Dec. 30, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:04:05
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Welcome aboard, John. | |
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Very nice to meet you, man. | ||
| I've been admiring your Instagram page and all the social media stuff forever and it's crazy and perplexing and so I couldn't wait to get you in here and see. | ||
| How the hell did you acquire this magical spot that you have in Alaska? | ||
| I'd have to give you some context. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I grew up on an Indian mound in North Florida, to give you an idea. | ||
| An Indian mound? | ||
| Yeah, my parents moved this family down from Ohio and bought nine acres on the St. Johns River in 1962. It's where I grew up and it was on top of an Indian mound. | ||
| We didn't know it at the time. | ||
| So I was always out digging in the mound looking for pottery and was always captivated by looking for treasure. | ||
| And I did that as a kid and then Did a lot of surfing and stuff like that, as you might think, in Florida. | ||
| Got to be pretty good at swimming. | ||
| Ended up in high school setting the American record in a 50-yard freestyle. | ||
| And there was a fellow, an assistant coach at the University of Florida named Eddie Reese. | ||
| You might recognize his name. | ||
| He's the head coach at the University of Texas right here. | ||
| Three-time Olympic coach, widely regarded now as the greatest swim coach of all time. | ||
| I gave him a call before we came over here just to say hello. | ||
| We're in and out quick. | ||
| But he recruited me to Florida. | ||
| And I got recruited at a couple other colleges because I was a pretty quick swimmer. | ||
| University of Alabama, I met Bear Bryant. | ||
| The swim coach took me by the practice field and introduced me to him. | ||
| And he said, can you catch a football? | ||
| You should be a football player. | ||
| You're too big to be a swimmer. | ||
| And that was a couple hundred pounds ago, by the way, I should mention. | ||
| And he says, can you catch a football? | ||
| I said, yeah, I think so. | ||
| He said, hey, Joe, Joe, come over here, throw this guy a pass. | ||
| It was Joe Namath. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| He says, go long. | ||
| I start running down the field. | ||
| Threw me a ball and I said, you gotta catch this. | ||
| You gotta catch this. | ||
| And I caught it. | ||
| He says, throw it back. | ||
| And I did. | ||
| And then went to the swimming pool and met all the swimmers and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| Then I got recruited by Florida at Coach Eddie Reese and decided I want to go to Florida that seemed like a lot more fun. | ||
| And I went to Florida and The first year I was there, I was an All-American swimmer, and I got seventh place at West Point in the NCAAs. | ||
| The next year, my coach, the NCAAs were in Knoxville, Tennessee. | ||
| He says, coach says, you don't win this year. | ||
| I'm going to send you to Alaska. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alaska? | |
| What's that? | ||
| Never even thought about Alaska. | ||
| I got second place. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| I'm going to Alaska. | ||
| I didn't win it. | ||
| Now, here I am. | ||
| Full scholarship. | ||
| Great family. | ||
| I had five sisters growing up. | ||
| And, uh, Doing real good. | ||
| I said, fuck it. | ||
| I only got second place. | ||
| I'm going to Alaska. | ||
| So I dropped out of college. | ||
| So just because he said that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But obviously he was probably fucking around, right? | |
| Yeah, he was fucking around, but the thing is, I was such a shitty student, if I didn't drop out, I was going to flunk out. | ||
| And I talked to the registrar there by the name of Wendy Smallwood, who took care of all the athletes coming in. | ||
| She said, man, if you don't get out of here, you're going to flunk out. | ||
| So I said, well, if I drop out, can I come back my junior year? | ||
| And she goes, oh yeah, you can do that. | ||
| But if you flunk out, no. | ||
| I said, okay, I think I will. | ||
| And then I saw a movie called Jeremiah Johnson. | ||
| I said, you know what? | ||
| I'm going to be a mountain man. | ||
| And then after that, I went down to the registrar's office, took the dropout sheet, wrote Gone Fishing on it as my excuse. | ||
| Hung it on my college door. | ||
| I had played a two-card gut poker game the night before. | ||
| I had, you know, 50 bucks. | ||
| I got enough. | ||
| Put that in the next morning, 6 o'clock in the morning, taped that to my door and out the door. | ||
| I went with a backpack, a shotgun, and that's about all I had. | ||
| Hitchhiked, got down to I-75 and started hitchhiking. | ||
| Somebody picked you up with a shotgun? | ||
| It was in a case. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Got me in trouble in Seattle. | ||
| I got arrested for being the I-5 sniper. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And that was, you know... | ||
| Sniper with a shotgun? | ||
| Well, they had to look at the shotgun to find out I wasn't the sniper because the sniper used a rifle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I just walked into that. | ||
| I made a phone call at a gas station nearby where the sniper was shooting the day before. | ||
| So all these cops showed up. | ||
| It's the only time I've been arrested by 60 police officers. | ||
| He goes, okay, killer, where's the gun? | ||
| I go, what are you talking about? | ||
| I forgot where I put the shotgun. | ||
| So I'm wandering around the gas station looking for it. | ||
| Found it tucked between the water cooler and a wall where I'd stop to take a drink of water when all the action started. | ||
| So they, yeah, that's a shotgun. | ||
| They took me back to the University of Seattle. | ||
| I told them I had been sleeping in the brush, you know, and there was a board there that said riders needed to Alaska must be mechanically unkind. | ||
| So I called that number. | ||
| I said, oh yeah, fuck yeah, I'm a mechanic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Laughter No idea. | |
| But I said, what do you got? | ||
| He goes, a Volkswagen van. | ||
| Luckily, that was the only vehicle I'd ever turned a wrench on. | ||
| Because earlier, like two years earlier, three years earlier, I went on a surfing safari from Florida to California in a Volkswagen van. | ||
| We had to drop the engine out in Tempe, Arizona. | ||
| It's only four bolts, but we had a spare engine because we figured that might happen. | ||
| So, anyways, I got a hold of the guy, rode up to Alaska with him, and got about six jobs. | ||
| Because one thing I couldn't do as a swimmer is you're always working out. | ||
| You know, swim six hours a day for six years. | ||
| And never made any money. | ||
| I got up there and I had a part-time job swim coach working as a film editor from the University of Alaska. | ||
| Just different bullshit jobs that I could make. | ||
| Money, man. | ||
| I'm making money. | ||
| I like this. | ||
| So I came back after that, Joe, and I went back to college. | ||
| And I mentioned, I think, that I was a shitty student. | ||
| I didn't get any better my junior year. | ||
| So junior year, I go, I'm done. | ||
| I went to the NCAAs in Long Beach. | ||
| Didn't do very well. | ||
| And I knew I was going to go. | ||
| They had the swim banquet at the end of the year and the head coach told me, by now Eddie Reese had moved on to another college. | ||
| I think he went to Auburn. | ||
| He looked at our team and he said, I'm going to go places. | ||
| Instead of being an assistant coach, I'm going to be a head coach. | ||
| And then he ended up at Texas, where he's been an Olympic coach three times. | ||
| Countless national championships. | ||
| Just a good guy. | ||
| I know you love sports. | ||
| He's the winningest coach in swimming history. | ||
| If you ever get a chance to meet that guy, he's awesome. | ||
| And so I went back and the coach said, at the banquet you've been elected captain for the senior year. | ||
| I said, I ain't doing it. | ||
| I'm going to Alaska. | ||
| I'm out of here, man. | ||
| So off I went. | ||
| Went back to Alaska and I've been there since... | ||
| What made you want to go back? | ||
| Just Alaska. | ||
| It's a big country, man. | ||
| Big country and just spacious. | ||
| Just, I wanted to be a gold miner too. | ||
| And I had done some gold panning up there and I'm going to go be a gold miner. | ||
| Well, I got there in 74 and I got a job up there as a teamster. | ||
| It was right before the pipeline. | ||
| Started hauling freight as a teamster. | ||
| And put my money into a little gold mining operation on a creek that some guy sold me. | ||
| He said, there's a lot of gold on this creek. | ||
| There wasn't shit on that creek. | ||
| But he got my money. | ||
| And so, went out there and did our best for the summer and ended up going broke mining. | ||
| And I said, well, I didn't do it right. | ||
| So, ended up getting a job, running air freight. | ||
| Working prior to the pipeline, then the pipeline started getting going. | ||
| And a buddy of mine who's a diver at the University of Florida, he came up to Alaska. | ||
| And he got on as an air freight driver for CF Air Freight, Consolidated Freightways. | ||
| I was a teamster for him. | ||
| And he was driving a truck For the terminal manager who owned the truck for the Air Freight Division. | ||
| And they said, that's a conflict of interest. | ||
| You need to sell the truck to somebody else. | ||
| Let them hire a company to do it. | ||
| So he said, you guys want to buy this truck, this business? | ||
| And how much? | ||
| 10,000 bucks. | ||
| We had nothing. | ||
| We went to every bank in town. | ||
| Now, you guys are, what, 20-somethings? | ||
| 24? | ||
| You got no collateral? | ||
| You want to buy a $10,000 truck? | ||
| You know, there's going to be a business associated with it. | ||
| The last bank we went to was the First National Bank, and the guy standing at the counter heard us talking to the manager. | ||
| And he goes, Bill was the name of the manager at the bank. | ||
| He goes, hey Bill, I'll back their play. | ||
| And we looked at the guy. | ||
| He looked familiar because we had delivered some windshields to him. | ||
| He was a windshield guy. | ||
| He had a junkyard and spare parts and stuff like that. | ||
| So he co-signed a note. | ||
| I knew him as well as I know you right now. | ||
| And pretty soon, the manager of the air freight company called us in. | ||
| He says, boys, your life's about to change. | ||
| And we said, what's that mean? | ||
| He goes, we just got the contract to handle all the air freight for the LA Esca pipeline. | ||
| We said, what's the LA Esca pipeline? | ||
| Well, the big pipeline they're going to be hauling. | ||
| They're building up here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| What's that mean to us? | ||
| He says that means you're going to get rich. | ||
| Your first delivery is sitting over at Reed Tool. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Drill bits. | ||
| How much? | ||
| 10,000 pounds. | ||
| You've got to remember, we're getting paid by the pound to deliver air freight. | ||
| Generally speaking, a minimum piece of freight, less than 50 pounds, was like $5.40 a pound or a delivery. | ||
| We made 700 bucks or something in minutes for them to drive a forklift up, unload the pallet, and haul it off. | ||
| And I looked at my partner Ken and I said, man, we're going to do good. | ||
| And within a short amount of time, within a year and a half, we handled all the air freight north of the Alaska Range. | ||
| We're bringing in 747 Flying Tigers into Anchorage every night, three of them, solid freight. | ||
| Transship the freight from the plane to a flatbed truck. | ||
| Get 10 or 12 trucks every morning before 8 o'clock. | ||
| Take it over to the North Star terminals where it was unloaded. | ||
| And we weren't allowed to touch it because those guys were a different union. | ||
| And we'd just drink coffee. | ||
| And then they'd sign our bill of ladings. | ||
| We'd be out of there every morning by about, before the coffee even got cold, with about 30, 40 grand worth of revenue. | ||
| Give that to a couple young guys that had never had money. | ||
| In Alaska during a pipeline, that's a recipe for disaster. | ||
| And boy, did we... | ||
| What'd you do? | ||
| Boy, did we go through it. | ||
| You know, it was crazy. | ||
| We'd walk into a... | ||
| A buddy of mine had a restaurant named Jack O'Brien and called him Ivory Jacks up there in Fairbanks. | ||
| Good man. | ||
| And we'd go in and go, there'd be 200 people in that restaurant. | ||
| And I didn't know the guy very well, but we lived in the same area out in the woods nearby his restaurant. | ||
| We go there on occasion. | ||
| I say, hey, Jack, dinner's on me tonight for everybody in here. | ||
| And drinks. | ||
| You go, really? | ||
| I said, yeah, really. | ||
| At the end of the night, it was like 40 grand. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
| All of a sudden I had a little money. | ||
| Didn't know any better. | ||
| And we spent it and we had fun and we built a pipeline. | ||
| A lot of stuff happened during that pipeline that people don't even realize. | ||
| That thing was only supposed to cost $800 million to build. | ||
| It cost $9 billion. | ||
| It's... | ||
| It seems like the companies that were building it, they call them the Seven Sisters, you know, all the big oil companies were grouped together. | ||
| And an operating company was called Aliasco Pipeline. | ||
| And it was like somebody flew over Alaska and said, let's drop $9 billion on these guys and see what they do with it. | ||
| It was totally unbelievable. | ||
| Okay, so you got all this money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Got all this money. | ||
| And then at the end of the pipeline, I told my partner, you want to buy this company from me or you want me to buy it from you? | ||
| Well, flip the coin, come over the fair price. | ||
| Flipped the coin, he won, he bought me out. | ||
| And I said, okay, now I had a little money. | ||
| Went to work drilling for uranium for Exxon and Chevron up in the Seward Peninsula for a company called Resource Associates and was just a guy hauling the drill rig around. | ||
| And from there I started getting more interested in the mining end of things. | ||
| And keep in mind I'm still a young guy. | ||
| I'm not married yet. | ||
| We'd go to Costa Rica. | ||
| I bought a farm down there and decided I'd be a coffee farmer. | ||
| I wasn't worth a shit at that either. | ||
| I had some lemon trees growing and the first deal I made I sold 500 lemons for three bucks. | ||
| I said I don't think I'm gonna make money not farming. | ||
| So I go back to Alaska and I protected my little wealth I had. | ||
| I was able to protect by going to Costa Rica. | ||
| Costa Rica is named Costa Rica because of its beauty not because it's got a lot of treasure. | ||
| But when you have conquistadors going by, going, let's call this place Costa Rica. | ||
| These murderous guys going totally... | ||
| And the Incas and the Aztecs can attest to this. | ||
| They're there for his treasure. | ||
| And so I got back to Alaska. | ||
| Started getting serious. | ||
| My wife's name is Ramona. | ||
| We got married when I was 28. And we have five kids of our own. | ||
| The youngest out there, Elora. | ||
| And Drew was my CEO and her husband. | ||
| And her sister, just older than her, they own a company called Gold Daughters. | ||
| And my wife and I bought an old dredge after I'd decided to go mining for somebody else as an equipment operator. | ||
| So I went up and I drove a loader 712s and was able to get paid in gold and that would help get me through Costa Rica. | ||
| And the price of gold, when I started, was $250 an ounce. | ||
| When I ended, it was $800 an ounce. | ||
| And I said, oh, this is glorious. | ||
| So I was making money gold mining and learned a lot about gold mining. | ||
| I learned a lot about how to do it. | ||
| I learned a lot about how not to do it. | ||
| And so, after that, I decided, well, I've got to get into something else. | ||
| I was driving back to town and I had to stop. | ||
| I'd been drinking some beers and I had not had a beer all summer. | ||
| And through the trees I see these big metal Big metal pipe sticking out of the ground. | ||
| It was the fall time. | ||
| So I walked back there and it's a gold dredge. | ||
| Are you familiar with what a gold dredge looks like? | ||
| The machine? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a big, huge floating barge with a digging ladder and a tailing stacker and a trommel. | ||
| This one was about, it's a six cubic foot dredge. | ||
| I mean, each bucket would hold six cubic feet of dirt. | ||
| And while I was there, some other people drove in. | ||
| They walked in, and I'd never seen one. | ||
| I didn't even know it was there, just outside of town. | ||
| And these people were going on it, and I said, man, this would be a cool tourist attraction. | ||
| So I found out who owned it, and I got a hold of the guys that owned it, and I said, hey, you guys want to sell that dredge? | ||
| They said, sure, we'll sell it. | ||
| We were going to turn it into a tourist attraction, but we bought some leases in a place called Prudhoe Bay. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| You guys don't want to be in tourism anymore. | ||
| They had some of the best leases in Prudhoe Bay where the oil is coming from. | ||
| So I bought it. | ||
| We bought it. | ||
| Moved a bunkhouse over there to it. | ||
| Turned it into a really nice tourist attraction. | ||
| And then I said, you know, Carnival Cruise Lines owned a company called Holland America West Tours. | ||
| They came up and said, hey, I was in my 40s. | ||
| They say, you're a pretty young guy. | ||
| We don't think you should ever have to work again. | ||
| I said, I've been thinking the same fucking thing. | ||
| So they bought it from us. | ||
| Okay, now I'm out of tourism. | ||
| I want to go mining. | ||
| And I got to know the owners of a company called Alaska Gold Company. | ||
| Prior to that was called Fairbanks Exploration Company. | ||
| And the parent company to that was called United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company. | ||
| So I was the next guy in line. | ||
| It was a privately owned company all that time. | ||
| At the time I bought that company, I became the largest private landowner in Alaska with 10,000 acres of patented land with proven reserves close to 800,000 ounces. | ||
| Gold was low. | ||
| These guys were tired of it. | ||
| They'd run it from 1925 until I bought it. | ||
| It took out over 8 million ounces. | ||
| I'm going to say over 8 million, but records indicate a little bit different. | ||
| And in the process of that, I went down to Utah and got all their archive material, which included all the notes and the correspondence files, and exploration files, and stratigraphic files, and the researches. | ||
| All the paperwork they had in Boston, because Boston was where U.S.S.R.N.M. was headquartered. | ||
| So I had kind of an advantage in the gold mining business because now I have 10,000 acres of land, a lot of it already mined out by the dredges, but the dredges only took what they could make at $20 an ounce. | ||
| And when they stopped, it was $35 an ounce. | ||
| And I didn't check today, but I think it's close to $1,800 an ounce. | ||
| And they only mined what was good at that time. | ||
| It's like if you imagine a chicken. | ||
| You got the white meat, which is where all the pay was, and then you got your drumsticks and your wings on the margins. | ||
| And that's the kind of stuff that was left. | ||
| And it wasn't worth mining back when I bought the company, but it is now. | ||
| So now we have some really good properties and the exploration files that cover the entire state of Alaska. | ||
| And Drew out there, he's got hard rock claims and Valdez that we picked a file out of the exploration files and identified an area that... | ||
| No one even knew about, except our company engineers who died decades ago. | ||
| Our consultants are all dead. | ||
| All these reports that we read were written in the 20s and 30s and 40s. | ||
| But they're all gone. | ||
| And they weren't trying to promote mining. | ||
| They were trying to find gold. | ||
| So if they say there's gold here, there's gold there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And that's what we're doing now. | ||
| We're a mining company. | ||
| But now we've morphed into a land management company because we've got a half a dozen mines that are on different pieces of our ground, mining. | ||
| And we just manage the land. | ||
| Make sure that, you know, we got legitimate people mining. | ||
| Okay, so this is how you get to the land. | ||
| Now how do you get these bones? | ||
| How does this all start? | ||
| Getting to that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The way I discovered the bones was after I bought the property. | ||
| There was a stripping pile done by an adjacent miner that was dumping overburden on these flat tailings. | ||
| And I had a tour guide, a big guy. | ||
| I said, Josh, run over there and find me a mammoth tusk. | ||
| I'd never found a mammoth tusk, but I'd heard they were finding them over there. | ||
| And the ground they were dumping on was on my ground. | ||
| So he went and he says, what do they look like? | ||
| I said, well, they look like tree trunks, only they got a curve to them. | ||
| So he went, and he was gone half an hour. | ||
| He comes back with a seven-foot tusk over his shoulder. | ||
| I went, holy shit! | ||
| I said, go get me another one. | ||
| He came back an hour later with another one about three feet long, a broken one. | ||
| So I walked over there to look at this area where the mining was going to take place. | ||
| And they ended up mining it. | ||
| They had a right to mine it. | ||
| The company took out about 3,000 ounces out of this one little area. | ||
| And I was like, God damn, this stuff stinks. | ||
| So one day, we were walking around the area after they had mined it, moved on to another place, and we saw all the smell. | ||
| We walked around the side of this hill, and we got up in this little draw, and we were picking, my kids were with me too, we were picking bones off the ground, little shards, little leg bones and stuff. | ||
| So we filled up a garbage bag with those. | ||
| We went back again and again and again, and then I took an excavator back, built a little road around the side so we could get back to it with a machine, took a couple of digs out of the muck, found a mammoth tusk. | ||
| I said, oh boy, let's get something going. | ||
| So we got a big floating barge and put a pump on it, 471 Jimmy, with a giant. | ||
| They're called giants, but they're actually hydraulic monitors. | ||
| They look like big long pipes that you spray water out of. | ||
| And our pump was an 8-inch intake, 6-inch outtake, and we nozzled it down to 2 inches, 2 1⁄2 inches. | ||
| We could fire the water way out there and wash the overburden away. | ||
| The overburden there is about 60 feet high. | ||
| It's permafrost, silt. | ||
| Underneath that, you have your gravel layer. | ||
| Underneath the gravel, you have the gold and the bedrock. | ||
| And the Gravel layer and the muck interface is where most of the bones are. | ||
| So we started finding lots of bones. | ||
| I mean, a lot of bones. | ||
| And in the first three years, we found thousands and thousands of tusks and bison heads and bones. | ||
| And by the way, all those skulls you got out there in your building here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ain't got a step bison skull. | ||
| I'm going to fix that shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm gonna. | ||
| And then I don't even know how many we have. | ||
| We stopped counting. | ||
| And mammoth tusks, same thing. | ||
| And when did steppe bisons go extinct? | ||
| 12,000 years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And so the permafrost is slowly melting. | ||
| And you're hosing it down and pulling it. | ||
| So the stench is literally like this ancient rotting biological material. | ||
| It stinks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It's organic. | ||
| But it's been frozen forever. | ||
| Thousands, 20,000 years, 30,000 years, 50,000 years. | ||
| So this is you with the hose spraying it onto the side of this wall. | ||
| So the way you do it is you just spray the side of these, like what would you call that hill? | ||
| It's a muck bench. | ||
| A muck bench. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| So you spray that until you see something poking through? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Well, you spray it, and then you walk up there, and you turn the nozzle off the side, and you'll pick up the bones, the little pieces, leg bones, back bones. | ||
| Why is there so much in this one area? | ||
| Nobody knows. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Well, that's what's so crazy. | ||
| When I watched the documentary on your place, when you show this giant room where you have all these buckets, Of femurs and skulls and tusks and you have those paleontologists who are just like, they can't even believe what they're seeing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's because a lot of those animals, they say, never lived up there during the ice age. | ||
| So when they see it and they still think that, I just say, well, they sure as fuck died here. | ||
| So it's changing their ideas of what existed in that area. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And what's the oldest bones that you guys have found? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| We've sampled maybe four or five of them. | ||
| It costs $400 a sample, do a carbon-14 test on them. | ||
| If I was to sample my entire collection today, it'd cost $100 million. | ||
| Because we have close to a quarter million fossils now. | ||
| The whole place is crazy. | ||
| I mean, it's so hard to believe that this one area has so many bones. | ||
| They have no idea of, like, did these animals fall into a muck pit? | ||
| Why are they there? | ||
| They don't know. | ||
| Because there's so many of them. | ||
| And we're talking bones. | ||
| We're not even talking fossils. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because they froze. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is very, very unusual. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The documentary you saw, the Dick Mole paleontologist. | ||
| What an unfortunate name, by the way. | ||
| Dick Mole. | ||
| You know, I see what you're saying there. | ||
| I know you do. | ||
| Yeah, he's one of the good ones. | ||
| You know, he came up and spent a few days with the filmmaker that made that film, by the way. | ||
| The filmmaker is an artist pure, just through and through. | ||
| And I met him when he was working for National Geographic. | ||
| And then he came to me and he says, hey, I'd like to make a documentary about the Boneyard. | ||
| So I gave him unfettered access for four years. | ||
| I said, do what you gotta do. | ||
| Just stay out of our way. | ||
| Don't make me worry about finding you under a muck bench or a tree falling on you. | ||
| Just go do your thing. | ||
| So he did. | ||
| And the stuff that you're seeing there, and you saw in that video that you watched, the documentary, it's like nobody knows why any of that stuff is there. | ||
| Is that the most unusual sight that they've ever discovered in terms of just the sheer quantity of bones? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Wow, and you just found it by accident. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just makes you think, how many more of those are out there? | ||
| Well, I know one more. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's the next creek down. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So this area where you're extracting these bones from, how big is the actual area where you're finding these? | ||
| Five acres. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That's it. | ||
|
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Wow! | |
| And I get blamed, well, I have a, you're the, I gotta be honest with you on a little thing here. | ||
| When you first mentioned the Boneyard Alaska and talked about our site, I don't know how you found it, but you found it. | ||
| Who did you have on here? | ||
| I think it was Forrest Gallant. | ||
| Yeah, it was Forrest Gallant. | ||
| And I picked up 5,000 followers on my Instagram account that day. | ||
| And I said to myself, the only guy I'm ever going to talk to about this site is Joe Rogan. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| And I used you as a crutch for three solid fucking years. | ||
| Because I didn't want to talk to anybody about this. | ||
| But everybody's so interested in it. | ||
| I said, I'll talk to Joe Rogan. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I've had countless opportunities to talk to newscasters and network reality TV people that want to do blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| No. | ||
| I ain't going to do it. | ||
| I'll talk to Joe Rogan about it. | ||
| Well, thank you for that. | ||
| No. | ||
| Thank you for that. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Well, it's just so unusual. | ||
| At first, I just thought, oh, you probably found a couple things on this place. | ||
| And then as I'm going over your Instagram page and I'm seeing all the stuff that you're pulling out of there, I'm like, this doesn't even seem real. | ||
| Like, how could this one area have so many bones and so many tusks? | ||
| Like, how many tusks do you have? | ||
| Mammoth tusks. | ||
| We stopped counting. | ||
| Not because we can't count that high. | ||
| It's just because, what's the point? | ||
| Thousands? | ||
| I have a friend that says I got 10,000 dead woolly mammoths on my ground. | ||
|
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Wow! | |
| In five acres! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's insane! | ||
| Have any of these paleontologists speculated on why this one area would have so many dead animals? | ||
| No. | ||
| If they have, they haven't told me. | ||
| And so you dated a few of them. | ||
| And what were the dates from those few? | ||
| They went from as recent as 3,000 years ago to 22,000 years ago. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| And the reason this site is so interesting to them is because it's all from one little area. | ||
| So the context is there. | ||
| And it spans what's called the extinction event. | ||
| Graham and Randall. | ||
| Yeah, the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I'm kind of going along with them because... | ||
| But that would make sense why they're all there. | ||
| Well, you've got to remember that the world, Pleistocene started, what, two and a half million years ago and stopped about 11,800 years ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that whole area was ice, except for an ice-free corridor between Siberia and Alaska in the lower 48. They went right through where we're at. | ||
| So there was migration happening, coming through there. | ||
| And these animals lived there for tens of thousands of years. | ||
| The grazers. | ||
| Well, wherever there's grazers, there's going to be carnivores. | ||
| You have the short-faced bear. | ||
| You got the cave lions. | ||
| We found all that stuff. | ||
| You found short-faced bears? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Yep. | ||
| You got a short-faced bear head? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What does that look like? | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| How big is it? | ||
| Probably about that long. | ||
| They stood, when they stood up on their hind legs, they were 12 feet. | ||
| Yeah, we've shown photos of these replicas standing next to people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And not only that, but you have a little mini factoid for you. | ||
| It takes a mammal 21 seconds to take a leak. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Check it out. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| By the way, I hope you have your bullshit detector on. | ||
| I know you got one. | ||
| And anytime you want to throw it on, you throw it on me. | ||
| I believe you. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm just telling you. | ||
|
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|
Okay. | |
| Some of this stuff sounds no fucking way. | ||
| There it goes. | ||
| 20 seconds. | ||
| Empty their bladders in about 20 seconds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The golden rule. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All mammals weigh more than 2.2 pounds. | ||
| Empty their full bladders in about 20 seconds. | ||
| Unless you've been drinking... | ||
| I've gone 100 seconds before. | ||
| I bet you have. | ||
| It's kind of a contest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So anyways, you've got to remember also that a grizzly bear can cover about 100 yards in 8 seconds. | ||
| And they've got some pretty powerful noses on them. | ||
| So all these animals that stop to take a piss, they get whacked. | ||
| That's my theory. | ||
| I don't think that's a good theory. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| I have another theory, though, that I discovered in Florida. | ||
| What? | ||
| Pelicans flying in groups of prime numbers. | ||
| They do? | ||
| Seems like that to me. | ||
| I pay attention to shit like that, Joe. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If you say, look, there's a group of eight pelicans flying over there, I'll go, bullshit, there's one and then there's seven behind it. | ||
|
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|
Hmm. | |
| There's 23 of them. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| Prime number. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| But I threw that out on my Instagram one time to challenge people. | ||
| Go find a group of pelicans flying in an odd number. | ||
| And it was kind of hard for them. | ||
| So, you ain't got pelicans around here, but... | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm not a fan. | ||
| You ever see pelicans swallow seagulls? | ||
|
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No. | |
| They just grab a seagull, swallow it whole. | ||
| They're ruthless motherfuckers. | ||
| Oh, they are. | ||
| Like, people think of pelicans, oh, they carry, it's like a stork. | ||
| They carry the baby. | ||
| Those are big birds. | ||
| No. | ||
| That thing is to swallow giant things. | ||
| That's why their mouth is so big. | ||
| I saw a pelican last year. | ||
| Drew was with me. | ||
| It has a fish stuck sideways in its gullet. | ||
| He couldn't hack it out. | ||
| He couldn't get it out. | ||
| And there went another pelican around there to help it put his beak in there and pull it out. | ||
| I mean, this thing was gagging on it. | ||
| I don't even know what happened to him. | ||
| They probably figured it out. | ||
| You'd think. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they're evolutionarily designed to swallow enormous things. | ||
| Just think, they were goddamn dinosaurs about 60 million years ago. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a wild place. | ||
| So this mass extinction event theory does explain why there would be so many all in this one area. | ||
| If they all died very quickly and then they just got sunk into the muck and permafrost. | ||
| So the Randall Carlson Graham Hancock theory, which is not really their theory. | ||
| It's an actual scientific theory called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory that says that there's a certain period of time somewhere around between 12,800 years ago. | ||
| And then Graham thinks it's probably happened multiple times since then. | ||
| Maybe not as big, but similar impacts where we pass through this comet cloud. | ||
| And the United States, which was covered in half a mile of ice, or as much as a mile high of ice, half the country, all that was wiped out almost instantaneously. | ||
| And that these things hit all over the world, probably reset civilization, and probably caused the mass extinction of... | ||
| In North America, it was like 65% of the megafauna died very quickly. | ||
| Geologically speaking, real quick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To add a little interest to our site, you know, we do have excavators. | ||
| We do dig around. | ||
| We'd have mining gravel operations and stuff like that. | ||
| But in the boneyard, we use the excavators primarily to keep the drains open. | ||
| And we were digging one day and we found burnt bedrock. | ||
| And you've probably seen a picture of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the bedrock is actually burned. | ||
| I mean, you can tell it's burned. | ||
| Rub it. | ||
| It's got charcoal. | ||
| I mean, it's like And then the gravels right above it are burned. | ||
| Now, to go along with that theory, we had sea levels that rose three to four hundred feet in a relatively short period of time. | ||
| And Beringia, which was that land bridge that came across, suddenly it was no longer a land bridge, it was underwater. | ||
| Worldwide sea levels rose three to four hundred feet around the globe. | ||
| Yeah, quickly. | ||
| Real quick. | ||
| And might have been quicker than the megafauna could adopt to. | ||
| Megafauna had to have. | ||
| They had to have the right ecosystem to live in and it changed too quick and they couldn't adopt. | ||
| That's my theory. | ||
| Adapt, yeah. | ||
| So that's probably part of it too, right? | ||
| Because some of the things probably survived. | ||
| They think a lot of things died on the impacts or during the floods and during... | ||
| If you found charcoal, I mean, they found this stuff that they call nuclear glass. | ||
| It's called the trinitite, I believe. | ||
| That's the way they... | ||
| The way they pronounce it, but it's the same sort of material they found during the Trinity explosion Which is like from the immense impact of the explosion it turns sand and you know particles into glass and they found they find that all around the world at that same when they do core samples of that same time period and So if there's impacts like that, there's most likely fires and And so that's probably what you're looking at. | ||
| It could be. | ||
| Or it could be some other sort of mass fire that hit that area. | ||
| But it's under 60 feet of silt, 10 to 15 feet of gravel. | ||
| And where this is located is the widest pay streak in the interior. | ||
| It's about a mile wide, this pay streak, where the gold is. | ||
| The mountains used to be, you know, a few thousand feet taller than they are right now, where the pay was coming out of that host rock. | ||
| And gold's got a specific gravity of 19, meaning it'll displace itself 19 times in water. | ||
| So that's how sluice boxes work. | ||
| Gold pans. | ||
| You mix the dirt with the water, the gold goes right to the bottom. | ||
| Same way with the pay streak. | ||
| The gold's moving down the creek. | ||
| It goes deeper and deeper and deeper. | ||
| The gravel goes over the top of it. | ||
| Pretty soon it hits bedrock. | ||
| It can't go any deeper. | ||
| And that's where it stays. | ||
| And the gravel just keeps moving down. | ||
| So there was a lot of water that went through this valley. | ||
| This creek there now is not 15 feet wide. | ||
| But the valley itself with the pay gravels is a mile wide. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| And there's gold throughout the whole thing. | ||
| So at one point in time, there could have been a river that's a mile wide that was running through there. | ||
| Could have been. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And these animals that they said that aren't supposed to be there, what animals are those? | ||
| Dire wolves being one of them. | ||
| Dire wolves? | ||
| You found dire wolves? | ||
| Dire wolves. | ||
| Do you have photos of this stuff? | ||
| Is it all up on your Instagram? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Well... | |
| Jamie's looking. | ||
| Yeah, there might be some on my page. | ||
| So when you found direwolves, like in what condition? | ||
| Just the bones? | ||
| You found some tissue, too, which is kind of crazy. | ||
| Like a lot of these animals died, and you found little pieces of soft tissue and tendons and ligaments, which those paleontologists were thrilled by. | ||
| Like they couldn't believe it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They had bones with marrow still in them. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The carnivores had pretty strong jaws. | ||
| They liked the marrow. | ||
| That might explain why so many bones are broken where they're broken. | ||
| They chewed into these animals. | ||
| One of the other extinct, not just dead, but extinct animals we found up there is... | ||
| We've never found elk before. | ||
| Well, we found some elk, but the experts say they didn't exist up there. | ||
| And I know you'd like to hunt elk and eat elk. | ||
|
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But elk exist in Alaska. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| They exist down, I think they do. | ||
| They do. | ||
| So that's a dire wolf skull? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| They have a Roosevelt elk in Alaska. | ||
| They have them on some of the islands on the coast. | ||
| A Fognac? | ||
| A Fognac has Roosevelt elk on it. | ||
| Because it's a very difficult hunt that people go on. | ||
| And the problem is there's enormous brown bears on there. | ||
| And my friend Steve Rinella told a story on the podcast of how they shot an elk up there. | ||
| And it's an incredibly difficult hike in and hike out. | ||
| You go into very thick brush and terrain at a very steep angle. | ||
| It's very hard to get through with anything. | ||
| So they take this elk, they hang it in a tree, and they come back the next day to cut it up and to take it apart. | ||
| But by the time they get back, a bear has already claimed it, and they don't know this yet. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| And they get rushed by this bear. | ||
| It ran straight through their camp, but it found so many people didn't know exactly what to do, and it ran through. | ||
| One of their guys winds up on top of the bear's back somehow. | ||
| So it literally plows through the camp, and he's riding this bear's back for like 15, 20 yards, and then falls off the bear's back. | ||
| The bear runs into the woods, and the bear's huffing at him, and then they get out their rifles. | ||
| They were eating lunch. | ||
| They had no idea. | ||
| So there are elk up there. | ||
| Yeah, but they're not in the interior. | ||
| Which is crazy because they're on the island. | ||
| Like, how are they on a Fognac if they're not in the interior? | ||
| How'd they get on that island? | ||
| How'd the little mini mammoths get down to one of the islands on the southeast? | ||
| They say these miniature mammoths lived there until 3,000, 4,000 years ago. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| That's island dwarfism, right? | ||
| That happens with elephants, too. | ||
| When elephants live on an island, they get smaller. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, no, there's a mystery up here. | ||
| So is that one you found? | ||
| That's not one we found. | ||
| That's one they found in Siberia. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| But the same sort of situation. | ||
| Yeah, we found one. | ||
| It's like the frost is melting and that one actually has tissue all over it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We have a specimen that was found called Effie for Fairbanks Exploration. | ||
| There's a mammoth trunk in its leg and its skull cap and stuff. | ||
| We have... | ||
| We have found a lot over the years, and they all, you know, there was a deal with AMNH, and you might have heard me rant about that a little bit. | ||
| What's AMNH? Alaska American Museum of Natural History. | ||
| Back in the 1920s, when the company started hydraulicking, they started unearthing all these fossils. | ||
| The company had eight bucket-line dredges running. | ||
| So they were moving millions of yards. | ||
| They moved 277 million yards of silt hydraulically, which was just 17 million more yards than they dug out of the Panama Canal. | ||
| And so all those bones, there was a guy named Childs Frick in New York. | ||
| His father was Henry Frick, the US steel magnet with Carnegie. | ||
| They've decided to get a hold of the USS R&M company in Boston. | ||
| They said, hey, how about we finance to get these bones out of Alaska and bring them to AMNH. So they worked a three-way deal with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, President Bunnell up there. | ||
| A guy named Otto Geist started going out with a bone wagon. | ||
| They collected bones from 1928 until 1958. They were only supposed to collect scientifically important bones. | ||
| For those, they were supposed to do research on them and write reports and submit them to my company. | ||
| Well, they didn't do that. | ||
| They collected the bones, sent them to New York City, Where they just languished in the basements of the AM&H. When I bought the company, I started going through my files and I found this deal. | ||
| And I got a hold of the University of Alaska and I said, these are our company bones. | ||
| Let's go find out what's going on with them. | ||
| They haven't done the reporting they're supposed to. | ||
| So myself, along with a guy named... | ||
| I got the reports right here. | ||
| Dick Osborne, who was the author of this report, I'm going to give you this report, by the way, because I've told everybody that I'm going to start a bone rush. | ||
| A bone rush? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Well... | ||
| They took 500,000 or so bones from Fairbanks to New York City. | ||
| Left them in the crates, and there's a picture on there someplace when I went there to visit, in crates that have yet to be opened. | ||
| But in the 40s, they took about A whole boxcar load of these bones. | ||
| They ran out of storage and they dumped them in the East River. | ||
| What? | ||
| In the East River. | ||
| And I've told everybody that, again, with Joe Rogan, the only place I'm going to divulge that location... | ||
| So all that stuff in those pictures is all from your property? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| What a crazy piece of land you stumbled upon. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| And so they dumped how much in the East River? | ||
| I'm told by Dick Osborne, a boxcar load, 50,000, or 50 tons. | ||
| Just threw it in the water? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Is it still there? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Could it be still there? | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Some of it, maybe? | ||
| Certainly the Tusks. | ||
| Do you know where it was? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| So you're going to hire some divers? | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| You have a lot of people that follow you on your Instagram. | ||
| I got a lot of people that follow me, thanks to you. | ||
| And I said, you know, those bones, as far as I'm concerned, that they dumped in the East River, they're no longer mine. | ||
| They're finders keepers. | ||
| So if any of you guys want to go out and find some bones, I'll tell you exactly where the fuck they're at. | ||
| But I'll only tell Joe Rogan. | ||
| So I have to tell people? | ||
| Tell them right now. | ||
| Okay, tell them right now. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Do you know what street they pulled up to where they dumped them off? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Would you like to announce it to everybody? | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| You do it. | ||
| You want me to? | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It only makes sense. | ||
| Imagine if you see a bunch of divers pulling woolly mammoth tusks out of the East River. | ||
| The title of this draft report is Early Man in Eastern Beringia, Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, Artifacts and Associated Fauna Recovered from Fairbanks Mining District, Alaska. | ||
| Authored by Richard Osborne, the Quaternary Center, University of Alaska Museum, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison. | ||
| Robert E. Vander, Vertebrae Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, and a fellow named Robert Sattler, Tana Chiefs, Fairbanks, Alaska. | ||
| They wrote the introduction, and the report, this associated draft, never released, goes through the history of the bone collecting in Alaska, at least off my ground. | ||
| So, the part that I want to reveal to people, because I said I would, we'll see if anybody's out there got a sense of adventure. | ||
| Because if I was, and I'm not going to tell people you're allowed to do this, but if I was listening to your podcast, and I happen to have a boat, and I happen to have a little scuba equipment, because I'm going to tell them, everybody, right now, where the fuck they're at. | ||
| Where the fuck are they? | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| You looking for the address? | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm just going to take the part off where I had this posted on my Instagram. | ||
| It was redacted where the location was. | ||
| Because I want to make sure everybody in the world has a chance to hear it at the same time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because this is going to be a bone rush. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You got it? | ||
| So here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright, here we go. | |
| Mistakes made in the field as to acceptable condition of the bone shipped to New York City were dumped in the East River. | ||
|
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|
Okay. | |
| The dump site at that time was off. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| And there it's redacted. | ||
| Here, I'm going to read what's redacted. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The dump site was off. | ||
| The East River Drive at about 65th Street. | ||
| The common New York City hospital dump site as well for difficult to dispose of materials. | ||
| Potentially a challenging archaeological dig for archaeologists in the distant future. | ||
| Now, I'm going to say this about that. | ||
| These bones that we find, they're paleontological in nature. | ||
| Archaeology is a study of human stuff. | ||
| What happened there? | ||
| Did they mix a bunch of the bones in with a bunch of the stuff from the hospital? | ||
| Is there stuff in the hospital? | ||
| Or is there even more stuff from AMNH that was dumped there that they didn't have room to store? | ||
| Like human stuff? | ||
| Could be human stuff. | ||
| I just can't imagine that they just didn't have any room for it, so they dumped valuable bones. | ||
| They were of no value to these guys. | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| But you got to remember, this was in 1928 to 1958. People, you know, miners didn't collect the bones. | ||
| That's what makes me such an oddball. | ||
| I have friends going, when I first started this 15 years ago, going, What the fuck are you doing? | ||
| There's a lot of gold under those. | ||
| Go get the gold. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Ah, the bones, man. | ||
| We're going to get the bones. | ||
| Then we'll get the gold. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| So, 15 years later, I'm saying, we'll get the goddamn gold. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| I take a pretty long view of history, and I appreciate your view of history. | ||
| And I'll tell you something else about history. | ||
| History's just not about What happened in the past? | ||
| History's about what's about to fucking happen. | ||
| What we just talked about is about to happen. | ||
| Now people are gonna go and they're gonna go, he just told us where it is. | ||
| You can pull it up on Google Earth and find that site. | ||
| And how far into the water was it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Did they dump it off of boats? | ||
| Did they dump it right off the shore? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| How wide is the East River? | ||
| The dump site at the time was off the East River Drive at about 65th Street. | ||
| So that ain't that wide. | ||
|
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|
Is that right? | |
| Is that what I'm looking at? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is this 65th Street? | |
| I think so. | ||
| It says right there 53rd Street Tunnel. | ||
| So that's the neighborhood. | ||
| So there's 65th Street. | ||
| And so somewhere right off of that... | ||
| I'd say right alongside. | ||
| Because right here is the train bridge. | ||
| Do you know how crazy it would be if there's fucking mammoth bones right there in the East River? | ||
|
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Tusks. | |
| Right there in the East River. | ||
| Dude, let me tell you something about mammoth bones, mammoth tusks. | ||
| They're extremely valuable. | ||
| And a complete set of tusks, like the day, did you see that little video snippet I said about the day we found a full-grown woolly mammoth? | ||
| I mean all of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I did see that. | ||
|
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|
Okay. | |
| Well, and thousands of bones within a week and another mammoth the next day. | ||
| Tusks don't float. | ||
| They don't roll along the bottom. | ||
| They sit where they're at. | ||
| They're curved. | ||
| They weigh a lot. | ||
| They're very dense. | ||
| Same with the leg bones. | ||
| They're dense, too. | ||
| I don't know what kind of current that river has, if even has a current. | ||
| All I know is this is where they say they dump them. | ||
| And I got to go with that. | ||
| This is where they say they dump them. | ||
| This is where they dump them. | ||
| So all it would take is just a well-heeled expedition of guys who know how to scuba. | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't even be well-heeled. | ||
| You know, you can take an underwater camera and drop it over with your fishing pole. | ||
| Or, like, they have those underwater drones now, too, with cameras on them. | ||
| And they got the side-scanning sonar and stuff that you can use. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| We've tried looking at using those kind of things at the boneyard, but they can't pick up tusks buried 10 feet down. | ||
| You know, they shoot pulses into the earth and it's supposed to refract back up. | ||
| You just got to find them where they're at. | ||
| And I was going to tell you how valuable these tusks are. | ||
| The set we found on the day, we had an offer for $485,000 for the pair the next day. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| And guess what, Joe? | ||
| You and I both know what $485,000 looks like. | ||
| What would you rather look at? | ||
| Is that a 12-foot mammoth tusks? | ||
| Or a bunch of hondos sitting on a... | ||
| Depends on what phase of my life I'm at. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think at this point in your life you'd rather look at the tusks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd look at the tusks. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| 12-foot tusks? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| But I want to see the tusks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Now, I don't have as many sunsets in front of me as I do behind me, but I have an idea I won't have to sell those in my lifetime. | ||
| I'll let Drew out there and Allura decide what happens to those things. | ||
| We just built our own, you know, they said, well, storage is a problem. | ||
| We just built this fall, before we came down here, framed up a 5,000 square foot building to house some of the collection. | ||
| We have so many bones, I've filled up four vans, delivery trucks, big, you know, semi-trailer filled. | ||
| Started off with, eh, we got a few... | ||
| Now we got a few hundred thousand. | ||
| And you're not even done digging. | ||
| Oh, fuck no. | ||
| That's what's so crazy. | ||
| In a five-acre parcel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That is so wild. | ||
| I mean, you must have spent many a night thinking, how the fuck are they all here? | ||
| Like, what is this? | ||
| I want to give you this for your copy. | ||
| All right, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're welcome. | |
| Tell people, go get it. | ||
| Go get them tusks. | ||
| You know how amazing it would be if someone came on? | ||
| Tell you what, if somebody goes there and they gets a tusk, I'll have you on the podcast. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| A buddy of mine just sold a broken tusk for $100,000. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| I mean, they're not making any new ones. | ||
| It's just weird that you could even own them. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I know a guy who was on a ranch in Montana, and I think the story was someone was elk hunting on the ranch, and they saw something in the ground, and they contacted the ranch owner, and it turned out there was a T-Rex skeleton, and someone purchased it for over a million dollars. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| There's a guy on Instagram, I want to say Bucky DeFingerlitz or something like that, that found... | ||
| He should get together with Dick Mole. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he found the best preserved T-Rex I think ever found on his rancher. | ||
| He raises cattle out west. | ||
| That's the funny thing about the Instagram is we meet through Instagram people that we've never met personally. | ||
| There's a guy named Matt Slingsby up in Alaska. | ||
| You follow him. | ||
| Slingsby AK. You're goddamn right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| By the way, when I go to Florida in the wintertime, I always bring down some of his smoked salmon. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| So I brought you a couple jars of it. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| He makes this stuff himself. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| He makes his own smoked salmon. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| And cans it. | ||
| That's a big thing up there, right? | ||
| People can salmon? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I'll eat this. | ||
| But yesterday, he posted a video that's no longer online. | ||
| Of a grizzly bear that charged into a herd of musk oxen that had just laid down calves. | ||
| It killed all of them. | ||
| One bear killed over 10 baby musk oxen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| And that video's not on today. | ||
| Did Instagram take the video down? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I haven't asked him, but I'm going to find out. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of those sites like Nature is Metal, you know, that website? | ||
| I think they get their videos taken down. | ||
| I think there's a lot of the faint-hearted amongst us that think that there's something wrong with watching videos of animals killing other animals, that somehow or another it's cruel. | ||
| Well, I know I get accused of climate change and global warmth and stuff. | ||
| You do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because of mining? | ||
| Because we're melting the permafrost. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| It is, but they... | ||
| You're literally a part of one of the greatest paleontological discoveries ever. | ||
| I know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, you're above the global swarming! | |
| Yeah, and I'm pretty... | ||
| It's warming! | ||
| It happens. | ||
| Yeah, well, but just people are just out of their fucking mind looking for things to complain about. | ||
| It's 50 degrees below zero right now in Alberta. | ||
| I just got a message from one of my buddies. | ||
| It was 50 below at our house two days ago up in Fairbanks. | ||
| It warmed up today to 14 below. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| You brought a little of that weather here. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Here we are. | ||
| Balmy 20. You know, one thing I noticed about this town is you got some blue sky. | ||
| Oh yeah, it's nice. | ||
| This sky here is really blue. | ||
| Yeah, it's beautiful. | ||
| It's a great town. | ||
| It seems like good, clean air. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's great here. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| And Eddie Reese lives here too, so next time I come down, I'm going to go visit him. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Make sure I have some time. | ||
| So people give you a hard time, but that's just people. | ||
| It doesn't matter what. | ||
| If you're donating money, you're not donating enough. | ||
| If you're helping people, you're not helping enough. | ||
| Or you're helping the wrong people. | ||
| Or you should be doing this instead. | ||
| Or you shouldn't have the money to donate in the first place. | ||
| There's just too much noise. | ||
| But what you've discovered, what people should be concentrating on is... | ||
| The immense magnitude of that discovery and how crazy it is that they're literally discovering that there's animals that are in there that they didn't think existed there. | ||
| Clearly they did. | ||
| You've got an enormous number of them. | ||
| You've got burnt ground below them. | ||
| Like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| Like, what is all that? | ||
| Well, the step bison, they're extinct. | ||
| Short-faced bears, they're extinct. | ||
| The American lion, extinct. | ||
| You got American lions up there? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That one skull I got. | ||
| It's like you have everything up there. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| How much variety, like how many different animals have you found bones of? | ||
| That's an American lion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, look at those teeth. | ||
| That is so cool. | ||
| Look how cool that tooth is. | ||
| My son and I, Kinsey, were out there at the boneyard one day and we were hydraulicing and then shut the pump down and went up for the final walkthrough on the muck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's insane. | |
| And you know, as the guys want to do at the end of the day, just piss against the muck bench, you know, just take a leak. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he's over there, I'm over here taking a leak. | ||
| And we both look at about the same time and that thing is staring at us out of the muck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| Just the top part, not the lower jaws. | ||
| We had found the lower jaws to that thing two years earlier in two different pieces. | ||
| In the same area? | ||
| Yeah, downstream. | ||
| So we don't sell anything from the boneyard that might go to another animal that we found or the same animal. | ||
| That's why we have so many. | ||
| We pick them all up. | ||
| We pick every little bone up. | ||
| Save them. | ||
| They're all boxed. | ||
| How many people are involved in the... | ||
| Is it categorized? | ||
| Do you have it catalogued? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| We just pick them up. | ||
| That's what it looks like. | ||
| I was scared to ask because it looks like you just have so many stacked. | ||
| What's in that box right there where it looks like skin below that, Jamie? | ||
| There's a short one right there. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I think that's a caribou. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| A mummified caribou. | ||
| We find horses. | ||
| We found a different species of horse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Horse? | |
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Harrington horse. | ||
| We found that. | ||
| Paleontologists come uncorked when they see shit like that. | ||
| Because it's not supposed to be there either? | ||
| They've never found them. | ||
| They found them in the Yukon, but they didn't... | ||
| What do they base whether or not an animal lived there on? | ||
| Is it whether or not they've found bones of them? | ||
| Because if you're dealing with something that's 20,000 years ago, how do they really know what was where unless they find a dead one? | ||
| Well, how do you know what they're telling you is the truth? | ||
| How do they know what the truth is? | ||
| They don't, but they're in a business. | ||
| This happened 20,000 years ago, and I've got a doctorate in this field, so that's what happened. | ||
| Right, but they're only basing it on evidence that's been discovered. | ||
| And when you have a place like yours where you're discovering an insane amount of new evidence, you could literally rewrite paleontological history. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| No, they can. | ||
| But your place can't. | ||
| Well, it looks like now I'm going to have to accommodate somebody. | ||
| It's only going to happen if Joe Rogan's involved. | ||
| So how many people do you have that are paleontologists that are involved in this? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Here's the qualifications. | ||
| Have you been to Fairbanks before? | ||
| No, I have not. | ||
| I'd like to invite you to Fairbanks. | ||
| I'd like to go. | ||
| It's going to summer, though. | ||
| I want you to come up in the fall so you can go moose hunting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Have you ever tip a moose over? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, I shot a moose once in BC. Delicious. | ||
| Do you like moose meat? | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love moose meat. | ||
| We'll put you on your own creek. | ||
| We'll give you a four-wheeler or a truck or whatever you need. | ||
| Come up, bag a moose, take you to the boneyard. | ||
| Within minutes, you will be a boner. | ||
| All you gotta do is find one. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| But the people involved in this, just my family and some family friends. | ||
| Wow, that's incredible. | ||
| And Dick Moll. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do we have to be called boners? | |
| Yeah, you have to, Jamie. | ||
| Don't be scared of a name. | ||
| Well, my kids are all master boners. | ||
| In order to be a master boner, you've got to find 10,000 of them. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| You're not going to be there long enough to find 10,000. | ||
| Do you got a lot of moose up there? | ||
| A lot of moose. | ||
| Want to hear my moose call? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not bad, right? | |
| That's pretty good. | ||
| That's not bad. | ||
| Want to hear mine? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Moose! | |
| laughter laughter Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. | ||
| When we bag a moose, we want to make sure it's near some place we can get a front end loader to. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. | ||
| You don't want to try to shoot. | ||
| I shot one off the Yukon in the Hodzana River once and it fell into the river. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| Right as the sun set. | ||
| How'd you get him out? | ||
| I tried to chop them up in half with an axe underwater. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| Spent the night on a gravel bar. | ||
| The guys I had upstream, they got caught in the dark and they didn't come floating down until the next day. | ||
| So I started a fire by the bank and they finally came down and we cut it out. | ||
| I'd prefer a road hunt. | ||
| A buddy of mine had the same thing happen last year. | ||
| He shot a moose and it ran into the river and died in the river. | ||
| And they're like, fuck. | ||
| A 2,000-pound animal. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, that's horrible when that happens. | ||
| But they're so unusual. | ||
| Like when you see them, they don't look real. | ||
| Like they're so big. | ||
| And you see these... | ||
| Goddamn barn doors coming off the side of their heads. | ||
| Like, that is a real animal? | ||
| And you shoot one of those, you're eating good meat for a year. | ||
| Every day you could have moose meat for a year. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| I let guys, I have different areas, and I have one group of guys that likes to go to the certain areas. | ||
| So my rule is, you can hunt there, but I get a quarter of whatever. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| That's a good deal. | ||
| So every time I, if they get a moose, I get a quarter of it. | ||
| And then another group, same thing. | ||
| So last year I got five quarters of moose. | ||
| I never really went hunting. | ||
| But it helps me. | ||
| I give the moose away to, you know, go down to the Pioneers or some food bank or someplace. | ||
| Oh, that's nice. | ||
| Pass a little bit of it around. | ||
| The guys that can't hunt anymore that are no longer able to go hunting, I'll take some and give them some moose meat. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| And we always have a freezer full of it just in case. | ||
| It's so good for you. | ||
| Oh, it's great. | ||
| It's the best meat, like wild game meat in particular. | ||
| And moose is unusual. | ||
| It's a very different taste than elk, very different than deer. | ||
| It's like similar but not, you know. | ||
| I've never had elk. | ||
| It's delicious. | ||
| I got some for you. | ||
| You got a little freezer bag? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I think I have some. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| I think we brought some freezer bags. | ||
| We did, right? | ||
| Yeah, we got freezer bags. | ||
| When are you flying back? | ||
| Tonight. | ||
| Okay, I'll hook you up. | ||
| Oh, that'd be great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because we're going to... | ||
| I got summer sausage for the plane. | ||
| You can eat it on the plane flight. | ||
| I got some roasts for you. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Some steaks. | ||
| Don't do all that. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| No. | ||
| Take it with you. | ||
| It's the best meat. | ||
| I'll set you up with some moose meat though. | ||
| I'll send you that. | ||
| Just set me up near a moose. | ||
| We'll get our own moose. | ||
| Oh, I'll put you on a moose. | ||
| Are there a lot up there? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| The problem with moose is moose are usually around grizzlies. | ||
| That is a problem. | ||
| That's a fucking big problem. | ||
| I shot a black bear once that was tearing a door off a cabin where my sister was the camp cook. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| The night before, I'd seen bear tracks all over the place, and I said, I'm not going to eat much for dinner. | ||
| I'm just going to be a light sleeper tonight. | ||
| About 3 o'clock in the morning, I hear this, boom, John! | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Another rifle shot. | ||
| I step up. | ||
| My 6 was right there. | ||
| I blasted that black bear right on the doorstep and wounded it pretty good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ. | |
| They die hard, man. | ||
| Yeah, they're a big, strong animal, a big, spooky animal. | ||
| And they're not, I mean, black bears, they're not even nearly as big as grizzlies, but they're still terrible. | ||
| They sound like a dying man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you don't kill them for a shot, that's it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're going, aww. | |
| A buddy of mine, Mike Hawkridge, he's got a place called BC Outfitters. | ||
| I think it's Big Country Outfitters. | ||
| I hunted with him up in British Columbia. | ||
| One of them was coming into a cabin. | ||
| A grizzly was coming into a cabin. | ||
| He literally shot it at the doorstep of the cabin. | ||
| It's like right there coming in. | ||
| And they're terrifying up there. | ||
| And they put a ban on hunting them too because all the people from Vancouver are like, Don't kill the grizzly. | ||
| The grizzly's your friend. | ||
| It's like the biggest, scariest fucking thing in the woods. | ||
| And it also, wildlife biologists say they have to be managed. | ||
| If you don't manage their population, then they decimate the population of deer and elk and moose and And everything that lives up there. | ||
| And so there's all these people that understand the balance of nature and these well-trained, well-educated wildlife biologists who make recommendations and then people vote on it, which is crazy because you're having people vote who are never even in the woods. | ||
| You got people voting in Vancouver and they're like, don't kill the bear. | ||
| The bear is your friend. | ||
| We don't want trophy hunters. | ||
| But what they don't understand is that you're making life extremely difficult for all the people that live up there. | ||
| If you don't manage those populations, you lower the amount of game that are there, the game animals, and also you make it very dangerous for those people because now those bears are no longer scared of people because they used to associate people with gunshots and fear and people will hunt them. | ||
| Now they think of people as food. | ||
| When the wolves come into town, if you have a dog out on a chain, you go out the next day and all you got is a collar and a head. | ||
| Wolves are unbelievable hunters. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| They really are. | ||
| I got a couple of creeks with different packs. | ||
| If they get a moose, they'll camp there for a week and a half eating it. | ||
| That must be so wild to see. | ||
| I was out at one of my creeks. | ||
| There was a calf moose stuck down in a tailing pile. | ||
| It couldn't make up the side of the tailings because they're so loose. | ||
| So I called fish a game. | ||
| I said, there's a calf out here if you want to come rescue it. | ||
| And it was towards the end of the day, and they said, nah. | ||
| I said, well, what about tomorrow? | ||
| He said, it won't be there tomorrow. | ||
| And I went out there the next day, and it was just bones. | ||
| Wolves came in, hit it, ate it. | ||
| How often do you see wolves? | ||
| All the time. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I got wolves within... | ||
| I see wolves coming to the boneyard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Fuck. | ||
| They smell that and they go, time to eat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ugh! | |
| They like that rotten meat, man. | ||
| God. | ||
| We got lynx there that hang out. | ||
| Drew was walking up the draw one day and they're... | ||
| He looked up and there was a big lynx about 15 feet away from him just looking at him. | ||
| Like, what the fuck are you doing, man? | ||
| What are you coming up here in my neighborhood for? | ||
| And he kind of backed away and said, I'm going to get out of here. | ||
| I only saw a lynx once. | ||
| I saw a lynx in Alberta. | ||
| Wild looking cat. | ||
| Cool looking animal. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So those wolves, are they ever a threat to people up there? | ||
| When there's a pack of them, they're a threat to anything. | ||
| But they generally don't fuck with people? | ||
| It's hard to see wolves. | ||
| It actually is hard to find them. | ||
| But sometimes, like where we're at, you can hear them howling. | ||
| They're actually out there making noise, looking for each other. | ||
| And, you know, we're in their neck of the woods. | ||
| They're not in my neck of the woods. | ||
| You know, suddenly there's a road there. | ||
| And they're going, what the fuck? | ||
| Who put this in here? | ||
| This is good walking. | ||
| I got a picture in my phone of a pack of wolves that went by an underground miner that's one of my creeks. | ||
| They've got signs up that say no trespassing and all that. | ||
| Wolves are just walking by like, we don't care. | ||
| Yeah, come on. | ||
| I asked the same guy, I said, you never see bears out here. | ||
| This guy did several tours in Vietnam as a sniper because he liked his job. | ||
| I said, do you see a lot of bears out here? | ||
| He goes, I hate bears. | ||
| I said, have you ever shot one out here? | ||
| He goes, I've shot 57 of them. | ||
| I'm like, fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ. | |
| Jesus Christ, you probably shouldn't say that on the podcast. | ||
| That guy might be in trouble. | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Life and property, man. | ||
| Well, and they will take life and they will take property. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He will take their life. | ||
| He doesn't like them. | ||
| I've only shot one bear. | ||
| I tried to shoot a grizzly once and my rifle jammed. | ||
| Have you ever eaten bear? | ||
| No. | ||
| Tastes good, believe it or not. | ||
| Especially black bear. | ||
| Black bear's good. | ||
| My friend Steve Rinella said that some of the best meat he's ever eaten is black bear that had been eating blueberries. | ||
| Oh, I bet. | ||
| And he shot them up in Alaska, too. | ||
| That's where he got it. | ||
| I would have probably eaten black bear that day I shot the black bear at the cabin if we had more time. | ||
| But we were running up to the cut to go to work, and I cut a couple of his claws off, and we buried it. | ||
| Just didn't have time. | ||
| But he was, again, life and property, tearing the door off to get inside where the food was. | ||
| Yeah, well, they're predatory, too. | ||
| They'll kill people. | ||
| Black bears will kill people. | ||
| And a kid got killed at Rutgers University. | ||
| He was in the woods outside of Rutgers University a few years back in New Jersey. | ||
| Yeah, New Jersey has the highest amount of black bears per capita in the United States. | ||
| How crazy is that? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, and they banned hunting. | ||
| We have to stop the bear hunt. | ||
| The bears are your friends. | ||
| And then bear-human encounters increased by over 200% over the term of this new governor. | ||
| And then he finally relinquished and now reopened the bear hunt. | ||
| Now they're going to extend the bear hunt. | ||
| They're going to hunt more of them. | ||
| Because bears are not easy to hunt, too. | ||
| Unless you're in open fields in the spring where they're coming out and they're eating grass, generally they hunt them in the thick shit with bait. | ||
| And people are like, oh, that's so wrong. | ||
| You're using bait. | ||
| But it's literally the only way to control their populations. | ||
| You won't find them. | ||
| When we're up in Alberta, when you go through the woods, you hardly ever see black bears. | ||
| But they're everywhere. | ||
| They're all over the place. | ||
| They just smell you coming a fucking million miles away, and they steer clear. | ||
| Yeah, they do. | ||
| So do wolves. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We got a lot of coyotes out there at the boneyard. | ||
| I'll show you a picture that my friend John Rivett sent me from Alberta. | ||
| He sent me this recently. | ||
| A couple of weeks ago, there was wolves up there in front of one of his trail cams. | ||
| And it's pretty fucking cool pictures. | ||
| Let me find this. | ||
| I know he sent it to me recently. | ||
| He might have sent it with Jen, too. | ||
| But they live in a very remote part of Alberta, where it's, you know, it's all what they call crown land up there. | ||
| You know, so it's just... | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| It might be on Instagram. | ||
| I'm not going to find it. | ||
| I know he sent it to me recently, but it's pretty fucking cool. | ||
| These wolves that are up there, they killed something, and they're all surrounding it, tearing it apart, and it just happened to be in front of one of his trail cameras. | ||
| They caught it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because they have trail cameras set up on all these various roads to see what's walking in and walking out, and they killed something a few yards. | ||
| Yeah, I let guys trap beaver on my ground. | ||
| And beavers can fuck up a water system pretty quick. | ||
| Especially if you have flowing water you need to keep flowing. | ||
| And they'll dam it up and then you've got problems. | ||
| So we have guys that go out and trap beavers in the winter. | ||
| I ate beaver. | ||
| I've never had beaver. | ||
| I had beaver with Steve Rinella. | ||
| He cooked it. | ||
| He made like a beaver pot roast. | ||
| It was delicious. | ||
| It tasted almost like beef. | ||
| It was very good. | ||
| Oh, that kind of beaver. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, you're talking about the other guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, the other thing they used to eat, we tried, but it's disgusting, is the tail. | ||
| They used to eat, like pioneers used to eat beaver tail. | ||
| The trappers used to eat it because it was a very good source of fat because the tail is basically all fat, but it's pretty nasty. | ||
| Did you try that? | ||
| Yeah, I ate it. | ||
| I've never had that. | ||
| It's kind of weird. | ||
| It's not something you're interested in. | ||
| But if you're starving, it would be a source of fat. | ||
| And I think that's what they were doing it for. | ||
| But the meat itself, like I said, he braised it and then he slow cooked it. | ||
| It was very good. | ||
| It was surprising to me that people don't hunt beavers for food. | ||
| That's how good it was. | ||
| Because they hunt them primarily for their pelts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a warm pelt, too. | ||
| It's great fur. | ||
| So when you're up there, you got wolves in that area, you have bears in that area, you got moose, you got all this wildlife, and then you have this piece of ground where all these animals from thousands of years ago died. | ||
| That is a special place you have. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And it's been fairly unknown about. | ||
| Until now. | ||
| Have you had a problem with people going up there and looking around? | ||
| Well, one of the things that we do, my company has a, we're in a solid waste business. | ||
| We have a construction debris landfill close by. | ||
| So we have really good access control. | ||
| At one point in my life when I had all this land, I was going, okay, I gotta somehow make a living with all this property if I'm not gonna mine it. | ||
| And I had a piece that was all mined out. | ||
| We got it permitted to be a construction debris landfill. | ||
| I was looking around and going, who owns a solid waste business in this country? | ||
| Well, the mafia. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I want to get in on what they're doing. | ||
| Because that's where the money's at. | ||
| Solid waste? | ||
| Solid waste. | ||
| Landfills? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Wouldn't that be dirty? | ||
| Isn't that like, if you're dumping waste on your land, doesn't that leak into the ground and get into the water supply? | ||
| It would, but we only take construction debris. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| You know, we have the airport sitting in our landfill. | ||
| The Fairbanks, the old international airport. | ||
| 700 houses from Isleson Air Force Base. | ||
| You just chop them up, throw them in there? | ||
| No, we don't. | ||
| We just... | ||
| Smash them? | ||
| We don't do the demolition. | ||
| We just have the place where the guys that do the demolition can take them. | ||
| So that's kind of how our company, even though we're a gold mining company, we're actually land managers. | ||
| But when you're digging a hole like that, are you concerned that maybe they could dig a hole and there would be woolly mammoths in there too? | ||
| Well, they're right next to where we're digging. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, wouldn't you think that, unfortunately, that they could smash and destroy valuable bones? | ||
| No, no, they're just delivering the refuse. | ||
| Right, but I mean, to dig that hole, right? | ||
| No, the hole's already been dug. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All that part has already been mined out. | ||
| And you're sure there's nothing in there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, there's stuff adjacent to it, but we don't impose on that. | ||
| So, what is it about this one particular five-acre area? | ||
| Like, why are there so many animals in this one spot? | ||
| And do you think there's multiple other spots? | ||
| You said you know of one. | ||
| But you have 10,000 acres. | ||
| I mean, how many more of those are out there? | ||
| And how many more in the surrounding land that's not yours might also hold these similar piles of these dead ancient animals? | ||
| We have no way of knowing. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Listen, I've spent 15 years on this one piece. | ||
| Fifteen years on five acres. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And my wife, by the way, my wife calls it my adorable little hobby. | ||
| So when she sees this, if she ever discovers how much money we spend on fuel and equipment, you know, I'm in trouble. | ||
| Yeah, but historically... | ||
| I mean, it's so significant. | ||
| It's such an unusual place. | ||
| When I first found your page, I thought, something's wrong here. | ||
| I'm reading something wrong. | ||
| I can't help you come from this one place. | ||
| Maybe this guy collects it, brings it in from other places. | ||
| Maybe he's a paleontologist. | ||
| And then I'm like, no, this guy's just fucking finding this shit on his land. | ||
| And the way you were going about it, it's like, I'll just put it over there. | ||
| I was like, this is bananas. | ||
| These are huge scientific discoveries. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I'm not a scientist. | ||
| Well, I guarantee you a lot of... | ||
| Well, many must already know about you, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| They might after this. | ||
| How do they not know? | ||
| If you're a paleontologist and you're studying short-faced bears, or if you're studying, you know, these ancient deceased mammoths and all these... | ||
| Wouldn't you be drawn to your place? | ||
| You would think. | ||
| Now, the fellow that made that documentary film... | ||
| He's really... | ||
| He did a beautiful job on that documentary. | ||
| He's won several film contests. | ||
| The most recent was Denali Film Contest last summer. | ||
| It hasn't gotten really seen by anybody, but we went up to the Explorers Club in New York City for a screening of it several years ago when it was done. | ||
| And those people were really interested in it. | ||
| And... | ||
| I'm in the Explorers Club. | ||
| Drew's in the Explorers Club. | ||
| We do some pretty neat shit. | ||
| But I don't know any... | ||
| We're not looking for anybody to come out there. | ||
| We're kind of like, I'll only tell Joe Rogan about this. | ||
| He lasted three fucking years and now look what happened. | ||
| I mean, I don't want to say you're obligated, but I think what you're sitting on is of immense historical significance. | ||
| Not only that, but it's going to be very expensive for those guys, whoever does this kind of work, to do the proper research. | ||
| Because it's a moving body of frozen ice and muck with trees that can topple down the size of your chunks of ice, the size of a pickup truck can fall out of no place. | ||
| So that's why we don't want a bunch of people out there wandering around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And you've developed a method to do it. | ||
| Yeah, we have. | ||
| But you're just kind of doing it for yourself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're just doing it. | ||
| It's like going Easter egg hunting every day. | ||
| That's unheard of. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Isn't that unheard of? | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| It's very crazy, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| Dropping out of the University of Florida with a full scholarship and hitchhiking to Alaska is crazy. | ||
| All of it's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The whole story's crazy, but it's just crazy that you've got this five-acre patch of land that's yielded dire wolves, short-faced bears. | ||
| I mean, look at this. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, that's true, coming out of a washout. | ||
| You can see a tusk on the ground, too, on the left. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| So he just goes in this washout and pulls out these tusks. | ||
| How many more do you think are in there? | ||
| We have no clue. | ||
| That is so insane. | ||
| This was the day after the day. | ||
| You know, the day before, we had pulled out a mammoth and a half. | ||
| And that's another tusk over there that he's grabbing? | ||
| Yeah, that he's grabbing right there. | ||
| So they're just everywhere in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there had to be just thousands of animals that died and died in a way where they froze and sunk into the muck. | ||
| I think they were transported there by water. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| I don't think they died right there. | ||
| We found some mummies. | ||
| Oh, like they died in a flood. | ||
| They could have, wherever they died, and that just happened to end up there. | ||
| But so many of them? | ||
| Just guessing, right? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| You remember I told you I was a shitty student. | ||
| He seems to be a good bone digger. | ||
| Oh, excuse me, boner. | ||
| A super boner. | ||
| If you find 50,000, you're a super boner. | ||
| Oh, you have like tears? | ||
| Yeah, and there will never be another super boner but me. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| And I win the chili cook-off every year. | ||
| You throw a little mammoth meat in that chili. | ||
| Have you ever eaten mammoth meat? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yep. | ||
| You ate it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What? | ||
| How old was it? | ||
| We didn't carbon date it, but it's got to be at least 12,000 years old. | ||
| So you found physical tissue, like muscle and tissue, and you cooked it? | ||
| I have a friend up there that found a bison. | ||
| Blue babe is what it's called. | ||
| You'll probably find it someplace. | ||
| They got killed by a lion. | ||
| It's one of the main displays at the University of Alaska Museum. | ||
| And when he discovered it, he got a hold of the museum. | ||
| He was using giants like I use. | ||
| And this was... | ||
| There is it right there. | ||
| Yeah, it's Dale Guthrie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So the whole thing was frozen solid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's got the... | ||
| We're looking at this image. | ||
| It's got the tissue on it. | ||
| It's got all the skin. | ||
| It's got everything. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And... | ||
| You guys cut a chunk off that and threw it in the Traeger? | ||
| Not off that one. | ||
| But when he found it, he got a hold of the museum. | ||
| He says, hey, I have something coming out of the muck here you guys might want to come look at. | ||
| But before I tell you about it, what's the process? | ||
| Well, what do you think it is? | ||
| Well, I think it's an Ice Age animal. | ||
| Well, and it's right where I'm mining. | ||
| And they said, well, we can do an emergency excavation. | ||
| We can come in, have it out of there in a day. | ||
| He said, okay, come get it. | ||
| He told them where it was. | ||
| They went in there. | ||
| And this is significant. | ||
| You're done mining here. | ||
| What? | ||
| You're done. | ||
| We're not going to do an emergency excavation on this. | ||
| This is a complete animal. | ||
| It's going to take us a while. | ||
| So he's a friend of mine. | ||
| He says, guess what happened, John? | ||
| I said, what? | ||
| He goes, I had to go mine another creek the rest of that summer. | ||
| You want to know the name of that creek? | ||
| I said, yeah. | ||
| It's called No Gold Creek. | ||
| He goes, you know why they call it that, John? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| He says, I ate nothing but pork and beans and hot dogs all winter. | ||
| I had no money. | ||
| I had no gold. | ||
| Those guys came in. | ||
| Shut everything down. | ||
| Shut everything down. | ||
| For this one animal. | ||
| For this one animal. | ||
| Does he regret making that phone call? | ||
| He did. | ||
| Because after it was all restored and became a preeminent display at the university, and it's been in New York City too, with the AMNH on display. | ||
| His mom was living in Palm Springs in California, came up to visit him. | ||
| Now she's elderly. | ||
| And he's a long-time plaster mining family. | ||
| His father, they were having dinner at the creek one night, and his wife said, there's somebody in the sluice box. | ||
| They were sitting down to eat, looked out, grabbed his rifle, bang. | ||
| Put his rifle down, finished his meal, went to bed. | ||
| He shot the guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The next morning they're having breakfast. | ||
| EPA had come in on a site visit. | ||
| One of the EPA guys came running down and said, there's a wounded guy inside your sluice box. | ||
| And the old man says, he's wounded? | ||
| Yeah, he's wounded. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| Off he went. | ||
| He didn't kill him. | ||
| He clipped him. | ||
| He didn't try to clip him. | ||
| He tried to kill him. | ||
| Now, getting back to my story. | ||
| Jesus Christ, how crazy are people in Alaska? | ||
| Just kill him and go back to dinner? | ||
| That's some Wild West shit. | ||
| It is. | ||
| This was probably 40 years ago that happened. | ||
| 30 years ago. | ||
| And... | ||
| Anyways, he's the one that found Blue Babe, this guy, the son. | ||
| It's his mom. | ||
| His dad had passed. | ||
| His mom came up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hold on. | |
| Go back to the guy who got shot. | ||
| What was the guy doing? | ||
| Stealing gold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| It was inside the guy's sluice box. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It happens. | ||
| You know, the guy's getting inside. | ||
| We've caught people doing stupid shit. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| And guys that crawl into your sluice box at the end of the day. | ||
| How big is a sluice box? | ||
| They all vary, but generally speaking, they're, let's say, 30 feet long and maybe 6 or 8 feet wide with riffles that stop the gravel and the gold goes over. | ||
| Did this guy get in trouble for shooting that guy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-uh. | |
| No. | ||
| Property. | ||
| Nobody likes those guys stealing shit. | ||
| And the guy didn't file charges for being wounded. | ||
| He just kind of went someplace. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| But, my buddy, his mom came up to visit, go to the museum up there, to see. | ||
| He says, come on mom, I want to show you Blue Babe. | ||
| So they went up there and it was a $3 admission per person. | ||
| He gets to the front and He says, yeah, this is my mom. | ||
| There'll be two of us. | ||
| But I'm the guy that discovered Blue Babe. | ||
| And the girl, they're taking the money. | ||
| She didn't know any better. | ||
| She goes... | ||
| Oh, that's nice. | ||
| He says, yeah. | ||
| He says, let me make a call. | ||
| So she calls somebody. | ||
| She comes back and says, I tell you what, we're going to let you in for free, but it's going to be three bucks for your mom. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Oh, my God is right. | ||
| They made a big mistake. | ||
| Because the same guy found a full woolly mammoth. | ||
| You asked if I ate woolly mammoth before. | ||
| He didn't make no fucking phone call. | ||
| Had a little bit of a barbecue. | ||
| Jesus! | ||
| A lot of Jack Daniels and shit like that went down. | ||
| Now explain what condition the meat was in. | ||
| Was it frozen solid? | ||
| No, not by the time we ate it. | ||
| Right, but when he found it. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| It was frozen solid. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| And so it just thaws it out? | ||
| Once it's out of the permafrost, it starts melting. | ||
| And then what was it like? | ||
| Like a steak? | ||
| Oh, fuck no. | ||
| Like a shoe leather. | ||
| Well, of course, they're very thick. | ||
| You gotta put them in some kind of, you know, you gotta let them soak into some kind of marinade. | ||
| Did you have any apprehension about eating a 20,000-year-old mammoth? | ||
| Not after the first few drinks. | ||
| How much of it did you guys cook? | ||
| It wasn't very much. | ||
| He sold the whole animal to a collector. | ||
| Got close to half a million bucks for it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so how does one even transport? | ||
| Do you have to refreeze it? | ||
| Like, what do you do? | ||
| I think the buyer just wanted the bones. | ||
| He wanted the skeleton. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Because the skeleton of a woolly mammoth is very expensive. | ||
| You know, you talk about tusks. | ||
| Wouldn't that tissue be very valuable? | ||
| I'm not the only guy around that's eating mammoth up there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Is that a small club of you guys? | ||
| I don't know if it's a small club. | ||
| We don't recognize it in each other, but you've got no choice. | ||
| You find a woolly mammoth with meat on it, you're going to have to eat some of it. | ||
| You just have to. | ||
| Why? | ||
| What's the point if you don't? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you didn't even eat that bear. | |
| What's that? | ||
| The berry shot. | ||
| You didn't eat him. | ||
| No. | ||
| He was too fresh. | ||
| That's so ridiculous. | ||
| Too fresh. | ||
| So how did they cook it? | ||
| They sauteed it and slow cooked it? | ||
| Like, what'd they do? | ||
| No, just carved it. | ||
| Carved meat off, threw it on a stick over a campfire. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Caveman style? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Until you go caveman. | ||
| You know, you're the kind of guy to go caveman in an instant. | ||
| You'd be up there fucking running around the campfire chewing on a woolly mammoth prime rib. | ||
| You'd be... | ||
| So you put a little salt on it? | ||
| How are you eating it? | ||
| Just whiskey. | ||
| No, I've changed my drink to tequila because I know it's healthy for me. | ||
| Healthy. | ||
| Air quotes. | ||
| Healthy. | ||
| So, how many of you ate this mammoth? | ||
| About ten of us. | ||
| Ten of you? | ||
| Just everybody has a couple bites or do you like have a full meal? | ||
| Oh fuck no. | ||
| Just a few bites. | ||
| That's all you want. | ||
| Does it taste good? | ||
| You know it's like when you jump into your ice water, it's different. | ||
| How many people do that? | ||
| I think a lot now. | ||
| Probably a few people. | ||
| It's pretty common. | ||
| Amongst the kind of people that I associate with. | ||
| I was down in Juneau for a tourism deal when I sold my business to Carnival. | ||
| The night before, we all got a little bit liquored up. | ||
| And the next morning, I had to put the final negotiations together with these guys. | ||
| So I went out to the glacier that's just outside of Juneau. | ||
| I think it's called Mendenhall. | ||
| Mendenhall. | ||
| And got out there, walked out there, never seen it. | ||
| And there was nobody around late in the fall. | ||
| And I'm a swimmer. | ||
| I go, fuck, you ain't got a ball if you don't go hop in that water. | ||
| So I know what it's like to get nice cold water. | ||
| So I stripped down, went in. | ||
| God damn, this is cold and I got the hell out. | ||
| But my hair was still dry. | ||
| I said, what kind of pussy are you? | ||
| I gotta go in there and swim a little bit. | ||
| So I went back in, took a few strokes, hit a piece of ice with my hand like it was the end of the pool deck, swam back out, got out, put my pants on, put my shoes on, walked back to my rental car. | ||
| Got up to my rental car, going back into Juneau, going too fast through the residential area, get pulled over by a cop. | ||
| License registration, I said it's a rental car, here's my license. | ||
| He goes, how come you ain't got a shirt on? | ||
| Why's your hair wet? | ||
| I said, I have a meeting. | ||
| I was trying to get my cobwebs out of my head. | ||
| I went swimming with that glacier down there. | ||
| He goes, you went in there and swimming? | ||
| I said, yeah. | ||
| He goes, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I ain't got time for this. | ||
| No ticket, no nothing. | ||
| I went in, had a good meeting with those guys. | ||
| Wakes you up, doesn't it? | ||
| Oh, it does. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It really does. | ||
| That's all I have to do at first thing in the morning. | ||
| Gets the party rolling. | ||
| Do you do that every day? | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't imagine. | ||
| Well, then I work out. | ||
| I work out after I get out of there. | ||
| I saw your gym. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| I go to CrossFit Jack's with my... | ||
| All our family does. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| And we do CrossFit. | ||
| I do it down here. | ||
| I don't do it up north, but my wife and daughter and Drew, they all do it. | ||
| And... | ||
| I'm not very good at it because I'm kind of not in the best shape for being my age. | ||
| But I do deadlifts and I do barbell stuff and things like that. | ||
| And they really enjoy CrossFit. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| We have a little box in our shop where they do overhead with woolly mammoth tusks. | ||
| How much do one of those weigh? | ||
| Those are 90-pounders. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| They do air squats with them over their heads. | ||
| They got pictures of Drew and Allura doing it. | ||
| Or Chris, actually, my sister Chris, when she was up there. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a great way to work out, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| We have a little box. | ||
| Oh, that's amazing. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's some hearty people. | ||
| Yeah, Drew out there, he played for Detroit for seven years. | ||
| Oh, so you got a real setup back there, huh? | ||
| Yeah, he's a tiger. | ||
| And strong. | ||
| Crossfit's good for you. | ||
| I don't do enough of it. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It is great for you. | ||
| So is that cold plunge. | ||
| I can't do it, dude. | ||
| Out there, you just need a bucket of water in the ground. | ||
| Just climb into a barrel. | ||
| It's already frozen, you know? | ||
| Just chip the ice off the top, climb right in. | ||
| You don't need any equipment. | ||
| Now, I like the hot tubs outside in the Northern Lights and all that stuff. | ||
| That's nice, too. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| That's nice, too. | ||
| I can't imagine in Alaska doing that. | ||
| It'll probably feel good. | ||
| It's probably warmer than the outside air. | ||
| Especially the last couple weeks. | ||
| Yeah, minus 50, huh? | ||
| Is that like when you take hot water and you throw it in the air and it turns into mist? | ||
| I've seen that in videos. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Take a cup of coffee, throw it up in the air, nothing hits the ground. | ||
| Makes hardy people, though. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Fairbanksons are really good to each other. | ||
| Kind of have to be, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're really great to visitors. | ||
| It's a friendly town. | ||
| Alaska, if you've been up there, you know what I'm talking about. | ||
| I've been to Anchorage. | ||
| Well, I've been to a couple different places. | ||
| You've been to Anchorage? | ||
| Yeah, I've been to Anchorage. | ||
| I did comedy up there. | ||
| I'm sorry, that's 357 miles from Alaska. | ||
| It's not Alaska? | ||
| No, you've got to come to Fairbanks. | ||
| Anchorage is 357 miles away. | ||
| You want to see Alaska, come to Fairbanks. | ||
| I was impressed with Anchorage. | ||
| I was impressed with the character of the people. | ||
| And they just seemed like more sturdy people. | ||
| And I was like, of course they are. | ||
| There's fucking moose everywhere, bears everywhere and shit. | ||
| It's like you're living in a totally different reality than people that live in the lower 48s. | ||
| Yeah, my son lives in Palmer and his wife and two kids. | ||
| And that's outside of Anchorage a little ways. | ||
| And the folks in Anchorage will know what I'm talking about. | ||
| They're not going to get too upset with me for saying that. | ||
| But it's kind of a statewide thing. | ||
| Anchorage is, you know, wherever you're at, a little bit those many miles away from. | ||
| What is Anchorage to you guys if it's not Alaska? | ||
| It's a big city. | ||
| A big city? | ||
| It's a huge city. | ||
| How many people? | ||
| A couple hundred thousand? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Is that the biggest city in Alaska? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is the population of Anchorage? | ||
| Is that where Sarah Palin lives? | ||
| She lives in Wasilla. | ||
| Is that close? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Isn't that close to Anchorage? | ||
| Have you met her? | ||
| No, I have not. | ||
| Nice lady. | ||
| Is she? | ||
| Yes, she really is. | ||
| She looks like a nice lady. | ||
|
unidentified
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288,000. | |
| Whoa. | ||
| Big city. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| Todd Palin, good friend of mine. | ||
| I guess everybody knows everybody up there. | ||
| How many people live in Alaska, all told? | ||
| 700,000-something. | ||
| The whole state. | ||
| And it's enormous. | ||
| Well, here we are in Texas. | ||
| Now, this will piss off some of your Texas folks, but let's say, you know, you got North Carolina, South Carolina. | ||
| Let's say we did that to Alaska. | ||
| North Alaska, South Alaska. | ||
| Makes Texas the third largest state. | ||
| Right now they can say they're the second largest state. | ||
| Until 1959, they were the biggest state. | ||
| So it's bigger than two Texases? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Texas beat third largest. | ||
| It's as big as the most 20 eastern states on the sea. | ||
| Alaska, on the entire east coast, most eastern 20 states. | ||
| Didn't we buy it from Russia for like $60? | ||
| Two cents an acre. | ||
| Seven million dollars? | ||
| That's it? | ||
| You imagine what a return on your investment. | ||
| Look at what it looks like if you just plunk it down the middle of the country. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Holy shit is it big. | ||
| We're up there where the two is. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| Where's Anchorage? | ||
| Anchorage down there. | ||
| Right there? | ||
| That's still Alaska, bro? | ||
| Up a little farther, right in there. | ||
| Dude, that's Alaska. | ||
| You're out of your mind. | ||
| That's still Alaska. | ||
| That's so funny that the hardiest of hardy people I had that woman, what is her name, Sue, what's her name from, Sue Akins, from Life Below Zero. | ||
| What a wild lady that is. | ||
| I'll tell you what. | ||
| That lady got attacked by a bear, mangled, broke her hip, like fucking tore her apart. | ||
| She crawls back to her place. | ||
| There's no one around, right? | ||
| Everyone is a plane flight of like seven hours to get to her, right? | ||
| She heals up, goes back out, kills that bear and eats it. - And I believe every word of that too. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| She is a hard lady. | ||
| She was a wonderful person to talk to. | ||
| I really enjoyed her company. | ||
| She's a fascinating person. | ||
| I mean, again, as hearty as it gets. | ||
| She is. | ||
| You know, and she lives in that area where you're not allowed to have permanent structures. | ||
| So the structures that she lives in all have, like, cloth outside. | ||
| Yeah, that's her. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So they live in these houses that the bears can rip into and get into them. | ||
| So like she has to be locked and loaded everywhere she goes. | ||
| They got polar bears where she's at too, I think. | ||
|
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Ooh. | |
| Those are nasty critters. | ||
| They're the nastiest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're the only ones that don't eat anything but meat. | ||
| Ugh. | ||
| And they're nothing compared to those short-faced bears. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, fuck. | |
| Boy, we're lucky those aren't around. | ||
| What's the biggest... | ||
| How many short-faced bear skulls have you found out there? | ||
| Two. | ||
| Two. | ||
| And not only that, but I found years ago when I was mining as a worker at another camp, I was a hydraulicer. | ||
| I was the guy on the giant. | ||
| I found a saber-toothed skull. | ||
| And the University of Alaska head of geology had brought up visiting dignitary from... | ||
| Somewhere in England. | ||
| Some museum in England. | ||
| And they were going around meeting people. | ||
| And I showed this guy from England my saber-toothed tiger skull. | ||
| At the time I was 20, probably... | ||
| 26, 27. And he says, hey, that's a unique specimen. | ||
| How about I take it back to England with me and I'll clean it and I'll restore it and send it back to you. | ||
| I said, okay. | ||
| Off it went. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| Never saw it again. | ||
| Never saw it again. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| That's worth a lot of money, too. | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| I found another one in the archives. | ||
| Of the bones that were sent to AMNH. And it was on a shipping manifest, saber-toothed tiger skull. | ||
| But somehow, when I went to visit AMNH, they didn't show it to me. | ||
| And then, if you watched that, well you did, you watched the documentary today, and they said, Pat Druckenmiller said, to his knowledge, there's never been a saber-toothed tiger skull found in Alaska. | ||
| So, the one I sent to England has never come back, and the one that AM&H apparently got but never wrote up a report on never made it anyplace. | ||
| Could it be in those crates? | ||
| It could be. | ||
| It could be in some benefactor's house. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| And let's explore that a little bit in terms of the bones that were dumped in the river. | ||
| What if they're not there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| What if they distribute it amongst their wealthy friends? | ||
| That's how you get rid of stuff like that. | ||
| You get your benefactors. | ||
| Hey, would you like a mammoth tusk? | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't imagine anybody would throw a mammoth tusk away. | ||
| I would think even back then. | ||
| They would. | ||
| Really? | ||
| God, that's so crazy. | ||
| They had hundreds of thousands of bones. | ||
| We have a couple hundred, a few thousand. | ||
| They could take up a lot of space. | ||
| I get it, but throwing them away seems an insane waste of something that's very valuable. | ||
| Even back then, I think they would understand that it's valuable. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| By the way, I brought you a hat. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Fairbanks Gold Company, Alaska. | ||
| Is that your sweater that you're wearing, too? | ||
| Same logo. | ||
| That's my logo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fairbanks Gold Company. | ||
|
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|
Nice hat. | |
| Yeah, it's, uh... | ||
| My daughters have this business called Gold Daughters. | ||
| And my... | ||
| We make stuff out of woolly mammoth ivory, as you know. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And, uh... | ||
| That fellow that, uh... | ||
| Carved that tooth pipe... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| ...is the fellow that carved this. | ||
| And, uh... | ||
| I want to give it to you. | ||
| It just seems strange to me that you're allowed to carve woolly mammoth tusks and teeth and make stuff out of it. | ||
| I have them carve me all kinds of stuff. | ||
| And I wanted to bring that to you. | ||
| That's for you. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| If you can't see it, that's a little skull that's carved into this and it's a pipe. | ||
| It's a woolly mammoth tooth. | ||
| Woolly mammoth tooth carved into a pipe. | ||
| I bet that's the only one of these, Jamie. | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
| I brought something for Jamie too. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| This is so wild. | ||
| Look at the size of this tooth. | ||
| It just seems kind of fucked up that someone would smoke pot out of this. | ||
| Well, you don't have to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| Jamie, do you ever use a pipe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
For what? | |
| When you're sitting around, going over your literature. | ||
| Give one of those to Jamie and give the other one to somebody else that you want to. | ||
| I made those. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My daughter, Allora... | ||
| Longley is her last name. | ||
| These are legal? | ||
| They're totally legal. | ||
| Tobacco-less only. | ||
| I know, but that's what I'm saying. | ||
| I mean, the actual owning this tooth seems crazy. | ||
| No, we own thousands and thousands of pounds of that material. | ||
| That's so nuts. | ||
| But we've found that with the broken tusks that we find, we make stuff out of. | ||
| What do you make out of the broken tusks? | ||
| Those. | ||
| Just pot? | ||
| Pipes? | ||
| No, actually, here's something else. | ||
| You'll like this story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I brought you some guitar picks. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to get one of these to Gary Clark Jr. I made all these, Joe. | |
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| I sent Kelly Slater... | ||
| Was doing a fundraiser for a homeless surfer. | ||
| So I sent him a care package of things to sell at the auction that they were going to give the money to this guy. | ||
| And I included some picks and some pipes and some stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And I said, hey, if you know any... | ||
| Guitar guys that might appreciate, make sure you give them one of these picks. | ||
| So he sends me this video a year and a half later or so. | ||
| It's been a while tracking this guy down. | ||
| He's giving a pick to Eddie Vedder. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| He sent me the video. | ||
| I think I have it posted on my site. | ||
| And he's playing with it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Eddie Vedder's going, well, Kelly giving it to him, he goes, oh, this is cool, because he likes to collect fossils, too, apparently. | ||
| That's pretty fucking cool. | ||
| Drew and I make stuff. | ||
| We make earrings. | ||
| We make pipes. | ||
| I'm a little torn on that. | ||
| It's extinct. | ||
| I know! | ||
| You know how many elephants we've saved? | ||
| How many elephants have you saved? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| It's illegal to carve elephant ivory anymore. | ||
| You're not allowed to deal in elephant ivory anymore. | ||
| They used to be able to use pre-ban ivory for like pool cues and things like that. | ||
| It was all elephants that were shot decades and decades ago and the logic behind it was they've already been killed. | ||
| It would be a horrible waste to just Leave this stuff. | ||
| In some places, they've burned it. | ||
| Have you ever seen those where they have piles of tusks and they just burn them? | ||
| That seems even worse to me. | ||
| Well, the mammoth ivory, we have thousands of pounds of broken tusks. | ||
| They come out broken, just like the bones. | ||
| So we make stuff out of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You know, and the picks apparently make the guitar sound better. | ||
| Drew's dad plays, and he loves his. | ||
| It's got to be better than plastic. | ||
| Well, just the thought behind it would almost kind of make it better. | ||
| Like, knowing that you're playing with something that died 20,000 years ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, it's a mind blower. | ||
| I'm torn, Jamie. | ||
| Are you a little torn on this, too? | ||
| Does it seem kind of fucked up that you're making stuff out of a limited resource of things that died tens of thousands of years ago? | ||
| Do you see what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, but you were just talking about those elephants. | ||
| We're talking about something that died 20,000. | ||
| Right, but they're still making elephants. | ||
| You know, I don't think you should kill elephants for their ivory, for sure. | ||
| But the pre-banned ivory, that's an animal that exists. | ||
| They're still around. | ||
| Let me call my wife Moana, hide that ivory and shit. | ||
| Gigs up. | ||
| Well, it seems to me that it could very easily go down. | ||
| You can have that. | ||
| Oh, thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It just seems to me that it could very easily go down that they would make that illegal. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| I know they made walrus ivory illegal. | ||
| You can still use prehistoric walrus ivory for the things that the carvers use. | ||
| That's even more fucked up. | ||
| So you could use the stuff from the animals that are long extinct. | ||
| Again, a very finite resource. | ||
| But you can't use the ones from the ones that are alive. | ||
| I prefer to think that the less of that resource that's available, the more valuable it becomes. | ||
| That is true, but if everybody turns them into potpipes, it's going to be a real fucking problem. | ||
| Not everybody will. | ||
| My daughter makes beautiful jewelry out of her little pieces of ivory that she has. | ||
| She's the Saks Fifth Avenue of mammoth ivory jewelry. | ||
| Jew and I are the Dollar General. | ||
| Does your daughter have a website where she sells her stuff? | ||
| Ellora Longley. | ||
| That's her Instagram page. | ||
| Go to her Instagram, see if you can find her. | ||
| Yeah, it's awesome. | ||
| She's really good at it. | ||
| And so she just sells it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She just had a Christmas thing that she unloaded. | ||
| She sold eight nice pieces. | ||
| They call it when you drop, I guess. | ||
| When you drop stuff. | ||
| So here it is. | ||
| So this stuff that she has, all that, this is all mammoth ivory? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Mammoth ivory, and then you see some with gold nuggets on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's pretty fucking cool. | ||
| Yeah, also comes off our ground. | ||
| She makes rings, too? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I'm telling you, she's Saks Fifth Avenue. | ||
| That's cool-looking stuff, I'll tell you that. | ||
| That ring right there with a piece of walrus ivory in it, or mammoth ivory, whatever that is? | ||
| Yep, mammoth. | ||
| That's mammoth ivory? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And she turns that into a ring? | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| You've got to remember that what we start with is a nasty-looking just shard. | ||
| And she spends a lot of time on those. | ||
| She's making cabs now, and she's learning the business from a guy up in Jacksonville. | ||
| Guy Beard is his name. | ||
| He does a jewelry store. | ||
| We have a set of tusks in there for sale that we found on another creek. | ||
| It's a match set. | ||
| So you sell the tusks? | ||
| Off another creek, yeah. | ||
| Not from the boneyard. | ||
| We keep everything from the boneyard in one collection. | ||
| But we have a bunch of different mining operations going. | ||
| And when you do have them, what do you do? | ||
| You put it up for auction or something? | ||
| You put it at Christie's? | ||
| Or what do you do? | ||
| No, we sell them. | ||
| I told this guy, go ahead and sell them if you want. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He's got a real upscale jewelry store in Jacksonville. | ||
| So if someone wants to buy a mammoth tusk, how much does one of those cost? | ||
| That pair he's selling right there is like $250,000, $225,000, something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I know a rich guy who bought a saber-toothed tiger head. | ||
| Bought a real saber-toothed tiger skull. | ||
| Probably bought it from your guy. | ||
| Stole it from you. | ||
| Son of a bitch. | ||
| You know, they have a lot of saber-toothed tigers, I think, in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, that area. | ||
| But Alaska... | ||
| They find them in Los Angeles. | ||
| La Brea Tar Pits. | ||
| Yeah, which is bizarre. | ||
| If you're around La Brea... | ||
| You're like, surely I'm in the wrong place. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And then you go to the La Brea Tar Pit Museum and you're like, what the fuck? | ||
| It's right here? | ||
| We found more bones in 15 years than they've found in 100. Whoa. | ||
| And I've been there. | ||
| And they have a lot of dire wolves in that display. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, dire wolves never lived up in Alaska. | ||
| That's what's crazy is that your one five-acre plot has changed where they thought dire wolves lived. | ||
| Not just them, but the fact that we find badger skulls. | ||
| Some of the experts say, well, badgers didn't live here back in the Ice Age. | ||
| But one of my most significant finds ever is a blue feather. | ||
| A blue feather. | ||
| I have it on my site someplace. | ||
| It was buried deep inside the hollow end of a 10-foot mammoth tusk that was under 65 feet of overburden in the gravels. | ||
| And, you know, when you're cleaning out a tusk, when you get it out of the ground and the material starts to dry, we put clamps on those tusks so as they dry they don't split. | ||
| And out of the end comes this blue feather. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| People go, what's your most significant find ever? | ||
| I go, that blue feather. | ||
| Is that a peacock? | ||
| I don't know what the fuck that is. | ||
| People go, why don't you carbon date it? | ||
| Okay, well there's not a whole lot left of it now, so let's burn it all the fuck up so we can know how old it was. | ||
| They have no idea what that is? | ||
| I have no clue. | ||
| But I've heard from paleontologists, you're going to call this one, that's impossible. | ||
| There were no birds up here with blue feathers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| During the ice age. | ||
| So, I've always wondered that. | ||
| I see yellow in there, too, though. | ||
| Yeah, there's yellow in there for sure. | ||
| I've always wondered that in terms of, like, how they know... | ||
| Like, the fossil record is fascinating to me because it's not easy for things to become fossils. | ||
| It's very difficult. | ||
| It requires very specific circumstances. | ||
| And most things, the vast majority of things, never become fossils. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Forrest Galante, see if you can find this video. | ||
| He thinks that dragons might have been a real thing. | ||
| I think he could be onto something there. | ||
| He says if you look at the same period of time throughout Europe and in Asia, they were all drawing the same thing. | ||
| And there's people battling the same thing. | ||
| And he said, if you had an animal that had very thin bones, because it could fly, the same as a bird does, and they died, and they weren't fossilized, there'd be no record of them. | ||
| There'd be nothing left. | ||
| And he thinks it's really possible that at one point in time that was a real animal. | ||
| Here, play this. | ||
| Giant scaly animal that could fly. | ||
| So when you break that down, you think about the fact that large birds had a hard time being fossilized because their bones are so porous, right? | ||
| So because bones, they have like hollowish bones, they break down very easily and they don't fossilize. | ||
| So the group that says this... | ||
| Basically, they're saying the evidence is the reason there's no fossils of dragons is because they had bird bones and they were actually very delicate animals. | ||
| But a handful of these small population of these giant flying lizards existed and basically encompassed all these different countries where they all depicted fighting dragons in their own way and they were all killed off by knights or whatever it is and then didn't fossilize. | ||
| So it's like the science is saying that if there were lizards big enough to fly around and eat people, they didn't have bones that could fossilize. | ||
| So it would be like an eagle. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's why all these human populations around the world have depictions of them, because they did actually exist. | ||
| Now, are there any... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, it makes you think. | ||
| The fossil record is a really fascinating thing because they're getting their understanding of what existed and didn't exist based on what was fossilized. | ||
| Especially when you come into dinosaurs, they're always finding a new dinosaur. | ||
| I mean, it's a regular thing that they find a new species of dinosaur. | ||
| You know, every few years they find something. | ||
| The university curator, Pat Druckenmiller, that was on the video you watched, he's got six or seven dinosaurs that he's discovered himself. | ||
| And when you discover it, you get to name it. | ||
| So he's that kind of... | ||
| He's really legit. | ||
| And... | ||
| We've run into a problem with people that say they're paleontologists, but they're really just looking to get a collection going. | ||
| And we're not interested in assisting. | ||
| I would imagine that's a big thing with people. | ||
| And the other thing is the AMNH has poisoned the well for me when it comes to sending anything outside the state of Alaska. | ||
| And the way it works in America, you talked about in this documentary that in some countries, like in Canada... | ||
| If someone finds something, it becomes property of the country. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Crown property. | ||
| But in America, it's yours. | ||
| If you own the land, it's yours. | ||
| But if you find that, what I'm finding on the state mining or state mining claims or federal claims, they own it. | ||
| They're the landowner. | ||
| They don't always take possession of it, but if they want to, they'll come in and stop you from mining. | ||
| I can't imagine why someone hasn't reached out to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why there isn't, like, Oh, they have. | |
| You know, I told them, I'll only tell this story to Joe Rogan. | ||
| I've been leaning on this crutch now for three years. | ||
| You fucked it all up a little bit when you invited me on your show. | ||
| I had to have you on. | ||
| I was so fascinated by your page. | ||
| And the story itself is even more crazy than I thought it was. | ||
| I just thought, I didn't realize the scope of the collection. | ||
| Oh, it's huge. | ||
| It's going to get a lot bigger, but we will not allow any of our fossils outside the state of Alaska. | ||
| That's why we built that 5,000 square foot facility this fall. | ||
| You might have to build another one. | ||
| Yeah, it's already in the works. | ||
| So as you dig into these, what do you call them, muck hills? | ||
| As you dig into these, how much of the land have you excavated, have you extracted these things from? | ||
| Myself, personally? | ||
| Well, just like the whole company. | ||
| The company has probably mined out of the 10,000 acres that I currently own, probably mined out 3-4,000 acres. | ||
| And so out of those 3-4,000 acres, you've extracted all these bones. | ||
| But only out of 5 acres, you've extracted these bones. | ||
| 5 acres, but the company didn't save bones. | ||
| They were all taken to AMNH in New York City. | ||
| So it's possible that you've only scratched the surface of what's at your place? | ||
| Not impossible. | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
| We have just barely touched it. | ||
| We're only talking an area Five acres. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a really nice giant piece of land with a house on it. | ||
| The fact that you've got this many animals from that relatively small piece of property is just fucking insane. | ||
| Well, and like I said, the next creek down is a mile long. | ||
| This is a gulch. | ||
| And the next creek down, you're finding stuff there too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| And we're able to use stuff these days that they didn't have back in the day, like drones. | ||
| You can fly up a creek and see if there's something laying on the top. | ||
| And that's just what's laying on the top. | ||
| Yeah, just sitting on top. | ||
| The other significant thing that we haven't talked about is the wood that, you know, is abundant in that area. | ||
| This was all grasslands back in the day. | ||
| These are all grazers. | ||
| The caribou, the bison, they're all grazers. | ||
| Carnivores are not grazers. | ||
| They're meat eaters. | ||
| For thousands of years they had a nice balance of, you know, everybody's happy. | ||
| But, you know, suddenly things changed. | ||
| It went from grasslands to forested lands because it became, it left the ice age and became uplands. | ||
| And uplands is where people like to build their houses because there's basically a little permafrost under it. | ||
| So a lot of the housing in Fairbanks is on the south slope of a hill. | ||
| And you sometimes see people that build on permafrost. | ||
| And if you do that, you're asking for trouble. | ||
| Because the ground's melting underneath your house. | ||
| And that's good if you're in the landfill business and you have a construction debris landfill because that's where they end up. | ||
| Because the houses start to sink. | ||
| Somebody has to go in, they tear them up, they take them out to us. | ||
| And we'll take care of it for you. | ||
| And the other significant thing we haven't talked about is we've only found the big stuff. | ||
| But that water is running down a drain. | ||
| And we take the excavator in there and we dig that drain out pretty regularly. | ||
| We stack all that material up. | ||
| I would wager, pretty much everything I own, that there are millions of microfossils in that material. | ||
| And millions. | ||
| We're talking claws, teeth, little tiny things that get caught in the current and go downstream. | ||
| We bail them out, we stack them up. | ||
| We're not going to spend the time with a hand screen and go through it, but someday somebody might. | ||
| Might be one of my grandkids' kids. | ||
| We're in this for the long haul. | ||
| You were saying the trees, the wood? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sometimes you strip off the permafrost and there's trees underneath that stuff. | ||
| Whole trees? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We dug a permafrost tunnel in nearby, came in probably 40 feet, 30 feet below the permafrost. | ||
| There's trees growing in it. | ||
| There's old trees that were there. | ||
| And it kind of meshes with that theory that there used to be no moose up there, because they're not grazers. | ||
| You know, they're a different breed of animal altogether. | ||
| They eat willows, they eat trees, they eat that kind of stuff. | ||
| And not so much grass. | ||
| So there was a transition, and there was a big, well, there's no moose up here. | ||
| Well, in that film, you saw those guys discover three moose bones inside one of our collection areas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That heretofore, they never thought existed up there during the Ice Age. | ||
| So that's significant. | ||
| Could have been right at the transition. | ||
| It's got a carbon date. | ||
| It costs 400 bucks a pop. | ||
| It just seems to me that this is so big and so important. | ||
| It's bizarre that it hasn't gotten more attention. | ||
| You know why that is. | ||
| I'm only gonna talk to Joe Rogan about it. | ||
| You think I'm bullshit. | ||
| I've used you as a crutch for years. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| You don't know? | ||
| I'm glad you appreciate it, but that explains why nobody knows what we're doing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But don't you think, like, this is important for science, important for the human race and our understanding of the past, and this is not as simple as just a pile of bones? | ||
| I mean, this is of great historical importance. | ||
| I agree with you 100%. | ||
| That's why we collect them. | ||
| What do you think is going to happen to all of them though? | ||
| Have you thought of it? | ||
| One of those guys that knows what he's talking about is going to have to come up and identify them. | ||
| They're going to have to figure it out. | ||
| It's not my job to figure it out. | ||
| I don't have time or the expertise. | ||
| They must shit their pants when they get up there. | ||
| If you've had guys come up there before and they see all the stuff you have. | ||
| Well, the couple that you saw on that video, one of the very few people I've ever allowed in there to look at it. | ||
| And the only reason that was is because the filmmaker was making a documentary. | ||
| When they got up there and they saw that, what was their initial response? | ||
| They couldn't believe it. | ||
| They still can't believe it. | ||
| The one guy offered to come up and categorize everything. | ||
| That was Dick Moe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I said, well, we're not done yet. | ||
| We're going to keep working. | ||
| So it hasn't happened yet. | ||
| It seems like it should. | ||
| Oh, it should. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's going to cost somebody a lot of money to do it, and I'm not going to pay for it. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| Because this is just a hobby. | ||
| But then also you have to be careful of who you allow. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And whether or not they get righteous and want to take it from you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which they like to do sometimes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why we never find anything of archaeological value. | ||
| It's a whole different set of laws. | ||
| Have you ever found anything of archaeological value? | ||
| I mean, theoretically, hypothetically, if you did, if you found like weapon points or something like that. | ||
| I have a skinning tool that I posted. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If Jamie can find that. | ||
| How recent is that? | ||
| Do you post it? | ||
| I posted a lot of this stuff in the last few weeks, anticipating this, so it wouldn't be hard for him to find it. | ||
| That's not it. | ||
| That looks like a tooth. | ||
| Is that a tooth? | ||
| That's a tool? | ||
| Let's see here. | ||
| Within the last few weeks? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a scapula. | ||
| Yeah, with a point tip that apparently stuck in it. | ||
| Oh, there was a tip stuck in the scapula? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Click on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, whoa. | |
| Whoa. | ||
| So that is something, a spear or an arrow or something that went through that? | ||
| If you scroll a few more of those pictures, you'll see there's an elk, by the way, an elk skull that we found. | ||
| They didn't live up there, by the way. | ||
| Okay, there's a ground squirrel in my hand there. | ||
| That's a ground squirrel jaw, skull. | ||
| So where's this tool? | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Is it up or down? | ||
| There's a bunch of stuff. | ||
| If you scroll down a little bit, Jamie, to the right side, what is that? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Those are all a bunch of spear points and arrowheads that were found on my ground. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Were shipped to the AMNH and ended up in Wisconsin where they were lost for 15 years. | ||
| They found them now? | ||
| Somebody tracked them down. | ||
| Those are all from our ground. | ||
| So how old did they think those are? | ||
| Keep scrolling and I'll see if... | ||
| It's got a big gold scale sitting on a gold scale. | ||
| Is that your golden retriever? | ||
| Yeah, my daughter's golden retriever. | ||
| Go a little bit farther, I think. | ||
| No, that was a little thing I made. | ||
| Hey, you like that caribou handler? | ||
| Go up a little bit. | ||
| Where at? | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Someone carve a face into it? | ||
| Looks like a face. | ||
| Did you find it like that? | ||
| Yeah, laying on top of a tailing pile. | ||
| Ten miles below the boneyard. | ||
| So it looks like somebody... | ||
| Yeah, that totally looks like a face. | ||
| Like somebody was working on it. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Go back to the thing. | ||
| Let's try to find the tools. | ||
| So those arrowheads, what time do they date those things to? | ||
| I don't know if they ever did anything with them. | ||
| They just went from Fairbanks to New York City. | ||
| So nobody had any speculation or nothing? | ||
| There's another dire wolf skull on the right there. | ||
| Go down there, Jamie. | ||
| Click a black up, up, up, up. | ||
| That's a badger right there. | ||
| No, it's up a little bit further, Jamie. | ||
| Yeah, right there to the right. | ||
| That's it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Look how dark it is. | ||
| Is that dark from the muck? | ||
| It's dark from being wet. | ||
| We had just found it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And so they didn't think dire wolves lived up there? | ||
| No. | ||
| So have they altered their history books now? | ||
| It seems like they're trying to a little bit. | ||
| I'm going to get on my phone and see if I can find that. | ||
| Look at that mushroom popping onto that ice. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| There's a lot of flora that we don't even know. | ||
| It grows there in the silt that comes down. | ||
| It just starts sprouting immediately. | ||
| And I'm thinking it's ice age stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Ice age stuff that the seeds are in there and then once the warm air hits them. | ||
| Boom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And it's not found in any other areas around where I'm at. | ||
| I mean, it's right there at the boneyard. | ||
| You got to bring some botanists in there too then. | ||
| I don't want to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I just want to collect the stuff. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| And find somebody who's got as much interest in history as you do to go up and do it. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure there's people listening right now that are chomping at the bit. | ||
| Because it seems like you have one of the most unique places on earth. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| It's just so crazy that it's just five acre chunk. | ||
| What is significant about it? | ||
| What is it about that area? | ||
| Is there any speculation as to why they would all wind up there? | ||
| The next creek up, which is a major tributary, it's where Gold Daughters is at, is another creek. | ||
| And when they put the pipeline through there, they were digging down to bedrock and trying to find a firm base for their VSMs, which are the pipes that hold it up in the air. | ||
| Finding all kinds of tusks. | ||
| All kinds of tusks. | ||
| So it's just everywhere up there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like the guy that built that pipe, Mammoth Mogul. | ||
| He also made a... | ||
| His name is Mammoth Mogul? | ||
| His Instagram is Mammoth Mogul. | ||
| Put him Mammoth Mogul. | ||
| Mammoth underscore Mogul. | ||
| I think that's what he has. | ||
| It's M-O-G-A-L or M-O-G-U-L. I'm not sure. | ||
| And so... | ||
| But they don't know why. | ||
| No one has come to you and said, hey, John, I think this is why. | ||
| Yeah, I get all kinds of people that think that's why. | ||
| But what do they think? | ||
| Why do they think all those animals are in this one spot? | ||
| They don't have a clue. | ||
| Even the people in that film who are experts have no idea. | ||
| And there's no place that's remotely similar to this in terms of the amount of stuff that they've pulled out of one area? | ||
| If there is, they're not talking about it. | ||
| Let's say they're on state property, state claim. | ||
| They can be shut down, like right now. | ||
| So they would probably keep their mouth shut and just keep digging? | ||
| I would think so. | ||
| This is patented land that we own from the surface to the center of the planet. | ||
| It's the highest bundle of property rights you can acquire. | ||
| We own it. | ||
| It's not playing Mother May I with the state or the feds. | ||
| If you find it on native lands, it's theirs. | ||
| You're not even allowed to touch it. | ||
| If you see a tusk in a creek, this actually happened. | ||
| It was on native corporation land. | ||
| Guy picked the tusk up, put it in his airplane, lost his airplane. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It got confiscated. | ||
| What do those folks do with it when they find them on native land? | ||
| Don't know. | ||
| It seems like this very... | ||
| They're allowed to collect it. | ||
| They're allowed to do that. | ||
| But this whole thing seems like this very unusual moment that needs to be capitalized on. | ||
| This crazy spot, like what you've done and even what you're doing. | ||
| You're just continually extracting history. | ||
| It just seems so important. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's just so crazy that it's a guy who's a miner who just happened to find that shit. | ||
| Just like, put it over there. | ||
| Well, here's the downside of being crazy. | ||
| Because we have a lot of good mining ground. | ||
| Here it is, Mammoth Mogul. | ||
| Oh, so he makes a lot of cool shit. | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| Look at all this stuff. | ||
| Let's go to that tusk that he has, Jamie. | ||
| Look at that, man. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I tell people, if you ever have a chance to acquire one of his carvings, just do it. | ||
| You can thank me later. | ||
| What is the... | ||
| Yeah, look at that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 150 pound blue tusk. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| For sale, $675,000. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Somebody's gonna buy that. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some crazy rich fuck. | |
| What is that? | ||
| Go down there to that head thing to the left of the hat. | ||
| I think that's the one I have. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| It's a mammoth carved into a piece of mammoth. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's one of mine now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| If he puts it up on his site and I see it before somebody buys it, I buy it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He made that pipe there out of a mammoth tooth. | ||
| Well, he's going to get sold out now. | ||
| You don't? | ||
| No. | ||
| Tell him to send it to you before he posts it. | ||
| I have talked to him. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I have no idea what that is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| Now you haven't found any dinosaurs. | ||
| No, not that I know of. | ||
| What happens if you find dinosaurs? | ||
| The same deal? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think the dinosaurs mostly are up on the North Slope. | ||
| You know, that's where they've been finding them. | ||
| They're pretty secretive about where to. | ||
| Do you ever stop and think, like, how crazy it is that it's you? | ||
| That you are the guy who has found this stuff? | ||
| You're the guy who owns this piece of property. | ||
| You're the guy who stumbled upon one of the greatest historical sites in all of paleontology? | ||
| I don't know if we have that, but... | ||
| Seems like it. | ||
| Going back to the crazy part of it, I've got 10,000 acres of really good mining property, and I haven't been mining that little piece, even though I know there's a lot of gold there because we have the drill logs. | ||
| And right below it, the miner took out 3,000 ounces in about a 4-acre piece of land. | ||
| So it kind of goes up, and for years I had a guy working with me going, Fuck these bones. | ||
| Let's just go mining. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| What are you doing to other people? | ||
| That guy's a fucking nutter, man. | ||
| He's out there all day just picking up bones. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| We turn the giant on, the auto giant, and we just let it run and we'll come back in a couple hours and see what we found. | ||
| And Dick Mole, when he was up there, he was like this. | ||
| He was on a private little conversation. | ||
| He says, John, tell me, do you have your bones and your collection insured? | ||
| I said, excuse me. | ||
| He says, do you have your collection insured? | ||
| I said, what do you mean do I have my collection insured? | ||
| He says, well, it's valuable. | ||
| Do you have it insured? | ||
| I said, no, I never even thought about it. | ||
| Well, you should think about it. | ||
| I said, Dick, okay, help me out here. | ||
| What should I insure it for? | ||
| If I was you, I'd insure it for $450 million. | ||
| He says, it's not worth that, though. | ||
| It's only worth $150 million, but you always insure heavy. | ||
| I said, are you serious? | ||
| He goes, yeah. | ||
| Now, after that conversation, I got back in my truck. | ||
| I went, alright. | ||
| I was fucking crazy. | ||
| You think I'm crazy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck that. | |
| I'm crazy. | ||
| But I felt vindicated. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| For somebody to even think it's even close to something like that. | ||
| And because... | ||
| Like I said, it's just a hobby. | ||
| I'm trying to put myself in your shoes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm trying to imagine if I was you and I stumbled across this, if I would do anything different. | ||
| No, you wouldn't. | ||
| I don't think I would. | ||
| No, you'd do the same fucking thing I'm doing. | ||
| I probably wouldn't talk about it on the podcast, though. | ||
| No, you'd just talk to yourself. | ||
| I'd tell Jamie. | ||
| You'd just be talking to yourself. | ||
| I would put our phones in a fucking Ziploc bag and put them in a safe and have a conversation with them. | ||
| Here's you out there. | ||
| It's just, like, unedited footage on YouTube. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just a bunch of stuff. | |
| Yeah, my son, Kenzie, did a lot of filming back in the early days. | ||
| I do love the fact that you document all this stuff, and you do put it online. | ||
| I mean, I think that's pretty fucking cool. | ||
| And there's a piece of mammoth ivory and heads and bones and shit. | ||
| Is that a day's collection? | ||
| Just all stuff you caught in a day? | ||
| Probably a couple days. | ||
| So amazing, man. | ||
| I mean, I know you realize how fortunate you are, but I mean, amongst all the people that have ever lived, how many people have ever found a spot like this? | ||
| It's fucking bunk. | ||
| It's hard for me to imagine why they're all there. | ||
| I'm trying to look on the map. | ||
| Where? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is this it, the area? | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Based on, I'm like, we've done this stuff with Graham and Randall, you know, so like, looking at the map, it seems like there was a flood. | ||
| Go up, see where it says Gulfstream? | ||
| Yeah, right here. | ||
| Zoom in on that. | ||
| See where it says Gold Reg 8? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Now go to the left of that. | ||
| See that body of water right there? | ||
| Down. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, this like right here? | |
| Right. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| And now go right to where it says Calder Creek. | ||
| Come up this way or up the other way. | ||
| The other down. | ||
| Right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I see right here. | |
| All right. | ||
| Now go where it meets. | ||
| Up. | ||
| No. | ||
| Go up. | ||
| Upwards towards the pond. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| So zoom out and you get this sort of topological view of it. | ||
| But the thing is, it's like, so you think that they died and then floods might have carried them there. | ||
| So if it was like a mass extinction. | ||
| Do you see that big body of earth moving stuff up there? | ||
| Go to the right of Fox? | ||
| Go up a little bit. | ||
| I'm trying to move it right. | ||
| Right to the left there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rear? | |
| No, to the right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I see Fox there. | |
| Go to the right of that. | ||
| You see that right there. | ||
| That's the Fort Knox mine. | ||
| Oh, God, how gross is that? | ||
| Largest open pit mine in North America. | ||
| Look how big it is. | ||
| Now, if you go down Fairbanks Creek from there, you'll see off to the right, go up a little bit now. | ||
| Keep going right. | ||
| A little bit more. | ||
| Don't stop. | ||
| Just go straight up to the left. | ||
| Up more and go to the left. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Right to the left there. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Zoom in on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're looking at my mouse pointer, I see. | |
| What's that? | ||
| Now you go, you see that, that's a big pond. | ||
| Now over here on the stop, to the left of that, over there on the side, you see that dredge sitting there. | ||
| We call that Jordy's Dredge. | ||
| That's named after my daughter Jordan. | ||
| And that's where we took the family picnicking. | ||
| And for years, I put it on the National Register because I like to restore old stuff. | ||
| Something to do. | ||
| It's just so fascinating when you look at the sheer scope of the land out there, and you think of this one five-acre patch that you've pulled all these bones from, and then you imagine how much more is out there. | ||
| How much more hasn't been excavated? | ||
| How much more of that land has a similar situation going on in it? | ||
| The only land there that's been excavated is land that has gold on it. | ||
| There's no point in excavating the rest of it. | ||
| But if someone found a similar sort of scenario and they started blowing water into the mountainside, they might be able to pull things out of there, too. | ||
| It might be everywhere up there. | ||
| Well, if it's state or federal land, which most all the property is, you're not going to get a permit to do that. | ||
| But it feels like paleontologists could. | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| Even federal agencies that try to do deals with the feds have problems with the feds permitting process. | ||
| Even scientists? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just seems like it's so important. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's been some really incredible things that our company has been participating in because we do have a lot of private property. | ||
| We rezoned Chattaneca, which is one of the other areas up there that's one of the richest creeks in the state, is Cleary Creek. | ||
| And that's leased out to a gold miner out of the Yukon. | ||
| But we rezoned that to a private rocket range several years ago. | ||
| Rocket Range? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| You're running out to Elon? | ||
| It's right next to Poker Flats Rocket Range, which is a university rocket range. | ||
| But theirs is all on wetlands, permafrost. | ||
| And mine's all uplands. | ||
| So, Elon, if you're listening, call me. | ||
| Because I know he does listen to you. | ||
| I can write him a permit to launch a rocket on a cocktail napkin. | ||
| Only people he's have to talk to after that is FAA. Well, they do it all down here. | ||
| Yeah, they do. | ||
| But someday they might want to start doing it out of Alaska because of its location to the high Arctic. | ||
| And he sent a lot of his satellites are going up around the high Arctic to interconnect with that area that nobody else has done. | ||
| Now, what would someone do if they were building something like that and they stumbled upon a mammoth bone? | ||
| What would I do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd put it in my truck. | ||
| Wouldn't they keep digging? | ||
| Well, I'd get the next one too. | ||
| Do you feel like you almost have like a bounty of riches with this stuff where it's like so much that you're not even appreciating it for what it is? | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| Because you're just so accustomed to discovering it? | ||
| No, it's just that... | ||
| I don't need the money. | ||
| Not even money. | ||
| I don't even mean in terms of money. | ||
| I mean in terms of like how incredible it is. | ||
| It is absolutely incredible. | ||
| And I take a long view of history. | ||
| The shit that we're doing right now, I won't be around to see happen. | ||
| But it's gonna happen. | ||
| It took us 15 years just to collect what we got. | ||
| And you've only scratched the surface. | ||
| Just a little bit. | ||
| Not only that, but that area to the next creek down, the entire area from where we're at down to the next creek down is going to have incredible amounts too. | ||
| How much money have you spent doing this? | ||
| Mona, I haven't spent a shit, I haven't spent anything. | ||
| Talking to my wife there, because she thinks it's my hobby. | ||
| But if someone else did it... | ||
| It cost them, because you see the tools we use. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, D9. And 15 years of doing this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuel. | ||
| Labor, fuel, machines. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just so crazy that it's like a homegrown operation. | ||
| It's just a small, just a little outfit. | ||
| But is there anything like this anywhere else in the world that you're aware of? | ||
| No. | ||
| Imagine if you weren't there. | ||
| That's what's so crazy to me. | ||
| If you weren't there, if you didn't discover dire wolf skulls, saber-toothed tiger skulls, elk skulls, moose skulls, If you didn't discover all these animals, they wouldn't even think those animals were there. | ||
| They would confidently state those animals did not exist during that time in that area. | ||
| And they continue to say that. | ||
| But they're taking some minor steps to go, well, the dire wolves actually did live up there. | ||
| Now they're saying that. | ||
| Yeah, now they're saying that. | ||
| Well, duh. | ||
| I got half a dozen of them sitting on my bookshelf. | ||
| Half a dozen dire wolf skulls on your bookshelf? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| How big is a dire wolf skull? | ||
| About yea long. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Damn. | |
| That's got to be worth a lot of money. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| If someone bought a dire wolf skull online, Christie's at an auction or something like that? | ||
| You could probably find people that are selling them. | ||
| I guarantee. | ||
| See if you can find a dire wolf skull for sale. | ||
| The other thing I was talking about, the skinning knife that we found. | ||
| I have friends that are hard rock geologists. | ||
| They're some of the best on the planet that know where minerals are in Alaska, know where the valuable rocks are of all kinds of metals. | ||
| And the skinning knife I took to a fella, probably one of the best hard rock geologists that I know. | ||
| Well, in fact, he is. | ||
| And I said, Kurt, where'd this come from? | ||
| What kind of rock is this? | ||
| And he looked at it, he goes... | ||
| It's not from Alaska. | ||
| That rock is not from Alaska. | ||
| I said, where is that type of rock found? | ||
| He goes, Eastern Europe. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Now, Bulgaria, Romania, one of those areas. | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
| So someone, some ancient historical person came from Bulgaria or Eastern Europe with stone tools and made their way to your property. | ||
| And not only that, but let's say you're going to take a long trip. | ||
| You're going to pack more than one pair of underwear. | ||
| So let's take some of this rock with us. | ||
| We're never going to know when we might need to make some more flint tools, arrowheads, spear tips. | ||
| Probably loaded up a sled full of that kind of rock. | ||
| Drog it all the way across Europe. | ||
| Thousands of miles. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Went across the Bering Land Bridge. | ||
| And this promontory where this was found is an incredible story, because if what I hadn't done prior to that didn't happen, I would have never found it. | ||
| And that was, there's a letter I posted from a brigadier general that the last line is really good. | ||
| Your contribution to the safety of America cannot be overestimated. | ||
| Pull that letter up. | ||
| How are you contributing to the safety of America? | ||
| I got a call one day from a friend who owns a bunkhouse up on the Cleary Summit. | ||
| He goes, John, I got some guys up here who'd like to talk to you. | ||
| I said, okay, I'll be right up. | ||
| He says, I'll let them explain it. | ||
| So I get up there and I go into his bunkhouse, which is big. | ||
| And on the floor is all kinds of technology, cables, machinery, boxes, travel, kind of high-tech stuff. | ||
| And about 15 guys milling around in there working. | ||
| I met the guy in charge. | ||
| I go, what's up? | ||
| He says, I understand it. | ||
| You have a lot of land. | ||
| He says, I'm up here doing a test for the Air Force, and our permit expired before we were able to get moving. | ||
| And we need a place to do this experiment. | ||
| I said, what's the experiment? | ||
| He goes, you see all these guys? | ||
| I go, yeah. | ||
| He goes, those are acoustic engineers. | ||
| Now, Joe... | ||
| I've never even seen an acoustic engineer before. | ||
| Suddenly I got 15 of them in the same room. | ||
| I said, what are we studying? | ||
| Well, we're trying to improve the bunker buster. | ||
| I said, what's the problem with the bunker buster? | ||
| It's not working right. | ||
| It's not going deep enough in Afghanistan. | ||
| We want it to penetrate the earth farther. | ||
| So we're going to lay out a bunch of grids. | ||
| We're going to do some explosions. | ||
| We're going to measure the Sound waves or whatever they do. | ||
| But we got no place to do it now and we got everybody here. | ||
| Steve here is saying that you can probably accommodate us. | ||
| And I said, sure I can. | ||
| I got a lot of land. | ||
| I said, but why are you testing it in Alaska? | ||
| Why aren't you testing it in Utah or the lower 48 someplace? | ||
| What do you need to come up here for? | ||
| Well, we want to do it in permafrost. | ||
| I said, Afghanistan doesn't have permafrost. | ||
| Not that I'm aware of, especially for a bunker buster. | ||
| I said, this don't sound right to me. | ||
| He goes, step outside. | ||
| So we go outside. | ||
| I said, what the fuck are we doing here? | ||
| He goes, North Korea is buying atomic weapons from Russia. | ||
| Those atomic weapons are being experimented with and tested in permafrost. | ||
| We're going to set up similar explosions scaled down to find out what size weapons North Korea is buying. | ||
| I said, that makes a lot of sense, actually. | ||
| Makes a lot more sense than that bunker buster bullshit. | ||
| He said, the problem, we don't have a place to do it. | ||
| I said, I'll tell you what we'll do. | ||
| I will let you go on any of the property I own, thousands of acres of permafrost. | ||
| You do your testing. | ||
| And he goes, well, what do you want for that? | ||
| I want a letter from a high-up guy in the Air Force, thanking me for my contributions to the safety of America. | ||
| There it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does it say on the top, Jamie? | |
| The Department of the Air Force, Brigadier General John Mark Jouas, I want to personally thank you for your cooperation and assistance during a recent Air Force-funded research project conducted north of Fairbanks, Alaska. | ||
| The data from this field experiment conducted on your land will be critically important to improving the United States capability to monitor nuclear weapons development around the world. | ||
| This experiment would not have been possible. | ||
| On behalf of the United States Air Force, I express our most sincere appreciation to you. | ||
| Your contribution to the national security of the United States of America cannot be overestimated. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| No, there's the flint tool I was telling you about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's it. | |
| It's about three inches by two and a half inches with a little area where you can see a thumb or a finger to hold on to it. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| And that rock is not host in Alaska, according to my geologist buddy. | ||
| Did they believe that people had traveled through Alaska from Eastern Europe? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they knew that people had done that in the past? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What if you find a dude? | ||
| What's the rules on that? | ||
| Like, what if you're hosing shit down and you find a dude? | ||
| Have you found a dude? | ||
| If I did, I would never admit it. | ||
| You found a dude. | ||
| You got a lot more dudes on your desk here. | ||
| These are not real. | ||
| This is from my friend Jack of the Dust. | ||
| Those are nice. | ||
| Yeah, they're pretty cool. | ||
| This is like a resin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So you feel that? | |
| It's not a real skull. | ||
| That's why they're all exactly the same. | ||
| I just always loved those Day of the Dead skulls. | ||
| Pretty dope, right? | ||
| That's cool, man. | ||
| Yeah, he's killer. | ||
| He makes a bunch of cool shit. | ||
| Goddamn, that's nice. | ||
| That guy's made me a few cool pieces. | ||
| I love art, you know? | ||
| Let me finish up on that Air Force thing. | ||
| Yeah, please do. | ||
| So I told the... | ||
| I think you're skirting around the dude part, huh? | ||
| A little bit? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| You'd have to stare at my logo pretty carefully. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| Okay, we'll talk later. | ||
| Shut the mics off! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who shut the mics off later? | |
| Yeah, the hat. | ||
| Check out the logo. | ||
| Yeah, you got a much better logo copy on yours. | ||
| If you stare at that logo, you'll figure it out. | ||
| Yeah, I think I get a sense of it already. | ||
| Are there rules if you find a dude? | ||
| It's archaeology is different they can shut the fuck down right now oh yeah that's why a building project and you know you stumble across something yeah New York City doesn't matter LA you're done you're done until there's been a proper excavation and documentation what if you find a whole village oh boy oh boy so you've already found tools you found evidence of humans We don't have to talk any further | ||
| about this. | ||
| Look at the logo on your hat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I get the logo. | |
| I get it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| Well, let me tell you where that flinting tool was found. | ||
| It was a promontory across from us, about a mile away, on top of a hill. | ||
| It had a commanding view of the entire valley. | ||
| I think a village lived up here. | ||
| Now get back to the acoustic engineers. | ||
| That's one of the spots where they decided to lay out their stuff and have an explosion. | ||
| And in the process of exploding that, a big tree fell over. | ||
| And underneath the root ball was that skinning knife. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| So... | ||
| That was, if I had not allowed them to do that, and I told them, you can do this experiment. | ||
| I want a nice letter, and if I don't get that letter, I'm going to send you a BFI. He goes, what's that? | ||
| I said, a big fucking invoice. | ||
| He says, I'll get you a letter. | ||
| So I said, okay. | ||
| You got that letter framed? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, I got that letter framed. | ||
| I'm proud of that letter. | ||
| You should be. | ||
| I am. | ||
| But you know what I'm really proud of? | ||
| The fact that he got a hold of me a couple years later and goes, remember what I told you about the Bunker Buster stuff? | ||
| I go, yeah. | ||
| He goes, we actually did use some of that data and we improved it. | ||
| You got credit for 14 kills. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| I said, okay. | ||
| I'm going to go ahead and have dinner now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pfft. | |
| What do you say to that? | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're fighting a war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we're still fighting a war. | ||
| And the nuclear stuff that they're talking about, the sabers are rattling right now. | ||
| Oh boy, this and that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And we had a governor in Alaska named Walter Hickel. | ||
| He was tapped by Nixon to be his Interior Secretary, you know, Department of the Interior, in charge of all federal lands. | ||
| And he went into Nixon one time, he says, this Vietnam War is all wrong. | ||
| You gotta get the fuck out of there. | ||
| Nixon goes, you're fired. | ||
| Mr. Hickel went back to Alaska. | ||
| He's one of those guys. | ||
| He says, I don't believe in wars. | ||
| I believe in big projects. | ||
| When the pipeline people came along, he says, we got oil on the North Slope. | ||
| Build a road up there, or I'll build a road up there. | ||
| If I build the road up there, we're going to take the oil. | ||
| It's on state land. | ||
| So they built the road, and they drilled wells, and they produce 12% of America's energy right now, to this day. | ||
| That's the last major project this country's ever had, was that pipeline. | ||
| But he had another pipeline he wanted to build, a 30-foot diameter pipe from southeast Alaska to California for water. | ||
| You could build one of those for not a whole lot of money, just a big garden hose. | ||
| Not having to worry about oil spills or you got a leak, you got water going into the Pacific Ocean. | ||
| Those kind of projects. | ||
| That's kind of what I think like nowadays. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| Sending $45 billion, another $45 billion to Ukraine? | ||
| Build that garden hose. | ||
| Go do something worthwhile for our country. | ||
| Yeah, but no. | ||
| The people we got, I don't want to start. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of corruption, a lot of chaos, a lot of mismanagement. | ||
| I think the mismanagement's the worst. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like to run an efficient business. | ||
| There's not a lot of us. | ||
| We're the largest private landowners in the state, and we don't have a lot of We don't deal with the bureaucracy. | ||
| We are fully permanent for what we do, and we just go about doing what we do. | ||
| We try to do it good. | ||
| And I'm sure in your travels and your trials and tribulations, you've run into the same thing I run into, which is sometimes a brick wall. | ||
| You go, hmm, how am I going to get around that brick wall? | ||
| How am I going to go over it, around it, under it? | ||
| I'm going to get there. | ||
| I'm going to get the other side of that wall. | ||
| But sometimes you go up against idiots. | ||
| Let's send $45 billion to Ukraine. | ||
| That'll make it $100 billion. | ||
| We've got some real problems. | ||
| You guys here in Texas got a little bit of a problem down on the southern border, I think. | ||
| It's a pretty big deal. | ||
| It is a big deal. | ||
| Do you see there's this Title 42? | ||
| What is exactly the regulation behind Title 42? | ||
| But there was a big thing in the news about all the people that are camped out waiting for this Title 42 thing to be overturned so they can make their way into the United States. | ||
| It's insane how many people it is. | ||
| And for my friends in Mexico, they tell me it's not even Mexicans. | ||
| That it's like 15% of the people that are coming across are actually from Mexico. | ||
| That if they just sealed off the southern border of Mexico to Central and South America, it would stop this. | ||
| Yeah, but why don't we? | ||
| Makes too much sense. | ||
| All of it is crazy. | ||
| Title 42 border rules confound Washington and migrants alike. | ||
| So what is Title 42 exactly? | ||
| Because I've heard Governor Abbott talk about it. | ||
| The drawn-out saga of Title 42, the set of emergency powers that allows border officials to quietly turn away migrants, Has been chaotic at the US-Mexico border. | ||
| Quickly, quickly turn away migrants. | ||
| In Washington, it hasn't unfolded much better. | ||
| The Supreme Court is weighing whether to keep the powers in place following the months of legal battles brought on by Republican-led states after President Joe Biden's administration moved to end the Trump-era policy, which was set up to lapse this week until the court agreed which was set up to lapse this week until the court agreed to take The administration has yet to lay out any systemic changes to manage an expected surge of migrants if the restrictions end. | ||
| And a bipartisan immigration bill in Congress has been buried just as Republicans are set to take control of the House. | ||
| In short, America is right back where it has been. | ||
| A divided nation is unable to agree on what a long-term fix to the immigration system should look like. | ||
| Basic questions, for example, should more immigrants be allowed in or fewer, are unanswered. | ||
| Meantime, the asylum system continues to strain under increasing numbers of migrants. | ||
| So people can just kind of show up and say they're seeking asylum, and they just let them go. | ||
| And so, I mean, I don't know what kind of background checks they're doing. | ||
| I don't know if they know if these people are coming from who knows fucking where. | ||
| And I don't blame them for wanting them to come here. | ||
| I don't blame them either. | ||
| You know, we've got a divided country right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've got half the people that go to work every day and pay their taxes and do what they think they're supposed to do, and then you've got the other half that are making $100,000 a year doing nothing but collecting the largesse of the other half that's providing it. | ||
| And then when you print $10 trillion and you throw it on top of that, now you're starting to see why a pipeline was supposed to cost $800 million, cost $9 billion. | ||
| There's no management. | ||
| It's just run amok. | ||
| And the kind of crap that they put into that latest spending thing for Ukraine is unreal. | ||
| The budget coming down the pike, $1.7 trillion. | ||
| The taxpayers don't have a prayer. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| What are we doing doing this for? | ||
| I pay my taxes. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| I pay big property taxes. | ||
| Because I had a lot of property, but I pay them. | ||
| Well, then the people that collect my property taxes turn around and give it away to places I would never want to see my money go to. | ||
| But they do it, because that's what they do. | ||
| And it's almost a thing now that you can't question. | ||
| You know, you can't question whether or not this is the right thing to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, you get canceled. | ||
| Yeah, it's all very strange. | ||
| As long as you've been alive, is this the strangest time you feel in terms of politics? | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| I think now it's gone beyond my ability to understand what's really supposed to be happening and what's going down here. | ||
| You know, even our neighbors to the north, Canada is different than it used to be. | ||
| Have you been in Canada? | ||
| No, I haven't been since the pandemic. | ||
| Well, they locked the borders down. | ||
| You weren't allowed to go in. | ||
| The last time I went through, it was a bad trip. | ||
| It was a quick trip. | ||
| And... | ||
| When I got to the American Customs Guard coming out back into Alaska, he goes, you got anything to declare? | ||
| And I said, no. | ||
| I said, that fucking trip was horrible. | ||
| Those Canadians have jacked up the price of gas. | ||
| They're selling it by the pint. | ||
| I'm getting raped on the exchange. | ||
| You know, Canadian dollars versus an American, you're losing 15% right off the bat. | ||
| He goes, wow. | ||
| I said, you know something? | ||
| I'll tell you something. | ||
| There's only two people. | ||
| There's only two kinds of people in Canada. | ||
| He goes, yeah, what kind is that? | ||
| I say, they're either hockey players or hookers. | ||
| And he goes, my mother lives in Toronto. | ||
| I said, is she on the maple leaves? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| You know, they really... | ||
| I'd like to see Alaska kind of... | ||
| I was part of the Alaskan Independence Party at one time. | ||
| Like Alaska branch off onto its own? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Secede from the Union? | ||
| Walter Hickel, the guy I was talking about, governor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The big vision. | ||
| He ran for governor under that ticket, and he won. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| But he won, and it went no place, of course. | ||
| Don't you think if Alaska became a country of the United States or just invaded it? | ||
| They've already invaded it. | ||
| You know, we have some huge military bases. | ||
| I wouldn't advise getting rid of those and do what they do in other parts of the world here. | ||
| We're gonna put a base here in Puerto Rico. | ||
| Okay, cool. | ||
| Those guys don't want to be a state. | ||
| They're a territory, man. | ||
| Territories are weird. | ||
| They get all the benefits and they don't have to do all the bullshit. | ||
| Well, that's why people like, you know, they go over there and they get great tax breaks. | ||
| As long as they spend more than 50% of their time there, they don't have to pay federal income tax. | ||
| Which is bananas. | ||
| Isn't that what it is? | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Something. | ||
| They also got screwed on the shipping stuff, I remember. | ||
| Like everything had to get shipped to America first before it shipped over there. | ||
| And they were down on resources and stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then the power goes off every time it rains. | ||
| Well, Alaska was a territory until 1959 when it became a state. | ||
| It was 1959 that happened? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the company, my company, formerly Alaska Gold, formerly Fairbanks Exploration, was adamant they didn't want Alaska to become a state. | ||
| They wanted it to remain a territory. | ||
| And I have all the president's files in my archives. | ||
| That's the beauty of my archives. | ||
| I have all the records, everything, every letter ever written, every document, every drill log, every map, every cleanup book. | ||
| I can tell you particle size distribution on a certain cleanup on a certain creek on a certain day. | ||
| Now, the thing I like about those maps, it shows areas where the ground was frozen and the dredge couldn't dig all the way to bedrock. | ||
| Well, bedrock's where the gold's at. | ||
| The ground's still frozen. | ||
| So you just take the map out and go, let's go dig over here. | ||
| What do you say, boys? | ||
| Well, look at there. | ||
| Still got the pastry. | ||
| Take it out. | ||
| So, the president weighs in, tells the guys up in Fairbanks, you guys have to fight this statehood stuff. | ||
| Go to the Chamber of Commerce, do whatever you gotta do, but don't let them become a state. | ||
| Fight it tooth and nail. | ||
| Well, the government brought up a bunch of troops. | ||
| Right about the time it was to vote on whether Alaska would become a state. | ||
| Thousands of troops. | ||
| They all got to vote. | ||
| And they voted for Alaska to become a state. | ||
| And Alaska became a state. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| And the F.E. company shut down half the dredging fleet. | ||
| Shut down four of the dredges right now. | ||
| You're done. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| They kept two of them running for another three years. | ||
| Then they stopped. | ||
| So that's the company I bought years later. | ||
| It's always been privately held, never been public. | ||
| So when I bought it, it was assets only, including leases, including royalties, including contracts with AM&H and the University of Alaska. | ||
| Those are my goddamn bones. | ||
| So when I went to New York to tell them where the cow eats the cabbage, went through the basement, looked at the bones, met with the head guy. | ||
| He says, what are you here for? | ||
| The bones, what do you want? | ||
| I said, I want them all. | ||
| They're sitting in your basement. | ||
| I want them all sent back to Alaska. | ||
| I'll pay for it. | ||
| I started a research fund at the university up in Alaska. | ||
| Put money in it to make this happen. | ||
| They said, well, we can't do it right now. | ||
| We're doing asbestos abatement in the basement where these things are located. | ||
| I said, are you telling me you've polluted my collection? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| The abatement will be done in about six or seven years. | ||
| I said, fine. | ||
| When it's done, I'll come get them. | ||
| But I told you I was in the solid waste business. | ||
| I know what asbestos abatement's all about. | ||
| So I'd taken some samples while I was down in the basement looking at those bones. | ||
| And I had them analyzed up in Fairbanks, of course. | ||
| And it's called non-RACCM. Asbestos-containing material is called ACM, A-C-M. Non-RACCM is non-regulated asbestos-containing material, which means it's not hazardous. | ||
| So I'm going, okay, I'll get these bones. | ||
| I had the funds set up, I had the money put out. | ||
| Years later they said, fuck this guy. | ||
| We're not giving his bones back. | ||
| I said, well, I made it up for the long haul here, boys. | ||
| This was 20 years ago, Joe. | ||
| It's been going on a while. | ||
| So then we found Boneyard. | ||
| I got distracted. | ||
| I said, oh, boy, we're finding our own bones. | ||
| Let's just keep finding our own bones. | ||
| But then I started thinking about it again. | ||
| I still want the bones back. | ||
| And I found that document. | ||
| It tells me where they dumped them all in the East River. | ||
| Or at least a bunch of them. | ||
| Well, why not start a bone rush? | ||
| And that's what we're doing right now. | ||
| You just did it. | ||
| It's going to be the biggest goddamn bone Russian world history. | ||
| Well, stay tuned. | ||
| Let's see how that all turns out. | ||
| Something's going to happen. | ||
| You know, I'm not a scientist. | ||
| I'm not going to... | ||
| Hey, boys, all I can do is tell you where they're at. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you did. | ||
| If you want to go find them, go find them. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| I guarantee you someone's going to try to find them. | ||
| Oh, I would if I was down there and I was one of those guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You would too. | ||
| Yeah, and it would be a great documentary. | ||
| It would be. | ||
| If guys set out to do that and they played a clip from this podcast, you have my full permission, and then go and jump in that water with scuba gear, start pulling out mammoth tusks, Holy shit. | ||
| One tusk. | ||
| Daddy's got a new boat. | ||
| But you probably wouldn't want to sell it. | ||
| No. | ||
| You'd want to keep it. | ||
| Yeah, you'd want to keep it. | ||
| Unless you found another one. | ||
| Unless there's someone that's going there just specifically to sell it. | ||
| What if it was a saber-tooth skull? | ||
| What if it was a dire wolf skull? | ||
| What if it was stuff that was never supposed to be discovered? | ||
| You really have no idea what they threw out. | ||
| I don't have any idea what we got. | ||
| I mean, we got... | ||
| When Dick was out there, he said, oh, I see that. | ||
| You know what that is? | ||
| I said, no. | ||
| He said, that's a scapula from a lion. | ||
| I told him, we got a bunch of those. | ||
| We do. | ||
| I didn't know what they were. | ||
| There's some kind of bliss that comes from not knowing. | ||
| Because if I knew what I was looking at, I'd probably go, holy shit. | ||
| How many animals did you guys find that are not supposed to be up there? | ||
| Half a dozen, probably. | ||
| Probably more than that. | ||
| I just don't know. | ||
| I don't know enough to... | ||
| Because there hasn't been a real accounting of everything that's up there in your piles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I had a group of paleontologists come over from the Yukon on a visit, and they were out with the university guy. | ||
| He says, oh, come on. | ||
| I said, sure, bring them over, and I had a couple tables we dumped a couple tubs out on. | ||
| Now, we've got hundreds of tubs that are filled with bones. | ||
| We emptied two tubs out. | ||
| We spent over two hours just going crazy over those two tubs. | ||
| Harrington Horse. | ||
| The guy says, oh, I can't believe this. | ||
| They were finding all kinds of stuff. | ||
| I didn't know what it was, just bones. | ||
| Some of these guys are pretty well trained. | ||
| They can tell the difference between a horse and a Harrington horse. | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I have a picture of one on my internet or my page of a stilt-legged horse, Harrington horse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does it look like? | |
| They look like zebras. | ||
| They're striped? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Find a Harrington horse. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So it's kind of fun. | ||
| It's like all my kids love doing it. | ||
| My wife loves doing it. | ||
| They were raised doing it. | ||
| They were raised looking for gold. | ||
| There's a Harrington horse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| Look at that cool thing. | ||
| Yeah, look at that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| And that was in Alaska. | ||
| Almost like a zebra. | ||
| A horse is a horse, of course, unless it's not. | ||
| And that's a... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Crazy animal. | ||
| Scientists recognize new species of late Pleistocene horse. | ||
| So when did they find this? | ||
| When did they discover this thing? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Does it say there, Jamie? | ||
| Oh, these specimens were collected 100 years ago, were wrongly assumed to represent previously known species of or genera. | ||
| During the Pleistocene, there were three lineages of horses in the Americas, the Cabaline horses, the New World stilt-legged horses, and the Hippodion horses. | ||
| The Cabalene horses belong to the Equus genus, which includes all living species of horses, donkeys, and zebras. | ||
| The species of Cabalene horses that lived in North and South America likely included the predecessor of the modern-day domesticated horse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It was probably the same species. | ||
| The New World stilt-legged horses are so anatomically resembled the Asiatic wild horses and donkeys that paleontologists mistakenly thought they were closely related. | ||
| In recent years, paleontologists began to reject this assumed affinity, and the genetic studies cited in this blog entry supports their reassessment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| They diverged from Equus horses between 4 and 5 million years ago. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And they died about 12,000 years ago. | ||
| About what your guys have been telling you. | ||
| The Dryas. | ||
| Yeah, the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. | ||
| It was about 12,000 years ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know. | ||
| We've got to send Randall Carlson to your spot. | ||
| I'll bring him. | ||
| That needs to happen. | ||
| I bet he would have some very unique insight. | ||
| Yeah, Forrest Golan, I think I told you this, had texted me and said he was in Anchorage and he wanted to come up and visit the Boneyard, but I was already in Florida. | ||
| And I told you that, you know, hey, he had got a hold of me and why don't you guys come up next year? | ||
| You know, it was thawed out and water's running and shit like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's when you said, hey, why don't you get on the show? | ||
| And I said, well, fuck yeah, I'll get on the show. | ||
| Gigs up. | ||
| Gigs up. | ||
| We did it. | ||
| Well, listen, John, thank you very much for being here, man. | ||
| We just did three hours, believe it or not. | ||
| Did we really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I've been kind of real nervous about doing this. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You seem super relaxed. | ||
| Well, it's all bullshit. | ||
| I haven't slept well in a week. | ||
| He seemed great. | ||
| He did a great job. | ||
| It's an absolutely fascinating story. | ||
| I think I regard you as the best interviewer I've ever heard. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate that. | |
| You're a real communicator, and you also have a true appreciation for history and prehistory, which is, if you don't have that, I ain't got time to talk to you. | ||
| Well, it's just so fascinating. | ||
| But you have always been a guy. | ||
| Now the gig's up. | ||
| The gig's up. | ||
| If you want to send Forrest up there, you send him up. | ||
| He's coming on soon. | ||
| We'll talk about it for sure. | ||
| That'd be awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Three hours, huh? | ||
| Yeah, three hours. | ||
| Well, good for me. | ||
| I'm going to be able to sleep like a baby tonight. | ||
| You did a great job, John. | ||
| I'll wake up every two hours and cry. | ||
| Thank you very much, Matt. | ||
| I really appreciate you. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| And the address of the Instagram site is the Boneyard Alaska. | ||
| Do you guys have a website? | ||
| No. | ||
| The only thing I do online is the Boneyard Alaska. | ||
| Can I mention a couple others? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's also the YouTube video that we talked about so people would know. | ||
| My daughter's got a YouTube. | ||
| But there's that video that we referenced, the documentary. | ||
| What is that on? | ||
| My daughter's YouTube is Gold Daughters. | ||
| At Gold Daughters YouTube. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| My son's is at Kinsey. | ||
| And then the Instagrams are The Boneyard Alaska, Ice Age Fossil Works, that's where I sell my pipes and guitar picks and stuff. | ||
| Elora Longling, where you get the Saks Fifth Avenue, beautiful jewelry. | ||
| And at Gold Daughters, my daughter. | ||
| And Boneyard, Alaska. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Boneyard, Alaska is the documentary that folks can watch and it's on YouTube right now. | ||
| That's my darling wife. | ||
| Yeah, we raise good kids and we got great adults. | ||
| Boneyard, Alaska only has 113 views. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Let's see what it has tomorrow. | ||
| When is this going to air, by the way? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| It'll air next week. | ||
| Yeah, we'll let you know. | ||
| I'll let you know as soon as it's coming up. | ||
| Yeah, because I told people they all want to know when. | ||
| I said, I'm not at liberty to say because basically I don't know. | ||
| It'll air next week. | ||
| This one will. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| We'll look at it. | ||
| We're going to be back in Florida tonight and I'll have a bottle of, you know, my tequila and I'll be all ready for it. | ||
| All right, brother. | ||
| Thank you very much for being here. | ||
| You're the man. | ||
| Next time I come back, let's talk a little bit about the pipeline. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think you get a kick out of that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Next time. | ||
| How did that go from $800 million to $9 billion? | ||
| Well, it's probably just really good people doing a really good job and no corruption at all. | ||
| The hookers even had a union. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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