Steven Rinella and Joe Rogan dive into bizarre curiosities like walrus baculums (fossilized penis bones) and a Boy Scout’s radioactive hoarding, critiquing how unfiltered ideas—whether in podcasts or media—get weaponized by narratives. Rogan contrasts his raw, authentic interviews with scripted TV, citing COVID’s role in worsening homelessness despite wealth, while Rinella warns against misusing the Endangered Species Act for wolf reintroductions, like Colorado’s Proposition 114. They debunk the "Blitzkrieg hypothesis" of human-caused megafauna extinctions and expose brutal tribal warfare tactics in Empire of the Summer Moon, questioning whether modern romanticization distorts history. Rinella’s survival books, including Meteor Guide, prioritize pragmatism over myth, underscoring how real-world risks demand grounded preparation—not just idealism. [Automatically generated summary]
When I was younger, I don't know how I came into his orbit, but there was a fur buyer And taxidermist and muskrat trapper in Muskegon County, where I grew up in Michigan, and he had amassed a very impressive collection of baculums.
The reason I have become interested in things being fossilized is, you know, if you're out on national forest land, notice I'm not saying national parks, but if you're out on national forest land or BLM land, various land designations, you know, if you find, like, an antler, a deer antler, you can keep it, right?
Say if you found a skull that had obviously been opened up by ancient Native Americans, are you under any obligation, if you can't take it, to point archaeologists, drop a pen, point archaeologists to the spot where you found it, I can't imagine.
I'm virtually certain you're not under any obligation.
I did one time find a bison skull on national forest land and did a site report.
Where I cooperated with the forest, the administrative unit of that national forest, because I had gone and did some work on it, had a radiocarbon date.
So I was able to supply them with a piece of information they didn't have.
And so we cooperated and did a site report.
And I had also kind of like called a little bit to make sure I wasn't in the wrong.
Yeah, it's kind of a funny thing about the book business is Audio, as you know, because you've kind of in some ways helped be at the vanguard of pioneering this, but audio is more and more important.
It's more and more valuable now.
When I sold my first couple books, a publisher would buy your book and they would buy all rights to it.
And they would then go sell the audio off for sometimes next to nothing.
And someone would buy the audio rights for a certain specified amount of time.
So my first couple books...
My publisher buys my book, and then my publisher basically turns around.
Publisher then, in this case, Random House, turned around and sold the audio rights to, I think, Brilliance Audio, whatever it is.
And they got it for 10 years.
And at first I thought that they didn't invite me to read it because I didn't think I was like up to it.
Right.
But I wasn't invited to read my own book.
They hired a soap opera actor of some sort to read it.
I now think it's just an efficiency thing.
Like they have sort of a stable.
This company was based in Michigan, my home state, just totally coincidentally, but happened to be based there.
They have like a stable of talent that comes in and they're clean.
They do clean work.
They do fast work.
and they produce an audio book.
Working with an author, it might take four or five days to record an audiobook.
But they can just get a guy that comes in, nails it, hammers it, whatever.
I get the product, and I turn it on.
And he starts talking, and I couldn't get across the room fast enough to turn it off.
It was like watching...
It was like watching my wife have sex with another man.
To see, to hear, I'm like, that is not what that book sounds like.
Oh my God, it was a defensive.
And then 10 years goes by, because I wrote that book a decade ago.
10 years goes by, and we get the rights back.
So then, now Random House has them back, and I got to go in and record my own thing.
And I got to update some of the science and stuff, you know?
It was kind of like one of those little...
It was one of those career...
Like a little career highlight for me.
Like somebody looking from the outside in wouldn't see...
Wouldn't see it as anything.
But to me, it was richly symbolic that I had, whatever.
Got to be in a position to be like...
I want to do it.
I go in and record my book.
It's how it wants to be.
And that something could still kind of have life after...
Yeah, my friend Gad Saad, who is a professor out of Montreal, he wrote a book, he's an evolutionary biologist, and he wrote a book called The Parasitic Mind about just very bizarre behaviors and the way people are, the weird thought viruses that people are falling into today, like woke culture and all that kind of shit.
Like, what's problematic about it, how it's not very objective and not rational, and that people are expected to think and behave a certain way because the gatekeepers of social media and all these people are the ones that are forcing this on folks.
Anyway, he's got a very popular podcast.
And yet they still hired somebody else to read his book.
Without all the delivery, I mean, I'm not trying to conflate that, like writing a book and stand-up, because delivery is vastly more important than what you do.
But you do get a sense of the cadence of how something goes.
And it feels important to you.
But it's kind of like a goofy way to think about it.
Because everyone that reads it is on their own trip.
They don't know your cadence.
But somehow it's just offensive to hear them read it aloud.
But it's an interesting way of talking about it, that you were at the height of your writing powers because you were free.
Just concentrate on that.
You know, I think about that a lot with anything.
You know, like that's the case with stand-up comedians.
It's the case with fighters for sure.
When fighters have families and they start getting distracted by a bunch of other businesses and other things that they're doing, it almost always signifies a downslide in their skills.
I'm watching The Last Dance, the Jordan documentary.
And I'm not a basketball fan at all.
Most of the stuff is new information to me.
But in watching it and that study of focus and discipline.
And I wonder, in looking at him, I couldn't help but think.
Let's say there was an undecided election.
It was like a contested, undecided election.
And there's a global pandemic.
That guy would still go on that field, or on the court, sorry, and probably be just as good as he always is.
And I think that a decade ago, whatever, like at that point in life when you're just like, I don't know, maybe more self-absorbed or something, I could be sitting right now in this current climate, like I'd be sitting right now just like singularly focused on this thing.
The thing about, well, you know, obviously I haven't been doing much stand-up during the pandemic.
I only did one weekend.
I did one weekend in Houston, and I got real weirded out thinking, like, what if I caught COVID and then I gave it to somebody, particularly if I gave it to a guest.
Like, if you really stopped and thought about that, that'll fuck with your head.
If you have, you know, people in the media, if you have 100,000 professional journalists that are focused on comedy, you know, what are the numbers that are not going to enjoy you?
I think that it's not a bad idea to have a certain amount of money where you give it to people in times like this COVID pandemic.
When you look at this pandemic, if people had a certain amount of money that came to them every month, And they didn't have to worry about food, and they didn't have to worry about housing.
They were taken care of.
You could see how it would be easier to get back on track.
The way people are today, where more than 30 plus percent can't pay their rent, they're on the verge of eviction, and all the protections against eviction are about to run out.
I'm with you.
This is a great example of where you do need big government.
This pandemic is the best example ever.
Or at least some sort of organized charitable organization where they really know how to take care of people that run into hard times.
Especially hard times like this where it's through no fault of your own.
The real argument against universal basic income is the same argument against a lot of people who use it against welfare, that you remove incentive.
You give people free money, and you remove their incentive, you remove their motivation, and then you develop a whole class of people that relies on this, and they've become accustomed to it, and it's actually terrible for them, it's terrible for everybody else.
When I look at that issue, that's one of the things I think about is, I don't even want to pretend that I don't view things through my own lens, but when I look at myself at pivotal points in my life and trying to get going, the fact that I was intensely motivated By just trying to find a way to pay my rent and my cell phone bill.
Intensely motivated by that.
And I do wonder if you had alleviated me from that, what path I might have gone down.
And I don't think of myself as being weird or that different.
So I wonder.
But in terms of when you're talking about The censorship and woke culture is...
There's a guy I work with, Byron, and he was kind of...
I feel like I'm sort of capturing his sentiment.
He was pondering how...
If you think about the...
In the 60s, right?
That it was like the right, you know, the right, they were the squares.
You know, they were the ones like, tsk, tsk, tsk.
Like the disapproving, you know, what are they doing now?
And he was kind of, he was noticing that how the left...
If I watch anything on my phone at night, it's super innocuous.
Like, I like watching pool.
I like watching pool games.
I like watching, like, maybe a science video or something like that.
Something very uncontroversial and innocuous.
I don't allow myself to get into conflict at night.
yeah i think that's very bad for your sleep and bad for your head if something bothers you you know even something that is even if i agree with them like even if someone says something like oh he was kind of a you know ignorant when he said that or this is a stupid thing this is a bad perspective i'm even if i agree with the person that's saying that i don't want to i don't want to read that at night i don't mind reading in the morning and then thinking yeah good point Yeah, I could have handled that better.
Or yeah, maybe I should have looked at it this way.
I'm not without fault, but I don't think it's good to read that shit at night.
But reading that shit at any time, look, I'm my worst fucking critic.
I hate everything I do.
So if someone is just agreeing with the perspectives that I already have about things that I should have said differently.
And the other thing is most of the things I'm criticized on It's like thinking on the fly.
Like doing this.
I don't have any idea what I'm about to say.
You don't either.
We're just talking.
So words pop in your head, ideas pop, and you try to express them.
It doesn't always work out, and sometimes you're tired.
Sometimes you're hungover.
Sometimes you're not feeling so good.
Your brain doesn't always fire at the exact same way.
My car is remarkably consistent.
You get in your car, as long as it's tuned up, you hit the gas, it responds in a way that's very consistent.
I remember the writer Ian Frazier saying to me that when he was young and wanted to be a writer, he imagined himself sitting at his typewriter chuckling to himself.
Which is like, isn't the reality.
Even like when I get a, you know, we're working on an episode, a show episode, and I get a rough cut.
I don't get a, when I open it, I open it with a sense of dread.
It changes conversation a little bit when you're talking to someone.
If I have someone really good on it, or someone that is laying a lot of stuff on me that I wish I retained, I'll have to go back and re-listen to it, because it's kind of amazing.
I've always prided myself on...
Being really good at remembering what people said.
Like, if I'm fighting with my wife, and later we're fighting about the fight, and she's like, well, you said...
I said, no, no, no.
It's not what I said.
I said, quote, and you said, quote.
And I'll go to the grave with that, right?
Like, I'm very good at remembering what people said.
And I'm shocked when I re-listen to a guest that I'm really excited to have on, and they're like, it's an information-heavy episode.
I'm shocked at all the stuff I missed.
Let me see if you're wondering, just the fact that there's a microphone and headphones, somehow I lose my ability to be a person who just locks info up.
Well, that's the problem with the early days of my podcast is that we didn't have any thought that people were actually listening.
When I did the earliest versions of the podcast, like 10 years ago, 9 years ago, we would just get barbecued and we would just talk shit as if no one was in the room.
If I sat down with Joey Diaz or Ari Shafir or one of my comedian friends, we would just say the most ridiculous, preposterous shit because that's how we talk to each other when there's no one around because that's the things that we find funny.
When you're talking to a comedian, regular things aren't as funny.
It's like if you're going to show a boo-boo to a guy who's an ER doctor and you've got a cut on your finger, that's not impressive.
I just saw a guy get shot in the head.
He needs more.
I need more.
I want to see an amputation.
You want to freak me out?
Show me something that's a real injury.
And that's how comedians are.
There's an unfortunate aspect to those conversations.
If you take...
Those conversations and you edit them out of context and then show it to people.
And I think part of that was also, he's a smart guy.
And he was also in the middle of his renegotiation with Sirius Satellite Radio.
And he was probably mocking comparisons to what he does with this huge organization, Sirius XM. Yeah, he used to be like the lapdog of FM and then became like the lapdog of satellite.
I think I tell you this every time I come on your show, but the first time I ever heard the word podcast, I'm not joking, I had never heard the word until Helen Cho told me about going on Joe Rogan's podcast.
Like, someday they'll make a, if they make a movie, like The Social Network, not The Social Dilemma, but they make a movie like The Social Network, which is about, like, Zuckerberg and those guys that come up on Facebook.
They'll make, like, when they do the story of you...
My business of selling old ranch-worn leather gloves to people who wish they had that look took off and made a boatload of money.
And then later I'm like, yeah, I always knew.
But people would be like, dude, you did all kinds of stupid, nothing ever worked out for you.
Then all of a sudden this thing takes off and you want to now act like you saw it coming?
So I think that...
Probably in the, you know, probably in the back, it's good that you don't act this way, but probably in the back of your head, you probably recognize Iran, like maybe you recognize Iran to something.
Sam Kinison and Roseanne Barr are the perfect examples that I use.
Both of them were normal people, and then they got hit by cars.
Sam Kinison got hit by a truck and his brother who talks about it in his book called Brother Sam, his brother Bill wrote a book about it.
It's like there was one Sam and then Sam got hit by a car and became a totally different person because of head trauma and then became wild and impulsive and just became a maniac.
That was the Sam Kinison that we all knew and loved.
Same thing with Roseanne.
One of the things when I was defending Roseanne when she got in big trouble and she came on the podcast...
To talk about it.
I wanted people to understand what I knew about Roseanne.
Roseanne was in a mental health institute.
She was institutionalized for nine months after a car accident.
She was hit by a car walking across the street when she was 15 years old.
And just fucking wrecked.
Like massive brain trauma.
Like really never the same again.
Couldn't count.
She was great at mathematics.
She was really an excellent student.
And then hit by a car and then just wild and impulsive.
And they locked her in a mental institution for nine months.
She was crazy.
She's like certifiably crazy.
Medicated on a whole bunch of different things.
And my take was like to make her responsible for things she said when she's been rewarded her whole life for saying outrageous shit.
And she's on Xanax.
And she's smoking pot.
And she's drunk.
And you just want to label her as this awful, horrible person when America's loved her for her whole life for being the same way.
For being wild and impulsive.
But my point is that those two people were created that way from brain trauma.
It made them wilder.
There's no doubt I have some brain damage.
There's no doubt.
And when people say, like, why aren't you worried about criticism or why don't you...
I think there's some of that there.
There's gotta be some of it where I've had enough trauma, just the right amount, just enough of these, where it doesn't bother me that much.
You know when you, earlier we were reading up on baculums, and it was saying how baculums had been invented multiple times, right?
And all these dead-end lineages.
And you look at something, you know, flight, right?
Someone could be excused for Coming and seeing things.
A dragonfly and a bird.
And imagining that there was an event that spawned these things.
But in fact, they arrived at this same place.
They arrived at the same sort of place with winged flight through completely unrelated channels.
They just got there on their own.
What's funny about podcasting is as podcasting It takes itself more seriously.
It's like you have this sort of convergent...
You know the term like divergent evolution and convergent evolution.
There's a convergent evolution with news and podcasting.
It started out as maybe somewhat of a revolt.
It was uncontrolled.
It was irresponsible.
It was goofy.
It was like a response to...
But as it's becoming, become formalized...
With scrutiny, with ideas of responsibility, with ideas of making a usable, practical, respected product, there's kind of a convergent evolution of driving it back into the thing that maybe it was a response against in the first place.
They have these, like, weird little fake interactions.
That is the opposite of podcast.
Podcast is real.
Like, if that was me, and you played some video about some guy who decided he was going to try to do a backflip over a Lamborghini and landed on his head, and I would be like, how the fuck does that happen?
Like, you have a baby.
Like, you have kids.
You have a baby.
Like, look at my little baby.
And then your baby starts growing up, and you're like, God, I'm so proud of him.
Look at the little drawing you made.
And then it gets to the point where he's on YouTube doing backflips over Lamborghinis and landing on his head.
Like, what went wrong?
Yeah.
That's how a normal human being would talk.
But you don't have that when you have a massively overproduced program, when you have all these people that have a vested interest in that being successful.
So you have executives, you have producers, you have writers, you have all these people that have a piece of the pie.
So instead of having a Jamie and a couple of other folks that are security guys out there, instead of that, I have, what, a hundred people?
Like a normal show that reaches the amount of people that this show does, there would be a staff of a hundred people.
And then the things that you were going to talk about would be heavily vetted.
You would have people come in with pieces of paper, and they would talk about, okay, in the first segment, you're going to discuss whether Pennsylvania's vote is coming in, and let's be real clear that here's the information that you have to go over, and there's none of that here.
So, whether I'm good or bad, whether I'm right or wrong, at least you know it's just me.
This is the thing that we're worried about when it goes to Spotify.
Like, people are worried, oh my god, they're going to have sensors in the room.
There's going to be people telling them what to do.
What people are worried about is it becoming overproduced.
It becoming something other than what it is.
Because they know that's the natural course of progression.
Somebody gets a hold of something that's wild and untamed, and they go, we've got to harness that and make a lot of money off of it.
But the way to make a lot of money off of podcasting is the opposite way.
It's to leave it wild.
But how are you going to leave it wild, though, when all these people are paying attention to it and all these people are criticizing it?
You know, as we talked about, if a million people know about your show or a hundred million people know about your show and just one percent of them are mad at you, one percent of a hundred million is a million fucking people are mad at you!
Even if 99% think you're awesome, that 1 million could make a big dent in your head.
I think a way that they might invite you to look at it, I'm not suggesting you do this, but I think a way they might invite you to look at it could be captured by this article I read many, many years ago called The Radioactive Boy Scout.
And it was about a kid who was working on some project where He needed to find some, you know, Ameriseum or something for some Boy Scout project he was doing.
In smoke alarms, when you have a smoke detector, there's like a radioactive substance in there and smoke inhibits the ability of the substance to hit a sensor.
Really?
So, he started buying up any and all smoke detectors that he could ever get his hands on, right?
And then got into that he could find, I can't remember what it was, like in old types of clocks, he was finding some radioactive substance, and he got himself a Geiger counter.
He would drive around with a Geiger counter on the front seat of his car past antique shops and shit, right?
No, it was a story in Harper's Magazine called The Radioactive Boy Scout.
He winds up accumulating so much of this shit in the shed that not only like eventually when it all breaks, like not only did they haul away the shed, they hauled away like his yard.
Because he feels that me and other individuals and lots of people that by talking about and celebrating an activity in my case,
hunting, fishing that it creates that my enthusiasms become infectious and it Increases the number of people and diminishes the quality of the experience that people who've always hunted will have because of competition.
Very valid argument, right?
So I like to hear him out on it.
I like to hear him out on it because he's smart.
He's smart.
So I like to hear him out on what he's thinking.
I'm only doing the same thing with you.
I don't hold your opinion.
I don't hold the opinion of someone, but I'm just saying it is.
There's a real problem with these heavily produced television shows, heavily produced radio shows, and even now internet shows.
There's a real problem with them, is that there's inauthentic voices.
They don't resonate with people.
I know that's not a real person.
That's not a person that's unfiltered.
That's a person that's getting scripts, they're wearing makeup, they have a team of people that are attending to them and telling them what to do and how to say it.
And there's a lot of other people, again, behind the scenes that are all paying attention to everything you do, and they'll come in in between takes and scenes.
There's an interview with Donald Trump with this woman from CBS, very contentious interview, and he wound up putting the whole interview online.
This woman was criticizing him and asking him questions, and he was like, you know, the way you talk to me, you would never talk to Joe Biden like this, and 60 Minutes wound up using a very small percentage.
Was it 60 Minutes, Jamie?
Yeah.
They wound up using a very small piece of it.
But during the full one that Donald Trump put out, they interrupt the conversation because one of the producers is like, the American flag is blowing in the background because of the air conditioning and it's kind of distracting.
And so the guy stops everything because he thinks that the flag is distracting.
Like...
No one can see the fucking flag.
It doesn't matter.
Like, what are you talking about?
But this is what happens when you get a whole crew of people.
You get so many chefs in the kitchen, and some guy just decides that he's gonna stop the conversation between the fucking President of the United States, who's getting grilled by this lady because he doesn't like the way a flag is moving.
That to me symbolized everything that's wrong with heavily produced and overly produced television.
Or one of the things that's wrong, right?
What's really wrong is they push the agenda, they push what you're going to talk about, and they'll decide who your guests are.
No one has any say.
And who my guests are.
I choose all of them.
I choose the day they come in.
I choose what we're going to talk about.
The conversations are only what I'm interested in, things I'm interested in.
So I don't have to fake anything.
Like, I love talking to you.
I was excited to talk to you today.
I got excited.
Woke up this morning, all right, Steve Rinell is going to be here.
There's no, like, oh, who do we have to talk to today?
Yeah, that became real popular because it's obviously just the way these chicks are talking.
They just talk that way.
And people are like, oh my god, this is how we talk when we're with our friends.
And people, it resonates with them.
You can't get that on The View.
You can't get that on these heavily produced bullshit shows that are on television where you have a million producers and everybody cuts in between commercials and fixes people's hair and you're super self-aware.
That's what happens on those goddamn things.
It's weird.
People come in with notes and the producer is like, maybe we can bring up this in this episode.
I know you like to talk about this, but let's be aware that people think that and you think this.
It shows that whenever you talk about this, people tune out.
So we've got to stop talking about that.
So they show all this research and all these metrics and they fuck it.
It gets all fucked up.
What resonates with people is authentic conversations.
And you don't get authenticity when you have overly produced things with a hundred people's ideas all shoved into one person's mouth.
It doesn't work that way.
So the more these podcasts get bigger and bigger, the more they fall apart because too many people get involved.
You have too many people shift them and mold them and change them and then they become just like everything else.
All these other overproduced things.
And look, there's some overproduced things that are really good.
You know, like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
You could watch it to this day.
You're like, wow, that's a fucking really good show.
But it wouldn't work today.
It wouldn't because now it's like you have water in your ears and you don't know you have water in your ear and then it comes out and you're like, oh, that's what hearing is like.
I can hear better.
If someone put that water back in your ear, you'd be like, what the fuck is that water doing in there?
I know what it's like to have no water in my ear now.
People are accustomed to this thing now where there's no filter between you and that person.
You're in the room.
That's how I feel when I listen to your show.
It's you and whoever's in there with you.
That's it.
There's no, like, one show that I really liked, I've liked a lot of your shows, but one show that I really liked was the one we were talking with the author whose book got turned into The Revenant, the movie.
That story, though, is a little bit, in some ways, might have a little bit to do with a sense of...
responsibility or something because I had taken so many swipes over the years at my swipes at the movie The Revenant and voiced my dissatisfaction with that movie so much that I believe it went like this I believe the author then reached out or a friend of the author reached out to say um You know,
he's really aware of how much fun you guys have with the movie.
And I was like, duh, I should probably have the guy on.
Based on a real wrestler, Mark Schultz, who fought in the UFC. And in the movie, a lot of things take place that I don't know whether or not they took place because I'm not intimately connected to the movie, but I'm intimately connected with the UFC. And when Mark fought in the UFC, he fought a famous fighter.
It's a famous fight.
It's a historical fight.
He fought as a wrestler against a guy named Big Daddy Goodrich.
Gary Goodrich was a famous fighter.
He was a famous pioneer of the sport.
In the movie...
The only fight that Mark has ever had his entire career, an MMA fight in the UFC, in the movie he fights a Russian guy, a white guy.
That's kind of like two combined with the second one.
But to tell you which things have been different, I remember actually having a conversation like this with a producer one time about filming hunting things.
We were like, well, how do you do it?
How do you cut this thing up?
They'd be like, man, you could do it with a scalpel.
It's very precise.
I use a very small knife to do it.
And no joke being like, could you do it with a machete?
Because in their mind, there's not the respect for how things are done.
It's so show business that you're not in love with how someone did something.
You're in love with what the end product could be visualized as, meaning it's more arresting in their mind to see someone cut something up with a machete.
Like, this was the first time an Olympic gold medalist in wrestling competed in the UFC. We got to see this insanely dominant wrestling, like, where he just took him down any time he wanted to and just completely controlled the fight.
It was really fascinating.
And because he was a coach for Brigham Young, I believe it was Brigham Young University, they told him he can't keep fighting.
Like, if you're going to coach wrestling, you can't do this cage fighting thing.
Because this is early UFC. No gloves.
You could wear shoes.
The rules were like real squirrely.
It was a totally different thing than it is now.
It was one weight, maybe two weight classes back then.
One or two weight classes.
That's it.
And so for them, it was like distasteful.
Whereas now, maybe they would look at that as an opportunity to get amazing publicity for the college.
Look, our head guy is a UFC champion.
Because Mark Schultz could have been a UFC champion, no doubt about it.
No one was going to stop that guy from taking him down.
I mean, he was like one of the best wrestlers to ever wrestle.
Yeah, I had a conversation once when I was just starting to get into acting.
I think maybe I had just been cast in the news radio and I got brought, maybe not even, I had been brought in to meet with these producers because they knew I had a martial arts background.
They wanted to talk about me doing a martial arts movie and the interview did not go very well.
Because they were talking about things in movies, like all these wild scenes, and they were asking me what I like.
And I go, well, I like things that are realistic.
I want to see something that I know would work.
Like if a guy, you know, jumps up and split kicks two people and knocks them across the room, like that doesn't...
I don't...
I go, I want to see like realistic scenarios where a person who knows martial arts can go, oh, that's pretty badass.
Like...
Chuck Norris, give him all the shit you want, but there's a lot of Chuck Norris movies where we had real realistic fight scenes.
So that was the thing that shocked me originally about doing books is I remember This is not to discredit my agent, but I remember having a conversation with my publisher and we kind of like over lunch one time hit on an idea for a book and she seemed to like agree with the idea and it's just two of us in a room and she had an imprint and could make that call at Random House and we're
like talking and I'm like, you know, I think it'd be really cool and I left the lunch and And called my agent and said, like, I think I maybe just kind of sold a book.
You know, you should call and double check.
And to think that, like, a thing of that level of impact would come about with just that.
There's so many men out there that feel like they don't have anybody that represents the way they think.
So one of the things I think that resonates with this show is because there's no filter, because there's no executives that tell you what to do, I could just be myself.
I think that you're very, very open about the evolution of your thought, and you're very open about ideas that you're not trying on, but you're open about your thought process.
Meaning that you'll voice something and do a good job of voicing that you're aware that there's probably more to the story.
And I think that someone could even look at transcripts of what you say and get a false idea of it, where if they listen to you, it would carry with it the lack of certainty as you hear a new piece of information and discuss it.
Like, for instance, I remember when everybody's all worked up because Trump referred to Pompeo as the Secretary of the Deep State, which I thought was funny.
I could go on all day about legitimate complaints someone might have with the administration, but the thing about him saying funny things and that making people mad, I kind of a little bit appreciate the humor sometimes.
They avoid so many different things that would be detrimental to him because in large part because they believe they covered that stuff too much in 2016 with Hillary when it came to the emails and deleting the 30,000 emails and And then the FBI reopening the investigation right before the election and that could have cost her and they've decided their approach this time they've decided that Trump is bad and he's a danger to democracy and so they're only going to cover the news that they think is important.
Well, the problem with that is then you open up the door to Fox News being able to say, why aren't these other people covering this?
They're not covering this because they're biased and it's fake news.
And these people are criminals.
This is all legit.
This is all happening right now.
This is real stuff.
Here's Joe Biden stumbling.
Here's Joe Biden saying things that don't make any sense.
People who don't think that there is an inherent bias within news organizations, within long-term legacy news organizations, they're either feigning ignorance because it benefits them, or they're just flat-out naive.
After what you were saying, I'm reading updates now.
As of now, they've called Wisconsin for Biden.
Arizona has not officially been called, but I'm seeing that it's called.
And if he just wins Nevada and Michigan, which he's currently up in, that's enough to give him 270. And it doesn't matter about PA. It doesn't matter about Pennsylvania at that moment.
I heard last night, I think it was Karl Rove actually that was saying on Fox News that this reporting number is not accurate because they have no idea how many people voted right now and how many mail-in ballots or early ballots are sitting out there.
So saying that like 99% or 95% as in that might not be a good accurate number to go off of.
You know what's funny that what's not happening yet is when we set this date, Joe, we sat here and talked about that America would be on fire as we recorded this.
Isn't it funny, like, the different way, the different camps, if there is, like, a court and a dispute, the different camps, like, that the one impulse is to mount a giant flag on your truck.
My 12 year old daughter said, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
She hated it.
We tried to make her watch it because I just wanted her to understand the dangers and the dilemmas of social media.
But to her, social media is awesome.
I like TikTok.
She's TikTok-ing and shit and hanging out with her friends.
She only sees the positive sides of it.
What I was trying to get her to see is obviously she has no interest at all in politics.
She doesn't understand the division that's happening in this country because people live in these echo chambers and they argue ideas and the way social media exacerbates this with their algorithms that point you towards things that are outrageous, point you towards things that piss you off and keep you in this sort of ideological bubble.
And the people were dividing further and further away from each other.
And you look at this shift in the way people view the other side, whereas there were so many more people that were sort of centrists or, you know, had, you know, a little bit of ideas from the left, a little bit of ideas from the right.
Now, it's very divided, very divided.
And it's directly correlating with the invention of social media.
Well, I felt like I could definitely see it because when I was there, there was an enormous amount of tension around the homeless crisis in Seattle.
That loitering laws, camping laws were just suspended.
And they would go into an encampment.
I wish I knew the proper term for them.
They'd go into an illegal encampment or whatever.
And move everybody out.
Actually scrape the topsoil away.
Because of needles and stuff, whatever.
Scrape the topsoil away.
Pull out and then people would just move back in.
And there was a lot of tension about this.
And it was that some people were like, why can't we enforce?
Why don't we enforce the law?
And people would be like, well, it's inhumane to people who are in need.
And there was an emerging tension there.
So to have it later be that you saw that blow up on this grand national scale...
Doesn't surprise me.
After seeing like that level of just consternation from people who'd been there a long time about why do I have this feeling that there's like laws that I'm held to but some people are just not held to a law.
Los Angeles, when I first moved there in 94, was nothing like this.
Nothing.
There was no tents, ever.
You never saw tents.
Now, my friend sent me a video where she was driving down in Venice, and she held her phone up out the window, and it is a mile plus of tents.
Just nothing but tents.
It's crazy.
Like, you look at it, you're looking at thousands of tents.
Like, this is insane!
How do you put the lid on that?
How do you get those people out of there?
Where do you put them?
How do you clean that area?
I mean, it's disgusting.
And you're talking about Venice, which is like a very wealthy area.
There's a lot of money in Venice.
There's a lot of beautiful houses.
You're on the beach.
And they're fucked.
It's fucked.
I was going to a restaurant there with my wife and we stopped at a red light and there was this beautiful house to the left, probably like millions of dollars, right?
To the right, 10 tents.
Right across the street from their fucking house.
Like a small road and then homeless encampment across the street from this beautiful house.
Like, what the fuck?
And I talk to people that are there, and like, no, we have those little ring doorbell things with the videos.
Constantly seeing people stealing shit.
Constantly seeing people breaking into their yard, trying to get into their house, wandering in their backyard, trying to get into their garage.
It's like, and there's no solutions.
The government doesn't do a goddamn thing about it.
I was having a conversation with someone recently where they were challenging why you could feel proud about being a citizen of a country where you just were born there and you just lived there because you were born there.
I'm like, man, I can't really suss it out, but I feel like I have a sort of sense of pride and patriotism.
And so I worry about the country in a way, what it feels like for people.
I worry about what it feels like for people to be American.
And knowing that there are people at a point that are even challenging the idea of taking pride in that, that's a sign of something bad.
And also people who...
Conversely are taking their deep sense of pride and love and using it to leverage and diminish Other people.
A sort of like, I love it more, or I have more of a right to love it.
And even the fact that to either lack patriotism or conversely to weaponize patriotism, it all makes me feel like I'm a little skittish right now, man.
Look, I get where people would say you had no say in being American.
Why would you be proud of that?
You should be proud of things you've accomplished.
You should be proud of things you worked hard towards.
But what America stands for, I feel super lucky to be an American.
I think America stands for an incredible amount of innovation, incredible contribution to music and art and comedy.
And just the overall impact that it's had on the culture of the world for a country that's just a little over 200 years old is phenomenal.
It's insane.
I mean, I think this is the greatest experiment in self-government and then getting a bunch of people to live together and then what kind of impact it has on the rest of the world ever.
I had a conversation recently with someone who'd built, over the course of their life, they'd built a billion-dollar business and highly critical of the government.
Highly critical of the government while simultaneously building a billion dollar business telling me he feels no patriotism.
There's places in the world right now where if you did the exact same thing, they'd literally come for you and kill you.
We were talking yesterday on the podcast about this wrestler in Iran that is a world champion wrestler who they executed because he participated in a peaceful protest.
And the UFC tried to make a plea to the Iranian government to not kill him and they fucking killed him anyway.
They wanted to send a nice message.
This guy was a national sports hero and they wanted to send a nice message.
We don't give a fuck.
What you are, you are under us.
We are a powerful theocracy and we'll fucking kill you.
And they did.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's happening right now.
That's 2020 somewhere else.
As bad as it is here, and it's not ideal.
The government's not ideal.
This is not perfect.
When you can get an old man who can't talk, another guy who's full of shit, and they're the only people that we have to choose from.
No, that's not good.
That's not good.
And there are other choices.
I voted for Joe Jorgensen.
I voted for the libertarian candidate, even though I knew she wasn't going to win.
I mean, I voted for her in California, where she had no chance.
I'm interested to hear you did that, because I had an astonishingly similar thought process as I filled out my ballot, is to live in a state where there's not any question about where it's going to go, and to...
Try to support, not necessarily the Libertarian Party, but try to support the idea that you'd have a viable third party of some sort.
It jarred the minute or the seconds that occurred, jarred my brain so hard that as I've tried to be curious about and study about what happened in my brain...
It's parallels are all found and it's discussed by people who discuss near-death experiences, which might just mean I'm not as tenacious mentally as I'd like to be, but my brain got joggled.
When you're around something like that where there can be no doubt that you can't get out of the way, you can't fight it off, you're helpless, it must trigger something in your mind where you come to grips with the reality of predator and prey that you almost were on the menu.
There's just no way around it.
There's no rationalizations you can play in your mind when you're confronted with such absolute superiority.
We were hunting and had hung an elk up in a tree and left it for a day and a half.
All the meat hanging in a tree.
And we're camped a few miles away from there and went back to retrieve...
Went back with a few guys to retrieve the meat out of the tree.
And a bear had found it.
And...
We were very, very aware that this might occur and went up and investigated the area around the tree and determined that a bear hadn't found it yet.
In fact, the carcass of the animals laying that far away was untouched.
In hindsight, there was a pile of bear shit that had been smeared.
On the ground.
And I remember looking at that pile of bear shit and wondering if it had been smeared by a bear's foot or smeared by a boot.
And I determined that it looked like it had been smeared by a boot, which would have meant we'd smeared the shit when we were hanging the thing in the tree.
And then stupidly, we sat down to eat lunch.
And within a couple of minutes of sitting down and eating lunch, the bear came in and its open mouth passed.
But I know I was in the middle of saying that when all of a sudden the people around me erupted off the ground as though like a landmine had gone off underneath us.
And I'm, yeah, like, I mean, relative to most, a ton of exposure to those things.
I got to expose my 10-year-old kid to him this year a couple times, you know, hunting caribou in Alaska, and it was, like, cool to kind of see his thought process.
Because we're always talking about, I'm going to do this and I'll do that.
And we're always like, yeah, you know, I actually prefer the 44 over the 3 because, you know, if I can't get it done with this, 13, you know, I got 13 reasons he doesn't want to charge me with this semi-auto.
People that live in proximity to things that are regarded as endangered tend to have a different perspective on the abundance than people who look at it from far away.
They're just codifying that you have a right to hunt and fish.
It doesn't usually have teeth, but it might in the future.
It would just give a way to challenge laws.
It's being used right now.
Montana has a right to hunt and fish.
You have a constitutional right to hunt and fish.
Meaning that a state has to recognize that renewable resources should be allocated to hunters and anglers.
And one might ask, well, how does it ever come into fruition?
There's a lawsuit right now in Montana.
There's a lawsuit against the governor and the state who they put a cap, they put a quota on the wolf harvest.
And they're being sued by a conservation group who's worried about the steep decline in elk numbers.
They're being sued by that conservation group that their right to hunt is being infringed upon by a reticence to control wolf numbers to the detriment of big game herds.
I think people are supposed to act apologetic for the fact that they want wild game resources.
We talked about this one individual that you were curious about who is very instrumental in wolf reintroductions and he refers to hunters as the recreational big game killing industry.
It's kind of like a swipe at people who sort of act like it's not a legitimate perspective to want there to be deer, elk, moose, caribou to eat and use.
I'm very unapologetic about my view that I want there to be a lot of deer, elk, whatever, game.
Yeah, and it'll be like, you can imagine, it'll be like all kinds of lawsuits, all kinds of issues, a lot to be sussed out, but it's forcing the state game agency to craft a plan and take seriously what it would look like.
Because the argument is like, oh, you're making it a popular vote, you're taking science out of the hands of scientists and putting it into the hands of the public.
But in all fairness, I hope it doesn't pass because wolves are showing up in Colorado on their own.
I think that's a better way to go.
But, you know, I think it's like less social tensions.
It'll happen slower.
It'll be like a...
You'll kind of like generate a sort of different sort of wolf that way.
When we established wolf hunting seasons and trapping seasons in Montana and Wyoming and Idaho after a long period where there were no wolf seasons, it had a really dramatic impact on how the wolves behaved.
It made them much more secretive, moved them into different areas, kind of pushed them out of some of the bigger riparian zones.
It just sort of changed their attitude, changed the way they interact with the landscape.
So that you're getting...
It might be true that by having wolves that have this instinct of—they're already coming out of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, passing down through southern Wyoming and going to Colorado—they might have developed a finer-tuned instinct about avoiding trouble with people.
Because there's a lot of selective pressure against wolves and against grizzlies.
A lot of selective pressure against those that are too ready to engage with man.
It's a good way to end up dead when you engage with man and spend too much time around livestock, spend too much time around developments.
It doesn't work out for those ones.
The ones that shy away from and avoid habitations, avoid livestock, that mentality in a wolf gets rewarded.
So, it could be that if we're headed down a path where it's just gonna happen, that Colorado's gonna have wolves.
And I'll say, like, absolutely it is gonna happen, because it happened.
They would say that wolves are gone because of human manipulation, because of a very intentional plan to shoot them and poison them off the face of the earth.
I'm kind of like, you know, if you could work into my brain on it and sort of like just accept that what I'm telling you is kind of a true thing, like I do like wolves to be on the landscape.
I... I don't think we can justifiably play God and eliminate species from the planet.
That feels very deeply wrong to me.
I want wolves to be on the landscape, but if they're going to be on the landscape, We're going to have to set what that looks like and then open up like pressure release valves and pressure release valves will take the form of hunting and trapping.
Like state management, there should be a stable population of wolves.
We should agree what that population looks like and they should be managed by the state as a renewable resource.
It's like what I want is pretty clear.
I'm not like an anti-wolf person.
What I am is an anti-abuse of the Endangered Species Act person.
The Arctic explorer Viljalmer Stephenson describes sneaking up on a grizzly bear that was a marmot.
And he describes seeing a walrus's head sticking out of the water and then realizing it was a hill on the land with two white snowshoots coming down these troughs in the hillside.
When people talk about seeing Bigfoot, you know, I ran into one lady when I was doing this Bigfoot show up in Mount Rainier, and she was very adamant that she saw a gorilla.
She saw a big gorilla walking through the woods.
She's like, I'm looking at it.
I'm like, that's a gorilla.
And I remember, like, wow, this lady's so sincere.
I wonder what she really saw, but...
Now I'm convinced she saw a black bear that was standing on two feet.
But I bet in her mind, I'm thinking about me seeing that stupid squirrel, thinking it's a wolf.
People, your brain plays little tricks on you and then your imagination fills in the blanks.
And so someone might, like, whatever, someone might be doing something and, like, realize, oh, you know, and they duck into a brush and lay down, and people are like, oh, yeah, if you go to this moment and this second, you'll see it.
They don't even know it's there.
The guys don't even know it's there, but you can see it in the bushes.
People love to find missing things, things that aren't real.
You know, I've always said this, that, like, if Bigfoot was 100% real, if everybody knew there was Bigfoot, It wouldn't be nearly as interesting as orcas.
If orcas weren't real, if orcas were a legend, people have seen this thing.
It's in the water, it's intelligent, and it's enormous, and they can sing, and they have different languages and dialects.
They might be aliens.
They might be from another planet.
Apparently, they don't even hurt people.
They help people.
They fall off boats, and they actually rescue them.
These are all things that people have said about killer whales.
But because we know killer whales are real, you seem like, oh, look!
You can put them in a fucking swimming pool and stick them in a parking lot in San Diego and people come to see them and they think it's cool.
My kids, they have a lot of, we get them a lot of animal books and they like the dinosaur books, especially the ones where there's always a picture of a dinosaur and then a person.
Relative, right?
So you get a relative size sense.
I find myself, I probably have a hundred times my children said, That's all.
That dinosaur book is great.
Dinosaurs are great.
The biggest thing to ever live on the face of the earth is alive right now.
There's another thing like, you know, with American pronghorn or what we popularly call antelope, they're ridiculously fast for anything they have to deal with.
And it was like they, you know, the theory is they co-evolved with the American cheetah.
I was at the Lindenmeyer site in Colorado, a famous Folsom site, Ice Age encampment.
And it was funny because I happened to be at that site that there was a guy there...
Working these certain sediment levels to find these little micro crystals, these things that were created during the impact, because you had all this radiocarbon dating that had been done around Lindenmeyer, so we knew all these ages.
And he was in there looking for these things, and the anthropologists that I was with were very dismissive of him.
Yeah, the Blitzkrieg hypothesis held that it was the arrival of humans that led to the extirpation and extinction of a lot of the Ice Age megafauna.
So you'd look and it would be that why did mammoths go extinct in Europe 30-40,000 years ago, but they went extinct here 10,000 years ago.
And you'd map human migrations and you found this compelling pattern of the fact that people show up and shit goes extinct.
We did a podcast about this with a guy you should talk to sometime named David Meltzer who knows this world better than anybody.
And it's really elegant.
It's a very elegant theory.
It explains a lot very quickly.
It's seductive because I think it's seductive from a cultural perspective because it allows you to fantasize that past cultures were as destructive as our own which makes you feel good.
That they were hunting these things to extinction back then, so we can't be that bad for driving things to extinction now.
Everything about it was very packaged up and had a nice bow on it.
What started to eat away at the Blitzkrieg hypothesis is that more DNA work on remains, like more DNA work on bones, and a greater picture of effective population size Of these past populations.
And you realize that things were in steep decline anyways.
Things were changing rapidly anyways.
Maybe people came in and kind of like did the coup de grace on some of these things.
But it wasn't that they blinked out.
They faded out for a long time.
But everything, our old perspective of how we used to look at it made everything seem very compressed and very immediate.
And so it's just gotten more complicated, as we understand more, that mammoth populations were perhaps collapsing long before people showed up.
That was the idea, too, that people coming into a valley and you would kill some females and could have, for pachyderms, these things with very low fecundity, that you could come in and kill some females and have this impact on it.
There's also the problem that I remember criticism of people that used to feel this way.
The criticism used to be that they called them the bison boys, where they had this fantasy of these roving, highly effective big game hunters.
And then people point now to, why is there not more evidence of, why is there such limited evidence of humans killing mastodons and mammoths?
I mean, stuff's just gone, right?
It's been a long time ago.
But that's another thing.
When we used to do archaeology, they would throw everything away except for the big bones.
They would look for projectile points, look for big bones.
Everything else would just get washed away in sluice boxes or through sieves.
And we weren't looking at the finer picture of what people ate, what was there.
They thought that any association of human artifacts and mammoth remains meant that it could only mean one thing.
Like, there is no compelling reason to think that this is a kill site.
Because now, you take an elephant, a dead elephant, dump it on the ground, look at it in a month, look at it a month later, look at it a month later, look at it a month later.
What happens to the bones?
You know?
And things that we used to think were kill sites are just not.
It's a long time.
Something dies.
Time goes by.
Someone goes and camps there.
Later it all gets jumbled up.
You find a projectile point in a mammoth bone.
Oh my god, he killed it!
And then other people are like, well no, now that we've analyzed it, 3,000 years separated these two occurrences.
There's only so much place on the planet.
Shit happens in the same place time and time and time again.
So it's just, it's falling apart.
For reasons Melcher would describe more eloquently than me.
It is fascinating when they're trying to piece together what happened based on some bones and some fossils and based on tools and just whatever evidence that they find in the ground and that they're trying to put together a comprehensive portrait of history through this.
Because they had all kinds of radiocarbon dates because they built all these fires up there.
He did this whole book-type thing about it.
The academic community accepts it.
The academic consensus is that he's right.
During the Ice Age, whatever it was, 12,000 some odd years ago, whatever the hell it was, 10,700, like some Ice Age date, people camped up here, made shitloads of projectile points.
This guy found them.
We were doing kind of a continuation of that work of mapping out campsites, and we would find unbelievable points.
Just the idea of holding on to one of those, just put it in your hand and just imagine what it was like when that guy used tendons to lace it to a stick.
There's a lot of arrowheads apparently out here on ranches.
People find them all the time.
My friend Gary Clark Jr. had a picture on his Instagram page.
You can probably find it, Jamie, of a perfect arrowhead he found on this ranch.
I mean, it's just perfect.
And you just look at that arrowhead and you think, God damn, someone sent that through the lungs of a white-tailed deer probably hundreds of years ago.
Because I just want to see how, I'd want to see, maybe not 20, whatever the hell it is, I'd want to see how woolly mammoths interacted with that landscape.
Now, if you scroll back to the page, Jamie, you go down, they've had a bunch of, like, look at the one in the upper right-hand corner.
Oh, there's Forrest Gallant on the podcast talking about it.
But that, all the tusks they keep finding there, I mean, they've had, it's a treasure trove.
In this one area, and it's not an enormous area.
I mean, I think it's only a few acres that they've been excavating and finding all this shit, but it's just a massive amount of dead bones and skulls and tusks in this one area.
You know, we had this, like, linear idea about, like, you know, that all of a sudden we sort of, like, in this organized fashion went and found these areas.
But they're going to be looking back at this time, about what a chaotic time it is.
I mean, this is a history time.
When people in the future are going over the 21st century and all the different turns and trials and tribulations, this is going to be a pivotal moment.
Yeah, where they talked about him going over to Europe and taking part of those Wild Bill shows that they did over there.
That is one of the more fascinating things about the Wild West, was that these people that were involved in these historical battles then recreated them.
I feel like if you went, like my old man fought World War II. I feel like if had you gone, I don't know, man, maybe when he's older in life, and they said like, hey, do you want to get together with some of the, you know, what you like to call krauts who were in the war and you show what happened when your buddy got killed?
And the crazy thing was that the Native Americans had no sense of...
There was no quitting.
There was no sense of turning themselves in.
There was no sense of...
If you were captured, you were murdered and mutilated.
So they would fight to the bitter end.
They knew there was no surrender.
Because if you surrendered, you would be tortured and killed.
Some of the depictions of the tortures from that and Empire of the Summer Moon, some of the things they did to the bodies, it's just like, Jesus Christ.
When did they develop such insane cruelty?
And has this always been a part of being a human being?
Or was this exacerbated by the hard conditions of the planes?
There's things about, like, things that these Great Lakes tribes of, like, making people eat parts of themselves, you know.
But a lot of it had, you know, there's, like, things about how you, if you could handle that and not crack.
It was respected.
It was like a testing.
But I don't know what it was like to live.
I can't even begin to imagine what it was like to live with that level of stuff.
I recently read a book called Plainsman of the Yellowstone, and it was a history of the Yellowstone Basin.
This guy takes that whole...
It's sort of like an antidote to Sun of the Morning Star because He takes that Custer fight, which has become so emblematic of the West, regarded as this big turning point in the history of the Indian Wars, and he treats it like a little inconsequential thing that happened one day.
It just didn't really matter.
The book was written, man.
I mean, you know what I mean?
It was like, everyone knows how this story's going to end, and that day didn't have any bearing on how it was going to end.
A guy did something stupid, got some people killed, the war ground on.
It'd be like if we're imagining D-Day, right?
It'd be like, let's say we're imagining D-Day, and then we heard about some peripheral story that happened on D-Day where a weird thing happened and some soldiers got killed, and some guy made a mistake and got some people killed.
And our telling of D-Day, and let's say that incident was called the whatever, the baculum incident.
Now, when we conceptualize D-Day, when we talk about Custer, it's like, this isn't his analogy, but I'm presenting it this way.
When we talk about Custer, we're sort of talking about D-Day as the baculum incident.
Some kind of honor code that I can't even begin to try to guess at and explain, but things that would land you in jail today for war crimes were a matter of course.
Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game.
Volumes 1 and 2. Big Game and Small Game.
Then did a Wild Game book.
Wild Game cookbook.
This is a very pragmatic, practical...
It's kind of almost a response to the sort of fantasy land that the survival genre has become.
It's a lot more, there's a lot, it's for people who actually spend time outdoors, avoiding, avoiding trouble, managing trouble, conducting risk assessment.
And then also just like how to think, how to behave, what to do, what things matter, what things don't, what risks live in your head, what risks are real.