Nov. 5, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:05:22
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
I wish he was my friend still. | |
| 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. | ||
| And you brought this up because Frank Von Hippel had given us this fossilized walrus, ancient walrus, dick bone. | ||
| Pecker bone, swizzle stick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A friend of mine, Clay Newcomb, he saves the black bear ones and people use them as drink stirrers and stuff. | ||
| The first deer I ever killed, you gave me one and I was using it as a coffee stirrer for a while. | ||
| Oh, no, it's not like an actual bone bone in there. | ||
| Isn't there a bone bone in there? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, you gave me one. | ||
| You might not have given me one from that. | ||
| You gave me one from something else. | ||
| Maybe a raccoon or a bear or something? | ||
| I'd have to look at it. | ||
| I don't know, but you gave me a dick bone, and I had it in my backpack for a long time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, huh. | |
| Yeah, so... | ||
|
unidentified
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How often do you give away dick bones that you don't even remember that? | |
| Well, I wish I had more to share. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This guy, this Bob Ferris guy, we used to laugh because he looked like Bob Ferris looked exactly like Bob Dylan. | ||
| And he's got to be around still. | ||
| I remember being over at his house one day and him advising someone over the phone with an earshot of me. | ||
| I remember this guy was going out to set muskrat traps. | ||
| And I remember Bob Ferris advising him, if anybody fucks with you, shoot him. | ||
| And I was young enough that I didn't get that that was a humor thing. | ||
| You know, whatever. | ||
| Just like a thing you'd say to your buddy to have a laugh. | ||
| And I remember being like, man, these guys are serious about muskrats. | ||
| I was like, I hope I don't run into that dude in the marshes. | ||
| And now I'm like, oh yeah, I could totally see saying that to somebody and then we'd have a laugh and get off the phone. | ||
| How many animals have that bone? | ||
| Man, I wish I knew. | ||
| And I don't even know what... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not universal. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It'd be interesting to look up. | ||
| Until right now, I never gave it any thought to what classification of things has an actual baculum, an actual pecker bone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Chimps have it, right? | |
| All the weasels have it. | ||
| I think chimps have it. | ||
| We don't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Weasels do. | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| It's absent human. | ||
| Ungulates. | ||
| Elephants. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Monotremes? | ||
| Monotremes? | ||
| What is that word? | ||
| Monotremes? | ||
| Oh, the platypus. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And echidna. | ||
| Barsupials, lagomorphs, hyenas... | ||
| Binoturongs, Cyrenians, and Cetaceans, among others. | ||
| Evidence suggests that the baculum was independently evolved nine times and lost in ten separate lineages. | ||
| God, it just keeps coming up, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just keeps coming up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The need to have one of those. | ||
| The need to, yeah, a built-in hard-on. | ||
| That's a really nice one. | ||
| I like that one. | ||
| There are some that are big enough. | ||
| I don't know what they're off. | ||
| There's some that are big enough to be used as a cane. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What animal is that? | ||
| I thought it was like certain walrus ones. | ||
| People used to use them as canes. | ||
| Well, that's not small. | ||
| That one right there. | ||
| And it's interesting because of the fact that it's fossilized. | ||
| It's so heavy. | ||
| Imagine carrying that between your legs. | ||
| I wish I had a... | ||
| I feel like I want to challenge you on... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at this. | |
| I feel like I want to challenge you on that being fossilized. | ||
| Well, he said it was fossilized. | ||
| You don't think it is? | ||
| You think by the appearance? | ||
| Because it's so light? | ||
| But doesn't it feel heavy as shit? | ||
| Yeah, I don't want to get in over my waders here, but I... I want to challenge that. | ||
| But I would need to scrape into it with a pocket knife and I don't want to do that to your baculum. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| Here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here. | |
| But see, don't do it, because who am I to tell? | ||
| I mean, you might scrape into it, and I don't... | ||
| Would they curve that to make that handle? | ||
| But goddamn, dude, this is so heavy. | ||
| No, there are... | ||
| That I don't know. | ||
| They might, but there are some that have a hook in them. | ||
| It keeps your mate from getting away. | ||
| Jamie, that would be a hell of a pimp stick. | ||
| You walking around with one of those? | ||
| Lil Pimp should have one of those. | ||
| Lil Pimp? | ||
| Did you hear that? | ||
| The thing with Trump? | ||
| He called Lil Pump. | ||
| There's a rapper named Lil Pump, and he called him Lil Pimp. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| Yeah, he did it the other day at a rally, and everybody was upset. | ||
| Tim's new character, I was going for it. | ||
| This has got to be fossilized, man. | ||
| How else could it be that heavy? | ||
| What kind of bone would be that heavy, Steve? | ||
| That's so heavy. | ||
| Here, come on, man. | ||
| You want me to put a little... | ||
| Yeah, get in there. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I'm going to give a little scraper down here on the end. | ||
| Scrape it. | ||
| Tell me what's up. | ||
| God, it is. | ||
| It's fossilized. | ||
| Well, now I want to say that, just like we were talking a minute ago about how bettors are betting, like, it's Trump, it's Biden. | ||
| I'm like, back to, it's fossilized. | ||
| But it's so heavy. | ||
| I'm a flip-flopper. | ||
| My convictions are weakly held. | ||
| But no, poking it with your knife makes me think that it's a... | ||
| Poking it with your knife... | ||
| But this is way outside of my area of expertise. | ||
| Poking it with your knife makes me a believer. | ||
| I think Von Hippel is a biologist, right? | ||
| He's a... | ||
| Man, you got a really good fact checker over here, man. | ||
| It's like having Doug Dern around. | ||
| Yeah, it is very similar. | ||
| Doug's a very good fact checker. | ||
| That's all he does. | ||
| He only, like when you're talking to him, he just looks at his phone. | ||
| Because he's like, no matter what you say, he's like, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Biology? | ||
| Ecology? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| There's another one that's a physicist. | ||
| When it comes to... | ||
| 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? | ||
| Or if you find a chunk of bone, you can keep it. | ||
| But not an arrowhead, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because that's an artifact. | ||
| But that's weird that you're supposed to leave it there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dude... | |
| Does anybody... | ||
| That's an interesting thing I'd like to talk about because... | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| They do. | ||
| I remember... | ||
| So... | ||
| Let me finish my thing about fossilized real quick. | ||
| The reason I start to think about it is if... | ||
| You're allowed to pick up a bone. | ||
| It depends on the land designation. | ||
| Let's say you're on a national forest and you find a piece of bone, you can keep it. | ||
| If it's fossilized, you can't keep it. | ||
| I found a few buffalo skulls that are old but still bone. | ||
| Here you have this thing that could be 300 years old eroding out of a riverbed. | ||
| If it's not fossilized, You can have it and keep it if it's just bone. | ||
| The thing is, if that thing has cultural markings on it, then it becomes an artifact. | ||
| So say you found a friend of mine. | ||
| I don't know where they might have got it off. | ||
| I don't know where they got it. | ||
| They had had, like the grandfather found it. | ||
| They had a buffalo skull that had been axed open, and it was so clearly hit open with a tool to get the brain out. | ||
| Which would make it an artifact and then you can't touch it. | ||
| Or if it's fossilized, you can't touch it. | ||
| The private land is totally different. | ||
| But yeah, it would be that... | ||
| So now when I look at stuff, I'm always picking it up. | ||
| I'm always wishing I had a better sense because I don't want to grab... | ||
| I don't want to find something to bring home and then be in violation because I brought home a fossilized thing. | ||
| Are you under any obligation to report it? | ||
| 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. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm virtually certain you're not under any obligation. | ||
| I did one time find a bison skull on national forest land and did a site report. | ||
| Where I cooperated with the forest, the administrative unit of that national forest, because I had gone and did some work on it, had a radiocarbon date. | ||
| So I was able to supply them with a piece of information they didn't have. | ||
| And so we cooperated and did a site report. | ||
| And I had also kind of like called a little bit to make sure I wasn't in the wrong. | ||
| And this is in your book, American Buffalo, which is really good. | ||
| I listened to the audio version. | ||
| It's so nice to hear your voice that you got a chance to do it because I know the first version of it, they hired some actor to do it. | ||
| 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... | ||
| A decade. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Can you give me another example? | ||
| Another example of... | ||
| Of a thought virus. | ||
| Well, thought virus is probably not even... | ||
| I mean, he's used that term before, but it's basically woke thinking. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Like, what's problematic about it, 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. | ||
| And I was like, this is so crazy. | ||
| You have such a distinct voice. | ||
| What the fuck are they doing? | ||
| Why would they do that? | ||
| I think that it leads to a lot of listener disappointment. | ||
| At the time I did this, though, I was just a writer. | ||
| So there wasn't that. | ||
| Maybe we're moving away from that. | ||
| When you're working on something, and I'm sure... | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| You'll know intimately well what I'm talking about. | ||
| Imagine your stand-up. | ||
| If you had to turn in a word doc... | ||
| I've had to do that before. | ||
| For someone else to do your stand-up? | ||
| I had to do that before. | ||
| Oh, not for someone else to do it, but for them to decide whether or not the things that I was saying were approvable. | ||
| Oh, I gotcha. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know if this makes any sense. | ||
| It does. | ||
| This is particular to virtually nobody. | ||
| No, I think it makes a lot of sense. | ||
| I mean, particularly now, because your podcast becomes so popular, and people are used to the way you talk. | ||
| You have a very unique way of describing and discussing things. | ||
| I could imagine how offensive it would be if someone just sort of actored it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| And that was... | ||
| I was at the height of my writing powers because I was just a writer. | ||
| I wasn't married. | ||
| I didn't have kids. | ||
| You were free. | ||
| I could spend a couple years just focused on something. | ||
| The fact that that book still works and people still read it... | ||
| I'm happy about that. | ||
| I look and be like, yeah, man. | ||
| I feel like that was a reasonable book. | ||
| That's an interesting way. | ||
| It's a very good book. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| But it's an interesting way of talking about it, that you were at the height of your writing powers because you were free. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For sure, man. | ||
| I'm watching right now on Netflix. | ||
| I'm watching The Last Dance, the Jordan documentary. | ||
| And I'm not a basketball fan at all. | ||
| Most of the stuff is new information to me. | ||
| But in watching it and that study of focus and discipline. | ||
| And I wonder, in looking at him, I couldn't help but think. | ||
| Let's say there was an undecided election. | ||
| It was like a contested, undecided election. | ||
| And there's a global pandemic. | ||
| That guy would still go on that field, or on the court, sorry, and probably be just as good as he always is. | ||
| And I think that a decade ago, whatever, like at that point in life when you're just like, 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Instead of the school board is voting. | ||
| Whether or not kids are going back to school full time. | ||
| And I need to pay attention to that because I have kids. | ||
| I need to pay attention. | ||
| I feel obligated to pay attention politically. | ||
| And I have other mediums that I work in now. | ||
| You just get spread out doing stuff. | ||
| I feel like maybe that doesn't happen to you. | ||
| No, it does. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| I remember you telling me you have three jobs. | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| Do you jump from one to the other? | ||
| They connect, fortunately. | ||
| They help each other. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But stand-up comedy for sure helps podcasting. | ||
| Podcasting for sure helps stand-up comedy. | ||
| You get more comfortable doing each one of them because the fact that stand-up comedy is live and then podcasting is also live, right? | ||
| There's no net. | ||
| There's no script. | ||
| And you get more comfortable expressing yourself. | ||
| In stand-up comedy, the fear of doing it in front of live audiences, you get accustomed to people paying attention to you and watching you. | ||
| That makes UFC commentary easier. | ||
| Because when the cameras are on the UFC, I never think, oh shit, all these people are watching now. | ||
| I never think that, because people are always watching. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I can just express myself. | ||
| So they feed into each other. | ||
| What do you, because you get increasingly, at least from my perspective, increasingly you get scrutinized and over-scrutinized in the media. | ||
| Is it hard to tune it out? | ||
| It's easier than ever. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| Because it's so common. | ||
| I could just shut it off. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's just, it's one of the things that happens. | ||
| You get too big. | ||
| You get too big, you get too popular. | ||
| Look, if there's 300 million people in this country, and you have 1% of them are critics, you get a million critics. | ||
| Yeah, and you're being conservative with that number. | ||
| If you're really lucky, you only have a million critics. | ||
| You really have three million critics. | ||
| Three million critics, that's a crazy number. | ||
| That's such a nutty number. | ||
| If there's 300 million people and 1% of them don't like you, you have three million people that don't like you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's going to be high. | ||
| It's going to be a few thousand. | ||
| When I'm reading about you and what you think and how you are, and I'm sitting there thinking like, no, he's not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It makes me question everything I read. | ||
| I was saying to someone the other day that there's one thing Americans like. | ||
| There's like two stories Americans like in this order. | ||
| They like a story about what an asshole a celebrity is. | ||
| And the second thing they like most, but not as much as that thing, is how great a celebrity is. | ||
| But they like the first one better. | ||
| Yeah, it's way better. | ||
| Well, it's more sellable, right? | ||
| I mean, that's why this Ellen is mean thing has gotten so much traction. | ||
| You know, Ellen's mean to her guests and she's mean to... | ||
| People are like, ooh, tell me more. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's exciting when you find out how much... | ||
| When you find out Ellen has like a half a billion dollars, you're like, oh my god. | ||
| Tell me more about how mean she is. | ||
| I need to know the dirt. | ||
| It's just a common thing with people. | ||
| If someone becomes successful, you're going to get scrutinized. | ||
| And it's also different perspectives. | ||
| For some people, the way I think and the way I talk is offensive to them. | ||
| They have a very clear-cut idea of the way people should think and behave. | ||
| It's particularly on the left, which is... | ||
| It's become more and more weird because it would be much easier for people on the left to label me if I wasn't left-wing. | ||
| That's what's confusing. | ||
| It's because I do support basically every left-wing position other than Second Amendment. | ||
| And increasingly, the way they attack the First Amendment is weird. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| They seem to think that censorship is okay as long as you're censoring someone who disagrees with the way you think, which is a new thing in the left. | ||
| The acceptance of the First Amendment. | ||
| I mean, I brought this up before, but the ACLU was founded by people that were literally supporting Nazis, like supporting actual neo-Nazi groups. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, in litigation, free speech issues. | |
| Yeah, this is important. | ||
| Even though their views are abhorrent, you have to support their ability to express themselves. | ||
| This is what the foundation of this country is about. | ||
| Free expression is the only way you find out what's right and what's wrong. | ||
| Shutting people down, stopping people from communicating is a silly, short-sighted approach to debating an issue. | ||
| And this is more and more common than ever on the left. | ||
| Because of deplatforming, because they have the ability with social media, because social media is not really protected by the First Amendment. | ||
| Social media, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or whatever, they're private companies. | ||
| And they can decide, hey, we don't want this guy on because his views don't align with ours. | ||
| And they have silenced people and kicked people off their platforms that really aren't doing anything wrong. | ||
| They're saying things that the people that own and run the social media companies don't agree with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That, to me, is the weirdest aspect of the left today. | ||
| But other than that, like gay rights, women's rights, civil rights, women's right to choose, I'm with all that. | ||
| I'm with all of them. | ||
| I'm with universal basic income. | ||
| I'm with Medicare for all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm not going to argue about that. | ||
| This is why I am. | ||
| This is why I am. | ||
| I think that it's not a bad idea to have a certain amount of money where you give it to people in times like this COVID pandemic. | ||
| When you look at this pandemic, if people had a certain amount of money that came to them every month, And they didn't have to worry about food, and they didn't have to worry about housing. | ||
| They were taken care of. | ||
| You could see how it would be easier to get back on track. | ||
| The way people are today, where more than 30 plus percent can't pay their rent, they're on the verge of eviction, and all the protections against eviction are about to run out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I see that argument too. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Has sort of taken over this air of disapproval. | ||
| Like, oh my goodness. | ||
| How could that young man say that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like they've switched. | |
| Someone should tell that young man to stop that. | ||
| You know what happened? | ||
| Social media. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| People got the ability to complain where other people are going to listen. | ||
| There's so much signal out there. | ||
| There's so much noise. | ||
| So many people have the opportunity to complain about things. | ||
| And they're also formulating their complaints in a way they hope will resonate with people that really have no dog in the fight. | ||
| So they just want to say something that people go, oh, that guy's got a good point. | ||
| Click. | ||
| I'll give him a little heartbeat for that. | ||
| You know what I wanted to ask you about, man? | ||
| I know that you've said this for as long as I've known you, that you don't pay attention to social media comments. | ||
| On a recent episode of yours, I heard you put it that you post something and run away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But do you ever, late at night, sneak a peek? | ||
| So you really don't break your own rule? | ||
| No, never at night. | ||
| Imagine if you see something at night and think, fuck that guy, and then it rolls around your head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's terrible. | ||
| No, at night, I don't... | ||
| If I watch anything on my phone at night, it's super innocuous. | ||
| Like, I like watching pool. | ||
| I like watching pool games. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good point, man. | ||
| My brain's not that consistent. | ||
| My brain sometimes is like a six-cylinder, and sometimes it's like a fucking supercharged V8. It varies a lot, you know? | ||
| And also, sometimes subjects come up that I didn't anticipate. | ||
| Occasionally, I'll talk about something where I'm deeply studied on it. | ||
| And it'll come up and I'll go, oh, no, no, no, this is why that is. | ||
| And I get very excited and I have a very clear idea of everything that's nuanced about that particular subject. | ||
| But sometimes things come up and I'm like, oh, yeah, hmm. | ||
| And I'm in the process of talking. | ||
| I'm kind of working it out in my own head and I'm not exactly sure how I think about it. | ||
| And I have to kind of formulate opinions on the fly. | ||
| Or formulate a descriptive on the fly. | ||
| Or try to tell a story that maybe I haven't really worked out in my head. | ||
| I'm trying to tell it while I'm thinking about it. | ||
| I'm also talking. | ||
| It doesn't always work out that good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a thing I'm thinking about that's very similar to this. | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| I'll tell you an example of a thing that someone said to me that struck me as really funny. | ||
| And then I wanted to go and tell people what they said, but then I'm like, shit, I don't know if I can tell people that they said that. | ||
| Oh, that's a weird one? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Are you enjoying doing podcasts? | ||
| Man, yeah. | ||
| It has... | ||
| It's my... | ||
| Of the things I do, of the various things I do for a living, it's the thing I enjoy most actually doing it. | ||
| Having a guest on. | ||
| For instance, there's a guest we have. | ||
| I bring him up because I was thinking of him. | ||
| This guy, Jim Heffelfinger from Arizona. | ||
| I bring him up because we're talking about criticism. | ||
| I'll always read criticism that he sends. | ||
| If he listens to something and he's like, that's just not right. | ||
| It's not coming from a mean place. | ||
| It's coming from a place where he's trying to be additive to a conversation. | ||
| And he'll send me some things and be like, hey man, this is a thing you should think about and maybe want to clarify. | ||
| I'll open that email every single time. | ||
| And he gives me a lot of them. | ||
| Yeah, that's different. | ||
| It's a beautiful relationship. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| But all criticism doesn't go that way because people want to see people bleed. | ||
| But here's this guy who doesn't want to see people bleed. | ||
| He just wants to advance the conversation. | ||
| But the time I had him on, we were having a conversation about biology, wildlife management. | ||
| And I'm just like, the whole time, I'm thrilled by what I'm hearing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, thrilled by the presentation. | ||
| Thrilled by what I'm hearing. | ||
| It's great information. | ||
| It's delivered well. | ||
| That, if you had a joy meter in your head, like, of all the things that you actually do, that to me is... | ||
| That interaction to me is great. | ||
| Yeah, because you're getting something out of it. | ||
| You're living. | ||
| Whereas writing... | ||
| It's almost trite. | ||
| I kind of hate the actual act of doing it. | ||
| Not enjoyable. | ||
| Actually doing it is not enjoyable. | ||
| Everything that comes out of it I love. | ||
| Doing it is not enjoyable. | ||
| It's such a common thing to say. | ||
| Hunter S. Thompson famously hated writing. | ||
| That was a torturous thing to do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Not with like, oh boy, it's here! | ||
| That's not how I feel. | ||
| That's how I feel when I edit my stand-up specials. | ||
| Even if I know they were a killer. | ||
| Even if I know I killed. | ||
| I know I was there. | ||
| Standing ovation. | ||
| Everybody cheered. | ||
| Everybody laughed. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| I sit down. | ||
| I'm like, Jesus. | ||
| And I have to go over it, you know, and try to find what's the best camera angle and how to, you know. | ||
| Yeah, but I do like it a great deal. | ||
| It's funny that you're running... | ||
| It changes conversation a little bit when you're talking to someone. | ||
| If I have someone really good on 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, it's also because you're in the process of not just listening to what they're saying, but you're steering the conversation. | ||
| You're trying to figure out how to respond, when to step in, when to not step in. | ||
| You have questions. | ||
| You don't know when to ask them. | ||
| Should I hold up? | ||
| Would I let this guy continue this thought? | ||
| I have to stop here because there's something weird, but I don't want to make this uncomfortable and I want to miss anything out. | ||
| So there's all this shit going on that you're sort of managing the conversation. | ||
| It's not as simple as you just sitting there talking to somebody. | ||
| You're talking to someone and you know that other people are going to listen. | ||
| And it doesn't seem like it's an art form, but it's definitely an art form. | ||
| You get better at it and you also develop a way of expressing yourself that's entertaining for people to hear. | ||
| It's not just that you're talking. | ||
| You're talking in a way where it smoothly and comfortably enters other people's brains. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One of the ways I've noticed that, and I even had that problem when we were having our little preamble chit-chat here, the presence of a microphone. | ||
| Changes my thought pattern. | ||
| Oh, yeah, for sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| You do get used to it, though. | ||
| After 1,500 episodes. | ||
| I feel way less inclined to say something really indefensible. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the problem with the early days of my podcast is that we didn't have any thought that people were actually listening. | ||
| When I did the earliest versions of the podcast, like 10 years ago, 9 years ago, we would just get barbecued and we would just talk shit as if no one was in the room. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh my god, these guys are horrible human beings. | ||
| No, we're comedians and we're just talking shit. | ||
| You'd have to preface, if you went around saying, wouldn't it be funny if someone thought? | ||
| Right, but even then they would cut that part out. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| But that's what a conversation is like when you're just goofing on stuff with your friends. | ||
| But you just leave out the part where you say, wouldn't it be funny if someone thought? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you just say it as though it's coming from you. | ||
| But everyone, it's understood that you mean, like, wouldn't it be funny if? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a weird medium, podcasts are, because it's never really existed before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| This is a new thing. | ||
| Like, my friend Adam Curry is the original podcaster. | ||
| He's the podfather. | ||
| He was the first guy to ever have a podcast. | ||
| And he was an MTV DJ host. | ||
| He actually lives here in Austin. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| You remember Adam Curry? | ||
| I never put it together that was the same person. | ||
| That's Adam Curry. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Beautiful, handsome man. | ||
| He had those flowing locks. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, I've known this, but I never like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He never put it together as the same person. | ||
| He runs the No Agenda podcast. | ||
| He's actually one of the reasons I moved to Austin. | ||
| He was singing Austin's praises. | ||
| And I had been here many, many times. | ||
| He used to kind of wear like that Michael Jackson leather jacket. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| With the fold-over flaps. | ||
| Look at that handsome bastard. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Look at that hair! | ||
| That's the same dude! | ||
| Yeah, that's the same dude. | ||
| Now show a picture of him today. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| That's him today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah, he's the original. | ||
| He's the OG. Oh, yeah, but I never... | ||
| I can't think of a parallel here, but no, I'm aware of these two... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, but you hadn't put them together. | ||
| Oh, that's the same guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| It's amazing. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| He's got a great podcast called No Agenda. | ||
| It's his podcast. | ||
| And he really had the very first one. | ||
| And I don't think that was any earlier than 2000. Jamie, what was that? | ||
| 2005, maybe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sounds right. | |
| Somewhere around then? | ||
| So his original podcast was four years before my first podcast, which is 2009. 2007? | ||
| Okay, so two years before mine. | ||
| So you're talking about a guy, a thing, rather, that's only been around for 13 years. | ||
| There was never a thing where you could just put something out there, sit down, talk to people, and there's no middle middle. | ||
| People think, because I have this deal with Spotify, that there's a bunch of people sitting over my shoulder. | ||
| You come in here. | ||
| You see what it's like? | ||
| There's no one here. | ||
| Like it's a skeleton crew. | ||
| There's actually a sensor standing right next to me right now. | ||
| With a gun. | ||
| It's exactly the same. | ||
| It's such a skeleton crew. | ||
| To have something, like we did an election show last night that 7 million people saw. | ||
| To have something that has a total skeleton crew, it doesn't make any sense that it could reach those kind of numbers. | ||
| So this new form of communication, it hasn't been figured out yet. | ||
| No one exactly knows its potential. | ||
| No one knows exactly what the influence of it is. | ||
| There's a lot of mainstream media people that are really upset by it. | ||
| That's also one of the reasons why I get so criticized. | ||
| People get so mad. | ||
| They don't like the fact that I have this much influence. | ||
| They don't like the fact that so many people are paying attention. | ||
| It doesn't seem right. | ||
| This is not from the New York Times. | ||
| This is not from NBC. This is not from whatever. | ||
| But all of a sudden, all these people are watching it. | ||
| But this is a new thing. | ||
| People haven't figured this out yet. | ||
| Even though it's been around for 13 plus years, they're still going, what the fuck is this? | ||
| Four years ago, no one took podcasts seriously. | ||
| Four years ago, Howard Stern had an episode where he was mocking podcasts and saying, why don't you just yell out the window? | ||
| No one's listening. | ||
| He was like, you're wasting your time. | ||
| And he was making fun of Adam Carolla for doing it. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Making fun of people for doing it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, but I don't remember what my original point was. | ||
| Brand new. | ||
| Brand new. | ||
| This is a fucking really new thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I was like, a what? | ||
| I could go and show you where I was sitting when I heard it. | ||
| And she's like, you just need to go. | ||
| She's right. | ||
| And I was like, it's a what? | ||
| A what? | ||
| What? | ||
| That'll never work. | ||
| Well, that was a lot of people's attitude. | ||
| Even, like, people that I was really close with. | ||
| Like, there's a Comedy Store documentary that just came out. | ||
| It was a five-part documentary. | ||
| And one of the episodes, my friend Tom Segura, who was on, like, episode two or some shit. | ||
| Like, he was on early, early... | ||
| He's been on a fucking hundred-plus times. | ||
| I have no idea how many times he's been on, but... | ||
| He was there in the early days, and in the documentary, he was talking to Brian Redband, and he was saying, like, what is he doing? | ||
| Like, why is he doing this? | ||
| And Redband was like, I don't know, some people are listening. | ||
| And he's like, and you go to the list, and it's like 2,000 people? | ||
| Like, 2,000 people were watching this? | ||
| That's it? | ||
| And you're spending three hours doing this fucking stupid show for 2,000 people for no money? | ||
| Like, why are you doing this? | ||
| Yeah, but would you imagine yourself being a visionary, or do you imagine yourself being that, you know, it was lucky? | ||
| Lucky. | ||
| Yeah, no vision. | ||
| No, I've expected it to be the way it was forever. | ||
| Like, someday they'll make a, if they make a movie, like The Social Network, not The Social Dilemma, but they make a movie like The Social Network, which is about, like, Zuckerberg and those guys that come up on Facebook. | ||
| They'll make, like, when they do the story of you... | ||
| I wonder if they'll do it that you had a vision. | ||
| Let me put that to bed. | ||
| Let me put that to bed right now. | ||
| I thought it was going to be the way it was back then forever. | ||
| No one paid attention. | ||
| Very small amount of people, but fun. | ||
| It was a great way for... | ||
| Look, I loved doing morning radio. | ||
| I used to love doing it. | ||
| I hated getting up. | ||
| Oh, like the Collins to promote your shows? | ||
| Well, not Collins. | ||
| I'd go there. | ||
| Say if I was going to Phoenix. | ||
| You liked those things? | ||
| Loved it. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| I'd get up in the morning, smoke a joint, go in there with my friends, and we'd talk shit. | ||
| And if it was a radio station... | ||
| And there'd be like the zany guy, and then you'd have his female counterpart who put him in his place. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you had to go in there and do it at 7 in the morning. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I used to love it. | ||
| I used to love it because I would go in with Ari or Joey or someone like that and we would go and we'd have some fun. | ||
| And we'd say, hey, we're going to be the improv this weekend. | ||
| And then they would say, so, you know, what's been going on? | ||
| What are you into? | ||
| And then you have a story about this and about that. | ||
| I'm like, that is fun. | ||
| That's fun. | ||
| And you leave there and you have a good time with them. | ||
| You know, like... | ||
| Eight out of ten of them were a good time. | ||
| Two out of ten were like, this guy's gross. | ||
| Like, this show sucks. | ||
| Some people were clunky. | ||
| They're not good at it. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| When I used to have to do that for books, I just thought that was the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person. | ||
| But when you're high and it's early in the morning and you went to bed like three hours ago and you just get up... | ||
| At least you deal in comedy to go and be like, well, if you go back to the Lewis and Clark expedition, you'll find... | ||
| Nothing was expected of me, right? | ||
| I was just like this silly person who hosted Fear Factor or was on a sitcom and I would come in and I would be in town to tell jokes. | ||
| And that was what it was... | ||
| So I always thought, particularly when I did... | ||
| If I did the Opie and Anthony show in New York, that was a really fun one. | ||
| Because those guys were on... | ||
| I first started doing it, it was on the regular radio too, but they were on XM. And when they were on XM, you could swear. | ||
| I was like, this is amazing. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You could swear. | ||
| You could just go in. | ||
| And it was a hang. | ||
| You'd have four or five comedians in the room. | ||
| We'd all just be shitting on each other and laughing. | ||
| And you'd get out of there like, God, it felt so good. | ||
| It was so fun. | ||
| Then you'd go get some breakfast, take a nap, and go do your shows. | ||
| Did you used to do Stern ever? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But that was a different thing because Stern was at the helm. | ||
| He was never a hang. | ||
| It was the Howard Stern show. | ||
| It was Howard Stern asking questions, you responding to those questions. | ||
| It was very historic, that show. | ||
| He's the first guy. | ||
| If it wasn't for him... | ||
| There would be none of this. | ||
| There was guys before... | ||
| I guess Imus was one of those guys. | ||
| I was never an Imus guy. | ||
| But he was the guy who was nationally known as the man who had this outrageous radio show. | ||
| And that sort of helped the Opie and Anthony show come to fruition. | ||
| And then that... | ||
| I think the Opie and Anthony show was, in a lot of ways, the nexus. | ||
| In a lot of ways, it was the idea that led to podcasts. | ||
| But when I was doing it, there was no thought in my head like, this is going to be just like the Opie and Anthony show. | ||
| Or this is going to be just like Howard Stern. | ||
| Just you wait. | ||
| Just you wait. | ||
| There was none of that. | ||
| It was just keep showing up. | ||
| And then one day, I was at the Chicago Theater. | ||
| I did this gig at the Chicago Theater. | ||
| It's 3,700 people, right? | ||
| Sold out show. | ||
| And I go, I had a story I was going to tell. | ||
| I go, how many people listen to the podcast? | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| And I went, oh, shit. | ||
| I'm putting that into my movie, man. | ||
| And I remember thinking, oh. | ||
| My movie's going to be called The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But I remember very clearly being, oh no. | ||
| Like, almost a sense of dread. | ||
| Like, shit. | ||
| Like, this has gotten to a place where I didn't know where it was, and it's already there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I'd been just doing it, you know, I think by that time we were doing it at the Ice House. | ||
| We had this little room off the comedy club at the Ice House. | ||
| We'd show up there and do it there. | ||
| And... | ||
| It was just bizarre. | ||
| I was like, what happened? | ||
| Because you're just doing it like this, right? | ||
| Yeah, but you know what you could say if you wanted to twist this? | ||
| I think you could say in your own defense is... | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| Maybe you knew something. | ||
| Maybe you knew more than you thought because you probably weren't doing ten goofy things. | ||
| How so? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Meaning... | ||
| Like, let's say I... Went out and started 20 business, 20 goofy little businesses. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then at some point, like, holy shit! | ||
| One of them took off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Turns out... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Definitely not. | ||
| I'm trying to help you out here, man. | ||
| Don't help me out. | ||
| I'm telling you it's not the case. | ||
| It's just dumb luck. | ||
| I have a certain amount of brain damage. | ||
| I don't know how much I have, but definitely have a little. | ||
| From getting hit in the head? | ||
| Just getting punched, for sure. | ||
| There's a certain amount. | ||
| It's inevitable. | ||
| From the time I was 15 until I was 21, I got hit a lot. | ||
| There must be some. | ||
| I think there's a certain amount of not give a fuck that comes with that. | ||
| You think that was kicked into your head? | ||
| I'm not joking. | ||
| Sam Kinison and Roseanne Barr are the perfect examples that I use. | ||
| Both of them were normal people, and then they got hit by cars. | ||
| Sam Kinison got hit by a truck and his brother who talks about it in his book called Brother Sam, his brother Bill wrote a book about it. | ||
| It's like there was one Sam and then Sam got hit by a car and 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. | ||
| God, I'm gonna have you just full out. | ||
| You think about the things that hold people back. | ||
| One of the big things that hold people back is fear. | ||
| They're worried. | ||
| They're worried about the repercussions. | ||
| They're worried about other people's reactions. | ||
| They're worried about how you'll be viewed. | ||
| They're worried about all these things. | ||
| I don't have a lot of that. | ||
| For whatever reason. | ||
| I mean, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. | ||
| I'm a genuinely nice person. | ||
| But if someone doesn't like me, I'm like, what the fuck am I going to do? | ||
| Just keep moving. | ||
| I think... | ||
| What happened with me with podcasts is that all these people were telling me you're wasting your time. | ||
| All these people were telling me not to do it. | ||
| Like, why are you wasting your time doing this? | ||
| And all this thing is, eh, I like doing it. | ||
| I'm just going to keep doing it. | ||
| Like, I just didn't, it didn't, like, agents want, I had nothing to do. | ||
| Agents to this day that I have that could have gotten in on the podcast, could have gotten a piece, didn't want it. | ||
| Do they double back around now? | ||
| Oh, yeah! | ||
| I imagine they do. | ||
| They had a chance! | ||
| Like, I need help with ads. | ||
| Ads? | ||
| What the fuck are you doing? | ||
| You're wasting your time. | ||
| We're here doing real things. | ||
| We didn't have time for this. | ||
| They didn't want to have anything to do with it. | ||
| But I didn't have some fucking grand vision. | ||
| I just know what I like to do. | ||
| And when I like to do something, I go, oh, I like to do that. | ||
| I'm just going to keep doing that. | ||
| This is the same thing with martial arts. | ||
| It's the same thing with bow hunting. | ||
| The amount of time that I spend practicing archery is fucking preposterous. | ||
| It's ridiculous for a person who is as busy as I am. | ||
| But that's what I like. | ||
| I like doing that, so I do that. | ||
| I take weeks off every year to go in the mountains and hunt because I like doing that. | ||
| I'm just going to keep doing that. | ||
| That's what I like doing. | ||
| You know when you, earlier we were reading up on baculums, and it was saying how baculums had been invented 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. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's where the brain damage comes in. | ||
| Because I go, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| That's where I go, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I'm not doing that. | ||
| When people say, you can't have people like Alex Jones on the podcast. | ||
| You can't get drunk on a podcast that 10 million people are going to watch. | ||
| You can't smoke pot all the time. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| I'm like, yes, I can. | ||
| I've done it the whole time. | ||
| Why am I stopping now? | ||
| Well, now it's a big business. | ||
| Now you have this big deal. | ||
| Now they're writing articles about you in the New York Times. | ||
| Now you have to stop. | ||
| But that's the way it got there in the first place. | ||
| The way it got there in the first place is people are tired of seeing these pre-packaged... | ||
| Like, if you see... | ||
| Like, here's the best example. | ||
| Evening news. | ||
| Good evening! | ||
| Hi, I'm Skip... | ||
| Fuck face. | ||
| You know, there's these guys with this fake voice doing this, like, super overproduced thing where they're talking about subjects. | ||
| The banter in between stories On fake news, or on news, rather, news broadcasts, is the most fake communication known to man. | ||
| Like, the woman will say something, the guy will go, well, that's certainly a crazy story. | ||
| In other words... | ||
| We're going to go to Bob outside. | ||
| And then they go to this and that, and I find that's a terrible thing, a terrible tragedy. | ||
| Amazing, terrible. | ||
| Like, you could see... | ||
| Really inspiring. | ||
| They have these, 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 those people would all have insurance. | ||
| Oh, absolutely, man. | ||
| They'd have an enormous system of gatekeepers and legal. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then the things that you were going to talk about would be heavily vetted. | ||
| You would have people come in with pieces of paper, and they would talk about, okay, in the first segment, you're going to discuss whether Pennsylvania's vote is coming in, and let's be real clear that here's the information that you have to go over, and there's none of that here. | ||
| So, whether I'm good or bad, whether I'm right or wrong, at least you know it's just me. | ||
| This is the thing 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. | ||
| You can't pay attention to it. | ||
| I think a way that they might invite you to look at it, I'm not suggesting you do this, but I think 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. | ||
| What's Ameriseum? | ||
| It's a radioactive substance. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay? | |
| Is this a novel? | ||
| 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. | ||
| How many did he have? | ||
| In barrels. | ||
| How many did he have? | ||
| I read it a long time ago. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Just doing his thing. | ||
| Collecting smoke. | ||
| Oh my god, look at his face! | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| Yeah, hauled away his yard. | ||
| Look at his face! | ||
| Like he's got radiation poisoning on his face. | ||
| People might regard you as the radioactive Boy Scout. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like at a time, you were just out getting some smoke detectors. | ||
| And then over time, you like accumulated something where people had to take notice. | ||
| There's a little bit of that. | ||
| And they would be like, dude, I understand, but you just can't put that many of those things in one spot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But what's the argument against it? | ||
| The argument against it would be... | ||
| You tell me. | ||
| I don't hold that viewpoint. | ||
| I'm just saying, I like to imagine... | ||
| My brother has emerged as someone who's highly critical of my occupation. | ||
| And I like to hear him out about it. | ||
| Danny or Matt? | ||
| No, Matthew. | ||
| Why? | ||
| What's he critical of? | ||
| He is... | ||
| Well, give me the counter-argument. | ||
| What's he critical of? | ||
| Oh, why doesn't he like what I do for a living? | ||
| Because he feels that me and other individuals and lots of people that by talking about and celebrating an activity in my case, | ||
| hunting, fishing that it creates that my enthusiasms become infectious and it Increases the number of people and diminishes the quality of the experience that 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. | ||
| Someone might say, I get it, Joe. | ||
| It was all fun. | ||
| It wasn't supposed to happen. | ||
| But they would say, but here you are. | ||
| Time to pull the plug. | ||
| Here you are. | ||
| You now have a level of power that could be dangerous. | ||
| But what could be dangerous about it? | ||
| Picture that you said something. | ||
| It's over now, and everybody was always worried about it happening during the election. | ||
| Picture that you said, like, man, I think that if you're in that county, you should go down to the polling place and do X. A lot of dudes, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you... | ||
| Wield like a level of influence. | ||
| And I think that you probably now and then bite your tongue. | ||
| Well, I definitely don't tell people how to vote. | ||
| No, no, I don't mean how to vote. | ||
| I was doing a poor example of that. | ||
| But that's a good example because that would be where it could get dangerous. | ||
| Like, what if I had an idea that was really not well thought out and not good for the general public and I was... | ||
| And you threw out because it was funny. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then I told people to go do it. | ||
| I thought it'd be a fun stunt. | ||
| Let's see how many people we can get to... | ||
| Or you're just musing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I could see that. | ||
| And that alarms people, because people would do it. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't do that. | ||
| Most of what I do is talk about ideas and talk shit, and talk about things that are happening already. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I implored people in Missoula County, Montana, to go vote for my sister-in-law, Juanita Vero, and she won by a landslide. | ||
| But I think she was going to win anyway. | ||
| Oh, that's awesome. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| She's a county commissioner. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I got tangled up in politics there for a minute. | ||
| There's a real problem with the gatekeepers. | ||
| There's a real problem with these heavily produced television shows, heavily produced radio shows, and even now internet shows. | ||
| There's a real problem with them, is that there's inauthentic voices. | ||
| They don't resonate with people. | ||
| I know that's not a real person. | ||
| That's not a person that's unfiltered. | ||
| That's a person that's getting scripts, they're wearing makeup, they have a team of people that are attending to them and telling them what to do and how to say it. | ||
| And there's a lot of other people, again, behind the scenes that are all 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. | ||
| Are you aware of that? | ||
| No. | ||
| 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 he's like, what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh? | |
| 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? | ||
| That shit never happens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why it resonates. | ||
| All these shows where it's heavily produced and you're just trying to get the biggest celebrities in. | ||
| There's a really disturbing video of Howard Stern from 2013 that somebody leaked. | ||
| And it's him giving some speech in front of all of his employees talking about getting the show to become more popular. | ||
| This is what we have to do. | ||
| And we have to get X amount of celebrities. | ||
| We need two A-lists and two B-lists a week. | ||
| And I was like, wow. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, I was like, oof, damn. | ||
| And they're telling people to make fake Twitter profiles and tweet to celebrities. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And when you watch this, it's like, yeah. | |
| Oh, that's too bad. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That was my feeling, too. | ||
| As a person who was a gigantic fan of him growing up, it's like, I never thought he thought like that. | ||
| I never thought anybody would do that. | ||
| This is... | ||
| One of the best things about podcasting, at least with the way some people do it, is just authentic. | ||
| It's just raw. | ||
| So when people hear it, stumbles and all, they know this is just two guys talking. | ||
| This is two girls talking. | ||
| That show, what is that called? | ||
| Call Her Daddy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a bad analogy. | ||
| But you get what I'm saying. | ||
| I'm getting what you're saying. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, Michael Punk. | ||
| That's a great one. | ||
| Spelled P-U-N-K-E. Yeah, that's a great one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't remember, no, I think he doesn't pronounce the E. Shit. | |
| I don't think it's Michael Ponkey. | ||
| I think it's Punk. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Sorry, Michael. | ||
| But you, because you have such a great knowledge of that subject and, you know, he does as well and you're asking, what is this and what is that? | ||
| What was it like for you when they, instead of doing it on the plains, they decided to do it in a rainforest in the Pacific Northwest? | ||
| Like, what the fuck was that like? | ||
| And you're talking to him like, it's real clear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is just you and that guy and Giannis and whoever else is there. | ||
| There's no agenda. | ||
| There's no filters. | ||
| There's no producers. | ||
| So it's intriguing to a person because it resonates. | ||
| It gets in the head easy. | ||
| It slides right in there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it was because of historical inaccuracies, right? | ||
| And it was no fault of his. | ||
| And that's why I tried to make it clear. | ||
| I think what it is, I don't even think he listened. | ||
| I think he heard that we're always hacking on him. | ||
| He thought we were hacking on him. | ||
| On him. | ||
| And I was like, I'm not hacking on him! | ||
| We're hacking on the movie! | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then I wanted to get with them to be cool. | |
| Isn't it always a problem when someone takes a movie that's based on a real historical event and they distort that historical event just for film? | ||
| An example that I always use is that movie, was it Dreamcatcher? | ||
| Was the movie Foxcatcher? | ||
| Oh yeah, the Olympic wrestling team movie. | ||
| Based on a real wrestler, Mark Schultz, who fought in the UFC. And in the movie, a lot of things take place that I don't know whether or not they took place because I'm not intimately connected to the movie, but I'm intimately connected with the UFC. And when Mark fought in the UFC, he fought a famous fighter. | ||
| It's a famous fight. | ||
| It's a historical fight. | ||
| He fought as a wrestler against a guy named Big Daddy Goodrich. | ||
| Gary Goodrich was a famous fighter. | ||
| He was a famous pioneer of the sport. | ||
| In the movie... | ||
| The only fight that Mark has ever had his entire career, an MMA fight in the UFC, in the movie he fights a Russian guy, a white guy. | ||
| They change it. | ||
| It wasn't the same dude that Rocky had to fight. | ||
| No, but it wasn't the same dude. | ||
| But they took a historical event and they distorted it for no reason. | ||
| Like, you could have had him fighting Big Daddy Goodrich. | ||
| You could have had Big Daddy... | ||
| Because Big Daddy also wore a gi. | ||
| He famously would go into the octagon with a karate outfit on. | ||
| So he had his gi on. | ||
| And in the movie, there's a guy with a fucking bare shirt. | ||
| A white guy. | ||
| Or a bare chest. | ||
| It didn't make any sense. | ||
| It's like, why would you change reality? | ||
| As an MMA fan, I know what happened. | ||
| Like, it's a historic fight. | ||
| It would be like... | ||
| When Muhammad Ali fought Sonny Liston. | ||
| If instead of Sonny Liston, you had him fight some fat white guy. | ||
| Why would you do that? | ||
| When everybody knows what happened. | ||
| So that's a historic movie where someone, exactly what we're talking about with podcast, with anything else, overproduced. | ||
| Someone got their greasy little fucking fingers on it and they decided to change reality. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| It comes from a couple places, and I've been witness to it a little bit. | ||
| I think it comes from people wanting to exert creative influence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also people... | ||
| Three things. | ||
| Why do you exert creative influence? | ||
| Wishing that the truth had been different. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense in this case. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| And a third one... | ||
| That's kind of like two combined with the second one. | ||
| But to tell you which things have been different, I remember actually having a conversation like this with a producer one time about 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. | ||
| They can picture it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, why be inhibited? | ||
| Why be inhibited by the reality? | ||
| And I think a lot of people would look and be like, oh, no shit. | ||
| You could do that with a scalpel. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they love that fact. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But some people don't love that fact. | ||
| Well, we're talking about those little Havalon-type knives. | ||
| When I first saw that, I go, oh, that's genius. | ||
| And then I thought, oh, of course. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| You're surgically cutting up parts of an animal. | ||
| It does make sense. | ||
| But the difference between that is this is a physical act that hasn't taken place yet. | ||
| You're about to do it, and you're going to film it. | ||
| What we're talking about is a historical event. | ||
| And that's where it's a real problem, especially for someone who's... | ||
| I mean, I'm kind of a martial arts historian. | ||
| You asked me about the UFC. I know a lot. | ||
| You can't lie to me. | ||
| You can't say that Mark Schultz fought some Russian guy. | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| That is just a producer who thinks, ah, people won't know. | ||
| People won't know. | ||
| Just do it anyway. | ||
| That's some guy's ego. | ||
| Well, no, no, Gary. | ||
| Greasy-fingered motherfucker who wants to come in and ruin something because he has his own ideas of how to put his little touch in it. | ||
| He's like, I turned it into the white guy. | ||
| He's sitting in the movie theater. | ||
| This was my idea. | ||
| They wanted to give it a black guy from Canada wearing a gi. | ||
| That's who he was. | ||
| Big Daddy Goodrich is from Toronto. | ||
| I mean, Big Daddy Goodrich is famous. | ||
| That's why this is crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, Mark Schultz was famous, too. | ||
| Like, this was the first time an 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. | ||
| He was the one played by not Mark Ruffalo. | ||
| Mark Ruffalo is the older brother. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Mark Ruffalo is the older brother. | ||
| And the older brother, Dave Schultz, would get murdered by this DuPont guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a crazy story. | ||
| Are you familiar with the Charlton Heston movie, I believe it was from 1980, called The Mountain Men? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a period piece about free trappers, like beaver trappers. | ||
| Based on real humans? | ||
| Just informed by a hodgepodge of actual events. | ||
| So there's an element in there, a very detailed element stolen from John Coulter's life, an event that's come to be known as Coulter's Run. | ||
| There's some characters that are these amalgams of different people who kind of drifted in and out of that time in the 1830s and 1840s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There it is. | |
| They do a great job with costumes, but they're beaver trappers. | ||
| The trapping scenes are laughably bad. | ||
| And you wonder why they didn't just bring someone in to have them... | ||
| It would have been less effort to have the beaver sets they're making make sense. | ||
| But they're like, someone out there just doesn't care. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| I had a conversation once. | ||
| It's also one of those movies where all the Native Americans are, well, except for the heroine, the Native Americans are blundering idiots. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What year was this? | ||
| I believe it was made in 1980. Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Yeah, I had a conversation once when I was just starting to get into acting. | ||
| I think maybe I 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. | ||
| What was the cop movie Chuck Norris did? | ||
| Lone Wolf McQuaid? | ||
| No, that was the one we fought, David Carradine. | ||
| Is that how he fights? | ||
| They killed his dog and then he got pissed. | ||
| That was pushing it too far. | ||
| There was one movie with it where Chuck Norris did... | ||
| God, it's not the Thin Blue Line, is it? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Code of Silence. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That was a movie where it was a real movie. | ||
| It wasn't just a karate movie. | ||
| It was a real movie. | ||
| It was probably 1980 as well. | ||
| What year was that movie? | ||
| Here he is in a bar next to... | ||
| This speaks to you, Joe, because he's by a pool table getting ready to karate fight. | ||
| 85? | ||
| Yeah, I was... | ||
| He's got everything you like. | ||
| It wasn't too outrageous. | ||
| It was like he was really fighting. | ||
| It made sense. | ||
| You could see that happening. | ||
| Maybe that's not the best example. | ||
| You know who was a good example, as weird as it sounds? | ||
| Steven Seagal's early movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Above the law. | ||
| A lot of people hate saying that. | ||
| I fucking loved Above the Law. | ||
| That Steven Seagal movie, when he fucked people up in a bar, like, you believed it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm like, he's not doing jumping, spinning wheel kicks or anything like that. | ||
| He's cracking people over the head with pool cues and breaking their arms. | ||
| It's like, all that stuff, like, okay, I buy that. | ||
| I buy that. | ||
| I would someday like you to do an analysis, a sort of director's cut style analysis of the fight scene at the end of Cannonball Run. | ||
| LAUGHTER This is Steven Seagal walking in. | ||
| Dude, this was back when he was lean and thin. | ||
| I met him in a catfish joint in Oxford, Mississippi. | ||
| A catfish place? | ||
| Yeah, he was there getting fried catfish. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Do you remember when he was a real cop on a television show? | ||
| People got mouthy with him in this movie and it's not a good move. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bang! | |
| He starts fucking people up. | ||
| See that? | ||
| Look at that elbow. | ||
| That upward elbow. | ||
| 100% legit. | ||
| 100% real move that you see in Muay Thai all the time. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| Kevin Ross could be doing that right now. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Bam! | ||
| That's 100% legit. | ||
| Knee to the face. | ||
| All legit. | ||
| That stuff makes sense. | ||
| Look, this guy's going to swing. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| All this shit. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| This is Steven Seagal at his best. | ||
| These are like legit, believable fight scenes. | ||
| Oh, now he's going to get... | ||
| But watch this. | ||
| Steven Seagal, people talk a lot of shit about him, but Steven Seagal was a legit Aikido master. | ||
| He was one of the first, if not the first American to teach at a dojo in Japan. | ||
| He taught Aikido. | ||
| He was 100% legit. | ||
| When I met him, he was wearing some kind of robe. | ||
| He lost the script somewhere along the line. | ||
| But back then, during this movie, man, I fucking loved that guy. | ||
| And I remember bringing him up in the meeting. | ||
| And I'm bringing this scene up. | ||
| And I'm like, that's what I want to see. | ||
| I don't want to see shit that I know won't work. | ||
| And they weren't into it. | ||
| And they were like, people don't know that. | ||
| I go, but I know that. | ||
| And he goes, yeah, but how many people are you, like, you are out there. | ||
| I go, but that movie's a successful movie. | ||
| And the guy got upset at me. | ||
| He just didn't want to hear me criticizing his perspective on something that I wasn't an actual expert in. | ||
| Has GQ asked you to do one of those breakdowns? | ||
| Would you? | ||
| Of a karate scene in a movie? | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| I've done the breakdown where you watch all the hunting scenes. | ||
| Oh, have you done that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's fun. | ||
| I'd probably do that without GQ. I don't want them in the mix. | ||
| You don't need them in there? | ||
| Why would I want anybody else in there? | ||
| Then you have a producer. | ||
| Then you have a big organization behind you. | ||
| When you could just do it here. | ||
| You could just spark up a joint and go, yeah, all right. | ||
| Let's put out Lone Wolf McQueen. | ||
| Well, because they kind of like pull the... | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| I had fun... | ||
| They get the rights to things, maybe? | ||
| Well, they kind of put it on. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They pulled all... | ||
| And I actually pointed out a bunch of hunting scenes and movies for them. | ||
| And then they did their homework and found a bunch more. | ||
| And they just play hunting scenes for movies. | ||
| Cameron Haynes did that with archery and movies. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| And you know what he said to me? | ||
| He said, the best is that movie Brave. | ||
| That animated movie, Brave, he's like, the girl's form is excellent. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She does everything perfect. | ||
| Because it's animated, you don't have to teach an actor to do it. | ||
| You could just mimic a professional archer doing it. | ||
| See if you can find the archery scene in Brave. | ||
| Well, whether you do it with them or not, I feel like a good fight scene breakdown would be like a gift to society. | ||
| Eh, maybe. | ||
| But that scene in Above the Law, that's all legit. | ||
| Maybe not the flipping the guy on the ground that was holding the gun. | ||
| Let me see if we can see the girl pull the bow back. | ||
| Would it be a good parody? | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| Watch her. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Her technique. | ||
| I mean, even the way she's holding the bow, it looks like a real human. | ||
| Oh, she's got some corset that's holding her back. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| I mean, her technique looks perfect. | ||
| Oh, they must have. | ||
| Look. | ||
| I mean, that looks perfect. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| Looks good. | ||
| What I wanted to do... | ||
| So this franchise, this GQ franchise, it's called The Breakdown. | ||
| I wanted to do a parody of The Breakdown where an expert comes in and analyzes diarrhea scenes from movies. | ||
| LAUGHTER Well, that would never actually happen because... | ||
| Like the scene from, what was the movie? | ||
| Yeah, Dumb and Dumber was a good one. | ||
| Yeah, well, that volume of excrement would never actually be generated by a human of that size. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You'd be dead. | |
| You'd be dead. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's something about people, when you get too many people, too many minds, too much influence, you know, just get involved in things. | ||
| That point was the thing that, oh, the toilet scene? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| I remember being really inspired by that. | ||
| That's what should happen, right? | ||
| Yeah, but that's like the amount of people that are going to go read a book. | ||
| So there you put a thing out that you feel is of influence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A fraction of a fraction of what is going to hear you talk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's not even two people in the conversation about who you're going to talk to. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird. | ||
| You've reduced it. | ||
| You've reduced it down to a single point. | ||
| But people know what to expect. | ||
| Like people that listen to the show, like I'm... | ||
| My ideas evolve. | ||
| I get interested in new things. | ||
| But I'm always me. | ||
| I'm not a product. | ||
| I'm not a thing that someone has concocted. | ||
| There's certain people that are on late night television where you hear them talk. | ||
| You go, man, I want to get that guy drunk. | ||
| I want to know what that guy's really like. | ||
| I don't buy it. | ||
| With me, if you like me or don't like me, you know exactly what I am. | ||
| And also, there's not a lot of men that are allowed to just be like a regular man on TV anymore. | ||
| Or on anything. | ||
| What are they supposed to be like? | ||
| You gotta be some fucking half-neutered thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| You know, you have to... | ||
| All evidence of toxic masculinity must be removed from the way you think and behave. | ||
| You can't be like a guy would be if he's just hanging out with his friends. | ||
| Like, that's problematic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's problematic to distribute mainstream. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's a lot of people like me out there. | ||
| To your credit... | ||
| I think that you're very, very open about the evolution of your thought, and you're very open about ideas that you're not trying on, but you're open about your thought process. | ||
| Meaning that you'll voice something and do a good job of voicing that you're aware that there's probably more to the story. | ||
| Well, I'm not married to my ideas. | ||
| I think that's important, too. | ||
| I think there's like a subtext there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| Which is a little bit important. | ||
| When people are always mad about something Trump said. | ||
| Like, you go to the New York Times, you read, like, Trump said this horrible thing. | ||
| And then you go and find the video. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like, for instance, I remember when everybody's all worked up because Trump referred to Pompeo as the Secretary of the Deep State, which I thought was funny. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everybody's all angry about it. | ||
| You know, this magnitude... | ||
| Then you go watch the video. | ||
| I'm like, the dude's making a joke. | ||
| He's funny. | ||
| It was like everything about the interaction was a joke. | ||
| That was in the interview with CBS. The same sort of thing. | ||
| The interview with CBS, the woman brought up a thing. | ||
| He's like, that's not what I said. | ||
| What I said was a joke. | ||
| I was joking. | ||
| I said it like this. | ||
| I'm joking. | ||
| I'm being sarcastic. | ||
| I'm being silly. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, he was saying that, explaining to her, like, you're saying it in a different way than I said it. | ||
| That's not how I said it. | ||
| Like, she was trying to say a thing in her words, like, you said, and she says it this way. | ||
| He's like, that's not what I said. | ||
| I said it like this. | ||
| And he says it the way he said it, and you go, oh, he's fucking around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they're trying to distort what he said because it makes a better narrative, the narrative that he's an asshole. | ||
| I could go on all 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. | ||
| He's an awesome troll. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the ways he got so much attention during the 2016 election. | ||
| He would say outrageous shit knowing that the media was going to complain about it, and they were just giving him free advertising. | ||
| Because he was saying things you're not supposed to say when you're running for president. | ||
| And when he was saying it, they're like, this is outrageous. | ||
| And they thought they were sinking him. | ||
| They're like, we're going to show what a bad person he is. | ||
| And people would watch him say it, and they'd start laughing. | ||
| He played him for fools, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He played him for fools. | |
| They gave him free advertising. | ||
| We're in a weird place for people that might listen to this someday. | ||
| No one knows who the president is right now. | ||
| The election went on last night, but it hasn't been decided, and it might not be decided for three or four days. | ||
| They think that Pennsylvania is the big one, and they don't know who's going to win Pennsylvania. | ||
| And if he wins Pennsylvania, apparently he wins. | ||
| Maybe if he wins one other state in Pennsylvania, he wins. | ||
| But if he loses Pennsylvania, Biden wins. | ||
| And it could be real weird. | ||
| Do you think you'll run for president someday? | ||
| Me? | ||
| No fucking chance. | ||
| That's a terrible job. | ||
| It seems like they just distort who you are. | ||
| They push a narrative. | ||
| They say things about you that are horrible. | ||
| They do ads where they're just trying to break down your character. | ||
| And it depends on who the establishment is for or against. | ||
| I mean, what they're doing with Biden has been extraordinarily weird. | ||
| Where they're ignoring all of his gaffes. | ||
| They're ignoring all of these real legitimate... | ||
| I don't think you can say they're ignoring his gaffes. | ||
| I mean, you can go watch gaffe compilations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but not on CBS, not on NBC, not on CNN. Not his allies. | |
| Look, anybody who is in the news is not in the news. | ||
| You're in the business of distributing the news that you want people to see. | ||
| You don't want people to see him thinking he's running for Senate. | ||
| He's like, well, the reason why I'm running for senator! | ||
| You don't want to hear that. | ||
| So they don't show it. | ||
| They take away all the times he forgets what he's talking about. | ||
| There's no thing that they've ever had on CNN where they have a legitimate conversation on whether or not he can hang in there for four years. | ||
| Forget about eight. | ||
| How much cognitive decline has this man experienced? | ||
| You don't feel that they discuss that. | ||
| Not on CNN. No. | ||
| No, they haven't. | ||
| They avoid it like the plague. | ||
| They avoided the Hunter Biden emails. | ||
| They avoided all that. | ||
| They avoid so much. | ||
| They avoid so many different things that would be detrimental to him because in 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. | ||
| Here's Joe Biden over and over and over again. | ||
| You don't vote for me. | ||
| You ain't black. | ||
| All that crazy stuff. | ||
| They're not highlighting all that. | ||
| Super Thursday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a madman. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's weird, but it shows you that the news is not just the news. | ||
| It's the news for the left and the news for the right. | ||
| You don't just get some unbiased source. | ||
| I think that people who aren't on that are... | ||
| Either feigning ignorance. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it's never been this obvious, where they're just ignoring really hard... | ||
| You don't want someone to be president if they can't think right, right? | ||
| If someone's showing a real, clear sign of cognitive decline, you don't... | ||
| You're supposed to highlight that. | ||
| Like, this is part of the news. | ||
| But they had already picked him to be the guy running for the Democratic Party, and they just decided to just ignore all that shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, like, I read the New York Times. | ||
| Something going on, Jamie? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, so Biden's going to win. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's the part of like... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And this is for which state? | ||
| Any of the states. | ||
| Any of the states. | ||
| Yeah, so the closest ones right now are Nevada, Michigan, and Georgia. | ||
| Wow, look how close they are. | ||
| Oh, dude, they're down to reporting, like, chunks of 3,000 votes. | ||
| It's fucking nuts, man. | ||
| And the Trump administration, I think, has said they already filed a lawsuit to stop the counting in Michigan. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What? | ||
| I don't understand how you... | ||
| Why would you want to stop counting? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| Like, how can you justify the argument that you want to stop counting? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they want to keep counting in Arizona. | ||
| But what's the argument? | ||
| Like... | ||
| I wish I understood. | ||
| What do they mean, stop counting? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So it looks like Arizona's lost. | ||
| 51% to 47%. | ||
| That's a big gap. | ||
| 100,000 left. | ||
| 100,000 gap. | ||
| Well, it's only 84. So they have 16% of the possible vote out there. | ||
| Yeah, but what's pissing off Trump, though, is what's pissing off his team is that what they're counting are mail-ins. | ||
| And mail-ins are... | ||
| Democrats are way more likely to vote mail-in. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So that's like... | ||
| I'm sure I'm telling you something you already know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's his gripe about these things that are laying around. | ||
| And I think that he thinks they're just going to start making them up. | ||
| He tweeted earlier, like, they keep finding Biden votes in all these states. | ||
| Yeah, he's like, someone's going to find 4,000 Biden votes somewhere. | ||
| Which, I don't know. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They also made weird rules in some states where the signature on the envelope does not have to match the actual person's signature. | ||
| Like, when you sign the envelope for a mail-in ballot. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I know. | ||
| My midterm ballot got thrown away. | ||
| Because it didn't look like your signature? | ||
| I got a note. | ||
| I was out of town. | ||
| I got a call. | ||
| There was a problem with my ballot. | ||
| By the time I got back, it was over, and I didn't get counted. | ||
| And did they say why? | ||
| Yeah, it was like I didn't sign and date it right, or didn't sign and date where I was supposed to sign and date. | ||
| I was quite pleased with democracy, the fact that they tried to call me to rectify the situation. | ||
| I would have had to do a bunch of stuff, and I think they probably knew there's no way I had enough time to do everything I needed to do. | ||
| But the fact that some dude would place a call to be like, bro, your vote's not counting. | ||
| You call back, or you've got to do X, Y, and Z in a hurry to get your vote in, and I missed. | ||
| Biden wins Wisconsin. | ||
| Fox News projects limiting Trump's chances of reaching 270 electoral votes. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So if Biden won Wisconsin, Wisconsin's in. | ||
| So it's kind of over, right? | ||
| Man, I just lost 300 bucks. | ||
| It's interesting that Arizona went blue. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I mean, California always goes blue. | ||
| Oregon always goes blue. | ||
| That all makes sense. | ||
| Washington, that makes sense. | ||
| You know what's funny that what's not happening yet is when we set this date, Joe, we sat here and talked about that America would be on fire as we recorded this. | ||
| I think they're waiting to find out what the results are, and then they light the fuse. | ||
| They can't start the fire yet. | ||
| They might have won, like, both sides. | ||
| You know, like, the Trump people, they're like, I'm not sure if I'm mad yet. | ||
| And then, you know, the Biden people, oh, has he won? | ||
| What's happening here? | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| Once it's decided, once it goes to court, that's going to be a shit show. | ||
| Isn't it funny, like, the different way, the different camps, if there is, like, a court and a dispute, the different camps, like, that the one impulse is to mount a giant flag on your truck. | ||
| And get other dudes in trucks to roar around. | ||
| But that's only the Trump people. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's one camp. | ||
| One camp would be, I have a friend who has a student who has a husband in the military and he described these rolling motorcades as vanilla ices. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Why Vanilla Isis? | ||
| Because he served and it reminded him of the Isis flags in the back of trucks. | ||
| Vanilla Isis. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That was his depiction of it. | ||
| But the other camp is that you... | ||
| In the other camp, when you're mad, you march downtown. | ||
| It's like the two sort of playbooks are just very different. | ||
| Yeah, one's in a car, one's marching. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One's like a display. | ||
| I don't think that anyone... | ||
| No one that's going to get mad about the Biden... | ||
| No Biden person will put a big Biden flag on their truck and drive aggressively on a highway. | ||
| No. | ||
| Here's my take on it. | ||
| And Trump people aren't going to go downtown. | ||
| No, they're not going to march. | ||
| Not without their cars. | ||
| I wonder what side is in worse shape to march. | ||
| The Biden people, the Trump people, who would have worse backs and fucked up knees? | ||
| Oh, that's impossible to say. | ||
| Right now, talking about that responsibility thing, man. | ||
| I feel like you probably don't feel this. | ||
| I, right now, am kind of grieving for America a little bit. | ||
| Not about how the election might twist, but I'm grieving for America about if the polarization is true. | ||
| And I sometimes question whether it's true or not. | ||
| Because when I go out, I just have like... | ||
| I've been talking about this all the time lately. | ||
| When I go out about in my community and elsewhere, sitting here right now, whatever, I have very positive interactions with my fellow Americans. | ||
| When I go to the gas station and go in to buy some shit, it's like I come away happy. | ||
| That's most people. | ||
| When I go talk to my neighbors, I legitimately, my neighbors around me, I have no idea who they're voting for. | ||
| I really don't know. | ||
| I kind of actually don't care. | ||
| When I go and talk to my neighbors... | ||
| There's like a love, right? | ||
| But then all I hear about is the ripping apart. | ||
| And I'm like, either I'm in the dark, and it's ripping apart, and I'm like too stupid to notice it. | ||
| But I do... | ||
| I'm a little scared. | ||
| I'm a little scared as well. | ||
| Did you watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix? | ||
| We've been in our old people with kids way watching it in 15 minute increments. | ||
| We have a TV in our bedroom but now and then when I'm home we watch 15 minutes of it on a cell phone. | ||
| I have no idea why. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if the division and hatred Is only digital. | ||
| But it spills out, obviously. | ||
| It does spill out into the real world. | ||
| No, you're correct. | ||
| You look at Portland, you look at Seattle. | ||
| You lived in Seattle for a while. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Could you ever have imagined that they would take over a six-block area of Seattle? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You really did? | ||
| You thought they could? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And this is pre-COVID when you were living there. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, being witness to that and hearing the amount of griping about that, and then seeing it, no, I'm not like, wow. | ||
| No, it felt very, like, almost not at all surprising that it happened. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I think there's places in this country that have legitimate, almost unfixable issues with homeless people. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Los Angeles is not one of them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I've got input on all kinds of things, but I'm low on input on that. | ||
| I have zero. | ||
| Our company, we did a river access park cleanup, went and picked up all kinds of garbage at a river access near where we work. | ||
| There was a homeless encampment there in the woods at the river access. | ||
| I remember being very... | ||
| I was kind of scared. | ||
| Because I was like, it's super rude to go and pick up garbage and sort of act like there aren't people camp there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And not acknowledge these human beings like you would. | ||
| If there was people that were fishing or people that were having a picnic, you would engage. | ||
| So I'm like, why do I feel like chicken shit about engaging? | ||
| So then I go up and guys, I know it's going to seem like we're kind of like up in your business. | ||
| We're doing a cleanup project. | ||
| Just bagging up garbage and hauling away. | ||
| Dude's like, hey, give us a couple bags. | ||
| So, they take some bags, fill up some garbage, set it on the trail, we haul it away. | ||
| And, like, for a week I've been, like, plotting how I'm gonna... | ||
| And it was easy. | ||
| It's just like, it was just... | ||
| Yeah, we have this... | ||
| It was like, it was like he... | ||
| I remember there was this writer, Jeff Dyer, he wrote this book, Yoga, for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. | ||
| Jeff Dyer. | ||
| He was a humorist. | ||
| I remember he had this essay he wrote about struggling with his desire to witness great poverty when he would travel. | ||
| He's a professional traveler, you know, and you'd go to India and he would, he struggled with why do I want to go? | ||
| Like, is it bad? | ||
| Like, what is it that I want to go witness? | ||
| Behold the spectacle of poverty. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Instead of like most people, don't put that in their travel itinerary. | ||
| So he would specifically do that on purpose? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He talks about it in his book. | ||
| Why do I like that? | ||
| It's definitely a perspective changer, right? | ||
| You start thinking you have problems and you go see people with real problems. | ||
| You're like, whoa, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But homeless people in this country, it used to be a different thing. | ||
| It used to be all people that were drug addicts or all people that were mentally ill. | ||
| But I think with COVID, you've got people that just had nowhere else to go. | ||
| There's a lot of people that they might be homeless right now, but they don't want to be. | ||
| They just don't know what to do. | ||
| I think that number is bigger than it's ever been before. | ||
| And that's what makes it even scarier. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why something like universal basic income is interesting to me. | ||
| I'm not interested in letting the government take our taxes and do things to... | ||
| You don't get a receipt for where your taxes go. | ||
| You don't know how much your taxes are going to... | ||
| Frivolous things or things that don't make any sense or things you don't agree with. | ||
| But if I knew that my taxes were going to very specific things that I agree with, I wouldn't have a problem paying more taxes. | ||
| You remember Ross Perot? | ||
| He used to make those little charts showing where your money went. | ||
| Scared the shit out of everybody. | ||
| He's the reason why Bush didn't win a second term, Herbert Walker Bush. | ||
| That was the first time, unless Trump loses, in modern history where a president didn't win a second term. | ||
| The first time, well, Carter, and then Herbert Walker Bush. | ||
| Because they saw that Ross Perot thing. | ||
| He bought a half hour of regular television back when there was no internet. | ||
| It's like, I'm going to show you what's going on here. | ||
| Here, look at this chart. | ||
| This is where your goddamn money goes. | ||
| And people were like, what the fuck? | ||
| He opened up a lot of people's eyes to what the IRS is and where your money goes and why it's dirty. | ||
| Scare the shit out of people. | ||
| It's a weird time to be alive, Steve. | ||
| I'm worried about the future of this country, too. | ||
| I'm worried about it in a way that I've never been worried before. | ||
| Yeah, I just like America so much. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's like, how can you be proud of that? | ||
| You were just born there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| I want to know if this is true. | ||
| Because someone was saying that Google and Facebook both removed the ability to have an American flag emoji. | ||
| That cannot be true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just read it. | ||
| Just Google that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Just Google that. | ||
| Google and Facebook remove the ability to have an American flag emoji. | ||
| Maybe it was Twitter. | ||
| Like you put a series of American flags and thumbs up? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Can't do that anymore? | ||
| I don't do emojis. | ||
| I made a decision a long time ago. | ||
| I literally don't know if it's true. | ||
| I read it and I was like, what? | ||
| I was running out the door. | ||
| I was like, what? | ||
| Um... | ||
| 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 mean, it's an amazing place to be. | ||
| I had a conversation... | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| I was going to say, I just think right now people are concentrating only on the negative aspects of it. | ||
| I had a conversation recently with someone who'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. | ||
| I'm like, fucking you don't feel any patriotism! | ||
| Dude! | ||
| You can't really do anything anywhere else. | ||
| You've hacked on the government the whole time and built a successful business and you don't think there's a little magic in that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To be in a place where that can go down? | ||
| That's pretty cool. | ||
| The government's not ideal. | ||
| No, but it's pretty cool to be able to... | ||
| I just feel like you'd be like, man, this place is so great. | ||
| I hacked on the government my whole career and made a bunch of money. | ||
| And no one shows up to beat me up. | ||
| If you did that in China, you'd be dead. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was Yeah, I think that that's a very... | ||
| 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. | ||
| We need multiple parties. | ||
| That it doesn't just happen. | ||
| It doesn't have to fall into this crazy system of this collection of thoughts and this other collection of thoughts, and you pick between those two. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's all you got. | ||
| I thought that any effort you could lend to the idea of a third seat at the table Would, however, you know, you're pissing into the wind. | ||
| Still, man. | ||
| Yeah, you have those two schools of thought and these two schools of thought are both funded by the same fucking people. | ||
| I mean, that's what's hilarious about it all. | ||
| They're all funded by gigantic businesses. | ||
| It's not ideal. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| And the idea of a third party candidate gets mocked. | ||
| I mean, all the way back to Ross Perot. | ||
| He's about as close as anybody has come. | ||
| He at least took some votes away from... | ||
| I don't think Gary Johnson... | ||
| I voted for him too. | ||
| Gary Johnson didn't put a dent in it. | ||
| He barely had a chance. | ||
| And I don't think Joe did either. | ||
| But it's one of those things where you got to look at it and go, do you agree with this system? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you just keep going? | ||
| Keep going with it every four years? | ||
| Well, four years is eight, and then 12, and then next thing you know, you're dead. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| You only get 100 if you're real lucky. | ||
| And you're not even voting for most of those. | ||
| When you get to the end, what is... | ||
| When do you step up? | ||
| When do you say, I don't want to participate in this ridiculous duopoly anymore? | ||
| Because that's what it is. | ||
| And they're both in cahoots with some branch of the media. | ||
| It's gross. | ||
| And then there's so much money involved. | ||
| And so many people are saddling up to the table and influencing them and whispering in their ear. | ||
| They're making all these compromising deals. | ||
| I like that you think about how long you have left on the planet. | ||
| I think you should. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I wake up, I try to think about that every day. | ||
| You know, all like politicians, they'll enter our office and I'll make a clock set for like four years or whatever, and it counts down. | ||
| I need to get one of those. | ||
| For life? | ||
| For like roughly my life expectancy, and it counts down backwards. | ||
| Well, don't you think that your life expectancy, I mean, you are one of the few people that I know that has almost been killed by a grizzly bear. | ||
| Well, yeah, well... | ||
| You had a real shot. | ||
| In a situation, like in a brush, yeah. | ||
| A real shot. | ||
| Something enough where it was scary enough that I now, now that I've studied it a fair bit, that I now know I had a mental... | ||
| I had a... | ||
| I had a near-death experience mental experience, even though I was unharmed. | ||
| But it jarred my brain. | ||
| So hard. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But don't you think that... | ||
| Is joggle the word? | ||
| It is now. | ||
| Don't you think that when you're in contact with an animal that's that large, I mean, a predatory animal that's... | ||
| How big was it? | ||
| 10 feet? | ||
| How big was that grizzly? | ||
| Easily? | ||
| Yeah, I don't want to... | ||
| Enormous. | ||
| Like, it was like... | ||
| Struck all of us, and we've looked at a lot of bears as being like, you know, a mature brown bear. | ||
| Okay, so... | ||
| Mature Kodiak brown bear. | ||
| Yeah, that's what we wanted to talk about. | ||
| Talk about where you were at, Afognak Island, which is a place that has enormous bears. | ||
| That whole part of the world is known for some of the largest brown bears on Earth. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's separated from Kodiak by a narrow strait. | ||
| So the Kodiak brown bear being the world's biggest bear, it was a neighboring island. | ||
| But that specific specimen, I don't know, a mature animal. | ||
| Just huge. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| Just huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Are you familiar with the term playing possum? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| So our understanding of opossums now is that they're not playing. | ||
| They conk out, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Stress. | ||
| He's not playing dead. | ||
| He hits such a stress level that he shuts off. | ||
| I'm embarrassed to admit, but I think it's instructive to point out, that I was playing possum in that moment, and I don't mean playing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It possumed me out. | ||
| Let's tell everybody who doesn't know the story. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So, real quick. | ||
| Fognac Island. | ||
| Yeah, originally we've been yapping a long time. | ||
| But we had... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just 18 inches from my head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| And I was facing away, so I was the last one to see it. | ||
| Janus, who you know, he had a pistol. | ||
| He had bear spray, but he hit it in the head with a pair of black diamond trekking poles. | ||
| He had sat down. | ||
| He's got spray and set his pistol on his pack. | ||
| But then when I talk about playing possum and all the shit that happens to you, his instinct is to smack it with a track and pull. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You spend all your time thinking about how you're going to handle this, that, and the other thing. | ||
| Um, and, uh, sometimes it's disappointing that you don't handle stress that well, you I don't know where I went. | ||
| One of our guys got run over by a bear and rode it down the hill. | ||
| At that moment, I snapped out of whatever I was in. | ||
| But it shut me down bad. | ||
| I even noticed there's a thing that happens to people when they get really cold. | ||
| They enter a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy mentality when you start to get cold. | ||
| As you start to get really cold, where you could be in a hypothermic situation, people stop doing the obvious things that you would do to get warm. | ||
| And as aware of that as I am, as many times as I've experienced that, I still see it happen to me. | ||
| I still have to snap myself out of it. | ||
| You're getting cold. | ||
| You're getting lethargic. | ||
| You're getting cold. | ||
| More lethargic. | ||
| The cold's getting worse. | ||
| And I have to be like, you can step in right now and stop this. | ||
| It still doesn't come naturally. | ||
| When you talk to people who train for this kind of stuff, they have to train in a very realistic environment. | ||
| They have to train to keep your head and just make good decisions. | ||
| If you walk into an active car crash scene and there's a severed hand laying on the ground, some people are just going to see that hand. | ||
| And they're not going to see anything else. | ||
| Some people are just going to see chaos and they're not going to focus on any particular thing. | ||
| But it's like the person can come in, see the hands, see everything around them, assess all that. | ||
| It's just from exposure to that super traumatic stuff. | ||
| Not that getting cold is traumatic, but when I look at how I respond to things, I do catch that there's a mentality to practice and learn. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| It's understandable that something like a bear attack would trigger senses and trigger a response that you're just not conditioned for. | ||
| I don't know how you'd ever get conditioned to a bear attack. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| On that same island, these dudes, at the same island, there were some guys, the same island, I think it was later that same year. | ||
| Some operatives, some military guys happened to be hunting there. | ||
| They got attacked by a bear and killed it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| One of them got messed up bad, but he killed it. | ||
| I'm like, why'd he kill it and I didn't? | ||
| Well, maybe they had their gun out, right? | ||
| You were in a weird situation, too, because if you guys were relaxed eating lunch... | ||
| Your guard's down. | ||
| You're sitting there chewing on a sandwich. | ||
| I always laugh because you know I was in the middle of saying... | ||
| What? | ||
| Like, I was in the middle of a sentence. | ||
| I'll never forget because someone was laughing about why... | ||
| We were putting some sandwiches together and someone was laughing about why my sandwich looked so much nicer than someone else's sandwich. | ||
| And I said, if you want... | ||
| I was in the middle of saying, if you want a sandwich like this, get your own fucking TV show. | ||
| But... | ||
| I was never able to finish the sentence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| But I know I was in the middle of saying that when all of a sudden the people around me erupted off the ground as though like a landmine had gone off underneath us. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Because they saw it and I didn't see it. | ||
| I was looking the other way. | ||
| And it came in running. | ||
| Oh, just... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was scary, man. | ||
| And I've had a fair bit of exposure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You, yeah, you've been exposed to more than 99.999% of the population. | ||
| And for it to rattle you like that. | ||
| It was disappointing, man. | ||
| Because we're always talking about, I'm going to do this and I'll do that. | ||
| And we're always like, yeah, 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. | ||
| It's like all this, like, bullshit, you know? | ||
| And all of a sudden it, like, hits and, like... | ||
| You know, swat it with a track and pull. | ||
| I've only seen one grizzly ever in the wild, up close, and it wasn't a big one. | ||
| It was like a six-foot bear. | ||
| But it looked at me in a way that another bear has never looked at me before. | ||
| I've seen black bears. | ||
| Black bears look at you like, what are you? | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Can I walk by you? | ||
| Like, black bears look at people in a weird way. | ||
| Yeah, they're like denizens of the underbrush, man. | ||
| The grizzly looked at me like this. | ||
| Just locked on me. | ||
| And I was like, oh, shit. | ||
| Like, that is just a different thing. | ||
| Like, it looked at me like, am I eating you? | ||
| Am I going to eat you? | ||
| Yeah, there's a mindset probably that comes from just not being challenged. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And where I was at in Alberta, you can't hunt them. | ||
| So no one hunts them. | ||
| So they're bigger, they're more fierce, and they have no pressure. | ||
| You can still in Alberta. | ||
| Can you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| B.C. you can't anymore. | ||
| B.C. you can't, but you can hunt grizzlies in Alberta. | ||
| Yeah, I think Alberta. | ||
| I'm not saying everywhere, but I know that they still... | ||
| Some places of Alberta. | ||
| B.C. lost its grizzly hunts. | ||
| This is my friends John and Jen Rivett. | ||
| They were talking about how they're trying to get them to open up some sort of a season because they have a lot of them up there now. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And because the woods are so dense, They don't really know how many of them there are, but there's so many encounters with people. | ||
| Yeah, the B.C. shutdown was very... | ||
| Political, right? | ||
| It was a referendum issue. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird one, right? | ||
| Because the people that are making that decision, they've never had any experience with bears. | ||
| But you talk to the people that actually live in the bush, and they'll tell you, there's a lot of grizzlies up there. | ||
| And then there was also a thriving business and industry of people that were guiding up there. | ||
| And they're constantly in contact with them. | ||
| And they're like, this is not an endangered animal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People that live in proximity to things that are regarded as endangered tend to have a different perspective on the abundance than people who look at it from far away. | ||
| This is a good time to find this out. | ||
| What happened in Colorado with the wolves? | ||
| Oh, I mean, it had to have. | ||
| Did it pass? | ||
| Jamie could pull it up. | ||
| It had to have passed overwhelmingly. | ||
| I know it was on track, too. | ||
| I know that Utah's right to hunt and fish passed by a landslide. | ||
| Constitutional right to hunt and fish. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| 30-some states have it now. | ||
| They're just codifying that you have a right to hunt and fish. | ||
| It doesn't usually have teeth, but it might in the future. | ||
| It would just give a way to challenge laws. | ||
| It's being used right now. | ||
| Montana has a right to hunt and fish. | ||
| You have a constitutional right to hunt and fish. | ||
| Meaning that a state has to 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. | ||
| What's most of your food, right? | ||
| Yeah, I want that to be on the landscape. | ||
| I want there to be abundant amounts of that. | ||
| And I'm not bashful about the fact that my desires there influence my feelings about predator management. | ||
| I don't view it as that bad. | ||
| Wolves kill coyotes. | ||
| Competition. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's see here. | ||
| Pass? | ||
| It says it's too close to call. | ||
| It's up $10,000. | ||
| No, shit! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| To that... | ||
| Wow, man. | ||
| I think they were predicting it was a done deal. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| It's only up $10,000? | ||
| Now that, to be clear, that is just... | ||
| That proposition 114 in Colorado is... | ||
| They're saying restore gravels. | ||
| What it is is making the state fish and game agency will need to craft a plan. | ||
| There's still a lot. | ||
| It's not like that passes and all of a sudden here comes a helicopter full of wolves. | ||
| It doesn't go that way. | ||
| They have to craft a plan and that plan has to be approved? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So I hope it doesn't pass. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Generate a different sort of wolf? | ||
| I mean that wolves that... | ||
| This is a little bit... | ||
| It's a little bit fuzzy, but it's like... | ||
| When 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 showed up on their own. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How many... | |
| Do they know what the numbers are right now? | ||
| Just a handful, but they think they're having pubs. | ||
| So, the architects of this plan in Colorado would say it's just not gonna happen fast enough. | ||
| They want it to happen real fast. | ||
| And do they have a specific reason why they want it to happen faster? | ||
| They would say that wolves are gone because of human manipulation, because of a very intentional plan to shoot them and poison them off the face of the earth. | ||
| This was in the 1800s? | ||
| Yeah, 1800s, 1900s. | ||
| And that is wrong. | ||
| That's a sin against nature, and that we have an obligation to rectify that crime, that sin, and bring this animal back. | ||
| Their enthusiasms don't extend to all sorts of imperiled wildlife, but this is a highly, to them, a very symbolic one. | ||
| It's very symbolic. | ||
| Why they don't have those passions around the black-footed ferret? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I would love black-footed ferrets. | ||
| They don't feel that way about black-footed ferrets. | ||
| But with wolves, it's like... | ||
| It means a lot to them. | ||
| I think also that is... | ||
| Bringing wolves in is a little... | ||
| It's like also... | ||
| No one's ever going to tell you this. | ||
| I have a suspicion that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
that. | |
| I have a personal theory that it's a kind of a way to sort of stick it to it's kind of a way to stick it to cattle producers. | ||
| It's kind of a way to stick There's a little bit of that that infuses it, a little bit of a cultural antagonism. | ||
| That itch isn't scratched with black-footed ferret work like it is with wolves. | ||
| It's just symbolic. | ||
| So are they like vegetarians? | ||
| They want to stick it to cattle producers because they don't want people growing cattle? | ||
| Well, I mean, to speak in very, very general terms, the cattle industry has been historically quite hostile to... | ||
| Environmental groups? | ||
| No, hostile to predators. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Hostile to wolves. | ||
| I'm kind of like, 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. | ||
| So I'm not anti-predator at all, man. | ||
| I enjoy seeing them. | ||
| I enjoy cutting the tracks. | ||
| Do you see them in Montana a lot? | ||
| You know, I got friends that see them a lot. | ||
| I see them only very rarely and glimpses of them. | ||
| But you can go find them quite easily in certain areas. | ||
| Like in Yellowstone National Park, you can go find them. | ||
| People would run, like even before the hunting season started, you'd run into them more. | ||
| I was with Ben O'Brien in BC the first time I met Ben, and we found a carcass of a moose calf that had been torn apart by wolves. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| It was pretty recent. | ||
| It was cool to see. | ||
| The other day, we were looking at a brand new track and a big burn area. | ||
| A brand new track and brand new powder snow and a big burn area. | ||
| And then looking around, you felt like you could see everything. | ||
| And the snow was still falling. | ||
| It was brand new. | ||
| I was like, why can't I see that thing? | ||
| And then I talked to a friend of a friend, and he was in that same area on that same day and had a couple passes and 40 yards of them. | ||
| So, you know, it happens and it doesn't. | ||
| Yeah, they're such an iconic animal for the West. | ||
| I'm glad they're around. | ||
| I'm glad they exist. | ||
| I've only seen one in the wild once, and that was in Alberta, and it was at dusk. | ||
| I barely see it run across the road. | ||
| I was like, is that a fucking dog? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It was one of those things. | ||
| Yeah, I saw a black one this year, and all the time I saw it, I was wondering if that's what I was seeing. | ||
| The whole time I actually spent looking at it, I was like, is that what I'm seeing? | ||
| And then it was gone, and I was like, oh, that's what I saw. | ||
| So I never even appreciated... | ||
| It was so fleeting. | ||
| I never appreciated the moment. | ||
| I spent the whole moment in wondering... | ||
| What I was looking at. | ||
| I had that happen the other day where I was like, oh my god, there's a mountain lion. | ||
| I'm like, oh no, it's not. | ||
| It's the back of a bighorn sheep. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| My head went mountain lion. | ||
| I saw a squirrel once in Alberta and I thought for a whole second that it was a wolf. | ||
| I was like, is that a wolf? | ||
| It's a fucking squirrel. | ||
| I was like, what is wrong with you? | ||
| But it was just like in between trees and dense forest. | ||
| I couldn't tell what the fuck I was looking at. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's weird how the mind plays tricks on you like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why I don't trust you. | ||
| Oh, it's a walrus. | ||
| Oh, no, it's not. | ||
| It's the earth. | ||
| When people talk about seeing Bigfoot, you know, I ran into one lady when I was doing this Bigfoot show up in Mount Rainier, and she was very adamant that she saw a gorilla. | ||
| She saw a big gorilla walking through the woods. | ||
| She's like, I'm looking at it. | ||
| I'm like, that's a gorilla. | ||
| And I remember, like, wow, this lady's so sincere. | ||
| I wonder what she really saw, but... | ||
| Now I'm convinced she saw a black bear that was standing on two feet. | ||
| But I bet in her mind, I'm thinking about me seeing that stupid squirrel, thinking it's a wolf. | ||
| People, your brain plays little tricks on you and then your imagination fills in the blanks. | ||
| There are these online forums. | ||
| People have found three Bigfoots on our TV show. | ||
| Because they don't realize. | ||
| That people are always, like, ducking to get out of a shot. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The biggest thing ever is alive right now. | ||
| And they're just like, yeah. | ||
| T-Rex, man. | ||
| I'm like, are you listening to me? | ||
| The biggest creature ever is now! | ||
| Now! | ||
| They're like, man, if I could only visit the dinosaur... | ||
| Like a shark. | ||
| Imagine if a shark wasn't real. | ||
| But then you could see one. | ||
| Or they thought a shark was extinct. | ||
| Everyone cares about Megalodon. | ||
| They think they might have found a Megalodon. | ||
| Megalodons might still be alive. | ||
| But nobody cares about a Great White. | ||
| That's alive for sure. | ||
| There's a lot of them. | ||
| They fucking breed up in San Francisco. | ||
| Go in the water. | ||
| They find them. | ||
| There's an amazing video of drone footage off of Malibu. | ||
| These guys are surfing. | ||
| And you follow the drone footage just a couple hundred yards from the servers and you see a great white swimming through the water. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just right past these people. | ||
| It's like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| I was looking at this radio tracking shit of a great white on the East Coast. | ||
| And he'd be like hanging around the coast, you know, and also like beelines for Bermuda. | ||
| Hangs around there. | ||
| Beelines back where it came from. | ||
| Just like, yeah, they'll go over a thousand miles over this away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're incredible, man. | ||
| Yeah, they're amazing. | ||
| And they're real. | ||
| And no one gives a shit. | ||
| I mean, they care if they see it. | ||
| If you see it, like, whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where animals are native and non-native, it's such a strange conversation. | ||
| I really enjoyed your episode that you did with Jesse Griffiths where you were a hunting neil guy. | ||
| Texas, where we are now, is a weird place. | ||
| My wife saw an axis deer the other day. | ||
| She's like, near our house. | ||
| She's like, I saw this deer. | ||
| It was like a full-sized deer, but it had spots like a fawn. | ||
| And I go, oh, it's an axis deer. | ||
| She's like, they have those here? | ||
| I'm like, they must. | ||
| They have everything. | ||
| They have. | ||
| We're laughing, driving down the road. | ||
| Like, oh, a zebra. | ||
| It could easily be a zebra. | ||
| No, I'm not kidding. | ||
| Like, we're like, oh, a zebra. | ||
| Yeah, you saw a zebra. | ||
| And not only that, but a free-range zebra. | ||
| Wild zebra. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know that. | ||
| The one I'm talking about, I don't know. | ||
| I would imagine that happens if some amount of them get away here and there. | ||
| Us, it was just wide open, like woods in between houses. | ||
| It was an axis deer. | ||
| The zebra I'm talking about was someone's zebra, but it's still just funny. | ||
| The climate supports it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so these Neil guy, I mean, you know. | ||
| They're from India? | ||
| Is that what it's from? | ||
| An antelope from an Indian subcontinent. | ||
| An antelope species. | ||
| Such a cool looking animal. | ||
| Strange looking. | ||
| Jesse's restaurant here in Austin, man. | ||
| I mean, he serves it. | ||
| Yeah, shout out to Dai Due. | ||
| It's a great place. | ||
| We're going there tonight. | ||
| I doggone him about the name of that all the time. | ||
| But it comes from this... | ||
| He'll have to explain it to you. | ||
| It's Italian for something. | ||
| Yeah, it's like to eat from both the kingdoms. | ||
| He kind of regrets naming his place that, because I was like, I don't know how to pronounce it. | ||
| But it's like, eat from the kingdom of the land and kingdom. | ||
| It's some portion of this sort of like proverb-y thing, saying like, eat from the land, eat from the sea. | ||
| Which isn't bad advice. | ||
| Is he fully open now? | ||
| Because when I went there, he just had the patio. | ||
| I don't believe so. | ||
| I believe it's some kind of limited situation. | ||
| Austin's interesting. | ||
| Some places are just open. | ||
| Just wear a mask, come on in. | ||
| And then other places, like his place, is a little bit more protective. | ||
| Like yourself, he's an exceedingly generous person. | ||
| Jesse is. | ||
| Remember we were talking all that shit about America? | ||
| Good American. | ||
| Yeah, he seems like a real nice guy. | ||
| I've only met him once, but his restaurant's amazing. | ||
| What does Neil Guy taste like? | ||
| You know, it's kind of funny the way describing Wild Game goes. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| It was described to me by people who are down there. | ||
| We were on a famous ranch called Eteria. | ||
| It's very limited access, but just through social connections and things, we're able to hunt on this property that doesn't get hunted very heavily. | ||
| The people there that have grown up on that property, grown up in cattle ranching, they view it as... | ||
| They view it as superior to beef. | ||
| Meaning like, Neil guy are for eating, cattle are for selling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Is the way, someone explained it. | ||
| I mean, because there's like a great monetary value, there's like a market for cattle. | ||
| There's a market for Neil guy too, but it's different and more complicated. | ||
| But it was like, this is what we eat. | ||
| We eat the Neil guy. | ||
| We sell the cattle. | ||
| It's approachable, mild, reminiscent of beef. | ||
| It's very, very popular. | ||
| There's a handful of things in the U.S. where... | ||
| We have filmed and talked about Sika deer a lot in Maryland or Delmarva Peninsula. | ||
| People in those areas, as popular as white-tailed deer are, it's like America's deer, America's meat. | ||
| People in those areas are like, screw that, man, I'm eating Sika deer. | ||
| And with people that have exposure to axis deer feel that way, and people that have exposure to neil guy are like, that's my animal. | ||
| So it's in that collection of... | ||
| Yeah, they're insane, man. | ||
| I got that Hyde Tanned by a guy here in Austin who ran the process for me. | ||
| Got it tanned and my daughter wanted it for her bedroom and there was some kind of custody battle that wound up in my boy's bedroom. | ||
| Look at that picture. | ||
| That looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book. | ||
| That doesn't look like a real animal. | ||
| The one on the right? | ||
| The big picture? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's amazing. | |
| No, they're crazy, man. | ||
| Aren't there vitals in a weird place too? | ||
| Very far forward. | ||
| So you almost... | ||
| Low and forward. | ||
| And how far do the lungs go back? | ||
| What do you mean the limbs go back? | ||
| Lungs? | ||
| Oh, lungs! | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| Not as far as if you're accustomed to... | ||
| Not as far back as if you're accustomed to deer. | ||
| You gotta aim weirdly forward and weirdly low. | ||
| I shot one and shot the top of the heart off it. | ||
| But I was aiming... | ||
| I was under instruction from a person. | ||
| A guide that we were with. | ||
| And he was, like, imploring me, like, you have to listen to me. | ||
| Like, it has to go this way or you'll lose that thing in the brush. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He said, when they make it into the brush, man, you get a sinking feeling. | ||
| They, like, don't go down easy. | ||
| I shot it twice. | ||
| He's like, shoot it again, shoot it again. | ||
| I'm like, really? | ||
| I feel like I shot it again. | ||
| But they're worried about losing the strong, strong animals. | ||
| But, yeah, man, they run. | ||
| Most of them are on private land. | ||
| There are public hunting opportunities for them. | ||
| Is that an animal that gets hunted by tigers in its natural environment? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| But I have no, I have zero expertise on that. | ||
| That's the thing about axis deer, apparently, was explained to me, that they do, in their natural habitat, they do get hunted by tigers. | ||
| So they're so fucking fast. | ||
| They're equipped to deal with it. | ||
| Have you hunted Axis? | ||
| Yeah, I have, yeah. | ||
| How fast are they? | ||
| Fast. | ||
| They're so fast. | ||
| But I haven't hunted them with a bow where it really comes to haunt you. | ||
| Leopards prey. | ||
| Oh, leopards. | ||
| Yeah, leopards prey. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now you look like, why does he need to be that? | ||
| Like, he doesn't have any reason to be that fast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I gotta get a hold of Dan Flores again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I had him on years ago to talk about his book, American Coyote, and I lost contact with him. | ||
| Are you still talking to him? | ||
| Man, I haven't, but I feel as though if I reached out to him, he would be as warm and inviting as he always is. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| He's an intellect, man. | ||
| Very, very interesting person. | ||
| When I was in graduate school, I had to take an out-of-discipline seminar or something like that, and I took his... | ||
| History writing, western history, whatever the hell class I took of his. | ||
| And he kicked my ass. | ||
| You know, kicked my ass. | ||
| It was a very hard class to take. | ||
| And I learned a tremendous amount from that guy. | ||
| He was a good professor. | ||
| I want to get him together with someone like Randall Carlson, who's an expert in the Younger Dryas impact theory. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because the two of them coincide. | ||
| The mass extinction of North American mammals coincide timeline-wise With the Younger Dryas impact theory. | ||
| So, you know, Randall Carlson spent his entire life focusing on this impact theory and how it ended the Ice Age. | ||
| People talk about it being like the idea that never dies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was at the Lindenmeyer site in Colorado, a famous Folsom site, Ice Age encampment. | ||
| And it was funny because I happened to be at that site that there was a guy there... | ||
| Working these certain sediment levels to find these little micro crystals, these 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. | ||
| It was like, ah! | ||
| You know, but they're... | ||
| Less and less so now. | ||
| Well, yeah, well, they're very invested. | ||
| They're like... | ||
| I did an interview with a guy not too long ago, and we were talking about scientists. | ||
| Oh, it was an entomologist, Justin Schmidt, I think it was. | ||
| We were talking about, like, why do young scientists always make all the discoveries? | ||
| Not all of them, but, you know, the good idea, like, some of the good ideas come from young scientists. | ||
| He said, because people my age, all we do is defend our old shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
LAUGHTER It seems kind of true, right? | |
| Because we're so busy defending our old theories. | ||
| Well, so many people in the anthropology side want to employ the Blitzkrieg theory, right? | ||
| No, at this point it's deader than dead. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Remember when I talked about I got an opportunity to revise my book after 10 years? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I put some language in there around the Blitzkrieg hypothesis. | ||
| So what's the replacement theory? | ||
| Well, explain the Blitzkrieg theory. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, mammoths have a long gestation period, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| These people killed those mammoths. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| You know, sites that are described as kill sites that now people investigate. | ||
| Like, we have no reason to believe this is a kill site. | ||
| There's a thing that came out of Mexico not long ago where they're like, oh, it was a big kill site. | ||
| They even flipped the bones over in order to do this and that to them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, I remember that. | |
| Yeah, and then these analysts come look at it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What a lot of anthropologists laugh about is that everything unexplained is always of religious significance. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Like, let's say you find a couple buffalo skulls in a circle. | ||
| Like, they're doing a dig and they find some buffalo skulls facing the same way in the circle. | ||
| Oh, I see what you're saying. | ||
| It was like a ritual. | ||
| Yeah, it was ritualistic. | ||
| Or just they just died there. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, I might be cutting up deer and my kids come in and do something, line the hooves up in some way, stick them in the snow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or whatever, things just like freakish. | ||
| But yeah, like unexplained things are always like ritualistic, symbolic. | ||
| We read stuff into stuff. | ||
| But yeah, the Blitzkrieg hypothesis, I'm sure there's probably some hanger on, but it's... | ||
| It's as dead as the mammoths. | ||
| I used to love it because it was so beautiful. | ||
| Especially because there's stuff like this, like Wrangle Island. | ||
| That's where the woolly mammoths were survivors. | ||
| They lived there until 3-4 thousand years ago. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Why? | ||
| And then you'd be like, but no one ever showed up there. | ||
| They didn't get colonized by humans. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why did all this big shit go extinct in Australia 40,000 years ago? | ||
| When people showed up. | ||
| It's... | ||
| You got to have that Meltzer dude on. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| David J. Meltzer. | ||
| He's at Southern Methodist University. | ||
| When I went to visit him, you know what he showed me is the Folsom type site where they first excavated Folsom bones. | ||
| I got to hold them. | ||
| And you can see on the skulls, this is no joke. | ||
| This isn't like us making believe something's true. | ||
| These are, you know, 12, 13,000 year old Weissen skulls. | ||
| And you can see all the cut marks where they cut the tongues out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, you can see the knife work on the bones. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, that dude is sharp, man. | ||
| He's written a bunch of books about this stuff. | ||
| He'd kind of blow your mind a little bit. | ||
| When we were in Nevada, when we went on that mule deer hunt for your show, I found an arrowhead and I lost it. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck happened. | ||
| Someone cleaned my office and it disappeared. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| We were going to talk about putting... | ||
| Yeah, you're supposed to... | ||
| You're supposed to leave it there. | ||
| Put it back. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't. | ||
| I was with some anthropologists one time and we were finding sweet shit up in the Brooks Range in Alaska. | ||
| And you had to leave it there? | ||
| Man, they'd photograph it and sketch it and stuff and tuck it back into the... | ||
| Oh, that seems so crazy. | ||
| Tuck it back into the tundra. | ||
| What did you find? | ||
| Oh, old stuff. | ||
| Old stuff. | ||
| These guys are... | ||
| Like what kind of stuff? | ||
| Projectile points. | ||
| Big projectile points. | ||
| Like how old? | ||
| Well, the guy I was with, he's retired now, a guy named Mike Kunz, he had found a thing called the Mesa site, and he had identified like... | ||
| This is that kind of area. | ||
| It's mathematically the most remote area in North America, if you factor in distance from roads and settlements. | ||
| He had found this very prominent mesa where it wasn't a campsite. | ||
| It was just a place that people would sit and wait for game to come by and found hundreds of projectile points up there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| These things are like Ice Age projectile points. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Unbelievable points. | ||
| It just seems so fucked up to leave them there. | ||
| It hasn't been picked over yet. | ||
| I know, but it seems so fucked up to leave. | ||
| Dude, Tony, man, it was like against every bit of like Michigan elbow grease I've ever had laid up in me. | ||
| I would fantasize. | ||
| I would be like, you know, you might be leaving that there, but someday I'm going to get me a helicopter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It will be mine! | ||
| Just the idea of holding on to one of those, just put it in your hand and just imagine what it was like when that guy used tendons to lace it to a stick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bad dudes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To get their food. | ||
| A lot of know-how. | ||
| They didn't know they were bad. | ||
| They thought they had cool stuff. | ||
| They're showing each other new shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I know, right? | ||
| New techniques and strategies. | ||
| They're like, check this out! | ||
| And they're like, oh, you young guys. | ||
| You know, they thought it was sweet. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of that out here. | ||
| There's a lot of arrowheads apparently out here on ranches. | ||
| People find them all the time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Yeah, that's sweet. | ||
| That's so awesome. | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
| It's perfect. | ||
| And it looks like someone just made it. | ||
| Ugh, man. | ||
| Time travel. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Could you imagine? | ||
| If there was ever a time where you could just go to view, just to be a fly on the wall of history, do you know when you think you would go? | ||
| 20,000 years ago, Mile City, Montana. | ||
| You're so specific! | ||
| Why? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Like I've seen woolly mammoths in that, in their habitat there at sort of the arrival of the first humans. | ||
| There's a guy I'm friends with online. | ||
| I don't know him in real world, but he's contacted me. | ||
| He's actually sent me some stuff from his site. | ||
| The Instagram handle is TheBoneyard in Alaska. | ||
| Do you know this guy? | ||
| No. | ||
| Let me see if I can find it. | ||
| They found it already. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| The Boneyard, Alaska. | ||
| They have this site that they found something there once, many, many years ago. | ||
| And since then, they've been pulling all these... | ||
| There's an Ice Age caribou horn. | ||
| They've been pulling all these incredible pieces out. | ||
| I mean, just over and over and over. | ||
| Did you see that one picture? | ||
| He had a bear track. | ||
| Look at that, right next to his foot. | ||
| Is that a black bear? | ||
| Or a small grizzly bear? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Well, I'd want to see the front foot better, but the front foot's back behind his heel, and it looks like a grizzly. | ||
| Now, if you scroll back to the page, Jamie, you go down, they've had a bunch of, like, look at the one in the upper right-hand corner. | ||
| Oh, there's Forrest 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. | ||
| On my first date with my wife, I took her to the La Brea Tar Pits. | ||
| At least she knew what she was getting into. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Yeah, my old stomping grounds. | ||
| I've never been, but that's... | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| No. | ||
| She tells a story where they had like a little miniature bronze of a mammoth, and she said, oh look, a baby mammoth. | ||
| They must have found a baby mammoth. | ||
| And I was like, well, no, actually, you know, that's it. | ||
| She's like, yeah, no shit. | ||
| You know, she's like, I was like, well, little lady, let me set you straight. | ||
| That's a specific time. | ||
| So you would want to see that more than anything else? | ||
| Yeah, if I could do a second, if I could take a second whack at it, I would go like a second setting, like Back to the Future Part 2. Yeah. | ||
| I would go to join Daniel Boone on his first trip over the Cumberland Gap. | ||
| That ought to be wild. | ||
| That'd be my second trip. | ||
| Didn't they eat wolves? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I know he's got a great story about a wolf coming into their camp and biting a guy. | ||
| And what surprised these hunters was that the wolf seemed very intent on one individual and bit this individual. | ||
| He then later developed hydrophobia. | ||
| And they were out jack-lighting for deer where they'd burn pine knots in the front of a boat and drift down rivers to shoot deer. | ||
| And he had a bout of what they called hydrophobia and went berserk. | ||
| He had... | ||
| Rabies? | ||
| Yeah, he had rabies. | ||
| So hydrophobia is... | ||
| Like that fear of water. | ||
| I don't know what it is, but people freak out. | ||
| Had a bout. | ||
| Had to be restrained. | ||
| Took him home and he died. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was in his social circle. | ||
| So the wolf had given him rabies when it bit him. | ||
| Came into a camp. | ||
| What alarmed them was how it seemed so intent on a person and eventually bit that person and killed that guy. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| And then there's another thing that happened to Boone where Boone's kid was tortured and killed by Indians and he was hastily buried. | ||
| And Boone went back to... | ||
| Boone went back to find the bones of his son. | ||
| And the wolves had torn at the body. | ||
| And Boone, it was a rainstorm. | ||
| Boone later described how he had lifted his boy out and held him, you know, sobbing. | ||
| And then heard some sounds in the distance, and it was some Indians coming and slipped off into the night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And you think about that moment for that guy. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Later in life, he would go on these long hunting trips, just him and his slave together. | ||
| We're going like... | ||
| They're like old men. | ||
| Old buddies. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| I don't mean to say like buddies because it was like... | ||
| But they were like... | ||
| Him and a slave would go on these long journeys hunting together. | ||
| Which I think would be like a great play. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It kind of would be. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| When I retire, I'm going to work on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Just imagine being those people not knowing what was out there, making their way across the country. | ||
| That's just a type of mindset. | ||
| It's a rare individual that I just don't think we grow people like that anymore. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's over-observed. | ||
| It's over-observed. | ||
| But Lewis and Clark were supposed to keep their eyes out for mammoths. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I was like, oh, while you're out there, man. | ||
| There was some consideration? | ||
| Was there any stories of mammoths? | ||
| People had all the bones. | ||
| All the bones had come out of stuff. | ||
| Jefferson got really interested in some of these mammoth and mastodon bones that had come out of some of those licks. | ||
| And was like, hey, man, you know, in addition to all the other shit, keep your eyes out for a big elephant. | ||
| It must have been fascinating to see what the wildlife was like before it was molested by modern humans, you know, back in the 16, 1700s. | ||
| Dude, read Russell Osborne's Journal of a Trapper. | ||
| What year was that from? | ||
| He was in the late 30s, early 40s. | ||
| He was a meticulous journal keeper. | ||
| One of the few people that wrote a journal who wasn't full of shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a great depiction of what it was like. | ||
| And he was like, you know, 30 years after. | ||
| Contact in those areas. | ||
| I think I mentioned this to you before, but our idea of pre-contact, contact. | ||
| There's this Elliot West, this historian, and he describes how... | ||
| When Lewis and Clark hit the Great Plains, I might have told you this. | ||
| When Lewis and Clark hit the Great Plains, there were Indians living on the Great Plains. | ||
| So here's Lewis and Clark discovering the Great Plains, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There were Indians on the Great Plains who had been to Europe, met the King of France, and returned at that time. | ||
| He has this essay. | ||
| I can't remember what it's called, but it's a muddled history. | ||
| You want to put it into this neat chronology. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Shit, there were hundreds of years of just touch and go. | ||
| Of interaction? | ||
| Touch-and-go interactions. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Hundreds. | ||
| 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 there's, like, crazy interplay. | ||
| I had no idea that anybody back then from a Native American tribe had gone to France. | ||
| That sounds insane. | ||
| Like, how'd they even get over there? | ||
| You remember Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Kind of similar to that. | ||
| People would be brought as delegations. | ||
| We'd be trying to manipulate the governments, France, Spain, England. | ||
| We'd be trying to manipulate tribes to participate and form alliances that you would... | ||
| Let's say the French might ally with a group and that group would stop the bleed of English colonists pushing into the Appalachians. | ||
| A lot of it was self-serving too. | ||
| The tribes absolutely weren't capable of making these decisions for themselves. | ||
| They got on board with these plans. | ||
| But yeah, they were whining and dining, man. | ||
| To be like, you know, we're happy to join forces with you. | ||
| Come to see my palace. | ||
| It's funny because we're in such a historic time right now, but we're in the middle of it. | ||
| You know, one day they're going to look back on these days post this crazy election. | ||
| When people are jockeying for position, who's going to be able to control? | ||
| Oh, they'll be like, fucking podcast! | ||
| Joe Rogan. | ||
| I'm sure that's going to have a weird... | ||
| Joe Rogan had to ruin it all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or not. | ||
| Or not. | ||
| But they're going to be looking back at this time, about what a chaotic time it is. | ||
| I mean, this is a history time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What's this, Jamie? | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| 1725 group of Indians, including one, how do you say that? | ||
| Atoe? | ||
| An Osage? | ||
| Osage. | ||
| Osage. | ||
| One Missouri chief, one Missouri young woman, one Illinois, one Chicago? | ||
| How do you say that? | ||
| Chicago U. Oh, Chicago. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I don't know the pronunciation. | ||
| And one, uh, were sent to Paris, France. | ||
| There they met with the director of the Company of the Indies and the Duke and the Duchess of de Bourbon. | ||
| The chiefs were given a complete French outfit, which included a blue dress coat, silver ornaments, and a plumed hat trimmed in silver. | ||
| They were presented to King Louis XV, and they performed a dance at the opera. | ||
| The French king gave each of the chiefs a royal medallion, a rifle, a sword, and a watch. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Then it goes on to name more groups. | ||
| So that's 1725. Lewis and Clark were 1804, but those were not Western. | ||
| One of the books that I read, I was listening to, I should say, on audiobook about Native Americans, maybe it was... | ||
| Black Elk. | ||
| Black Elk Speaks? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It would be as though... | ||
| This isn't... | ||
| Participants in the Battle of Little Bighorn, where they defeated the 7th Cavalry under Custer and annihilated his command. | ||
| Participants in that battle would later get together. | ||
| They would get together. | ||
| Because there was other campaigns going on at the same time. | ||
| So we think about Custer getting killed, but not too far away was more soldiers that didn't. | ||
| But anyways, participants in that would later get together and play it out. | ||
| It's hard to picture that we would have Al-Qaeda fighters. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Reenacting. | ||
| Come and be like, oh yeah, I survived the global war on terror and shit. | ||
| Now we're going to show you like, no, I was sitting here when they kicked in the door. | ||
| How that happened. | ||
| Actual people from like Gettysburg would get together. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And pretend to... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, look at this. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I feel like he might be like, yeah, no, no. | ||
| That still feels a little fresh. | ||
| Yeah, real fresh. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and these guys were doing this not long after. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Dude, they weren't even old men yet. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, like half a decade. | ||
| It's so... | ||
| And we're talking about the level of animosity that these people would kill each other on both sides and mutilate the bodies. | ||
| Deep, deep, deep hatred. | ||
| The likes of which is hard for us to comprehend. | ||
| Like... | ||
| The impulse to desecrate the corpse of your enemy and then get together and have a Wild West show about it. | ||
| Mutilating bodies. | ||
| You recommended Son of the Morning Star. | ||
| Have you read it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's heavy. | ||
| It's heavy shit. | ||
| The things that they did to each other. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| What led them to be so vicious? | ||
| It's a great question, man. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And we've lost sight of D-Day. | ||
| It was just a little blip. | ||
| It was a thing that happened that didn't matter. | ||
| The war ground on. | ||
| They beat them. | ||
| They knew they were going to beat them. | ||
| No one wondered who was going to win the war. | ||
| Some guy screwed up, got some people killed. | ||
| We subjugated the tribes. | ||
| And then it became bigger over history. | ||
| Over time it became that we like that that story got infused with all this folklore importance and symbol and it's like deeply symbolic. | ||
| I'm a sucker for it. | ||
| Yeah, I am too. | ||
| Deeply symbolic. | ||
| War was intimate then. | ||
| There was no other way. | ||
| You had to be close. | ||
| You had to be close to each other to kill each other. | ||
| It's a different world, right? | ||
| And with the Plains Indians, even more intimate because you're just dealing with bows and arrows and lances on horses. | ||
| It's a different kind of life and death. | ||
| Yeah, and flying a drone over the Middle East from Texas and then going home at night and having dinner with your family. | ||
| It's interesting how we're more and more separated from that. | ||
| And also interesting that the Plains Indians seem to take delight in it. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| There was fun sport. | ||
| There was ever-increasing ways to be more cruel and vicious. | ||
| There was entertainment involved in it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, expected. | ||
| I forgot to talk about your book. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| We don't need to talk about it at length. | ||
| I'd love it if you mentioned it. | ||
| I'm very proud of it. | ||
| Meteor Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival. | ||
| This is your... | ||
| How many... | ||
| You guys have written... | ||
| You had the two books on wild game preparation. | ||
| Yeah, we had the guide books. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Um... | ||
| Yeah, and it comes out December 1. Pre-order now. | ||
| Oh, I got a copy of it right here, baby. | ||
| Is there going to be an audio version of this? | ||
| Man, I don't know. | ||
| We haven't talked about it. | ||
| It's illustrated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That would be a problem, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's more meant to be like a usable manual. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like a usable manual. | ||
| But I'm quite happy with it. | ||
| Thanks for bringing it up. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thanks for being here, man. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Always is. | ||
| I'll come back in a year or two years, whatever. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| Come back anytime. | ||
| Your podcast is the Meat Eater Podcast. | ||
| It's available everywhere. | ||
| And then the show is on Netflix. | ||
| And sometimes it's on the Sportsman's channel too, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| It has this complex thing of first window, second window stuff. | ||
| Our episodes currently premiere on Netflix. | ||
| You can find them on Sportsman Channel, Outdoor Channel, past episodes. | ||
| But new stuff goes up on Netflix and winds up there. | ||
| We just recently put our seasons one and two just on YouTube. | ||
| You just go check them out on YouTube. | ||
| We'll be adding to that YouTube stash as well. | ||
|
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Beautiful. | |
| Thanks for being here. | ||
| Thanks a lot. |
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