Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - We Went To Alaska (Stories From Good Mythical MORE)

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

We spill all about our recent trip to Alaska from seeing the northern lights to dog sledding! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And sometimes, a smooth, silky latte just wins. It's exceptional but effortless. Like actually effortless. Simply press, brew, and explore. Nispresso, what else? Keep exploring at nespresso.com. We went to Alaska. Welcome to Good Mythical More.

Yes, we did. We took a trip to Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska to be specific. And a lot of people that we met up there were like, what are you guys doing up here? Making a video? Is this an episode of WonderHull? What's going on?

People, they see us together in an odd location. They're like, no, we're just doing this for a small little segment we're gonna do for Good Mythical Morning during a vendor reveal party. No. Yeah, because I mean, you have, We had to get these when they get stuck. Yeah.

Well, the friends, we have friends. We have friends, you didn't know about it. We tried to explain that we have, yeah, and we take vacations, and we did take a vacation together. And they had been talking up the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis for a long time to us about how we gotta go and do it. And it worked out.

Yes. So yeah, we wanted to give you a little trip report, and we used to give trip reports on Ear Biscuits. Yes. So because we're in that vibe, Jenna, we got you on the mic. What's up? Yes, hey guys. Oh my goodness.

Listen to me. Have you ever been to... Just like Ear Biscuits. Alaska before. I've never been to Alaska. It's one of the 50. I haven't made it to. I'm horribly jealous.

You haven't been to any of the 50 states? Yeah. I've been to most of the 50 states, but Alaska is one of the few left. Yeah, you actually have a thermist that has all the places that you've been with the stickers on it. I do. I love adding stickers to it. Our friend Jacob, this was him marking off the 50th state for him to visit.

And our friend Mike, who was also there, he is now only one short of 50. He has to go to Hawaii. Hawaii. Yeah, it's good to end on one of the cool ones. I don't play those games. Spoiler alert though, I highly recommend going to Fairbanks

at the right time of year to see the Northern Lights. I've just been gushing about it at every turn. Now you took this picture, which is amazing. Yeah, let me just say a couple, yeah, it is an amazing picture, thank you, Link. It looks like that tree is being sucked up into some sort of a vortex. Now, if you've taken pictures of the Northern Lights

before, you know something that I'm about to reveal, which is the way that a camera exposes for the Northern Lights is more impressive than what you see in real life. Okay, so I want to acknowledge that. Specifically in terms of the colors. Yeah, how green and how bright that is is something that happens inside your camera.

And by the way, I took my nice camera and then I had, of course, my iPhone, and everyone else in the group was taking pictures with the iPhone just using night mode, and their pictures were incredible. I scrapped my nice camera, just threw it in the snow. No, I put it away and I just used... Which was like four and a half feet deep.

Yeah, I used my iPhone, so all the pictures that you're going to see are ones that were taking with iPhones. With the naked eye, describe what this picture, what this would look like. I would say that would be, first of all, because you're seeing it in person, it's still unlike anything you've ever seen before. and there's a movement to that that is sort of mesmerizing and also it's probably 50 to 70% as bright as it shows up in the picture. So it's still like, whoa, I'm seeing something

that it's the first time in my life when I've looked at something in nature and thought this looks like magic happening because I don't have a category for it. But the color of it would be more cloud-like gray. grayish white, and if you're fortunate and the conditions are right, you start to see colors. I don't recall on this night seeing the green.

I could see the green. A little tinge green. I would say pale green. And sometimes purple. Most of the time it was like wispy cloud type colors. And your brain wants to make sense of it. And so it kind of, make sense of it as a cloud like it's that close,

but it's really a lot further away. Right. But they are localized to certain places that I think they start to understand where those are so that you can book tours to different like mountaintops with viewings and things like that. I mean, we got very lucky. So there was a big solar storm that was happening

when we got there and we were kind of on that what people thought might be the tail end of it and also the brightness of the moon was increasing seeing each subsequent night. We had picked a certain night to do a paid tour, which you had to do weeks in advance. So we were stuck with the paid tour. But our friends who got there a day before us were like,

guys, we saw an incredible Northern Light Show last night, so let's go out tonight. So we got up at 3 a.m. to get on the shuttle to get to the airport that day, on Sunday. And then we get to Alaska. And they're like, guys, we gotta go and we gotta stay out till 3 a.m. in order to see these things, and we did.

We can show more pictures, because over the course of three nights, we saw an incredible light show that got actually better every night. Yeah, our first night, it was only like a half hour, and it's determined based on where you are, as well as all the other conditions. So what we learned was just because it starts to kick up

doesn't mean it's gonna keep going, it might have lasted 20, 30 minutes and it was gone. Every night we were like in the right spot when something crazy was happening. Keep going through these and we'll get to, I mean, Oh my gosh, I'm sorry, those photos are so good. Isn't that crazy? It is disorienting when you see it.

And this one right here where it looks like it's shooting down at you, that only happened a handful of times for a few seconds at a time. Most of the time it was like you were looking at like Bob Ross painting the sky in a long brush stroke. But then, like that right there, those were like some yurts that, speaking of yurts, that you took a shuttle out to, and this was like a company that had this private land or whatever, and you got to go inside the yurt, get some hot cocoa if you got a little cold.

Because, by the way, temperature, we're talking probably 5 to 12 or 13 below Fahrenheit, below freezing at night. And apparently that's warm. And they were all talking about how warm it was. Like, yeah, I got above zero today. Like, kids walking around and just a hoodie. Yeah. In Fairbanks. Meanwhile, we rented extremely, like the jacket that I rented,

I asked the guy, I was like, how much does this jacket cost if I were to buy it? He was like $1,600 for the jacket. And I had a jacket in gloves and a bib and these crazy boots. He only gave you that one that was that expensive because you're so big and that's what he had. He was like, this one's rated to 60 below. I was like, yes, sir. Or like an Arctic expedition. But all of the clothes were like crazy, crazy expensive

if you were to buy them. The biggest challenge was allotting time and energy to get in and out of everything that you had to put on. Like we're spoiled, we're not used to any of that. But on this night at the Yerts, when we were out there from like midnight till 2 a.m., you kind of have, bala clava that you just like bring down to just a little slit.

Which I called the Baclavai, I'm sorry. That's what I called. You just had to have a slit. But it was on the horizon. And then over the course of 30 minutes, these bands just start to come over. Yeah. This night especially.

And then they start to turn into loops and one's looping around the moon. And then at a certain point, it was filling the entire sky. And I couldn't crank it. I couldn't cring my neck anymore. I just laid down on the ground and just started wallering around like a fool, just looking at every which away. He did.

He may have embarrassed the group. Just, I mean, other people were there just kind of like stepping over me because I was on the path. Yeah, the dog sled path. You can't not be on the path because then you'll sink in five feet of snow. Now, we're gonna show you a video. And the video is what is the naked eye sees. So this is what it looks like to the naked eye.

So you can see the green, you can see the purple, and again, as you can kind of see the scale there with the trees. As you're looking at this, it's moving so fast that because your brain normalizes it to the size of a cloud, when you see it moving like that, it has this disorienting effect that you totally see why people feel like they're seeing something spiritual. Or their ancestors communicating with them.

I mean, there were a lot of indigenous beliefs historically of this is communication from the other side. Right. And I get it. You start to see things in it like you would in a cloud. And the reaction of everyone there, like there's our group and then there's like a group over here, there was like a group from Japan,

people come from all over the world to see these. Just like the giggling and the, ha, ha, oh, like you just get, people make all these noises. and I'm wallering on the ground making these noise. It was a universal language of everybody who was watching this thing happen. Like, we are seeing this together. Some of the times when we make those noises, it's because we were sitting in lawn chairs

that then would, you'd sit down in the chair and then it would sink into the snow and you would just, it would turn into a climb. That happened to me. Absolutely. So when we, at the end of the trip, because we're gonna tell you some other things we did, but it, just so you know, Jenna,

when you prepare for your Alaskan trip, not to set, first of all, there's only like a, even in the time of the year that we were there, which is kind of as, you know, spring is sort of beginning, which is a good time because it's not too cold, but you can still see the lights. Mm-hmm.

There's still only like a 40% chance that they're gonna appear at all in a given night. We saw them three solid nights in a row and the locals were like, you guys don't understand, like this is, like you're getting, this is almost as good as it gets. And so I feel very lucky that we got to see that. So if you go, Jenna, you may not get to see this.

It could suck for you. Just so you know. I can still go. My sleep schedule is a bit more loose than say like links, so I could just stay up. This boy stayed up every night. That's so surprising. How did you do it, Link?

Because I am a champion napper. And at any, like I would take a nap at five o'clock. I'd go to sleep when the sunset. I'd wake up and I'd just do whatever they told me to do. We had a pretty nocturnal schedule where pretty late mornings and then the earliest things that we did would be like around 1030, 11, speaking of which, so one of the cool things that we did was,

well, the second night, let's show that. We went to a hot spring and this is a natural hot spring where the water is like well over 100 degrees, and it's coming into this thing, and this is the Chena Hot Springs, where there's a long road, like an hour and a half long drive that just goes to this hot spring. And there's like an ice museum there.

It's definitely worth a visit. And then a few Brave Souls, including me and you, got into the hot springs. And so it's like zero degrees outside, and then you're in this hot spring. So as you can see, my hair froze. Super, super, fuck. Yeah.

That is wild. I'm very jealous about this. This is very cool to me. Oh yeah, and I think parts of it got to 130 degrees, which they had to add water to cool it down a little bit. There were some hot spots. I got a little burned. Did you jump back out and roll in the snow

and then get back in? No, we ran into the locker room as soon as we got. It was so cold. It was surrounded by boulders. They had like put boulders all around it, and then the boulders were covered in snow, and I did climb up and sit on a boulder just to like get completely freezing and then get back in.

But yeah, my hair, it didn't look crazy like yours, but it was a complete, it was like a shell. It was like a shell, like the magic shell that you put on your ice cream. Dink, ding, ding. So highly recommend that. Ice museum there was, you could take it or leave it, but the hot springs for sure.

So I knew that we were gonna be in Alaska. So I started listening to that James Missioner, Alaska, which I still haven't finished, of course, because it's like 51 hours long. I probably never will finish it. But I listened to enough of it to, to, he was talking all about the woolly mammoths. And so I was like, you know, we're going to Alaska.

I wanna see some mammoths. I did a little research and I found out about Dr. Matt Wooler, yes, interesting name, who's at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who is like the leading researcher on a project of dating, basically figuring out the life cycle and actually where mammoths went when they were alive.

No, no, romantically dating. Oh yeah, he's dating mammoths. It's a little kinky, but I'm not gonna yuck his yumb. So the thing that Matt has pioneered, and the reason that he's holding that issue of Science Magazine with a mammoth on the front, which we'll tell you about in a second, is because he and his team pioneered this method.

So you take a mammoth tusk, and if you look at it as it's kind of cut open, you see that it looks like a series of ice cream cones stacked on top of each other, and that's because based on the annual changes in diet of a mammoth, it's just like a tree ring. It grows at a different rate. So that's how you can look at a tusk

and be like, oh, this mammoth live to be 30 years old. So like the new ones grow and kind of push the tusk further out? Right, so the oldest part is at the end. Now, what he figured out is so there's this, you can use isotopes, and isotopes change year by year based on, well, they, They changed based on diet and they changed based on location. And so what his team did is they figured out a way

to look at a layer of the tusk and then look at the isotopes, the information from isotopes in there to know where that mammoth was throughout its life. And his team figured out, so if you watch the movie Ice Age, which many of you probably have seen, you see that there's the migratory animals

that are migrating across the plains and the mammoths are migrating with them. He's like, no, no, we learned that that's not what happens. Lots of animals will migrate. Don't watch Ice Age the movie to learn anything. But the mammoths went wherever they wanted to go, and that's based on the research that he did to figure out that they went wherever the food was. And so what he's doing is he's taking these tusks,

and he's dating them, and he's doing this isotope magic science, using all this cool equipment that we got to see, and he's plotting where these things went during their life and when they were there, and it's incredible. And of course, this is the kind of thing that gets you on the cover of Science magazine. Well, it gets the willing mammoth on the cover. Yeah, yeah, he didn't get to be on there,

like riding the mammoth. He asked for it, but he didn't get that. He didn't ask for that, just to clarify. So take that, everybody loves Raymond. And this... Your misinformation is ruining science. This tusk that we are holding is the tusk from the mammoth

that they recreated in this painting that he had commissioned, that's on the cover, which in the university, in this other room, he had that painting, which the artist that he commissioned for the painting of the mammoth insisted on doing it life size. So that painting is, as you can imagine. Well, not, it's not.

It's mammothsites. That's what he said. It's the size of the mammoth would have been. Oh, really? Yeah, that's why they couldn't fit it in any place in the university. And so they had to build it, they were building a special room in that lab,

and the reason that the scene, ceiling goes up like that, is so they're going to put, you weren't listening too closely. I know I was listening, I just wasn't processing. Yeah, everything you was saying. So anyway, thanks to Dr. Matt for showing us around. That was one of the coolest. And that was also the day-

Can you believe that he let me hold that mammoth femur and tus? Yeah, he just let Link touch everything. He didn't know. He didn't know who we were until we started walking around to another, he took us to a couple of the labs. And boy, where we popped? popular on campus.

What we learned is that there are places in the world where there's a high concentration of mythical beasts. We find those from time to time. And it turns out, Fairbanks, Alaska is one of those places. And word got out, word got out that we were in town. And so we started having a lot of people come up. When you stole the jerky, when you went in there, you were recognized in that moment.

Weren't you? Yes, I was. So you really didn't steal it? You wanna eat it? Let's try it. Hold on, when you were recognized that you just run away from the person? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm feeling this jerky for DMM. Here you go, now you can call this Good Mythical More salmon jerky taste test. Um, it tastes better than it smells. Oh, it does? I have a science question while you're chewing on the jerky. Yeah. How I know if the doctor, if you then was able to like,

kind of, is there a correlation between how the mammoths are going around searching for food as if it's like a memory to them the same way that elephants have their pattern based on where they remember watering holes to be. Yeah, so one of the things they've discovered because these things lived very, very recently given the geological time. We're talking like 10,000 years ago, ish, I think.

And so there's actual intact DNA and a lot of these fossils. They haven't even fossilized yet. It's basically just like specimens that are in this frozen tundra. And so they can look at the genome of a mammoth and they can compare it to the genome of an elephant and basically say these are very, very close,

which is the reason that they believe that they're going to be able to bring back the mammoth. If you've heard about this. And the way that they would do that is they would take an elephant and they would use, I guess, CRISPR, to edit the DNA of the elephant to match the DNA that they have found in a mammoth, and that little baby elephant would become a woolly mammoth.

But they're altering the DNA so that instead of having to put saddles on them, their back is perfect to be ridden by tourists ad nauseum. So I think that's why they're bringing back the mammoth just for tourism. Yucky. That's a joke. That was a link joke that didn't have an indication of being a joke, so that's why I'm here. They are not doing that. But we were asking Matt about that because this is something I've known about for years

and have been reading about and like very much anticipating bringing the mammoth back. And then we asked him the question of, he's not gonna divulge any information. Like he's on the team or the board or whatever that knows about this, but he wasn't gonna tell us anything about it.

But we were just asking about the how you evaluate the ethics of doing such a thing, right? And he was like, well, there's a whole board of ethics that kind of think. He's like, I'm the researcher and I'm just gathering information and I'm giving information, that's my specialty. And then there are people who are like,

should we be doing this? And so whether or not it happens. There's a couple of elephants on the board. No poachers. Right, exactly. So that was a highlight for definitely. Also a joke, but also true. We took Science Mike with us,

and as you can imagine, this was the highlight of the trip for him. He could have stayed in this lab forever. I think he had to change his pants afterward. Not in the back, in the front. Is that a joke? That's not a joke, yeah. He's .

Sorry, Matt. Pretty cool. Can I talk about the dogs? Yeah, yeah, talk about the dogs. I mean, well, let's just talk about the dogs. Well, he may have said one thing, but we also experienced dog sledding. Yeah. We signed up for like an hour sled ride where a, I'm gonna call him a professional dog sledder.

that they own their own dogs, like two people in a sled. Like, Christy and I got in there, got to put my legs around, I got to straddle my wife, and then they bundled us up, and then they got stood on the back, and then boom, these dogs take off. And this is footage of, this is your sled, right?

Yeah, I'm straddling my wife in that picture. So these are huskies. And my guy had just, two weeks earlier, had completed the Iditarod. 1,000 mile race that the winner completed in 10 days. You're six hours on, six hours off, and you just go on that cycle until you complete the race with one 24 hour rest period in there at some point

that you get to elect. There's checkpoints, the vets, check out the dogs. If your dog experiences a problem, like a sprain or something like that, then you'll leave them at the checkpoint. They'll be taken out of the race, but you can't replace them. You start with 16 dogs. So my guy, he's done it multiple years.

He and his wife both race. I mean, I was just bombarding this guy with questions, but this particular year, he checked. he checked a number of his dogs out, like three or four of them. So by the end, he was dwindling down to the point where he was just, it was just survival to get through it. And just so, just to answer a question that a lot of people have is like, is this like, what do the dogs think about this?

Well, let me tell you right now, the dogs love it. We got there, and so all the dogs are kind of, they live outside in these, you know, they're adapted to this place. In fact, they were talking about how they get so upset during the summer because they get so hot because it'll get to like 70, 80, sometimes 90 degrees in Fairbanks during the summer. And so during the summer, the dogs barely move

and just get fat, they said. And then once it starts getting cold, they just run, they wanna run. When we showed up at this place, they were all out there kind of at their little houses and they see the people lining up, the tourists lining up to get ready to go. And they start going, ooh, ooh, hoo!

They just start going nuts and they're all egging each other on. And then they put them into the harnesses And they're just like trying to go. They go like 15 times a day, and they just wanna keep going and going and going. And then multiple times we had to stop for different things. In fact, Mike and Jenny's whole sled turned over at one point. And so everybody was kind of stopped.

They were fine. And when you stop, the dogs are like, what are we doing? Why are we not going? They just want to run because they're made to do that. They don't even stop. Do keep. Oh, they're just crapping all over the place,

just in full stride. And you would smell it when that happened. Well, yeah, I mean, Jenna, we just remember that too when you go. I know you're into that. It's been. Jenna? What?

Yeah, you're into that. I'm just trying to engage. Hi, thank you. We can engage in other way. You ever seen a running dog ducky? Yes. All right. Say more.

Okay, say more. I've seen like dog sledding stuff before, Because that race you were talking about is based on the Balto, Togo, like race that happened to bring, like, the medicine to people back in, like, the 1920s. Yes. See? Yes. She's really engaged.

That's a joke, not true. So they, and they go for, like, when they get to be about 10-ish or so, they retire and become people's pets. And so one of the ones that was there greeting us, they're all so nice. These dogs are so nice, was a retired sled dog. So that's how they live out their older years. I think my guy said he owns 36 dogs right now, and when they reach that a certain age,

then they no longer pull, and they live in the house. And then he said, and my wife still sneaks a couple of other ones in of a night too. Were there lots of puppies that you could play with? No puppies. No puppies in sight.

Okay, I'll have to remember that. I won't get to play with puppies. Yeah, it was all full-grown dogs. But I did see them dukey while running. Yeah, yeah. And we know you're into that. Last thing we did, last day before we got on the plane to come back, is we, in fact, Christy was the one.

We all kind of threw in the hat what we wanted to do. And Christy said, I want to see the reindeer. So there she is, seeing the reindeer. And let me just say, this picture, of course, is with one that is on a little harness, and she's kind of holding it. This is Poppy, the lead reindeer of this. She has like a 36-point rack.

Is female. All of them are female. All the ones, because the bulls, you can't do what we did, which is this is maybe the only place in the world is running reindeer ranch where they bring the reindeer out. This is just loose out in the woods, and you go on a walk with the reindeer, and it's the herd just running around you,

coming out to you and running around you. Yeah, very cool. Like 15 reindeer just out doing the reindeer thing. Rangier games? Reindeer games. Reindeer games. Literally playing reindeer games and you can pet them as they walk by

and they're not that interested in you and they, this is the fascinating thing about them. They don't drink water, they eat snow. That's how they, I mean, of course that kind of makes sense but they're like, yeah, we don't give them water they just until the summertime. I didn't think that was the most fascinating thing about them. What do you think?

They stand still when they dokey. Oh, yes. And it's little pebbles, just like a deer, Jenna, just in case you were wondering. Thank you. Yeah, it was. And that was, that was fascinating. And then when we went to dinner that night,

they had reindeer on the menu and everybody was like. Well, it's livestock. I mean, we were basically walking around with Alaskan cows. Well, so a reindeer is a domesticated caribou. So because of some slight domestication that has taken place, they have shorter legs, and I guess they have a little bit more meat on the bones or whatever.

So they are not... That's the same reindeer. Look how small she looks next to Rhett in your... Yeah, they're big. They're bigger than they seem when they're next to me. Wow. That's hilarious. That's not a reindeer you can ride.

It's a little pony. We were asking her, so... I can, Tibet or something. Well, yeah. She said, the woman who's telling us about this said that there's an indigenous group of people, I think in Mongolia or Tibet or something. Yeah.

I've seen them riding them. That ride reindeer or something that's very closely related to these reindeer. I'm going to have to stop you now. Not because we're at time, but just because I think we've learned too much. Yep. Go to Alaska.