The Joe Rogan Experience - #565 - Trevor Valle

Episode Date: October 23, 2014

Trevor Valle is paleontologist and the host of 'Mammoth Unearthed' debuting on October 26th on the NatGeo Channel.

the Joe Rogan experience Trevor Valle welcome buddy how's it going man? good man when we were sometimes when people sit down and you know

you just start talking you're like shit shit stop talking. We got to record. Trevor's a paleontologist and explain to me the job site thing. Like when someone's digging, you have to, they need a paleontologist on site in certain places? Well, it all depends on really where you are.

So here in the state of California, we have a uh a law called sequa it was started in 1970 and that mandates mandates that any archaeological or paleontological stuff so like dead bodies of of you know early californians or glassware all the way up to woolly mammoth bones or not woolly mammoth but mammoth bones saber, saber-toothed cats, stuff like that, or even older, has to be mitigated. They have to be protected. So my job right now, I work for a company called SWCA, Environmental Consultants. We go out and we make sure that the glassware and the fossils

and the bones and all that that get found by 40-ton excavation machines when they're building new hotels in downtown wow so yeah i'm standing next to things that could very easily kill you so when they do that how they keep from fucking something up like what when they're digging in is it just dumb luck oh no they they fuck stuff up that's how we find it so because we we don't have x-ray vision i can't like look in the ground and go, hey, there's a whale there. So the bulldozers going by, the excavators scooping stuff up. And you're just scrambling to check?

Yeah. Wow. It's like it digs this big hole, dumps it over. I'm looking in the hole and I'm looking over at the spoil pile where they're mounding everything up and trying to hop back and forth. And all of a sudden you hear this sickening crunch and you're like oh you wave everybody off and there's like this bone sticking out you sweep it away and like oh crap it's a mammoth okay and then i shut the shot i shut the job site down did they get mad at you oh yes really yeah what's like the biggest thing you found and how pissed were they um i can't say exactly where but somewhere here in los angeles uh i was part of a team so the job site i was working on they found a whale a whale a fossil whale a five million year

old whale whoa where there's no water right now holy shit think like downtown la whale wow that's what how long five million years old about five million years old holy fuck we were finding shark's teeth and stuff like that hanging around um and the the owner of the company was uh the the owner of the uh the construction company the the forgot what their name is uh supervisor um the general contractor uh he's like oh you're just finding teeth i'm like well you know where you find really big shark teeth you occasionally find their food and they ate whales he's like oh you won't about three weeks later oh yep look whale rib cage wow the whole rib cage yeah so how big is that five million year old whale the jacket's about three quarters the size

of this table a jacket yeah um sorry i'm like thrown out terms we wrap uh fossils in plaster to protect it because we're taking the dirt out with them so we can prep it later so i'm gonna like take out hammers and chisels in about a month and try and work all of the bones out of this big block of dirt so we wrap plaster around it. We call it plaster jacketing. Oh. So we put all that on there. And so, yeah, it's about three-quarters the size of this table.

I mean, it's like 19, 20 ribs, like three or four verts, some other random bones. We don't know what it is. And what makes, like, some of it stay in the dirt and the rest of it deteriorate? Like, what's the... Dumb luck. it deteriorate like what's the dumb luck just dumb luck yeah absolute dumb luck it's uh we get a lot of uh you know paleontology it's still a young science it started in the 1800s in england pretty much before that yeah before that was natural

philosophy natural philosophy natural philosophy wow so uh like in the 1860s when darwin released uh origin of the species his big book on evolution he was saying oh you know we don't have that many things in the fossil record because paleontology was still new like three years later they found archaeopteryx that big that big uh lizard bird yeah archaeopteryx early bird they found that and then everyone went nuts it's like oh crap look evolution fossils this is awesome so it was this huge uptick in in study and now it's one of the i mean ross on friends was a paleontologist how many people do you know saw jurassic park or 10 000 bc and all that yeah paleontology we're kind of getting into a getting into its own swing again it's kind of cool right now we're kind of cool right now we've got piercings we're covered in tattoos we're kind of we're cool people you're a hipster you could you could easily be like a chef somewhere or a comic well i've i've seen that uh i have a lot of visible tattoos i'm

wearing jeans today but i'm like i've got them all over my legs too and they're all like science either science or geeky oh cool and i've seen chefs with like spatulas yeah carrots and minor minor like fossil shark teeth and saber-toothed cats yeah what is that a turtle the top one oh it's a frog type thing it's a horned lizard oh yeah it's uh my favorite horned lizard it's uh the regal horned lizard from the desert southwest i'm a nerd man i'm a total i'm the world needs nerds it's uh the regal horn lizard from the desert southwest i'm a nerd man i'm a total i'm the world needs nerds it's important i love nerds legos transformers lizards you know that's where you lost me you lost me in transformers i never got that fucking goofy ass robots are turning the but the uh so when you find like a giant rib cage of a whale how do you know when to stop looking how do you know like we found like five or six bones how do you know i think we got it all

when the bones run out we stop and then we dig underneath but sometimes when we dig underneath to like pop what we think is everything out we find more and then we have to go down and then one jacket can turn into five so do you have time constraints like when you press that red button you shut it down no you could go on for years yeah if it's big enough yeah wow do you ever worry about getting assassinated like I would think these fucking assholes that build parking structures you know they can be seriously, they can be dicks. Do they put you in a room with a cigar-smoking asshole? No, they don't.

We close down the site, so they can't even get near us unless we let them. Wow. Yeah. I mean, at that, we limit it to foot traffic only, and we're the first ones in and the last ones out during the day, because we need to make sure everyone else is gone so nothing happens to the because we're also we're safeguarding whatever it is we find what's like the most adamant that anybody's ever gotten with you about keeping a job site open um the other week i was uh working an archaeological site and a guy yelled at me because i was trying to salvage an 1800 sears catalog that was buried in

sand and uh yeah he was getting kind of savage with me he's like you're stopping my guys for fucking piece of trash i'm like i'm sorry man this is a dateable catalog that has hand illustrated things in it and it's necessary from the 1800s yeah he couldn't see that that's kind of cool nope i was getting i was getting in the way of his excavator it's like wow so i closed that part of the site five feet of the site for three hours and he gave me a lip you're holding up my guys it's trash wow dude chill man trash from the 1800s is kind of cool, isn't it? Yeah, it's like bottles and horseshoes. People have their own agenda. People have their own agenda.

Everybody has their own agenda. I've always been fascinated by the idea of a fossil, because when we started learning in school about the fossil record and started learning about fossils, and now you look at something and it's actually not even the bone anymore. It's like the minerals have replaced the bone. I had a conversation with a friend of mine once about that he had a um um megalodon tooth on his desk yeah you've got one right there yeah i found some in la too oh really yeah in la that the whale site i was talking about we actually found meg teeth

before that whoa that's what i'm saying is like yeah when you find big sharks like that you can find their food yeah megalodon in downtown la is it megalodon is that how you say it or is it megalodon megalodon your emphasis is on a different syllable it doesn't same thing oh okay yeah it's like nuclear nuclear no that it's that's nuclear it's that's spelled new clear um don't you remember how bushy's say oh yeah no no no nuclear nuclear nuclear yeah nuclear bombs it's like uh was it uh california when uh swartzenegger used to say california yeah yeah um the scientist not a politician huh the bones or the the teeth rather when they you see them and they're all black i was trying to tell him i go that's not really the tooth i go that's sort of the minerals have kind of taken over where

the tooth was you're absolutely right and he was like no it's fucking tooth i'm like dude it used to be a tooth but that's why it's black how many black teeth do you have he's like it's just fucking old like i don't think it works like that. Mineralization, yeah. So all the calcium gets replaced by heavier minerals in the bone, the tooth, all that that's been replaced. It's been petrified. Just like petrified wood. Still looks like wood. Right, right, right. But it weighs, instead of weighing two pounds, it weighs 15.

And it's a fucking rock. It's cool looking. Yeah. Petrified wood is the weirdest shit ever. But let me tell you man i used to be that kind of paleontologist and then i started working at the tar pits and then i went to siberia with these woolly mammoths they're not petrified yeah this is what they were saying in the press thing i found so incredibly fascinating yeah you're finding completely flat flash frozen animals

yeah there was skin hair like i played with its lips it had undigested food and it's gonna be real clear when you say played with like yeah well what are you doing yeah front mouth yes yeah yes um but it's like yeah it had the the whole mouth structure was still there the lower lip the root of the tongue the root yeah the like where it connects yeah the base of the tongue where it connects in the back of the throat it was like still in this animal it was an animal it wasn't bones it yeah it was creepy man wow i'd never dealt with something like that before and how did it how was it so well preserved did it fall into a glacier or something we think uh the way that it was preserved i mean you'll you'll see you'll you'll see in the show um we only kind of have half of a mammoth because the

top half has been exposed to weathering and all that but the bottom half stayed in frozen mud and permafrost so it probably got trapped in either a mud bank a pit something like that, and got stuck, died, got buried in snow. The whole thing froze, and then maybe the back end of it got eaten away. It got scavenged. Dogs came on and went, hey, look, free meat. That kind of, it's just, it's crazy. I did a podcast with a guy named Randall Carlson. Have you ever heard of him?

The name sounds familiar. He's an expert in astro um in asteroidal impacts and yeah yeah he was oh um he had one um example of a woolly mammoth that died almost instantly and he believes that the impact of some sort of a large body like killed this thing and not not just killed it but broke its back like upon impact like so just some massive impact like you know x amount thousands of years ago they think like 12 plus thousand years ago whoa yeah and he had uh he had actually he had photos of it right he had photos of the the woolly mammoth and its broken position and they had found it very similarly it was like

very well preserved and uh sort of permafrost weird i would think something falling from space and then falling from the sky at terminal velocity if it's like a big rock we do more than just break something's back well it depends on i guess how close it is to the impact obviously just fucking killed everything really close to it. Oh, like it impacted nearby. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, it flattened forests.

For some reason, I'm thinking like, you know, a meteor comes out of the sky and like hits the mammoth exactly. Well, you know that site in Siberia, the Tungusku site? Oh, yeah. That flattened all the trees and all. Flattened everything for like some insane amount of thousands of acres. Yeah. And that was a meteor impact. in the 19 early 1900s right 1908 or something almost like yeah um well he believes that you know that one big one that we we found is like a pittance in comparison to some something that hit around 12 000 years ago and they think there's pretty significant evidence

all over asia and europe in the form of uh nano diamonds tritonite yeah nano diamonds and that's right nuclear glass now i remember his name yeah um there is there's there's evidence of that um he did put forth a pretty solid hypothesis but we're starting to find out we have uh everything didn't go extinct right at that moment though no he's saying they were about 60 of all land mammals died off in that era that's a large that's a huge chunk but woolly mammoths kept going for how long uh they were around until about 4 000 years ago whoa yeah Woolly mammoths were living on Wrangel Island in Northeastern Siberia when the pyramids were being built in Egypt. Holy shit.

And then we had pygmy mammoths on the, on the channel islands. You can cruise up to channel islands outside of LA. Yeah. Pygmy mammoths. Yeah. If you cruise up to the natural history museum at Santa Barbara. Yeah. They, they have pygmy mammoths.

They're related to another mammoth species we had in North Americaica called the colombian mammoth wow yeah so that's amazing when were they there how long how recently um i think they went extinct about uh not for for some reason like six to eight thousand years ago is this sticking my head yeah we had um eleven thousand five hundred years ago we still had saber-toothed cats roaming LA. Yeah. Yeah. That's so crazy. It's crazy stuff, man.

Saber-toothed cat is a weird fucking animal. Like, what made that animal grow these huge fangs like that? That was just in order to sink into the necks of its victims, right? I mean, that was entirely what it's for. Yeah. They're basically knives. Yeah, quick and easy death and they say that like saber-toothed cats and even you know big cats that are alive today there's their teeth can actually sense like where the jugular is their teeth can like as they sink in they can feel heartbeats through their teeth well you can too

you can yeah bite your bite your wrist i'm not gonna do that i know what i'm just saying um have somebody bite your wrist not me um and you can actually you can feel the pulsation because in your mouth yeah the sensitivity of your teeth yeah i mean you you know how your teeth hurt when you're eating something cold or drinking something you've got nerve endings in it right right yeah it makes sense theirs may have a larger nerve ending that i'm not quite sure on cat uh cat tooth anatomy but they may have just a larger nerve ending that allows them to feel uh easier did so did you guys stumble upon any saber-toothed cats uh not in siberia no no i mean when you're doing like job sites in la like i used to be the assistant lab supervisor at the at the labrea tar pits i

ran into cats all the time uh i even dropped a skull of one on the floor accidentally oh no when i was cleaning it shattered yeah i put it back together kind of with glue yeah just how long that take about six months fuck yeah one slip six months of work yeah oh my god if you ever talk to a paleontologist and they say they've never broken, damaged, or otherwise impacted a bone, they're lying. Those motherfuckers. Yeah. We've all done it. It happens.

Yeah, I imagine. You know, it happens, man. Yeah. You drop shit all the time. I mean, I almost fell down an ice cliff in Siberia, and uh my friend got stuck uh repelling down one and stuck yeah you'll see yeah for how long um he wasn't stuck that long probably about 10 minutes but uh um so in the show you'll see uh tim king he's uh like my co-host like co-adventurer buddy um we have to get down this ice cliff and and it's a huge ice cliff it's not like you know

oh we're kind of going down from like the top of you know the top of pierce college down to the street no this is a mountain of ice that we're rappelling down dude fuck ice cliffs that's all i have to say and yeah the bank started eroding away and his rope jammed and he's dangling there and freaking out and panicking. And I'm like down at the bottom looking up going, why isn't he coming down? I'm trying to get him on radio and no one's. Yeah, he got stuck. We both went into ice caves.

He got lost. Oh, no. His light went out and he got turned around and these caves were like minus 10 degrees. He doesn't have a backup light? No. What kind of shit is that? I don't know.. He doesn't have a backup light? No. What kind of shit is that? I don't know. How do you not have a backup light?

I figured when you go into a nice cave, there's a few things you want to bring. One of them is a fucking backup light. You'd think. Yeah. I mean, we were with a whole film crew, but for narrative's sake, it was our expedition. He was getting me into siberia

and i was going to you know do biopsies and discover mammoths and things like that so like going into an ice cave you think oh no i've got this great flashlight it's in a ziploc bag it's this big bank of leds i've got a little glow thing i've got a camera that can see in the dark and but no light goes out and you kind of panic a little a little yeah yeah so you guys are there you're uncovering how many of these mammoths are you uncovering that are in such great condition well we only got access to one unfortunately um but finding a mammoth carcass is actually pretty rare you can find like a chunk of a mammoth that may have some hair or tissue like just falling out of a wall or something like that. More often than not, you find bones.

Finding an intact or even mostly intact carcass, a whole body, is a really rare event. And we were lucky enough to just to get access to one of the newest ones. Because we kept striking out. We're like, oh, we're going to go here and look for one. It's like, nope, didn't find it. find it oh well there may be another one here these tusk hunters these guys that cut into the mountain just to find woolly mammoth tusks and sell them because elephant ivory is illegal mammoth ivory is not because the animal is already dead oh i see so these guys mammoth ivory is beautiful, too.

Yeah. It's got a weird sort of a tan quality to it. Yeah, tan. I've seen that. Kind of almost chocolatey in some places. It's really pretty. People use it for things, right? For artwork and stuff.

Yep. Artwork. They carve it. So a single tusk, say you have a hundred pound tusk that is perfect quality. It's just like they pulled it out of an ice cliff. That thing uncut will be 40 50 000 dollars whoa yeah yeah there was an episode on a life below zero where they were looking for mammoth tusks they were looking for them in the side of a mountain or a hillside

in alaska are they that common yeah they're pretty. Enough that there's an actual commodity and an entire economy based on it now. But if you find the tusk, it doesn't necessarily mean you'll find the body, because a lot of times the body is rotted away. Right. Or, unfortunately in our case, if they find the tusk, they don't care about the body. All they want is the tusk. When you

think, being a paleontologist, and you think about the fossil record, how many holes are there in it from animals that just simply did not get fossilized? Oh, we've got gaps all over it. We've got 300, 400, 500 million year old bacterial fossils. Then we have stuff that died last week. We have, on a long enough timeline, we have everything. But there are spaces because nothing not everything fossilizes like for every discovery like that

hobbit man they found and florence's that's 10 years ago already that's so weird i was just reading that on twitter this morning like in the car here i'm like that's right it's been 10 years since the weird hobbit people there's still some people that try to dispute that but apparently they've been discredited the there was a guy was trying to say that they were actually some form of down syndrome children and that what that's what accounted for the the deviation but the it seems like the consensus is no you're dealing with a totally different species yeah i'm i'm not i'm not that up on my uh on my paleoanthro. It's like I'm kind of a hardcore paleontologist. We don't dig people.

We're kind of like loners and like dead animals more than humans. But what if you found a person? I would freak out and call my boss. Oh, you'd back up? Yeah, it's just like, nope, I don't, no. If you found like a heavy brown Neanderthal-looking motherfucker in there, you know? That would rewrite history, and that would, well, that would rewrite, write history.

And that would be cool to be part of it, but I'm actually not legally allowed to, cause I'm a paleontologist, not an archeologist. If I come across human remains, I stopped the entire project. I called the coroner and my boss, and then like a certified archeologist comes out.

It's very being an archaeologist and dealing with people and tribal remains and all that in california very very specific and i know in mexico city they're constantly like digging for an apartment building or something like that and they find like some huge pyramid structure that's been covered in dirt for thousands of years that nobody knew existed yeah my co-host tim he's a mesoamerican archaeologist that's his deal um i don't know if he's on that on that project he's a teacher up north in north and norcal but it's yeah that's his thing so yeah i wish i knew more about the floriensis uh thing because stuff like that's fascinating where did we come from that's fascinating. Where did we come from? That's another one that was only, I believe, 14,000 years ago.

It was alive, right? The- Floriansis? Yeah, Floriansis. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think it was somewhere. It was recently enough that it was like one of those whoa moments. Like, whoa.

Right. There's a little person running around 14,000 years ago. Right. Three foot tall humans that were kind of chimp like but not really and they walked like people did right that's a mind fuck man and then you've got you know like australopithecus it's four and a half million years old or epithecus it's like 4.4 uh whatever the whatever the current thing is yeah uh but you're right we do have gaps all over the place and occasionally they fill them and occasionally we fill them like there's we have a 55 million year old timeline just of horse evolution alone from when they used to be

dog-sized tiny little like horse-like animals with multiple toes on their on their on their feet all the way up to your modern horse uh that's like huge single hoof we have every transitional stage for 55 million years including those budweiser horses yeah including the clydesdales yeah what happened with them how'd they grow hair on their feet is that some asshole decided to grow like a poodle yeah it's just uh when you get into things like that like horse breeds cat breeds dog breeds and all that that's all human intervention that's all human intervention. That's all artificial selection. Um, that's, Hey, I like that horse because it's bigger, it can carry more and it kind of looks more noble. So I'm going to breed that with the biggest female I have

and then take their kids and breed them with the second biggest. And you just start, you know, you just start building this genetic pyramid of things that you like. And you're naturally selecting the traits you want and artificially selecting the traits you want and getting rid of the ones you don't. You don't like that color? I am only going to breed white horses. paleontology and you you got into this subject the subject of animals being someone actually actively changing the way an animal that's got to be a very bizarre thing to try to conceptualize that someone took like say like a wolf and turned it into a chihuahua like that that is really the that's where they came from right yeah and Yeah. And this is only recently discovered. That's like the last 50,000 years.

God. Yeah. But it's only been recently proven that they all came from wolves, correct? Oh, yeah, genetically. Yeah. Because you can take a wolf and they're, so wolves and dogs, common ancestor. But then wolves, what more than likely happened was wolves have uh you had kind of like this this proto wolf um it was just canis lupus it was your normal everyday wolf but you have a

group of them that see we didn't domesticate wolves wolves domesticated us they came in closer for fire and for for for warmth, for food, for protection. So if you kind of think about it, we, we were like giving scraps to these dogs and getting them to come out to come closer. But they're like,

Hey, I'm going to hang out with these people because they have a fire. I have food and I can bark and let them know when things are coming. So if you think about it, they actually domesticated us was sort of a joint effort no maybe maybe i i occasionally like to knock humans down a couple yeah you seem to err on the side of the animals again don't dig people um so say you have uh one like small neighboring city has a big a really big big bad wolf and you have the second biggest so they mate and then those puppies are bigger and then oh well we don't want them as

furry so only keep uh only keep the shorter coat puppies and then breed them and then yeah and then all of a sudden you're like oh i need really big dogs oh no i want a small dog that i can carry around because it's fashionable yeah it's weird man even all our food like do you think a banana you know your normal everyday you know cool organic banana that you get that's not that's not a banana a banana is this weird green thing with seeds in it yeah it's yeah we've been doing it ever since we stopped being nomadic and stopped the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and started planting we've been changing our own everything yeah that's why people when they get angry about gmo foods like well everything you eat is it is modified yeah it's like do you mean lab gmo do you mean like gene spliced right i mean what i

what i call hip geneered or hippie engineering farming engineering it's like i'm going to make a honey crisp apple by grafting one brand of an apple or one breed of an apple to another one that's gmo yeah it's like we need to be very you know like brief segue we need to be very clear on our labeling was it grown in a lab does it have fruit fly dna in it it's like does it glow in the dark no okay it's still gmo but it's not like some creepy you know mixing chemicals you know god apple well people just they love to throw that around like organic you know it's like i only eat organic like okay what do you what the fuck are you telling me define organic yeah what does that what do you, what the fuck are you telling me? Can you define organic? Yeah. What does that mean?

Do you know what that means? Or are you just saying a word that you think makes you look like a better person? Right. Right. It's like, oh, gluten. It's like, do you know what gluten is? Yeah. It's like, do you know, it's like, do you really know what free range means?

Right. Or grass fed. Grass fed. Grass fed. Yeah. You know, nor hormone. No hormone. My girlfriend, she's, you know very very you know healthy eating very fit and uh is getting me on the kick too and like teaches me this stuff like taught me how to read a

label uh-huh on food and i'm like oh holy crap okay that's cool yeah it's it's good stuff when you actually when you take time to do the research things you know things just kind of pop out and research, things, you know, things just kind of pop out. And it's, it's kind of nice that way when you have, because we have the internet and all that, it's easy. It's easy to do research, but it's also very easy to get thrown astray with like, you know, I, I usually only read things that end in like.edu.org. See, I'm the opposite. I go right to the creationist forum.

I want to know how those motherfuckers are thinking i i know how they think that's have you seen my twitter feed that's nine times out of ten all i'm doing is debating debating evolution with do you really yeah oh i need to link your twitter what's your twitter at tattoos and bones really yep that's hilarious tweeting you like the last two days man oh dude welcome to the club a lot of fucking people out there on the internet it There's a lot of humans. Are there? Yeah.

At tattoos and bones. Yeah. A-N-D bones? One word? A-N-D, yeah. All right. But yeah, and like people are, I get that a lot because I go to Siberia. I, you know, with Mammoth Unearthed and I dig up a woolly mammoth carcass and I'm telling people about it.

And like, occasionally I'll throw like a picture up on Twitter because we filmed it last year and it's just debuting on Sunday. And then people are like, oh, well, look, you found, you found that animal. It's frozen. It's proof that the world's only 6,000 years old. I'm like, oh, don't even start. Yeah. Those are the best. Or there's gaps in the fossil record and you know things like that and it's just like please just do your research maybe you just need to talk to kirk cameron you know you're talking a lot of shit but you don't really know until you sit down with kirk cameron have you ever seen his buddy that shows that banana is proof of evolution that would be ray

comfort yes this dumb fuck who doesn't even understand that we changed the way bananas look like this guy he calls a banana an atheist nightmare have you seen that video it's beautiful man yeah i'm sorry that video is beautiful oh yeah it's and him and duane gish and the gish gallop where you're just like throwing a word salad at somebody it's like oh well evolution isn't true because right it's like dude shut up they're all just gay that's what it is that's that's fine but embrace it no it's great nothing wrong with being gay but i really believe that that's what's going on with most of those guys they're the reason why they're so hog wild for jesus like kurt cameron that's a gay man i'm not a gay man but i'm pretty good spotting some things in

this life i know what a gay man looks like i don't know what all gay men look like i've been fooled before but you know what i'm saying it's like you put a fucking lizard outfit on a dog i'm gonna go hmm something's up with that lizard what is this that's him with the banana oh yeah that's there it is yeah peeling it yeah it. Fucking goof bag. But he never even bothered doing the work to understand that we used to have different looking fucking bananas within a written human record. That ain't that long ago, stupid. Yeah, and I think once somebody brought him an actual non, like an original natural banana,

and he was like like what's that it's a banana you dumb fuck yeah it's like sorry because he said he knew that part of his brain is all just for fighting off cock fighting off the love of the cock so he puts that just i don't have any room for that i can't do that kind of research i'm busy fighting off the gay. So I'll just sit here with this banana and just pontificate. I mean, he could, if that, if that, if that is in any way, shape or form, a hypothesis or true. It's my thesis. Why, why use such a phallic symbol? Why did he?

For all the same reasons. He doesn't understand what he's doing. It's drawn to it. It's the transference of, you know, into the symbol. So it's actually giving him power. It makes him feel comfortable. But it's such a ridiculous proposition that God made a food that we could hold perfectly. Yeah.

What, tomatoes are no good? Like, why can't... I mean, a fucking tomato is pretty easily held, too. Like, that's really stupid. Why isn't a tomato banana-shaped? Which tomato? That's true, right? Yeah, you've got.

Cherry tomatoes. Cherries, hothouse, grape, you know, all these different ones because we've, you know. Modified them. Yeah, we modified them. We got involved. But that's why I really like my job. I go way before all that. Right.

I'm dealing with stuff that I can. Pre-people. Yeah. Or at least pre-people that had the knowledge to fuck with things yeah yeah you know they were still like wandering around going crap can we kill that big furry thing we don't know maybe we'll just wait until one dies and then butcher it and like drive off the smaller animals but it's stuff like that it's watching being able to be in an environment where this animal lived.

Like I was in Siberia. It was, it was cold. It was fucking crazy. And I'm in the land of these animals looking out over the wastelands, like in a train and seeing nothing but reindeer herds and, and the, and the net people,

the net people are reindeer herders. Yeah. And they wear reindeer leather and they make their sleds and they use mammoth ivory from mammoth tusks they find to make the buckles for their reindeer sleds. Whoa. And these are people that their culture has been doing this for 8,000 years. So I'm walking with people whose direct relatives may have actually seen mammoths. So I'm walking with people whose direct relatives may have actually seen mammoths. Yeah.

And there's this, there's this whole sequence in mammoth on earth where I'm hanging out with the Nanette people drinking reindeer blood to like, you know, to sacrifice a reindeer to the ground so I can like find a mammoth because mammoths to them are bad juju. Mammoths are bad juju? Yeah. They have this, this really, see, I'm a, I'm a I'm a scientist, and it's like I'm not a theist. I'm not an atheist. I'm not even agnostic. I'm just a scientist.

I need data. So here I am with these people for a week, the Nanette, and I don't have my archaeologist anthropology buddy with me because he's on a different side of the planet at this point on the other side of Siberia still trying to find find a mammoth i chase a lead going out here and that's the time i really kind of needed him because i was completely out of my element i'm with these very naturalistic shamanic animistic people and they're like well you know mammoths are bad luck they're a sign of trouble and they tell me off camera that they have this three-tiered world that they have an upper god the middle realm and then

the lower god the upper god gifted the nanette people the reindeer the lower god is too large and too powerful to use reindeer so he uses mammoths as herd animals and to pull his sled when a mammoth dies the bones fall into the middle world. If the Nanette people find them, they have to sacrifice one of their reindeer back. Wow. Yeah. So here I am surrounded by all these just very awesome, caring, hearty native people. And then they're, well, you know, we're're gonna have to sacrifice a reindeer in order for you

to find a mammoth because if you find one and pull any bones out we have to you know so do you have to compensate them for their caribou when that happens no no they they did it they were very welcoming like i'm hanging out in their tent but like if you find a mammoth and then they have to sacrifice one of their reindeer or caribou oh they killed though they killed the caribou before that but do you eat it or do they do they have to sacrifice they have to leave it in the ground like no no they they ate it oh okay um so it doesn't go to waste it doesn't go to waste but then they pass around the cup of blood and they make everybody drink oh including me what does that taste like like like you get punched in the mouth and you know you're swallowing blood it's just it's blood

um but the fact that i'm watching the animal get butchered in front of me and it's not there this wouldn't be some like you know modern weird ritualistic thing with like people wearing like nitrile gloves and it's very clean no it's just like nope slit the animal open go throw the organs over there and then take this metal coffee cup with like a blue and pink daisy print on it, dip it into the chest cavity, and pass it around. Holla. It's still steaming. I mean, the animal had just died 45 seconds ago. Have you ever touched the inside of one of those animals, like right after they died?

Oh, yeah. They're so warm. Yeah. The blood was steaming like i'm holding this it's like coffee cup steaming full of blood and i'm just like and i had a head cold at the time i'm just like oh well if we'll cure the common cold why not and i just chug it did it do anything to you uh no it kind of it felt like i was sucking on a whole bunch of like copperies. What if you got a raging hard-on? Would you immediately call your friends and go,

Listen, I think I'm onto something. Or would you keep it to yourself? Hmm. I might keep it to myself. Really? How dare you? You're a scientist. You owe the world.

No, I have to test it first. Okay, so you just keep it. Trevor's just wandering around Russia with hard-ons all the time like what's he doing next up saint petersburg come here i'm not sure oh wow still not convinced give me another gallon of that shit i was totally doing like the bill hicks goat boy voice there for a moment it's like very similar'm Mammoth Boy. That's the sound. So, when you're finding these animals, you said there were some that existed 4,000 plus years ago? Mm-hmm. How old are the ones that you find?

Like, when you found this one that is essentially, like, you're finding the actual body of this thing. You feel the tissue and the hairs on it how old how old was that animal about 40 000 years old whoa yeah so before humans had ever stepped foot on on north america you know uh 10 000 years after native aboriginal people came to uh came to australia uh like we're it's like that's a stupid long amount of time yeah we can't really get that into our brain can we no no the even even as somebody that works in what we call deep time like i'm i'm working a site right now that can be you know 30 40 000 years old but i just came from a site that was seven eight million years old

million millions of years continents were in different places yeah that's i mean it's like there was a land bridge between asia and and alaska the bering sea land bridge that these mammoths cruised over 40 000 years ago ice was different 65 million years ago india wasn't part of asia it hit it causing a bunch of volcanoes and a comet came in an asteroid and hit south america and wiped out the dinosaurs like stuff's in different places man yeah it's like like the rocks you hold depending on where you are some of them are four and five billion years old they're as old as the earth itself they were formed when the solar system was forming it's kind of messed up to think about it's almost impossible yeah as like a point of reference in your little pea brain little monkey brains is like you think trying to

think of what absolute zero is you know it's like what true nothingness the the concept of zero is very difficult because everyone's like oh you knowness the the concept of zero is very difficult because everyone's like oh you know i take the coffee coffee cup away i have zero coffee but think about that think about zero coffee cup there's zero there's none it's like trying to remove an entirety of something that is nothingness then go beyond that well i was listening to a lecture on the big bang where it was explaining the concept of a pre-big bang universe which apparently they believe only existed for the amount of time that it takes light to get like across a photon like or across an atom like like literally like an almost immeasurably short amount

of time where there was no physics yeah it was just it was a singularity it's just like yeah and this when this guy was trying to explain this i rewound it and played it back and forth like fucking four times in a row and i'm like oh i'm too stupid i'm too stupid to get that in like i'm trying to conceptualize the idea of this and then i'm like okay well what happened before that no one knows no no one knows i mean even even uh and that's that's the thing working working in a hard physical science like i do we have radiometric dating we have geology we have biology we have all this stuff that tells us how old this mammoth is what it did what it's related to we can do DNA mapping and all of that we can see

the evolutionary paths of these animals but then you get into well how did life on earth start abiogenesis you know it's like whoa okay bacteria and RNA and lightning strikes and we're in you mean Jesus um do you mean Jesus well no Jesus came after. He was always here. It's his plan. It's part of the Lord's plan. I would have to see empirical data on that. Oh, wow. How dare you?

So when you're finding these woolly mammoths, is this just luck? Or does someone alert you to the fact that they found one and then you go? We had to use kind of the scary bit which is the tusk hunters themselves so so tusk hunting is legal kind of so there's x amount of permits that are released by the russian government for people to go and look for tusks one guy that we ran into his name is ig Igor, of course. Of course. They're always named Igor. That's a cool fucking name. Right? And he was a cool dude. He was like the river baron.

He had the biggest boat, the fastest boat, and the biggest gun on the entire Yana River. The biggest gun? Yeah. It's like a.50 caliber, like a Barrett sniper rifle. Really? Yeah. Wow. What the fuck was he shooting?

It's the Soviet version of it, which I think is the Dragunov. But he's the boss of that area. He has a permit, but there are other people in the area that don't have a tusk permit that try and go and poach tusks because they can sell them on the black market. It's not more like the gray market. You have to have a permit to get a tusk. So if you're a guy and you live in Siberia and you're in your backyard and you're digging a hole and you find a tusk, you can't just take that tusk. Nope.

Huh. No, there's no such thing as land and mineral rights there. Oh, okay. It's not like Montana or anything. So what do you do? Do you have to like pretend, oh, just thinking about maybe getting a tusk license, you know, whatever. You have to pretend you don't have $ hundred thousand dollars worth of shit right or you find somebody that does have a permit or you sell it on the black market um but these people since they go out

with right when the snow starts to melt right when the permafrost starts to get uh starts to get weaker they go in and they drill in and dig into these cliff sides they know where all of the big finds are first so uh tim and i had to get in well with this kind of weird gray hat semi mob scene of tusk hunters and here's like two american dudes walking in you know one's dressed as indiana jones one's dressed as a biker coming in and going, Hey, do you know where any mammoths are? And they're looking at us like, yeah, you're wealthy American dude. Um, we don't really want to tell you because you're going to take the tusks away and this

is our entire commodity. So we had to really be nice to them and really be very, very deferring because we heard a few times that some of these Tusk bosses, the big guys, kind of like Igor, there was a group that went in to poach him. One got sent home in a box. They killed him. Yeah. Because he was poaching.

Yeah. Whoa. In like one dude's area. So we're, we're dealing with serious people. Like we're walking through parts of, you know, Nowheresville, Northeastern Siberia past, you know, cars that like with bullet holes in them. And this is like, it's not the wild West. It's the wild East. It's laws don't really apply in some of the places we were in.

Wow. So it's just a completely different animal. Oh yeah. It's, it was something I'd never, I was not prepared for. So how long does the politics of, like, getting in with these people, how long does that take for them to trust you to the point where they're going to lead you to this stuff? Well, we would talk, you know,

we would have people talk on our behalf for a couple days, and then we would go meet them. We'd kind of try and butter them up. Bring them vodka or some shit? Yeah. No, no. Better. We brought them like Jameson and things like that.

But don't say better to them. No. Better than vodka? There you go. No, man. You break out a bottle of Jameson Private Reserve, they go nuts. Really? They love Jameson?

Yeah. What about Jack Daniels? What about a good goddamn American beverage? No? you know what the fuck is this no we tried man how about makers makers would have been good i didn't have there wasn't any at the duty free shop because we i flew from la to london to moscow and that was so i flew from la to london spent 19 hours in london gearing up and hit a duty-free shop at Heathrow before we got to Moscow. So then we flew to Moscow. Then we flew something like across, I think, 10 time zones to this tiny little town called Yakutsk.

And once you're there, all bets are off. Because, yeah, trying to find anything there that remotely resembles something American is, I was not ready for this. Wow. It was really weird, man. Do you speak Russian or read Russian? No, I kind of started faking it to the point, I was there for six weeks. It got to the point where, you know, you know like like uh thank you spasibo you know stuff like that just kind of started to happen i did however go on an adventure by myself

no production assistance no director nothing trying to track down a pharmacy because i had like an ear infection and i'm like okay so i'm on Google trying to learn the words and then trying this like Aptica and people are like, oh, dude, I don't understand Russian. So I'm like in a weird combination of Google translate maps on my phone and then starting to recognize how the letters work. I found a pharmacy. I was really proud of myself. How long did that take? About 45 minutes

and it was right around the corner from the hotel so i went in like four different opposite directions and then yeah and then you have to find ear infection medication try asking someone that doesn't speak english for hydrogen peroxide yeah what does it look like in russian too they have that wacky language yeah it's cyrillic it's all like like upside down cues and all weird stuff it it's it was it was an adventure man it was absolutely an adventure i and some of them i wish were in the show but the stuff that's in the show it's going to blow your mind we're in ice caves we're we're climbing down cliffs we're touching physically touching the skin of a woolly mammoth that's like 40 000 years old i'm like i'm showing the trunk

the tusk i'm doing a full biological study on this thing with tissue and blood and what's the environment that you're doing this in uh outside outside of a permafrost cave in a truck yeah and so do you cover this thing when you find it do you like how do you try do you attempt to mitigate the damage that the sun and the one elements the one we finally got our hands on was discovered a few months before and it was secreted away in this weird uh it was like a permafrost fish locker. It's this natural cave that they store their food in. So we were the first Westerners to see this thing. Because it kind of made a news splash.

It was like the bleeding mammoth. And everyone's like, oh, whoa, cool. There's a woolly mammoth. It's leaking blood and i'm like i need if if we're in siberia i need to see this mammoth because this is like the newest and baddest mammoth i've got to see this thing so we go and we track it down and we go into this this permafrost fish locker and and you'll see in the show we were kind of like walking along and then we turn and there's this mammoth shaped snowball it's covered in snow and ice but we're the first again the first westerners because this had been found by a small group of people in this tiny little fishing village called kazachie no one had seen it yet so it takes

they find it and they find it they store it and hide it away and then how does the word finally get to the paleontologist in los angeles um through funny enough through google and twitter and things like that there's this big if you search back to last may no it was may of uh may of 2012 no it was May of 2013. There was the bleeding mammoth that was found. It's the Lyakovsky mammoth. The Russians that found it, one of them is a paleontologist for the Northeastern Federal University. There it is.

Yeah. Check it out. That's the actual... That's the bleeding mammoth that was found way back then. Well, that looks like a rock. Right? Check it out. That's the actual. That's the bleeding mammoth that was found way back then. And. Well, that looks like a rock. Right. But you're actually looking at the front left leg. And so it's totally frozen.

It's like this rock hard permafrost ball at this point. So you've got the front left leg and you've got the scapula. So the very up underneath the discovery news logo there that's the uh that's where the mouth is whoa but it's all you know it's completely frozen in this little thing and bleeding in what way is they found this goo leaking out of it or leaking out near it and And it, it took the world by storm briefly. And we're like, okay,

this is weird. I'm going to Siberia. I got to check this mammoth out. It's gotta be there. It didn't just like show up. People go, Hey, look,

we've got liquid blood. Ha ha. We've got this mammoth. And then they make it disappear. It's like, screw that man. I need to find this mammoth. If I'm kind of striking out,

finding other mammoths, I've got to at least get my hands on one. And we managed to track that mammoth if i'm kind of striking out finding other mammoths i've got to at least get my hands on one and we managed to track that mammoth down and i brought on a whole slew just this portable lab of an endoscope a biological microscope i was going to see if it has blood look at the trunk tissue look at all this stuff and like start this mini autopsy on a mammoth body. Wow. It was a trip. I mean, you'll see.

It's really intense, man. What's your feeling on these people that want to clone something like this? Oh, yeah. Because this is a real issue that we're heading into in 2014 where we actually have the capability of doing something like this where they can take some DNA from some sort of a living dinosaur or a living elephant, rather, and figure out a way to create a mammoth.

This is possible. Yeah, people have been asking me this a lot recently, especially since we're doing all the press for Mammoth on Earth here. They keep saying, it's like, oh, it's like oh it's like clone mammoth clone mammoth i i don't believe yes we can probably do it it'll probably take longer than we think maybe like 50 60 years it's not like a five oh from now from now i think yeah the way as technology advances right i mean there was a korean geneticist team on site while we were filming in case uh because they were also looking after looking for that mammoth. And I actually became really good friends with a couple of them.

And we were talking at length and there it's like, yeah, it's like maybe 50, 60 years away from right now. But the problem is, at least in my personal and mildly slightly professional view it's unethical why bring back an animal just to kill it why would you kill it it would eventually die it's it's uh the it would not have a mammoth life the mammoth, the environment that it was lived in is extinct. All other members of its species and genus for that matter are extinct. You could say that it was naturally selected to be, to be extinct. It was gone.

It didn't survive, be it get hunted by humans or whatever the prevailing theory is right now. That animal is no longer here. If we bring back one solitary individual, how lonely, how is that ethical? That animal is no longer here. If we bring back one solitary individual. It'll be lonely. How is that ethical? We can figure out social aspects of mammoths by watching their direct cousins, the elephant. You put a rug on an elephant. There you go.

There's your woolly mammoth. Couldn't we have like an island called like Paleolithic Park and have like a bunch of cloned mammoths wandering around and we have a nice place we could take a family and see look honey there's the mammoth let me tell you man i mean i've been i've helped uh design like use paleontology and design like life-size puppet saber-toothed cats and and stuff like that yeah i would love to see a dinosaur or a mammoth or a saber-toothed cat or archaeopteryx you know some amazing awesome fossil but these things are gone and it's more than just that the animal is no longer living the environment it lived in is no longer there we're not exactly

sure what it ate if we can pin down the exact grasses and everything that a woolly mammoth ate what if they're extinct in the wild now we can't feed it what it would normally eat make it eat fucking tv dinners who gives a shit if i could look at the damn thing you can they're frozen there's frozen carcasses that pop out of the ice go check them out man i i completely see your point i totally understand i'm only fucking around but no worries but the reality is i if someone cloned a fucking dinosaur, I'm there. Oh, yeah. I'm there, man.

Absolutely. With bells on. I want to see that shit. I want to be that cliche moment of Dr. Grant, Jurassic Park, like falling out of the Jeep and knocking his sunglasses off and going like, holy crap, that's a brachiosaur. I want to see the T-Rex steal the goat from the rope. Right. Right.

I want to be there. I want to see the t-rex steal the goat from the rope right right i want to be there chokes that thing down uh just but just have a bunch of marines standing by with giant guns like bitch move you make one bad move it's over dinosaur fuck face i could the idea of that would be awesome i mean the idea of it the idea of it i mean if when it comes to a t-rex you're dealing with a 40 foot long animal that had 10 000 plus pounds of force per bite and jesus wrote it around 6 000 years ago 6 000 years ago um it was i think it was a last yeah 6 000 years ago with thursday funny i think it was like thursday october 23rd ha 6 000 years ago it's like it's the anniversary of jesus riding Velociraptor from Galilee right now. It seems inevitable, though, that someone's going to do something along those lines.

I agree with you that it's probably not ethical to clone a mammoth. But when you start collecting things like blood, you have like real genetic tissue. If there was any blood left, we there wasn't any blood no the problem with the problem with uh the same thing that would that happens to a mammoth is the same thing if i put like you know myself in permafrost or you anybody it doesn't matter how fit you are how uh adapted to the environment you are, anything like that. When a mammal cell freezes, all the liquid inside freezes, and the ice crystals form and shatter the cell wall, leaking out all of the genetic material into this soup. So you need an intact cell with a complete nucleus

in order to even begin thinking about cloning really yeah it's fascinating so you we have the woolly mammoth genome but we don't have the genetic information from a single individual to actually begin cloning oh so that's why it would be like 40 or 50 years now because then the technology is just not quite at that level yet and we don't have the evidence yet we don't have the physical requirement of mammoth dna so when you're finding this goo what exactly is it is this exploded cell yeah it's exploded cells it's like uh blood like hemoglobin stained tissue and melted um it's this the same thing that would happen if you like put a steak in a deep freezer for a year and then take it out and let it sit on your counter for overnight.

It just turns into this just cellular goo. It's a steak in a deep freezer turns in a goo. What do you mean? Yeah. If you let it after you thaw it out, it just starts to decompose. After how long are you talking about? Usually like, you know, a couple of days You know, just leave it out at room temperature. It's kind of bad.

But that's different than a regular piece of meat that you leave out at room temperature? No, no. Well, yeah, actually it is. Once the cells, once they get cold enough to burst, there will still be cohesion. You'll still have, like, muscle tissue, but it'll start to leak out and be kind of gross. And it kind of starts to, well, at least when it comes to the man, it starts to smell like a barnyard, a really bad one because after all the

ice, so we're, we're checking it every, uh, every couple minutes and every hour or so with a thermal scanner. And at first it was all nice and solid and hard. And we drilled a couple holes through the tissue when it was hard in order to take hard and we drilled a couple holes through the tissue when it was hard in order to take core samples and look at muscle tissue and then we noticed this goo which is a combination of cellular material and water you know melting ice mud what's left of blood

and just gross starting to seep out of the holes and yeah it's it's kind of disgusting it's pretty wild though i think that you're actually getting a liquid from this animal that was exist that existed 40 000 years ago yeah wow it's it kind of messes with your head even it was we filmed it last year and it's just it's airing on sunday and just to think about it's like no this time last year i was still recovering from from poking a mammoth. Recovering? Yeah, just mentally recovering. Oh, I see.

Yeah, it was just like, no, I didn't get some mammoth super flu or anything, which would be cool. That is something to think about, right? Yes. Is it possible that bacteria or some diseases could survive? Bacteria and viri and all that, they're much hardier than a human cell is. I know there's some strains of trichinosis that can survive a deep freeze like they say that some strains of trichinosis uh you can get from uh something that's been

frozen for like years so if you take a piece of meat from an animal that has trichinosis yeah and freeze it for a couple years thaw it out and cook it if you don't cook it to 160 degrees yeah you can get trichinosis yeah which is insane that means those larvae survived deep freeze for years yeah what the fuck man it's there it's that's that's evolution right there that's like nope you know we're gonna we're gonna hang out and and be hardy and just you know the the weaker ones die. Nature's scary, dude. Yeah, nature's totally scary. That's why it's scary to clone a mammoth, right?

Because who knows what kind of fucking crazy new plague. I think, what is it, Jurassic Park 2, the T-Rex goes and destroys San Diego. I mean, all of a sudden we have like a rampant woolly mammoth like tearing apart, you know, downtown Seoul. I mean. They'd shoot that shit so quick. Yeah it's just i mean they're big 14 light that fucker up like a christmas tree and then we'd all have mammoth steaks i wanted to actually try a piece of the meat from the mammoth to eat yeah they wouldn't let me you really wanted to eat i really wanted to try it yeah why would you do that why not because it's 40 000 years old

and you could just have a sandwich instead i'm already i'm already doing the once in a lifetime thing right but why do people have to if everybody has to fucking i have to take it into my body well i come on i already at this point it's i'd had you know i've been fighting mammoth bones i've been drinking reindeer blood i mean come on you're a barbarian at this point. Yeah. Might as well be wearing, like, leather underwear. Yeah. No. Still, the parka actually still smells like mammoth now that you mention that.

Really? Yeah. I wouldn't wash it either. Why would you wash your parka? I kind of don't. Well, you don't want to. It smells like an animal that lived 40,000 years ago. Right.

That's pretty damn cool. Right. Wow. want to it smells like an animal that lived 40 000 years ago that's pretty damn cool right wow so is this the ultimate for you to be able to find this this animal this really mammoth carcass it it really was i mean it was an absolute dream come to i mean you'll you know you'll seen the show it's this sunday night it airs yeah it's uh so it airs it's it headlines national the national jesus bad bad bad bad um i can already hear it in my head. It's like, don't mess up the name. It's like I'm bad at my own press. It airs Sunday night, 8 p.m. Eastern Pacific,

as it headlines the National Geographic Channel's Day of Expedition Marathon. Yeah, it's a two-hour documentary. And yeah, Nat Geo Channel, Sunday the 26th at 8 p.m and if you're in la though you can see it two days early why is that because i'm throwing a party at my friend's bar oh shit a mammoth party mammoth party when what day is this uh friday night 8 8 30 damn it are you gonna be here fucker oh really bummer man, I would love to come to your mammoth party. Yeah, we're going to put it up on my friend's bar. It's in East Hollywood.

It's the faculty. Powerful plug for the factory. Faculty. Powerful plug for the faculty there and the preview party. East LA? East Hollywood. East Hollywood? Yeah.

Is that technically like Silver Lake? Is that the new way of saying Silver Lake? No, we're we're here to be a hipter east hollywood we're in this weird little it's it's this bizarre place where we're not quite los feliz we're not quite silver lake and echo park and we're not quite koreatown you should just run out there and buy real estate for east hollywood right now just because the fact that you've said that it's kind of like this cool new spot people like that's the new place yeah and the fucking mad scramble to buy real estate in east hollywood yeah i've been there

for three years now and create a market but it's weirdly enough it's already starting to do it of course because it's like there's the hip like you know craft beer wine place that that my friends got and then like the boutique ice cream the tattoo shop the crossfit place you know it's just like in this one corner i love that area yeah i love los feliz i love silver lake i i don't live there but my buddy duncan does and i whenever i go to visit him we walk around his neighborhood i'm like this is the weirdest part of la yeah it's like this is a melrose and vermont melrose and vermont melrose and heliotrope right there. Wow. Yeah, it's a great, weird little, like, it's like boutique antique shop. Really?

It's like three blocks down, somebody just got shot. This is bizarre. Yeah. So, yeah, it's crazy. Oh, that sucks, man. That'd be rad if you could come. Cannot do, my friend. Cannot do.

It does sound pretty badass, though. So, now that you've done this what what's next for you i mean this is essentially the ultimate for you uh yeah i i mean i found a woolly mammoth well one i went to northeastern siberia where very few american paleontologists ever go i'm one of the few people to actually touch and interact with a actual like woolly mammoth carcass. It's kind of, it is right now.

It is the ultimate for me, but man, I don't know what's next. And like, how can I top that other than like digging out a Tyrannosaur in the middle of Montana or there is a lot of that in Montana, right? Yeah.

Montana is a huge it's uh because there is like it's called the western interior seaway it connected the great lakes in the gulf of mexico um that's why kansas and all that that's all good farmland it's because it was underwater so montana utah all that they were they were swampy areas yeah i've been to the area the badlands in montana in those mountains where you're walking around on silt yeah the mountains are covered with what was essentially at the bottom of the great western inland sea yeah yeah so yeah the dakotas uh all that uh they find cell shells up there yeah like seashells yeah which is just like what the fuck my my My coworker at SWCA, Lee, he's like a tried and true Montana paleontologist.

He's had his hand in more T-Rex skeletons than anybody I know. Wow. He's a really cool dude. Do they find megalodons in Montana as well? Ooh, I don't know. They do in Bakersfield. Bakersfield, California? Yeah.

Wow. Just up north. Yeah. Yeah, there's actually a place called Shark's Tooth Hill because they found Meg Teeth there. Wow. Yeah. Chile. There's ones out in the Carolinas and Georgia and Florida.

All over the place. Yeah, they're fantastic, man. How much does it piss you off when you see those shows where they pretend that they have footage of a Megalodon? Have you seen that goofy shit where they they actually have fake photos from like world war ii i purposely don't watch them because then my blood sugar goes off up and i probably end up doing a twitter tirade and my girlfriend would get mad at me and why would she get mad at you for a twitter tirade oh there was one time i think in like two days i i did like over a thousand tweets just like debating people it's just because it it becomes all focused i'm i'm just you know my my brain's

kind of wired different than than a lot of people i will just focus and nitpick and just go nuts and she's just like you know you could be doing i i'm not going to scroll through hundreds of tweets it's like what's going on i'm like oh i i was making a point he was saying there were gaps in the fossil record and yeah oh is it one of those dudes who one of those evolutionary yeah yeah deniers yeah yeah that's unfortunately incredibly common but yeah i've uh unfortunately incredibly common in the u.s not in other places no really no we're one of the highest rates of evolution denial and science denial in the entire world what do you attribute that to um corn gmo corn is that what it is monsanto it's chemtrails it's not i'm not

even gonna get started on all that man um again i'm a scientist i need data um i don't i don't know maybe it's it's freedom it's it's actual freedom it's you know the freedom to believe it's the freedom to have faith it's it's great it's a great thing to have it's a great thing to question i don't knock that i don't knock religions i don't knock i have a lot of people that are religious i have a lot of people that are atheists that are all good friends of mine I do not in any way shape or form care what you believe Just keep it out of my science Don't don't tell me that You know

300 years of geology is wrong Don't tell me that I'm effectively lying to the public you are lying to the public You know that the earth is 6 000 years old exactly exactly man they had a recent gallup poll uh that was some something insane like 46 percent of americans believe that the earth is less than 10 000 years old yeah yeah 10 000 years or less or something like that that hurts yeah i mean that that that directly flies into my entire way of thought feeling and all of that. And yes,

I let it be instead of just like, you know, putting my blinders on and going through just like do, do, do, do. That's cool. Yeah.

But just keep it out of my science. I kind of feel like that's the last crazy gasp of, uh, this, this sort of, uh, science denial. I feel like this,

what we're experiencing right now is the last crazy gasp of it as we we're we're in this incredible age of information but i believe that even what we're experiencing right now will pale in comparison to the access to data that we'll have in just 20 or 30 years that it'll be something symbiotic some some chip or something you have in your brain. Or wet wear. Yeah, it'll almost be impossible to deny. Because we kind of have like a symbiotic connection with technology. I mean, essentially, everyone feels lost without their phone.

You put on glasses. What is glasses? It's technology that's allowing you to see when you really can't see that good. There's going to be something that's going to be better than glasses. We do that. It's called contact lenses. Okay, now it's on my eyeball. Now it's lacing. Well, we can actually imprint something in your eyeball, and it's permanent, and you

never have to worry about it breaking, and it's a simple procedure. Okay, we'll do it. Okay, your memory sucks, so what we're going to do is we're going to give you a chip, and all your memories will now be stored on your chip. You'll be able to plug in and send them to your friends. Is it painful? No, no, no. You don't feel a thing

okay we'll do that and then boom boom boom boom and it's going to get to a point where there is 6 000 years old no it's not fuck face come here yeah come over here boom i'm going to show you the actual evolution of the earth itself you'll be able to see in the next 10 minutes how we've proven that i think i think it's the last gasp of the science denialism that we see right now i think it's the last gasp i i kind of hope so i think within 100 years it's going to be over that would that would be rad um that would be really rad it seems like it has to be it no it doesn't seem like it has to be it needs to be yeah it needs to be because that's what's holding us back as a species is it's like personal

beliefs i just read this fantastic article on the difference between belief where somebody says i believe in i believe the earth is four and a half billion years old or i believe it's six thousand years old one is i believe factually that the earth is four and a half billion. It's like, I believe I have faith in. We need to figure out how to keep those both within the public thought, both within the idea that it's perfectly okay to have these sorts of beliefs. But science doesn't impact religion. We are not out to kill God or anything like that. We're just out to ask questions. Boy, the way you said that, it makes me think you want to kill God.

No, I don't. I don't care. I don't care. It's completely irrelevant. You cannot disprove an unprovable. Why? Why waste the time? Well, it's just, folks, I think the existential angst that comes along with being

a human being is very difficult to manage and there's a lot of people that look for all sorts of tools and vehicles for distributing their just the anxiety of being alive right and they take comfort in some strange things like i've had these conversations with people before where they defend religion by the fact that it gives people comfort and like, okay, that's all well and good, man. But, you know, well, think about how many great people have been Christian and great people have believed in religion. That's all well and good. That's fine, yeah.

But it doesn't mean anything. Yeah. The reality of what we can measure, what we can prove, what we can show, what we can measure what we can prove what we can show what we've learned if that is in any way impacted by these people who believe things if it's in hindered retarded slowed down diverted in any way then those belief systems are fucking dangerous yeah because they're confusing and they get in the way of our understanding as As much as we know now, we know an incredible amount. It's still an unbelievably limited amount of information we have in comparison to what's actually out there for us to discover. of competing data too which is kind of the problem it's having competing data is fine having data that is completely thrown together with confirmation bias and oh no it has to be this because i don't like that it's like just let the method do its job let science let science is

a tool you don't you when when you break a hammer you you bitch at the tool but it's your fault that you didn't see the crack or anything like that in it science is the tool use the tool the way it's the way it's supposed to be used let it test things let it do that it's it doesn't mean it doesn't have any malice the nice thing is you know what if you're wrong that's rad because if you're wrong that means you can come up with a whole new idea of cool shit to do. You found some new stuff. Yeah. Having a negative is a positive.

Having a negative result means that it's something else, which is cool. It's an unanswered question. If you answer the question, cool. Refine it. Make it better. Again, personal beliefs are fucking rad man if it makes you a better person and it's another tool in your basket to use whether it's digging up a mammoth or finding the cure for cancer by all means please use it just don't bring it into science don't have

confirmation bias don't do you know oh we we can't we can't believe that because the earth is only 6 000 years old why are you doing that why are you going against hundreds of years of geology and science and technology and all of this stuff that we've already unlocked because they're dopes that's the problem it's playing dopes there's something it's easy to be a dumb dumb we got a real cushy life it's easy to be negative and it's easy to yeah it's easy to be stupid yeah those are two really easy things to be yeah oh i'm always negative oddly enough are you yeah well the twitter rants thousand tweets in a day yeah i want to go outside dude yeah no but i'm usually outside that's the thing that's true i work it's slow i'm waiting for the excavator blew a hydraulic line and i'm just like oh you motherfucker and then you just go off on a yeah and then you know i make my point and then

they come back i'm like no you're not getting it and then i make my point again and then they come back i'm like no you're still not getting it here's a 43 page pdf on 55 million years of horse evolution oh it's all the same kind do you think Do you think that you're being trolled ever? Do you think people recognize that you do this? Well, kind of, because I follow a few accounts that actually purposely retweet them. They retweet the stupid. On purpose? On purpose.

Just to start. Yeah. If man came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? That's my thing. That's what I always tell people. Because we didn't come from monkeys, man. Bro't even know right right okay now you see if uh whoa um yeah it's like take that darwin retweets that question that's all he does and he gets into debates and it's like that's okay i'll follow that and someone says take that darwin no that that's the account

take that darwin oh that's funny i need to check that out and then there's also like theory fail theory fail when people say evolution is fake because it's just a theory oh that's great it's like theory is the biggest thing ever I've actually heard intelligent people who are educated biologists being referred to as non Darwinists or they believe in a non Darwinian form of evolution what what other potential forms of evolution are there what or are hypothesized what's the error that people believe I that I'm not that sure on to be honest. I've never heard that. A non-Darwinist?

A neo-Darwinist? No, non-Darwinian. I've never heard that. Really? Yeah. Maybe I'm just hanging out with idiots. Non-Darwinian evolution. I'll Google it.

Yeah, it's scholarly articles for non non-darwinian evolution oh wow um scientific paper written by jack lester king thomas h dukes published in 1969 is credited along with uh motu kimura's 1968 paper evolutionary rate of the molecular level at the molecular level proposing what became known as the neutral theory of molecular evolution paper brings together a wide variety of evidence ranging from protein sequence comparisons to studies of the trefers mutator gene and e coli trefers mutator gene cool trefers two f's um uh analysis the genetic blah blah blah blah blah can you tweet me that link so i can check that later yeah sure definitely all these other interviews that i'm doing today yeah oh man who else you doing today um mary lou henner mary lou henner yeah she like a gymnast or

something no the the actress um she was on taxi oh mary lou henner oh the redheaded lady yeah yeah and she uh it's really cool uh yeah she has a she's supposed to be a genius she she has a photograph like a bizarre amazing awesome photographic memory well she could remember the very day the time like of like 1979 i was you know in my living room It was 12 p.m. and this happened. Yeah. And weirdly in this big grand synthesis of the world, she filmed a movie in my girlfriend's old home in Toronto, like in 94, and has a signed headshot.

My girlfriend has a signed headshot from Mary Lou Henner. Wow. Yeah, and I i'm gonna ask her i'm gonna like hey do you remember like this this this house in toronto she does and she'll probably like oh yeah and the it was near a thing with that and the wallpaper was this color which was kind of like ecru and it's just like whoa and she's a very rare example yeah right extremely extremely i actually think i gotta be bugging off to get to that. Where is it? Does she have a podcast or something? It's syndicated radio.

Mary Lou Henner is a syndicated radio show. Yeah. That's amazing. What's the subject about? Anything she wants. No kidding. How come I don't know about that? It's Mary Lou.

Yeah, on Twitter it's at Mary Lou Show. Well, I saw her interviewed once and I was like, wow, she's surprisingly intelligent. And that whole photographic memory thing. Right. That's a bummer if you date her, though. You know, you can't say, you didn't say that. Oh, fuck yes, I did. And the relative humidity was 83%, and it was, oh, crap.

Okay, man, well, listen, thank you very much for coming on here. If you've got to go see Mary Lowe, I totally understand. Right on. This is amazing. Tattoos and Bones on Twitter. You can follow him on Twitter. And this Sunday? Yeah, this Sunday.

What time? 8 p.m. on the National Geographic channel, Mammoth Unearthed. Listen, dude, I'm so happy there's people like you out there doing that. Thanks, man. It's so cool to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor and just take in this information. Thanks. Knowledge. I'm looking forward to your show.

Thanks, man. Check out museums. Get out there. Anyone can do my job, to be honest. No, that's not true. Yeah, it is. You have to be into it. No, I'll take you out camping.

We'll find fossils. It'll be fun. Oh, I know how that works. No, not like that. Oh, man. Yeah, with Ray. You have to be into it. No, I'll take you out camping. We'll find fossils. It'll be fun. Oh, I know how that works. No, not like that. Oh, man. Yeah, with Ray Comfort's banana. There we go. Trevor Valle, ladies and gentlemen.

That's how you say it if you want to be cool. Thank you, brother. I really appreciate it. That was awesome. This was amazing.