The Joe Rogan Experience - #1559 - Steven Rinella

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

Steven Rinella is an outdoorsman, author, and television personality. He currently hosts MeatEater, available on the Sportsman Channel and Netflix, as well as the MeatEater podcast. His new book The MeatEater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival is available on December 1.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day you're just telling me about your friend who has a dick collection i wish he was my friend still it was um when i was younger i don't know how i came into his orbit but there was a fur buyer and taxidermist and muskrat trapper in muskegon county um where i grew up in michigan and he had amassed a very impressive collection of baculums and you brought this up because frank von hippel had given us this uh fossilized walrus ancient walrus dick bone pecker bone swizzle stick yeah a friend of mine clay newcomb he uh he he he uses them for very like the he saves the black bear ones and people use them as drink stirrers The first deer I ever killed

You gave me one and I was using it as a coffee stirrer For a while No it's not like an actual bone bone in there Isn't there a bone bone in there? Well you gave me one You might not have given me one from that You gave me one from something else Maybe a raccoon or a bear

I don't know but you gave me a dick bone And I had it in my backpack for a long time. Oh, huh. Yeah, so he had – How often do you give away dick bones that you don't even remember that? Well, I wish I had more to share. This guy, this Bob Farris guy,

we used to laugh because he looked like – Bob Farris looked exactly like Bob Dylan. And he's got to be around still. I remember being over at his house one day and him advising someone over the phone with an earshot of me. I remember this guy was going out to set muskrat traps. And I remember Bob Ferris advising him, if anybody fucks with you, shoot them. And I was young enough that I didn't get that that was a humor thing you know that whatever just like a thing you'd say to your body to have a laugh and i remember being like man these guys are serious

about muskrats i was like i hope i don't run into that dude in the marsh and now i'm like oh yeah i could totally see saying that to somebody and then we'd have a laugh and get off the phone how many animals have that bone man i you know i wish knew. And I don't even know what... It's not universal. No, no. It'd be interesting to look up. Until right now, I never gave it any thought to what classification of things has an actual baculum, an actual pecker bone.

Chimps have it, right? All the weasels have it i think chimps have it we don't yeah weasels do uh here it goes oh it's absent human ungulates uh elephants what is that monotrems monotremis what is that wordreme? Oh, the platypus. Oh, okay. And echidna. Barsupials, lagomorphs, hyenas, binotaurongs, sirenians, and cetaceans, among others. Evidence suggests that the baculum was independently evolved nine times and lost in ten separate lineages. God, it just keeps coming up, man. Yeah. It just keeps coming up. Yeah yeah the need to have one of those the need to yeah a built-in hard-on uh that's a really nice one i like that one um there are some that are big enough i don't know what they're off there's some that are big enough to be used as a cane Really? Yeah What animal is that? I thought it was like certain walrus ones

People used to use them as canes Well that's not small That one right there And it's interesting because Because of the fact that it's fossilized It's so heavy Imagine carrying that between your legs I wish I had a

I feel like I want to challenge you on I feel like I want to challenge you on that being fossilized. Well, he said it was fossilized. You don't think it is? You think by the appearance? Because it's so light? But doesn't it feel heavy as shit? I don't want to get in over my waders here, but I want to challenge that.

But I would need to scrape into it with a pocket knife. I don't want to do that to your baculum. That's okay. You can do that. But I would need to scrape into it with a pocket knife. I don't want to do that to your baculum. That's okay. You can do that. Here. But see, don't do it because who am I to tell? You might scrape into it. Would they curve that? God damn, dude. This is so heavy.

No, there are... That I don't know. They might, but there are some that have a hook in them. It keeps your mate from getting away. Jamie, that'd be a hell of a pimp stick. You walking around with one of those? Lil Pimp should have one of those. Lil Pimp! Did you hear that? The thing with Trump?

He called Lil Pump. There's a rapper named Lil Pump, and he called him Lil Pimp. No, I didn't. Yeah, he did it the other day at a rally, and everybody was upset. Tim's new character I was going for. Yeah. This has got to be fossilized, man.

How else can it be that heavy? What kind of bone would be that heavy, Steve? That's so heavy. Here, come on, man. You want me to put a little? Yeah, get in there. You know what? I'm going to give a little scraper down here on the end.

Scrape it. Tell me what's up. God, that does. It is. It's a great bet. Tell me what's up. God, that buzz, it is. It's fossilized. Well, now I want to say that just like we were talking a minute ago about how bettors are betting like it's Trump, it's Biden. Yeah. I'm like back to it's fossilized.

But it's so heavy. I'm a flip-flopper. When I picked it up. My convictions are weakly held. But no, poking it with your knife makes me think that it's a... Poking it with your knife... But this is way outside of my area of expertise. Poking it with your knife makes me a believer.

I think Von Hippel is a biologist, right? He's a... Man, you got a really good fact checker over here, man. It's like having It's like having Doug Dern around Yeah it is Very similar Yeah

Doug's a very good Fact checker That's all he does He doesn't He only Like when you're talking to him He just looks at his phone Because he's like

No matter what you say He's like Nuh uh Nuh uh Nuh uh That's what his official title is Yeah Yeah yeah Yeah he Biology read biology ecology yeah yeah okay yeah so there you go there's another one that's a physicist uh when it comes to the reason i have

become interested in things being fossilized is uh you know if you're out on national forest land not notice i'm not saying national parks but if you're out of national forest land or blm land various land designations uh you know if you find like an antler deer antler you can keep it right or if you find a chunk of bone you can keep it um but not a not an arrowhead right no no because that's an artifact what do you but that's weird you're supposed to leave it there dude does anybody that's an interesting i'd like to talk about because no no they do i remember so let me finish my thing about okay fossilized real quick just because it'll uh the reason i start to think about it is if but you're allowed to pick up a bone okay if you're just out on depends on the land designation let's say you're on a national forest and you find a piece of bone you can keep it if it's fossilized you can't keep

it okay so you could find a like i found a few buffalo skulls that are old but still bone so here you have this thing that could be like 300 years old eroding out of a riverbed and if it's not fossilized you can have it and keep it um if it's just bone the thing is if that thing has cultural markings on it then it becomes an artifact so say you found a a friend of mine i don't know where they might have got it off i don't know where they got it they had had like the grandfather found it they had a buffalo skull that had been axed open and it was so clearly hit open with a tool to get the brain out which would make it an artifact and then you can't touch it or if it's fossilized you can't touch it the private land is totally different

but um yeah it would be that uh so now when i like look at stuff i'm always picking it up i'm always like wishing i had a better sense because i don't want to grab i don't want to like find something to bring home and then be in violation because i brought home a fossilized thing are you under any obligation to report it like say if you found a skull that had obviously been opened up by like uh ancient native americans are you under any obligation if you can't take it to like pointologists, drop a pin, point archaeologists to the spot where you found it? I can't imagine. No. I'm virtually certain you're not under any obligation.

I did one time find a bison skull on national forest land and did a site report where I cooperated with the forest, the administrative unit of that national forest, because I had gone and did some work on it and had a radiocarbon date. So I was able to supply them with a piece of information they didn't have, and so we cooperated and did a site report. And I had also kind of like called a little bit to make sure I wasn't in the wrong. And this is in your book, American Buffalo. Yeah, that I wrote like 20 years ago. Which is really good. I listened to the audio version it's so nice to hear your voice that you you got a chance to

do it because i know the first version of it they hired some actor to do it yeah it was it was it's kind of a funny thing about the the book business is you know audio as you know because you've kind of like in some ways helped be at the vanguard of pioneering this, but, um, audio was more and more important. It's more and more valuable. Now, when I sold that my first couple of books, um, a publisher would, you know, buy your book and they would buy it. They buy just kind of like all rights to it. Right. And they would then go sell the audio off for sometimes next to nothing. And someone would buy the audio rights for a certain specified amount of time. So my first couple books, my publisher buys my book.

And then my publisher basically turns around. Publisher then, in this case, Random House, turned around and sold the audio rights to, I think, Brilliance Audio, whatever it is. And they got it for 10 years. And at first I thought that they didn't invite me to read it because they didn't think I was up to it. But I just wasn't invited to read my own book. They hired a soap opera actor of some sort to read it. I now think it's just an efficiency thing.

They have sort of a stable. This company was based in Michigan, my home state, totally coincidentally but happened to be based there they have like a stable of talent that comes in and they're clean they do clean work they do fast work um and they produce an audio book like working with an author it might take four or five days to record an audio book but they can just get a guy that comes in nails it hammers it whatever i get the i get the product and i turn it on and he starts talking and i couldn't get across the room fast enough to turn it off it was the most it was like it was like watching uh it was like watching my wife have sex with another man whoa is like to see to hear i'm like that is not what that book

sounds like you know right and oh my god was it offensive and then 10 years goes by i wrote that book a decade ago 10 years goes by um and we get the rights back so then not random house has him back and i got to go in and record my own thing. And I got to update some of the science and stuff. It was kind of like one of those little, it was one of those career, like a little career highlight for me. Like somebody looking from the outside and wouldn't see it as anything.

But to me, it was richly symbolic that I had whatever, got to be in a position to be like, I want to do it. I go in and record my book. It's how it wants to be. And that something could still kind of have life after a decade. Yeah, my friend Gad Saad, he's a professor out of Montreal. He's an evolutionary biologist.

professor out of Montreal. He's an evolutionary biologist and he wrote a book called The Parasitic Mind about just very bizarre behaviors and the way people are, the weird thought viruses that people are falling into

today. Woke culture and all that kind of shit. Can you give me another example? Another example? Another example of... Of a thought virus. Well, thought virus is probably not even... I mean, he's used that term before, but it's basically woke thinking.

Okay. Like what's problematic about it. Now, it's not very objective and not rational and people are expected to think and behave a certain way because the gatekeepers of social media and all these people are the ones that are forcing this on folks anyway uh he's got a very popular podcast and yet they still hired somebody else to read his book and i was like this is so crazy like you have such a distinct voice like why would you yeah what what the fuck are they doing like why

would they do that i think that it leads to it leads to a lot of listener disappointment yes at the time i did this though i wasn't i was just a writer right so there wasn't that and maybe we're moving away from that um when you're working on something and i'm sure oh no you'll know intimately well what i'm talking about uh imagine your um imagine your stand-up if you had to like turn in a word doc i've had to do that before for someone else to do your stand-up i had to do that before oh not for someone else to do it but for for them to decide whether or not the things that i was saying were approvable oh i got you i went up and without without the without all the delivery i mean like i i don't want to i'm not trying to conflate

that like writing a book and stand up because delivery is vastly more important than what you do but you you do get a sense of like the cadence of how something goes yeah and it feels important to you but it's kind of like a goofy way to think about it because people that everyone that read it everyone that reads it is on their own trip they don't know your cadence but somehow it's just offensive to hear them read it aloud yeah well i don't know if this makes any sense this is like peculiar this is like particular to virtually nobody no i think it makes a lot of sense i mean particular not particularly now because your podcast becomes so popular

and people are used to the way you talk you have a very unique way of describing and discussing things and i could imagine how offensive it would be if someone just sort of acted it yeah you know yeah it is and um that was so like that book i was at the height of my writing powers because i hadn't had um i was just a writer i wasn't married i didn't have kids uh you were free i i could i could spend a couple years just like focused on something you know and so i do like the fact that that thing still the fact that that book still works and people still read it, like, I'm happy about that, you know. Because I look and be like, yeah, man, like, I feel like, like, that was a reasonable book. That's an interesting way.

It's a very good book. I really enjoyed it. But it's an interesting way of talking about it, that you were at the height of your writing powers because you were free. Because you really could just concentrate on that. I think about that a lot with anything. That's the case with stand-up comedians. It's the case with fighters for sure. When fighters have families and they start getting distracted by a bunch of other businesses and other things that they're doing,

it almost always signifies a downslide in their skills. Yeah. Almost always. For sure, man. I'm watching right now on Netflix, I'm watching The Last Dance, the Jordan documentary. And I'm not a basketball fan at all. Most of the stuff is new information to me.

But in watching it and that study of focus and discipline, and I wonder in looking at him, I couldn't help but think, let's say there was an undecided election. It was like a contested, undecided election. And there's a global pandemic. That guy would still go on that field, or on the court, sorry, and probably be just as good as he always is. And I think that a decade ago, whatever,

like at that point in life when you're just like, maybe more self-absorbed or something, I could be sitting right now in this current climate. Like I'll be sitting right now just like singularly focused on this thing instead of the school board is voting like whether or not kids are going back to school full-time and and like i need to pay attention to that because i have kids i need to pay attention like you know i feel obligated to pay attention politically and i have other mediums that i work in now and it's just yeah you just get like spread out um doing stuff i feel like

maybe that doesn't happen to you no it does yeah it does i remember you tell me you have three jobs yeah i do jump from one to the other uh they connect yeah fortunately they help each other the the thing about uh well you know i obviously i haven't been doing much stand-up during the pandemic i only did one weekend did one weekend in houston and then i got real weirded out thinking The thing about, well, obviously I haven't been doing much stand-up during the pandemic. I only did one weekend. I did one weekend in Houston and then I got real weirded out thinking like, what if I caught COVID and then I gave it to somebody, particularly if I gave it to a guest. But stand-up comedy for sure helps podcasting.

Podcasting for sure helps stand-up comedy. You get more comfortable doing each one of them because the fact that stand-up comedy is live and then podcasting is also live right you're there's no net there's no script and you get more comfortable expressing yourself in stand-up comedy the fear of doing it in front of live audiences you you get accustomed to people paying attention to you and watching you that makes UFC commentary easier because when the cameras are on the UFC I never think oh shit all these people are watching now i never think that because people are always watching i don't care it doesn't i can just express myself so all they feed into each other what do you because you get increasingly at least from my perspective

increasingly you get scrutinized and over scrutinized in the media is it hard to tune it out it's easier than ever really yeah it's interesting because it's so common i could just shut it off yeah no it's it's just it's one of the things that happens you get too big you get too big you get too popular look if there's 300 million people in this country and you have one percent of them are critics you get a million critics you know yeah and you're being you're being conservative yeah like you if you're if you're really lucky you only have a million critics you really you have three million critics three million critics is that's a crazy number that's such a nutty nutty number if there's 300 million people and 1% of them don't like you,

you have 3 million people that don't like you? Yeah. That's insane. If you really stopped and thought about that, that'll fuck with your head. If you have people in the media, if you have 100,000 professional journalists that are focused on comedy,

what are the numbers that are not going to enjoy you? It's going to be high. It's going to be a few thousand when i'm reading about you um and what you think and how you are and i'm sitting there thinking like no he's not it makes me it makes me question like it makes me question everything i read i'll say to someone the other day that there's there's one thing americans like there's like two stories Americans like in this order. They like a story about what an asshole a celebrity is. And the second thing they like most, but not as much as that thing, is how great a celebrity is. But they like the first one better.

Yeah, it's way better. Well, it's more sellable, right? I mean, that's why this ellen is mean thing has gotten so much traction you know ellen's mean to her guests and she's mean people are like oh tell me more exactly it's exciting when you you find out how much and you when you find out ellen has like a half a billion dollars you're like oh my god tell me more about how mean she is like i need to know the dirt that's a it's just a common thing with people someone becomes successful you're you're gonna you're gonna get scrutinized and

it's also like different perspectives like for some people the way i think and the way i i talk is offensive to them they don't you know they have a very clear cut idea of the way people should think and behave you know it's particularly on the left which is you know it's become more and more weird because it would be much easier for people on the left to label me if i wasn't left wing that's what's confusing it's because like i do support basically every left-wing position other than second amendment and increasingly the way they attack the first Amendment is weird. Like they seem to think that censorship is okay as long as you're censoring someone who disagrees with the way you think, which is a new thing in the left.

The acceptance of the First Amendment, I mean, like I brought this up before, but the ACLU, the ACLU was founded by people that were literally supporting Nazis, like supporting actual neo-Nazi groups and saying it like no. Oh, in litigation, like free speech issues. Yeah, this is important. Like even though their views are abhorrent, you have to support these. You have to support their ability to express themselves. Like this is what the foundation of this country is about. Like free expression is the only way you find out what's right and what's wrong. of this country is about.

Like free expression is the only way you find out what's right and what's wrong. Shutting people down and stopping people from communicating is a silly, short-sighted approach to debating an issue. And this is more and more common than ever on the left. Because of deplatforming, because they have the ability with social media, because social media is not really protected by the First Amendment. Social media, whether it's Twitter or youtube or whatever they're private companies and they can decide hey we don't want this guy on because his views don't align with ours and they have silenced people and and kick people off their platforms they really aren't doing anything wrong they just do they're saying things that the people that own and run the social

media companies don't agree with. Yeah. That, to me, is the weirdest aspect of the left today. But other than that, like gay rights, women's rights, civil rights, women's right to choose, I'm with all that. I'm with all of them. I'm with universal basic income. I'm with Medicare for all. Yeah.

I'm not going to argue about that. This is why I am. This is why I am. This is why I am. I think that it's not a bad idea to have a certain amount of money where you give it to people in times like this COVID pandemic. When you look at this pandemic, if people had a certain amount of money that came to them every month, and they didn't have to worry about food, and they didn't have to worry about housing. They were taken care of. You could see how it would be easier to get back on track. The way people are today, where more than 30-plus percent can't pay their rent,

they're on the verge of eviction, and all the protections against eviction are about to run out. This is a great example of where you do need big government. This pandemic is the best example ever, or at least some sort of organized charitable organization where they really know how to take care of people that run into hard times, especially hard times like this where it's through no fault of your own. people that run into hard times, especially hard times like this where it's through no fault of your own. The real argument against universal basic income is the same argument against a lot of people we use against welfare, that you remove incentive. You give people free money, and you remove their incentive.

You remove their motivation, and then you develop a whole class of people that relies on this, and they've become accustomed to it. It's actually terrible for them it's terrible for everybody else yeah i see that argument too that's what when i look at that issue that's one of the things i think about is you know i don't even want to pretend that i don't view things through my own lens but when i look at myself at pivotal points in my life and trying to get going, the fact that I was intensely motivated by just trying to find a way to pay my rent and my cell phone bill,

like intensely motivated by that. And I do wonder like if you had alleviated me from that the the what path i might have gone down and i don't think of myself as being like a weird or that different so i wonder but in terms of when you're talking about the the censorship and woke culture is there's a guy i work with byron and he was kind of i feel like i'm sort of capturing his sentiment he was pondering how if you think about the in the in the 60s right that it was like the right you know the right they were the squares you know they were the ones like tsk tsk tsk like the disapproving you know what are they doing now

and he was kind of he was noticing that the how the left has sort of taken over this like air of disapproval like oh my goodness how could that young man say that you know it's like they've switched they've switched perspectives yeah he someone should tell that young man to stop that. You know what happened? Social media. That's what happened. People got the ability to complain where other people are going to listen. There's so much signal out there.

There's so much noise. So many people have the opportunity to complain about things. And they're also formulating their complaints in a way they hope will resonate with people that really have no dog in the fight so they just want to say something that people go oh that guy's got a good point click i'll give him a little heartbeat for that you know you know what i wanted to ask you about man i i know that you uh you've said this for as long as i've known you um that you don't pay attention to social media comments. On a recent episode of yours,

I heard you post something and run away. Yeah. But do you ever late at night sneak a peek? So you really don't break your own rule? No, never at night. Imagine if you see something at night, then you go, fuck that that guy and then it rolls around your head it's terrible no at night i don't if i watch anything on my phone at night

it's super innocuous like i like watching pool i like watching pool games gotcha i like watching like maybe a science video or something like that something very uncontroversial and innocuous i don't allow myself to get into conflict at night yeah i think that's very bad for your sleep bad for your head if something bothers you you know even something that is even if i agree with them like even if someone says something like oh he was kind of a you know ignorant when he said that or this is a stupid thing this is a bad perspective i'm even if i agree with the person that's saying that i don't want to i don't want to read that at night i don't mind reading it in the morning and then thinking yeah good point yeah yeah i could have handled that better or yeah maybe i should have looked at it this way yeah i'm not without fault

but i don't think it's good to read that shit at night but reading that shit at any time look i'm worst fucking critic i hate everything i do so if if if someone is like just agreeing with the perspectives that i already have about things that i should have said differently or and the other thing is like most of the things i'm criticized on it's like thinking on the fly like this like doing this like i don't have any idea what i'm about to say right like you don't either we're just talking so words pop in your head ideas pop when you try to express them it doesn't always work out and sometimes you're tired sometimes you're hungover sometimes you're you're not feeling so good so like your brain doesn't always fire at the exact same way like my car is remarkably consistent right you get in your car as long as it's tuned up it's you hit the gas it responds in a way that's

very consistent yeah that's a good point man my brain's not that consistent my brain sometimes like a six cylinder and sometimes it's like a fucking supercharged v8 it's it varies a lot you know and it and also sometimes subjects come up that i didn't anticipate like occasionally i'll talk about something where i'm deeply studied on it and like it'll come up and I'll go, oh, no, no, no, this is why that is. And I get very excited and I have a very clear idea of everything that's nuanced about that particular subject.

But sometimes things come up and I'm like, oh, yeah, hmm. And I'm in the process of talking. I'm kind of working it out in my own head, and I'm not exactly sure how I think about it. And I have to kind of formulate opinions on the fly, or formulate a descriptive on the fly, or try to tell a story that maybe I haven't really worked out in my head, and I'm trying to tell it while I'm thinking about it, I'm also talking.

It doesn't always work out that good. Yeah. Yeah. There's a thing I'm thinking about that's very similar to this um i never mind i'll tell you an example of a thing that someone said to me that struck me as really funny and then i wanted to go and tell people what they said but then i'm like shit i don't know if i can tell people that they said that oh it's a weird one yeah i get it do you are you enjoying doing podcast is it man yeah uh it has it's my so of all of the things i do okay of the the the

various things i do for you know a living um it's the thing i enjoy most actually doing it right like having a guest on um for instance there's a guest we have uh i bring him up so i was thinking of him or this guy jim jim heffelfinger from arizona um i bring him up because we're talking about criticism um i'll always read criticism that he sends if he listens to something or right and he's like that's just not right it's not coming from a mean place it's coming from a place where he's trying to be additive to a conversation and he'll send me some things to be like hey man you might um this is a thing you should think about and maybe want to clarify like i'll open that email every single time and he gives me a lot of them yeah that's different it's a it's a beautiful relationship

you know and it's like but but all criticism doesn't go that way because people like to people want to see people bleed right but here's this guy like doesn't want to see people bleed he just wants to advance the conversation but having you know to have the time i had him on i have him we're having a conversation about biology um wildlife management and i'm just like the whole time i'm like thrilled by what i'm hearing yeah like thrilled by the presentation thrilled by what i'm hearing it's great information is delivered well um that if you had a joy meter in your head, like of all the things that you actually do, that to me is, that interaction to me is great. Yeah, because you're getting something out of it.

You're living. Whereas writing, yeah, it's almost trite to say, like, I kind of hate the actual act of doing it. Not enjoyable. Like, actually doing it. Not enjoyable. Like, actually doing it is not enjoyable. Everything that comes out of it I love. Doing it is not enjoyable. It's such a common thing to say. I mean, so many writers find, I mean, Hunter S. Thompson famously hated writing.

Yeah. That was a torturous thing to do. Didn't like doing it. I remember the writer Ian Frazier saying to me that when he was young and wanted to be a writer, he imagined himself sitting at his typewriter chuckling to himself which is like isn't the reality even like when i get a you know we're working on an episode a show episode and i get a rough cut i don't get a um when i open it i open it with a sense of dread not with like oh boy it's here it's like that's not how i feel i open i'm like that's how i feel when i edit my stand-up specials even if i know they were a killer

even if i know i killed i know i was there standing ovation everybody cheered everybody laughed fuck sit down i'm like jesus and i have to go over it you it and try to find what's the best camera angle. Yeah, but I do like it a great deal. It's funny that you're running. It changes conversation a little bit when you're talking to someone. If I have someone really good on, or someone that is laying a lot of stuff on me that I wish I i retained i'll have to go back and re-listen to it because it's kind of amazing um i've always prided myself on uh being really good at remembering what people said um like if i'm fighting my wife and later we're fighting about the fight and she's like well you said i said no

no no it's not what i said i said quote and, quote, and I'll go to the grave with that. Right? Like, I'm very good at remembering what people said. And I'm shocked when I re-listen to a guest that I'm really excited to have on, and they're like, it's an information-heavy episode. I'm shocked at all the stuff I missed. And I'm just wondering, like, just the fact that there's a microphone and headphones, like, somehow I lose my ability to be a person who just like locks info up well it's also because you're

in the process of not just listening to what they're saying but you're steering the conversation you're trying to figure out how to respond when to step in when to not step in you have questions you don't know when to ask them should i hold up would i let this guy continue this thought i have to stop here because there's something weird but but I don't want to make this uncomfortable, and I don't want to miss anything out. So there's all this shit going on that you're sort of managing the conversation. It's not as simple as you just sitting there

talking to somebody. You're talking to someone, and you know that other people are going to listen. And it doesn't seem like it's an art form, but it's definitely an art form. You get better at it, and you also develop a way of expressing yourself that's entertaining for people to hear it's not just that you're talking you're talking

in a way where it smoothly and comfortably enters other people's brains yes uh one of the ways i've noticed that and i even had that problem excuse and I even had that problem when we were having our little preamble chit-chat here, the presence of a microphone changes my thought patterns. Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure. You do get used to it, though. Yeah, I feel way less inclined to say something really indefensible. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the problem with the early days of my podcast is that we didn't have any thought that people were actually listening.

Like when I did the earliest versions of the podcast, like 10 years ago, 9 years ago, we would just get barbecued and we would just talk shit as if no one was in the room yeah we would talk like if i sat down with joey diaz or ari shafir or one of my comedian friends we would just say the most ridiculous preposterous shit because that's how we talk to each other when there's no one around because that's the things that we find funny like when you're talking to a comedian, like regular things aren't as funny. It's like we've seen – it's like if you're going to show a boo-boo to a guy who's an ER doctor and you got a cut on your finger, like that's not impressive. I just saw a guy get shot in the head. Yeah.

Like he needs more. I need more. I want to see an amputation. Like show me – you want to freak me out? Show me something that's like a real injury. And that's how comedians are. It's like there's an unfortunate aspect to those conversations. If you take those conversations and you edit them out of context and then show it to people,

oh my God, these guys are horrible human beings. Like, no, we're comedians and we're just talking shit. You'd have to preface. If you went around saying, wouldn't it be funny if someone thought right but even then they would cut that part out that's what i'm saying but that's like what a conversation is like when you're just goofing on stuff with your friends but you just leave out the part where you say like wouldn't it be funny if someone thought yeah and you just say it as though it's coming from you but everyone it's understood that you mean like wouldn't it be funny if right yes exactly yeah it's a it's a

it's a weird medium podcasts are because it's never really existed before right this is a new thing like my friend adam curry is the original podcaster he he's the pod father he was the first guy to ever have a podcast and he was a an mtv dj host he actually lives here in austin oh you remember adam i never put it together that was the same person that's adam curry yeah beautiful handsome man he had those flowing locks oh yeah no i've known this but i never like yeah he runs the never put it together as the same person the no agenda podcast he's actually one of the reasons i moved to austin he was singing austin's praises and i had been here many many times he's kind of like that

michael jack Jackson leather jacket. Oh, yeah. With the fold-over flaps. Look at that handsome bastard. Look at that. Yeah. Look at that hair. That's the same dude.

Yeah, that's the same dude. Now, show a picture of him today. Right there. Bam. That's him today. Yeah. Damn. Yeah, he's the original.

He's the OG. Oh, yeah, but I you know i can't think of a parallel here but no i like i'm aware of these two yeah right but you hadn't put them together oh that's the same guy oh no yeah yeah he's awesome i love that guy he's um he's got a great podcast called no agenda it's his podcast and um he he really had the very first one and i don't think that was any earlier than 2000 jimmy what was that 2005 maybe somewhere around that so his pod his original podcast was four years before my first podcast which is 2009 so 2007 okay so two years before mine so you're talking about a guy a thing rather that's only been around for 13 years.

There was never a thing where you could just put something out there, sit down, talk to people. And there's no middleman. People think because I have this deal with Spotify that there's a bunch of people sitting on my shoulder. You come in here. You see what it's like? There's no one here. It's a skeleton crew. There's actually a censor standing right next to me right now.

With a gun. It's exactly the same. It's such a skeleton crew there's actually a sensor standing right next to me with a gun it's exactly the same it's it's such a skeleton crew and to have something like we did an election show last night that seven million people saw to have something that has a total skeleton crew doesn't make any sense that it could reach those kind of numbers so this this new form of communication it hasn't been figured out yet yeah like no one no one exactly knows its potential no one knows exactly what the influence of it is there's a lot of mainstream media people that are really upset by it that's also one of the reasons why i get so criticized people get so mad they don't like the fact that i have this much influence they don't like the fact that so many people are paying attention that it doesn't seem right you know

that this is a this is not from the new york times this is not from nbc this is not from whatever it's but all of a sudden all these people are watching it but this is a new thing so people haven't figured this out yet even though it's been around for 13 plus years they're still going but what the fuck is this like four years ago no one took podcasts seriously yeah Yeah. Four years ago, Howard Stern had an episode where he was mocking podcasts and saying, why don't you just yell out the window? No one's listening. It was like, you're wasting your time.

You're wasting your... And he was making fun of Adam Carolla for doing it. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Making fun of people for doing it. And now I think part of that was also, he's a smart guy. And he was also in the middle of his renegotiation with Sirius Satellite Radio, and he was probably mocking comparisons to what he does with this huge organization, Sirius XM.

Yeah, he used to be like the lapdog of FM, and then became like the lapdog of satellite. Yeah. Yeah, but it's – I don't remember what my original point was, but no one – Brand new. Brand new. This is a fucking really new thing. Yeah. I mean...

I think I tell you this every time I come on your show, but the first time I ever heard the word podcast, I'm not joking, I had never heard the word until Helen Cho told me about going on Joe Rogan's podcast. And I was like, well, what? I could go and show you where I was sitting when I heard it. I remember you telling me that. And she's like, you just need to go. She's right.

And I was like, it's a what? A what? Ellen Show. What? That'll never work. Well, that was a lot of people's attitude. Even people that I was really close with. There's a comedy

store documentary that just came out it was a five-part documentary and one of the episodes my friend tom segura was uh who was on like episode two or some shit like he was he was on early early he's been on a fucking hundred plus times i have no idea how many times he's been on but he was there uh in the early days and he's in the the documentary he was talking to brian red band and he was saying like what is he doing like why is he doing this red band was like i don't know some people are listening and he's like can you go to the the list and it's like 2 000 people like 2 000 people were watching this that's it and you're spending three hours doing this fucking stupid show for 2 000 people for no no money? Like, why are you doing this?

Yeah, but would you imagine yourself being a visionary? Or do you imagine yourself being that, you know, it was lucky? Lucky. Yeah. No vision. No, I've expected it to be the way it was forever. Like, someday they'll make a, if they make a movie like The Social Network, not The Social Dilemma, but they make a movie like The Social Network,

which is about Zuckerberg and those guys coming out on Facebook, when they do the story of you, I wonder if they'll do it that you had a vision. Let me put that to bed. Let me put that to bed right now. I thought it was going to be the way it was back then forever. No one paying attention. Very small amount of people, but fun.

It was a great way for it. Look, I loved doing morning radio. I used to love doing it. I hated getting up. Oh, the call-ins to promote your shows? Well, not call-ins. I'd go there. Say if I was going to Phoenix.

You'd like those things? I loved it. It was fun fun i'd get up in the morning smoke a joint go in there with my friends and we talk shit and if it was maybe like the zany guy and then you have his like his his yeah yeah female counterpart who put him in his place exactly you have to go in there and do it exactly at seven in the morning yeah exactly i Yeah, exactly. I used to love it. I used to love it because I would go in with Ari or Joey or someone like that, and we would go and we'd have some fun. And we'd say, hey, we're going to be at the Improv this weekend. And then they would say, so what's been going on?

What are you into? And then you have a story about this and about that. I'm like, that is fun. That's fun. And you leave there and you have a good time with them. Eight out of ten of them were a good time. Two out of ten were like, this's gross like this this show sucks some people were clunky they just they're not good at it they're just oh dude i'm like when i used to have to do that for

books it was i just thought that was the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person but when you're high and it's early in the morning and you went to bed like three hours ago and you get up at least you deal in comedy to go and be like, well, you know, if you go back to the Lewis and Clark expedition, you'll find. Nothing was expected of me, right? I was just like this silly person who hosted Fear Factor or was on a sitcom. And I would come in and I would be in town to tell jokes. And like that was what it was. So I always thought like particularly when I did, if I did like the Opie and Anthony show in New York, that was a really fun one.

Because those guys were on, well, I first started doing it, it was on the regular radio too, but they were on XM. And when they were on XM, you could swear. I was like, this is amazing. Oh, yeah. You could swear. You could just go on. And it was a hang. You'd have four or five comedians in the room.

We'd all just be shitting on each other and laughing. And you'd get out of there like god it felt so good it was so fun then you go get some breakfast take a nap and go do your shows would you uh did you used to do stern ever oh yeah yeah yeah yeah but that was a different thing because stern was like at the helm it was never a hang you know it was the howard stern shows howard stern asking questions you responding to those questions and you know it was very historic that show like he was the Howard Stern show. It was Howard Stern asking questions, you responding to those questions. And it was very historic, that show. He's the first guy. If it wasn't for him, there would be none of this.

There was guys before. I guess Imus was one of those guys. I was never an Imus guy. But he was the guy who's nationally known as the man who's who had this outrageous radio show yeah you know so and that sort of helped the opie and anthony show come to fruition and then that i think the opie and anthony show was the in a lot of ways the nexus it was it was a lot of ways it was the idea that led to podcasts but when i was doing it there was no thought in my head like this is going to be just like the opie and anthony show or this is going to be just

like howard stern just you just you wait just you wait there was none of that i just keep showing up and then one day i was at the chicago theater i did this gig at the chicago theaters 3 700 people right sold out show and i go i had a story I was going to tell. I go, how many people listen to the podcast? Yeah. Oh, is that right? And I went, oh, shit. I'm putting that into my movie, man.

And I remember thinking, oh. My movie's going to be called The Joe Rogan Experience. But I remember very clearly being, oh, no. Like, almost a sense of dread like shit like this is uh this has gotten to a place where i didn't know where it was and it's already there yeah because i've been just doing it you know i think by that time we were doing at the ice house we had this little room off the the comedy club at the ice house we'd show up there and do it there and uh it was just bizarre i was like what

happened like because you're just doing it like this right yeah but you know you know what you could say if you wanted to twist this and make i think i think you could say in your own defenses maybe i'm wrong here but maybe you knew something maybe you knew more than you thought because you probably weren't doing 10 goofy things how's that what do you mean meaning like let's say i um went out and started 20 business 20 goofy little businesses right right and then at some point like holy shit like one of them took off yeah yeah turns out my business of selling old um ranch worn leather gloves to people who like, you know, wish they had that look took off and made a boatload of money. And then later I'm like, yeah, you know, I always knew.

But people be like, dude, you were always like you did all kinds of stupid everything. Nothing ever worked out for you. Then all of a sudden, like this thing takes off and you want to now act like you like saw it coming. So I think that probably in the, you know, probably probably in the back it's good that you don't act this way but probably in the back of your head you probably recognize you're on like maybe you recognize you're onto something nope definitely not i'm trying to help you out don't help me out i'm telling you it's not the case it's just dumb luck i i have a certain amount of brain damage i don't know how much i have, but definitely have a little.

And I think part of – From getting hit in the head? From pharmaceutical – or not pharmaceutical. Just getting punched for sure. There's a certain amount. It's inevitable. From the time I was 15 until I was 21, I got hit a lot. There must be some.

And because of – I think there's a certain amount of not give a fuck that comes with that. Yeah. Like literally. You think that was kicked into your head? This is, I'm not joking. Sam Kinison and Roseanne Barr are the perfect examples that I use. Both of them were normal people and then they got hit by cars. Sam Kinison got hit by a truck and his brother who talks about it in his book called Brother

Sam, his brother Bill wrote a book about it. It's like there was one Sam and then Sam got hit by a car and his brother who talks about it in his book called brother sam his brother bill wrote a book about it it's like there was one sam and then sam got hit by a car and became a totally different person because of head trauma and then became wild and impulsive and just became a maniac that was the sam kinnison that we all knew and loved same thing with rosanne one of the things when i was defending rosanne when she got in big trouble and she came on the podcast to talk about it. I wanted people to understand what I knew about Roseanne. And Roseanne was in a mental health institute.

She was institutionalized for nine months after a car accident. She was hit by a car walking across the street when she was 15 years old and just fucking wrecked, like massive brain trauma, like really never the same again. Couldn't count. She was great at mathematics. She was a really, an excellent student. And then hit by a car.

And then just wild and impulsive. And they locked her in a mental institution for nine months. She was crazy. She's like, like certifiably crazy. Medicated on a whole bunch of different things. And my take was like, to make her responsible for things she said when she's been rewarded her whole life for saying outrageous shit. And she's on Xanax, and she's smoking pot, and she's drunk, and you just want to label her as this awful, horrible person when America's loved her for her whole life for being the same way, for being wild and impulsive. But my point is that those two people were created that way from brain trauma.

It made them wilder there has there's no doubt i have some brain damage there's no doubt and when when people say like why aren't you worried about criticism or why don't you i think there's some of that there there's got to be some of it where i i i've had enough trauma, just the right amount, just enough of these where it doesn't bother me that much. God, I'm going to have you just full out whop me on the head. You think about the things that hold people back. Just the right amount.

The things that hold people back. One of the big things that hold people back is fear. They're worried. They're worried about the repercussions. They're worried about other people's reactions. They're worried about how you'll be viewed. They're worried about the repercussions. They're worried about other people's reactions. They're worried about how you'll be viewed. They're worried about all these things. I don't have a lot of that for whatever reason.

I mean, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I'm a genuinely nice person. But if someone doesn't like me, I'm like, what the fuck am I going to do? Yeah. Just keep moving. I think what happened with me with podcast is that all these people were telling me you're wasting your time all these people were telling me not to do it like why are you wasting your time doing this and all this thing is i like doing it

i'm just gonna keep doing it like i just didn't it didn't like agents want i had nothing to do agents to this day that i have that could have gotten in on the podcast, could have gotten a piece, didn't want it. Do they double back around now? Oh, yeah. I imagine they do. They had a chance. Like, I need help with ads. Like, ads.

Like, what the fuck are you doing? You're wasting your time. We're here doing real things. We don't have time for this. Like, they didn't want to have anything to do with it. This is just – but I didn't have time for this like they didn't want to have anything to do with it this is just but i didn't i didn't have some fucking grand vision i just know what i like to do and when i like to do something i go oh i like to do that i'm just going to keep doing that like this is the same thing with martial arts the same thing with bow hunting like the amount of

time that i spend practicing archery is fucking preposterous it's ridiculous for a person who is as busy as i am but that's what i like i like doing that so i do that you know like i take weeks off every year to go in the mountains and hunt because it's i like doing that i'm just gonna keep doing that that's what i like doing you know when you earlier we were reading up on baculums and it was saying how baculums had been invented um multiple times multiple times right and all these dead-end lineages and you look at something um you know flight right someone could be excused for coming and and seeing things you know a dragon flying a bird right and imagining that there was a uh like an event

that that spawned these things right but in fact they arrived at this like same place they arrived at the same sort of place with like winged flight through completely unrelated channels you know they just got there like on their own what's funny about podcasting is as podcasting uh takes itself more seriously it's like you have this sort of convergent, you know the term like divergent evolution and convergent evolution. There's a convergent evolution with like news and podcasting.

It started out as maybe like somewhat of a revolt. You know, it was uncontrolled. It was irresponsible. It was goofy. It was like a response to. But as it's become becoming become formalized with scrutiny with ideas of responsibility with with ideas of like making a um you know usable practical respected product there's kind of a convergent evolution of driving it back into the thing that maybe it was a response against in the first place.

Exactly. That's where the brain damage comes in. Because I go, get the fuck out of here. That's where I go, get the fuck out of here. I'm not doing that. When people say, you can't have people like Alex Jones on the podcast. You can't get drunk on a podcast that 10 million people are going to watch. You can't smoke pot all the time.

You can't do it. I'm like, yes, I can. I've done it the whole time. Like, why am I stopping now? Well, now it's a big business. Now you have this big deal. Now, you know, they're writing articles about you in the New York Times. Like, now you have to stop.

But that's the way it got there in the first place. The way it got there in the first place is people are tired of seeing these prepackaged. Like if you see, like here's the best example. Evening news. Good evening. Hi, I'm Skip. Fuck face. You know, there's these guys with this fake voice doing this like super overproduced thing where they're talking about subjects.

where they're talking about subjects. The banter in between stories on fake news is, or on news, rather, news broadcasts, is the most fake communication known to man. Like, the woman will say something, the guy will go, well, that's certainly a crazy story. In other words... We're going to go to Bob outside.

And then they go to this and that, and I find that's a terrible thing, a terrible tragedy. Amazing, terrible. Like you could see. Really inspiring. They have these weird little fake interactions. That is the opposite of podcast.

Podcast is real. Like if that was me and you played some video about some guy who decided he was going to try to do a backflip over a Lamborghini and it landed on his head. And I would be like, how the fuck does that happen? Like, you have a baby, like you have kids, you have a baby, like, look at my little baby. And then your baby starts growing up and you're like, God, I'm so proud of him. He's a little drawing you made. And then it gets to the point where he's on YouTube doing backflips over Lamborghinis and landed on his head.

Like, what went wrong? Yeah. Like, that's how a normal human being would talk but you don't have that when you have a massively overproduced program when you have all these people that have a vested interest in that being successful so you have executives you have producers you have writers you have all these people that have a piece of the pie so you instead of having a jamie and a couple of their folks that are security guys out there, instead of that, I have, what, 100 people?

Like a normal show that reaches the amount of people that this show does, there would be a staff of 100 people. And those people would all have insurance. Oh, absolutely, man. They'd have an enormous system of gatekeepers and legal. Exactly. And then the things that you were going to talk about would be heavily vetted. You would have people come in with pieces of paper, and they would talk about, okay, in the first segment, you're going to discuss whether Pennsylvania's vote is coming in.

And let's be real clear that here's the information that you have to go over, and there's none of that here. So whether I'm good or bad whether i'm right or wrong at least you know it's just me this is the thing they were worried about when it goes to spotify like people are worried oh my god they're gonna have sensors in the room there's gonna be people telling them what to do what people are worried about is it becoming overproduced to becoming something other than what it is because they know that's the natural course of progression somebody gets a hold of something that's wild and untamed and they go we got to harness that and make a lot of money off of it but the way to make a lot of money off of podcasting is the opposite way

is to leave it wild but how are you going to leave it wild though when all these people are paying attention to it and all these people are criticizing it you know as we talked about this like if a million people know about your show or a hundred million people know about your show and just one percent of them are mad at you one percent of a hundred million is a million fucking people are mad at you even if 99 think you're awesome yeah that one million could make a big dent in your head you can't pay attention to it i think a way that they might invite you to look at it i'm not suggesting you do this but i think the way they might invite you to look at it could be uh captured um by this article i read many many years ago called the radioactive boy scout um and it was about a kid who was working on some project where he needed to find some you know

americium or something for some boy scout project he was doing what's americium it's a radioactive substance so in smoke alarms when you have a smoke detector um there's like a radioactive substance in there and smoke inhibits the ability of the substance to hit a sensor really so he started buying up any and all smoke detectors that he could ever get his hands on right and then got into that he could find i can't remember what it was like in old types of clocks he was finding some radioactive substance and he got himself a geiger counter it would drive around with a geiger counter on the front seat of his car past antique shops and shit right okay is this a novel no it's a story it was a

story in harper's magazine called the radioactive boy scout he winds up accumulating so much of this shit in the shed that not only like eventually when it all breaks like not only did they haul away the shed they hauled away like his yard how many did he have in barrels how many did he have i i i read it a long time ago wow okay just doing his thing collect the smoke to collect this oh my god look at his face so jesus christ yeah hauled away his yard look at his face like he's got radiation poisoning on his face people might regard you as the radioactive boy scout yeah like at a time you were just out getting some smoke detectors because you and then over time you like accumulated something where it people had to take notice there's there's a little bit of that and they would be like dude i understand but you just

can't put that many of those things in one spot but what's the argument against it the argument against it would tell me you tell me i don't hold that viewpoint i'm just saying i i like to um i like to imagine um my brother has emerged as someone who's like highly critical of my occupation and i'd like to hear him out about it danny or matt no matthew why um he he is well give me the counter argument no what's he critical of you say oh why doesn't he like what i do for a living because he feels that me and other individuals and lots of people that by talking about and celebrating an activity, in my case, hunting, fishing, that it creates that my enthusiasms become infectious and it increases the number of people and diminishes the quality of the experience that that people who've always hunted will have because of competition

very valid argument right so i i like to no i like to hear him out on it i like to hear him out on it because he's smart yeah you know he's smart so i like to hear him out on it because he's smart. He's smart. So I like to hear him out on what he's thinking. I'm only doing the same thing with you. I don't hold your opinion. I don't hold the opinion of someone, but I'm just saying it is. Someone might say, I get it, Joe. It was all fun. It wasn't supposed to happen, but they would say, but here you are.

Time to pull the plug. It wasn't supposed to happen, but they would say like, but here you are. Time to pull the plug. Like here you are. You now have a level of power that is, that could be dangerous. But what could be dangerous about it? Picture that, picture that you, picture that you said something. It's over now, and everybody was already worried about it happening during the election. But picture that you said, like, man, I think that if you're in that county, you should go down to the polling place and do X.

Well, okay. A lot of dudes, right? Yeah. So you wield a level of influence. And I think that you probably now and then bite your tongue. Well, I definitely don't tell people how to vote. No, no. I don't mean how to vote.

I was doing a poor example of that. But that's a good example because that would be where it could get dangerous. Yeah. Like what if I had an idea that was really not well thought out and not good for the general public and I was a performer to this idea. And you threw it out because it was funny. Yeah. Yeah.

And then I told people to go do it. I thought it'd be fun, a fun stunt. Let's see how many people we can get to. Or you're just musing. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. And that alarms people because people would do it.

Yeah. But I don't see that. And that alarms people because people would do it. Yeah, but I don't do that. Most of what I do is talk about ideas and talk shit and talk about things that are happening already. Yeah. I implored people in Missoula County, Montana, to go vote for my sister-in-law, Juanita Vero, and she won by a landslide.

But I think she was going to win anyway. Well, that's awesome. That's a good thing. She's a county commissioner. There you go. I got tangled up in politics there for a minute. There's a real problem with the gatekeepers. There's a real problem with these heavily produced television shows, heavily produced radio shows, and even now internet shows.

There's a real problem with them is that there's inauthentic voices. They don't resonate with people. I know that's not a real person. That's not a person that's unfiltered that's a person that's getting scripts they're wearing makeup they have a team of people that are attending to them and telling them what to do and how to say it and there's a lot of other people again behind the scenes that are all like paying attention to everything you do and they'll come in in between takes and scenes you know there's a there's an interview with uh donald trump with uh this woman from cbs very contentious interview and he wound up putting the whole interview online are you aware of that no this woman was uh criticizing him and asking him questions and he was like you know the way you

talk to me you would never talk to joe biden like this and um 60 minutes wound up using a very small percentage was it 60 minutes jamie yeah they wound up using a very small piece of it but during the full one that donald trump put out like they interrupt the conversation because one of the producers like the american flag is blowing in the background because the air conditioning and it's kind of distracting and he's like well huh and so the guy like stops everything because he thinks that the flag is distracting like no one can see the fucking flag it doesn't matter like what are you talking about but this is what happens when you get a whole crew of people you get so many chefs in the kitchen and some guy just decides that he's going to stop the conversation between the fucking president of the united states who's getting grilled by this lady

because he doesn't like the way a flag is moving. That to me symbolizes everything that's wrong with heavily produced and overly produced television. Or one of the things that's wrong, right? What's really wrong is they push the agenda, they push what you're going to talk about, they'll decide who your guests are. No one has any say

on who my guests are. I choose all of them i choose the day they come in i choose what we're going to talk about there's the the conversations are only what i'm interested in things i'm interested in so i don't have to fake anything like i love talking to you i was excited to talk to you today i got excited woke up this morning all right steve renell is going to be here there's no like oh, who do we have to talk to today? That shit never happens. That's why it resonates. All these shows where it's heavily produced and you're just trying to get the biggest

celebrities in. There's a really disturbing video of Howard Stern from 2013 that somebody leaked. And it's him giving some speech in front of all of his employees talking about getting the show to become more popular. This is what we have to do. And we have to get X amount of celebrities. We need two A-list and two B-list a week. And I was like, wow. Oh, really?

Yeah, I was like, damn. And they're telling people to make fake Twitter profiles and tweet to celebrities. And you watch this, like, gosh. Oh, that's too bad. Yeah, exactly. That was my feeling too as a person who was a gigantic fan of him growing up it's like i didn't i never thought he thought like that i never thought anybody would do that this is one of the best things about podcasting

at least with the way some people do it it's just authentic it's just raw so when people hear it with stumbles and all they know this is just two guys talking this is two girls talking it's what like that um that show what is that called the caller daddy yeah yeah that became real popular because it's obviously just these way these chicks are talking they just talk that way they and and people like oh my god like this is how we talk when we're with our friends. And people, it resonates with them. You can't get that on The View. You can't get that on these heavily produced bullshit shows that are on television

where you have a million producers and everybody cuts in between commercials and fixes people's hair and you're super self-aware. That's what happens on those goddamn things. It's weird. And then people come in with notes and the producer is like, maybe we can bring up this in this episode. I know you like to talk about this, but let's be aware that people think that, and you think

this, and this is a, and we've got, it shows that whenever you talk about this, people tune out. So we got to stop talking about that. So they show all this research, and all these metrics, and like, they fuck it. It gets all fucked up. and all these metrics and like they fuck it it gets all fucked up what what resonates with people is authentic authentic conversations and you don't get authenticity when you have overly produced things with a hundred people's ideas all shoved into one person's mouth you do it doesn't work that way so the more these podcasts get bigger and bigger the more they fall they fall apart

because too many people get involved you have too many people shift them and mold them and change them and then they become just like everything else all these other overproduced things and look there's some overproduced things that are really good you know like the tonight show with johnny carson you could watch it to this day like wow that's a fucking really good show but it wouldn't work today it wouldn't because now it's like you have water in your ears yeah and you don't know you have water in your ear and then it comes out you're like oh that's what hearing is like i can hear better if someone put that water back in here you'd be like what the fuck's that water doing in there i know what

it's like to have no water in my ear now yeah that's a bad analogy but you get what i'm saying i'm getting what you're saying people are they, they're accustomed to this thing now where you, you, you know, that's just, there's no filter between you and that person. You're in the room. Like,

that's how I feel when I listen to your show. Like it's you and whoever's in there with you. That's it. There's no, like one show that I really liked. Uh, I've liked a lot of your shows, but one show that I really liked was the one we were talking to with the

author whose book got turned into The Revenant that movie yeah Michael Punk that's a great one spelled P-U-N-K-E yeah

that's a great one I can't remember no I think it's I think he doesn't pronounce the E shit I don't think it's Michael Punky I think it's Punk yeah

damn sorry Michael but you because you have such a great knowledge of that subject and you know he he does as well and you're you're asking what is this and what is that what was it like for you

when they instead of doing it on the plains they decided doing a rainforest in the pacific northwest like what the fuck was that like and you're talking to him like it's real clear there's this is just you and that guy and you know yannis and whoever else is there there's there's no agenda there's no filters there's no producers so it's it's intriguing to a person because it resonates it gets in the head easy it slides right in there that that story though is a little bit um in some ways might have a little bit to do with uh a sense of responsibility or something because i had taken so many swipes over the years at my uh swipes at the movie the revenant right and voice my dissatisfaction with that movie so much that i believe it went like this i believe the author then reached out or a friend of the author reached out to say um

you know he's really aware of your uh how much fun you guys have with the movie. And I was like, duh, should probably have the guy on. But it was because of historical inaccuracies, right? And it was no fault of his. Right. And that's why I tried to make it clear.

I think what it is, I don't even think he listened. I think he heard that we're always hacking on him. He thought we were hacking on him. On him. And I was like, I'm not hacking on him. We're hacking on the movie.

The fact that... And then I wanted to get with them. I wanted to get with them to be cool. Isn't it always a problem when someone takes a movie that's based on a real historical event and they distort that historical event just for film? Just for... An example that I always use is that movie... Was it Dreamcatcher?

Was the movie... Foxcatcher. Foxcatcher. Oh, yeah. Which is... Yeah, the movie Foxcatcher? Fotchcatcher. Oh, yeah. Which is... Yeah, the wrestling. Yes. The Olympic wrestling team movie.

Based on a real wrestler, Mark Schultz, who fought in the UFC. And in the movie, a lot of things take place that I don't know whether or not they took place because I'm not intimately connected to the movie, but I'm intimately connected with the UFC. And when Mark fought in the UFC, he fought a famous fighter. It's a famous fight. It's a historical fight. He fought as a wrestler against a guy named Big Daddy Goodrich.

Gary Goodrich was a famous fighter. He was a famous pioneer of the sport. In the movie, the only fight that Mark has ever had his entire career, MMA fight in the UFC, in the movie he fights a Russian guy, a white guy. Like they change it. Instead of Big Daddy. It wasn't the same dude that Rocky had to fight no but it's no it's the same dude but but they took a historical event and they distorted it for no reason like you could have had him fighting Big Daddy Goodrich you could have had Big Daddy because Big Daddy also wore a gi he famously would go into uh into the octagon with a karate outfit on so he had his

his uh his gi on and in the movie now there's a guy with a fucking bear shirt a white guy like or a bear chest it didn't make any sense it's like why would you change reality as an mma fan i know what happened like it's a historic fight it would be like when muhammad ali fought sunny liston if instead of sunny liston you had him fight some fat white guy like yeah why would you do that when everybody knows what happened so that's a historic movie where someone exactly we're talking about with podcast with anything else overproduced someone got their greasy little fucking fingers on it and they decided to change reality i think that it comes from a couple places and i've been a witness to it a little bit

uh i think it comes from people wanting to exert creative influence yeah um and also people three things why do you exert creative influence? Wishing that the truth had been different. That doesn't make any sense in this case. Well, yeah. And a third one, that's kind of like two combined

with the second one, but to tell you which things have been different, I remember actually having a conversation like this with a producer one time about you know filming hunting things uh we're like well how do you do it you know like how do you like cut this thing up they'd be like man you would do with us you know you could do with a scalpel

right it's like very precise i use a very small knife to do it. And no joke being like, could you do it with a machete? Because in their mind, there's not the respect for how things are done. It's so show business that you're viewing, you're not in love with how someone did something. You're in love with what the end product could be visualized as meaning it's more arresting in their mind to see someone cut something up with a machete like they can picture it right so why be inhibited why be inhibited by the reality and i think a lot of people would other would look and be like oh no shit you could do that with a scalpel right and they love that fact yeah but some people don't love that fact well we're talking about like those little

havalon type knives those uh when i first saw that i go oh that's genius and then i thought oh of course it makes sense like you're surgically cutting up parts of an animal it does make sense but the difference between that is is this is a physical act that hasn't taken place yet. You're about to do it, and you're going to film it. What we're talking about is a historical event, and that's where it's a real problem, especially for someone who's a...

I mean, I'm kind of a martial arts historian. You ask me about the UFC, I know a lot. You can't lie to me. You can't say that Mark Schultz fought some Russian guy like that's nonsense it doesn't make any sense

that is just a producer who thinks ah people won't know people won't know just do it anyway that's some guy's ego won't know no guy greasy fingered motherfucker

who wants to come in and ruin something because he has his own ideas of how to you know how to put his little touch in it he's but i turned it into the white guy like he's sitting in the movie theater this was my idea they wanted to give it a black guy from canada wearing a gi that's who he was big daddy goodrich is from

toronto i mean big daddy goodrich is famous that's why this is crazy yeah like mark schultz was famous too like this was the first time an olymp Olympic gold medalist in wrestling competed in the UFC. We got to see this insanely dominant wrestling, like, where he just took them down anytime he wanted to and just completely controlled the fight. It was really fascinating. And because he was a coach for Brigham Young, I believe it was Brigham Young University, they told him he can't keep fighting. Like, if you're going to coach wrestling, you can't do this cage fighting thing. Because this is early UFC. No gloves.

You could wear shoes. Like, the rules were, like, real squirrely. It was a totally different thing than it is now. It was one weight. Maybe two weight classes back then. One or two weight classes. That's it. And so, for them, it was, like, distasteful.

Whereas now, maybe they would look at that as an opportunity to get amazing publicity for the college look our head guy is a ufc champion because mark schultz could have been a ufc champion no doubt about it no one was going to stop that guy from taking him down i mean he was like one of the best wrestlers to ever wrestle and they he was the one played by not mark ruffalo mark ruffalo is the older brother. Right. Mark Ruffalo is the older brother. And the older brother, Dave Schultz,

had got murdered by this DuPont guy. Yeah. It's a crazy story. Are you familiar with the Charlton Heston movie, I believe it was from 1980, called The Mountain Men? No. It's a period piece about free trappers, like beaver trappers. Based on real humans?

Just informed from a hodgepodge of events. Informed by a hodgepodge of actual events. So there's an element in there, very detailed element stolen from John Coulter's life, an event called, come to be known as Coulter's Run. John Coulter's life, an event that's come to be known as Coulter's Run. There's some characters that are these amalgams of different people who kind of drifted in and out of that time in the 1830s and 1840s. There it is. They do a great job with costumes.

But they're beaver trappers. The trapping scenes are like laughably bad. And you wonder why they didn't just bring someone in to have them, like it would have been less effort to have the beaver sets they're making make sense but they're like they just someone out there just doesn't care they don't care i had a conversation it's also one of those movies where all the native americans are well except for the the heroin like the native americans are blundering idiots. Oh, God. Yeah. What year was this? I believe it was made in 1980. Yeah, there it is.

Yeah, I had a conversation once when I was just starting to get into acting. I think maybe I'd just been cast in a news radio, and I got brought, maybe not even. I'd been brought in to meet with these producers because they knew I had a martial arts background. They wanted to talk about me doing a martial arts movie. And the interview did not go very well

because they were talking about things in movies, like all these wild scenes. And they were asking me what I like. And I go, well, I like things that are realistic. I want to see something that I know would work. Like if a guy you know jumps up and split kicks two people and knocks them across the room like that doesn't i don't i go i want to see like realistic scenarios where where a person who knows martial arts can go all

that that's pretty badass like like chuck norris give him all the you want but there's a lot of chuck norris movies we had like real realistic fight scenes. Yeah. Like what was the cop movie Chuck Norris did? Lone Wolf McQuaid? No, no, that was the one where he fought David Carradine. Is that how he fights now? Yeah.

No matter, like they killed his dog and then he got pissed. That was pushing it too far. There was one movie where Chuck Norris did, God, it's not the thin blue line, is it? What is it? Code of Silence, that's right. That was a movie where it was a real movie. It wasn't just like a karate movie.

It was like a real movie. It was probably 1980 as well like what year was that movie here he's in a bar next to this speaks to you jokes he's by a pool table getting ready to karate fight 85 yeah i was got everything you like it wasn't too outrageous it was like he was really fighting like it made it made sense like you could see that happening maybe that's not the best example you know who's a good example as weird as it sounds You could see that happening. Maybe that's not the best example.

You know who's a good example, as weird as it sounds? Steven Seagal's early movie, Above the Law. A lot of people hate saying that. I fucking loved Above the Law. That Steven Seagal movie. When he fucked people up in a bar, you believed it. I'm like, he's not doing jumping, spinning wheel kicks or anything like that. He's cracking people over the head with pool cues and breaking their arms. It's like all that stuff. Okay okay i buy that i buy that i would someday like you to do a

lie like an analysis a sort of director's cut style analysis of the fight scene at the end of cannonball run this is steven seagal walking in dude this was back when he was lean i met him in uh i met him in a catfish joint in Oxford, Mississippi. A catfish place? Yeah, they were getting fried catfish. Really? Yeah. Do you remember when he was a real cop on a television show?

People got mouthy with him in this movie, and it's not a good move. Bang, he starts fucking people up. See that? Look at that elbow, that upward elbow. 100% legit. 100% real move that you see in Muay Thai all the time. That's real. Kevin Ross could be doing that right now.

Right there. Bam! That's 100% legit. Knee to the face. All legit. That stuff makes sense. Look, this guy's gonna swing. Boom! All this shit. This is real. This is Steven Seagal at his best. These are like legit legit believable fight

scenes oh now he's gonna get but watch this even the way look why is it steven seagal people talk a lot of shit about him but steven seagal was a legit aikido master like he was one of the first if not the first american to teach uh at a dojo in japan he taught a keto he was a hundred percent legit when i met him he was wearing some kind of robe he lost the script somewhere along the line but back then during this movie man i fucking love that guy and i remember bringing him up in the meeting and i'm and i'm bringing this scene up i'm like that's that's what i want to see i don't want to see shit that I know won't work. And they weren't into it.

And they were like, people don't know that. I go, but I know that. And he goes, yeah, but how many people are you, like you were out there? You know, I go, but that movie's a successful movie. And the guy got upset at me. Yeah. He just didn't want to hear me criticizing his perspective on something that I wasn't an actual expert in.

Has GQ asked you to do one of those breakdowns? Would you? Of what? Of a karate scene in a movie? Well, no. Like, I've done the breakdown where you watch all the hunting scenes oh have you done that yeah yeah it's fun i'd probably do that without gq i don't want them in the mix you don't need them in there why would i want why would i want anybody else in there then you have a producer then you have a big organization behind you when you could just do it here

you could just spark up a joint go yeah all right yeah if you got a lone wolf they kind of like pull the i don't know why like i didn't i i had fun um they get the rights to things maybe well just like they kind of like put it out i don't know it was like they they played they pulled all and i actually pointed out a bunch of hunting scenes and movies for them um and then they did their homework and found a bunch more and they just play hunting scenes for movies cameron haynes did that with archery and that's correct and the you know what he said to me he said the best is that movie brave that animated movie brave he's like the girl's form is excellent is that right yeah like she does everything perfect like because it's animated you don't have to teach an actor to do it you could just mimic uh like a professional archer doing it like see if you can find like a scene the archery scene

in in brave well whether you do it with them or not i feel like um a good fight scene breakdown would like would would uh be like a gift to society uh maybe but that like that scene in uh above the law That's all legit Like maybe not the The flipping the guy on the ground That was holding the gun Let me see if we can see the girl Pull the bow back

Would it be a good parody Look at this Watch this Watch her Okay Her technique I mean even the way She's holding the bow

It looks like a A real human Oh she's got some corset That's holding her back Look at that Look at that I mean her Her technique looks perfect oh they must have look i mean that looks perfect yeah you're right looks good what i wanted to do so this this franchise is gq franchise it's called

the breakdown i wanted to do a parody of the breakdown where an expert comes in and analyzes diarrhea scenes from movies well that would never actually happen because like the scene from uh what was the movie yeah dumb and dumber was yeah well you know that that volume of uh excrement would never actually be generated by a human of that size you'd be dead yeah but there's something about people when you get too many people too many minds too many too many too much influence you know just that it was the thing that things that point was the thing that oh toilet scene so that was the thing that shocked me originally about doing about doing books is i remember um to this is not to discredit my agent but i remember having a conversation with my publisher

and we kind of like um over lunch one time hit on an idea for a book and she seemed to like agree with the idea and it's just two of us in a room and she had she had an imprint and could make that call at random house and we're're like talking and I'm like, you know, I think it'd be really cool. And I left the lunch and called my agent and said like, I think I maybe just kind of sold the book. You know,

you should call and double check. And to, to think that like a, a thing of that level of impact would come about with just that i'm never being really inspired by that that's what should happen right yeah but that's like a the amount of people that are going to go read a book so there you put a thing out that you feel is of influence yeah a fraction of a fraction of what is going to hear you talk yeah and there's and there's not even two people in the

conversation about who you're going to talk to yeah it's weird you've you've reduced it you've reduced it down to a single point but people know what to expect like people that listen to the show like i'm my my ideas evolve yeah i get interested in new things but i'm always me you know it's not i'm not a product i'm not a thing that someone has concocted i'm not a thing that someone like when there's certain people that are on like late night television where you hear them talk you man i want to get that guy drunk yeah i want to know what that guy's really like i don't buy it i don't buy it with me if you like me or don't like me, you know exactly what I am. And also, it's not a lot of men that are allowed to just be like a regular man on TV anymore or on anything.

What are they supposed to be like? You got to be some fucking half-neutered thing. Oh. You know, you have to. All evidence of toxic masculinity must be removed from the way you think and behave. You can't be like a guy would be if he's just hanging out with his friends. Like, that's problematic. And it's problematic to distribute mainstream.

Like, there's so many men out there that feel like they don't have anybody that represents the way they think. that represents the way they think. So one of the things I think that resonates with this show is because there's no filter, because there's no executives that tell you what to do, I get to be myself. There's a lot of people like me out there. To your credit, I think that you're very, very open about the evolution of your thought and you're very open about ideas that you're not trying on, but you're open about your thought process.

Meaning that you'll voice something and do a good job of voicing that you're aware that there's probably more to the story. Yeah, you have to. Well, I'm not married to my ideas. I think that's important too. I think there's probably more to the story yeah you have well i'm not married to my ideas i think that's important too i think there's like there's like a sub there's like a subtext there and i think that someone could even look at transcripts of what like could look at

transcripts of what you say and not and get a false idea of it where if they listen to you it would carry with it the lack of like the the lack of certainty as you hear a new piece of information and discuss it right i see what you're saying which is a little bit important when people are always mad about something trump said like you go to the new york times you read like trump said this horrible thing and then you go and find the video exactly like for instance i remember when everybody's all worked up because trump um referred to pompeo you know as the secretary of the deep state which i thought was funny okay yeah everybody's all angry about it um well you know this magnitude then you go watch the video i'm like the dude's make is like he's just making a joke like he's funny yeah it was like everything about

the interaction was a joke that was in the interview with cbs the same sort of thing the interview with cbs the woman brought up a thing he's like that's not what i said what i said was a joke i was joking i said it like this this is i'm joking i'm being sarcastic i'm being silly that's what i do yeah like he was saying that explaining to her like you're saying it in a different way than i said it that's not how i said it like she was trying to say a thing in her words like you said and and she says it this way he's like that's not what i said i said it like this like and he says it the way he said it and you go oh he's fucking around yeah but they're trying to distort what he said because it makes a better narrative the narrative that he's an asshole i could go on all well i don't want to get into too much but i

could go on all day about legitimate complaints someone might have with like the administration but the thing about him like the thing about him saying funny things and that making people mad like i really don't i kind of a little bit appreciate the humor sometimes he's an awesome troll i mean that's one of the ways he got so much attention during the 2016 election he would say outrageous shit knowing that the media was going to complain about it and they were just giving him free advertising because he was saying things you're not supposed to say when you're running for president and when he was saying they're like this is outrageous and they thought they were sinking him they're like we're gonna show what a bad person he is and people would would watch him say it and they played him for fools man for fools they gave him free advertising and you know it's a we're in a

weird place for people that might listen to this someday uh no one knows who the president is right now um the election has been went on last night but it hasn't been decided, and it might not be decided for three or four days. They think that Pennsylvania is the big one, and they don't know who's going to win Pennsylvania. And if he wins Pennsylvania, apparently he wins. Maybe if he wins one other state in Pennsylvania, he wins. But if he loses Pennsylvania, Biden wins. It could be real weird.

Do you think you'll run for president someday? Me? No fucking chance. That's a terrible job. It seems like they just distort who you are. They push a narrative. They say things about you that are horrible. They do ads where they're just trying

to break down your character. Yeah. And it depends on who the establishment is for or against. I mean, what they're doing with uh biden has been extraordinarily weird where they're ignoring all of his gaffes they're ignoring all of these like like real legitimate i don't think you can say they're ignoring his gaffes i mean you can go watch gaffe compilations yeah but not on cbs not his allies look anybody who is in the news is not in the news. You're in the news. You're in the business of distributing the news that you want people to see.

Yeah. You don't want people to see him thinking he's running for Senate. He's like, well, the reason why I'm running for Senator. You don't want to hear that, so they don't show it. They take away all the times he forgets what he's talking about they they don't say they don't there's no thing that they've ever had on cnn is where they have a legitimate conversation and whether or not he can hang in there for four years forget about eight like how much cognitive decline has this man experienced you don't feel that they discussed that not on cnn no no they haven't they avoid it like the plague they avoided the

hunter biden emails they avoided all that they avoid so much they avoid so many different things that would be detrimental to him because in in large part because they believe they covered that stuff too much in 2016 with hillary when it came to the emails and deleting the 30 000 emails and and then the fbi uh reopening the investigation right before the election. And that could have cost her. And they've decided their approach this time, they've decided that Trump is bad and he's a danger to democracy. And so they're only going to cover the news that they think is important. Well, the problem with that is then you open up the door to Fox News being able to say,

why aren't these other people covering this? They're not covering this because they're biased and it's fake news. And these people are criminals. This is all legit. This is all happening right now. This is real stuff. Here's Joe Biden stumbling. Here's Joe Biden saying things that don't make any sense.

Here's Joe Biden over and over and over again. You don't vote for me. You ain't black. All that crazy stuff. They're not highlighting all that. Super Thursday. Yeah, he's. They're not highlighting all that. Super Thursday. Yeah, he's a madman. Yeah.

It's weird, but it shows you that the news is not just the news. It's the news for the left and the news for the right. You don't just get some unbiased source. I think that people who aren't on that are either feigning ignorance. Like people who don't think that there is an inherent bias within news organizations, within long-term legacy news organizations. They're either like feigning ignorance because it benefits them, or they're just flat out like naive.

But there's never been this obvious where they're just ignoring really hard you don't want someone to be president if they can't think right right someone's showing a real clear sign of cognitive decline you don't you're supposed to highlight that like this is part of the news but they had already picked him to be the the guy running for the democratic party and they just they just decided to just ignore all that shit yeah but like i read the new york times so i go on jamie yeah i just after what you were saying that uh i'm reading updates now they've as of now they've called uh wisconsin for biden arizona has not officially been called but i'm seeing that it's called and if he just wins uh nevada and michigan which he's currently up in that's enough to give him 270 and it doesn't matter about pa doesn't matter about pennsylvania at that moment

oh so biden's gonna win that i i don't know that's the part of like i've i heard last night um i think it was carl rove actually that was saying on Fox News that this reporting number is not accurate because they have no idea how many people voted right now and how many mail-in ballots or early ballots are sitting out there. So saying that like 99% or 95% might not be a good accurate number to go off of. And this is for which state? Any of the states. Any of the states. Yeah, so the closest ones right now are Nevada, Michigan, and Georgia. Wow, just look how close they are.

Oh, dude, they're down to reporting chunks of 3,000 votes. It's fucking nuts, man. And the Trump administration, I think, has said they're already filed a lawsuit to stop the counting in Michigan. What does that mean? I don't know. What? I don't understand how you... Why would you want to stop counting? I don't understand. How understand how you like why would you want to stop counting

i don't say like how can you justify the argument you want to stop counting yeah but they want to keep counting in arizona but what's the art like i wish i understood what is um what do they mean stop counting i don't know so it looks like arizona's lost 51 to%. That's a big gap. 100,000 gap. Well, it's only 84%. So they have 16% of the possible vote out there. Yeah, but what's pissing off Trump, though, what's pissing off his team is that what they're counting are mail-ins, and mail-ins are Democrats way more likely to vote mail-in.

Yeah, right. So that's like, I'm sure I'm telling you something you already know. Yeah. That's his gripe about these things that are laying around. And then I think that he thinks they're just going to start making them up. He tweeted earlier, he's like, they keep finding Biden votes in all these states. Yeah, he's like, someone's going to find 4,000 Biden votes somewhere. Which I don't know.

Sure. They also made weird rules in some states where the signature on the envelope does not have to match the actual person's signature. Like when you sign the envelope for a mail-in ballot. Really? I know my midterm ballot got thrown away. Because it didn't look like your signature? I got a note. I was out of town.

I got a call. There was a problem with my ballot. By the time I got back, it was over, and I didn't get counted. And did they say why? Yeah. It was like I didn't sign and date it right or didn't sign and date where I was supposed to sign and date. Oh. Well, I was quite pleased with democracy.

The fact that they tried to call me to rectify the situation. I would have had to do a bunch of stuff. There'd be no way. I think they probably knew there was no way I had enough time to do everything I needed to do. But the fact that some dude would place a call to be like, bro, your vote's not counting. You call back or you got to do X, Y, and Z in a hurry

to get your vote in. And I missed. Biden wins Wisconsin. Fox News projects limiting Trump's chances of reaching 270 electoral votes. Wow. So if Biden won Wisconsin, Wisconsin's in. So it's kind of over, right? They're going to go to lawsuits now, so we'll see how it goes.

Man, I just lost 300 bucks. It's interesting that Arizona went blue. That's interesting. I mean, California always goes blue. Oregon always goes blue. That all makes sense. Washington, that makes sense. You know what's funny that what's not happening yet is when we set this date, Joe,

we sat here and talked about that America would be on fire as we recorded this. I think they're waiting to find out what the results are, and then they light the fuse. They can't start the fire yet. They might have won, like both sides. Yeah. You know, like the trump people they're like oh i'm not sure if i'm mad yet and then you know the biden people oh is he won what's happening here no one knows once decided once it goes to court that's going to be a shit show

isn't it funny like the different way the different camps if there is like a court and a dispute the different camps like that the one impulse is to mount a giant flag on your truck and get other dudes and trucks to roar around but that's only the trump people i know that's the same like that's one camp yeah okay one camp would be a i have a friend who has a student who has a husband in the military and he described uh these rolling motorcades as vanilla isis why vanilla isis because he was he served and it reminded him of the isis flags in the back of trucks vanilla isis that's hilarious that was his depiction of it but the other camp is that you in the other camp when you're mad like you go to like you go that you march downtown you know it's like the two sort of like playbooks you know are just very different yeah one's in a car one's marching yeah

yeah one's like a display yeah like i don't think that any no one that will get if no one that's gonna get mad about the buy like no biden person will put a big biden flag on their truck you know and drive aggressively on a highway no here's my take on trump people aren't going to go downtown no they're not going to march and not without their cars i wonder what would like who's what side is in worse shape to march the biden people the trump people like who would have like worse backs and fucked up knees oh that's impossible to say you know i i like right now talking about that responsibility thing man um i write like i i don't know if you i feel like

you probably don't feel this i right now i'm kind of like grieving for america a little bit not about how the election might twist but i'm grieving for america about um if the polarization is true. And I sometimes question whether it's true or not. Because when I go out, I just have like, I've been talking about this all the time lately. When I go out about in my community and elsewhere, sitting here right now, whatever, I have like very positive interactions with my fellow Americans.

When I go to the gas station and go in to buy some shit, it's like I come away happy. That's most people. When I go talk to my neighbors, I legitimately, my neighbors around me, I have no idea who they're voting for. I really don't know. I kind of actually don't care.

When I go and talk to my neighbors, there's like a love, right? But then all I hear about is the ripping apart and i'm like either i'm in the dark and it's ripping apart and i'm like too stupid to notice it but i do like i do um like i'm a little scared i'm a little scared as well um did you watch the social dilemma on netflix we've been in our old people with kids way uh watching it in 15 minute increments yeah it's like we have a tv in our bedroom but now then like when i'm home we like watch 15 minutes of it on a cell phone i have no idea why uh my 12 year old daughter this is the dumbest thing i've ever seen she hated it we tried to make her watch it because I just wanted her to understand the dangers and the dilemmas of social media.

But to her, social media is awesome. I like TikTok. She's TikToking and shit and hanging out with her friends. She only sees the positive sides of it. What I was trying to get her to see is, obviously, she has no interest at all in politics. She doesn't understand the division that's happening in this country because people live in these echo chambers and they argue ideas. And the way social media exacerbates this with their algorithms that point you towards things that are outrageous, point you towards things that piss you off and keep you in this uh this sort of ideological bubble and the people are dividing further and further away from each other and you look at this shift in the way uh people view the other side whereas there were so many more people that were sort of

centrists or you know had you know a little bit of ideas from the left a little bit of ideas from the right now it's very divided very divided and it's directly correlating with the uh invention of social media yeah but the if if the division and hatred is only digital but it spills out obviously it does spill out into the real world no you're correct portland you look at seattle you. You lived in Seattle for a while. Could you ever have imagined that they would take over a six-block area of Seattle? Yes. You really did?

You thought they could have done it? Well, I felt I could definitely see it because when I was there, there was an enormous amount of tension around the homeless crisis in Seattle, around the homeless crisis in Seattle that loitering laws, camping laws were just suspended. And they would go into an encampment, like whatever, I don't know what you call it. I wish I knew the proper term for them. They'd go into an illegal encampment or whatever

and move everybody out, actually scrape the topsoil away because of needles and stuff, whatever, scrape the topsoil away, pull out, and then people would just move back in. And there was a lot of tension about this, and it was that some people were like, why can't we enforce? Why don't we enforce the law? And people would be like, well,'s like inhumane to people who are in need and there was like an emerging tension there so to have it later be that you saw that

kind of like blow up on this grand national scale doesn't surprise me after seeing like that level of of just consternation from people who'd been there a long time about why do i have this feeling that there's like laws that i'm held to but some people are just not held to a law and this is pre-covid when you were living there oh yeah yeah yeah so like being witness to that and hearing the amount of of griping about that um and then seeing it no i'm not like wow that's no it felt very like almost not like not at all surprising that it happened yeah i think there's places in this country that have like legitimate almost unfixable issues with homeless people sure los angeles is not one of them uh los, Los Angeles, when I first

moved there in 94 was nothing like this. Nothing. There was no tents ever. There was no, you never saw tents. Now, uh, my friend sent me a video where she was driving down, uh, in Venice and she held her phone up out the window and it is a mile plus of tents, just nothing but tents. It's crazy. Like you look at it, you're looking at thousands of tents. Just nothing but tents. It's crazy. Like you look at it, you're looking at thousands of tents. Like this is insane. How do you put the lid on that? How do you get those people out of there?

Where do you put them? How do you clean that area up? I mean, it's disgusting. And you're talking about Venice, which is like a very wealthy area. There's a lot of money in Venice. There's a lot of beautiful houses. You're on the beach. And they're fucked.

It's fucked. I was going to a restaurant there with my wife and we stopped at a red light and there's this beautiful house to the left probably like millions of dollars right to the right 10 tents right across the street from their fucking house like a small road and then homeless encamp and cross the street from this beautiful house like what the fuck and i talked to people that are there and like no we have ring those little ring doorbell things with the videos constantly seeing people stealing shit constantly seeing people breaking into their yard trying to get into their house wandering around their backyard trying to get into the garage it's like and they there there's no solutions the government doesn't do a goddamn thing about it yeah i've got input on all kinds of things but i'm like low on input on that i have zero we did uh uh our company we did a river

like a river access park cleanup went and picked up all kinds of garbage at a river access near our near where we work and uh there was a homeless encampment there in the woods at the river access. I remember being very – I was kind of scared because I was like, it's super rude to go and pick up garbage and sort of act like there aren't people camped there. Right. And not acknowledge these human beings like you wouldn't. If there was people there fishing or people there having a picnic you would engage right right so i'm like why do i feel like chicken shit about engaging so then i go up and guys uh i know it's gonna seem like we're kind of like up in your business we're doing a cleanup project just bagging up garbage and hauling away dude's like hey give us a couple bags

so they take some bags fill up some garbage set it on the trail we hauled away and like for a week i've been like plotting how i'm gonna and it was easy it's just like it's just yeah we have this uh it was like it was like he i heard there's this writer jeff jeff dyer he wrote this book yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it jeff dyer he was a humorist i remember he had this essay he Jeff Dyer. He wrote this book, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. Jeff Dyer. He was a humorist. I remember he had this essay he wrote about struggling with his desire to witness

great poverty when he would travel. He was a professional traveler. He'd go to India and he would, he struggled with, why do i want to go like is it bad like what is it that i want to go witness behold the spectacle of poverty you know yeah instead of like most people uh don't put that in their travel itinerary.

So he would specifically do that on purpose? Yeah. He talks about it in his book. Why do I like that? It's definitely a perspective changer, right? You start thinking you have problems and you go see people with real problems. You're like, whoa, okay. Yeah.

Yeah. But homeless people in this country, it used to be a different thing. It used to be all people that were drug addicts or all people that were mentally ill. But I think with COVID, you've got people that just had nowhere else to go. There's a lot of people that they might be homeless right now, but they don't want to be. They just don't know what to do. I think that number is bigger than it's ever been before. And that's what makes it even scarier.

And that's one of the reasons why something like universal basic income is interesting to me. I'm not interested in letting the government take our taxes and do things. You don't get a receipt for where your taxes go. You don't know how much your taxes are going to frivolous things or things that don't make any sense or things you don't agree with. But if I knew that my taxes were going to very specific things that I agree with, I wouldn't have a problem paying more taxes. You remember Ross Perot? He used to make those little charts showing where your money went.

Scared the shit out of everybody. He's the reason why Bush didn't win a second paying more taxes. You remember Ross Perot? He used to make those little charts showing where your money went. Scared the shit out of everybody. He's the reason why Bush didn't win a second term, Herbert Walker Bush. That was the first time, unless Trump loses, in modern history where a president didn't win a second term. The first time, well, Carter and then Herbert Walker Bush. Because they saw that Ross Perot took a he bought a half hour of regular television back when there was no internet it's like i'm gonna show you what's going on here here look at this chart this is where your goddamn money goes and he was telling and people were like what the fuck like he opened up a lot of people's eyes to what the irs is and where your money goes

and and why it's dirty yeah scare the shit out of people it's a weird time to be alive steve i'm not uh i don't i'm worried about the future of this country too um i'm worried about in a way that i've never been worried before yeah i i like i just like like america so much i was having a conversation with someone recently where they were kind of like challenging, like challenging why, um, challenging why you could be proud, why you could feel proud about being, um,

in a, um, like a citizen of a country where you just were born there and you just live there because you were born there. It's like, how can you be proud of that? You're just born there. Right. I'm like, man, I can't really suss it out, but I feel like a citizen of a country where you just were born there and you just live there. Cause you were born there. It's like, how can you be proud of that? You're just born there. Right. I'm like,

man, I can't really suss it out, but I feel like, like I have like a sort of, uh, like, uh, a sense of pride and patriotism and to,

and so I like worry about the country in a way, like what it feels like for people. Like I worry about like what it feels like for people to be American. And, um, like what it feels like for people like i worry about like what it feels like for people to be american and um knowing that there are people at a point that are even challenging the idea of taking pride in that like that's a sign of something bad and also people who conversely are taking their deep sense of pride and love and using it to leverage and diminish other people here's a sort of like i love it more or i have more of a right to love it and like even like the fact that the to to either lack patriotism or conversely to weaponize patriotism it all makes me feel like a little like i'm a little skittish right now man right i know what you're saying i want to know if there's

uh this is true because someone's saying that google and facebook both remove the ability to have an american flag emoji that cannot be true uh i don't know i just read it just google that that's just look just i don't know just google that google. Google and Facebook remove the ability to have an American flag emoji. Maybe it was Twitter. Like you put a series of American flags and thumbs up? Yeah, exactly. Come on. Can't do that anymore?

I don't do emojis. I made a decision a long time ago. I literally don't know if it's true. I read it and I was like, what? I was running out the door. I was like, what? Look, I get where people would say you had no say in being American. Why would you be proud of that?

You should be proud of things you've accomplished. You should be proud of things you worked hard towards. But what America stands for, I feel super lucky to be an American. I think America stands for an incredible amount of innovation, incredible contribution of music and art and comedy. And just the overall impact that it's had on the culture of the world for a country that's just a little over 200 years old is phenomenal. It's insane. I mean, I think this is the greatest experiment in self-government and in getting a bunch of people to live together and then what kind of impact it has on the rest of the world ever.

I mean, it's an amazing place to be. I had a conversation. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I was going to say, I just think right now people are concentrating only on the negative aspects of it. I had a conversation recently with someone who had built, over the course of their life, they'd'd built a billion dollar business and highly critical of the government highly critical of the government while simultaneously building a billion dollar business telling me he feels no patriotism i'm like fucking you don't feel any patriotism dude you can't really do you've hacked on your you've

hacked on the government the whole time and built a successful business you don't think there's a little magic in that? Yeah. To be in a place where that can go down? Well, the government's not ideal. No, but it's pretty cool to be able to. I just feel like you'd be like, man, this place is so great. I hacked on the government my whole career and made a bunch of money,

and no one shows up to beat me up. If you did that in China, you'd be dead. Yeah. Damn it. There's places in the world right now or if you did the exact same thing they'd literally come for you and kill you you know we we were talking yesterday on the podcast about this uh uh wrestler in iran that is a world champion wrestler who they executed because he participated in a peaceful protest

and the ufc uh tried to uh plea make a plea to the iranian government to to not kill them and they fucking killed them anyway they wanted to send a nice message this guy was a national sports hero and they want to send a nice message we don't give a fuck what you are you are you are under us yeah we are a powerful theocracy, and we'll fucking kill you. And they did. Yeah. Yeah, that's happening right now. That's 2020 somewhere else.

As bad as it is here, and it's not ideal. Government's not ideal. This is not perfect. We can get an old man who can't talk, another guy who's full of shit, and they're the only people we have to choose from. No, that's not good. That's not good. and then there are other choices i voted for uh joe jorgensen i voted for the libertarian candidate even though i knew she wasn't going to win i mean i voted for her in uh california where she had no chances yeah i i think that that's a uh that's a

very um i'm i'm interested to hear you did that because I had an astonishingly similar thought process as I filled out my ballot is to live in a state where there's not any question about where it's going to go and to try to support – not necessarily like the Libertarian Party, but to try to support the necessarily like the libertarian party but try to support the idea that you'd have a viable third party of some sort we need multiple parties it doesn't have to fall into this crazy system of

like this like collection of thoughts and this other collection of thoughts and you pick between those two that's it that's all you got I any i thought that like any effort you could lend the idea of a third seat at the table would would however you know you're pissing into the wind still man yeah you have those two two schools of thought and these two schools of thought are both funded by the same fucking people i mean that's that's what's hilarious about it all they're all funded by gigantic businesses it's um it's not ideal it's not good and the the idea of a third party candidate

gets mocked i mean all the way back to ross perot just uh no one i mean he's about as close as anyways come you know he at least took some votes away from uh i don't think gary johnson i voted for him too gary johnson didn't put a dent in it he you know he barely had a chance and i don't think joe did either but it's one of those things where you you gotta you gotta look at it and go do you agree with the system no do you just keep going keep going with it every four years well if you know four years is eight and then 12 and then next thing you know you're dead like it's over you only get a hundred right if you're real lucky and you're not even voting for most of those like when you get to the to the end like what is

when do you step up yeah when do you say i don't want to participate in this ridiculous duopoly anymore because that's what it is i I mean, and they're both in cahoots with some branch of the media. Like, it's gross. And then there's so much money involved and so many people are saddling up to the table and influencing them and whispering in their ear and they're making all these compromising deals.

I like that you think about how long you have left on the planet. I think you should. Yeah. Yeah. I wake up, I try to think about how long you have left on the planet. I think you should. Yeah. I wake up, I try to think about that every day. You know how politicians, they'll enter an office and they'll make a clock set for four years or whatever, and it counts down?

I need to get one of those for roughly my life expectancy, and it counts down backwards. Well, don't you think that your life expectancy, I mean, you are one of the few people that I know that has almost been killed by a grizzly bear wow yeah that's well um you had a real in a situation like in a brush yeah something enough where it was scary enough that i now now that i've studied it a fair bit that i now know i had um i had a mental, I had a, I had a, I had like a, like a near death experience, mental, a near death experience, mental experience, even though I was unharmed, but, but it jarred my brain. So hard. It jarred my, the, the, the, the, the, the minute or the seconds that occurred jarred

my brain so hard that as I studied, as I've tried to be curious about and study about what happened in my brain, its parallels are all found and it's discussed by people who discuss near-death experiences, which might just mean I'm not like, I'm mentally not that, I'm not as tenacious mentally as I'd like to be, but my brain got joggled.

But don't you think that- Is joggle the word? It is now. Don't you think that when Is joggle the word? It is now. Don't you think that when you're in contact with an animal that's that large, I mean, a predatory animal that's... How big was it, 10 feet? How big was that grizzly?

Easily? Yeah, I don't want to... Enormous. It was like, struck all of us, and we've looked at a lot of bears as being like a mature brown bear. Okay, so... Mature Kodiak brown bear.

Yeah, that's what we wanted to talk about. Talk about where you were at, a Fognac Island, had a lot of bears as being like you know a mature brown bear okay so mature kodiak brown bear yeah that's what we wanted to talk about talk about where you were at a fognac island which is a place that has enormous bears that whole part of the world is known for some of the largest brown bears on earth yeah it's i mean it's separated from kodiak by a narrow straight it's like so like the kodiak brown bear being like the's biggest bear. It was a neighboring island. But that specific specimen, I don't know, a mature animal. Huge. Just huge. When you're around something like that where there can be no doubt that you can't get out of the way, you can't fight it off,

you're helpless, it must trigger something in your mind where you come to grips with the reality of predator and prey that you almost were on the menu. Like there's just no way around. You can't. There's no rationalizations you can play in your mind when you're confronted with such absolute superiority. Are you familiar with the term playing possum? Yes. Obviously. fronted with such absolute superiority are you familiar with the term playing possum yeah obviously so uh our understanding of opossums now is that they're not playing they conk out right yeah yeah stress he's not playing dead he hits such an like he hits such a stress level that he shuts off.

I'm embarrassed to admit, but I think it's instructive to point out, that I was playing possum in that moment. And I don't mean playing. Yeah. It possumed me out. Let's tell everybody who doesn't know the story oh yeah so real quick um fognack island yeah recently we've been yapping a long time but we had uh

we were hunting it had hung a elk up in a tree and left it for a day and a half all the meat hanging in a tree um then we're camped a few miles away from there and went back to retrieve went back with a few guys to retrieve the meat out of the tree and a bear had found it um and we were very very aware that this might occur and went up and investigated the area around the tree and determined the bear hadn't found it yet in fact the carcass of the animals laying that far away was untouched um in hindsight there was a pile of bear shit that had been smeared on the on the ground and i remember looking at that pile of bear shit and wondering if it had been smeared by a bear's foot or smeared by a boot

and i determined that looked like it'd been smeared by a boot which would have meant we'd smeared the shit when we were hanging the thing in the tree and then stupidly we like sat down to eat lunch and within a couple minutes of sitting down to eat lunch, the bear came in and its open mouth passed just 18 inches from my head. Jesus. And I was facing away, so I was the last one to see it. Jan, as you know, he had a pistol. He had bear spray.

But he hit it in the head with a pair of black diamond trekking poles. He had sat down. He's got spray and set his pistol on his pack. But then when I talk about, like, playing possum and all the shit that happens there, his instinct is to smack it with a trekking pole. Wow. Everything. happens to you his instinct is to smack it with a trek and pull wow everything you spend all your you know you spend all your time thinking about how you're going to handle this that and the other

thing um and uh sometimes it's disappointing that you don't handle stress that well you know i just i don't know i don't know where I went. One of our guys actually got ran over by a bear, rode it down the hill. At that moment, I snapped out of whatever I was in, but it shut me down bad. I even noticed there's a thing that happens to people when they get really cold.

They enter a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy mentality when you start to get cold. You lose, as you start to get really cold, like where you could be in a hypothermic situation, people stop doing the obvious things that you would do to get warm. doing the obvious things that you would do to get warm. And I is aware of that as I am. And as many times as I've experienced that, I still see it happen to me.

I still have to snap myself out of it. Like you just like, you're getting cold, you're getting lethargic, you're getting cold, more lethargic. The cold's getting worse. And I have to be like,

you can stop. You can step in right now and stop this. And I have to remind, it's still, it's like, it still doesn't come naturally, you know? When you talk to people who train, like, you talk to people who train for this kind of stuff, they have to train in a very realistic environment. They have to train to, like, keep your head, you know, and just, like, make good decisions your head you know and just like make

good decisions if you walk into like a active car crash scene or whatever and there's a severed hand laying on the ground right some people are just going to see that hand and they're not going to see anything else some people are just going to see chaos they're not going to focus on any particular thing but it's like the person come in see the hand see everything around them like assess all that it's like it's just from exposure to that super traumatic stuff not to get in cold traumatic but i do when i when i look at how i respond to things i do catch that there's like a a mentality to practice and learn yeah it's it's understandable that something like a bear attack would trigger senses and trigger response that you're just not conditioned for you're not you i don't know how you'd ever

get conditioned to a bear attack i don't know i don't know you i mean on that same island these dudes at the same island there was some guys some uh the same island i think it was later that same year uh some operatives some military guys happened to be hunting there they got attacked by a bear and killed it really yeah got one of them got messed up bad but he killed it i'm like why did he kill it and i didn't well maybe they had their gun out right you were in a weird situation too because if you guys were relaxed eating lunch with your guards down you're sitting there chewing on a sandwich i always laughed you know i was in the middle of saying what like i was in the middle of a sentence i'll never forget because someone was laughing about why we were putting some sandwiches together

and someone was laughing about why my sandwich looked so much nicer than someone else's sandwich and i said if you want i was in the middle of saying if you want a sandwich like this about why my sandwich looks so much nicer than someone else's sandwich. And I said, I was in the middle of saying, if you want a sandwich like this, get your own fucking TV show. But I was never able to finish the sentence. But I know I was in the middle of saying that when all of a sudden the people around me erupted off the ground

as though like a landmine had gone off underneath us. Whoa. Because they saw it, and I didn't see it. I was looking the other way. And it came in running. Oh, just. Yeah.

That was scary, man. And I've had like, you know, a fair bit of exposure. And I'm, yeah, like, I mean, relative to most, a ton of exposure to those things. I got to expose my 10-year-old kid to them this year a couple times, you know, hunting caribou in Alaska. And it was, like, cool to kind of see his thought process. Yeah, you've been exposed to more than 99.999% of the population. Yeah. And for it to rattle you like that.

It was disappointing, man, because we're always talking about, I'm going to do this, and I'll do that. And we're always like, yeah, I actually prefer the 44 over the 3, because if I can't get it done with this, I got 13 reasons he doesn't want to charge me with this semi auto it's like all this like bullshit you know and all of a sudden it like hits and like you know swat it with a track and pull i've only seen one grizzly ever in the wild uh up close and uh it wasn't a big one it was like a six foot bear but uh it looked at me in a way

that another bear has never looked at me before yeah i've seen black bears black bears look at you like what are you who are you what's going on can i walk by you like black bears look at people in a weird way yeah they're like denizens of the underbrush man the grizzly looked at me like this in a weird way. Yeah, they're like denizens of the underbrush, man. The grizzly looked at me like this. Just locked on me. And I was like, oh, shit.

Like, that is just a different thing. Like, it looked at me like, am I eating you? Am I going to eat you? Yeah, there's a mindset probably that comes from just not being challenged. Yeah. There's a mindset that probably comes from just not being challenged. Yeah. And where I was at in Alberta, you can't hunt them. So no one hunts them.

So they're bigger, they're more fierce, and they have no pressure. You can still in Alberta. Can you? Yeah. BC, you can't anymore. BC, you can't, but you can hunt grizzlies in Alberta. Yeah, I think Alberta. I'm not saying everywhere, but I know that they still, I believe that Alberta still has it. BC lost its grizzly hunts.

This is my friends, John and Jen Rivett. They were talking about how they're trying to get them to open up some sort of a season because they have a lot of them up there now. Oh, okay. And because the woods are so dense, they don't really know how many of them there are but there's so many encounters with people yeah the the bc shutdown was very it was political right it was very yeah it was like it was a referendum issue yeah that's a weird one right because the people that are making that decision they've never had any experience with bears but you talk to the people that actually

live in the bush and they'll tell you that there's a lot of grizzlies up there and then there was also a thriving uh business and industry of people that were guiding up there and you know they're constantly in contact with them and they're like you know this is not this is not an endangered animal yeah people that live in proximity to like people that live in proximity to things that are regarded as endangered tend to have a different perspective on the abundance than people who look at it from far away. This is a good time to find this out. What happened in Colorado with the wolves? Oh, I mean, they had to have. Did it pass?

Jamie could pull it up. It had to have passed overwhelmingly. Yeah. I know it was on track to. I know that Utah's right to hunt and fish passed by a landslide, constitutional right to hunt and fish. What does that mean? 30-some states have it now. They're just codifying that you have a right to hunt and fish.

It doesn't usually have teeth, but it might in the future. It would just give a way to challenge laws. It's being used right now. Montana has a right to hunt and fish. You have a constitutional right to hunt and fish, meaning that a state has to hunt and fish meaning that um that you know a state has to recognize that renewable resources can be like should be allocated to hunters and anglers um and it's and you one might ask like well how's it ever come into fruition

there are there's a lawsuit right now in in montana there's a lawsuit against the governor and the state who they put a cap, they put a quota on the wolf harvest, and they're being sued by a conservation group who's worried about the steep decline in elk numbers. They're being sued by that conservation group that their right to hunt is being infringed upon by a reticence to control wolf numbers to the detriment of big game herds people are usually i think people are supposed to act like apologetic for the fact that they want wild game resources like it's like oh you know um we talked about this one individual that you were curious about who is very instrumental in wolf reintroductions. And he refers to hunters as the recreational big game killing industry. And it's kind of like a swipe at people who sort of act like it's not a legitimate perspective to want there to be deer, elk, moose, caribou to eat and use.

deer elk moose caribou to eat and use i'm like very unapologetic about my view that i want there to be a lot of deer elk whatever game what's most of your food right yeah i want like i want that to be on the landscape i want there to be abundant amounts of that and i don't i'm not bashful about the fact that my desires there um influence my feelings about predator management. I don't view it as that bad. Wolves kill coyotes. Competition. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's see here. Pass? It says it's too close to call. It's up 10,000 coyotes. No shit. Wow. To that, wow, man. I think they were predicting it was a done deal.

Holy shit. it's only now that to be clear that is just that proposition 114 in colorado is is they're saying restore great grails what it is is making that the state fish and game agency will need to craft a plan there's still a lot it's not like it's not like that passes and all of a sudden here comes a helicopter full of wolves it it doesn't go that way they have to craft a plan then that plan has to be approved yeah it'll be and it'll be like you can imagine it'll be like all kinds of lawsuits all kinds of issues a lot to be sussed out but it'll it's forcing the state game agency to craft a plan and take seriously what it would look like.

Because the argument is like, oh, you're making it a popular vote. You're taking science out of the hands of scientists and putting it in the hands of the public. But in all fairness, I hope it doesn't pass because wolves are showing up in Colorado on their own. I think that's a better way to go. But I think less social tensions, it'll happen slower. It'll be like a

you'll kind of like generate a sort of different sort of wolf that way um so i hope it doesn't pass what do you mean by that generate a different sort of wolf i mean that wolves that this is a little bit it's a little bit fuzzy but it's like when wolves when we established wolf seasons in montana wolf hunting seasons and trapping seasons in Montana and Wyoming and Idaho after a long period where there were no wolf seasons, it had a really dramatic impact on how the wolves behaved. It made them much more secretive, moved them into different areas, kind of pushed them out of some of the bigger riparian zones. It just sort of changed their attitude, changed the way they interact with the landscape so that you're getting um it it it might be true that by having wolves that have this instinct of they're already coming out of the greater yellowstone ecosystem you know passing down

through southern wyoming and going to colorado they might have kind of a they might have developed a finer tuned instinct about avoiding trouble with people because there's like a lot of selective pressure against wolves and against grizzlies a lot of selective pressure against those that are too ready to engage with man it's like a good way to end up dead when you engage with man and spend too much time around livestock spend too many time around developments it's like it doesn't work out for those ones the ones that shy away from and avoid habitations avoid livestock like that's the that mentality and a wolf gets rewarded so it could be that um if we're headed down a path where it's it's

It could be that if we're headed down a path where it's just going to happen, that Colorado's going to have wolves. And I'll say, like, absolutely it's going to happen because it happened. They showed up on their own. How many? Do they know what the numbers are right now? Just a handful, but they think they're having pups. So the architects of this plan in Colorado would say it's just not going to happen fast enough.

They want it to happen real fast. And do they have a specific reason why they want it to happen faster? They would say that wolves are gone because of human manipulation, because of a very intentional plan to shoot them and poison them off the face of the earth. This was in the 1800s? Yeah, 1800s, 1900s. And that is wrong. That's a sin against nature and that we have an obligation

to rectify that crime, that sin, and bring this animal back. Their enthusiasms don't extend to all sorts of imperiled wildlife but this is a highly to them a very symbolic one it's very symbolic uh people you know the black like why they don't have those passions around the black-footed ferret i don't know i would love black-foot ferrets. They don't feel that way about black footed ferrets. Um, but with wolves, it's like, it means a lot to them. I think also that is bringing wolves in is a little, it's like also no one's ever going to tell you this.

I have a suspicion that I have a, a personal theory that it's a kind of a way to sort of stick it to. It's kind of a way to stick it to cattle producers. It's kind of a way to stick it to hunters. There's a little bit of that that infuses it, a little bit of a cultural antagonism. That itch isn't scratched with black-footed ferret work like it is with wolves just symbolic so you think they so are they like uh vegetarians they want to stick it to cattle producers because they don't want people growing cattle well i mean just to speak in very very general terms the cattle industry has been historically quite hostile to...

Environmental groups? No, hostile to predators. Right. Hostile to wolves. I'm kind of like, if you could work into my brain on it and sort of just accept that what I'm telling you

is kind of a true thing, I do like wolves to be on the landscape. do like wolves to be on the landscape. I recognize that there are real problems that come, like real problems for real people that come with wolves. I don't think we should,

I don't think we can justifiably play God and eliminate species from the planet. That feels very deeply wrong to me. I want wolves to be on the landscape but if they're going to be on the landscape we're going to have to set what that looks like and then open up like pressure release valves and pressure release valves will take the form of hunting and trapping like state management there should be a stable population of wolves

we should agree what that population looks like and they should be managed by the state as a renewable resource it's like what i want is pretty clear um i'm not like an anti-wolf person what i am is an anti um abuse of the endangered species act person um so i'm not anti-predator at all man i enjoy seeing them i enjoy cutting the tracks in montana a lot you know i got friends to see them a lot i see them only very rarely and glimpses of them um but you can go find them quite easily in certain areas like in yellowstone national park you can go find them they were people would run like even before the hunting season started you'd run into him more i was with ben o'brien in bc the first time i met ben and uh we we found a uh carcass of a uh moose calf that had been torn apart by wolves it was wild

yeah it was pretty recent it was cool to see the other day we were looking at a brand new um it was funny because we're looking at a brand new track and a big burn area a brand new track and brand new powder stone powder snow and a big burn area and then looking around you felt like you could see everything and the snow was still falling those brains like why can't i see that thing um and then i talked to a friend of a friend and he'd had he was in that same area on that same day and had a couple passes and 40 yards of them so you know it happens and it doesn't yeah there's such a it's like iconic animal for the west you know i'm glad they're they're around i'm glad they exist i've only seen one in the wild once and that was in alberta and it was just it was at dusk barely see it run

across the road i was like is that a fucking dog what is that it was one of those things yeah i saw i saw a black one this year and all the time i saw it i was wondering if that's what i was seeing like the whole time i actually spent looking at it i was was like is that what i'm seeing and then it was gone and i was like oh that's what i saw so i never even appreciated it was so fleeting i never appreciated the moment i spent the whole moment in wondering what i was looking at i had that happen the other day where i was like i saw oh my god there's a mountain lion i'm like oh no it's not it's the back of a bighorn sheep i don't know why my head went mountain lion i saw a squirrel once in alberta and i thought for a whole second that it was a wolf yeah is that a wolf it's a fucking squirrel

i was like what is wrong with you but it was just like in between trees and you know dense forest i couldn't tell what the fuck i was looking at the arctic explorer um the john or steffensen was a hill on the land with two white snowshoots coming down these troughs in the hillside. It's weird how the mind plays tricks on you like that. Yeah. That's why I don't trust UFO reports. Oh, it's a walrus. Oh, no, it's not. It's weird how the mind plays tricks on you like that. Yeah. That's why I don't trust UFO reports. Oh, it's a walrus. Oh, no, it's not. It's the earth.

When people talk about seeing Bigfoot, you know, I ran into one lady when I was doing this Bigfoot show up in Mount Rainier, and she was very adamant that she saw a gorilla. She saw a big gorilla walking through the woods. She's like, I'm looking at it. I'm like, that's a gorilla. And I remember, like, wow, this lady's so sincere. I wonder what she really saw. But now I'm convinced she saw a black bear

that was standing on two feet. But I bet in her mind, I'm thinking about me seeing that stupid squirrel, thinking it's a wolf. People, your brain plays little tricks on you and then your imagination fills in the blanks. There are these online forums. People have found three Bigfoots on our tv show

because they don't realize that people are always like ducking to get out of a shot so someone might like whatever someone might be doing something and like realize all that you know and they duck into a brush and lay down and people are like oh yeah if you go to this moment and this second, you'll see it. They don't even know it's there. The guys don't even know it's there, but you can see it in the bushes.

People love to find missing things, things that aren't real. I've always said this, that if Bigfoot was 100% real, if everybody knew there was Bigfoot, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting as orcas. If orcas weren't real, if orcas were a legend, like people have seen this thing, it's in the water, it's intelligent and it's enormous and they can sing and they

have different languages and dialects and they might be aliens. They might be from another planet. Apparently they don't even hurt people. They help people fall off boats and they actually rescue them. And these are all things that people have said about killer whales. fall off boats and they actually rescue them and these are all things that people have said about killer whales but because we know killer whales are really seem like oh look you can put them in a fucking swimming pool and stick them in a parking lot in san diego and people come to see them and they think it's cool my kids they have a lot of we get them a lot of animal books and

they like the dinosaur books especially the ones where there's like always a picture of a dinosaur than a person relative right so you get a relative relative size sense i find myself i probably have a hundred times to my children said that's all that that dinosaur book is great dinosaurs are great the biggest thing to ever live on the face of the earth is alive right now. The biggest thing ever is alive right now. And they're just like, yeah. T-Rex, man. I'm like, are you listening to me?

The biggest creature ever is now. Now. They're like, man, if I could only visit the dice. Like a shark Imagine if a shark wasn't real But then you could see one Or they thought a shark was extinct Like everyone cares about Megalodon

They think they might have found a Megalodon Megalodons might still be alive But nobody cares about a great white That's alive for sure there's a lot of them They fucking breed up in San Francisco You can go in the water They find them There's an amazing video of uh drone footage off of malibu when these guys are surfing and you follow the drone footage just a couple hundred

yards from the servers and you see a great white swimming through the water just right past these people it's like jesus christ i was looking at this radio tracking shit of a great white on the East Coast. And he'd be like hanging around the coast, you know, and all of a sudden like beelines for Bermuda. Hangs around there. Beelines back where it came from. Just like, yeah, I think I'll go over a thousand miles over this away. Yeah. They're incredible, man.

Yeah, they're amazing. And they're real. And no one gives a shit they care if they see it if you see it like whoa but it's where animals are native and non-native it's such a such a strange conversation i i i really enjoyed your um your episode that you did with jesse griffiths uh where you were a hunting neil guy which is Texas, where we are now, is a weird place. Yeah. My wife saw an axis deer the other day.

She's like, near our house. She's like, I saw this deer. It was like a full-sized deer, but it had spots like a fawn. And I go, oh, it's an axis deer. She's like, they have those here? I'm like, they must. They have everything. They have.

We're laughing, driving down the road. Oh, a zebra. It could easily be a zebra. No, I'm not kidding. like they must they have everything they have we're laughing driving down the road like oh a zebra it could easily be a zebra no i'm not kidding like we're like oh a zebra yeah you saw a zebra and and not only that but a free range zebra wild zebra like low like yeah i don't know that the the one i'm talking about i don't know i'm i would imagine that happens at some amount of them like get away here and there. Where us, it was just wide open like woods in between houses.

There was access to here. Yeah. The zebra I'm talking about was like someone's zebra but it's still just funny. Like the climate supports it. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So these Nilga, I mean, you know. They're from India? Is that what it's from? An antelope from, you know, Indian subcontinent. An antelope species. Such a, Indian subcontinent. Such a cool looking animal.

Yeah. Strange looking. Jesse's restaurant here in Austin, man. I mean, he serves it. Yeah. Shout out to Dai Due. It's a great place. We're going there tonight.

You know, I dog on him about the name of that all the time. But it like comes from like this, he'll have to explain it to you. It's Italian for something. Yeah. It's like to eat from the both the kingdoms. It's something, it's some, he kind of regrets naming his place that but uh because i was like you know no one else would pronounce it but it's like um eat from the kingdom of the land and kingdom it's some portion of this sort of like proverbial thing saying like eat from the land eat from the sea which isn't which isn't bad advice is he fully open now because when i went

there i don't believe so he just had the patio i don't believe it's some kind of limited situation yeah austin's interesting like some places are just open yeah it's like wear a mask come on in and then other places like his place is a little bit more protective he um like yourself he's a exceedingly generous person. Jesse is. Remember we were talking all that shit about America? Good American. Yeah, he seems like a real nice guy.

I've only met him once, but his restaurant's amazing. What does Neil Guy taste like? Like I've only met him once, but his restaurant's amazing. What does Neal Guy taste like? You know, it's kind of funny the way describing wild game goes. I think that it was described to me by people who are down there. We were on a ranch, a famous ranch called Eteria. It's very limited access, but just through social connections and things,

we're able to hunt on this property that doesn't get hunted very heavily. And the people there that have grown up on that property, grown up in cattle ranching, they view it as superior to beef. Meaning like, neoguy are for eating, cattle are for selling.

Wow. Is the way someone explained it. I mean, because there's like a great monetary value. There's like a market for cattle. There's a market for neoguy are for eating, cattle are for selling. Wow. Is the way someone explained it. I mean, because there's, like, a great monetary value. There's, like, a market for cattle. There's a market for Neoguy, too, but it's different and more complicated. But it was like, this is what we eat. We eat the Neoguy. We sell the cattle.

So, it's approachable, mild, reminiscent of beef. You know? It's very, very popular. It's very popular. There's a handful of things in the U.S. where we have filmed and talked about Sika deer a lot in Maryland or Delmarva Peninsula. People in those areas, as popular as whitetail deer are, it's like America's deer, America's meat. People in those areas are like, screw that, man. I'm eating Sika deer.

it's like america's deer america's meat um people in those areas like screw that man i'm eating seagate deer and with people that have exposure to axis deer feel that way and people have exposure to neil guy are like that's my animal so it's it's in that it's it's in that collection of yeah they're insane man i got that hide tanned by a guy here a guy here in austin ran the process for me got it tanned and and my daughter wanted it for her bedroom, and then there was some kind of custody battle, and it wound up in my boy's bedroom. Look at that picture. That looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book.

That doesn't look like a real animal. The one on the right, the big picture? That's amazing. No, they're crazy, man. And aren't there vitals in a weird place, too? Very far forward. So you almost. Low and forward.

And how far do the lungs go back? Ooh. What do you mean the limbs go back? Lungs. Oh, lungs. Oh, I'm sorry. Not as far as if you're accustomed to. Not as far back as if you're accustomed to deer.

Yeah, you actually, you got to aim like weirdly forward and weirdly low i shot one shot top of the heart off it but i was aiming like i was under instruction from a person a guide that we were with um and he was like imploring me like you have to listen to me like it has to go this way or you'll lose that thing in the brush wow yeah he said when they make it into the brush man you get a sinking feeling they like don't go down easy i shot it twice he's like shoot it again shoot again like really i feel like i shot it again but yeah they're worried about losing the strong strong animals um but yeah man they run most of them around private land there are public hunting options opportunities for them

is that a an animal that gets hunted by tigers in its natural environment? I believe so. I believe so. But I have no, I have zero expertise on that. That's the thing about axis deer. Apparently it was explained to me that they do, in their natural habitat, they do get hunted by tigers. So they're so fucking fast.

They're equipped to deal with it. Have you hunted axis? Yeah, I have, yeah. How fast are they? Fast. They're so fast. But I haven't hunted them with a bow where you really really where it really comes to haunt you leopards play leopard yeah leopards pray there's another thing like you know with american

pronghorn or what we popularly call antelope um they're ridiculously fast yeah for anything they have to deal with and it was like they you know the theory is they they co-evolve with the american cheetah yeah and now you look like why does he need to be that? He doesn't have any reason to be that fast. Yeah, I got to get a hold of Dan Flores again. Yeah. I had him on years ago to talk about his book, American Coyote, and lost contact with him.

Are you still talking to him? Man, I haven't, but I feel as though if I reached out to him, he would be as uh as warm and inviting as he always is he's a great guy he's an intellect man very very he was um when i was in graduate school i had to take like a out of discipline seminar or something like that and i took his uh i took his his history writing history, whatever the hell class I took of his, and he kicked my ass. He kicked my ass.

It was a very hard class to take, and I learned a tremendous amount from that guy. He was a good professor. I want to get him together with someone like Randall Carlson, who's an expert in the Younger Dryas impact theory. Because the two of them coincide. Like the mass extinction of North American mammals coincide timeline-wise with the Younger Dryas impact theory. So Randall Carlson spent his entire life focusing on this impact theory and how it ended the

Ice Age. People talk about it being like the idea that never dies. Yeah. I was at the Lindenmeyer site in Colorado, a famous Folsom site, ice age encampment. And it was funny because I happened to be at that site, that there was a guy there working these certain sediment levels to find these little micro crystals these these like these things that were created during the impact because you had all this

radiocarbon dating that had been done around lyndon meyer so we knew all these ages and he was in there looking for these things and the anthropologists that i was with were very dismissive of him it was like ah you know but they're less and less so now well yeah well they're very invested they're like we i did an interview with a guy not too long ago and we were talking about scientists oh it was a entomologist uh justin schmidt i think it was we're talking about um like why do young scientists always make all the discoveries not all but you know the good idea like some of the good ideas come from young scientists he said because people my age all we do is defend our old shit it seems because we're so busy like we're so busy defending our old theories well so many

people in the anthropology side want to uh employ the uh blitzkrieg theory right which is no it's at this point it's dead or dead really remember i talked about i got an opportunity to revise my book after 10 years yeah yeah i put some language in there around the blitzkrieg hypothesis so what's the replacement theory well let's explain the blitzkrieg theory yeah the blitzkrieg hypothesis held that um that it was the arrival of humans that led to the extirpation and extinction of a lot of the ice age megafauna so you'd look and and and it would be that why did mammoths go extinct in europe you know 30 40 000 years ago but they went extinct here 10 000 years ago um and you map like

human migrations and you found this kind of this compelling pattern of the fact that people show up and shit goes extinct. We did a podcast about this with a guy you should talk to sometime named David Meltzer who knows this world better than anybody. It's really elegant. It's a very elegant theory. It explains a lot very quickly.

It's seductive because I think it's seductive from a cultural perspective because it allows you to fantasize that past cultures were as destructive as our own, which makes you feel good that they were hunting these things to an extinction back then. So we can't be that bad for driving things to extinction. Now everything about it was like very packaged up and had a nice bow on it.

What started to eat away at the blitzkrieg hypothesis is that um more dna work on extinct on remains like more dna work on bones and a greater picture of um effective population size of these past populations and you realize that things were in steep decline anyways things were changing rapidly anyways maybe people came in and kind of like did the coup de grace on some of these things but it wasn't that they blinked out they faded out for a long time but everything our old perspective of how we used to look at it made everything seem very compressed and very immediate um and so just it's just gotten like more complicated it's just gotten more complicated as we understand more that you had

that you had the the mammoth populations were perhaps collapsing long before people showed up and also there's the problem gestation period yeah, that's a long gestation period. Yeah. Yeah. That was the idea, too, that you could, like, people coming into a valley and you would kill some females and could have, like, for pachyderms, you know, these things with, like, very low fecundity, that you could come in and kill some females

and have this impact on it. There's also the problem that I remember a criticism of people used to feel this way the criticism used to be they called them the bison boys where they had this fantasy of these like roving highly effective big game hunters and then people point now to um why is there not more evidence of like why is there such limited evidence of humans killing mastodons and mammoths um mostly i mean stuff's just gone right it's been a long time ago but but that's another thing um when we used to do uh ant archaeology they would throw everything away except for the big bones uh they would look for projectile points look for big bones everything else would just get washed away in sluice boxes

or through sieves. We weren't looking at the finer picture of what people ate, what was there. They thought that any association of human artifacts and mammoth remains meant that, well, it could only mean one thing. These people killed those mammoths. Sites that are described as kill sites that now um people investigate like we have no reason to believe this is a kill site there's a thing that came out of mexico not long ago where they're like oh the the all there's a big kill site they even flip the bones over in order to do this and that to him yeah and then these analysts come look at like there is no compelling reason to think that this is a kill site

because now like you take a elephant a dead elephant dump it on the ground look at it in a month look at it a month later look at it a month later look at it a month later what happens to the bones you know um and things that we used to think were kill sites are just not. It's a long time. Something dies. Time goes by. Someone goes and camps there. Later, it all gets jumbled up. You find a projectile pointing a mammoth bone.

Oh, my God, he killed it. And then other people are like, well, no, not that we've analyzed it. 3,000 years separated these two occurrences. There's only so much place on the planet. Shit happens in the same place time and time and time again. So it's falling apart for reasons Meltter would describe more eloquently than me it is fascinating when they're trying to piece together what happened based on some bones and some fossils and based on tools and just whatever evidence that they find in the ground and that they're trying

to put together a comprehensive portrait of history through this. What a lot of anthropologists laugh about is that everything unexplained is always of religious significance. How so? Like, let's say you find a couple buffalo skulls in a circle. Like, they're doing a dig, and they find some buffalo skulls facing the same way in the circle. Oh, I see what you're saying. It was like a— A ritual. Yeah, it was ritualistic

or just people might be like died there yeah i mean you know i might be cutting up deer my kids come in and do something line the hooves up in some way stick them in the snow right or whatever things just like freakish but yeah like unexplained things are always like ritualistic symbolic reread stuff into stuff but yeah the blitzkrieg hypothesis i'm sure there's probably some hanger on but um it's it's it's it's as dead as the mammoths i used to love it because it was so beautiful especially because there's stuff like this like wrangle island that's where the the woolly mammoths were survived they lived there till three four thousand years ago and then that's why and then you'd be like but no one ever showed up there

they didn't get colonized by humans yeah why did all this big shit go extinct in australia 40 000 years ago when people showed up it's you gotta have that melter dude on what's his name? David J. Meltzer. He's at Southern Methodist University. When I went to visit him, you know what he showed me is the Folsom type site where they first excavated Folsom bones. I got to hold them.

And you can see on the skulls, this is no joke. This isn't like us making believe something's true. These are 12,000, 13,000-year-old bison skulls. And you can see all the cut marks where they cut the tongues out. Wow. Yeah. You can see the knife work on the bones. Wow.

Yeah. That dude is sharp, man. He's written a bunch of books about this stuff. He'd kind of blow your mind a little bit. When we were in Nevada, when we went on that mule deer hunt for your show, I found an arrowhead, and I lost it. I don't know what the fuck happened. Someone cleaned my office, and it disappeared.

We were going to talk about putting it. Yeah, you're supposed to leave it there. Put it back. Yeah, I didn't. I was with some anthropologists one time, and we were finding sweet shit up in the Brooks Range range in alaska and you had to leave it there man they'd photograph it and sketch it and stuff and tuck it back into the tuck it back into the seems so crazy tuck it back into the tundra what'd you find oh old stuff old stuff these guys are um like what

kind of stuff projectile points points. Big projectile points. Like how old? Well, the guy I was with, he's retired now, a guy named Mike Kunz, he had found a thing called the Mesa site, and he had identified, this is that kind of area, it's mathematically the most remote area in North America, if you factor in distance from roads and settlements. He had found this very prominent mesa where it wasn't a campsite it was just a place that people would sit and wait for game

to come by and found hundreds of projectile points up there wow you know these things are like ice age projectile points because they had all kinds of radiocarbon dates because they built all these fires up there um and so uh he there's there's a he did this whole like book type thing about it it's it's the academic community accepts it uh the academic consensus is that he's right during the ice age whatever it was 12 7 year 12 000 some odd years ago whatever the hell it was 10 700 like some ice age date people camped up here made shit loads of projectile points this guy found them um we were doing a kind of a continuation of that work of mapping out campsites and we would find like unbelievable points

unbelievable points it just seems so fucked up to what it hasn't been picked over yet i know but it seems so fucked up to leave dude tony man it was like against every bit of like michigan elbow grease i've ever had laid up in me i i would fantasize i would be like um i'd be like you know you might be leaving that there but someday i'm gonna get me a helicopter it will be mine. Well, just the idea of holding on to one of those, just put it in your hand and just imagine what it was like when that guy used tendons to lace it to a stick.

Yeah. Bad dudes. Yeah. To get their food. A lot of know-how. They didn't know they were bad. They thought they had cool stuff. They're showing each other new shit.

Yeah, I know, right? New techniques and strategies. They're like, check this out. And they're like, oh, you young guys. You know, they thought it was sweet. Yeah, there's a lot of that out here. There's a lot of arrowheads apparently out here on ranches. People find them all the time.

Yeah. My friend Gary Clark Jr. had a picture on his Instagram page. You can page you probably find jamie of a perfect arrowhead he found on this ranch i mean it's just perfect and you just look at that arrowhead and you think god damn someone sent that through the lungs of a white-tailed deer probably hundreds of years ago look at that yeah that's sweet that's so awesome look at that thing it's that's sweet. That's so awesome. Look at that thing. It's perfect. And it looks like someone just made it. Oh, man. Time travel.

I know. Could you imagine? If there was ever a time where you could just go to view, just to be a fly on the wall of history, do you know when you think you would go? 20,000 years ago mile city montana you're so specific why i just because i just want to see how um i'd want to see maybe not 20 whatever the hell it is i'd want to see how woolly mammoths interacted with that landscape

wow like i just seen woolly mammoths in that in their habitat there um at sort of the arrival of the first humans there's a guy i'm friends with online i don't know him in real world but uh he's contacted me he's actually sent me some stuff from his site but he's uh um the uh instagram handle is uh the boneyard in Alaska. Do you know this guy? No. Let me see if I can find it. You found it already.

There you go. The Boneyard, Alaska. They have this site that they found something there once many, many years ago. And since then, they've been pulling all these. There's an Ice Age caribou horn. They've been pulling all these. There's an Ice Age caribou horn. They've been pulling all these incredible pieces out. I mean, just over and over and over. Did you see that one picture? He had a bear track.

Look at that right next to his foot. Is that a black bear or a small grizzly bear? What is that? I'd want to see the front foot better, but the front foot's back behind his heel. It looks like a grizzly. Now, if you scroll back to the page, Jamie, you go down, they've had a bunch of, like, look at the one in the upper right-hand corner. Oh, there's Forrest Galant on the podcast talking about it. No.

But that, look at all the tusks they keep finding there. I mean, they've had, it's a treasure trove in this one area, and it's not an enormous area. I mean, I think it's only a few acres that they've been excavating and finding all this shit, but it's just a massive amount of dead bones and skulls and tusks in this one area. On my first date with my wife, I took her to the La Brea Tar Pits.

At least she knew what she was getting into yeah man yeah my old stomping grounds i've never been uh but uh that's uh oh you really no she tells a story where they had like a little miniature bronze of a mammoth and she said um oh look a baby man they must have found a baby mamm man and i um i was like well no actually you know that's she's like yeah no shit you know she's like i was like well little lady let me set you straight that's a specific time so you would want to see that more than anything else yeah if i could do a second if i could take a second whack at it i would go like a second setting like back to the future part two yeah i would go to join daniel boone on his first trip over the cumberland gap oh that ought to be wild that'd be my second trip didn't they eat wolves i don't know i know he's got a great story about a wolf coming into their camp and biting a guy.

And what surprised these hunters was that the wolf seemed very intent on one individual and bit this individual. He then later developed hydrophobia. And they were out jack lighting for deer where they burned pine knots in the front of a boat and drift down rivers to shoot deer. And he had a bout of what they called hydrophobia and went berserk. He had rabies. Yeah, he had rabies. So hydrophobia is like that fear of water. Like, I don't know what it is, but people freak out.

Had a bout, had to be restrained, took home and he died wow yeah and that was in his that was in his social circle so the wolf had given him rabies when it bit him came into a camp seemed very what alarmed them was how it seemed so intent on a person and eventually bit that person and killed that guy jesus and then there's another thing that happened to Boone where Boone's kid was tortured and killed by Indians, and he was hastily buried. And Boone went back to find the bones of his son, and the wolves had torn at the body. And Boone, it was a rainstorm boone later described how he had lifted

his boy out and held him you know sobbing and then heard some sounds in the distance and it was some indians coming and uh slipped off into the night wow and you think about like that moment for that guy jesus christ when he later in life he would uh go on these long hunting trips just him and his uh him and his slave together we're going like like they're like old old men old buddies or whatever i don't mean to i don't mean to say like bodies because it was like right but they were like they would like him and a slave would go on these long journeys hunting together which i think would be like a great play right it kind of would be oh dude when i retire i'm gonna work on that would be oh dude when i retire i'm gonna work on that just imagine being those people not knowing what was out there making their way across the country that's just a type of uh mindset

it's a rare individual that i just don't think we grow people like that anymore no it's over observed it's over observed but lewis and clark were supposed to keep their eyes out for mammoths really wow yeah it's like oh while you're out there man there was some consideration was there any stories of mammoths people had all the bones all the bones would come out of stuff jefferson got really interested in some of these mammoth the mastodon bones that had come out of some of those licks and was like hey man you know in addition all the other shit like keep your eyes off for a big elephant it must have been fascinating to see what the wildlife was like before it was molested by modern

humans you know back in the 16 1700s like dude read Russell read Russell Osborn's Journal of a Trapper. What year was that from? He was in the late 30s, early 40s. He was a meticulous journal keeper. One of the few people that wrote a journal who wasn't full of shit. Yeah. It's a great depiction of what it was like.

He was like 30 years after contact in those areas. I think I mentioned this to you before, but our idea of pre-contact contact, there's this Elliot West, there's this historian, and he describes how when Lewis and Clark hit the Great Plains, I might have told you this. When Lewis and Clark hit the Great Plains, there were Indians living on the Great Plains.

So here's Lewis and Clark discovering the Great Plains, right? There were Indians on the Great Plains who had been been to europe met the king of france and returned yeah yeah at that time he's like it is he has this essay it's like i can't remember what it's called but it's like it's a muddled history it is like you want to put it you want to put it into like this neat chronology and um shit there were hundreds of years of just touch and go of interaction touch and go interactions hundreds you know we we had this like linear idea about like you know that that all of a sudden we sort of like in this organized fashion went and found these areas but there's like crazy interplay i had no idea that anybody

from back then from a native american tribe had gone to france like that sounds insane like how did they even get over there you remember jim jarmusch's dead man yes kind of similar to that like people would be brought like as like like you know delegations you know like we'd be trying to manipulate the governments france spain england you know would be trying to manipulate tribes to participate and form alliances and you know that you would that the that the you know let's say the the french might ally with with a group and that group would stop the bleed of of english colonists pushing into the you know appellations and there's all these just and it was you know it wasn't a lot of it was self-serving too like

you know the tribes absolutely it was like they weren't capable of making these decisions for themselves they got on board with these plans but yeah they were whining and dining man to be like you know we're happy to join forces with you come to see my palace it's funny because we're in such a historic time right now but we're in the middle of it you know one day they're going to look back on these days post this crazy election when people are jockeying for position who's going to be able to control oh they'll be like fucking podcast jo Joe Rogan. That's going to have a weird...

Joe Rogan had to ruin it all. Yeah. Or not. Or not. But they're going to be looking back at this time about what a chaotic time it is. I mean, this is a history time.

Like when people in the future are going over the 21st century and all the different turns and trials and tribulations this is going to be a pivotal moment we um what's this jamie oh there you go 1725 group of indians including one how do you say that a toe and osage osage osage at one missouri chief one one Missouri young woman, one Illinois, one Chicago. How do you say that? Chicago you?

Oh, Chicago. I have no idea. I don't know the pronunciation. And one, uh, were sent to Paris, France. There they met with the director of the company of the Indies and the Duke and the Duchess of De Bourbon. Chiefs were given a complete French outfit, which included a blue dress coat, silver ornaments, and a plumed hat trimmed in silver.

They were presented to King Louis XV, and they performed a dance at the opera. The French king gave each of the chiefs a royal medallion, a rifle, a sword, and a watch. Wow. Then it goes on to name more groups. So that's 1725. Lewis and Clark were 1804. But those were not Western, not extreme Western. One of the books that I read, I was listening to, I should say,

on audiobook about Native Americans, maybe it was Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks elk speaks yeah where they talked about him going over to europe and taking part of those wild bill shows that they did over there that that is one of the more fascinating things about the wild west was that these people that were involved in these historical battles then recreated them. It would be as though... This isn't... Participants in the Battle of Little Bighorn where they defeated the 7th Cavalry under Custer and annihilated his command,

participants of that battle would later get together. They would get together. Because there was other campaigns going on at the same time. So we think about Kusar getting killed, but not too far away it was more soldiers that didn't. But anyways, participants of that would later get together and play it out. It's hard to picture that we would have Al-Qaeda fighters.

Right, reenacting. Come and be like, oh yeah, i survived the global war on terror and shit now we're gonna show you like no i was sitting here when they kicked in the door like like how that happened actual people from like gettysburg would get together right yeah and pretend to... Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, look at this. I feel like if you went,

like my old man fought in World War II. I feel like if he had you gone, I don't know, man, maybe when he was older in life and they said like, hey, do you want to get together with some of the, you know, what you like to call krauts

who were in the war and you show what happened when your buddy got killed? I feel like he might be like, yeah, no, no. That still feels a little fresh yeah real fresh yeah i mean and these guys were doing this not long after they weren't even old men yet no yeah like a half a decade it's it's so and we're talking about the level of animosity that these people would kill each other on both sides and mutilate the bodies.

Deep, deep, deep hatred. The likes of which is hard for us to comprehend. Like the impulse to desecrate the corpse of your enemy and then get together and have a Wild West show about it one of the mutilating bodies you recommended uh son of the morning star have you read it yeah yeah it's heavy it's heavy shit the things that they did to each other yeah yeah and the crazy thing was that the native americans had no sense of there was there was no quitting there was no sense of uh turning themselves in there was no sense of like if you were captured you're you were murdered and mutilated so they would fight

to the bitter end like they they knew there was no surrender because if you surrendered you would be tortured and killed yeah like some of the depictions of the tortures from that and empires of the summer moon yeah the things they did to the bodies like just like jesus christ like when did they develop such insane cruelty and has this always been a part of being a human being or was this exacerbated by the hard conditions of the of the plains like what what led them to be so vicious it it's a great question man there's things about like things that these great the great lakes tribes of like um making people eat parts of themselves you know uh

but a lot of it had you know there's like things about the how how you if you could handle that um and not crack it was respected it was like a testing you know but i don't know what it was like to live i can't even begin to imagine what it was like to live with that level of stuff there's a i recently read a book called planesman the yellowstone and it was a history of the yellowstone basin and um this guy takes that whole it's sort of like an antidote to Son of the Morning Star because he takes that that Custer fight which has become so emblematic of the west and like this regarded as this big turning point in the history of the Indian Wars and he treats it like just like a little kind of like inconsequential thing that happened one day just didn't really matter the the book was written man i mean you know i

mean it was like everyone knows how this story is going to end and that day didn't have any bearing on how it was going to end a guy did something stupid got some people killed the war ground on it'd be like if we're if it's like it would be like if we're like imagining d-day right it'd be like let's say we're imagining d-day and then we heard about some peripheral story that happened on d-day where like a weird thing happened and some soldiers got killed and some guy made a mistake and got some people killed and our telling of d-day um and let's say that incident was called the whatever the baculum incident okay um now when we conceptualize d-day when we talk about custer it's like this isn't his analogy i'm presenting it this way when we talk about custer

we're sort of talking about d-day as the baculum and incident and we've lost sight of d-day you know it was like just a little blip it's like a thing that happened that didn't matter the war ground on. They beat them. They knew they were going to beat them. No one wondered who was going to win the war. It was like some guy screwed up, got some people killed. We subjugated the tribes.

And then it became bigger over history. Over time, it became that that story got infused with all this importance and symbol. And it's deeply symbolic. I'm a sucker for it. Yeah, I am too. Deeply symbolic. Just war was intimate then. There was no other way. You had to be close.

You had to be close to each other to kill each other. Yeah. It's a different world, right? And with the Plains Indians, even more intimate because you're just dealing with bows and arrows. Yeah. be close and be close to each other to kill each other yeah it's a different world right and with the plains indians even more intimate because you're just dealing with bows and arrows yeah lances on horses it's a different kind of uh different kind of life and death yeah and flying a drone over the middle east from texas and then going home at night and having dinner with your family yeah yeah it's uh it's uh it's interesting how we're more and more separated from that

and also interesting that the uh the plains indians seem to take delight in it like it was uh it was fun there was fun sport there was ever increasing ways to be more cruel and vicious and it seemed to be there there was entertainment involved in it yeah some kind of honor code that i can't even begin to try to like guess at and explain but things that would land you in jail today for war crimes yeah we're a matter of course yeah expected um i forgot to talk about your book oh no we don't need to talk about it at length i'd love if you mentioned it i'm very proud of it meat eater guide to wilderness skills and survival um this is your uh how many you guys have written you had the the two books on wild

game yeah we had the guide book yeah guide books like um complete guide to hunting butchering and cooking wild game volumes one and two which is big game and small game then did a wild game book wild game cookbook and uh yeah this is a a very pragmatic practical it's kind of almost a response to the sort of fantasy land that the survival genre has become um it's a lot more there's a lot it's for people who actually spend time outdoors um avoiding avoiding trouble managing trouble conducting risk assessment and then also just like how to think how to behave what to do uh what things matter what things don't what risks live in your head what risks are real um yeah and it's it's yeah it's comes out december 1 is there gonna be pre-order now oh i got a copy of it right here baby is there going to be an audio version of this

man i don't know we haven't talked about it it's illustrated yeah that would be a problem right yeah and it'd be it's more meant to be like a usable manual yeah yeah like i'm usable manual but i'm quite happy with it thanks for bringing it up my pleasure thanks for being here man it was fun always very much always is i'll come back in a year or two years whatever please do come back anytime um your podcast is the meat eater podcast it's available everywhere um and then the show is on netflix and sometimes it's on the sportsman's channel too right yeah that's right but how does that work uh you know it has like this complex thing of like first window second window stuff so our episodes

currently premiere on netflix and then um go to know, you can find them on Sportsman Channel, Outdoor Channel, past episodes. But new stuff goes up on Netflix and winds up there. And we just recently put our seasons one and two just on YouTube. You just go check them out on YouTube. All right. We'll be adding to that YouTube stash as well. All right. Beautiful.

Thanks for being here. Thanks a lot. Bye, everybody.