Joe Rogan and Christopher Ryan explore human-animal parallels through "Vanthropology," where Ryan meets rattlesnake expert John Porter (15 bites, 50 years of study) and debates venom myths. They dissect cult psychology—like Wild Wild Country—and modern podcasting’s emotional triggers, while Ryan defends Sex at Dawn against monogamy critiques. The aquatic ape theory clashes with Rogan’s skepticism, but both agree IQ debates (The Bell Curve) ignore stress, epigenetics, and microbiome quirks, like toxoplasmosis altering mouse behavior or sugar cravings disrupting gut health. Bears’ cannibalism (50% of fawns consumed) and orcas’ complex social bonds contrast with Bigfoot’s lackluster mythos, leading to wild tangents—from urologist self-vasectomies to cougars attacking cyclists. Ultimately, their conversation reveals how human culture and biology mirror nature’s unpredictability, from ecological adaptations to the absurdity of fame. [Automatically generated summary]
If you said Bisbee and you didn't visit Stanhope, if you went to Phoenix and didn't visit a guy that you knew there, it's like, I'm sorry man, I got really busy.
That's normal.
But if you went to Bisbee and didn't visit Stanhope, Yeah.
I'm not saying anything that isn't pretty obvious if you drive through town.
I'm sure there are nice parts of town.
I don't know.
We just drove through.
The coolest thing about this van is...
I've combined it with the podcast.
And so I'm traveling, and I'm also meeting people along the way, some of which are planned, like if Stanhope had been around and was willing to hang, definitely would have hung with him.
But others just come up, like right near Bisbee.
See, people follow me on social media, and they're like, oh, I see you're in Texas.
You should visit my buddy in Terlingua.
And I did, and I'll tell you that story in a minute.
But near Bisbee, this woman, Dorothy, I think her name was, wrote to me, and she's like, dude, you're in southern Arizona.
You've got to drop in on my buddy, the rattlesnake guy.
Who's been studying rattlesnakes for 50 years by himself.
He's not looking for fame or anything, but I'll talk to him.
I think he'd like you and you guys would enjoy each other's company.
So I'm like, sure, I'll talk to the rattlesnake guys.
So he came out to this campsite and we hung out for the morning.
This guy is amazing.
John Porter is his name.
He's been studying snakes for 50 years.
He's just totally interested in them.
Lives on next to nothing in a trailer in the desert.
Because what I learned from him, one of many things I learned from him, is that rattlesnake venom is essentially digestive enzymes.
And what happens is, they bite an animal, the animal runs off 20 feet or something before it collapses.
The enzymes are...
They're digesting the animal from within because they don't have enough enzymes within their own digestive tract to digest the whole thing from outside, right?
So when they get the animal inside them, they're digesting it simultaneously from outside in and then from inside out.
But what I'm saying is, but if something else was going after that snake, if something had killed, it's like a coyote had killed a snake, I really wouldn't be bothered by it.
If something that bothers me...
For whatever weird reason, I think of a rabbit as being not just a rodent and a life form.
I think of it being like fucking Peter Cottontail or something stupid.
So just folded in thirds and I'd have a belt and it would come up and hang down in the front and the back.
Seriously, I was totally into it.
But anyway, I was wandering around the neighborhood in my Indian thing and I saw this rabbit and there was a bush with these hard little fruits on it and I grabbed one of these fruits and I threw it at the rabbit.
So I walk over and I look at the rabbit and it's just laying there and then I hear this squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak under this pine tree and I go, and there's this nest of Little baby rabbits with their eyes still closed.
So I took the babies home and the next door neighbor, my friend's mother, was a nurse.
And I showed her and she had like a syringe without the needle and she showed me you have to mix, can't give them straight milk because the rabbit milk is thinner so you have to mix water with it and all this stuff and I was feeding them and then I went back actually a little while later, maybe, I don't know, the next day or something and the big rabbit was gone.
Which then later in life, I thought maybe it wasn't dead.
Maybe it was faking it to try to save the babies to distract me somehow.
And I left the rabbits with this girl and told her how to take care of them and all that.
And the girl apparently forgot about mixing the water.
And so by the time I got back after a three-day weekend, a couple of them had died, but she didn't want to tell me.
And, you know, we were 10, 11. And actually it was all through the biology teacher and then it turned out by the time that she told them they were all dead.
As a psychologist, I find it really interesting because it's, you know, you see these guys, every fucking day there's another story about an anti-gay pro.
You know, minister who's been sucking little boys dicks every day.
Yeah, well, it's also a really shitty way of interacting with humans that some people participate in almost exclusively.
Like, there's some people right now in our culture that They're communicating with people, but the people that they're communicating with, they're only communicating with people online.
They're only doing it through Twitter or Facebook or however they do it.
So their days are spent interacting just randomly with people tweeting at them and reading tweets or reading message board posts or posts.
Posting things or reading Instagram You know passages all they're doing is interacting with people online and I just think there's a lot of kids developing that way because they're not even even when they're around each other they're spending more time Communicating with people through a device than they are doing it face to face because they're always distracted and And I feel like this is a very – it's not indicative of how we evolved.
Like this method of communication.
Like people say there's way more hate today than there's ever been before.
I don't think so.
I think it's the same amount of hate.
There's just this new weird form of expression that doesn't make you take into consideration the other people's feelings.
It's like the only time we've ever had something like that.
If you killed someone or you beat someone up and you looked at them and they looked at you and you knew that you hated them, at least that's an honest attack.
But if you want something terrible to happen to someone and you don't even know them, he just heard him on a podcast, he was a guest and he annoyed you, so you want terrible things to happen to him.
Yeah, but the thing in Spain is funny because if you come from Mexico, Uganda, wherever, and you immigrate to Spain and you get residency, you have to turn in your driver's license and they'll give you a Spanish license, right?
The only country where they won't honor your license is the United States.
Yeah, I was reading about expats and about people who just decide to just go and move over to Europe for a while.
It's such an adventuresome thing to do, if you really think about it.
As an American, because Americans are for sure locked into our way of thinking.
I don't want to speak for the whole group, but when you think of the typical American, you think of someone who just, they like things the way they have them here.
But the point is, if you even have a niggling of that, and then you decide to move to Italy for a year, that will go away.
You will realize, like, oh, okay.
I think that's one of the reasons why people cling so hard to those norms.
I go, because they know.
I think they know that Cambodia is different.
And if they were living in Cambodia, they'd be living like Cambodians.
They know that Laos is different.
They know that Vietnam is different.
How could that be?
How could these people in these other places...
Be just like you just a person but they walk around in a rice paddy all day and they push an ox and they don't have cell phones Like how did that happen?
Could that have happened to you?
Like if you just got a weird roll of the dice and instead of coming out with a seven you came out with a three Could you have been in Laos if you unless you know, I mean I mean And from a Laotian's perspective, he got the seven and you got the three.
Oh, for sure.
You make some guy take a cubicle job.
He's used to working outside in beautiful weather.
Or, I mean, how many number of people that come from other countries that speak Spanish, or speak English, rather, but they speak it with the accent of their place.
I took three years of German in middle school, high school, because I initially signed up for Spanish, which would have been the smart move.
But then over the summer, I was like eighth grade, I think.
And over the summer, this girl named Judy Gumpf, who I just lusted after Judy Gumpf.
Tell me about Judy.
Judy Gumpf was like the 15-year-old who was totally built and, you know, gorgeous and smart and going out with a 23-year-old dude with a Camaro.
And here I am with my zits and braces, and I'm thinking I got a shot at Judy Gumpf.
So she was taking German.
And she said, oh, but there are only eight people in the class.
I don't know if they're going to do it because you should have nine.
And I was like, Judy, I'm going to call the school and switch over to German.
I did.
I sat in that class for three years with Herr Flint.
And Judy.
Never had a shot at Judy, of course.
And then Herr Flint.
I have no talent for language.
I'm all right in English, but when you start talking grammar in the accusative case, and in German there are three genders, and there's die, der, das, masculine, feminine, and neutral, and every noun has a gender, and it's Like a fucking nightmare.
So we sort of had this unspoken agreement that if I was on the soccer team, He would pass me in German, even though I was lost constantly.
I mean, I would have failed out for sure, but he would give me a C as long as I was on the soccer team.
Not that I was any soccer star, it's just that he needed enough people on the team that they'd keep paying him or they'd shut it down.
So my memory of German is basically humiliation from Judy Gumpf, because I never got anywhere, Humiliation in the class because I couldn't understand a fucking thing.
And humiliation on the soccer field because not only did I suck at soccer, but he would scream at me in German.
They would go everywhere and sit down with people that were by themselves.
And if they thought you were lonely or an outcast, they would send in the hot one.
She would come and sit next to you and invite you places.
And then they'd pull you into the fold.
And they were just recruiting people left and right to join.
And then, like, I noticed as the class would go on, like, later in the semester, I noticed some of the people from the class were now in that little tight group.
And they'd all, like, hang together.
It was very strange.
I was like, I was watching people get, like...
They got culted up.
I mean, I was watching it happen.
But it was all like standard Christian stuff, but extremely involved in your life, very rabid, and recruiting, proselytizing everywhere.
And the fact that this happened, it was very strange, because I was like, you dummy, of course she doesn't like you.
But as getting back to the cult thing, I think some of the mechanisms, the psychological mechanisms that make that possible apply to what's happening in podcasting these days.
Now, if somebody says, as people have, like, you know, Chris Ryan, you know, deliberately misrepresented the science or doesn't understand the first thing about evolution or, you know, whatever it is.
I just don't engage because that's emotional.
It's like what we were saying earlier about comments online.
I think people react to sex at dawn very emotionally.
And so if they're reacting emotionally, there's no point in me engaging with them because they're expressing something that's going on in their lives that I don't know anything about and they're suffering in some way.
I'm not talking about Brett Weinstein or anybody specifically.
There's an emotional reason to have that kind of reaction.
Whereas if somebody says, look, on page, you know, 72, you said that bonobos are the only ape that does this and actually gibbons do it as well.
How come this guy can start a whole fucking cult in Australia and tell people he's Jesus and his girlfriend's Mary, and you guys can't get together and form yourself a nice gay church?
When I was there, you know, when you just walk around the Vatican and just see the fucking vast amount of pilfered riches that are all just sucked out by an ideology.
I mean, that's really what it is.
Like that church, that whatever the fuck you want to call it, that religion, they just acquired an ungodly amount of wealth.
You don't need to have some ornate temple with stained glass windows and it took craftsmen.
Like St. Peter's Basilica.
Is it a shock that that is probably one of the most stunning things that I've ever seen in my life?
One of the most beautiful works of art, yet was created for this religion that most likely the people that were living in that day We're probably like worshiping these people that were running this thing like as if they were deities themselves.
And I'm telling you, it's one of those things like you were talking about how you have to see another culture in person in order to really appreciate it.
I think that's the same with this thing.
St. Peter's Basilica is one of those ones when you're there.
Like, look how little those people are walking around down there.
He was telling me some really interesting things like when a human being puts its face in the water, all sorts of physiological changes start happening.
Your metabolism immediately slows way down.
Your oxygen consumption cuts way back just automatically.
We've got a lot of seemingly evolutionary adaptations to living in the water.
There was a period in human evolution where our ancestors lived in tidal areas.
So they spent most of their time in the water that was about body temperature so it was comfortable and it was shallow enough that they weren't worried about sharks coming in and deep enough that leopards and other predators from the land couldn't get at them so it was safe in that respect.
Also, you have great sight lines, so you can see if something's coming from a long way off.
And there's lots of food there, lots of mollusks and fish, and you can net.
And so it sort of made sense that they would be there.
And so we have these physiological adaptations for aquatic living.
Like, for example, human infants are the only apes, certainly, I don't know, primate, probably the only primates that know to hold their breath underwater.
So like that great Nirvana album cover of the baby.
So you take a baby and drop it in water and it holds its breath.
Part of it was also the theory that the human brain, in order for us to be born vaginally, the brain could only be so big before the kid was born, right?
And the idea would that be every dude's dick would just become a super dick, and every woman would be, you know, it was a joke about flying squirrel pussy people.
They would just jump dudes with big dicks in shopping carts.
We'd chase these girls to the edge of cliffs.
The women would leap off with their...
Giant GMO vagina.
The body would have to morph.
It'd have to change for the big dick pills.
But it does seem like if humans are going to get smarter, the head is going to have to get larger.
Does that make any sense?
Or is that just a crude way of looking at the brain?
Is it possible that people can get smarter?
Like if we evolved...
If we evolved from lower hominids, it's generally assumed that those lower hominids had little brains or littler brains than us, right?
Up until like Australopithecus or something like that?
Because isn't the thing about intelligence is like there's communication between elephants for sure.
And we know that they recognize each other after long periods of time.
Like 20 years apart.
They get together and they see each other and recognize each other instantly.
There's an intelligence there, but what we judge intelligence oftentimes depends on whether or not it can communicate with you, whether or not it changes its environment, builds a structure.
So this question of intelligence is really interesting and I think very important because, you know, we talk about intelligence as if we know what it is, but we don't.
It expresses itself in so many different ways.
There's so many manifestations.
So this big controversy that's happening now among...
I don't know if you're aware, this was Sam Harris and Ezra Klein and Andrew Sullivan and people are...
There are racial differences in intelligence, IQ specifically with Asians being the highest and then whites and then blacks, and that that's just the way it is, and social adjustments aren't going to change that because it's largely genetic.
But I think it's also true that Part of the argument is that social programs are a waste of money because they're not going to affect it because it's genetic.
You don't even know if it works because what have you done?
Go to an inner city school and pretend you're a 10 year old kid trying to get by in this life and you're literally seeing gang members and craziness and people flashing cash and people dropping out because they're pregnant when they're 13th and you're trying to tell me there's not some sort of a massive environmental factor.
If you were a white kid going to a school like that, I only went to a bad school for one year of my life.
I'm no OG, but I really did go to one bad school, Mary Curley Middle School in Jamaica Plain.
And in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, now it's become gentrified, sort of.
It's kind of like East LA or Silver Lake area.
A lot of hipsters have moved in and nice places, but...
When I lived there, it was not good.
It was very poor people, and the fucking middle school was scary.
It was 17-year-old kids in my seventh grade class.
It was just a weird play.
Maybe, I guess it was eighth grade.
But the point was, these kids were never going to graduate.
They knew it, and they were trying to go back to seventh grade again, or eighth grade, whatever the fuck it was.
And the teacher would have them in the class for a couple days, and then they would leave.
And everywhere you walked, you were scared.
Everywhere you walked, like, some weird shit was happening with people.
People were yelling at people.
There was always, like, tension.
And there was always, like, bigger kids around that were robbing other kids.
Like, fuck!
Like, I got through that year going, holy shit!
And when I got out of there, my parents moved.
We moved to a really nice part of town, Newton.
But If you're a kid growing up in that environment, good fucking luck learning anything.
It also makes people much more inclined to violence.
Yeah, sure.
When you grow up, even in the womb, if your mother's around horrible situations and people screaming and fighting, that cortisol and adrenaline and all those hormones are flowing through that baby, preparing that baby for a violent world.
I remember showing you one time, a long time ago, I was here doing a podcast and my phone, a message came in and I looked and it was this really hot woman in Australia who liked to send me naked pictures of herself.
And I showed it to you and you're like, that's a trap.
You don't know me, but some friend of yours, whatever.
He texts us back, hey, we're in this restaurant.
Come have a beer.
So we go to this restaurant.
There's this table.
Maybe a dozen people sitting at the table.
Hey, come on.
Yeah, have a beer.
Really nice people.
And after about 15 minutes, I say to somebody, are you guys tripping?
He's like, yeah, we ate some mushrooms.
Okay, some of them did, some of them didn't.
Anyway, but super relaxed.
And somebody makes some joke about like their beer glass was dirty or something.
And someone else is like, yeah, just lick it.
It's good for your microbiome.
And I'm like, oh, you guys know about microbiome?
I'm like, yeah, yeah.
I said, I read this article a couple years ago.
This dude, you probably read this article yourself.
This dude was in Africa with the Hadza people, the hunter-gatherers, and he took some Hadza shit and he mixed it up and blasted it up his ass to see if he could get a hunter-gatherer's microbiome because it's a much more complex microbiome, right?
Wasn't it Aubrey that was on the podcast talking about doing that tree frog poison?
Pretty sure it was him.
He's done everything.
He's like Mikey from that commercial about Mikey likes it for life.
He won't eat it.
He hates everything.
He's in there.
That's Aubrey.
He loves everything.
Takes everything.
But he was saying it was just a terrible ordeal.
But there was also an article that I read about certain countries where they didn't have an endogenous psychedelic or didn't have a local psychedelic.
So these people would take ordeal poisons.
So they would take poisons that would get them like literally to the brink of death, and then they would come out of it like a near-death experience.
And that this near-death experience provided some sort of a shamanistic, you know, some sort of a breakthrough experience where you could move on to the next level.
Like you'd experience something that was like, like we were talking about before the podcast, like when you lived in Portland, and then coming here in LA when it's sunny out, you're like, ah...
But when you're in the dimension of dimethyltryptamine and the world has become infinite fractals that are moving and changing and morphing, when you hear this song, the hallucinations or whatever they are that you're experiencing, the visualizations, they dance to the song 100% in sync.
It keeps people from having bad trips sometimes because they can cling to the music and the structure in the music, whereas their own paranoia and fear and inability to let go gets hit with that psychedelic juice.
Boom!
And you just experience that new...
And some people freak out, but this music might be able to bring them down.
Yeah, the sandcastles are beautiful, but one of the beautiful things about this is we know how temporary they are.
When you see a sandcastle, it's not just like, oh, this guy made an amazing sculpture.
It's like, oh, no, this person made something that they know is not going to last, and they put a massive amount of work into it, but part of the beauty of it is that it's not going to last.
Yeah, it's I just think that any time you willingly take on some new project managers, their opinion might very well be valid, but I'm not looking for it.
I want whatever I write to be out of my head, and whether it's good or bad, depending upon how much focus and attention I put into it.
You know, I'm pretty self-critical.
So if I think it's clunky, I'll try to redo it.
But I'm not interested in, like, artistically or creatively going down a direction where somebody else is picking the subject matter or somebody else is suggesting.
Well, you've had great success with your podcast as well, but the beautiful thing about your podcast is it allows you to put out an idea almost instantaneously.
I mean, you get together with this rattlesnake guy, you guys have a couple-hour conversation, you upload that shit, and that's it.
It's wonderful, and it brings really interesting people into my life, and my circle of friends now is largely composed of either guests or listeners of the podcast.
It's wonderful.
I've just put out a book recently that's sort of compilations of podcasts.
So it's not the whole conversation, obviously, but it's excerpts.
And the whole thing was crowdsourced.
So people who listen to the podcast pick the episodes.
They picked what part of the episodes that they thought was most interesting.
They transcribed it.
This guy, Adam McDade, did all the art.
The publisher, Misfit Press, are people that I know through the podcast.
They reached out to me and we had some beers.
Not intending to do anything together.
Just like, hey dude, we're in town and we like your show.
Can we get a beer?
And really like these guys.
And ended up having the CEO on the podcast, AJ. And yeah, so we just put out the book.
And it sort of fulfills my fantasy of being a writer without having to write.
I mean, really, there's a lot of amazing conversations that I've had with people on this podcast that I would love to see written down where I could read it, go over it, and not hear my own fucking voice.
See, I don't have spaces in my life where I'm doing something that would allow me to listen to voices talking that wouldn't interfere with what I'm doing.
So, like, I'm not a carpenter.
I'm not driving long distances.
You know, it's like I'm either...
Writing or doing my podcast or something else.
I don't commute.
You know what I mean?
So there's a specific sort of activities that lend themselves to listening to podcasts.
And a lot of people just don't have those spaces in their lives.
Yeah, man, if I stopped and thought about it, because before I started doing the podcast, I would listen to recordings of lectures that Terrence McKenna would give or Timothy Leary.
There wasn't a lot.
Or listen to Art Bell having some weird UFO expert on or something like that.
And then I think about all the conversations that I've been able to have with guys like John Anthony West, with Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson and Michael Shermer and you and Duncan and Ari.
I mean, so many people have had these crazy conversations with them that, to me, they've been...
I mean, it's shaped the way I look at everything.
It's changed everything.
So I feel like I'm constantly getting educated, you know?
Yeah, you set up your life as, like, you know, I'm not talking about myself, but you've had guests who are some of the smartest people in the world who come to you to sit here and chat with you.
I just got another set of headphones to give to my guests because ostensibly the main reason is I'm using handheld now because my whole thing's mobile, right?
My impulse is like, I got nothing, I got no secrets.
Because I feel like there's a...
Like a revolutionary shamelessness.
I feel so privileged and largely thanks to you and Duncan, honestly.
When I started the podcast and you guys did that shrimp parade thing and that really built up my audience and to the point now where it's self-sustaining and it's my main gig.
I don't think it's intelligent and I also don't this is my real honest feelings I do not think that fame is I don't think that people should aspire to it I think it should be something that happens if people like your work and then it's cool.
It's fine But I think there's way too much emphasis put on just trying to get attention.
And it's being rewarded and supported in this weird way.
There's nothing wrong with getting attention, but it should make sense.
It should make sense.
There should be some reason.
And if it's out of balance, you should probably look at why Why is it out of balance?
One of the weirdest parts about it is that you have to constantly be checking yourself.
Like, all these people are nice to you.
All these people are saying nice things to you or being mean to you.
All people that you don't even know.
So you can't rely on them for your self-esteem.
And you certainly can't rely on them for criticism.
You can't rely on them.
People you don't even know that don't care about you.
So you're in this weird position.
You have to be very careful with who you communicate with.
Because one of the weirdest things you'll see from famous people is all of a sudden they get this very strange thing where they feel like people are supposed to do things for them.
And they're not supposed to pay for things.
And everything's supposed to be easy.
And they're supposed to get that...
That's a weird one.
They don't respond to criticism well.
They don't understand that they're still a human being in the middle of growth.
No, they're a fucking star.
I'm a fucking star, and I want this, and I want it now.
And they're just like, what kind of fucking bullshit is this?
I was in Asia for a couple of years and I visited my best buddy in Paris and we're throwing a football around, I remember, in some back street in Paris, which freaked out the Parisians, of course.
And my buddy's like the opposite of me.
He's religious.
He's disciplined.
He speaks seven languages.
He's a musical prodigy.
I'm a lazy fuck.
Growing up, it was like I was Kirk.
He was Spock.
It was that kind of dynamic.
Half your audience won't even know who we're talking about.
Which explains why I've always wanted to fuck a green woman.
I've got this thing.
But he said to me, he's like, Chris, I figured you out, man.
I said, what's the deal?
He said, you're the anti-monk.
So what do you mean?
He said, monks cut themselves off from the temptations of life in order to pursue a spiritual path.
You're pursuing a spiritual path, but it's by way of the temptations of life.
You immerse yourself in them.
Because in those days I was doing a lot of drugs and, you know, whatever.
And I think he's right.
And in Buddhism there is a path of The drunken guru, right?
There is a path of sex and altered states of consciousness and sort of, you know, William Blake said, the palace of wisdom lies at the end of the road of excess.
Every comic that starts out, if they're being honest, like Fitzsimmons and I have talked about this a hundred times because we'd never thought of a career.
Fitzsimmons has won at least two Emmys for writing.
Brilliant guy.
And, you know, we were just two dorks.
Two 21-year-old dorks hanging out together in Boston.
That was a thing about some of the, I think, was it Peru?
Where they would find a lot of these skulls from a certain period of time that had been elongated.
And the alien people went nutty.
Like, this is it.
This is evidence.
This is evidence of contact.
The aliens, they've been here.
But it's just boards.
They just put boards on the side of their heads and stretched their heads up.
They think they might have even been trying to emulate one of, like, originally the idea was bounced about that someone in the royal family in Egypt had deformities.
And that was one of the things that said about King Tut.
Like, King Tut was not a healthy person.
Like, that he may very well have been the product of incest.
Yeah, and that some of the, like, heads, when you see people with, like, elongated heads and hieroglyphs and images, they might have actually done that to try to replicate someone who had something fucked up with To normalize it.
Which might have been like a royal who had been...
Like, if you saw that on the ship of a spaceship, on the deck, like, walking around, you'd be like, oh my god, that's the alien.
Oh, he must be from another planet.
Right?
Like, if you were on a spaceship, say if you're watching Star Trek, and that dude walks by, like, well, for sure, that dude must be playing someone from another planet.
There's something that you get from escaping civilization that you...
You don't know you're missing it until you're out there.
When you're out there, and I'm sure you've experienced this on your travels, there's a certain detachment from the masses, just to be out of the hive and the influence of all the people around you.
As weird as it seems, There's energy that we're all exchanging in these giant hives together and some people live off of it like those New York City people like my friend Jeff lives in New York City.
He's always gonna live in New York City.
This is what I like.
He likes it.
I love it.
He's walking through the streets.
Yes!
That's his thing.
To me, I'm like, wow.
My thought is always, how do you guys do this?
How do you guys do this?
That's all I ever think.
How the fuck do you guys do this?
For him, how could you live any other way?
But the people that But he has got a good life.
See, he enjoys what he does.
He has a fulfilled life.
He's happy.
But if you didn't, I think we're talking about the same thing.
If you were on the third floor and the worst enemy was below you just standing there smoking a cigarette, would you drop that bag on them or would you have mercy?
Just for people out there that you might go camping, please just get a gravity filter.
Don't get jarred yet.
It's real easy.
And there's also a thing called a SteriPen.
SteriPen's wonderful.
You take this SteriPen, you run it around in the water for a certain amount of time, and it kills everything bad in the water, and it doesn't taste any different.
There's a bunch, like SteriPen's a good one, but these gravity filters are amazing.
They have pumps, they have another one, you can take some water and you pump it, you pump it, and it goes through the filter into your water bottle and you can drink it.
You can clean up like 99.99% of all the bullshit with just a good filter, and you don't have to drop chemicals in there.
Some people bring iodine tablets and stuff like that.
You don't need to, but please don't drink at a creek, folks.
Just recently I read a thing online saying that it's almost never necessary to filter your water when you're camping.
And I've always filtered my water camping, but it was this thing where they took all these samples from creeks and apparently they're self-correcting mechanisms in nature.
He comes to LA. He was the most famous doctor in America for years.
But he's really interesting because he was at Harvard with Leary.
He studied under Richard Evans Schultes.
His undergrad degree is in botany.
Richard Evans Schultes is the guy who basically discovered in commas Hundreds of psychoactive plants in the Amazon.
You know, amazing dude.
Anyway, so Andrew was right in the mix and he sort of was central in Leary getting in trouble because Andrew wrote an article in the Harvard Crimson criticizing Leary for indiscriminately giving psilocybin to students and that's what triggered a lot of the tumult after that.
Anyway, Andrew...
Went on to Harvard Med School, residency at Mass General in Boston, like top, top flight, you know, academic stuff.
But instead, he got his MD, but then he went and worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the main government research center.
It's like early 70s, I think.
And he has never wavered in his understanding that drugs are not necessarily bad.
And so he did these double blind studies about marijuana.
The first, I believe, double blind studies of marijuana, where he said, like, OK, you know, people have tested marijuana and they say, oh, it's bad for your brain.
Because what they do is they get people high who've never been high.
And then they give them a bunch of math questions and they have trouble.
I can't answer them, whatever.
He's like, I've been high.
I don't want to do math when I'm high.
So let's test people on things they like doing when they're high, like color perception or pattern recognition or ability to recognize tonal changes in music, things like that.
And he found that their perceptions were actually heightened.
So it's like, ah, see?
Marijuana is not bad.
It's just bad for certain things and not others.
So then he did, I think it was about driving.
We said, okay, they find that marijuana impairs driving ability, but that's again because they're using naive people who've never been high before.
And they don't have a chance to practice driving while high.
So he got people, let them practice, let them get used to being high.
Then he tested their driving ability versus what it had been before or when they're not stoned and average scores and all that.
And again, he found that when people had a chance to practice, they drove fine.
There's no problem.
He got basically pushed out because he was finding, you know, he was demonstrating that it's not necessarily a bad thing.
What I was told is that it's not even necessarily just about the idea that it gets your dick hard, but there is value in the fact that it's a forbidden thing that's very difficult to acquire.
So I was with her in Guatemala, and we had met this other couple, Solange and Fabrizio.
And yeah, we were at this place called Tikal in northeast Guatemala, way, way back in the jungle.
And it's Mayan ruins.
Beautiful.
Crazy.
You know, it was like a big city.
When I was there, this was 1989, there were maybe 10 big ruins, big temples that they'd uncovered.
And we're staying in this campsite with hammocks.
It was very primitive at the time.
Anyway, it was a full moon, and Ana and I decided we were going to take some acid.
And watch the moon rise and the sunset up from the top of Temple 4. It's called the Jaguar Temple.
And so we went up with this other couple and there's this ledge up there and it's up above tree line.
You know, you're way above the tree line.
You can hear the monkeys and like see out over this flat jungle, the paten I think it's called.
And so we're up there and The sun's sinking and the moon is rising and the moon comes up.
It's beautiful and there's this big bank of storm clouds and the full moon is like between the horizon and the storm clouds, but then it starts to go up behind these clouds and you can see it's gonna get dark as fuck, right?
So this other couple are like, yeah, we're gonna go back to the campsite.
They didn't know we were tripping, right?
And we timed it so we were peaking like now, you know?
So they're going to go back to the campsite, but we were like, yeah, we're going to just hang here, right?
So I went over to hold the flashlight for them as they went down this ladder.
It was like maybe a 30-foot ladder, pipe ladder drilled into...
And there's these two dudes way over on the other side of the ledge.
And we go over to them, and they're Italian, and they don't speak English, but Ana spoke Spanish, so she was talking to them in Spanish and Italian, and you sort of understand, you know?
They're both Latin, similar languages.
And those guys were like, yeah, I don't know.
And we were like, well, watch out, because they're all around.
Like, oh, shit, yeah.
So while we're talking to them, now it's totally dark.
This Guatemalan dude comes up the ladder with an old bolt-action rifle, and And he's like the night guard or something.
So we go over to him, and Ana says to him in Spanish, son peligrosos los escorpiones.
And are they dangerous, the scorpions?
And the guy says, si son letales, hay muertos.
They're lethal, there are deaths.
I'm like, oh, fuck, man, I understood enough Spanish to get that.
I mean, you know, I'm peaking from the acid plus all the adrenaline.
And so this pain is running up my leg and it's like running up the bone in the center of the leg.
This kind of fire.
And when it gets to the top of muscles, they seize up.
So like, you know, from the knee down, it's just like rigid.
And then my tongue starts swelling and my throat starts swelling and I got this like Novocaine feeling in my lips.
And I'm sort of drooling and And I'm thinking, when this gets to my heart, that's when I die.
And so I'm with this guy, and we're lost.
And at first, I'm freaked.
I'm scared.
And then it occurs to me that I'm saying my last words to a guy whose face I've never seen, because we didn't shine the light in his face when we were talking to him.
And he doesn't understand English.
And that cracks me up.
I start laughing like a fucking maniac.
And he's got his arm around me.
He thinks I'm losing it.
And I'm just like, this is hilarious.
And I think about my friends and how they're going to be like, yeah, good on Chris.
He didn't die in some dumbass way like we all thought he would.
He died in this.
It's still a dumbass way, but at least it's interesting.
And then I start thinking, all right, I'm 27, but...
I've been around the world, literally around the planet.
The million bucks was, he said, when you're 30, you'll have a net worth of a million dollars, and if you don't, I'll write you a check for whatever you're missing, and we'll notarize it.
Speaking of something I read today, something about the Atkins guy.
This is an interesting story.
You know the Atkins diet?
It's very controversial because the Atkins diet is a lot of protein stuff.
I heard that the guy died of a heart attack and that they weren't being completely honest.
Apparently even Snopes says it's not clear.
The guy I feel like he was the head of like it's so weird when this happens the Atkins diet guy when he died he weighed 258 pounds so he was overweight and he was 72 years old and The story was he slipped on ice in front of his house and hit his head But he also had a history of heart disease.
I did not know that and he had had heart attacks and Is that why he got into the research that led to the diet?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I just read that today.
I'm like that there's some conspiracy.
It was a vegan guy who was talking about it.
There's a conspiracy about Atkins and that Atkins really died from a heart attack.
And saying that it's really terrible and that all the fat and all the stuff, all the protein you eat, you really shouldn't eat that much.
But it's very similar to what a lot of people are eating now.
When they're eating paleo and they're eating low carb.
Apparently the real problem, and I read this today, about high fat diets is if you're going to eat a high fat diet, it must be a low carb diet as well.
You cannot have high fat and carbs.
That is really bad for you because your body is going to use all the carbohydrates for fuel and all the fat that you eat is just going to be stored.
And apparently that combination, especially with saturated fats, is very bad.
Well, just to tie this together, the guy, after he explains this to me, he gives me a couple pills, probably aspirin or something, and he dips some water out of a bucket and says, take these pills, you'll be fine.
I've been traveling a long time.
I knew you don't drink water out of a bucket in the tropics, but this guy just told me I wasn't going to die, so I'll do whatever the fuck he says.
I drank the water and a week later I had hepatitis.
If you're eating a lot of sugar in particular, you got candida running around your gut and the unhealthy bacteria reacts better to that and just your body starts craving it.
That's one of the weirder things about when you do eat a low carb diet is your body really doesn't crave carbohydrates anymore.
It's a trick.
But when you're on carbohydrates, if you eat them a lot, man, your body's craving them all the time.
It's like you are being influenced by those organisms that are in your digestive tract, which is really freaky.
I remember mentioning him to you once on this podcast and Jamie brought up his photo and you looked at his photo and you said, there's a guy who does not give a fuck.
What do you think about, I mean, podcasting, in the intro to this podcast book we were talking about earlier, I said that I think that podcasting is on a par with the invention of the printing press in terms of the potential for radical social change.
Because there's no, like you said before, there's no filter.
There's nothing between you and your audience.
And that's a radical thing.
I mean, when the printing press came about, what that meant was...
You didn't need to have a team of scribes to copy out this thing that you've written, right?
So you can be just a regular guy and pay a thousand bucks or whatever the equivalent of that was in medieval Europe and have all these pamphlets printed.
So you could be Martin Luther and change the world if you have a good idea and it takes hold.
Podcasting seems similar to that in the sense that anybody who can afford a few mics and a laptop Can get their message out.
I think the internet in general and the ability for people to just create their own content, that's the real...
The gatekeepers to the masses have always been these production companies, content providers, networks, all these people, the hallowed halls, and those people all got fat on it in a weird way because the gatekeepers are the ones that hoarded all the money.
And they gave some of the money to the actors and some of the money to the writers, and everybody got wealthy.
Don't get me wrong.
But the Harvey Weinsteins of the world is the one that really got rich.
If you look at that guy, like, that guy's the guy that really got rich.
I mean, obviously, that guy's the worst example, right?
But he...
Obviously also, on a positive note, financed a lot of amazing movies, and if it wasn't for him, they wouldn't have gotten done.
But clearly, those people who do that, they're a different thing.
They're business people.
Now is the first time ever that there's a direct connection between a guy like you and a guy like whoever's listening to this right now.
That's never happened before.
I mean, the only one in the room, you know, we have Jamie helping out, and then it goes to the server, and then it's uploaded to the RSS feed, and then it goes to iTunes, and it goes to wherever the fuck you're getting your podcast from, and that's it.
There's no steps, there's no network, there's no notes, there's no production.
I mean, if you did your podcast, and your podcast was on some radio network somewhere, you'd have to go to meetings, weekly meetings with the studio, you'd have some fucking program director, some Dick, fuck, asshole, wants to tell you what not to talk about anymore.
But, I mean, she's already, like Stephen King, people like her, they can cut a totally different deal.
But the standard contract is what I had, which is, you know, 8% on hard copy, it's 8% for 5,000 copies, then 10%, 5,000, then 12% after that in hard copy.
But in terms of money, it's not that much money, especially if you stretch it out over the years it took to write it and all the promotion and all that.
It's not a way to make a lot of money, writing books.
It used to be.
If you had a New York Times bestseller back in the day, you made a lot of money.
But the reading audience is much smaller now than it was 20, 30 years ago.
It's at the point now where it's like, wait a minute, if I got a platform, I got access to media, I'm hiring my own editor, why am I giving you creative control and 92% of the fucking revenue?
This is the subject of Ari Shafir's podcast this week with Aubrey Marcus and they're talking about open relationships and they get super honest.
It's very intense.
I think that we live in cultural patterns.
And that what we see around us, we replicate.
I think there's a lot of evidence for that.
If you just pay attention, forget about studies, just look at how different people are in other parts of the world.
People that are putting plates in their lips and rings through their noses.
The way people tattoo themselves, the way people express themselves in dance.
Like, human beings vary so wildly in what we accept and what we don't accept.
I was going to bring up Japan earlier.
It's one of the more fascinating travel experiences I've had was going to Japan because when you go to Tokyo, you realize this is a completely different way of living.
They have a completely different way of interacting on the streets.
They have a completely different way that they have decorated their buildings.
I have tattoos.
They told me I had to wear long sleeves at the gym.
Yes, so I had to go back and just there's a lot of that like where you realize like this is a totally different way of living but if I live there I would live like these people.
So the momentum of these patterns in these cultures gets established and then it takes something radical to lift them and to free people from these patterns and once they're free from these patterns then they have a real opportunity to objectively assess the way they behave and And whether or not this is the way they want to behave or the way they want to live or whether or not you just expect it to because of this unthinking culture, this momentum.
I think that's what podcasts are doing.
The big thing With podcasts is that it's creating more narratives and it's creating more discussions about interesting subjects and more questions and discussions about why we live our life a certain way.
And if you live a regular life with regular people, what are the odds that you get a chance to sit down with a guy like you for three hours?
Or a guy like Graham Hancock?
Or a guy like, you know, fill in the blank.
All the fascinating people that you or I have talked to in our podcasts.
And then these conversations get right into someone's head while they have their earbuds on, while they're at work, typing some nonsense bullshit into some fucking form that they have to fill out because that's what they do for a living.
That's what's different.
And that's never happened before.
No generation before the podcast generation had that option.
You had Howard Stern, you had, and it was always funny, you had, you know, Art Bell was always weird, and then you had, like, all the right-wing wacko dudes on AM talk radio, the Michael Savages, and, you know, the fucking Rush Limbaugh's, and you had all those people, but you didn't have- Yeah, you didn't have a guy who just talks about whatever he wants to talk about.
You had to be like, well, Chris, before we give you this radio broadcast show, what kind of a show are you going to do?
Are you going to do a left-wing show?
Are you going to do a show on cooking?
What are you going to do?
Like, no, I'm going to talk about sex and tribes and about how I think monogamy is just a cultural construct and really the way we evolved.
Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you fucking hippie!
Get out of my office!
There's no money in that!
Like before, if you came to someone and said, hey, I'm going to write this book and it's going to sell about 400,000 copies and it's basically saying monogamy is bullshit, what do you think?
They'd be like, what?
Get the fuck out of here.
No one's going to buy that.
Everybody wants to be monogamous and have a picket fence and live in the same row of houses where everybody looks the same.
Everybody's got this, oh, you have an in-ground pool, you lucky bastard.
But what podcasts have done Is expose why we accept things as fact and why we just choose.
It's because everybody around us does it.
We are such a massive product of our environment.
You know, and I think...
When we were talking earlier about race, and about race being a determining factor for IQ, like, you don't really ever know.
You might know from studies, but you don't know until those people who have the high IQ have to live the lives of the people that have the low IQ. And they have to have the same environment that they grow up in, the same fears, and the same influences, negative and positive.
Then you'll know.
And even then you won't know.
Because there's so many determining factors.
Like, you know, I know people that are just way fucking smarter than me.
They're just smarter.
I just know they are.
They're just smarter.
What is that?
I don't know.
Is it the amount of studying they've done?
Is it the amount of knowledge?
Is it the path that they're on is different than my path?
Or a hunter-gatherer, these people in the Amazon we're talking about who can identify 500 different kinds of plants at a glance and, you know, know the behavior of animals and all this stuff.
But you give them an IQ test and they're like under 100 for sure.
Well, I've had conversations with people that are brilliant, super brilliant people, and scientists, and they'll try to explain to me mixed martial arts in some fucked up cockamamie way and I have to stop them.
I mean, it's fun to be able to flip people around like that.
And it would be a great thing to know if you lived in feudal Japan and you lost your sword and someone was coming at you and you had one chance at glory.
But it's just my point is that people who are brilliant and are geniuses in one aspect of life simply don't have enough time to accumulate the same amount of data about everything.
They just don't.
Whether it's about...
Fill in the blank.
Clock making.
Whatever the fuck it is.
There's things that people know that you don't know.
And it doesn't make you stupid.
It's just information.
The difference is between how you apply that information.
If you're a really smart person and you don't do shit with it, you're a moron.
You might be a really genius person, but if your life is falling apart and it's all because of your shitty decisions and you've never tried to improve upon your thought process and you just blame the whole world instead of yourself, you're a moron.
Personally, I don't think that I'm particularly intelligent.
I think that what I can do that a lot of people don't do is...
Think outside the box and connect dots that other people aren't connecting, which is precisely because I didn't go to the right schools and I didn't, you know, in my 20s, I went and fucked around the world for 20 years.
Even intellectuals, they get stuck in that trap of having to toe the line You know, in terms of like, I mean, good luck trying to find a conservative professor, right?
I mean, what is like 4% identify as conservatives in mainstream universities and colleges?
You know, I get into this a lot when people are talking about homosexuality and whether it's, you know, human nature or its culture or whatever.
And it's like, first of all, what do we mean by homosexuality?
You and I have talked about this before, this tribe in Papua New Guinea where the boys suck as much dick as they can because they think that semen contains the essence of masculinity.
And so it's like to them, that's not homosexual behavior.
That's normal male developmental behavior.
And yet we look at that and say, oh, well, that's gay, but they don't see it as gay.
So again, as you were saying, we replicate the behavior we see around us.
I think it's only, at least the only kind that's been reported by anthropologists, because again, there's a filtering there, is younger boys with older boys.
So it's the younger boys are given blowjobs to the older boys because that's the way to get stronger and more masculine.
It's pretty crazy, though, again, like what we were saying earlier, that you can have these pockets of culture that they're radically different than other places, but the people just adapt and conform to what's around them.
And I think that's the case with human beings everywhere.
I don't think it's just the people that live in New Guinea, and it's not just the people that live in the Congo or live in Woodland Hills.
And it's also interesting to look at how the culture reflects the environment, right?
And Marvin Harris wrote about this, cultural materialism, how a culture responds to an environment sort of like how, you know, cacti live in the desert.
There's a reason for that.
You put a cactus in the jungle, it dies immediately, right?
It's adapted to an environment.
So you've got desert cultures, right?
You've got jungle cultures.
So the culture actually...
Grows in a way that fits that ecological environment.
He was the first, I think he's the first person to figure this out, certainly the first time I read it.
Like, some islands, some cultures are cannibalistic and others aren't, right?
Why is that?
Like, I'd never thought about it.
Like, why would the Aztecs eat their victims, but the Christians didn't, but the Christians killed a lot more.
They just left them to rot on the field.
Why is that?
Is it the Aztecs are particularly evil or something?
I don't know.
He applied this prism to it and showed that also in the South Pacific, there were some islands that the people were cannibalistic and other islands where they weren't.
And so he looks at all these and what he figured out was that in the places where people are cannibalistic, there are no domesticated animals that eat different food than humans.
So, for example, you can't raise dogs for meat because dogs eat what we eat.
So it doesn't make sense.
But you can raise goats for meat, because goats eat shit humans don't eat.
So in the places that are cannibalistic, there was nothing they could domesticate for protein.
So when you killed a human, you ate him because you're protein-starved.
Isn't that crazy?
So it's an ecological thing.
The Aztecs had no pigs, right?
There was nothing they could domesticate.
No cattle.
They had turkeys, I think, was the only domesticated animal.
And a lot of times when the black bears are near people, the reason is because people have encroached on their areas and then they started getting into eating garbage.
I worked in this cannery in Kenai for like six weeks or something.
Salmon cannery, yeah.
Salmon cannery?
And I was 16 hours a day, seven days a week, just like full on fucking busting it out because the fish are coming in and they got the lines running, you know.
And at night, I would go back and sleep in my tent on this bluff where we were all camped out and So like, you know, after six weeks, everything smelled like salmon.
Everything.
My skin, my teeth, my hair, my butt, everything.
And so after we left, I was with these two other dudes, and we were like, let's go to McKinley and hike for a while.
Orcas are the animal that I always point to that if they didn't exist and there was a legend of them, it would be way more fascinating than Bigfoot.
If somebody told you that there's some mammal that lives in the ocean and they communicate with each other through a complex series of sounds that we to this day can't understand and that there's several tons.
There's some old ladies in my class that humble me.
I take yoga with these old ladies, old housewives, and they're fucking tough as shit, and they're in there every day.
I come there a couple days a week, and they look at me like, oh, decided to drop in.
They're there every day.
Every day.
You see their progress, too.
Especially, it's very impressive to me when you see flexibility progress in old people.
And you realize, like, most of what we take for, we decide, like, oh, this is how far your body should move when you're 60, or this is how your body should move when you're 70. It's based on the average person who doesn't do a It's a goddamn thing with their body.
Well, my buddy John Dudley uses those for deer hunting.
Because when you walk on the ground, well, not just that, when you walk on the ground, you leave scent.
So instead of doing that, he rides a bike.
So when you ride a bike, deer's nose is so much stronger and more powerful than ours that if the wind is at your back and the deer's in front of you, you're fucked.
You're just fucked.
But if you play the wind correctly, one of the best ways to avoid leaving scent if a deer passes by after you've been there is to ride a bike.
But you don't want to ride a bike and exert yourself because then you'll be sweaty and you have to sit in a tree stand.
You'll freeze your fucking ass off.
So instead he has these electric assist bikes and they're fucking amazing.
And when I was in Iowa, we took these suckers out into the woods.
Look, there's just some stuff out there, man, between the bears and the cats and also the foxes.
Foxes are amazing.
I mean, I love foxes.
I mean, I think they're really interesting animals, and they're one of the few animals in the wild that will, if you live in a certain area for long enough, they will almost become domesticated.
They'll get close to you and hang out with you, and you can feed them, and they'll walk with you and hang out with you real close by.
They're a weird animal.
They're not quite a wolf, and they're not like a coyote.
Weigh the fuck out, but once they get accustomed to you, they're very intelligent, and they realize, like, this guy's not going to hurt me.
Then they become like your little buddy, and if you give them food...
I mean, this is essentially how animals got domesticated, right?
This is how wolves became dogs.
They just hung around with us long enough that they were outside the edge of the campfire, and we gave them food to keep them from, you know, attacking us or whatever.
But foxes, in particular...
They'll kill the shit out of your cat.
They'll kill your dog.
Foxes will kill a lot of things.
They kill a lot of fawns.
I saw a fox on the internet with a fawn that was almost as big as its body.
It's a healthy balance, but it's only apparently a healthy balance according to biologists.
It's not according to vegans or hunters, but according to biologists, it's only healthy if the bear population is kept to a certain number.
If it gets too crazy, then they run out of food, and then there's a lot of cannibalism already, but then it gets even worse, and then they start encroaching on cities and towns, and it gets...
It gets weird.
But they treat it in terms of a number thing, instead of looking at it from a moral standpoint.
Like, should you kill an animal?
They're like, well, if you don't kill an animal, this animal's overbalanced, this animal's going to be underpopulated now, because they're going to go after them, and they're going to kill a disproportionate number of them.
He was explaining that the boars fuck up the coral reefs because they dig up all the dirt and then it runs off in the rain and it contaminates the bays.
There's a project right now in Maui where they're going to fence in an area, and the area that they're fenced in, they have to, it's like 5,000 acres, I think it is, where they have to eradicate the deer that are in this one particular area.
Because they're trying to reclaim the forest land and a lot of these deer, all of the deer, most of the large mammals in Hawaii are non-native.
And so these invasive species, these Axis deer from Asia actually, are just, they eat everything.
Nothing gets to grow.
There's not going to be a forest because the little things grow and they just eat them.
They eat them right when they're coming up, and there's so many of them.
So they also have a problem with people needing food.
So what they're doing is they have this project where they're going out and they're hunting these animals, killing them, and then giving the food to people for free.
So they've set it up like this so they have a real sustainable food source for all these poor people, which is the best meat in the world.
That's another one that's a weird one that I didn't know.
Dan Flores is a fascinating guy.
He wrote a great book on coyotes called Coyote America.
But he wrote a paper.
It was bison diplomacy, bison ecology, that's the name of it.
But it's basically saying that what happened was when the Europeans came to America and the Europeans spread disease, it decimated the Native American population by as much as 90%.
That is when the bison boom happened.
Right.
Bison ecology and bison diplomacy, the southern plains from 1800 to 1850.
So what his take is that the overpopulation of bison was a direct result of these Native American people being decimated.
Because their population dropped by 90%.
No one was hunting the buffalo.
So the buffalo just went crazy.
And there's like with no hunters chasing after them one, two, three decades later.
You've got a shit ton of bison just running around everywhere.
And he points to early settlers that described in great detail all of the various game animals that they came across.
But nary a mention of the bison.
And certainly not a mention of like these gigantic million strong herds of bison roaming the plains.
And you think that's a direct result of all their predators, the Native Americans, who had gotten really good at hunting them and even, you know, even surplus hunting them where they drive them off cliffs and just take what they could that was at the bottom.
When you see these giant stacks of skulls, they were using them as a commodity.
A lot of it was just for their tongues, believe it or not.
Their tongues were a very valuable delicacy.
And then it was for their skins.
They had meat hunting, what they called market hunting, where they'd take guys who came back from the war, and they were looking for a job, but one of the best jobs they can get.
Are you a good shot?
Great.
You could be a hunter.
And they would go and shoot fucking everything, everything that moved.
And they wiped out all the antelope, all the elk, all the bison.
It wasn't just the bison.
It's just the bison is such an iconic thing.
And then, obviously, those piles of skulls, it was unusual, the amount of effort they put into...
Killing them.
But I don't think it was necessarily just to wipe out them so that the Native Americans would starve.
Like, not only that, but this weird movement to the West and, like, a landing.
Landing on this weird continent that was filled with these people that lived in a completely different way I mean what are the odds that you're gonna get to a place you think of where Europe was in the 1700s the 1400s You know when the first started arriving and think of the sophistication with the boats and the written language all the different things and then they show up go across the ocean and land to a place that has zero cities and No, there were cities.
Each of our three luxury teepees has a comfy king-sized bed, fold-out couch, plenty of seating, rugs throughout, sink, undercounter fridge, Keurig, coffee maker, microwave, oh, you can make microwave popcorn, outdoor fire pit.