Behind the Bastards - The War of the Eggs

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

Robert is joined by Billy Wayne Davis to discuss the war on eggs.FOOTNOTES: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-california-went-war-over-eggs-180971960/ https://books.google.com/books?id=GDAZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA625&lpg=PA625&dq=%252525252522of+course+there+was+an+egg+war%252525252522&source=bl&ots=pZD5JqJ0RI&sig=ACfU3U0pVk0bJkfWLpUrMaDEurg_0hMbuw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiRycqf7JXhAhVqhuAKHS6uAgMQ6AEwAnoECAkQAQ%2525252523v=onepage&q=%252525252522of%252525252520course%252525252520there%252525252520was%252525252520an%252525252520egg%252525252520war%252525252522&f=false#v=onepage&q=%252525252522of%252525252520course%252525252520there%252525252520was%252525252520an%252525252520egg%252525252520war%252525252522&f=false https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DAC18600624&e=-------en--20-DAC-1--txt-txIN-%252525252522breathing+defiance+against+each+other.%2525252525E2%252525252580%25252525259D-------1 https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/15/487644637/the-gold-hungry-forty-niners-also-plundered-something-else-eggs https://sfist.com/2016/08/17/egg_war_farralons/ https://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_pre/ https://twitter.com/gragtah/status/442053685837717504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E442053685837717504%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsfist.com%2F2015%2F10%2F07%2Fsan_francisco_has_always_been_a_pre%2F https://books.google.com/books?id=GbPeRKhxJ08C&q=egg#v=snippet&q=egg&f=false   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Shit. Ah, damn it. I botched another introduction. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is never introduced professionally, despite it being literally my one job to do in order to distract. What's up with that? Sophie, okay, everyone already knows I fucked up. You don't have to jump on the kick me pile.

Here to distract from my failures, Billy Wayne Davis. Hey, guys, it's good to be back. I didn't think you messed it up. I thought the enthusiasm was there. That's all it really counts. Thank you, Billy. Thank you for successfully helping to height me back up. Now my ego has exploded again. Good. I like it up there real big. It's fun. I just want to publicly say that Robert told me if he ever asks me for a green juice, I'm supposed to kill him.

Yes, that was our rule. Because of a celebrity that shall not be named. Billy. That ego. Oh, right under the green juice level. I think that's asking, you can get your own green juice. I'm not going to be drinking green juice. Don't do it, Robert.

If I care about living that long ever, then I've lived too long already. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you don't have kids. See, we have to think different. You got it. You got it. That's good. Billy, it's been a little while. How have you been? I'm good. I mean, yeah. We've all been fighting the powers our own ways.

I saw some of your fighting the power. You can talk about the movie you were in now, I assume. If it's a secret, it's a bad one still. I think, yeah, I think, yeah. It is fun when people ask me, like, was that you? I'm like, I don't know. I do not know. Well, Billy. I was in Borat too, you guys. It was really fun. You were. And it's a great movie. You were great in it. And you got to hang out with some of my favorite chuds.

Yeah, I did. The Pacific Northwest. Yeah. Some of the people with guns who like to stand on street corners and yell at teenagers. That was... Light, lovely. I mean, it wasn't... That guy I've told my wife and other people, it was like, they're like, were you scared? I was like, it was people I grew up with. I know how to talk to them.

Yeah, they're not super complicated. But you know what is complicated, Billy? That was a great transition. Thank you. No, I was... Give a guess. So much stuff in my brain. Just eggs. Eggs are complicated.

A lot going on with an egg. Oh, man. Yeah. I forgot what podcast I was on and where we were going. And I was like, oh, eggs. And then I was like, nope, this is not going to go in a good... I like eggs and now I don't like them. You like eggs, so you like eggs.

You're on board as liking eggs, that's correct. Yeah. As far as a diet, they're pretty great. How do you feel about war? Less? I feel... I mean, at this point in history, I think it's a silly concept. How do you feel about the city of San Francisco?

I'm okay. All these things together I'm on board with. Okay. Yeah. That's what we're talking about. The egg war that rocked San Francisco for like 30 years back in the 1800s. Hail, yeah. Yeah.

We're talking about the egg wars. This sounds like some silly war that I would be involved in. Yes. It is some silly bullshit, Billy. It is some very, very funny, silly bullshit. And it starts as most stories of silly bullshit do in the city of San Francisco. Or at least like the collection of tents and whorehouses that became San Francisco eventually. It was really just a campsite with a lot of prostitutes back then.

Yeah. It's always been pretty great. It's always been great. And the poop on the streets thing, not new. No. No. No. No, the abundance, I think, is the new part.

Yeah. That's what I noticed when I was there. I was like, it's not that there's shit on the street. That is not new. There's a lot of it, you guys, and they were like, that is the problem. That is the problem. And I also think the average fiber content per person shitting on the street may have increased.

That's a theory I have. Well, I think if we're being honest, what happens is when you're on heroin, you get constipated and then you release all of it at once is what we're dealing with. Yeah. So, Billy, in 1848, the city of San Francisco's population was a mere 800 people. And again, it was basically just a big muddy campsite. There were more redwoods than people at this stage. And there used to be a shitload of redwoods all over San Francisco before we murdered

all those priceless works of natural art so that we could have the WeWork buildings. Can you imagine if there were redwoods just all over the city now? Instead of the things that are there? Yes. Some of the things that are there. Just like, no, like some of them. Yeah. We can keep like the 500 Club, like the good bars and shit.

Yes. Yeah, all of North Beach's stays. Yeah. Just a bunch of bars and redwoods and nothing else. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of grocery stores. So, yeah.

On January 4th, 1848, a carpenter building a mill near Coloma, California found flakes of gold in the water. The news got out and in a very short order, tens of thousands of Americans flooded into California's first gold rush. And California's kind of always been just a series of gold rushes ever since. That's why there's 40 million people here because people are dumb and they like easy money. Damn.

Also the weather. Vegas ain't getting smaller. No, no, it's not. Thank God, actually, this election, thank God for Las Vegas. One time I will say that. That is the thing you're looking at, Matt, huh? I'll be damned. Well, they did it.

No bother, huh? Okay. All right. I guess we'll keep gambling illegal everywhere else. Yes. You guys earned another four years. Well, my thought was like with that was like real quick, like, oh, he's pissed off everyone. Yeah.

He's got Vegas angry. Yes. And they're so easy to distract. Yes. Oh, yeah. It is funny that he picked a fight with Philadelphia too. Yeah. That's just that.

The bet. Yeah, you can't, they'll come to, they'll cross an aisle to get in a fight. Speaking of fights, you know, because of the Oakland Raiders, this is close enough anyway. Yeah. So all these people start flooding into California because they want to shitload of gold. And the city of San Francisco or the collection of tents that became San Francisco grew rapidly from a population of about 848 to 20,000 people by 1850. That's a lot.

I just think of, have you, and we've been to those cities like where the population explodes and the infrastructure can't really handle it. Yes. There's traffic everywhere. Yes. That's just traffic. Yeah. This is like before sewers.

Yeah. Like you see right now in a couple of cities in the world or even in the United States, you know, they grew too fast. There was a sudden influx of people and the infrastructure can't keep up. And it's a problem going from 800 to 20,000 people in two years is a calamity. It's like a hurricane hit. Like it's a natural disaster, you know, and it doesn't, it doesn't go well. It creates a series of problems, most of which will actually sound eerily familiar to anyone

who lives in San Francisco today or who's just like driven through it. And I want to quote here from a paragraph in The Anals of San Francisco about the city culture during the Gold Rush era. Despite the, and again, this is like written in fucking the 1850s. Despite the amazingly high cost of living and the extraordinary opportunities for frittering away money, everyone in Italy, San Francisco was supremely confident that he would be able to return home with an incalculable amount of gold. Everything was conceived on a vast scale and there was always plenty of cash available

for any scheme that might be proposed, no matter how impossible or bizarre it seemed. Oh, how the times have changed. Yeah, it's a completely different city today. Wow. You wouldn't write that exact same paragraph about San Francisco 160 years later. It's just that, that voice has changed. Now it's like, now it's like, in a land of ones and zeros. Yeah.

No, bro, you'd pay a cash for any plan you could propose. Yeah. Yeah, no, they're like big cars, but they carry a lot of people. Yeah, those are buses. No. No, no, because we don't pay the driver a salary. Instead, he gets a per mile fee based on an app and we don't have to give him health care. Brilliant.

Yeah. Brilliant. Where do you see what I'm going to do to Rhodes? We're laughing, but that's a conversation. Yeah, that is a conversation. I'm excited for rotor without an E, the app to come out and privatize the filling of potholes so that there are somehow more of them. Domino's tried that. It doesn't work.

So most depictions of San Francisco in the 1850s portray it as, again, essentially just a pile of brothels, casinos and crude tent neighborhoods filled with filthy male minors. One of the first problems that this explosion population had is that there were almost no women in the entire city. Oh, that's not good for the prostitution. Well, it's good for the prostitutes that are there. Well, yeah, it's good for Brenda. Brenda's having a good time. It's a seller's market for Brenda. Yeah, Brenda's like, hey, that'll be easy.

So one minor during this period is purported to have acquired a single woman's slipper and made a good living charging his fellows a dollar to touch it. Oh. I know that you understand how that works, too. I just thought of times in my life where I could see making a living doing that. A less ethical business person in the same field was Eliza Farnham, who operated a boat called the Bride Ship that ferried women from the east coast to the west, presumably so they could marry whichever minors had the best luck in uncovering gold. Yeah. Just a boat full of brides. At that time period, if we're being honest, that is not the worst way people were getting married.

No, because there's a decent chance you'll die on the boat. That's way better than being married back then. So food was, however, by a wide margin, the most expensive thing in the city because, again, basically no one lived in California at this point. I should say basically no white people lived in California and the indigenous people were not exactly psyched to help out a bunch of gold miners and also genocide and such. So yeah, there was not a great deal of farming infrastructure. There was not a great deal of food for this sudden, what had essentially been a small town that had turned into what at that point was like a mid-sized city almost overnight. There just wasn't fucking food. And for an example of how incredibly expensive shit was in San Francisco at this point, it was actually worse than it is today by comparison. So restaurants in... Unimaginable. Because it's incredibly expensive to eat in San Francisco. Right now, that's my opening joke. I paid $10 for a taco. My opening joke is literally to the crowd like, oh, are you all roommates? Is that how you all... is the whole crowd the roommate? And everyone laughs every time because it's funny.

Yeah, because they're actually two different households. Exactly, yeah. So at this period of time in the early 1850s, restaurants in town charged a dollar for a slice of bread, $2 if it was buttered, which is the equivalent of $56 in modern money. Wow. It's neck and neck. Because San France where the toast craze came from. Oh, you can get some good toast in San Francisco. Look, they've gotten good at making toast over the years. I guess it's always been a staple. Yeah. In 1850, a nice breakfast for two, which consisted of cheese, butter, sardines, bread, and two beers, would cost the equivalent of $1,200 modern dollars. So...

It's the same. It's the same, yeah. As is probably clear by now, the real money to be made in San Francisco during the gold rush was not in mining gold, but was in selling miners the things that they needed at radically inflated prices, which is kind of the same. There's a fun story from Reading, California, which is the center of the marijuana industry that nobody ever talks about because nobody wants to think about Reading all that much. Well, it's just on the highway, so it's easy. It's where a lot of the sales happen. And it's a good growing area all around it because it's dry, but also hot. People talk about Humboldt, but it's a bit wet there. One of the big things that is like a major product in the pot industry are turkey bags, which is what you put the pot into when you process it. And they're the bags that you would brine a turkey in.

And the company that made these bags noticed that year round they were selling a shitload of turkey bags in Reading, California. So they sent like a representative out to figure out like, are people just eating turkey all year round in this town? And then he found out and he had to like quietly go back home. We can't really advertise on this. I just interviewed a lady in Southern Humboldt and during the camp days, a bunch of, yeah, revenuers, as I was pointed out, this is the RS. I was like, well, moonshine, they call them revenuers and they were like, yeah. And they went, this guy was selling a black pipe and he sold way more than anyone ever had ever, ever sold ever. And they were like, let me see your books.

And the old man was like, no, no, no. You don't need to know why I'm selling this much of this stuff. Because you guys will make them stop doing this and I like money, man. I ain't doing anything illegal. I just liked that the old man was like, no, no. I ain't turning that money fountain off, sir. No thing I need to be doing that. So the same things happening in San Francisco during this period.

People are figuring out the people who are really making money aren't mining gold. They're mining miners, you know? And yeah, the most intelligent of them realized that, you know, the easiest thing to sell miners and the most profitable thing would be food and sex, but there was more competition in the sex business. Now, the most desired food stuff in all of the Bay Area was eggs. Not only are eggs filled with protein, they're a necessary ingredient in all manner of pastries and cakes. You know, you can't make fucking bagels or whatever without, or whatever. You can't make a lot of shit without eggs.

Yeah, they're critical. And alas for the growing polity, Gold Rush Era San Francisco was completely the fuck out of eggs. The problem started when the first 10,000 men or so flooded into the city and devoured every single chicken and rooster that they could get their hands on, like a horde of protein-hungry locusts. They just ate everything. Like, there's enough chicken to feed 800 people, people move in and eat it all overnight, and suddenly there's no more birds to lay eggs.

Now, it's not quite certain why, but no additional birds arrived for years to restock the Bay Area's farms. And this is a bit of a historical mystery, because both Southern California and Baja had farms and had chickens. And even in 1849, it wouldn't have been hard to send a few boatloads of birds up the coast. And there are different theories about why none of them actually were... Like, there were just no populations of breeding chickens in the Bay Area. One of the theories comes from an artist named Eva Croissant, who was one of the world's top experts on the very weird subject of today's episodes. And she cites some convincing evidence that a mix of two factors contributed to the lack of poultry.

Number one, chicken feed was in terribly short supply, and thus chickens were primarily fed garbage, which didn't help their health, and some sort of horrible bird plague kept killing off imported birds. Because we do have cases of people bringing in birds, and then they'll all die basically overnight. So, for whatever the cause was, it was impossible to establish a population of chickens in the city of San Francisco for years. As a result of this, in a city famed for gold, one of the most valuable items was the humble hen egg. It was not uncommon for eggs to be imported from as far away from Chile. Like, they're bringing Chilean eggs into San Francisco, because there's no lay-in eggs, and you see the... I think I got you. I could see those assholes still doing stuff like that today.

Being like, oh, that's a Chilean egg, motherfucker. That's $1,200. You're gonna have to pay a lot of money for these Chilean chickens. You know where Chile is? No? Yeah, it's real fancy. The eggs are the best. It's very fancy. They feed the chickens satin. So, the price of eggs at its peak was near the equivalent of $30 in modern dollars in egg in San Francisco. Yeah, I know some people who would be very rich based on their backyards, if that was still the case. One journalist at the time noted that the city of San Francisco was desperate for eggs,

and that a fortune would be made by any man or woman daring enough to figure out how to provide them. And it just so happened, Billy, that 26 miles off the coast of the bay lay the Faralan Islands, known as the Islands of the Dead, to the coast Miwok tribe. The Faralans are some of the least pleasant land on planet Earth. 211 acres of rocky cliffs and outcroppings of solid granite. They're basically giant, sharp boulders in the middle of the sea. That's what I was gonna say. It just sounds like big rocks. Yeah, they're huge, deadly rocks.

One representative of the National Marine Sanctuary described them as looking like a piece of the moon that fell into the sea. Now, the Faralans have never hosted human populations naturally. Like the indigenous people didn't live there. They called them the Islands of the Dead. Like, don't fucking go there. You'll get killed. It's a bad place to be. Partly because the seas around them are incredibly rough, and until people had kind of like more modern boats, even when people had modern boats, boats crashed into them all of the goddamn time. Yeah, I was gonna say, it's still just needless, you guys. We don't need to do this.

Yeah, and there was really nothing there. The island's only natural inhabitants were hordes of sea lions and hundreds of thousands of birds. The most common species was called the Common Mirror. It's a small ocean bird with exactly one noteworthy attribute. Its eggs are the size of softballs. So it's smaller than a chicken, but its eggs are like twice the size of a chicken's eggs. Now, mirror eggs are actually, if you look them up online, they're really cool looking eggs. I kind of want to get some and try them.

They're rounded at the bottom and narrow on the top, kind of like one of those Russian nesting dolls, and it's theorized that this is because they lay them on the sides of cliffs and stops them from like rolling over. They're really neat. They're very vividly colored. Some of them are like turquoise, and they're covered in like black markings that look almost like alien handwriting. They're like pretty... Like a nice, like a nice mug from, from like, from like taeus.

Yeah, they look like somebody in Taos made them. Yes, that's what you described. I just thought of an aunt I had. I'm like, she would love this, this egg. I just have a side note question, Billy. When I said, do you want to come back on behind the bastards? Did you think we would be talking about eggs? I don't, I never know. I wanted to have a fun one.

It's very funny to me. I didn't, I didn't think that the president of the United States would discuss stuff that we had discussed. Fair enough. The bleach? I know. The bleach stuff. That was like, I was like, I don't like that I'm ahead of this.

I don't like it. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not wild about the fact that the thing that we laughed at because it was absurd was then urged for people to do by the president during a pandemic. And people did. Yeah, when everyone was joking about it, when it happened, I was like, this isn't good.

This is a problem. People are going to die. Yeah. I was like, people are already doing this. And if the president mentions it, it's not good. If people are like, isn't this funny? I'm like, I wish it was. I do.

That's the thing. That's what's beautiful about the thing that happened with the four seasons because most of the things that people have thought was funny that have happened this year aren't really funny. If you understand what's going on, they're terrifying. That one was actually like, that was just perfect. I did, I laughed that laugh where I didn't make noise when I first read about it because I was like,

I did that thing where I was like, who's behind? Like I, because I was like some comedian did this is very funny. Yeah. And then I checked so many sources. Did you also do the, did you also do like the dry heave? It was like, it was like my little toddler crying where I was like the harder I thought about the more I was like, that is, it's every now and then karma's just like, here you go.

What was even better about that was being able to share it with people who hadn't seen the story yet and then got to appreciate their initial laugh about, it's still funny. Sorry, back to eggs, my bad. It's perfect. No, Sophie, not back to eggs because we're professionals and that means it's time to go to ads. Oh.

See, Sophie, sometimes I bring us to ads and you don't warn me because I remember and you don't. So there you go. I'm a hack and a fraud, Robert. I'll fire myself. Now you're making me feel bad. Yeah, that was a harsh treatment. You really, you really spun that back at me.

Now the guns pointed in the other direction. Just like Raytheon brand, shoot yourself in the face rifle. I knew this was going to happen. Raytheon, I don't know, that's not my best Raytheon joke. Nope, but I'll take it. I'm sorry, ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. The FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space

with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back.

Well, Billy, eggs, eggs, eggs. So I do suggest looking up mirror eggs, because they're kind of fucking awesome, actually. They're really neat eggs. And yeah, they're edible, although they have a red yolk and a bluish tint that most people describe as unsettling to eat. Just the color?

Yeah, because it's like a weird color and it's not terrible, but it's not super appetizing. But there were a fuckload of them. A few sailors over the years had stopped off at the Firelands and found that during big chunks of the summer, it was covered in just piles of tens of thousands of eggs. And while they wouldn't taste great fried, they worked perfectly if you mixed them in a dough.

You could bake with them and you wouldn't notice that you aren't using a hen egg. And they're twice as big as a hen egg, so they really go a long way towards alleviating the egg shortage. And I'm going to quote from the Smithsonian here. Stale mirror eggs had a strong fishy aftertaste. In the words of one commenter, an overwrite mirror egg is something never to be forgotten.

It requires about three months to get the taste out of the mouth. As a result, the eggers inaugurated each harvest season by smashing all of the mirror eggs on the island, thereby ensuring the collection of freshly laid eggs. So when people started harvesting these eggs, which we're about to get into, you would have to break all of the eggs that were there when you arrived because it would force the mirrors to lay new eggs,

and then you would take those eggs and bring them back home. And if you're thinking, was this bad for the mirror population? Yes. Yeah. No, as soon as you said commerce, I was like, these birds are fucked. They don't do great. So bit by bit, people started to talk about

how all the eggs on this island might be able to satisfy the Bay Area's deep hunger for pastries. The first man to try and make a fortune off of feral and eggs was an adventurer from Maine named Doc Robinson. He'd heard whispers of mirror eggs in the saloons and gambling dens on the waterfronts. In the spring of 1849, Doc and his brother Oren chartered a boat and headed to the islands.

They found them absolutely covered in birds, hundreds of thousands of mirrors. The men loaded their boat so full of eggs that they could barely fit inside it. And I'm going to quote now from the book The Devil's Teeth by Susan Casey. Robinson and Dorman loaded their boat with eggs and headed back to San Francisco, coming up against a nasty storm

and dumping half their cargo into the ocean just to stay upright. Nonetheless, they sold the remaining eggs for a dollar or a dozen and pocketed $3,000 serious money in those days. Robinson opened his own burlesque haul, another big growth segment of the fledgling California economy, and neither man ever went back to the far loans, but others did. Within a week of the successful egg sale,

Southeast Fireland was swarming with Eggers. In keeping with the land grabbing ethos, six men immediately staked their claim, declaring that the islands belonged to them exclusively due to rights of possession and incorporating as the Fireland Egg Company. Egging, though lucrative, proved a tough way to make a living. The seasons spanned eight flurried weeks between May and July,

during which time it was man against mirror and both parties against the goals. Climbing near vertical rises of crumbling granite, the Eggers carried clubs in their freehands to fend off the attacking birds, at the same time stuffing the eggs into specially designed egg shirts, giant guinea sacks with multiple pockets, scalp wounds were common.

So... I just have... I mean... I've never wanted a fortune that bad, I don't think. No. Yeah, and it's not even a fortune, because these guys, after the first guy, he makes a fortune, right?

He makes sense to me. You go out, you have like one real shitty weekend, and you come back alive, and you buy a burlesque call, and you sell sex for the rest of your life. Yes. I understand that. These guys are like day laborers.

Yes. And it's so bad because the goals eat the mirror eggs. So like, while you're climbing up the rock, they're like dive bombing you and like biting into your skull and clawing at you to get at eggs. Gah! It's a bad gig. It just sounds like a metaphor for modern-day San Francisco.

Yeah. Yeah, it's not any different today. I would describe what they're doing is like driving for Uber. Uh-huh. Yes. But more ethical. Yeah. Though it's a fair wage.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure they were getting a better wage than Uber drivers are. Oh, man. Yeah. So Harper's Magazine sent a journalist out to the Feralons in the 1860s to look at the egging operation. And we have from that reporter a firsthand account

of what it was actually like. And I'm going to put it from there now. It's just him making vomit noises where he's just like... Bleurgh! From 15 to 20 men are employed during the egging season and collecting and shipping the eggs. They live on the island during that time and rude shanties near the usual landing place.

The work is not amusing. For the birds, seek out the least accessible places and the men must follow. Climbing often where a goat would almost hesitate. But this is not the worst. The goat sits on her nest and resists the robber who comes for her eggs. And he must take care not to get bitten.

The mere remains until her enemy is close upon her. Then she rises with a scream, which often startles a thousand or two of the birds who whirl up into the air in a dense mask scattering filth and guano all over the acres. Gah! So just shit clouds raining down on you and into your open scalp wounds

from the goats that have dived off to you as you're doing your job. Also hold on. Almost as high as Uber. Because you're really high up, so don't let go. Yeah. Yeah, and if you fall, you'll die horribly. And yeah, it was the men who did the job

tended to be as shady as you would expect of people who were willing to do that kind of work. The egg company hired mainly Greek and Italian immigrants who were comfortable with danger and desperate for money. And we all know what Italians are like, right? I don't. This is a very anti-Italian show, Billy. Oh, okay.

Yeah, no, it's fine. It's fine. I know what they're like. Yeah. So the rocks they scrambled up and down were slick with water and bird shit. Men fell all the time, often from great heights. When workers died, they were just entered

into the company log books as missing. For an example of one death. Oh, man. It's funny. And I was, okay, I'm making a bad joke about the shadiness of the Italians, but one of the aspects of this that's really interesting for Italians involved in this were like leftist labor organizers.

And this was just like the only work they could get because it was a bad time to be a part of organized labor, especially as things get into the 1860s. So that's a dimension of all of this, too, is that there's like these guys who are kind of locked out of the main economy because of, you know, politics. Companies not wanting to hire people who want to stand up

for their rights as laborers. So instead they get dive bombed and covered in shit. It's cool. You could go to bird shit island. You could work there. Yeah. You don't want to work for the man. You can work for the birds.

Well, and then it's also probably one of those gigs. You don't, no one tells you what it's really like. And then you learn what it's like when you get out there. Yeah. And the point I'm making by bringing this up is that a lot of these guys, a lot of them did have, you know, some sort of criminal background. The others, you know, being a labor organizer in this period

means you've been in a lot of street fights. And the point I'm making is that these are really tough people who are comfortable with violence. And that's going to matter in a bit. Yeah. Yeah. But first I want to talk about people dying on the job because that's always fun.

Can I just say let's do the job pitch where if you're just like, okay, yeah, you got to ride a boat out there. Okay. That's fine. I don't care about that. And then you like heights. I don't care about that. Like, can you climb?

Yeah. Cool. You just climb up there and get that egg. All right. Also the birds will, they're going to try to hurt you. All right. And you're going to get covered in shit. Yeah.

They're going to fall. They're going to be your open head wound. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. They're also, and you know how clean birds are. They're going to shit in your open wounds. Oh, yeah. And then that guy goes, now I'll get how much an egg?

Yeah. I think like 10 cents. You know, you're getting paid. You're getting paid. Okay. The money's not bad. Yeah. Okay.

So for an example of one of the kind of, one of the ways people died horribly doing the egg job. In 1858, the Daily Alta, California reported that an egg are, quote, missed his hold while robbing a gold's nest over the edge of a precipice and falling was dashed to pieces on the rocks below. That's how you'd want to go, I think. To pieces? Yeah.

That's instant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. I hope it wasn't slowly dashed to pieces. Doom. So, and you know, nobody went for that body.

They just said, oh, he didn't show up to work today. He's missing. Yeah. No way to know. Send his wife and children a bill for the passage over. Yeah. So, the Eggers developed a distinctly bleak view of their work due in part to their forbidding surroundings and in part due to the death rate.

Stories began to spread that if an Eggers spent too much time on the islands, he would start to see his name spelled out in the markings on the mirror shells. But still, the money was good and the Pacific Egg Company was soon harvesting thousands of dollars in eggs every single trip. It was not long before other entrepreneurial types noticed this. As a journalist for Harper's wrote, of course there was an egg war. The prize was too great not to be struggled for. Well, yeah, you're going to have a war with the eggs.

Yeah. It's good to know that the press has always been stroking just any type of war. Yeah. Have you guys tried shooting at each other yet? I'm going to stand over here. Maybe give it a shot. Okay. From the Devil's Teeth.

Quote, there were nonstop dust-ups as rifle gangs battled the company for the right to harvest the eggs. On more than one occasion, soldiers were summoned to calm things down. The battles often lasted for weeks involving threats, fistfights, barricades, and small arms. And during those interludes, San Franciscans would go eggless once again. Sometimes the ejected gangs would hide and see caves instead of sailing back to San Francisco, waiting for the authorities to leave so they could take another run at the

eggs. One tenacious group steered their boat inside Great Mirror Cave and remained there for two days, during which they were drizzled nonstop with guano. The ammonia buildup inside the cave killed several men. They were pissed to death. Yeah, they were. That's disgusting. And the dangers didn't stop once the cargo was collected.

Boats running eggs to the mainland were hijacked with regularities. So we got egg pirates in the mix. Well, as you were describing this, it just made me laugh because I'm like, man, if you gamify, humans are down for whatever the fucking prize is. Yeah. Yeah, I'll wait here while my friends choke to death on bird piss. We're going to make money, right? I will beat those guys.

Yeah. Oh, just as long as I get more eggs than the other assholes. Exactly. Yes. Now, what was already a very complicated and violent situation was compounded by some decisions the government made. In 1852, they decided to build a lighthouse on the Farolyn Islands. This was a sensible call geographically because ships kept running into the rocks in the

dead of night or during storms. It's a good place for a lighthouse. But actually building a lighthouse on such inhospitable terrain was easier said than done. Stone had to be quarried on the island to create the lighthouse. Workmen had to haul bricks up the hillside on their backs. It was just a miserable, miserable, miserable job. They completed construction in 1853.

And just as they were about to begin operation, they had to like the last thing they had to do after spending like more than a year agonizingly quarrying rock to build a lighthouse. The last thing they had to do was take a lens up into the tower. And as soon as they try, they realized that the lighthouse wasn't big enough for the lens to fit. So they had to knock down the lighthouse and rebuild it. It took another two years. Oh, my.

I think one dude about half way up is like, hey, you got, you know what? Never mind. Never mind. Never mind. I'm just not going to say anything. I'm going to not be here. I'm going to quit tomorrow. So in 1855, they finally finished the damn thing.

Several lighthouse keepers and eventually their families moved on to the island as its only permanent residence. Now, this immediately caused problems with what by then was just called the egg company. See, the egg company claimed to have a total monopoly on the island, a fact which was disputed by the government and basically everyone else who wasn't the egg company. What a lame name. No, that's on purpose. That's unfair.

That's when you name your cat, cat or tiger. Well, no, I think what they're doing is like, no, there can only be one and we are the egg company. The egg company. We will abide no competition. This is some Facebook shit. Drop the the. Yeah.

I mean, Facebook was the egg company was the first investor in Facebook. I think it should just be egg company. Drop the the. Drop the the. Sean Parkard them. I think the V. I think the V is the key. The V is the key. So yeah, the egg company says all of the eggs and everything else on the Feralans are our

property, which again, they have no legal right to, but they do have guns. So the lighthouse keepers. They do understand America. They understand America. That said, the government had guns too. So the egg company couldn't like kick the lighthouse keepers off, but they could repeatedly threaten them with violence. Now the problem.

What would I don't understand that they were like, hey, we'll go and get you. Yeah. Part of they were like, we don't, you can't, if you're going to be here, you can't eat any of the eggs or anything else that's on the. Oh, I see. And they were like, but we live here and it's the government's island. So that starts the problem. And what kind of continues it is that.

So in 1858, this guy named Amos Clift gets hired to be the head keeper of the lighthouse and Amos kind of organized the other lighthouse keepers by saying like, hey guys, our pay is complete shit. Like we're not getting nearly enough money. We have to live in this terrible death island in the ocean where it's always miserable. The least that we can should be able to do is make a fuckload of money selling these eggs. Like we have a right to this island. The egg company people don't.

So why don't we try profiting off of this shit? I like Amos. Amos is like, hey, you guys, we've got to have at least one perk here. Yeah, yeah. And that perk should be getting rich off of the egg rack. Yeah, I'm with Amos. Yeah. Now the problem is, of course, there's only a few lighthouse keepers and the egg company

is basically a mafia at this point, including the fact that it's filled with Italians. So for the most part, the outnumbered and vulnerable lighthouse crew tried to pick at the margins of the company's egg business and avoid direct confrontation. That's smart. Yeah, it worked for a little while. You got a guerrilla warfare that shit. Yeah. Yeah, Amos, however, was kind of impatient.

He was not willing to just nibble at the edges. He wanted a big cut of that sweet, sweet egg company. And he was also a heavy drinker, which he worked at a lighthouse, you know? Oh, man, that is, that's a big ambitious and headstrong and a drinker. And an alcoholic. Yeah. It's not a great mix. Yeah.

So author Susan Casey, he didn't write about being a drunk, but author Susan Casey, who went through all of the letters he sent home to his family during this period, noticed like the way that he wrote would change over the course of a long letter in a way that heavily suggested drinking. Quote, in almost all his letters, which tended to run several pages, Cliff's elegant penmanship starts off impressively and then morphs into a sprawling mess. According to Generates, the complaints about his post became increasingly bitter and his plans for total egg dominance grow larger in scale.

In a letter to Horace, which is one of his family members, written on November 30th, 1859, he outlined the situation. Before I came here, this egg company used to have things all their own way. But since I have been here, things have taken a turn and they have ascertained that I am not as easily bluffed. I think it will now be settled and the egg company driven off the island. I shall not abate my efforts in the least. If I succeed, I may perhaps reap the benefits.

Man. Who's going to get the eggs? Can you imagine? I mean, just from another perspective, like the egg company, this dude shows up and they're like, it's already a nightmare here. This is hard enough. Do you think that they called him a rotten egg behind his back? Thank you very much.

Perhaps. I was holding that in for the entire podcast. I like that you think any of these dudes use puns. No, no. He was too drunk and too obsessed with eggs. Do you want to know who's not too drunk and obsessed with eggs, though, Robert? Oh, now the people of Raytheon are big into the egg business. In fact, right now, our friends who are behind such wonderful inventions as the missile guidance

chip for the Hellfire missile and the missile guidance chip for the RX-9, the knife missile, are working on a way to shoot eggs right into the mouths of hungry people at speeds exceeding 40,000 feet per second. Not rotten eggs. Fresh eggs. We were trying to fade them. Cooked to perfection. Only the fresh, so fresh, they will completely penetrate up to three human bodies before

shattering. That's the Raytheon promise. We were fading them. Uh-huh. Eds. Eds. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are. We are. We are. You want to try that again, buddy? No, no. We just are. We just are? We are what? We just are. We're being. That's true. Weird.

So for Amos Clift, the egg racket meant a chance at more money than he would ever have a chance of making anywhere else as he wrote back home to his family. The egg season is the months of May and June and the profits of the company after all expenses are paid is every year from five to six thousand dollars, quite an item. And if this island is government property, I have a right to these eggs and I am bound to try and get it. And of course, he also added that once he got rich off of the eggs, the government could kiss his foot. So interesting guy, Amos, he's decided this is how he's going to make his fortune. He's kind of revealing his moves, though, too, a little bit. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, he's a drunk. He's a drunk. This is the government's island, so I have a right to the eggs, but also fuck the government once I get rich. Yeah. You're like, hey, man, just leave the last part out. Dude, I think you got to play it. Yeah. Yeah, he wasn't he wasn't a smooth customer.

Amos organized the lighthouse keepers into a brisk business that partly involved discouraging eggers from landing because they're the lighthouse. They can make it hard for boats to land. And yeah, they would also like basically work with groups of eggers to stop other groups from landing and get kickbacks from them. And of course, they also got involved in the business of gathering and smuggling eggs back into the mainland. So he's gets a couple of rackets set up. What a microcosm of a city. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It is a very San Francisco story. Yeah, it's nice. It is just immediately like, uh, we can make this racket work for everybody. I think there's a little bit of money around the edges of this for me. All I got to do is fuck over some people who aren't me. Yes, every American story ever is just going like, oh, I got this. Yeah.

You can, there's a lot about America in this tale. So right around the same time as Amos is getting his, his, his egg scheme off the ground, San Francisco's daily Alta newspaper reported that the egg company had begun to wage an open guerrilla war against the state, breaking up government roads as well as drawing lines, fencing off chunks of the island and putting up warnings that light keepers and their families could only cross on pain of death. I feel like destroying the roads that were built to allow the lighthouse to function and to allow like, like basically trying to cut off their supply lines, fencing off the areas where the eggs are and threatening to murder government employees who cross onto egg territory. In June of 1860, as things escalated to a point where light keepers felt unsafe to travel outside without rifles, Cliff wrote a letter to his family that, we are now in the midst of the egg season and the egg company and the light keepers are at war. Now, soon after this point, the Eggers launched a full frontal assault on the light keepers, trying to force them off the island at gunpoint. In July, one of the assistant light keepers was ambushed and injured.

Just as Cliff was plotting his response to these offenses, the US government realized what was going on and rather than getting broiled in an egg-based insurgency, they fired Cliff for the undue assumption to monopolize the valuable privilege of collecting eggs. That's fair. I hate to side with the government, but they got a goddamn point on this one. It does kind of seem like he was the problem. Do you think any of his relatives, like he had some smart ass cousins or stuff and they're like, dude, you've got to read Amos' egg letters. Awesome. I think he might be. I think he might be in some real trouble.

He's talking about gunfights. But he's talking about eggs. It's the funniest shit you have ever heard. People. Yeah. At the same time that the egg company men were sparring with the lighthouse keepers, another rival egg poaching company was forming with the goal of conquering the Feralin Islands for themselves and taking them from the egg company. Well, the egg company was American run. This new company was made up entirely of Italian immigrants.

Both claimed to have legal possession of the island. And it seems unlikely that either did. From a local news article at the time, quote, the chief of police in a posse visit the scene for a long time, two years or more, the right to gather the eggs on the Feralin Islands has been in dispute between rival companies and rumblings of approaching troubles between them have been heard for a year. One of these companies is composed mainly of Americans and it is known that the far as the Feralin's egg company, the other is made up of Italian fishermen, the American company claimed to have had original possession of the island and issued script in the usual manner of corporations. The Italian company were subsequent claimants and in a suit between them and Judge Hager's court lately, a writ of ejectment was sued against the Italians, who, being in part possession, refused to obey the summons. Yesterday, Chief Barks sent out officers Ellis and Clark to arrest certain of the Italians. And when they found two parties armed to the teeth in possession of different parts of the island and breathing defiance against each other, the officers attempted to serve their writ but were opposed. And though the partisans of the egg company sided with the officers, they were unable to affect the arrest of more than three of the other party, the rest vowing that they were ready for a fight and would rather be shot down than arrested.

So, yeah, yeah. I just, I don't, I think starting a farm a little outside of town would have been way easier than this. Yeah, it does seem like that. Seems like that would have been eggs over easy and they chose eggs over hard. I can't even look at you right now. I know. I know. I wanted to throw the microphone but it's mine. Fair enough. That's why I missed the studio. We'd be throwing a lot, yeah.

Somebody said they are upset that we're not throwing bagels anymore and it's because we're in our own houses. We're in separate homes. That's my property. I have respect for this. Yeah, when I throw eggs in the office, it's Daniel who has to clean them up and when I throw eggs in my own home, it's, well, not me still, but someone else who has to clean them up. Yeah. Wow, you're going to make your cat clean that up. Yeah, she loves eggs probably.

Yeah, it's pretty. Anderson, I would never. Over the next couple of years, that's one story, there were multiple gunfights like that and they would send police and soldiers to the island and there would be partisan sniping between the sides and it just kept happening between these American. What are essentially American and Italian gangs who are smuggling eggs? Yeah, it's like the meth trade but sillier. As the Smithsonian Institute notes, the egging season- But it doesn't get you high at all. It does not get you high.

I mean, if you eat only protein, you can get a little bit fucked up but not in a pleasant way. No, not in a- Yeah, no. Or like a sick to your stomach way. I don't feel good. Yeah. The egging season became increasingly violent. In the words of one commentator, the eight weeks between May and July devolved into an annual naval engagement known as the egg war.

Brawls broke out constantly between rival gangs, ranging in brutality from threats and shell throwings to stabbings and shootouts. The fighting was not confined to the islands. Boats transporting eggs were hijacked regularly. According to the San Francisco Examiner, there were many a bitter and fatal encounter between larger parties of rival claimants and boats mounting small cannons. Back in San Francisco, the courts were barraged by a dizzying variety of egg-related cases that included charges of petite larceny, trespassing, property damage, resisting an officer, and manslaughter. So cannons have entered into it. Yes. Just, well, we got lawyers involved, we got the press involved now that now we've got arms dealers involved. Yeah.

Gun runners running guns to the Eggman. They got rifles. Y'all need a cannon. Oh yeah, those rifles aren't going to work if they brought cops into the matter. Just you need a cannon is what you guys need. And I got a cannon guy. Okay. So. It all came due ahead, finally, in the spring of 1863. A man named David Batchelder managed to gather together an army of Italian fishermen. They made several attempts at an aquatic landing on the island.

Each time, the United States Revenue Cutter Service, the Coast Guard before the Coast Guard, caught them and took their guns. But eventually, Batchelder and his comrades succeeded in sneaking around the Cutter Service and landing on the island. On the evening of June 3rd, 1863, the fishermen sailed out to the Farolones again and were met by a group of armed Egg Company men. Isaac Harrington, the company's foreman, warned the men who were trying to land that they would do so at their peril. In return, Batchelder shouted that they would come in spite of hell. And then things got a little bit less dramatic and the Italians got drunk on their boats all night and spent the evening making fun of the people on the shore. But then at dawn, the hungover Italian soldiers attempted another landing. I like those guys. Those guys sound fun.

So these hungover Italians try to land again after making fun of the Egg Company all night and the employees of the Egg Company open fire. For the next 20 minutes, there's just like a massive gun battle, which includes cannons on both sides. By the time the Italians retreat, one Egg Company man is dead and five boatmen are wounded, one of whom was shot through the throat and died a little bit later. So, pretty sizable gunfight there. Now, this finally forced the government to take action, not by banning Egging, but by officially banning everybody besides the Pacific Egg Company from Egging. Unfortunately, for a reason that cannot be explained, the company found fewer and fewer eggs on the island every single year. There were fewer birds too. And again, no possible explanation as to why this might have been happening. Amazing.

In true capitalistic fashion, the Egg Company decided to make up for lost profits by butchering hundreds and hundreds of seals and lions in order to turn them into oil. Because again, there's not as many eggs anymore. Now, this process- We got these clubs. We got clubs. We were using them to hit birds, but now the birds are gone. But the birds, they don't want to come around anymore. Capitalism.

I felt that in my chest. So, they start butchering sea lions and seals. And the process of turning them into oil is like it's a nightmare. You basically like cut off their fat and put them in these huge pots. So, you've got these giant pots of like boiling animal fat. And since there's no money in cleaning up the rest, they would just leave the putrifying carcasses of the sea lions and the seals to rot. Next to these giant like bubbling cauldrons of fucking poison fat. The once pristine wilderness of the Faralones was filled with a permanent haze of fat smog and the stink of rotting flesh permeated everything.

So, they just turn it in the Mordor. Like, we've won the egg war. Let's ruin the islands. God. Yeah, it's good stuff. It is like, hey, I think that's humanity right there. Yeah, there's a lot to say about climate change in this. Including the fact that after the company wins and begin committing genocide against a second species, they also start to attack the lighthouse operators again.

For one thing, the company wanted to restrict the lighthouse operators and their families from taking eggs for their personal use. Even though the ships that brought them food would often be late by weeks due to bad weather and sometimes they needed to hunt the local birds in order to survive. They also tried to force the lighthouse to destroy its fog horn, which existed purely to save the lives of boats filled with people. But the fog horn scared the birds. So they were like, you got to shut that thing off. Just. In 1881, company men assaulted another lighthouse keeper for harvesting eggs. And in May of that year, the fucking army had to forcibly evict the egg company from the Farallones Islands.

So. I just, can you imagine being the governor and you just keep getting this one island. You're like, God, damn these egg guys. I have to send the army out over eggs? Army? Is this? And that happens, by the way, that big gun battle between those two sides occurs like the same time that Gettysburg is happening. So.

Easily a much more important battle. I think we can all agree. Well, that just sounds like, oh, you guys are doing fighting. We'll do fighting. We'll show you Gettysburg cowards how it really goes. We'll do it on that. Oh, you guys fighting over freedom? We got eggs.

We're doing eggs. This is a west coast. That is a west coast versus east coast. Like, oh, they're fighting because it's like racism and slavery bacteria. Like, where are you guys fighting? Eggs. Yep. A slightly higher profit margin.

So the egg war finally ends after like literally 30 years of escalating violence. And in part because they finally established chicken farms in Petaluma and suddenly eggs. Not every direction around San Francisco is farms. Yeah. But they weren't yet. It's... I like dude that just immediately started to brothel. He's like, man, I'm not going back to that island.

That island. That was... I am done with eggs. Uh-uh. It's all gonna be... I mean, eggs will still be involved, but in a less direct way. Yes. Yes.

So, uh, yeah. Mere eggs became much less common over the years because after four decades of taking all of the... Of not just smashing... Of like, not just taking eggs, but smashing all of the eggs on the island so that they would lay more eggs and then taking all of those. The bird, the mere population on the Faralones dropped from an estimated 400,000 to 60,000. Because, you know... Yeah. It was a good old fashioned genocide.

There's a degree to which the industry kind of destroyed itself. Yeah. Because it was greedy and made the environment that sustained it no longer possible. Oh, yeah. I guess there's no... Yeah. No, it's a thing that has never happened again and never will happen again. Probably not happening right now.

No. There's no signs of that happening now. No. Why would we do the same thing repeatedly thousands of times until we all die? That doesn't sound like us. What if we just made seeds that only worked once? Well, Billy, that's the egg war. That was kind of fun one.

Yeah, it was a hoot of one. It's like one of those where it's like, I don't think there's a bad guy. I mean, there's a good guy or a bad guy on that one. Yeah, I think the good guy is the guy who made that brothel. He is the only one. Yeah. Yes, he was there. And he told some people about it.

They're like, how did you get this brothel? He's like, oh, there's an egg island out there. I wouldn't go out there though. And people are like, okay. He's like, I told you guys not to go out there. Yeah. It's a hoot of a tale. I should note here that I found out after I had finished researching and started writing

that this is another episode that I think the dollop beat me to. So like to hell with you, Dave, I'm going to, I'll get my revenge. I wasn't going to not do it because it was election week when I wrote this and I don't have that much time to research stuff. But yeah. It's okay. Yeah, it just happens. It's the internet.

Yeah. And they're both talented. So we're good. Yeah. So, you know, listen to both, listen to both episodes and then send Dave and I both extensive essays taking apart who did better at which portions because we, I guarantee you we'll both read them and take them to heart. And Gareth and I will just be like the press.

We'll just sit over here and we'll be like, you guys should fight with guns. We're going to be over here. That's what Gareth, we'll let you guys fight. Yeah. I think Dave and I are going to do a joust over, I guess, who has the right to talk about Henry Kissinger. I don't know. Oh, I think.

That's an exhausting project. Oh, that should be. I think the forces should be joined. Yeah. I've talked to actually, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We've talked a little bit about that idea. It's just a matter of people's schedules. And also like, do you have any idea how hard it is to write an actual episode about Henry Kissinger? And it's when you said it too was like, I got excited and then you get a little scared too, because you're like, oh, he's still alive. I don't know. I've read two, two books already.

And I think I'm going to need to read two more to be able to like realistically write a nice succinct four part episode about the man. He's still doing stuff. He's never going to stop. He's always, he should be dead. Yes, he should. If you take nothing else out of this episode about eggs, it's that Henry Kissinger, it's that Henry Kissinger ought to be dead.

He may be eating those island eggs. That's a secret. Yeah. I think he eats islands and hope. Well, Billy. I'm a fan of him if he's listening. Yeah. Same here.

Billy, you got anything you want to plug it, you plug it, you plug? No, no, no. I was in Borat too. That was really fun. See if you can find me. Oh, I have a cannabis podcast where we interview the growers and the movers and shakers in the makeup communities. We're in season two.

We're in Humboldt County right now. And they have opened our doors. I mean, their arms and their doors to us in a way that we didn't foresee. So the season is getting longer. It's really cool. Now, Billy, one last question before we go out. If you were a strain of cannabis, number one, sativa or indica and number or hybrid, I guess. And number two, what's going to be the ratio of THC to CBD and the Billy Wayne Davis?

Well, here's the thing. They're having because of, you know, legality. It's tough to get a strain. There's some strains that have the higher CBD. It's just hard to find because what happens and this is just from knowing, this is from doing this podcast and I know just a smidge of the knowledge. But because of capitalism, they bred a bunch of shit and ruined some of the strains by jacking up the THC because you don't, because you got so many different cannabinoid receptors.

Yeah. That they're just now learning about. So my strain that I always go to is like, I like a sativa that's like it's one of the purest one is Jack Herrera. Now, most things are a hybrid now because they've crossbred so much stuff that it's hard to find just a pure sativa or a pure indica. And again, it's capitalism and then, you know, and some of the old land races are harder to grow because of capitalism.

There's just no money in it. Well, Billy, I guess that was the same. I mean, no, it was kind of the same story that I just told you, but with marijuana instead of eggs and more gunfights, but they're less publicized. Robert, if you were a type of egg, wait, wait, wait, wait. You didn't answer this question. What if you were a type of egg, what type of egg would you be like, how would you would you be like?

Oh, fucking ostrich. Hell yeah. Go bigger. Go home. Oh, those are good too. So delicious. And also, I just had some duck. I always order duck if it's on the menu.

Duck on feet. Oh, and duck fat. Yeah. I had a duck recently. We went out and went mushrooming and picked a bunch of chanterelles in the deep dark woods and then had a fucking, my friends brought over a duck they'd slaughtered and we had, oh, I kept the duck fat. So I was just every day for like the next week, I was just throwing duck fat and every goddamn

thing I made. That sounds awesome. Duck fat's the shit. Duck fat's amazing. Sorry. Well, everybody, eat some fucking duck fat, destroy capitalism, or at least eggs. I don't know. The episode's over.

Fair enough. Bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about

a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.