Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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*Clears throat* *Clears throat* Joe Rogan podcast, check it out! | |
The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. | ||
Trevor Valle. | ||
Welcome, buddy. | ||
How's it going, man? | ||
Good, man. | ||
Sometimes when people sit down and you just start talking, you're like, shit, shit, stop talking. | ||
We've got to record. | ||
Trevor's a paleontologist, and explain to me the job site thing. | ||
When someone's digging, 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 law called CEQA. It was started in 1970. And that mandates that any archaeological or paleontological stuff, so like dead bodies of early Californians or glassware all the way up to woolly mammoth bones, or not woolly mammoth, but mammoth bones, 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, they get found by 40-ton excavation machines when they're building new hotels in downtown. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
So yeah, I'm standing next to things that could very easily kill you. | ||
So when they do that, how do they keep from fucking something up? | ||
When they're digging in, is it just dumb luck? | ||
Oh no, they fuck stuff up. | ||
That's how we find it. | ||
Because we don't have x-ray vision. | ||
I can't look into the ground and go, hey, there's a whale there. | ||
So the bulldozer's going by, the excavator's scooping stuff up. | ||
And you're just scrambling to check? | ||
Yeah. | ||
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 and you sweep it away. | ||
I'm like, oh crap, it's a mammoth. | ||
Okay. | ||
And then 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? | ||
I can't say exactly where, but somewhere here in Los Angeles, 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. | ||
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
Where there's no water right now. | ||
Holy shit. | ||
So think like downtown LA, whale. | ||
Wow. | ||
That's how long? | ||
Five million years old? | ||
Yeah, about five million years old. | ||
Holy fuck. | ||
We were finding shark's teeth and stuff like that hanging around, and the owner of the company was the owner of the construction company, I forgot what their name is, supervisor, the general contractor. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yep, look. | ||
Whale ribcage. | ||
Wow, the whole ribcage. | ||
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, sorry. | ||
I'm like throwing out terms. | ||
We wrap fossils in plaster to protect it because we're taking the dirt out with them so we can prep it later. | ||
So I'm going to 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. | ||
unidentified
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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. | ||
Just dumb luck. | ||
Yeah, absolute dumb luck. | ||
We get a lot of... | ||
You know, paleontology, it's still a young science. | ||
It started in the 1800s in England, pretty much. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, before that was natural philosophy. | ||
Natural philosophy? | ||
Natural philosophy. | ||
Wow. | ||
So, like, in the 1860s, when Darwin released 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. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Like three years later, they found Archaeopteryx, that big lizard bird, 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 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 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 cool people. | ||
You're a hipster. | ||
You could easily be like a chef somewhere or a comic. | ||
Well, I've seen that. | ||
I have a lot of visible tattoos. | ||
I'm wearing jeans today, but I've got them all over my legs, too. | ||
And they're all either science or geeky. | ||
Oh, cool. | ||
And I've seen chefs with like spatulas. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
And like carrots. | ||
A knife. | ||
And mine are like fossil shark teeth and saber-toothed cats. | ||
Yeah. | ||
What is that? | ||
A turtle? | ||
The type one? | ||
Oh, it's a frog type thing? | ||
It's a horn lizard. | ||
Oh. | ||
Yeah, it's my favorite horn lizard. | ||
It's the regal horn lizard from the desert southwest. | ||
I'm a nerd, man. | ||
I'm a total... | ||
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 into cars. | ||
fuck off but so when you find like a giant rib cage of a wheel 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, 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, like, these fucking assholes that build parking structures, you know? | ||
They can be, seriously, man, 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... | ||
Whatever it is we find. | ||
What's like the most adamant that anybody's ever gotten with you about keeping a job site open? | ||
The other week, I was 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, yeah, he was getting kind of savage with me. | ||
unidentified
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He was like, you're stopping my guys for a 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? | ||
unidentified
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Nope. | |
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. | ||
Like I had a conversation with a friend of mine once about that. | ||
He had a megalodon tooth on his desk. | ||
Yeah, you've got one right there. | ||
Yeah, I found some in LA too. | ||
Oh really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
In L.A.? The whale site I was talking about? | ||
We actually found meg teeth before that. | ||
Whoa! | ||
That's what I'm saying. | ||
It's like, yeah, when you find big sharks like that, you can find their food. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Megalodon in downtown L.A. Is it Megalodon? | ||
Is that how you say it, or is it Megalodon? | ||
Megalodon, Megalodon, your emphasis is on a different syllable. | ||
It doesn't, same thing. | ||
Oh, okay. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's like nuclear nuclear? | ||
No, that's nuclear. | ||
That's spelled nuclear. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Don't you remember how Bush used to say it? | ||
Oh yeah. | ||
Nuclear. | ||
Nuclear. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Nuclear bombs. | ||
It's like, was it California when Schwarzenegger used to say it? | ||
California. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
I'm a scientist, not a politician. | ||
The bones, or the teeth rather, when 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 a 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. | ||
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, it's been replaced. | ||
It's been petrified. | ||
Just like petrified wood. | ||
Still looks like wood. | ||
Right, right, right. | ||
But it weighs, you know, instead of weighing two pounds, it weighs 15. Right. | ||
And it's a fucking rock. | ||
It's cool looking. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Petrified wood is the weirdest shit ever. | ||
But the, 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. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Yeah, this is what they were saying in the press thing I found so incredibly fascinating. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You're finding completely flash-frozen animals. | ||
Yeah, there was skin, hair. | ||
Like, I played with its lips. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
It had undigested food in its stomach. | ||
You gotta be real clear when you say played with. | ||
Yeah. | ||
What are you doing? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Front, mouth. | ||
Yes. | ||
But it's like, yeah, it had the whole mouth structure was still there. | ||
The lower lip, the root of the tongue. | ||
The root? | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, it was... | ||
Creepy, man. | ||
Wow. | ||
I'd never dealt with something like that before. | ||
And how was it so well preserved? | ||
Did it fall into a glacier or something? | ||
We think the way that it was preserved, you'll see in the show, we only kind of have half of a mammoth. | ||
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. | ||
Right. | ||
You know, 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 astroidal impacts. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
He had one example of a woolly mammoth that died almost instantly. | ||
And he believes that the impact of some sort of a large body killed this thing. | ||
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. | ||
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
Yeah, and he had, uh, he had actually, he had photos of it, right? | ||
He had photos of the, the woolly mammoth in its broken position, and they had found it very similarly. | ||
It was like very well preserved and, uh, sort of perma-frozen. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
Weird. | ||
I would think something falling from space and then falling from the sky at terminal velocity, if it's like a big rock, would do more than just break something's back. | ||
Well, it depends on, I guess, how close it is to the impact. | ||
Obviously, it just fucking killed everything really close to it. | ||
Oh, like it impacted nearby? | ||
Yeah, and flattened forests. | ||
For some reason, I'm thinking a meteor comes out of the sky and hits the mammoth exactly. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, you know that site in Siberia, the Tungusku site? | ||
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
That flattened all the trees and all that. | ||
Flattened everything for like some insane amount of thousands of acres. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And that was a meteor impact. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
In the early 1900s, right? | ||
1908 or something like that. | ||
Something along those lines. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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 Nanodiamonds right night. | ||
Yeah, the nano diamonds and that's right nuclear blast now. | ||
I remember his name. | ||
Yeah There is there's there's evidence of that He did put forth a pretty solid hypothesis, but we're starting to find out. | ||
Everything didn't go extinct right at that moment, though. | ||
No, he's saying there were about 60% of all land mammals died off in that era. | ||
That's a huge chunk, but woolly mammoths kept going. | ||
For how long? | ||
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 Channel Islands. | ||
The Channel Islands outside of L.A.? Yeah. | ||
Pygmy mammoths? | ||
Yeah, if you cruise up to the Natural History Museum at Santa Barbara, they have pygmy mammoths. | ||
They're related to another mammoth species we had in North America called the Colombian mammoth. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
When were they there? | ||
How recently? | ||
I think they went extinct about, for some reason, like 6,000 to 8,000 years ago is sticking in my head. | ||
Yeah, we had 11,500 years ago, we still had saber-toothed cats roaming L.A., 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. | ||
They were 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, 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 wrist. | ||
I'm not going to do that. | ||
I know, but I'm just saying. | ||
Have somebody bite your wrist. | ||
Not me. | ||
And you can actually, you can feel the pulsation. | ||
In your mouth. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
The sensitivity of your teeth. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, you know how your teeth hurt when you're eating something cold or drinking something? | ||
You've got nerve endings in it. | ||
Right, right, right. | ||
It makes sense. | ||
Theirs may have a larger nerve ending that I'm not quite sure on cat tooth anatomy, but they may have just a larger nerve ending that allows them to feel easier. | ||
So did you guys stumble upon any saber-toothed cats? | ||
Not in Siberia, no. | ||
When you were doing job sites in LA? I used to be the assistant lab supervisor at the La Brea Tar Pits. | ||
I ran into cats all the time. | ||
I even dropped a skull of one on the floor accidentally when I was cleaning it. | ||
It shattered? | ||
Yeah, I put it back together, kind of. | ||
With glue? | ||
Yeah. | ||
How long did that take? | ||
About six months. | ||
Fuck! | ||
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'd 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 my friend got stuck repelling down one. | ||
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 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. | ||
How do you not have a backup light? | ||
I figure when you go into an ice cave, there's a few things you want to bring. | ||
One of them is a fucking backup light. | ||
Yeah, you'd think. | ||
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 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, 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. | ||
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 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. | ||
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's already dead. | ||
Oh, I see. | ||
Mammoth ivory is beautiful, too. | ||
It's got a weird sort of a tan quality to it. | ||
Yeah, tan, 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 100-pound tusk that is perfect quality. | ||
It's just like they pulled it out of an ice cliff. | ||
That thing uncut will be $40,000, $50,000. | ||
unidentified
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Whoa! | |
Yeah, there was an episode on 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 common. | ||
Enough that there's an actual commodity and there's 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. | ||
I mean, 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. | ||
Florian says 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. | ||
There was a guy who was trying to say that they were actually some form of Down syndrome children, and that's what accounted for the deviation. | ||
But it seems like the consensus is, no, you're dealing with a totally different species. | ||
I'm not that up on my paleoanthro. | ||
I'm kind of a hardcore paleontologist. | ||
We don't dig people. | ||
We're kind of like loners and dead animals more than humans. | ||
But what if you found a person? | ||
I would freak out and call my boss. | ||
Oh, you back up? | ||
Yeah, it's like, nope, I don't, no. | ||
If you found a heavy, brown, Neanderthal-looking motherfucker in there, you know? | ||
That would rewrite history, and that would be cool to be part of it, but I'm actually not legally allowed to Because I'm a paleontologist, not an archaeologist. | ||
If I come across human remains, I stop the entire project. | ||
I call the coroner and my boss, and then a certified archaeologist comes out. | ||
Being an archaeologist and dealing with people and tribal remains and all that in California, very, very specific. | ||
I know in Mexico City, they're constantly digging for an apartment building or something like that, and they find some huge pyramid structure that's been covered in dirt for thousands of years that nobody knew existed. | ||
My co-host, Tim, he's a Mesoamerican archaeologist. | ||
That's his deal. | ||
I don't know if he's on that project. | ||
He's a teacher up north in NorCal. | ||
But, yeah, that's his thing. | ||
So, yeah, I wish I knew more about the Floriensis thing, because stuff like 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? | ||
unidentified
|
The... | |
Florensis? | ||
Yeah, Florensis. | ||
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. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
There's a little person running around 14,000 years ago. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Three-foot-tall humans that were kind of chimp-like, but not really. | ||
And they walked like people did. | ||
Right. | ||
That's a mindfuck, man. | ||
And then you've got, you know, like Australopithecus. | ||
It's four and a half million years old. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Or Artipithecus. | ||
It's like 4.4, whatever the current thing is. | ||
Yeah, but you're right. | ||
We do have gaps all over the place. | ||
And occasionally they fill them. | ||
And occasionally we fill them. | ||
We have a 55-million-year-old timeline just of horse evolution alone from when they used to be dog-sized, tiny little horse-like animals with multiple toes on their feet. | ||
All the way up to your modern horse that's like huge single hoof. | ||
We have every transitional stage for 55 million years. | ||
Including those Budweiser horses? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Including the Clydesdales. | ||
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 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 artificial selection. | ||
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 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. | ||
When you first started studying paleontology and 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, say, a wolf... | ||
And turned it into a chihuahua. | ||
Like that, that is really the, that's where they came from, right? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And this is only recently discovered. | ||
That's like the last 50,000 years. | ||
God. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
But it's only been recently proven that they all came from wolves, correct? | ||
Oh yeah, genetically. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Because you can take a wolf and they're, so wolves and dogs, common ancestor. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But then wolves, what more than likely happened was wolves have, you had kind of like this proto-wolf. | ||
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 warmth, for food, for protection. | ||
So if you kind of think about it, we were giving scraps to these dogs and getting them 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. | ||
It was sort of a joint effort, no? | ||
Maybe. | ||
unidentified
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Maybe. | |
I occasionally like to knock humans down a couple pegs. | ||
Yeah, you seem to err on the side of the animals. | ||
Again, don't dig people. | ||
So, say you have one small neighboring city has a really big bad wolf, and 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 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. | ||
Do you think a banana, your normal, everyday, cool, organic banana that you get, that's not a banana. | ||
A banana is this weird green thing with seeds in it. | ||
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 modified. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's like, do you mean lab GMO? Do you mean like gene spliced? | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Do you mean what I call hip-geneered or hippie engineering, farming engineering? | ||
It's like, I'm going to make a Honeycrisp 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 don't eat organic. | ||
Like, okay, 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, or grass-fed, grass-fed, or, you know, nor hormone. | ||
No hormone. | ||
My girlfriend, she's, uh, You know, very, very, you know, healthy eating, very fit, and is getting me on the kick, too. | ||
And, like, teaches me this stuff. | ||
Like, taught me how to read a label on food. | ||
And I'm like, oh, holy crap. | ||
Okay. | ||
That's cool. | ||
You know, 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 it's kind of nice that way when you have, because we have the internet and all that, it's easy to do research but it's also very easy to get thrown astray with like, you know, 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 know how they think. | ||
Have you seen my Twitter feed? | ||
Nine times out of ten, all I'm doing is debating evolution with creationists. | ||
Do you really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, I need to link your Twitter. | ||
What's your Twitter? | ||
At tattoosandbones. | ||
Really? | ||
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
That's hilarious. | ||
I've been tweeting you like the last two days, man. | ||
Welcome to the club. | ||
There's a lot of fucking people out there on the internet. | ||
There's a lot of humans. | ||
Are there? | ||
Yeah. | ||
At tattoosandbones. | ||
Yeah. | ||
A-N-D bones? | ||
One word? | ||
A-N-D, yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
Alright. | |
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 And then people are like, oh, well, look, 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. | ||
unidentified
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Ah! | |
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 this 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. | ||
I'm sorry, that video's beautiful. | ||
Oh, yeah, and him and Dwayne 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 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
It's like, dude, shut up. | ||
They're all just gay. | ||
That's what it is. | ||
That's fine. | ||
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. | ||
The reason why they're so hog wild for Jesus. | ||
Like Kirk Cameron, that's a gay man. | ||
I'm not a gay man, but I'm pretty good at 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, there it is. | ||
Yeah, peeling it. | ||
Oh, wow, man. | ||
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. | ||
He's like, what's that? | ||
It's a banana. | ||
You dumb fuck. | ||
Yeah, it's like, sorry. | ||
Because 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 use such a phallic symbol? | ||
Why did he? | ||
For all the same reasons. | ||
He doesn't understand what he's doing. | ||
He's drawn to it. | ||
It's the transference into the symbol. | ||
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. | ||
unidentified
|
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 it tomato-banana-shaped? | ||
Which tomato? | ||
That's true, right? | ||
Yeah, you've got... | ||
Cherry tomatoes? | ||
Cherries, hothouse, grapes, you know, all these different ones, because we've... | ||
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. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
They were still 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 drive off the smaller animals. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
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 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 the Nanette people. | ||
The Nanette people are reindeer herders. | ||
And they wear reindeer leather, and they make their sleds, and they use mammoth ivory for mammoth tusks they find. | ||
for their reindeer sleds. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, and there's this whole sequence in Mammoth on Earth where I'm hanging out with the Nanette people, drinking reindeer blood to sacrifice a reindeer to the ground so I can find a mammoth, because mammoths to them are bad juju. | ||
Mammoths are bad juju? | ||
Yeah, they have this really... | ||
See, 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 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 going to 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 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 the caribou before that. | ||
But do you eat it? | ||
Or do they have to sacrifice? | ||
Do they have to leave it in the ground? | ||
No, they ate it. | ||
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, including me. | ||
What does that taste like? | ||
Like you get punched in the mouth and you're swallowing blood. | ||
It's just blood. | ||
But the fact that I'm watching the animal get butchered in front of me... | ||
This wouldn't be some modern, weird, ritualistic thing with people wearing 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 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. | ||
Did you touch, have you ever touched the inside of one of those animals, like, right after they died? | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
They're so warm. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The blood was steaming. | ||
I'm holding this coffee cup steaming full of blood. | ||
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? | ||
No, it felt like I was sucking on a whole bunch of copper pennies. | ||
What if you got a raging hard-on? | ||
Would you immediately call your friends and go, listen, I think I'm on to something? | ||
Or would you keep it to yourself? | ||
I might keep it to myself. | ||
unidentified
|
Really? | |
How dare you? | ||
You're a scientist. | ||
You owe the world. | ||
No, I have to test it first. | ||
Okay, so you just keep... | ||
Trevor's just wandering around Russia with hard arms all the time. | ||
Like, what's he doing? | ||
Next stop, St. 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. | ||
Very similar. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I'm Mammoth Boy. | ||
unidentified
|
I'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? | ||
How old are the ones that you find? | ||
Like, when you found this one that is essentially... | ||
You're finding the actual body of this thing. | ||
You feel the tissue and the hairs on it. | ||
How old was that animal? | ||
About 40,000 years old. | ||
Whoa! | ||
Yeah, so before humans had ever stepped foot on North America. | ||
10,000 years after native Aboriginal people came to Australia. | ||
Like, that's a stupid long amount of time. | ||
Yeah, we can't really get that into our brain, can we? | ||
No, no. | ||
Even as somebody that works in what we call deep time, like, 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 7, 8 million years old. | ||
Million, millions of years. | ||
Continents were in different places. | ||
Yeah, that's too far. | ||
I mean, it's like there was a land bridge between Asia 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. | ||
Stuff's in different places, man. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's 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 a point of reference in your little pea brain, little monkey brains. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's like, you think, trying to think of what absolute zero is, you know, it's like what true nothingness, the concept of zero is very difficult. | ||
Because everyone's like, oh, you know, I take the 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 across a photon or across an atom. | ||
Literally... | ||
Like, an almost immeasurably short amount of time where there was no physics. | ||
Yeah, it was a singularity. | ||
It's just like... | ||
Yeah, and 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, ooh, 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 one knows. | ||
And that's the thing. | ||
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 weird things. | ||
And you mean Jesus? | ||
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? | ||
unidentified
|
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. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
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's Igor, of course. | ||
Of course. | ||
They're always named Igor. | ||
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. | ||
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 Tufts license, you know, whatever. | ||
You have to pretend you don't have $100,000 worth of shit. | ||
Right. | ||
Or you find somebody that does have a permit, or you sell it on the black market. | ||
unidentified
|
Um... | |
But these people, since they go out, right when the snow starts to melt, right when the permafrost 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 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 going, hey, do you know where any mammoths are? | ||
And they're looking at us like, yeah, you're a wealthy American dude. | ||
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. | ||
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
In, like, one dude's area. | ||
So we're dealing with serious people. | ||
Like, we're walking through parts of, you know, Nowheresville, northeastern Siberia, past, you know, cars with bullet holes in them. | ||
And this is, like, it's not the Wild West. | ||
It's the Wild East. | ||
Laws don't really apply in some of the places we were in. | ||
So it's just a completely different animal. | ||
Oh yeah. | ||
It was something I was not prepared for. | ||
So how long does the politics of 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 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? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
No, no, better. | ||
We brought them like Jameson and things like that. | ||
But don't say better to them. | ||
No. | ||
Better than vodka? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I'll tell you. | ||
No, man. | ||
You break out a bottle of Jameson Private Reserve, they go nuts. | ||
unidentified
|
Really? | |
They love Jameson. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
What about Jack Daniels? | ||
What about a good goddamn American beverage? | ||
unidentified
|
No? | |
What the fuck is this? | ||
No, we tried, man. | ||
How about Makers? | ||
Makers would have been good. | ||
There wasn't any at the duty-free shop. | ||
I flew from LA to London to Moscow. | ||
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. | ||
Then we flew to Moscow. | ||
Then we flew something 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. | ||
unidentified
|
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, like, 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 assistants, 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, apteka. | ||
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. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
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 you have to find ear infection medication. | ||
Try asking someone that doesn't speak English for hydrogen peroxide. | ||
What does it look like in Russian, too? | ||
They have that wacky language. | ||
Yeah, it's Cyrillic. | ||
It's all, like, upside-down cues and all weird stuff. | ||
It was an adventure, man. | ||
It was absolutely an adventure. | ||
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 climbing down cliffs. | ||
We're 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. | ||
What's the environment that you're doing this in? | ||
Is it outside? | ||
Outside of a permafrost cave in a truck. | ||
Wow. | ||
And so do you cover this thing when you find it? | ||
Do you attempt to mitigate the damage that the sun and the elements... | ||
The one we finally got our hands on was discovered a few months before. | ||
And it was secreted away in this weird... | ||
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, 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 you'll see in the show, we're 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. | ||
They find it. | ||
They store it and hide it away. | ||
And then how does the word finally get to the paleontologist in Los Angeles? | ||
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 2012. No, it was May of 2013. Yeah. | ||
There was the bleeding mammoth that was found. | ||
It's the Lyakhovsky 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? | ||
But you're actually looking at the front left leg. | ||
So it's totally frozen. | ||
Right. | ||
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 underneath the Discovery News logo there, that's where the mouth is. | ||
But it's completely frozen in this little thing. | ||
And bleeding in what way? | ||
They found this goo leaking out of it or leaking out near it. | ||
And it took the world by storm briefly. | ||
And we're like, okay, this is weird. | ||
I'm going to Siberia. | ||
I've got to check this mammoth out. | ||
It's got to be there. | ||
It didn't just show up. | ||
People go, hey, look, we've got liquid blood. | ||
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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. | ||
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 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? | ||
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 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 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 5, 10 year... | ||
Oh, from now? | ||
From now, yeah. | ||
The way as technology advances. | ||
Right. | ||
I mean, there was a Korean geneticist team on site while we were filming because they were also looking for that mammoth. | ||
And I actually became really good friends with a couple of them. | ||
And we were talking at length and 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 the... | ||
a mammoth life the mammoth step 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 | ||
we can figure out social aspects of of mammoths by watching their direct cousins the elephant you put a rug on an elephant the There you go. | ||
There's your woolly mammoth. | ||
Couldn't we have an island called Paleolithic Park and have a bunch of cloned mammoths wandering around and we have a nice place where you could take your family and see? | ||
Look, honey, there's the mammoth. | ||
Let me tell you, man. | ||
I've helped use paleontology and design life-size puppet saber-toothed cats and stuff like that. | ||
Yeah, I would love to see a dinosaur or a mammoth or a saber-toothed cat. | ||
Archaeopteryx, 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! | ||
There's frozen carcasses that pop out of the ice. | ||
Go check them out, man. | ||
I completely see your point. | ||
I totally understand. | ||
I'm only fucking around. | ||
Oh, no worries. | ||
But the reality is, 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, like, 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 be there. | ||
Chokes that thing down. | ||
But just have a bunch of Marines standing by with giant guns. | ||
Like, bitch, move. | ||
You make one bad move, and it's over. | ||
Dinosaur fuckface. | ||
The idea of that would be awesome. | ||
The idea of it. | ||
The idea of it. | ||
I mean, when it comes to a T-Rex, you're dealing with a 40-foot-long animal that had 10,000-plus pounds of... | ||
And Jesus wrote it around 6,000 years ago. | ||
Yeah, 6,000 years ago. | ||
I think it was 6,000 years ago with Thursday. | ||
Funny, I think it was like Thursday, October 23rd. | ||
6,000 years ago. | ||
It's like it's the anniversary of Jesus riding the velociraptor from Galilee right now. | ||
It seems inevitable, though, that someone's going to do something along these 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 real genetic tissue. | ||
If there was any blood left, we would. | ||
There wasn't any blood. | ||
No, the problem with... | ||
The same thing that happens to a mammoth is the same thing if I put myself in permafrost or anybody. | ||
It doesn't matter how fit you are, how 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? | ||
That's fascinating. | ||
So 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 from now? | ||
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 cells? | ||
Yeah, it's exploded cells. | ||
It's like blood, like hemoglobin stained tissue and melted... | ||
The same thing that would happen if you 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 cellular goo. | ||
A steak in a deep freezer turns into 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 days. | ||
You know, just leave it out at room temperature. | ||
It's kind of bad. | ||
But isn't that 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 mammoth, it starts to smell like a barnyard, a really bad one. | ||
Because after all the ice, so we're checking it 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 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 growth starting to seep out of the holes. | ||
And, yeah, it's kind of disgusting. | ||
It's pretty wild, though, to think that you're actually getting a liquid from this animal that existed 40,000 years ago. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Wow. | ||
It kind of messes with your head. | ||
We filmed it last year, and it's airing on Sunday. | ||
And just to think about it, it's like, no. | ||
This time last year, I was still recovering from poking... | ||
A mammoth. | ||
Recovering? | ||
Yeah, just mentally recovering. | ||
Oh, I see. | ||
Yeah, it's just like, no, I didn't get some mammoth superflu or anything, which would be cool. | ||
That is something to think about, right? | ||
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Yes. | |
Is it possible that bacteria or some diseases could survive? | ||
Bacteria and virae and all that, they're much hardier than a human cell is. | ||
I know that there's some strains of trichinosis that can survive a deep freeze. | ||
They say that some strains of trichinosis you can get from something that's been frozen for years. | ||
If you take a piece of meat from an animal that has trichinosis and freeze it for a couple years, thaw it out and cook it, if you don't cook it to 160 degrees, you can get trichinosis. | ||
Which is insane. | ||
That means those larvae survived... | ||
Deep freeze for years. | ||
Yeah. | ||
What the fuck, man? | ||
That's evolution right there. | ||
That's like, nope, you know, we're gonna hang out and be hardy and just, you know, 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, true. | ||
They're big, but... | ||
Light that fucker up like a Christmas tree. | ||
And then we'd all have mammoth steaks. | ||
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Mm. | |
I wanted to actually try a piece of the meat from the mammoth. | ||
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To eat? | |
Yeah, they wouldn't let me. | ||
You really wanted to eat a piece? | ||
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 doing the once-in-a-lifetime thing. | ||
Right, but why do people have to... | ||
Everybody has to fucking... | ||
I have to take it into my body. | ||
At this point, I've been finding mammoth bones, I've been drinking reindeer blood. | ||
You're a barbarian at this point. | ||
Might as well be wearing leather underwear. | ||
The parka actually still smells like mammoth. | ||
Now that you mention that. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I wouldn't wash it either. | ||
Why would you wash it, Parker? | ||
Well, you don't 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 animal, this really mammoth carcass? | ||
It really was. | ||
I mean, it was an absolute dream come to... | ||
I mean, you'll see in the show... | ||
And it's this Sunday night it airs. | ||
Yeah, so it airs... | ||
It headlines the National Geographic... | ||
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 8pm. | ||
And if you're in LA, though, you can see it two days early. | ||
Why's that? | ||
Because I'm throwing a party at my friend's bar. | ||
Oh, shit! | ||
A mammoth party! | ||
Mammoth party. | ||
What day is this? | ||
Friday night, 8.30. | ||
Damn it. | ||
You're not gonna be here. | ||
Fucker! | ||
Oh, really? | ||
Bummer, man. | ||
Yeah, I would love to come to your mammoth party. | ||
Yeah, we're going to put it up on the... | ||
It's 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... | ||
You don't appear to be a hipter. | ||
East Hollywood, we're in this weird little... | ||
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 are like, geez, good job. | ||
That's the new place. | ||
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Yeah. | |
And the fucking mad scramble to buy real estate in East Hollywood. | ||
Yeah, I've been there for three years now. | ||
You can create a market. | ||
But weirdly enough, it's already starting to do it. | ||
Of course! | ||
Because there's the hip craft beer wine place that my friends got, and then the boutique ice cream, the tattoo shop, the CrossFit place. | ||
It's just in this one corner. | ||
I love that area. | ||
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Yeah. | |
I love Los Feliz. | ||
I love Silver Lake. | ||
I don't live there, but my buddy Duncan does. | ||
And whenever I go to visit him, we walk around his neighborhood. | ||
I'm like, dude, this is the weirdest part of LA. Yeah, this is Melrose and Vermont. | ||
Melrose and Vermont, Melrose and Heliotrope right there. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah, it's a great, weird little, like, it's like a boutique antique shop. | ||
Really? | ||
It's like three blocks down, somebody just got shot. | ||
This is bizarre. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So, yeah, it's crazy. | ||
That sucks, man. | ||
That'd be rad if you could come. | ||
Cannot do, my friend. | ||
Cannot do. | ||
It does sound pretty badass, though. | ||
Beer, wine, mammoth? | ||
Now that you've done this, what's next for you? | ||
This is essentially the ultimate for you? | ||
Yeah. | ||
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 an actual woolly mammoth carcass. | ||
Right now, it is the ultimate for me, but I don't know what's next. | ||
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's a huge... | ||
It's because there is like... | ||
It's called the Western Interior Seaway. | ||
It connected the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. | ||
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 swampy areas. | ||
I've been to the area, the Badlands in Montana, in those mountains where you're walking around on silt. | ||
The mountains are covered with what was essentially at the bottom of the Great Western Inland Sea. | ||
Yeah, the Dakotas, all that. | ||
They find shells up there. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like seashells. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Which is just like, what the fuck? | ||
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. | ||
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Wow. | |
He's a really cool dude. | ||
Do they find megalodons in Montana as well? | ||
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 actually have fake photos from World War II? I purposely don't watch them because then my blood sugar goes up and I probably end up doing a Twitter tirade and my girlfriend would get mad at me. | ||
Why would she get mad at you for a Twitter tirade? | ||
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Oh, because... | |
There was one time, I think in like two days, I did like over a thousand tweets just like debating people. | ||
It's just because it becomes all focused. | ||
I'm just, you know, my brain's kind of wired different 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'm not going to scroll through hundreds of tweets. | ||
It's like, what's going on? | ||
I'm like, oh, I was making a point. | ||
He was saying there were gaps in the fossil record. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, is it one of those dudes who are evolutionary deniers? | ||
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Yeah. | |
Yeah, that's unfortunately incredibly common, but I've... | ||
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? | ||
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Um... | |
Corn? | ||
GMO corn. | ||
Is that what it is? | ||
It's Monsanto. | ||
It's Chemtrails. | ||
It's not even going to get started on all that, man. | ||
Again, I'm a scientist. | ||
I need data. | ||
I don't know. | ||
Maybe it's freedom. | ||
It's actual freedom. | ||
It's the freedom to believe. | ||
It's the freedom to have faith. | ||
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 tell me that 300 years of geology is wrong. | ||
Don't tell me that I'm effectively lying to the public. | ||
You are lying to the public. | ||
Do you know that the Earth is 6,000 years old? | ||
Exactly. | ||
Exactly, man. | ||
They had a recent Gallup poll that was something insane, like 46% 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 directly flies into my entire way of thought, feeling, and all of that. | ||
And yes, I let it. | ||
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 this sort of science denial. | ||
I feel like this, what we're experiencing right now, is the last crazy gasp of it. | ||
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 chip or something you have in your brain. | ||
Or wetware. | ||
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Yeah. | |
It'll almost be impossible to deny. | ||
Because we kind of have a symbiotic connection with technology. | ||
I mean, you 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. | ||
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 we're going to... | ||
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... | ||
The Earth is 6,000 years old. | ||
No, it's not, fuckface. | ||
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 it's the last gasp of the science denialism that we see right now. | ||
I think it's the last gasp. | ||
I kind of hope so. | ||
I think within a hundred years it's going to be over. | ||
That would be rad. | ||
That would be really rad. | ||
It seems like it has to be. | ||
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 the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, or I believe it's 6,000 years old. | ||
One is, I believe factually that the Earth is 4.5 billion. | ||
It's like, I believe I have faith in it. | ||
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. | ||
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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. | ||
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That's fine, yeah. | |
But it doesn't mean anything. | ||
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Yeah. | |
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 hindered, retarded, slowed down, diverted in any way, then those belief systems are fucking dangerous because they're confusing and they get in the way of our understanding of 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. | ||
And we have just an immeasurable amount of competing data, too, which is kind of the problem. | ||
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. | ||
Just let the method do its job. | ||
Science is a tool. | ||
When you break a hammer, 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 supposed to be used. | ||
Let it test things. | ||
Let it do that. | ||
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 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? | ||
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Because they're dopes. | |
That's the problem. | ||
There's plain dopes. | ||
There's something. | ||
It's easy to be a dum-dum. | ||
We've 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? | ||
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Yeah. | |
Well, the Twitter rants. | ||
Thousand tweets in a day. | ||
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Yeah. | |
I don't want to go outside, dude. | ||
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Yeah. | |
But I'm usually outside. | ||
That's the thing. | ||
That's true, right? | ||
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I work. | |
It's slow. | ||
I'm waiting for the excavator. | ||
It blew a hydraulic line, and I'm just like, doo-doo-doo-doo. | ||
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Oh. | |
You motherfucker. | ||
And then you just go off on a... | ||
Yeah, and then 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 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, you don't even know. | ||
Right, right. | ||
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Okay, now, you see, if... | |
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. | ||
Someone says, take that Darwin? | ||
No, 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? | ||
Yeah, 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 in science. | ||
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 other potential forms of evolution are there or are hypothesized? | ||
What's the error that people believe? | ||
That I'm not that sure on, to be honest. | ||
I've never heard that. | ||
A neo-Darwinist or a non-Darwinian? | ||
I've never heard that. | ||
Really? | ||
Maybe I'm just hanging out with idiots. | ||
Non-Darwinian evolution. | ||
I'll Google it. | ||
Yeah, it's scholarly articles for non-Darwinian evolution. | ||
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Oh, wow. | |
Wow. | ||
Scientific paper written by Jack Lester King, Thomas H. Dukes, published in 1969. It's credited along with Motu Kimura's 1968 paper, Evolutionary Rate 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 Treffer's mutator gene in E. coli. | ||
Treffer's mutator gene? | ||
Cool. | ||
Treffer's. | ||
two F's. | ||
Analysis of the genetic blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
Can you tweet me that link so I can check that later? | ||
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Yeah, sure. | |
Definitely. | ||
After all these other interviews that I'm doing today? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh man. | ||
Who else are you doing today? | ||
Um, Mary Lou Henner. | ||
Mary Lou Henner. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Is she like a gymnast or something? | ||
No, the actress. | ||
She was on Taxi. | ||
Oh, Mary Lou Henner. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Oh, the red-headed lady. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
And it's really cool. | ||
Yeah, she has a... | ||
She's supposed to be a genius. | ||
She has a photograph, like a bizarre, amazing, awesome photographic memory. | ||
Well, she can remember the very day, the time, like 1979. Yeah. | ||
I was, you know, in my living room. | ||
It was 12 p.m. | ||
and this happened and... | ||
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'm going to ask her. | ||
I'm going to be like, hey, do you remember this house in Toronto? | ||
I bet she does. | ||
And she'll probably be like, oh yeah, and it was near a thing with that, and the wallpaper was this color, which was kind of like a crew. | ||
It's just like, whoa. | ||
She's a very rare example of that, right? | ||
Yeah, 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 subjects about? | ||
Anything she wants. | ||
No kidding. | ||
How come I don't know about this? | ||
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. | ||
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Yeah. | |
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. | ||
Yeah, 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? | ||
8pm on the National Geographic channel, Mammoth Unearthed. | ||
Listen, dude, I'm so happy there's people like you out there doing that. | ||
It's so cool to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor and just take in this information, knowledge, and 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. | ||
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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. | ||
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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. | ||
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It was awesome. |