ability to play basketball.

Guest experts like biologists, ecologists, and more join us to share their unique insight into the animal's world.

Listen with friends and family of all ages on maximumfun.org or wherever you get podcasts.

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