#2258 - Steven Rinella

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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 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 hellhole real fast.

Right.

Or hike up a hill.

Right.

So I was like, that's not tough. And then later I was like, oh.
Yeah. Mental toughness.
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 like the fact that uh most people would crawl into a hole yeah you know after well i got i got a buddy i don't want to say who it is but he uh he had sold his business and he told me he goes well i'm gonna sell my business i'm gonna crawl into a deep dark hole and um 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 was i had to get back i'm not ready yet i gotta get back out people i think that's like these sort of fictional depictions of the future that you know everybody wants this future where you know 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 yeah 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 my wife's smart enough to worry about what had happened to us if we didn't have dragons to slay.
She feels that it might be essential. It's essential for life.
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 at people like that and and um you know part of looking at uh well biden and trump would be uh at that age like i plan on at that age to be like really kicking it just screwing around outside yeah just having that just thing that 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 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.

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.

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 literally zero input from anyone else. So everybody I talk to, I look at it and 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 tick.
I want to find out why she writes those books like that. I want to find out, you know, what keeps him going.
That 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 my own club now i'm 50 years old man just starting to wonder i'm starting to have all these questions 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 planning for the future is like silly I Really do I think you should have goals like if you enjoy doing things and you like I would like to get to this point I would like to do this or something to strive towards that's good, but this idea like you know One day you're just gonna like stop doing stuff like why? Yeah, are you alive? 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 it's a good point these are all questions i had never really thought about but i've become more interested in after i crossed that threshold you know 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 that 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 work with him i could do there's 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 uh we were eating barbecue and you told me you wish you were 10% less famous. But I feel like then you got 20% more famous.
Yeah. Yeah, I fucked up.
Well, I thought doing the Spotify thing. 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. Yeah.
It's very unageable you know what it is well i part you know if you'll allow me to tell you what it is okay please do and i i observed this uh i observed this my wife who's traveling through right now i observed this after uh we had dinner with you one time and um 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, like, 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.
I do four of these a week, so it's like they're hearing me. It's fucking 12 hours a week of me talking to you.
It's a lot. Yeah, that thing.
It's over-observed. Tim Ferriss mentioned it to me.
like people think, people 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 someone tries to pretend you're something other than you are, if there's a smear campaign against you, people are like, no, I know that guy.
Oh. Like they actually know you.
Yeah. They really know you.
Like people have listened to me like 100 hours. There's no confusion.
There's no like guesswork. Like this is who I am.
Yeah. I'm not that complicated.
It's a long charade. Yeah.
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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 charade.
Bullitting 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.
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 was not really who she was.
Yep. You know, but I hadn't already known that because I had a buddy who worked for her.
And he was like, she's a fucking monster. Yeah.
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, 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.
And 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.
Man, 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 a First Amendment they have different laws they have hate speech laws yeah 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's like if Caitlyn Jenner decides that she's a girl like Bruce Jenner decides he's a girl now, 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%.
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.
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 want to educate him on what he talks about on social media if he wants to keep his clinical license to practice as a psychotherapist.
Oh, is that right? But he doesn't want to practice anyway. He makes far more money doing what he...
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 yeah 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 you're gonna have to know what the outcome will be well knowing he's gonna trounce them like good luck debating that guy yeah good fucking luck like good luck like who do you got on your side that's gonna go up against that guy like shut the fuck up who on your creepy

authoritarian totalitarian regime is gonna 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

Thank you. 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 like America, but 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 some, 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 a really disastrous implications. Yeah.
But they'll probably, I mean, 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 know,

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'll see 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 to make money like to be in bed with the lobbyists in the military industrial complex and the pharmaceutical Industrial complex and they like to fucking import 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? But 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 can 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 fun 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 they're and i don't talk this way about anybody no i'm really surprised i 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 has so much control and he's been forced to resign so 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 going to happen in America, too.
If that Tim Walsh cocksucker, if that guy got into power, like if Kamala died 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 uh just weird and 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, 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 We 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 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 fucking governor. Yeah.
You ever going to run for governor? No, 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 don't know. 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 but i mean i don't like having employees but he's just great he's just great he's easy like that's why there's so few of us here you know like i have a friend who has a podcast a big podcast and there's like fucking 13 people working for him people running around with clipboards i'm like what do these people do yeah like why do you have so many people working for you like Like, this doesn't freak you out. And he's always got, like, inter-office conflicts and people are getting fired because people are fighting with each other and people are fighting over, like, promotions and trying to get to, like, backstabbing each other and, like, ugh.
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 sort of- Not even a mayor? No. I don't want to be a city councilman.
I don't want to be a congressman. I don't want to be shit.
I don't like the whole thing about it. It's just, it's not a good gig.
It's just 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 magnetic pull that takes you in the direction of being perhaps what you wanted to get.
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Get an expert now at TurboTax.com. It seems like it happens to a lot of the really idealistic young people that get involved in it, and then all of a sudden, 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 mercedes Mercedes.
Like, they get you. They slowly get you, you know? You know Evan Haver.
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, ooh, that's so true.
Oh, I mean like ideas in psychology.

Well, being around people.

Yeah, I'm with you.

Absorb the way they think.

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, ugh.

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 dc and lie yuck although I did get like a bizarre...

I did enjoy affecting the election.

Oh, dude, imagine.

I can imagine.

I did enjoy because I didn't want to.

I did not want to get involved in any way, shape, or form.

But it got so weird.

Yeah, you'd expressed that publicly in the past. I was like, I don't want to have nothing.
And I don't want to have anything to do with it in the future. I don't.
I didn't want to. I just felt sucked into it.
I'm 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 going to like, we're going to do it differently now. Like, what's going on? Did you see what's going on? Obviously'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 and talking about what to do with the land of all these homes that have been burnt down while these while it's still only six percent contained and he did this little dance like i've been talking with these like you know with the governor of hawaii about what to do we got some ideas to speculate we're gonna have some meetings like he's 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 the stuff for their kids the photos the fucking everything they have everything they Everything they have is gone.
Heirlooms, 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, 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 really 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 you know uh 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.
He's like, you've got to 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 the office obviously.
No, I know, but it's just like, it's almost like a cliche. But you know, the thing with what's going, 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 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 and with drop nets and dip nets is a huge thing. And when smelt numbers are 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 circle and had sent me a thing where Trump had called the Delta smelt like a basically useless fish.
And and I was like, man, I feel like there needs to be like a like an article in the Constitution that the president cannot shit talk smelt, you know. but then I realized it was a different smell so I got my I cooled off

once i realized it was the delta smell not our beloved rainbow smell 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 uh disparaging uh 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 draft king sportsbook an official sports betting partner of the NFL. Scoring touchdowns

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I get it. That's your world.

That's your world.

Yeah, it's, um,

there's a balance. A balance to

be held, for sure. You know, I'm

not real thrilled with this idea of

continuing to drill for oil in the gulf and drill for oil everywhere and knowing that occasionally these things blow up and you have a massive pollution and 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 it's this it's this very it's this very spirited debate and different administrations will have different plans they had a program like idle iron which is to pull them out there's 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 they're

they're you know they cause like 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

um you know it puts people in a situation and viewing it it puts you in a situation where it's

not that clean.

Yeah.

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they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, you know it puts people in a situation in viewing it it puts you in a situation where it's not that clean yeah you know like you're creating i mean you they you almost hate to say it because you're supposed to you know you know you're supposed to be uh and you know 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 spearfish there and fish there and it's like you 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 So Lake Austin used to be this, it's still very good for bass fishing. They have big bass on Lake Austin.
And 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 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 I live, people go to the docks like 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 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 remember the writer Tom? Was it Tom Robbins or Tim Robbins? No, Tim Robbins is the actor, right? Right, right. Tom Robbins, skinny legs and all, jitterbug perfume.
He had a line where, 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.
He had some line that like we used to have a crime problem and we brought in cops. It's like my first 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, and I remember I was in high school.
I went down, and I remember I was the sole person there to represent the milfoil side of the argument. And then they did it.
They went in and poisoned 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, you know, bringing in like the native seaweeds would take hold. But I mean, it absolutely transformed the lake.
And from a fishery perspective, not a perspective of native habitat, but from a pounds of fish perspective, the pounds of fish, like the biomass of fish declined by pulling out the weeds. Of course.
You know, and it's again, like some, on one hand you look like, well, why would you mess up with this? There's fish everywhere. And some people 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 is 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 ladybird lake so if you go to ladybird lake it's just hopping with bass remained a good fishery yes there's seaweed and all kinds of not seaweed but you know lily pads and all kinds of shit over there 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, you know, the shoreline zone.

And most of these fish species, they like it to be dirty, meaning weeds 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 to to to round up put round up 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 like really like verdant kind of like vibrant environment become increasingly like a swimming pool and a lot and a lot of those lakes man and it's just been it's just been it's just been depressing to watch happen yeah we were talking the other day about uh eating freshwater fish how how much toxic chemicals are in freshwater fish. It's fucking bananas.
Well, 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 who, a guy named Ron Spring. Yes.
I'll tell you the Ron Spring story? Okay, never mind. Go ahead, though.
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 to test them for heavy metals exposure. Okay.
And other toxic things are in the environment. And he'd lived his whole life like me with like 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 they'd be like, hey, you've got to go to the store and buy bread, eggs, cheese, butter, whatever.
And then they'd wait a minute and they'd say, what were you supposed to buy at the store? And he's telling me this story. And he told me, I was laughing because he said, Steve, I wouldn't have remembered that list if I never ate a piece of fish in my life.
So they were trying to gauge his memory based on the amount of heavy metal in his body? Yeah, presumably they tested his blood and found something of interest. And so they were trying to figure out what happens to a guy.
But I lived in Seattle, right on Lake Washington, and we would catch a lot of yellow perch. Because people, they're full of yellow perch, which are non-native, and everyone in that area in the Pacific Northwest is like a trout and salmon snob.
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 over 12 inches anyways. And we'd 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 a level of awareness from like an urban environment about those kind of toxins. 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 in. Man, I think it's like it's mercury, it's certain industrial solvents.
It's BPAs too. Yeahs, too.
Yeah. And I think that with Lake Washington, there was a lot.
Correct me. Maybe I'm wrong.
Like, as I say this, I might be wrong. I think there was things around Boeing plants and old solvents and stuff that went in the water.
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, mercury would come from the combustion of coal and it would be distributed globally, evenly everywhere.

So 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 paciferous 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 globally distributed in the oceans.
And they've slowed down mercury. They've slowed down how much mercury is going out because of the ways they scrub when they burn coal now.
But 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 much? I go, four, 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 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 if I come home from the comedy club and I'm hungry, it's easy to have what I thought was healthy food.

It's just sardines and olive oil.

What could be bad about that? 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.
I was like, oh, man. He goes, it's not enough to be concerned, but you're getting arsenic in your blood from these sardines.
Yeah. Well, I work with a guy, Seth, and he kind of had this perfect storm where we had been in Hawaii, so we had wahoo and yellowfin tuna, and he fishes in Alaska, so he had all his halibut, and then he's got a bunch of walleye that he catches.
He's a big walleye fisherman that he catches locally, and he wound wound up had like, there's like kind of like a long-term mercury deal and a short-term mercury deal. But 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, there's this other case that's kind of interesting.
This guy gets on a cruise ship, doesn't eat fish. This guy like doesn't have fish in his diet.
It was a 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 like uh generates mercury poisoning like a short-term version you know and dudes i hang out with in hawaii that hang out with in Hawaii that have access to a lot of big

paciferous fish, they'll sort of like deliberately pace themselves, you know?

Like 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

mercury poisoning. Really? No.
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 know. Well, no, I've had my blood tested.
I don't know. But I can't picture.
The sentiment I have about it is a friend of mine 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're talking about eating this stuff. And he said, if I can eat, if I can catch and eat so many big flatheads that it kills me, I win.
That's his attitude. Well, there's no cases of uh 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 i met ted's kid last night which one rocko yeah good kid no um you, 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 it's cervids oh just cervids cervids there hasn't been a case of it jumping to like a mole or something like that well they did 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 uh 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 all 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 like hey hang tight we're 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, you know, it didn't wasn't replicable, didn't hold up.
But when things like that happen, they tend to get a ton of 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 uh but yeah cwd um it's an it's a highly infectious disease it was first identified in colorado on a game on a 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 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 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 but now the debate is like is sort of does it matter or not right uh our mutual friend doug dern is like heavily involved in in cwd combating cwd trying to get more money spent to understand cwd um and they look at you're looking at there's two risks withD. One risk is that ultimately it's going to 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% and it takes a couple of 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, would you take that risk to be patient zero? Yanni was recently with a guy, and he's eating, him and his family have eaten four CWD-positive deer.
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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 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 at what point do you, at what point do you get comfortable?

I don't know.

Dude, it's a tough one. 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.

I used to say prion, but then I heard scientists say prion and I wanted to sound smart. 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 um so then i was like okay i'm gonna stick with prion now it's the guy that came up with it says prion oh so that's what it is and not prion yeah he's like said he's like we'll call it this and we'll pronounce it this way okay so it's prion it's now i'm now i'm trying to i always try to remember which one it is and it's uh yeah it's pre-on it's scary dude it's scary and and doug i've said this a hundred times like before like if i say man the main thing i'm worried about is people getting it um uh that pisses doug off because doug's worried about that we're gonna lose 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 the, see, that's one area where I'm going to get myself in trouble with Doug in all kinds of ways because that's the thing I think about is it's not that they're I'm not saying the ag world is complacent. Right.
I'm not saying they're complacent. Like 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 gonna get

nervous right but i'm like they're rubbing noses with these deer yeah and it gets on the grass it

gets sure and you can't kill that shit yeah i remember some politician was like well just cook

your deer meat longer and i was like well you i can't remember what it is you can't cook deer

meat to 1400 degrees you have to incinerate it or whatever you know whatever else it becomes

but but yeah cooking it isn't the thing it can survive that's why if you hunt there's a lot of

Thank you. 1300 degrees you know incinerate it or whatever you know whatever else it becomes but 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'd just be terrible if you're for a time where you couldn't bring anything.
Like, they really restrict movement, you know? Right. Like, it's easy to, 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 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 the 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 I, 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 yeah like i that's 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 well the thing is that's my kind of pork 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't got it but that's the other thing is it was over a decade ago so that's the other thing is that we all got it like all these hunters you know I don't think this is true but some people are like all these hunters they don't know it yet but it could be that all of a sudden in 10 years they all start dropping like flies or get developed dementia I don't it's such a I really think that

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

I'm sorry. rates and you look at the fact that it's always fatal, whether or not removing the human question to it, I do think that you will find that it'll become harder to produce big deer.

I worry about that.

And it'd be easy to track.

Just go and look at Boone and Crockett entries over time from all these counties.

So go to Buffalo County, Wisconsin, 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? It's like it seems very – 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're 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 it does it become like like do you view it like a rat or you see a rat and like recoil like i don't want that shit in my yard right they carry disease don't they if your dog could get it yeah like picture down the road that that like deer which are this like universally loved praised animal this kind of like symbol of the american outdoorsman becomes like a yeah that shit out of my yard you know what is when when doug talks about you know they do a lot of testing in this constant word a lot of testing what's the percentage that come up positive man uh they have i think that on doug's place i think that like last year i don't know if they got all the results from this year but i think last year they had close to 50% of bucks.
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 county wisconsin um somewhere in that ballpark and it's changed like i don't you when you were at doug's place remember at doug's place these have this uh these have this slogan like nice buck next year meaning right you know let deer grow let deer grow and and doug has really changed um over the years he's changed his tune and they 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, and CWD still spreads, right? So you wind up with this question of, like, how do you justify 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. But it's a controlled lowering to slow the 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.

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.'s crazy has it jumped to moose yeah i think that um cervids so so primarily white-tailed deer mule deer elk they found it they've had it transmit to caribou um cow i should know that because it's got way it doesn't.
Lower numbers, like, you know. Not from that.
Right, but I'm saying, like, the thing about moose is there's lower numbers, and they don't exist in, like, 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, caribouou 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 um right now in some areas particularly in the lower 48 the northern the northern states of the lower 48 between wolf depredation and uh and then uh 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...
It is found in moose in many state provinces, 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 that's maybe yeah that's but that's cockeyed they have moose in Texas no no I think it's mixing up two things but it says it there's I know but CWD has been found in Texas right but the moose in Texas 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.
Colorado is becoming like an unexpected, it's blowing up for moose. Really? Yeah.
Yeah. Colorado becomes better.
I mean, they've always said moose,ose, but Colorado's becoming a premier moose state. When did that happen? They've just been kicking ass there.
Up in the high country. More and more moose.
It's becoming a great moose state. Meanwhile, Maine is really suffering as a moose state.
Really? Yeah. Maine's whole brand promise is around moose and Colorado's going to steal it.
It's difficult to get a tag in maine right that's very hard very hard yeah yeah but it's for a non-resident especially i used to apply over there but i don't apply anymore now what what's what's causing the moose decline in maine ticks oh god this episode is brought to you by my friends at black rifle coffee that's all i drink folks drink, folks. If you see me drinking coffee in the studio, it's Black Rifle Coffee.
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Offer is valid for a limited time. Term time terms and conditions may apply help 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 it 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 uh widely dismissed by you know people that are a little bit more skeptical about conspiracies but uh rfj jr he's he believes it yeah yeah it's um 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 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's probably 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 like ah come on i don't 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, you're like, China? Okay. 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 stop. But instead he'd wake up in the morning and off in the distance, and he's like, someone else is doing it.
so uh 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 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 doing a really good job of maintaining everything. It's not a really well-maintained situation.
Yeah, I used to be a dude that 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 information. 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.

and 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.
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? 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 they're sociopaths they act like sociopaths They lie about studies.
They lie 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 I mean, at the same time, like I've been the recipient of, I've been the recipient of like remedies offered by Western medicine.

Remedies offered by Western medicine for diseases caused by science.

Yeah, you are. Possibly.

You are.

Yeah, you are a Lyme disease.

Yeah, some things.

Like if you, well, no, take a natural thing like Giardia.

These are, you know, I don't think anyone's arguing about that, but I mean, like, you get sick as shit. Oh, listen.
And 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 yeah and how do i sell it i sell it by you know like that's like remdesivir whether we're selling remdesivir during the the the covid crisis remdesivir is fucking horrible what does that know that one kidney failure they stopped prescribing 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. That's a good point.
They would have sued the shit out of him. You get a cease and desist.
Well, it's all documented. I mean, it's all backed up by, like, rock-solid information.
It's all, like, very well documented. What actually happened during the AIDS crisis, what actually happened during the COVID crisis.
It's all, it's all legitimate. It's all easy to research.
It's just scary that these people that you, 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 till four years ago a lot changed dude i'm fucking super skeptical now i'm also super skeptical of the um herd mindset that people fall into whenever there's some sort of a pandemic when there's a 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 to they're afraid of public humiliation, public, you know, 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 that were yelling at everybody else where's your mask put your mask on like you know there's people i went to a restaurant the other night the fucking guy served me had a mask on 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 um you know barry weiss's publication um and it was about when they had rolled back uh they had rolled back on masking laws i kind of forgot 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 one of these dudes that pushed a 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. So this person was arguing in some capacity they were arguing that um 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 do 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's saying, you could.
We did. And now you've granted criminals some level of anonymity.
You're cool just to walk around totally obscured. Well, it's also you're dealing with people that have severe anxiety if they think that that mask is actually going to protect them.
It doesn't do jack shit. Sure.
Especially if you're wearing the bandana. The bandana is just ridiculous.
Sure, but I'm not looking to have a rational argument with them. It was just like something I hadn't considered that you could make a law telling people about wearing masks or not.
I just forgot all about that shit. But it would be that 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 of this guy who wears a mask every day and he's been pushing for masking. He's like severely mentally ill.
Yeah. Well, that is.
Overrun with anxiety. Just like advocating for masking.
We shall be masking and double masking. 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 spotted a lot when I had a mask on.
With your mask on? Yeah, with a mask on. Yeah.
Yeah. I kind of, yeah.
Well, I'm short and wide. You know, I have an odd shape you know you know i think people look is that burly little man 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 even without like, like, 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.
Yeah. With sunglasses on and a baseball hat.
Yeah. You'd be 10% less famous.
Yeah. That's too late.
That fucking chicken is full on 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

so that 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.

Yeah, there is a movement back to that.

I think it was the mayor was proposing that.

But they should just make it illegal to wear a fucking

mask. You're a psychopath.
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 want to make sure that people can't commit crimes wearing a fucking bank robber mask this is nuts it a little bit you being um like you being a very libertarian dude i don't know if you describe yourself that way pretty much yeah i view like i'm a little surprised i remember you were having a conversation with jd vance and jd vance made a comment about uh just not a serious comment but made a comment like um you know dude 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 it was it was all said with levity yeah but i was a little surprised like i

could picture you as well um 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 there's no public there's

no public safety in skirts the guys get weird knees that's i don't 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, 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, and 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, 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. 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 so weird because during the crisis, we all – we did UFC fights.

And the UFC fights, the cornermen used to have to wear masks.

So, like, I'll see, like, highlights from, like, 2021.

And you see, like, the cornermen with the mask.

Like, God, I forgot about this. It's so ridiculous.

And their nose is hanging out. It's like the whole thing but cover your nose oh yeah okay like as if it matters like okay 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 oh it's i forgot my mask sure what do you want me to do this is the same goddamn thing like 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 of like needing to yell at my kids all the time because if you travel with your kids and they never got the stupid things on you know you're like but then you're not you're not even you're not even yelling at them about that 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 attendant yeah you spent two years being like put your damn mask on put your mask on i don't think it works no one 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'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, and we're all going to laugh.
And that's, like every now and then I'll go through my closet, and I'll put a jacket on that I haven't worn forever and i reach into a pocket and i pull out a fucking stupid surgical mask 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 brought up when i did that podcast with him like you sell masks on your website i go what do 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 off those fucking for these forego the profits I would pay have them illegal.
I'll give the government $10,000 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.
It was a good experiment to see how many people around you are bitches who would just fall in line the moment things got weird. And 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're always like following rules, always following rules and assuming somebody has your best interest in mind. And they don't.
They don't. There'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 fuck. 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 in new zealand new zealand's far more restrictive than us but our the way our system is set up all these television networks cnn n NBC, CBS, ABC, they all rely on a giant percentage of their advertising budget.
It 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.

The ads are great.

Yeah.

It's like it'll 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 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 just getting lucky, you know? Yeah.
And it's like, ask your doctor if such and such. And 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, God. Anal bleeding.
Oh, Christ. 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 you know you get 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 terror attacks to my kids you know and i want to be when they make in 10 years 20 years whatever when they make, in 10 years, 20 years, whatever, when they make a docuseries on the COVID-19 pandemic and the social response and the government response, 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? Yeah.
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 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.

They're going to be.

There's even a term.

There's a term.

It's called gel syndrome.

Maybe, Jamie, you 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. There's no amnesia.
Something gel, gel man, gel, type in gel amnesia. If you don't mind, it's killing me.
Gel man amnesia. It's that, let's say you're, 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.
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? 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 going to be like, 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.
Let's 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 on the trap that the amnesia is 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 uh 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.'s possible with some the hope or 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 with uh especially open source ones um the problem is they're they're essentially drawing from the entire internet, right? So you would have to assess where these large language models are getting their information from. 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 could distort the information that people would get. Yeah, 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, in the very short term,

AI is coming for certain types of writing.

Certain types of writing are going to be made obsolete by AI.

But the reason I don't worry about it as of now as a writer is it it's always going to be representative of it's always gonna 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 tom 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 to start being more careful about being like that Your work remains at the vanguard of feeding into the system of newness. Right.
Yeah. And that's going to be like a big challenge, 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 I was like, man, this ain't gonna be good for a writer.

Well,

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?

That was a hot topic?

Yeah,

it was all about witches

and witchcraft.

Yeah, how to spot sorcery. No, I didn 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 gonna know the truth no no i had no idea it's a lot of like how to spot witches they were the most popular books yeah but i think that like um 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 guess I've like survived through enough changes in the media landscape that I'm not as terrified as I once was.
Right? Yeah. I always said the first time I heard the word podcast was in the context of your name, right? 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 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 coming 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 the especially podcast it seemed so ridiculous most people thought it was stupid yeah and you even said 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 cause 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 wouldn't have done it had you said it well it seemed or i'd 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 this is 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.
And then the other thing is it just infuses you with so much knowledge. Yeah.
Because like you said, you get to corner people you want to corner. Oh, yeah.
That's the best part. Yeah.
The best part is the unintended education. Yeah.
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? 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 what's the beginning of this and then you know it's beneficial to everybody who listens too it's a weird new thing you know you know i want to tell you about because it's like this thing i'm trying trying to hunt down.
I recently had a guy on my podcast whose name is Randy Brown. And my brother Danny recommended him too because he works.
He's a fisheries biologist in Alaska. So he came on the show and what he did is in the 70s, he grew up in New Mexico and always wanted to live in the woods.
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.
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 of 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, 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's 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 um 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 on the river. And they keep telling them, 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 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, no way can you walk 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, no way can you walk to that area.

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.

It was a real bad snow year. He tracked him for about five miles and just said, ah, never mind, it's not worth it.
The next year, he takes a different route and goes into the headwaters of this river where this guy had taken off with his snowshoes, and he's canoeing down the river and sees his snowshoes hanging in a tree, okay? And there's a little cabin there, a little line cabin they had 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 says 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 He literally has no money. He's got no way to transport a body in the summertime to Eagle or Circle Alaska.
Does he have a responsibility to do that? This is in the 70s, man. He did.
He explains himself and did well. He didn't.
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 going to 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 didn't never caught the guy's name told it to a few people a while later he goes back and the body has was gone presumably been eaten by something so after we do this interview i can't stop this dude.
And I'm like, how can it not be that someone out in the world, like someone that has a kid or a brother or an uncle, 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 in the 70s. 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 if 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 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 said to him to Randy 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 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'm like, when I had this guy on the podcast, what should I ask him about? And he goes, ask him about the guy he found.
So he gives me this book. He gives me this book.
And it's called 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 to death is very much on his mind.
Like him and his body's even made up a sort of pact. Right.
So, 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 and they go up in the they're kind of north of the tree line but they're in a timbered grove um 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 um 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 um 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 i'm 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 eat them i've done that it just makes like a gelatin kind of tasteless like leather noodle basically.
And what he's documenting as they're dying from this is the horrible bowel obstruction. And they're trying to make, like in his journal, he's describing this, of trying to make 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 into bone plugs.
and even when they find these guys years later a guy from the canadian mountain police is Mounted Police is doing this very, basically a crime scene description of what went on in here. And still laying there a couple years later is a plate full of solidified excrement.
Oh, God. Everything else rotted away.
These guys are just skeletons, but that bone shit. Oh.
Yeah. and you look at like you and i just finished this book the other day and um so you look and be like oh they're starving to death starving to death but like when you starve that all this stuff is actually going on and it 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, 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 Donner 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

pers- 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 to struck off and the guy struck off with a 22 pistol and Randy's like um you cannot in that environment you cannot survive with a 22 pistol but he just knows it categorically you cannot survive the 22 pistol and the dude didn't yeah how could you yeah well you people would probably think that there's such a badass they would be so many bows do you 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 pistols 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 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.
And they'd load their big game bullets, you know. All the .243.
243 caribou the 243 where's he getting all the gunpowder or is he getting they were loading their own stuff wow so you'd have to go somewhere to get resupply yeah they would they had a camp that one of their camps they had a reloading station the various guys live in the bush would kind of come in there and use that reloading station and that John the Baptist Dude looted that reloading station Yeah, you gotta kill those guys Those guys accorded caused you to starve to death. Yeah, if you're in that kind of an environment and someone's a mooch now But you know what's weird is about it that I can't that someone point 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 brulee that the French brought over and like he's known as Etienne brulee and the french brought him over during the colonial era and gave him 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 uh allegedly ate him so everybody knows him as etienne brulee but which is burnt right But did he get the name after or before? Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Yeah, so you're like, well, hold on a minute.
Did he just happen? He presumably got burned to death or boiled or whatever. So it's like, is he Etienne Brule because of what happened to him or was he running around with that moniker and then 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 him? No, people keep telling me that.
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.
Yeah. 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 met him that way right originally i met him that way and then when he did um bourdain show you know 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 uh I don't know man almost like this like exodus of talent like all these people that worked on that great show you know um and they went on to do other stuff and then Mo and I got joined up on this and we've worked on Mo's a showrunner on it and we've worked on it together and uh it's coming out January 28th and it's a show on history channel where we look at outdoor mysteries so i brought up that we did an episode on donner party and um you might ask like what's the mystery about the donner party but it's kind of like what happened um 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 um you make people make when they're making a joke about cannibalism you'd be like oh the donner party you know i mean like people don't realize what happened there but and and going to that place uh 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 um a thing that you never ever realize and it changes everything i've ever thought about it half of those more than half of those were kids oh my god yeah you don't think about, right? It's mostly children. And you get into all this wild stuff about it, like you're trying to keep your kids alive.
Yeah. Right? So there's this sort of like, earlier I said, I'll touch on cannibalism.
I was talking about Randy Brown making that cannibalism pact. You're trying to keep your kids alive.
And the kids, by 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 the psychology of why keep going on.
You know what I mean? And then you think about it from that angle. If your kids were faced with starving to death, you would absolutely feed your kids human meat.
Yeah. 100 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 a those families still carry the stigma of course

you know

it's terrible

like They always did just like what they needed to to live, you know, but then there's 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 realize that and then following that up with reading that book about like the pain and anguish of of starving to death.
like you wind up having just more uh i want up 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. Got it.
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 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 to the ocean and they never made it and yeah but and there was they wound up having to do cannibalism yeah yeah and in the donner party they would have times in some of these cases they had a little system where you would not 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.. 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 than that they were eating people that were already there Jesus when we were out there filming in Donner Pass we met these people and they were saying that these guys were doing this thing about places named with Christmas names and they had thought Donner Like Donner and Blitzen? Oh god Oh wow 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 me on a arrow me on a arrow channel that one that episode oh it's like a whole little trailer so what is the 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 um when i was uh for instance when when I was growing up in the Great Lakes region, there's a, 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.
There's still people actively searching for it. We do one on Donner Party party what's in the ship that they're trying to get but it'd be gone now it was full of beaver pelts it was full of about like six tons of beaver pelts and uh there's all these different theories about that the crew mute need whatever but there's a guy this dude named steve libert who came out of uh 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, I went and dove that, that site to check out his claim of having identified this ship.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't think he's got it.
No? No. 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 i think he's found a very old ship but i don't think he's found the six thousand and ten thousand shipwrecks wow yeah wow the burden of the burden of proof on finding the griffin is is hard so his dude you've heard of the guy lasall lasall no he wound up dying down in this neck of the woods um he built the first ship and he got 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 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 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 it's somewhere.
It's somewhere. You know, because stuff lasts so long.
Like in that fresh water, stuff lasts so long. You'll go dive down and look at ships that are 100 years old, 200 years old.
Looks like you could refurbishish things. Really? Except for the ones that get broke up by ice.
Yeah. So that ship's laying around.
Wow. I'd like to tell you we found it.
Oh, God. 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 of 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 no they're so big especially when you add them all together you know yeah in places pretty deep but yeah they're littered with stuff man and dudes like there's just 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 yeah because you 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, LaS salle brought cannons from europe mounted them on the boat so like to in case someone was he was ready pirates did they have pirates back they did but also they just would you know try to intimidate native american tribes and you know they'd get them into the fur trade but also there's like rogue people and you're also at that time the french are duking it out with english had a big toe hold up in hudson bay um 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 like picture we had a picture if we had a naval vessel that sank off france right now it's not france's 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.
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 world it is man that's a because if you get lucky and if you find one that's filled with like Roman coins yeah like you we were talking about billions of dollars a lot of money to be made 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 like i mean like passed right over it so we didn't get to go do that we didn't go do that show um we did one about uh that centered that want to become a mostly a story that centered around um in the 70s there's this aircraft that was carrying the speaker of the house so do you remember um uh was it is it neena no hey jamie i i i hate to be treating you like a research assistant here hail cokie roberts that's who you know you know the journalist cokie roberts like npr and shit okay yes yeah Cokie Roberts' father was this guy, Hale Boggs.

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 Begich, 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, 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 what I mean?

Yeah, 1972.

Yeah, but it makes sense in Alaska.

Oh, it does.

But then you get into the huge number of all these missing aircraft and, like, search centered around this glacier that it would have been that 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.
And I think it was, 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 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 to 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.

Wow.

Yeah, we went right there.

1952.

Yeah.

Wow.

Look at that wheel.

Yep.

And on top of that glacier, we had got there after that.

We flew over it in a helicopter.

They don't want you landing there. But on top of that glacier is all 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 um this this other glacier where like most of that search focused for that baggage bogs 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 at like 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.
Well, here's dude searching that one. 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 man it's moving i mean not like literally alive but it's like groaning and moving yeah we went down and back back down to one of those sound like you know it was pretty quiet that day it was actually more peaceful there because you know how much that all that cold air from that ice generates so much wind we land this helicopter there and um the wind's howling and i don't know much about aviation i mean i use it a lot but uh the wind's so bad i was asking guy what point do you risk that your helicopter's gonna 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 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, 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 but it's like me just here you know i remember you telling about you're like you're uh you know that uh that 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 in there just thinking like how you just how you could get um smushed oh just obliterated yeah you know there's stories i was hunting with this dude years ago and he used to he used to be um involved with outward bound and they were doing a glacier hike a guide was doing a glacier hike and they 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.
Oh, God. Right? So picture you, like, you go down.
Oh, God. So you're down there.
You can hear water running everywhere. You can hear rivers underneath you inside that.
But 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 pushing heat, it'll melt the ice around the threads.

So you'll actually drill these big holes into the glacier like a V. Picture you're coming

in like a V and the two upper parts of the V are like 30 inches apart. And you drill

at a 45 degree angle until those holes meet. Then 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.
It can melt the thread out. So you're tied in on a little like, yeah, you're like tied.
Hoping it holds on. Onto a hunk of the ice.
You bag down into those suckers, dude. It's like it's an ass pucker.
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 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 an arrow yeah he was all tore up yeah well they made a movie about his last days a fictional movie I haven't watched 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 had a tattoo on his shoulder that was his wife he had tattoos yeah he did have tattoos it's just really wild thousands of years ago right um there's a really dumb movie about an ice man that uh i think it was like the 1980s i think it's called ice man no i remember that they they bring a guy back to. Yeah, and then the wife falls in love with him.
Oh, shit, I didn't know that happened, man. That happens in there? So dumb.
Yeah, the Iceman 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!

Is that what this is? It is. It's probably 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 these old movies like this. The other night we were watching.
Timothy Hutton. Temple uh indiana jones and temple of doom and you know the the love interest like the the indies love interest

in that movie i can't remember what her name is but anyways we're watching it with our with our

youngest kid and um who really wanted to watch 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 how perfect oral processes have made everybody's teeth.
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 you're like yeah you're right like teeth are so perfect on everybody now you know and you're looking at an old movie you're like oh that's before they were able to do all that right that's funny we watched that we watched that stupid show uh uh on new year's eve you know that ball dropping thing yeah and just you know 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 like but absurdly so you know and it was just really funny to look at that and be like you're right like there's something that looks like you can't put your finger on it's like the the the 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 her charm she had this gap yeah nowadays you'd feel some pressure to go tighten that up yeah you know probably put some shit on your teeth you want to be in the big movies gonna tighten that up tighten it up it's funny you were talking about the beaver pelts because 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 um just an immigrant right

comes to the u.s he's trying to figure out a way to make his to 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 um and that was like that was the commodity for uh north america when you look at all the english powers coming or all the european powers coming to establish colonies you know it's known like the spanish come in and they get like all that aztec gold all that incan gold other european powers were like jealous about the wealth spain was pulling out and mineral wealth and they always thought that in 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 the was fur you know fur was our thing fur was like the thing of value so astor became a fur trader um 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 originalsals and, um, we did one on the deer skin trade called the long hunters. It was about Daniel Boone, 1770s in the deer skin 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 do.
So when you hear about Jim bridger john colter 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 if all and when when they would trap a beaver so you know the revenant fucking be fucking beavers were around back then? a lot 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 in the tens of millions what are they now? 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?

But

people had always whittled away at them you know like earlier i mentioned daniel boone like his primary job was a deerskin he was in the deerskin trade and what they were using for back then 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, we found that 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 from history yes it's like a fur trading enterprise the hudson bay company in the english always had this model of the fur trade where they would build posts and then incentivize indians to hunt fur trap fur. They didn't trap, like 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, the sentiment was, it's beneath us, we're not going to give up our whole life away, everything we need comes from the buffalo, we live in big family groups, we follow the herds, 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 going to get the beaver? And so so they start hiring dudes they start hiring orphans and people that that that uh 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 hire 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 like that was the mountain man era all that stuff when they caught those be, 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 got these silky long guard hairs, and then there's under wool 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 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 under wool off throw the guard hair away uh throw the leather away take that under wool and turn it into a felt to make a hat Wow. ebenezer scrooge top hat that's what that shit was about so when this dude when lasalle you know comes over and 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 gonna build a giant ship fill that sucker full of beaver hides and i'll get rich thousands of beaver hides but but it but yeah 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 in this in this mountain men project we're doing like that whole history was born um you 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. If there's a time- 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 you don't no one knows you're there

you know you just go watch what where would you go would you go to that no i just changed my time for a long time i knew what my time was but i just changed my time recently what what is it i'll be happy to i'll be happy to explain what did it used to be uh there used to be an idea that's existed for much of my life

is about the peopling of the americas and um 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 of the Red Sea.

But you could have lived and died on the, you know,

generations were probably born and died on the Bering Land Bridge

with no idea that it was a bridge.

Like I said, it was 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,

we did a hunting history episode about this very question of,

um,

how and when and who,

Thank you. up anymore so we did a hunting history episode about this very question of um how and when and who were the first people to enter the continent right and now um 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 in 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 just somewhere around 13 14 what about those uh new mexico footprints that are 22 000 years old again yeah's clouded in the picture.
There's a lot of the dating, the dating on

that is clouded. But anyways, it's like

antiquity in America is much older than originally thought.

Right. So, 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 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 this corridor opened when they thought it did. So now the fashionable idea, it seems rock solid.
We film 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 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 remained remarkably similar. And with great speed, with great speed, all the way down the coast.
So all of a sudden there's people in Chile. Wow.
And instead of this idea that people came into the Great Plains and then spread to the coasts, it's that people came down that route. And, you know, that really old site, the currently oldest, the currently oldest, like, ironclad, absolutely accepted, academic consensus accepted site is that Snake River site on the Columbia drainage.
that they came down the coast and then the the continent was populated 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 their genesis was in these seafaring people and as people came down they kind of filled in so you go to like you know the the the the the the clingit or the hyda right um that live along the alaskan coast now like that's their ancestors right they were the they were they were perhaps people living that

way in 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

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 that well yeah that that's where the original the human diaspora is like anatomically like the sort of widely accepted scientific explanation is that anatomically and behaviorally modern humans. There was many waves of hominids coming out of Africa, but sometime around 70,000 years ago, 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 stop. Wow.
And what's wild is there's monkeys down there. Yeah.
That's what's wild. But man, there's this theory called the salutrian hypothesis, which is that Northern Europeans came over 10 plus thousand years ago.
There's always these different ideas that someone, you know, someone from somewhere else blew in on a raft. There's always this thing.
But what I'm talking about is a sort of like, again, the kind of like academically accepted idea, the sort of mainstream idea remains and is supported by genetic, linguistic, everything is that humans came out of the Americans that

are Native Americans came out of Siberia through a Siberian pathway, probably in waves. 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.
You live there. The sage wall is a recent discovery.
It was on private property. And these people, it was completely covered with woods and deadfalls and everything.
And they started cleaning it out and they found this thing that looks remarkably like a constructed wall. That's the wall in montana it's very wow it's very strange it's very strange and it's a vertical wall it goes down 13 feet under the ground and uh it's long and straight and it's very confusing because it very much looks like placed stones that were cut and moved somehow uh in this particular way.
And there's a lot of debate about whether or not- That's a wild looking wall. Wild looking.
Well, see if you could 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 um man-made but it's confusing oh you know i am yeah i'm familiar with that area yeah no i got it it's real weird yeah i mean looking 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 was I couldn't tell if he had a bug or if that was a nose ring but like 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, around 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.
I know. We'll do a future episode on that question.
I think natural, too, until you look at some of them. Like, some of those images, go back to some of those images, Jamie.
Some of those images are like, how the fuck? Like, they're so flat and straight. And look at that.
That is insane. From that angle, it's insane.
From that angle, you would no doubt 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 looks fake but it does look fake is that a fake image or is that the real image i can't tell that you know what added to the picture yeah it doesn't look like the same stuff from the video okay well let's see some of the images 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.
Look at the, it looks like a, so yeah, that's starting to look like these AI. Yeah, that looks AI.
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 here's a video this guy walk it down.
Yeah, it's really interesting stuff because there's so much evidence of humans Right the the you know with the mortal and pestle sure 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 like 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 is um and i have a friend uh david melzer i don't know if you're looking for guest suggestions but heffelfinger melzer okay i can love him but anyway melzer um he's an anthropologist and he's always been involved in this debate about where these these clovis hunters and these ice age americans like to what degree were they really these like uh northern wild men killing mammoths with spears and shit right um 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. And explaining away, David, I hate me saying this, but explaining away evidence that they were slaying mammoths.
And also explaining away the theory that they killed all the mammoths. And 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, man mammoth hunters right right you know and it's the more dude to be like oh no um you know yeah berry pickers right like they're they were gentle um but they they've finally just did all this work and and lo and behold um he was young but he would uh the uh he was eating mother, you know, drinking mother's milk.
Um, and it was, uh, they were mammoth eaters, you know, which backs up this idea that those big ass points, um, those big ass points they made were like being used. I participated in this study, uh, me and some of the guys I work with participate in this study with Meltzer, this guy named Metten 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 were supposed to just 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 the problem they have when they're looking at 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 to butcher this whole thing, a fresh dead bison, all the stone points, and then they went and cleaned all the bones. This guy John Hayes from Hayes Taxolery 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 be, to compare, you know? Like there's this famous Folsom site where all these, these 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.
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 um in going and extracting the tongue with stone tools i didn't do shit would have left any kind of mark like that you know and again you don't know how they did what they did but it just 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'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 just goes to show like you 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 they maybe that 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 that'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 could spend many, many, many, many, many days out wandering around the woods

and you don't find fresh dead 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.
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 the north and south america like a a sort of motivational driver for that really quick spread would be that let's say you were the you're you're you pop out in the great plains and the animals have never seen a person right a mammoth has never seen a person um 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.
You know, like I've had occasion before to see like an elk that would have had no way to encounter a dog. Encounter a dog.
And their attitude is kind of like, the hell is that? Right? Yeah. I mean, they're like curious about it.
They're kind of looking at it. So you can imagine like 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 going to do? Tiny thing.

Yeah, what's this thing going to 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.
Wow. 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 Noah 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. Mm-hmm.
Right? 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 you know there's skin cells from six mammoths a short-faced bear right right whatever it's just it's getting crazy you know it's funny like funny. Like talking about Indiana Jones, like that style, like the archaeology is becoming increasingly anthropology.
Archaeology is becoming like the realm of the science, like 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 100 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 them everything they need to 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. That's a place you should visit.
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, 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 them 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 they said that they dumped these things off, they found them now.
It's really wild. And so...
Yeah, that's a... 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 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 a hurry, man.
Archaeological. Yeah.
It gets a little, yeah. We, uh, we did one on the, we did one on the, the lost Roanoke colony.
And, um, there's archeologists working on what happened at the Ross lost Roanoke colony. And the minute you, um, bring up like human remain conversations, people, it's just like, shut the up yeah because it's get real weird enormously

complicated yeah i recently met a guy that does um he's a he's pueblon 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 the pueblo 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 the remains of his ancestors from all these museums and stuff. You know, they want them back.
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 yeah 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 and like no we're keeping it really yeah we're gonna do studies on him you know god it's so complicated yeah so yeah i think that it would be um finding that and then what complicates a lot of that human remains stuff too especially with stuff that he's talking about that stuff he has is as old as it did is you there's a little bit of a a little bit of question like the groups that are there now peoples that are there now were the people's that were there before right you know because people move all the time right you just look at like like how the comanche moved look how the sioux were in the upper midwest and in areas 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, it is not that. 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 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 are papered.
So you can't see. And there was a sign that just said, like we're in a repatriation issue.
So they blocked it all. Wow.
You know, I don't even know what was behind the paper. Whatever the display was, 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 those 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 um when i went it was the it was the child that had been struck by lightning after the fact and it was you know you just walk up and it's in a it's in a case but you're looking at someone's baby you know wow looking at someone's young child look like the the kid looked like you 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 I mean, wow. What is it, man? Oh, here's something that he found.
Look at this. This had been sawed.
Oh, no shit. Yeah.
So the piece that's missing. He found that like that? Mm-hmm.
The piece that's missing that's cut right there, that was a piece that they made to date it. Oh, I got it.

But the top part had been sawed.

Huh.

Yeah.

I forget how old that was.

No shit.

Yeah.

Yeah, but 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.

I would definitely like to. He's a fun dude, too.

All right, Steve. So your show, Hunting history channels that available now is it on now january 28th january 28th okay 10 p.m eastern there it is hunting history steve rinella there it is all right 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, man.
12 years ago. Yeah.
Time flies. Yeah, 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 and 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 got to put it to rest.

I can't stop thinking about that guy.

All right.