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Can you just tell me about your friend owes a debt collection? I wish he was my friend.

Still, it was when I was younger. I don't know how I came into his orbit, but there was a fur buyer. And taxidermist and Muskrat Trapper in Muskegon County, where I grew up in Michigan, and he had amassed a very impressive collection of vacuums.

And you brought this up because Frank von Hippel had given us this fossilized walrus, ancient walrus, dick bone, pecker bone, swizzle stick.

Yeah, a friend of mine. Clay Newcome he. He he uses them for very like he saves the BlackBerry ones and people use them as drink Sturt's and stuff, the first deer ever killed you gave me one and I was using it as a coffee store for a while.

Oh. No, it's not like an actual bone bone in there, isn't there. Bone bone there. No. Well, you gave me one minute. Might not have given me one from that. You gave me one from something else.

Maybe a rat, maybe a raccoon or a bear or something to have to look at it. I don't know.

But you gave me a dick bone and I had it in my backpack for a long time. Oh. Huh. Yeah. So, yeah. I love you. Give me Dick. Well you don't even remember that. Well I wish I had I wish I had more to share this guy this Bob Fair. Gary's laughs You look like Bob Forrest.

Look exactly like Bob Dylan.

And he's got to be around still, I remember being over his house one day and him advising someone over the phone within earshot of me.

I remember this guy was going out to set muskrat traps and I remember Bob Forrest advising him, if anybody fucks with you, shoot him.

And I was young enough that I didn't, like, get that.

That was the humor. Thing, you know, whatever, just like a thing you'd say to your body to have a laugh, and I remember being like, man, these guys are serious about muskrats, so I hope I don't run into that dude in the bar.

And now I'm like, oh, I could totally see saying that to somebody. And then we'd have a laugh.

Get out the vote. How many animals have that bone, man? You know, I wish I knew and I don't even know what. Yeah, that's universal.

No, no, it'd be interesting to look up I never until right now, I never gave it any thought to like what classification of things has, like what classification of things has like a an actual back in them, an actual pecker bone, you know, all those all the weasels have it.

I think chimps have it. We don't. Yeah, weasels do. Here go, oh, it's absolute human ungulates, elephants. What does that monotremes amount of tremors. What does that word?

Monogatari Oh, the platypus and the Kittner Marsupial's Laga morphs hyena's bino to wrong's Cyrene eons and cetaceans, among others.

Evidence suggests that the bacterium was independently evolved nine times and lost in 10 separate lineages.

That just keeps coming up, man.

Yeah, just it just keeps coming up the need to have one of those they need. Yeah. A built in hard on.

That's a really nice one, I like that one. There are some that are big enough, I don't know what they're off, there's some that are big enough to be used as a cane.

Really? Yeah, what animal? I thought it was like certain walrus ones, people used to use them as canes. Well, that's not small. That one right there. And it's interesting because because of the fact that it's fossilized so heavy and carrying that between your legs.

I wish I had. I feel like I want to chat with you. I feel like I want to challenge you on that being fossilized.

Well, he said it was fossilized. You don't think it is easing by the appearance because it's so light. But doesn't it feel. Yeah, I don't want to I don't want to get in over my waders here, but I. I want I want to challenge that, but I don't, but I would need to scrape into it with a pocket knife and I do that to your vacuum. That's OK. You could do that here. But see, even don't do it because, well, who am I to tell?

I mean, you might scrape into it and I don't, but they curve that the god damn dude, this is so. No, there are there are that I don't know they might, but there are some that have a hook in them. It keeps you keeps your mate from getting away.

Jamie, there'll be a hell of a pimp stick you walking around with all those little pimps have one of those little pimp.

Did you hear that? The thing with Trump, he called Lil Pump. There's a rapper named Lil Pump and he called them Little Pimp. No, I didn't. Yeah.

Yeah, he did it the other day at a rally and everybody was upset. Tim's the character I was going for.

Yeah, because this has got to be fossilise man.

How else could it be that heavy. What kind of bone be that heavy. Steve, that's so heavy here. Come on man.

You want me to get in. You know what? I'm going to give a little scraper down here on the end scrape. But tell me what's up.

But it is fossilize. Well, now I want to say that just like we were talking a minute ago about how bettors are betting, like it's Trump, it's Biden.

Yeah, I'm like. Back to its fossilized, but it's so heavy.

I'm a flip flopper when my convictions are my convictions are weakly held, but no, poking it with your knife makes me think that it's a poke in it with your knife.

But this is way outside of my area of expertise. Poking with your knife makes me a believer.

I think von Hippel is a biologist, right? He's a man you got a really good fact checker over here. He's like it's like having dog turn around. Yeah, it is very similar.

Yeah. Doug's a very good fact checker. That's all he does, he doesn't, he doesn't.

He only like when you talking to him, he just looks at his phone because he's like, no matter what you say is like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Biology, ecology. Yeah, yeah. OK, yeah.

So they have another one of the physicists when it comes to the reason I have become interested in things being fossilized is, you know, if you're out on National Forest Land, not notice, I'm not saying national parks, but if you're out on national forest land or BLM land, various land designations.

You know, if you find like an antler deer antler, you can keep it right, or if you find a chunk of bone, you can keep it. But not a not an arrowhead, right? No, no, because that's an artifact.

But that's weird. Supposed to leave it there. Dude, does anybody.

That's an interesting I'd like to talk about because. No, not they do. I remember. So let me finish my thing about Fossilize real quick. It'll.

The reason I started to think about it is if. But you're allowed to pick up a bone, OK, if you're just out on depends on the land, doesn't let's say you're on a national forest and you find a piece of bone, you can keep it. If it's fossilized, you can't keep it.

OK, so you could find a like I found a few buffalo skulls that are old but still bone.

So here you have this thing that could be like 300 years old eroding out of a riverbed. And if it's not fossilized, you can have it and keep it. Hmm.

If it's just bone. The thing is, if that thing has cultural markings on it, then it becomes an artifact.

So say you found a friend of mine where they might have got it off and where they got it. They had had like the grandfather found it.

They had a buffalo skull that had been axed open.

And it was so clearly hit open with a tool to get the brain out, which would make it an artifact. And then you can't touch it. Or if it's fossilized, you can't touch it. The private land is totally different. But yeah, it would be that. So now when I like, look at stuff, I'm always picking it up in my eyes, like wishing I had a better sense because I don't want to grab I don't want to like, find something to bring home and then be in violation because I brought home a fossilized thing.

Are you under any obligation to report it like, say, if you found a skull that had obviously been opened up by like ancient Native Americans, are you under any obligation if you can't take it to like archaeologists, like, you know, drop a pin point archaeologists to the spot where you found it?

I don't I can't imagine. No, I. I want to I'm virtually certain you're not under any obligation.

I did one time find a bison skull on National Forest Land and did a site report where I cooperated with the forest, the administrative unit of that national forest, because I had gone and did some work on it, had a radiocarbon date. So I was able to supply them with a piece of information they didn't have. And so we cooperated and did a site report. And I had also kind of like called a little bit to make sure I wasn't in the wrong.

And this is in your book.

Yeah, this that wrote, which is really good. I listen to the audio version. So nice to hear your voice to you. You got a chance to do it because I know the first version of it. They hired some actor to do it.

Yeah, it was it was this kind of a funny thing about the book business is. You know, audio, as you know, because you've kind of like in some ways help be at the vanguard of pioneering this, but. Audio is more and more important as more and more valuable now, when I sold out my first couple of books, a publisher would, you know, buy your book and they would buy they buy just kind of like all rights to it.

Right. And they would then go sell the audio off for sometimes next to nothing. And someone would buy the audio rights for certain specified amount of time. So my first couple of books, my publisher buys my book and my publisher basically turns around publisher. Then in this case, Random House turned around and sold the audio rights to, I think, brilliance, audio, whatever it is. And they got it for 10 years. And at first I thought that they didn't invite me to read it because I didn't think I was like up to it.

Right. But I wasn't invited to read my own book.

They hired a soap opera actor of some sort to read it. I now think it's just an efficiency thing.

Like they have sort of a stable this company is based in Michigan, my home state. Just totally coincidentally, I have to be based there.

They have a stable of talent that comes in and they're clean.

They do clean work. They do fast work. And they produce an audio book like working with an author.

It might take four or five days to record an audio book, but they can just get a guy that comes in nails at hammers that whatever I get the I get the product and I turn it on and he starts talking. And I couldn't get across the room fast enough to turn it off.

It was the it was like it was like watching it was like watching my wife have sex with another man.

Woe is like to see, to hear.

I'm like, that is not what that book sounds like, you know. Right. And oh my God was a defense.

And then 10 years goes by because I wrote that book a decade ago, 10 years goes by and we get the rights back.

So then not Random House has them back and I got to go in and record my own thing and I got to update some of the science and stuff, you know, it was it was like one of those little it was one of those career like a little career highlight for me, like like somebody's looking from the outside and wouldn't see I would like see it as anything.

But to me it was like richly symbolic that that I had whatever got to like be in a position to be like, I want to do it.

I go in, record my book, its how it wants to be and that something could still kind of have life after a decade.

Yeah. My friend Godsake who is a he's a professor out of Montreal, he wrote a book, he's an evolutionary biologist and he wrote a book on it called The Parasitic Mind, about just very bizarre behaviors and the way people are weird thought viruses that people are falling into today, WOAK culture and all that kind of shit.

And can you give me another example, another example of the thought virus?

Well, thought viruses, probably not even. I mean, he's used that term before, but it's basically woak thinking go like what's problematic about it now?

It's not not very objective and not rational and that people are expected to think and behave a certain way because the gatekeepers of social media and all these people are the ones that are forcing this on folks. Anyway, he's got a very popular podcast, and yet they still hired somebody else to read his book.

And I was like, this is so crazy. Like you have such a distinct voice. Like, why would you yell, what? What the fuck are they doing? Like, why would they do that?

I think that it leads to at least a lot of listener disappointment. Yes. At the time I did this, though, I wasn't I was just a writer. Right. So there wasn't that.

And maybe we're moving away from that when you're working on something, and I'm sure.

Oh, no, you'll know intimate like. Well, what I'm talking about. Imagine you're. Imagine your stand up. If you had to like turn in a word, doc, I've had to do it before for someone else to do your stand up, I had to do that before.

Oh, not for someone else to do it, but for for them to decide whether or not the things that I was saying were approvable. Oh, gosh.

I went to bed without without the without all the delivery.

I mean, like, I don't want to I'm not trying to conflate that, like writing a book and stand up because delivery is vastly more important and what you do.

But you do get a sense of like the cadence of how something goes. Yeah. And it feels important to you, but it's kind of like a goofy way to think about it, because people that everyone that read it, everyone that reads it is on their own trip. They don't know your cadence, but somehow it's just offensive to hear them read it aloud. Yeah, well, spell of this makes any sense. This is like the cure. This is particular to virtually nobody.

No, I think it makes a lot of sense.

I mean, particular not particularly now, because your podcasts become so popular and people are used to the way you talk. You have a very unique way of describing and discussing things.

And I could imagine how offensive it would be if someone just sort of acted it.

Yeah, you know. Yeah, it is. And that was. So like that book, I was at the height of my writing powers because I hadn't had I was just a writer, I wasn't married, I didn't have kids, you were free.

I could I could spend a couple of years just, like, focused on something, you know?

And so I do like the fact that that thing's still the fact that that book still works and people still read it like.

I'm happy about that, you know, look and be like, yeah, man, like I feel like like that was a reasonable book. There's an interesting way. It's a very good book. I really enjoyed it. But it's a it's an interesting way of talking about it that you were at the height of your writing powers because you were free, because you really could just concentrate on that.

You know, I think about that a lot with with anything, you know, like that's the case with stand up comedians.

It's the case with fighters for sure. When fighters have families and they start getting distracted by a bunch of other businesses and other things that they're doing, it's almost always signifies downslide in their skills. Yeah, almost always for sure.

Man, I'm watching right now on Netflix. I'm watching The Last Dance, the Jordan documentary, and I'm not a basketball fan at all.

And most of the stuff's new information to me. But in watching it and like that study of focus and discipline and I wonder like.

And looking at him, I couldn't help but think, let's say there was an undecided election, you know, it was like a contested undecided election and there's a global pandemic, that guy.

Would still go on that field or on the court, sorry, and probably be just as good as he always is, and I think that a decade ago, whatever, like at that point in life, when you just like maybe more self-absorbed or something, I could be sitting right now in this current climate, like I would be sitting right now just like singularly focused on this thing.

Hmm.

Instead of the school board is voting, like whether or not kids are going back to school full time and and like, I need to pay attention to that because I have kids. I need to pay attention. Like, you know, I feel obligated to pay attention politically. And I have other mediums that I work in now.

And yeah, you just get, like, spread out doing stuff. I feel like maybe that doesn't happen to, you know.

It does. Yeah, it does. I every time you have three jobs. Yeah, I do jump from one to the other, they connect.

Fortunately they help each other. The thing about well you know, I obviously haven't been doing much standup during the pandemic. I only did one weekend at one weekend in Houston and I got real weirded out thinking like, what if I caught covid and then I gave it to somebody, particularly if I gave it to a guest.

But standup comedy for sure helps. Podcasting, podcasting for sure. Help stand up comedy. You get more comfortable doing each one of them because the fact that standup comedy live and then podcasting is also live. Right. There's no net, there's no script, and you get more comfortable expressing yourself in up comedy, the fear of doing it in front of live audiences. You get accustomed to people paying attention to you and watching you. That makes your commentary easier because when the cameras are on the UFC, I never think, oh, shit, all these people are watching now and never think that because people are always watching.

I don't care. Yeah, it doesn't. I can just express myself so they feed into each other.

What do you. Because you get increasingly, at least from my perspective, increasingly you get scrutinized and over scrutinized the media, is was it hard to tune it out? It's easier than ever, really?

Yeah, it's interesting because it's so common. I could just shut it off. Yeah, no, it's just it's one of the things that happens.

You get too big, you get too big, get too popular.

Look, if there's 300 million people in this country and you have one percent of them are critics, you get a million critics, you know. Yeah, well, you're being you're being conservative.

Like, if you're if you're really lucky, you only have a million critics. You really have three million critics, three million critics. That's a crazy number.

That's such a nutty number.

If there's 300 million people and one percent of them don't like you, you have three million people that don't like, you know, that's insane.

Like, if you really stopped and thought about that, that will fuck with your head.

If you have, you know, people in the media, if you have a hundred thousand professional journalists that are focused on comedy and what are the numbers that you're not going to enjoy it?

It's going to be high.

It's going to be a few thousand when I'm reading about you and what you think and how you are. And I'm sitting here thinking like, oh, he's not.

Well, it makes me it makes me question like it makes me question everything I read. I was saying to someone the other day that there's there's one thing Americans like.

There's like two stories Americans like in this order, they like a story about what an asshole a celebrity is. And the second thing they like most, but not as much as that thing is how great a celebrity is. But they were they they liked the first one better. Yeah, it's way better. Well, it's more sellable, right?

I mean, that's why this Ellen is mean. Things gotten so much traction, you know, Ellen's mean and her guests.

And she's like like tell me more exactly how exciting when you you find how much and when you find out Ellen has like a half a billion dollars, she's like, oh my God, tell me more about how mean she is like, I need to know the dirt. That's it's just a common thing with people.

Someone becomes successful. You're going to you're going to get scrutinized. And it's also like different perspectives.

Like for some people, the way I think and the way I talk is offensive to them. They don't you know, they have a very clear cut idea of the way people should think and behave.

You know, it's particularly on the left, which is, you know, it's become more and more weird because it would be much easier for people in the left to label me if I wasn't left wing.

That's what's confusing, because, like, I do support basically every left wing position other than Second Amendment. And increasingly, the way they attacked the First Amendment is weird.

Like they seem to think that it's censorship is OK as long as they're censoring someone who disagrees with.

Yeah. Think which is a new thing in the left, the acceptance of the First Amendment. I mean, like brought this up before. But the ACLU, the ACLU was founded by people that were literally supporting Nazis, like supporting actual neo-Nazi groups and saying like, oh, in litigation free speech issues.

Yeah, yeah. This is important. Like like even though their views are abhorrent, you have to support this, that you have to support their ability to express themselves. Like this is what the foundation of this country is about. Like free expression is the only way you find out what's right and what's wrong.

Shutting people down, stopping people from communicating is a silly, short sighted approach to debating an issue.

And this is more and more common than ever on the left, like the because because of deep platforming, because they have the ability with social media, because social media is not really protected by the First Amendment, social media, you know, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or whatever, they're private companies and they can decide, hey, we don't want this guy on because his views don't align with ours and they have silenced people and and kick people off their platforms that really aren't doing anything wrong.

They just they're saying things that the people that own and run the social media companies don't agree with.

Yeah, that's that to me is the weirdest aspect of the left today. But other than that, like gay rights, women's rights, civil rights, women's right to choose, I'm with all that.

I'm with all of them. I'm with universal basic income. I'm with I'm with Medicare for all.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to argue about that.

But this is why this is why I am I think that it's not a bad idea to have a certain amount of money where you you give it to people in times like this covid pandemic.

When you look at this pandemic, if people had a certain amount of money that came to them every month and they didn't have to worry about food and they didn't have to worry about housing like they were taking care of, you could see how it would be easier to get back on track like the way people are today where more than thirty plus percent can't pay their rent. They're on the. Verge of eviction and all the protections against eviction are about to run out.

Yeah, like that. This was this is a great example of where you do need big government.

This this pandemic is the best example ever, or at least some sort of organized charitable, you know, some some sort of charitable organization where they really know how to take care of people that run into hard times, especially hard times like this, where it's through no fault of your own.

The real argument against universal basic income is the same argument against a lot of a lot of people we use against welfare that like you, you remove incentive, you give people free money and you remove their incentive, you remove their motivation, and then you develop a whole class of people that relies on this.

And they've become accustomed to it.

And it's actually terrible for them. It's terrible for everybody else.

Yeah. See that argument, too. That's what. When I look at that issue, that's one of the things I think about is, you know, I don't even want to pretend that I don't view things through my own lens, but when I look at myself at pivotal points in my life. In trying to get going, the fact that I was. Intensely motivated. By just trying to find a way to pay my rent and my cell phone bill.

But intensely motivated by and I do wonder, like if you had elevated me from that. The what path he might have gone down, and I don't think of myself as being like a weird or that different, so I wonder but in terms of when you're talking about.

The censorship and what culture is, there's a guy I work with, Byron, and he was kind of I feel like I'm sort of capturing his sentiment, pondering how, if you think about the.

In the 60s, right, that. It was like the right you know, the right there were the squares, you know, they were the ones like Tosk, like the disapproving, you know, what are they doing now?

And he was kind of he was noticing that the how the left has sort of taken over this, like, air of disapproval. Mm hmm.

Like, my goodness, how could that young man say that?

You know, like they tolerate they turn to destructive. Yeah. He's someone should tell that young man to stop that. You know what happened?

Social media. That's what happened.

People got the ability to complain where other people are going to listen or there's just there's so much signal out there. There's so much noise. So many people have the opportunity to complain about things.

And they're also formulating their complaints in a way they hope will resonate with people that really have no dog in the fight.

Mm hmm. So they just want to say something that people go, huh? Guys, got a good point. Click I'll give them a little heartbeat for that, you know.

Yeah.

I want to ask you about man, I know that you you've said this for as long as I've known you.

That you don't like, you don't you don't pay attention to social media comments on a recent episode of yours, I heard you put it that you post something and run away.

Yeah, but do you ever, like, late at night, like, sneak a peek like Drake so you really don't break a rule?

Never at night. Imagine if you see something tonight, you fucked that guy and then it rolls around your head. That's terrible.

No, at night I don't. If I watch anything on my phone at night, it's super innocuous.

Like I like watching pool. I like watching pool games. Gosh, I like watching like maybe a science video or something like that, something very uncontroversial and innocuous.

I don't allow myself to get into conflict at night.

Yeah. I think that's very bad for your sleep and bad for your head. If something bothers you, you know, even something that is even if I agree with them, like even if someone says something like, oh, he was kind of a, you know, ignorant when he said that or this is a stupid thing.

This is a bad perspective.

I'm even if I agree with the person saying that I don't want to I want to read that at night, I, I don't mind reading it in the morning and then thing. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. Yeah.

I could've handled that better or. Yeah. Maybe I should have looked at it this way. You know, I'm not without fault, but I don't think it's good to read that shit at night.

But reading that shit at any time will come our worst fucking critic. I hate everything I do.

So if, if, if someone is like just agreeing with the perspectives that I already have about things that I should have said differently. And the other thing is, like most of the things I'm criticized on, it's like thinking on the fly like this, like doing this. I don't have any idea what I'm about to say. Right. Like you don't either. We're just talking.

So words pop in your head, ideas pop when you try to express them. It doesn't always work out. And sometimes you're tired, sometimes you're hung over. Sometimes you're you know, it feels like your brain doesn't always fire at the exact same way. Like, my car's remarkably consistent, right? You get in your car, as long as it's tuned up, you hit the gas. It responds in a way that's very consistent. Yeah, that's a good point, man.

My brain's not that consistent. My brain sometimes is like a six cylinder and sometimes it's like a fucking supercharged V8.

It varies a lot, you know, and and also sometimes subjects come up that I didn't anticipate. Like occasionally I'll talk about something where I'm deeply studied on it and like, it'll come up and I'll go, oh, no, no, no.

This is why that is. And I get very excited and I have a very clear idea of everything that's nuanced about that particular subject. But sometimes things come up and I'm like, oh yeah. And I'm in the process of talking. I'm kind of working it out in my own head and I'm not exactly sure how I think about it.

And I have to kind of formulate opinions on the fly or formulated descriptive on the fly or try to tell a story that maybe I haven't really worked out of my head. I'm trying to tell it while I'm thinking about it. I'm also talking. Doesn't always work out that good.

Yeah. This is a thing of think about this, very similar to this. Bannerman, as I tell you an example of a thing that someone said to me, this struck me as really funny, and then I wanted to go and tell people what they said with them. Like, I don't know if I can tell people that they said that.

It's a weird one.

Yeah, you. Are you enjoying doing podcast, is it, man? Yeah, it has. It's my. So of all of the things I do think of the the various things I do for, you know, living, it's the thing I enjoy most.

Actually doing it. Right, like having a guest on for the guest we have, I bring a mug shots taken of him or this guy, Jim Jim Heffelfinger from Arizona, I bring him up because we're talking about criticism. I'll always read criticism that he sends if he listens to something or he's like, that's just not right. It's not coming from a mean place is coming from a place where he's trying to be additive to conversation. And he'll send me some things to be like, hey, man, you might this is a thing you should think about and maybe want to clarify.

Like, I'll open an email every single time and he gives me a lot of them.

Yeah, that's different.

It's a it's a beautiful relationship, you know, and it's like but but all the criticism does go that way because people like to people want to see people bleed. Right. Here's this guy like doesn't want to see people bleed. He just wants to advance the conversation. But having, you know, to the time I had him on have mean we're having a conversation about biology, wildlife management. And I'm just like the whole time. I'm like. Thrilled by what I'm hearing.

You know, like thrilled by the presentation, thrilled by what I'm hearing, it's great information is delivered well that if you had a joy meter in your head, like of all the things that, like, you actually do, that to me is. Is that interaction to me is great because you're getting the moment you're living, whereas writing.

Yeah, it's almost trite, say like. Like, I don't I kind of hate the actual act of doing it not enjoyable, like actually doing it is not enjoyable. Everything that comes out of it I love doing it is not enjoyable.

It's such a common thing to say. I mean, there's so many writers. I mean, Hunter S. Thompson, you know, famously hated writing. Yeah. Torturous thing to do. Didn't like doing.

I remember the writer Ian Frazier saying to me that when he was young and wanted to be a writer, he imagined himself sitting at his typewriter chuckling to himself, which is like isn't the reality even like when I get you know, we're working on an episode, a show episode and I get a rough cut, I don't get when I open it.

I opened it with a sense of dread. Hmmm, not with like, oh, boy, it's here, I got that's not how I feel now, but I'm like that's how I feel when I edit my standup specials, even if I know they were killer.

Even I know I killed. I know I was there. Standing ovation. Everybody cheered. Everybody laughed.

Fuck, sit down.

I'm like, Jesus and I have to go over it, you know, and try to find what's the best camera angle and how to, you know.

Yeah, but I do I do like it a great deal. It's funny that. That you're running, it changes conversation a little bit when you're talking to someone like if I have someone really good on Al sometimes or someone that is laying a lot of stuff on me that I wish I retained, I'll have to go back and listen to it because it's kind of amazing.

I've always prided myself on being really good at remembering what people said, like if I'm fighting my wife and later we're fighting about the fight.

And she's like, well, you said I said, no, no, no, it's not what I said.

I said quote and you said quote, and I'll go to the grave with that. Right.

Like, I'm very good at remembering what people said. And I'm shocked when I read listen to a guest that I'm really excited to have on. And they're like, it's an information heavy episode.

I'm shocked that all the stuff I missed. Let me see wonder like just the fact that there's a microphone and headphones, like somehow I lose my ability to be a person who just, like, locks info up.

Well, it's also because you're in the process of not just listening to what they're saying, but you're steering the conversation. You're trying to figure out how to respond, when to step in, when to not step in. You have questions. You don't know when to ask them. Should I hold up when I let this guy continue this thought I have to stop here because there's something weird. But I don't want to make this uncomfortable and I want to miss anything.

So there's all this shit going on with it. You're sort of managing the conversation. It's not as simple as you just sitting there talking to somebody, you're talking to someone and you know that other people are going to listen.

And it doesn't seem like it's an art form, but it's definitely an art form.

You get better at it and you also develop a way of expressing yourself that's entertaining for people to hear. It's not just that you're talking.

You're talking in a way where it smoothly and comfortably enters other people's brains.

Yes. One of the ways I've noticed that and I even had that problem. Excuse me. I had that problem. When we were having our little preamble chit chat here, the presence of a microphone. Changes my thought patterns for sure, for sure, you get you do get used to it, though, like I feel like 100 episodes, I feel way less inclined to say something really indefensible. Oh, yeah. But that's just. Well, that's the problem with the early days of my podcast, is that we didn't have any thought that people were actually listening.

Like when I did the earliest versions of the podcast, like, you know, 10 years ago, nine years ago, we were just get barbecued and we would just talk shit as if no one was in the room. Yeah, we would talk like if I sat down with Joey Diaz or Ari Shiftier, one of my comedian friends, we would just say the most ridiculous, preposterous shit, because that's how we talk to each other when there's no one around, because that's the things that we find funny.

Like when you're talking to a comedian, like regular things aren't is funny. It's like we've seen it's like if you're if you're going to show a boo boo to a guy who's an E.R. doctor, you got a cut on your finger. Like, that's not impressive. I just saw a guy get shot in the head. Yeah. Like, he needs he needs more. They need more. I want to see an amputation. Like, show me you want to freak me out, you know, show me something that's like a real injury.

And that's how comedians are. It's like there's an unfortunate aspect to those conversations.

If you take those conversations and you edit them out of context and then show it to me, oh, my God, these guys are horrible human beings. Like, no, we're comedians. And you'd have to shit you'd have to preface if you went around saying.

Wouldn't it be funny if someone thought, right, but even then, they work that part out?

But that's like what the conversations like when you're just goofing on some of your friends, but you just leave out the part where you say, like, wouldn't it be funny if someone thought, yeah, and just say it as though it's coming from you.

But everyone it's understood that. You mean like, wouldn't it be funny if. Right. Yes, exactly. Yeah.

It's a it's a weird medium. Podcasts are because it's never really existed before. This is a new thing. Like my friend Adam Curry is the original podcast, or he he's the Godfather. He was the first guy to ever have a podcast and he was an MTV deejay host.

He actually lives here in Austin. Oh. You remember Adam Conover put it together to those the same person as Adam Curry? Yeah, beautiful, handsome man here, those flowing. Oh, yeah, no, I've known this, but never like.

Yeah. He runs the never put it together with the No Agenda podcast. He's actually one of the reasons I moved to Austin. He was saying Austin's praises and I had been here many, many years to kind of work like that.

Michael Jackson, leatherjacket Jouyet with the bold, overflown, handsome bastard. Look at that. Yeah.

Oh, look at that hair. That's the same dude. Yeah, that's the same dude. Now, show picture of him today right there. Bam, that's him today. Yeah, damn, yeah, he's the original, he's the OG, so he oh, yeah, but I never like yo I can't think of a parallel here but not like I'm aware of these two. Yeah, right.

But you hadn't put them together. Oh that's the same guy. Oh no. I mean he's awesome. I love that guy. He's he's got a great podcast called No Agenda. It's his podcast and he, he really had the very first one.

And I don't think that was any earlier than 2000. Jimmy was at twenty five, maybe somewhere around that. So his podcast, original podcast was four years before my first podcast, which is 2009.

So. 2007, OK, so two years before mine.

So you're talking about a guy, a thing, rather, that's only been around for 13 years, like there was never a thing where you could just put something out there, sit down, talk to people. And there's there's no middleman. Like people think like because I have this deal with Spotify that there's a bunch of people sitting on my shoulder. You come in here, you see what it's like. There's no one here.

Like it's a skeleton crew. There's actually a sensor standing right next door with a gun.

It's exactly the same. It's it's such a skeleton crew. And to have something like we did in an election show last night that seven million people saw to have something that was a total skeleton crew doesn't make any sense that it could reach those kind of numbers. So this this new form of communication, it hasn't been figured out yet.

Yeah, like no one no one exactly knows its potential. No one knows exactly what the influence of it is. There's a lot of mainstream media people that are really upset by it. It's also one of the reasons why I get so criticized. People get so mad. They don't like the fact that I have this much influence. They don't like the fact that so many people are paying attention that it doesn't seem right. You know, that this is a this is not from The New York Times.

This is not from NBC. This is not from whatever it is. But all of a sudden, all these people are watching it.

But this is a new thing. So people haven't figured this out yet, even though it's been around for 13 plus years, they're still going, what the fuck is this?

Like four years ago, no one took podcast seriously. Yeah, four years ago, Howard Stern had an episode. He was mocking podcast and saying, why don't you just yell out the window? No one's listening.

He was like, you're wasting your time wasted. And he was making fun of Adam Caroll overdoing it. Oh, yeah. Making fun of people for doing it.

And I think part of that was also he's a smart guy and he was also in the middle of his renegotiation with Sirius Satellite Radio.

And he was probably mocking comparisons to what he does with this huge organization.

Sirius XM is he was like be like the lap dog of FM. And they became like the lap dog of satellite. Yeah, yeah. But it's I don't remember what my original point was, but no brand new. Brand new.

This is a fucking really new thing. Yeah.

I mean I've thought I think I'll tell you this every time I come on your show, but the first time I like ever heard the word podcast. I'm not joking.

I had never heard the word until Helen Cho mom told me about going on Joe Rogan's podcast.

And I was like, well, what I could I could go and show you where I was sitting when I heard it.

I remember, and she's like, you just need to go. She is right. It's a what, what? What? Oh, that's that'll never work.

Well, that was a lot of people's attitude.

Might even like people that I was really close with. Like, there's a Comedy Store documentary that just came out, was a five part documentary.

And one of the episodes my friend Tom Sagara was who was on like episode two or some shit like he was he was on early early. He's been on a fucking hundred plus times.

I have no idea how many times he's been on, but he was there in the early days and he's in the documentary. He was talking to Brian Redburn and he was saying, like, what is he doing? Like, why is he doing this?

Rabanne was like, I don't know, some people listening. And he's like, can you go to the list?

And it's like 2000 people, like 2000 people were watching this. That's it. And you're spending three hours doing this fucking stupid show for 2000 people for no money. Like, why are you doing this?

Yeah, but would you do you imagine yourself being a visionary or do you imagine yourself being the. You know, it was lucky, lucky, yeah, no vision, no, I expected it to be the way it was forever. Like some day they'll make a if they make a movie like The Social Network, not the social dilemma, but they make a movie like The Social Network, which is about Mark Zuckerberg. And those guys like Facebook, they'll make like when they do the story of you.

I wonder if they'll do it that right, that you had a vision? Well, let me put it, we're going to let do that right now. I thought it was going to be the way it was back then forever.

No one paid attention. Very small amount of people, but fun. It was a great way for.

I loved doing morning radio. I used to love doing it.

I hated getting up all the calling to promote your shows. Why not call Collins? I'd go there like when I say if I was going to Phoenix. You like those things I loved. It was fun. I'd get up in the morning, smoke a joint, go in there with my friends and we talk shit.

And if it was and they'd be like the zany guy. And then you have his like his his female counterpart who put him in his place.

Exactly.

You had to go in there and do exactly 7:00 in the morning. Exactly.

I used to love it. I used to love it because I would go in, like with Ari or Joey or someone like that, and we would go and have some fun and we'd say, hey, we're going to be the Improv this weekend. And then they would say, so you know what's been going on with he into. And then you have a story about this and about that. But that's fun. That's fun. And you leave there and you have a good time with them.

You know, like eight out of ten of them were a good time.

Two out of ten were like, this guy's gross like this. This show sucks. Some people are clunky. They just they're not good at it. They're just. Oh, dude.

Like, when I used to have to do that for books, it was I just thought that was the worst thing that could possibly happen to the person.

But when you're high and it's early in the morning and you went to bed like three hours ago and you get up, at least you deal in comedy to go and be like, well, you know, if you go back to the Lewis Clark expedition, you'll find nothing was expected of me.

Right? I was just like the silly person who hosted Fear Factor or who was on a sitcom. And I would come in, I would be in town to tell jokes and like, that was what it was.

So I always thought, like particularly when I did if I did like the Opie and Anthony show in New York, that was a really fun one because those guys were on.

But when I first started doing it, it was on the regular radio, too. But they were on XM.

And when they were on XM, you could swear I was like, this is amazing. Oh, yeah, you'd swear. You could just go on.

And it was a hang like you'd have like four or five comedians in the room. We'd all just be shit on each other and laughing and and he'd get out of there like, God, I felt so good. It was so fun. And you go get some breakfast, take a nap and go do your shows.

Would you did you used to do Stern ever. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was a different thing because Stern was like at the helm. He was never a hang, you know, it was the Howard Stern Show.

Was Howard Stern asking questions. You responding to those questions?

And you know, it was very historic that show like he was the he's the first guy he like.

If it wasn't for him, there would be none of this.

Like there was guys before. You know, there was like I guess Imus was one of those guys.

I was never an Imus guy, but he was the guy who was nationally known as the man who was who had this outrageous radio show. Yeah, I know. So and that sort of helped the Opie and Anthony show come to fruition. And then that I think the Opie and Anthony show was the in a lot of ways the nexus. It was it was a lot of ways it was the idea that led to podcasts.

But when I was doing it, there was no thought in my head like this is going to be just like the Opie and Anthony show or this is going to be just like Howard Stern to just you just you wait, just you wait.

There was none of that.

I just keep showing up. And then one day I was at the Chicago Theatre.

I did this gig at the Chicago theaters, 3700 people. Right. Sold out show. And I go, I had a story.

I was going to tell how many how many people listen to the podcast.

Yeah. Oh, right. And I went, oh, shit, I'm putting that into my movie, man. And I remember thinking, it's good because my movies can be called the Joe Rogan experience. But I remember very clearly being.

Oh, no, like like like almost a sense of dread, like shit like this is this has gotten to a place where I didn't know where it was and it's already there that I've been just doing it. You know, I think by that time we were doing at the ice house, we had this little room off to the comedy club.

The ice house would show up there and do it there. And it was just bizarre. I was like, what happened? Because you're just doing it like this, right?

You know? You know, you could say if you wanted to twist this, I think I think you could say in your own defenses.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but. Maybe you knew something, maybe you knew more than you thought because you probably weren't doing 10 goofy things. How do you mean? Meaning like, let's say I. Went out and started 20 business, 20 goofy little businesses, right, right, and then at some point, like, holy shit, like one of them took off. Yeah.

Turns out my business of selling old ranch worn leather gloves to people who like, you know, wish they had that look, took off and made a boatload of money.

And then later, I'm like, you know, I always knew you'd be like, dude, you realize like he did all kinds of stupid, everything.

Nothing ever worked out for you. And also, like, this thing takes off and you want to know act like you saw it coming. So I think that probably in the you know, probably the back, it's good that you don't act this way, but probably the back of your head, you probably recognize it like maybe recognize you around to something. Nope.

Definitely not trying to help you out. Don't help me out. I'm telling you, it's not the case. It's just dumb luck. I, I have a certain amount of brain damage.

I don't know how much I have, but definitely I have a little and I think part of it from pharmaceutical or not pharmaceuticals getting punched out for sure. There's a certain amount. It's inevitable. From the time I was 15 to twenty one, I got hit a lot.

There must be some.

And because I think there's a certain amount of not give a fuck that comes with that. Yeah.

Like literally I think that was kicked into your head. This is I'm not joking.

Sam Kinison and Roseanne Barr are the perfect examples that I use. Both of them were normal people and then they get hit by cars.

Sam Kinison got hit by a truck and his brother, who talks about it in his book called Brother Sam Brother Bill wrote a book about it is like there was one Sam. And then Sam got hit by a car and became a totally different person because of head trauma and then became wild and impulsive and just became a maniac. That was Sam Kinison that we all knew and loved. Same thing with Roseanne. One of the things when I was defending Roseanne, when she got in big trouble and she came on the podcast to talk about it, I wanted people to understand what I knew about Roseanne and then was in a mental health institute she was in.

She was institutionalized for nine months after a car accident. She was hit by a car walking across the street when she was 15 years old and just fucking wrecked like massive brain trauma, like really never the same again. Couldn't count. She was great at mathematics. She was a really an excellent student and then hit by a car and then just wild and impulsive. And they locked her in a mental institution for nine months. She was crazy. She's like, look certifiably crazy, medicated on a whole bunch of different things.

And my my take was like to make her responsible for things she said when she's been rewarded her whole life for saying outrageous shit and she's on Xanax and she's smoking pot and she's drunk and you just want to label hers is awful, horrible person when America's loved her for her whole life, for being the same same way, for being wild and impulsive. But my point is that those two people were created that way from brain trauma. Hmm. Yeah.

It made them wylder their hearts. There's no doubt I have some brain damage, no doubt. And when when people say, like, why aren't you worried about criticism?

Why don't you think there's some of that there? There's got to be some of it where I, I, I've had enough trauma, just the right amount, just enough of these where it doesn't bother me that much.

I'm going to have you just full out watch me on the head. You think about the things, just the right amount, the things, things that hold people back.

One of the big things that hold people back is fear right there. They're worried. They're worried about the repercussions. They're worried about other people's reactions. They're worried about how you'll be viewed. They're worried about these things. I don't have a lot of that for whatever reason. I mean, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I'm a genuinely nice person.

But if someone doesn't like me, I'm like, what the fuck am I going to do?

Yes, keep moving. I think what what happened with me with podcast is that all these people are telling me you're wasting your time.

All these people would tell me not to do it. Why are you wasting your time doing this? And all this thing is I like doing it. I'm going to keep doing it like I just didn't it didn't like agents. One had nothing to do. Agents, to this day that I have that could have gotten in on the podcast, could have gotten a peace, didn't want it. Do they double back around. No.

Oh yeah. They had a chance. Like I need help with ads like ads like fuck are you doing it, wasting your time with where you're doing real things.

We have time for this like they didn't want to have anything to do with it.

This is just but I didn't I didn't have some fucking grand vision. I just know what I like to do and what I like to do. Something I go, oh, I like to do that. I'm just going to keep doing that. I think this is the same thing with martial arts. I seem to bow hunting like the amount of time that I spend. Practicing archery is fucking preposterous.

It's ridiculous for a person who is as busy as I am. But that's what I like. I like doing that. So I do that. You know, I take weeks off every year to go in the mountains and hunt because I like doing that. I'm just going to keep doing that. That's what I like doing.

You know, when you earlier we were reading up on Vacuum's and it was saying how bad KM's had been invented multiple times.

Multiple times. Right. And all these dead end lineages.

And you look at something. You know, flight, right, someone could be excused for coming in and seeing things, you know, Dragonfly in a bird, right.

And imagining that there was like an event that spawned these things.

Right. But in fact, they arrived at this same place. They arrived at the same sort of place with, like winged flight through completely unrelated channels. You know, they just got there, like on their own. What's funny about podcasting is as podcasting takes itself more seriously, it's like you have this sort of convergent, you know, the term like divergent evolution and convergent evolution, convergence. There's a convergent evolution with like news and podcasting.

It started out as a maybe like a somewhat of a revolt. You know, it was uncontrolled. It was irresponsible. It was goofy. It was like a response to.

But as it's become becoming become formalized with scrutiny, with ideas of responsibility, with with ideas of like making a, you know, usable, practical, respected product, there's kind of a convergent evolution of driving it back into the thing that maybe it was a response against in the first place.

Exactly. That's where the brain damage comes in, because I go get the fuck out of kick in the head. That's where I go. Get the fuck out of here. I'm not doing that. What people say, like you can't have people like Alex Jones in the podcast. You can't get drunk on a podcast that 10 million people are going to watch. Yeah, you can't smoke pot all the time. You can't do. Yes, I can.

I've done it the whole time. Like, why am I stopping now? Well, now it's a big business. Now you have this big deal. Now, you know, you're writing articles about you in The New York Times. Like now you have to stop. But that is the way it got there in the first place.

The way it got there in the first place is people are tired of seeing these prepackaged. Like, if you see like, here's the best example, evening news.

Good evening. Hi, I'm Skip Fuckface. You know, these guys with this fake voice doing this like super overproduced thing where they're talking about subjects.

The banter in between stories on fake news is are on news, rather, news broadcasts is the most fake communication known to man like the woman will say something, the guy will go, well, that's certainly a crazy story.

In other words, we're going to go to Bob outside and then they go to this and that. And I find that's a it's a terrible thing, a terrible tragedy. Amazing, terrible.

Like you could see really inspiring there of these like weird little fake interactions.

That is the opposite of podcast. Podcasts is real.

Like, if that was me and you played some video about some guy who decided he was going to try to do a backflip over a Lamborghini and landed on his head. And I was like, I'll be like, how the fuck does that happen? Like, you have a baby, like you have kids, you have a baby. Like, look at my little baby like and then your baby starts growing up and you're like, oh, God, I'm so proud of them.

Is a little drawing made. And then it gets to the point where he's on YouTube doing back flips over Lamborghinis and landed on his head like what went wrong?

Yeah, like that's how a normal human being would talk. But you don't have that when you have a massively overproduced program, when you have all these people that have a vested interest in that being successful.

So you have executives, you have producers, you have writers, you have all these people that have a piece of the pie.

So you instead of having a Jamie and a couple other folks that are security guys out there, instead of that, I have with a hundred people like a normal show that reaches the amount of people that this this show does, there would be a staff of a hundred people and those people would all.

Oh, absolutely. It have an enormous gate system of gatekeepers and legal. Exactly. So and then the things that you were going to talk about would be heavily vetted. You would have people come in with pieces of paper and they would talk, OK, in the first segment, you're going to discuss the whether Pennsylvania's vote is coming in. And let's be real clear that, you know, here's here's the information that you have to go over and there's none of that here.

So whether we're whether I'm good or bad, whether I'm right or wrong, at least, you know, it's just me. This is the thing they were worried about.

When it goes to Spotify, like people are worried, oh, my God, they're going to have sensors in the room is going to be people telling them what to do, what people are worried about. Is it becoming overproduced to becoming something other than what it is because they know that's the natural course of progression.

Somebody gets a hold of something that's wild and untamed and they go, we've got to harness that and make a lot of money off of it.

But the way to make a lot of money off of podcasting is the opposite way is to leave it wild. But how are you going to leave it wild, though, when all these people are paying attention to it and all these people are criticizing it?

You know, as we talked about this, like if a million people know about your show or a hundred million people know about your show. And just one percent of them are mad at you, one percent of 100 million is a million fucking people are mad at you, even if 99 percent think you're awesome.

Yeah, that one million could make a big dent in your head. Can't pay attention to it.

I think a way that they might invite you to look at it. I'm not suggesting you do this, but I think where they might invite you to look at it could be. Captured. By this article I read many, many years ago called the Radioactive Boy Scout, and it was about a kid who was working on some project where.

He needed to find some, you know, americium or something for some Boy Scout project he was doing with americium, it's a radioactive substance. So in smoke alarms.

When you a smoke detector, there's like a radioactive substance in there and smoke inhibits the ability of the substance to hit a sensor, really. So he started buying up any and all smoke detectors that he could ever get his hands on. Right. And then got into that he could find a camera what it was like an old types of clocks. He was finding some radioactive substance and he got himself a Geiger counter drive around with a Geiger counter on the front seat of his car, passed antique shops and shit.

Right. OK, is this a novel? No, it's a story.

And it was a story in Harper's magazine called the Radioactive Boy Scout. He winds up accumulating so much of this shit in a shed, not only like eventually when it all breaks, like not only that, they haul away the shed, they haul away like his yard.

How many do you have in barrels? How many did he have? I read it a long time ago.

Wow. OK, just doing his thing. Collected small class. Oh, my God, look at his face, so. Jesus Christ, yeah. Hauled away his yard, look at his face like he's got radiation poisoning on his face.

People might regard you as the radioactive Boy Scout. Yeah, like at a time you were just out getting some smoke detectors because you were and then over time you, like, accumulated something where people had to take notice.

There's there's a little bit of that.

And they would be like, dude, I understand, but you just can't put that many of those things in one spot.

But what's the argument against it?

The argument against it would tell me. You tell me. I don't hold that viewpoint.

I'm just saying I like to I like to imagine. My brother has emerged as someone who's highly critical of my occupation, and I'd like to hear him out about it, Danny or no Matthew.

Why he he is. Well, give me the counterargument, though. What's he critical of you saying, oh, why doesn't he like what I do for a living? Because he feels that me and other individuals and lots of people.

That by talking about and celebrating the act and activity, in my case, hunting, fishing, that it creates, that my enthusiasms become infectious and it increases the number of people and diminishes the quality of the experience that that people who've always hunted will have because of competition.

A very valid argument. Right. So I like to not know.

I like to hear him out on it.

I like to hear him out on because he's smart. Yeah. You know, he's smart. So I like to hear him out on, like, what he's thinking. I'm only doing the same thing with you. Bye bye. I don't hold your opinion. I don't hold the opinion of someone. But I'm just saying like it is someone might say, I get it, Joe. It was all fun. It wasn't supposed to happen.

But they would say like but here you have to pull the plug, like here you are.

You now have a level of power that is.

That could be dangerous, but what could be dangerous about it? Picture that. Picture that you. Picture that you said something like, it's over now. Everybody was I worried about it happening during the election. But picture that you said, look, man, I think that if you're in that county, you should go down to the polling place and do X.

Well, OK, a lot of dudes, right? Yeah. So you. Real, like a level of influence, and I think that you probably. Now and then, bite your tongue. Well, I definitely don't tell people how to vote no, no, I don't mean I don't mean how to vote.

I mean, like, I was just I was doing a poor example of that.

That's a good example, because that's where it gets dangerous. Yeah. Like, what if I had an idea that was really not well thought out and not good for the general public.

And I was thrown out.

You threw out because it was funny. Yeah. Yeah. And then I told people to go do it. I thought it'd be fun. A fun stunt. Let's see how many people we can get to where you're just you're just musing.

Yeah, yeah. I could see that. But that all that alarms people because people would do it.

Yeah but I don't do that.

Most of what I do is talk about ideas and talk shit and talk about things that are happening already.

Yeah. I implored people in Missoula County, Montana to go vote for my sister in law, Juanita Viro, and she won by a landslide, but I think she was going to win anyway.

Well, that's awesome. That's a good thing.

She's a county commissioner. There you go. I got I got tangled up in politics there for a minute.

There's a real problem with the gatekeepers is a real problem with these. Heavily produced television shows, heavily produced radio shows, and even now Internet shows there's a real problem with them is that there's inauthentic voices. They don't resonate with people. I know that's not a real person. That's not a person that's unfiltered. That's a person that's getting scripts. They're wearing makeup. They have a team of people that are attending to them and telling them what to do and how to say it.

And there's a lot of other people, again, behind the scenes that are all like paying attention to everything you do. And they'll come in in between takes and scenes.

You know, there's there's an interview with Donald Trump with this woman from CBS, very contentious interview.

And he wound up putting the whole interview online where that no, this woman was criticizing him and asking him questions.

And he was like, you know, the way you talk to me, you never talk to Joe Biden like this. And 60 Minutes wound up using a very small percentage. Was it 60 Minutes, Jamie? Yeah, they want to be using a very small piece of it.

But during the full one that Donald Trump put out, like they interrupt the conversation because one of the producers, like the American flag, is blowing in the background because the air conditioning and it's kind of distracting and he's like, well, huh.

And so the guy stops everything because he thinks that the flag is distracting, like no one can see the fucking flag. It doesn't matter. Like, what are you talking about? But this is what happens when you get a whole crew of people.

Yeah. You get so many chefs in the kitchen and some guy just decides that he's going to stop the conversation between the fucking president of the United States who's getting grilled by this lady because he doesn't like the way a flag is moving.

That, to me, symbolizes everything that's wrong with a heavily produced and overly produced television or one of the things that's wrong. Right. What's really wrong is they push the agenda.

They push what you're going to talk about. You'll they'll decide who your guests are there.

No one has any say and who my guests are. I choose all of them. I choose the day they come in. I choose what we're going to talk about.

There's the conversations are only what I'm interested in, things I'm interested in. So I don't have to fake anything. Like I love talking to you. I was excited to talk to you today. I got excited, woke up this morning. I Steve and is going to be here. There's no like who do we have to talk to today? That shit never happens. Yeah. That's why it resonates. All these shows where it's heavily produced and and, you know, you just trying to get the biggest celebrities in.

And like, there's a really disturbing video of Howard Stern from like 2013 to somebody leaked.

And it's him giving some speech in front of all of his employees talking about getting the show to become more popular. This is what we have to do and we have to get, you know, X amount of celebrity to A-list and to be lost a week.

And I was like, wow. Oh, really? Yeah, I see him. And they're telling people to make fake Twitter profiles and tweet to celebrities.

And we watch just like yours, Steve.

Yeah, exactly. That was my feeling too. As a person who is a gigantic fan of him growing up, it's like I didn't I never thought he thought like that. I never thought anybody would do that. This is. One of the best things about podcasting, at least with the way some people do it, it's just authentic, it's just raw.

Some people hear it stumbles and all they know, this is just two guys talking. This is two girls talking. What that that show what does that call the call her daddy. Yeah. Yeah. That became real popular because it's obviously just this way. These chicks are talking, they just talk that way and and people like, oh my God. Like this is how we talk when we're with our friends and they people, it resonates with them. You can't get that on The View.

You can't get that on these heavily produced bullshit shows that are on television. When you have a million producers and everybody cuts in between commercials and fixes people's hair and you're super self-aware, that's what happens on those goddamn things.

It's weird that people come in with notes and a producer is like, maybe we can bring up this in this episode. I know you like to talk about this, but let's be aware that people think that and you think this and this is a and is that when we've got it shows that whenever you talk about this, people tune out. So we've got to stop talking about that. So they show all this research and all these metrics and they fuck it.

It gets all fucked up. What resonates with people is authentic, authentic conversations.

And you don't get authenticity when you have overly produced things with 100 people's ideas all shoved into one person's mouth. It doesn't work that way. So the more these podcasts get bigger and bigger, the more they fall, they fall apart because too many people get involved, too many people shift them and mold them and change them.

And then they become just like everything else, all these other overproduced things. And look, there's some overproduced things that are really good, you know, like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. You could watch it to this day, like, well, that's a fuckin really good show. But it wouldn't work today. It wouldn't, because now it's like you have water in your ears know and you don't know. You have water in the air. And then it comes out.

You're like, oh, that's what hearing is like. I can hear better if someone put that water back in here head like, what the fuck's that water doing in there? I know what it's like to have no water in my ear now. Yeah. That's a bad analogy, but you get what I'm saying. I'm giving more reason. People are they're accustomed to this thing now where, you know, that's just there's no filter between you and that person.

You're in the room like that's how I feel when I listen to your show, like it's you and whoever is in there with you.

That's it. There's no, like, one show that I really liked. I liked a lot of your shows, but one show that I really liked was when we talking with the author whose book got turned into The Revenant, The Michael Punke that that's expelled PUE NKE.

Yeah, that's a great one. I came up.

No, I think it's I think he doesn't pronounce the.

I don't think I think it's punk, I'm damn sorry, Michael, but you because you have such a great knowledge of that subject and, you know, he he does as well.

And you're asking, what is this? And what does that what was it like for you when instead of doing it on the planes, they decided to do it in a rainforest in the Pacific Northwest? Like, what the fuck was that like? And you're talking to him like it's real clear.

There's this is just you and that guy and, you know, Janice and whoever else is there. There's no agenda. There's no filters, there's no producers.

So it's it's intriguing to a person because it resonates and gets in the heti's. It slides right in there.

That that story, though, is a little bit in some ways might have a little bit to do with.

A sense of.

Responsibility or something, because I had taken so many swipes over the years at my swipes at the movie The Revenant, right.

And voiced my dissatisfaction with that movie so much that. I believe it went like this, I believe the author then reached out or a friend of the author reached out to say.

You know, he's really aware of your how much fun you guys have with the movie, and I was like probably had the guy on, but it was because of historical inaccuracies.

Right. And it was no fault of his. That's why I try to be clear. Like he I think what it is, I don't think he lives. I think he heard that we're always hacking at them.

He thought we were hacking on him, on him. And I was like, oh, my hacking on him. We're hacking on the movie, the fact.

And then I wanted to get with him. I wanted to get with them to be cool.

Is there always a problem when someone takes a movie that's based on a real historical event and they distort that historical event just for film, just for an example that I always use, is that movie was a dream catcher was that was the movie Foxcatcher.

Foxcatcher. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The wrestling.

Yes.

The Olympic wrestling team movie based on a real wrestler, Mark Schultz, who fought in the UFC and in the movie, a lot of things take place that I don't know whether or not they took place, because I I'm not intimately connected to the movie, but I'm still connected with the UFC. And when Mark fought in UFC, fought a famous fighter and it's a famous fight. It's a historical fight. He fought as a wrestler against a guy named Big Daddy Goodrich.

Gary Goodrich was a famous fighter, was a famous pioneer of the sport in the movie, the only fight that Mark has ever had in his entire career and may fight in the UFC.

In the movie, he fights a Russian guy, a white guy like they change it instead of big devastating.

Do the rakyat fight? No, but those things they do. But but they took a historical event and they distorted it for no reason.

Like you could have had him fighting Big Daddy Goodrich. You could have had big, big daddy also a war as he famously would go into into the octagon with a karate outfit on. So he had his his his geon. And in the movie is a guy with a fucking bear shirt, a white guy or bare chested. It didn't make any sense. It's like, why would you change reality as an MMO fan? I know what happened. Like, it's a historic fight.

It would be like when Muhammad Ali fought Sonny Liston if instead of Sonny Liston, you had him fight some fat white guy.

Yeah. Why would you do that when everybody knows what happened? So that's a historic movie where someone.

Exactly. We're talking about with podcast with anything else overproduced. Someone got their greasy little fuckin fingers on it and they decided to change reality.

I think that it comes from a couple of places and I've been witness to a little bit.

I think it comes from people wanting to exert creative influence.

Yeah. And also people.

Three things, wine, dessert, creative influence, wishing that. The truth had been different. But that doesn't make any sense. Well, yeah, and a third one.

That's kind of like to combine with the second one, but today, which things have been different, like I remember actually having a conversation like this with the producer one time about, you know, filming, hunting things where like how do you do it?

You know, how do you, like, cut this thing up? Maybe like, man, you would do with us. You could do with the scalpel, right? It's like very precise. He's a very small knife to do it and no job. Could you do it with a machete? Because in their mind, there's not the respect, there's not the respect for how things are done. It's so show business that you're viewing, you're not in love with how someone did something.

You're in love with, like, what the end product could be visualized as, meaning it's more arresting in their mind to see someone cut something up with a machete like they can picture it.

Right. So why be inhibited, why be inhibited by the reality and I think a lot of people would be like, oh, no shit, you could do that with a scalpel, right?

And they love that fact, yeah. But some people don't love that fact. Well, we're talking about this little Havoline type knives, those when I first saw that others genius and I thought, oh, of course, it makes sense. Like you're surgically cutting up parts of an animal.

It does make sense. But the difference between that is like this is a physical act that hasn't taken place yet.

You're about to do it and you're going to film it. We're talking about as a historical event. Yeah. And that's where it's a real problem, especially for someone who's I mean, I'm kind of a martial arts historian. You asked me about the UFC. I I'm I know a lot like you can't lie to me. You can't say that Mark Schultz fought some Russian guy. Like, that's that's nonsense. It doesn't make any sense. That is just a producer who thinks people won't know.

People will now just do it anyway. Yeah, that's some guy's ego. Well, no, no greasy fingered motherfucker wants to come in and ruin something because he has his own ideas of how to you know, how to put his little touch on it.

He thought I turned it into the white guy, but he's sitting in the movie theater. This is my idea. They wanted to give it a black guy from Canada wearing a guy. That's who he was. Big Daddy Goodrich's from Toronto.

I mean, Big Daddy Goodrich's famous. That's why this is crazy. Yeah. Like Mark Schultz is famous, too. Like this is the first time an Olympic gold medalist in wrestling competed in the UFC. We got to see this insanely dominant wrestling like we just took him down any time we wanted to and just just completely controlled the fight.

It was really fascinating. And because he was a coach for Brigham Young, I believe it was Brigham Young University, they told me, can't keep fighting like you're going to coach wrestling. You can't do this cage fighting thing because this is early UFC, no gloves.

You can wear shoes like it was.

The rules were like real squirrelly. It was a totally different thing than it is now is one way. I mean, maybe two weight classes back then, one or two weight classes.

That's it. And so for them, it was like distasteful, whereas now maybe they would look at that as an opportunity to get amazing publicity for sure. Yeah. The college look, our guys, the UFC champion, because Mark Shields could have been a UFC champion, no doubt about it. No one was going to stop that guy from taking him down. I mean, he was like one of the best wrestlers to ever wrestle.

And he was the one played by not Mark Ruffalo. Mark Ruffalo is the older brother. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Mark Ruffalo is the older brother and the older brother. Dave Schultz had get murdered by this to Pontecorvo. Yeah, yeah.

It's a crazy story. Do you are you familiar with the the Charlton Heston movie I believe is from 1980 called The Mountain Men.

No, it's a period piece about free trapper's, you know, like beaver trappers based on real humans, just informed from a hodgepodge of events, informed by a hodgepodge of actual events.

So there's an element in there very detailed. Element stolen from John Coulters life with an event called come to be known as Coulters Run.

There's some there's some characters that are these amalgams of different people who kind of drifted in and out of that time in the 30s, 1840.

It is. They do a great job with costumes. But the beaver trap there, beaver trappers, the trapping scenes. Our. In like. Laughably bad, and you wonder why they didn't just bring someone in to have them.

Like it's been so it's been less effort to have the beaver sets, they're making makes sense. But they're like they just someone out there just doesn't care, they don't care. I had a conference and it's also one of those movies where all the Native Americans are well, except for the the heroin, like the Native Americans are blundering idiots.

Oh, yeah. What year was this, I believe was made in 1980? Yeah, there it is. Yeah, I had a conversation once when I was just starting to get into acting. I'd think maybe I'd just been cast in the news radio. And I've got brought maybe not even been brought in to meet with these producers because they knew I had a martial arts background. They want to talk about me doing a martial arts movie.

And the interview did not go very well because because they were talking about things in movies like all these wild scenes. And they were asking me what I like. And I go, I like things that are realistic. I want I want to see something that I know would work. Like if if a guy, you know, jumps up and split kicks to people and knocks them across the room like that doesn't I don't I go I want to see, like, realistic scenarios where where a person who knows martial arts can go all that.

That's pretty badass. Like like Chuck Norris. Give him all the shit you want. But there's a lot of Chuck Norris movies.

We had like real realistic fight scenes. Yeah.

Like what was the cop movie Chuck Norris did Lonewolf McQuaid now now that that was the one we fought. David Carradine, there was a fight.

Yeah. Like no matter like they killed his dog and then he got pissed. So that was pushing it too far. There was one movie with where Chuck Norris did. It's not the thin blue line, is it? What is it? Code of silence.

That's right. That was a movie where it was a real movie. Like it wasn't it wasn't just like a karate movie. It was like a real movie. It was a good it was like critically it was probably 1980 as well.

Like what year was that movie?

Here he is in a bar next to this. Speaks to you, Joe, because he's by a pool table getting ready to karate fight.

Eighty five. Yeah I was got everything you like. It wasn't too outrageous. It was like he was really fighting like it, it made sense. Like you could see that happening. Maybe that's not the best example. You know, it was a good example is where does it sounds. Steven Seagal early movie.

Mm. Above the law. And a lot of people hate saying that. I fucking loved above the law that Steven Seagal movie when he fuck people up in a bar like you believed it. Yeah. I'm like he's not doing jumping spinning wheel kicks or anything like that is cracking people over the head with pool cues and breaking their arms. It's like that all that stuff like OK, I buy that. I buy that.

I would someday like you to do like an analysis, a sort of director's cut style analysis of the fight scene at the end of Cannonball Run.

This is Steven Seagal walking in the dude. This was back when he was leaving.

I met him and I met him in a catfish joint in Oxford, Mississippi, a catfish place. They're getting fried catfish.

Really?

Do you remember when he was a real cop on a television show? People got mouthy with him in this movie. And it's not a good move.

Bang starts fucking people up. See that look at that elbow, that upward elbow, 100 percent legit, 100 percent real move that you see in Mutai all the time, that's real that the Kevin Ross could be doing that right now, right there. Bam, that's 100 percent legit needed in the face of all legit. That stuff makes sense. Look, this guy is going to swing boom, all this shit. This is real. This is this is Steven Seagal at his best.

These are like legit, believable fight scenes.

Oh, no, I'm going to get well, but watch this.

Even the way Steven Seagal people talk a lot of shit about him. But Steven Seagal was a legit Aikido master, like he was one of the first, if not the first American to teach at a dojo in Japan. He taught Aikido he was a hundred percent legit. When I met him, he was wearing some kind of robe.

He lost his grip somewhere along the line. But back then, during this movie, man, I fucking love that guy. And I remember bringing him up in the meeting and I'm and I'm bringing this scene up and I'm like, that's that's what I want to see. I don't want to see shit that I know won't work. And they weren't into it. And they were like, people don't know that. I know, but I know that and goes, yeah, but how many people are you?

Like you were out there, you know, I go, but that movie's a successful movie. And the guy got upset at me. Yeah. He just didn't want to hear me criticizing his perspective on something that I was an actual expert in his GQ asks you to do one of those breakdowns, would you, of a karate scene in a movie?

Well, no.

Like I've done the breakdown where you watch all the hunting scenes.

Oh, have you done that? Yeah. Yeah, it's fun. I'd probably do that without GQ.

I don't want them in the mix. You don't need them in there. Why would I want why would I want anybody else in there. Then you have a producer, then you have a big organization behind you. When you could just do it here you could just spark up a joint go. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. If you. Yeah. Yeah.

Well they kind of like pull the I don't know like I didn't, I had fun.

They get the rights to things maybe. Well just like they kind of like put it on. I don't know, it's like they played, they pulled all that.

And I actually pointed out a bunch of hunting scenes and movies for them and then they did their homework and found a bunch more and they just play hunting scenes from movies.

Cameron Haynes did that with archery and. That's correct. And you know what he said to me? He said the best is that movie Brave, that animated movie Brave.

He's like, the girls form is excellent. Is that right? Yeah, she does everything perfect, like because it's animated. You don't have to teach an actor to do it. You can just mimic like a professional archer doing it, like see if you can find like a scene the archery scene in Brave.

Well, what do you do with them or not? I feel like on a good fight scene breakdown would like would would be like a gift to society maybe.

But that like that scene in above the law that's all legit. Like maybe not the, the flipping the guy on the ground that was holding the gun.

Let me see if we can see the girl pull it. But would it be a good parody. Look at this. Watch this. Watch, ok. Her technique, I mean, even the way she's holding the bow, it looks like a real human oh, she's got some corset that's holding her back through that.

Oh, that. I mean, her her technique looks perfect. Oh, they must look I mean, that looks good. What I wanted to do so this this franchise is GQ franchise is called The Breakdown. I wanted to do a parody of the breakdown where an expert comes in and analyzes diarrhea scenes from movies.

Well, that would never actually happen because like the scene from what was the movie. Yeah, Dumb and Dumber was like, well, you know, that that volume of excrement would never actually be generated by a human being.

So I said you'd be dead. Yeah, but there's something about people.

When you get too many people, too many minds, too many, too many, too much influence, you know, just it was a thing that things that point was the thing, the toilet scene.

So that was the thing that shocked me originally about doing about doing books is I remember to this is not to discredit my agent, but I remember having a conversation with my publisher and we kind of like over lunch one time, hit a hit on and I do for a book.

And she seemed to like agree with the idea. And it's just two of us in a room.

And she had she had an imprint and could make that call at Random House. And we're like talking and I'm like, you know, I think I'm really cool.

And I left the lunch. And called my agent said, like, I think I may be just kind of sold the book, you know, you should call and double check and. To think that like a thing of that level of impact. Would come about with just that, I'm going to be really inspired by that. That's what should happen, right? Yeah, but that's like the amount of people that are going to go read a book. So they're you put a thing out that you feel is of influence.

Yeah, a fraction of a fraction.

Of what is going to hear you talk. Yeah, and there's and there's not even two people in the conversation about who you're going to talk to. Yeah, it's weird. You've reduced it.

You've reduced it down to a single point. But people know what to expect. Like people that listen to the show, like my my ideas evolve. Yeah, I get interested in new things, but I'm always me. You know, it's not a I'm not a product, I'm not a thing that someone has concocted. I'm not a thing that someone like when there's certain people that are on like late night television, we hear him talk.

You, man, I want to get that guy drunk. Yeah. I want to know what that guy's got. I don't buy it. I don't buy it with me.

If you like me or don't like me, you know exactly what I am.

And also, it's not a lot of men that are allowed to just be like a regular man on TV anymore or on anything.

What are they supposed to be like? You got to be some fucking half neutered thing. Oh, you know, you have to know all all evidence of toxic masculinity must be removed from the way you think and behave. You can't be like a guy would be if he's just hanging out with his friends.

Like, that's problematic. And it's problematic to distribute mainstream.

Like, there's so many men out there that feel like they don't have anybody that represents the way they think. So. One of the things I think that resonates with the show is because there's no filter, because there's no there's no executives that tell you what to do. I could just be myself. Yeah. There's a lot of people like me out there, to your credit.

I think that you're very, very open about the I the the evolution of your thought and you're very open about. Ideas that you're not trying on, but you're open about. Your thought process. Meaning that you'll voice something and and do a good job of voicing that you're aware that there's probably more to the story you have. Well, I'm not married to my ideas. I think that's important, too.

I think there's like there's like a there's like a subtext there. And I think that someone could even look at transcripts of what like could look at transcripts of what you say and not and get a false idea of it.

Or if they listen to you, it would carry with it the lack of like the lack of certainty as you hear a new piece of information and discuss it.

Right. Situation, which is a little bit important when people are always mad about something. Trump said, like you go to The New York Times, read like Trump said, this horrible thing. And then you go and find the video. Exactly like, for instance, I remember when everybody's all worked up because Trump referred to Pompilio, you know, as the secretary of the deep state, which I thought was funny.

OK, yeah, everybody's all angry about it. Well, you know, the magnitude when you go watch a video like the news make is like he just made a joke.

Like he's funny. Yeah. It was like everything about the interaction was a joke.

That was in the interview with CBS, the same sort of thing.

The interview with CBS. The woman brought up a thing and he's like, that's not what I said when I said was a joke. I was joking. I said it like this. This is I'm joking. I'm being sarcastic. I'm being silly. That's what I do. Like he was saying that explaining to her, like you're saying it in a different way than I said it. That's not how I said it.

Like she was trying to say a thing in her words, like you said, and she says it this way is like that's what I said.

I said it like this like and he says it the way he said it. And he go, oh, he's fucking around.

Yeah. But they're trying to distort what he said because it makes a better narrative, the narrative that he's an asshole.

I could go on. I don't want to get into too much, but I could go on all day about legitimate complaint someone might have with like the administration. But the thing about him, like the thing about him saying funny things in that making people mad, like I really don't I kind of a little bit appreciate the humor sometimes.

He's an awesome troll. I mean, that's one of the ways he got so much attention during the 2016 election. He would say outrageous shit knowing that the media was going to complain about it and they were just giving him free advertising because he was saying things you're not supposed to say when you running for president. And when he was saying that, like, this is outrageous and they thought they were sinking him, they're like, we're going to show what a bad person he is.

And people would would watch him saying they play them for fools, for fools. They gave him free advertising. Well, you know, it's a we're in a weird place for people that might listen to this someday. No one knows who the president is right now.

The election has been went on last night, but it hasn't been decided and it might not be decided for three or four days. They think that Pennsylvania is the big one and they don't know who's going to win Pennsylvania. And if he wins Pennsylvania, apparently he wins. Maybe if he wins one other state in Pennsylvania, he wins. But if he loses Pennsylvania, Biden wins.

And it could be real weird. Do you think you'll torture? Do you think he'll run for president someday? Me?

No fucking chance. That's a terrible job. It seems like they just distort who you are. They they push a narrative. They they say things about you that are horrible. They they do ads where they're just trying to break down your character. Yeah. And it depends on who the establishment is for or against.

I mean, what they're doing with Biden has been extraordinarily weird where they're ignoring all of his gaffes. They're ignoring all of these like really real legitimate.

I don't think you can say they're ignoring his gaffes. I mean, go watch gaffe compilations.

Yeah, but not on CBS. NBC, not his and not his allies. Anybody who is in the news is not in the news. You're in the news. You're in the business of distributing the news that you want people to see. Yeah. You don't want people to see him thinking he's running for Senate.

He's like, well, the reason why I'm running for senator, you know, you don't want to hear that. So they don't show it. They take away all the times he forgets what he's talking about. They don't say they don't. There's no thing that they've ever had on CNN is where they have a legitimate conversation on whether or not he can hang in there for four years.

Forget about eight. Like, how much cognitive decline has this man experienced?

You don't feel that they discuss that? Not on CNN. Yeah, no.

No, they haven't. They avoid it like the plague. They avoided the Hunter Biden emails. They avoided all that. They avoid so much.

They avoid so many different things that would be detrimental to him because in large part because they believe they covered that stuff too much in 2016 with Hillary when it came to the emails and deleting the 30000 emails and on the then the FBI reopening the investigation right before the election. And that could have cost her and they have decided their approach this time. They decided that Trump is bad and he's a danger to democracy. And so they're only going to cover the news that they think is important.

But the problem with that is then you you open up the door to Fox News being able to say, why aren't these other people covering this? They're not covering this because they're biased and it's fake news. And these these people are criminals. This is all legit. This is all happening right now. This is real stuff. Here's Joe Biden stumbling. Here's Joe Biden, you know, saying things that don't make any sense. Here's job over and over and over again.

You know, you don't vote for me. You ain't black. All that crazy stuff. And they're not they're not highlighting Super Thursday. It's he's a mad man. Yeah.

It's like it's weird, but it shows you that the news is not just the news. It's the news for the left and the news for the right.

You don't just get biased source. I think that it's I think that people who are. That are our.

Either feigning ignorance like like people who don't think that there is an inherent bias within news organizations, within long term legacy news organizations, they're either like feigning interest, feigning ignorance because it benefits them or they're just flat out like like naive.

But there's never been this obvious where they're just ignoring really hard. You don't want someone to be president.

And if they can't think. Right, right.

Someone's showing a real clear sign of cognitive decline.

You don't you're supposed to highlight that like this is part of the news. But they had already picked him to be the guy running for the Democratic Party and they just they just decided to just ignore all that shit.

Yeah, but like I read The New York Times, so I go, Jamie.

Yeah, I just go after what you were saying that I'm reading updates now, though, as of now they've called Wisconsin for Biden. Arizona has not officially been called, but I'm seeing that it's called. And if he just wins Nevada and Michigan, which he's currently up in, that's enough to give him 270. And it doesn't matter about the matter about Pennsylvania at that moment.

So Biden's going to win that? I don't know. That's the part of like I heard last night, I think it was Karl Rove actually that was saying on Fox News that this reporting number is not accurate because they have no idea how many people voted right now and how many mail in ballots or early ballots are sitting out there sustaining like 99 percent or 95 percent of them.

That might not be a good, accurate number to go off. This is for which state and any of this? Any of the states. Yes, the closest ones right now are Nevada, Michigan and Georgia. Wow. Look how close they are.

Oh, dude, they're down to reporting like like chunks of three thousand votes. It's fucking nuts, man.

And the administration, I think, has said they're already filed a lawsuit to stop the counting in Michigan.

What does that mean? I don't know why.

That's why I don't see how you like why would you want to stop counting on our say? Like, how can you justify the argument? You want to stop counting.

Yeah, but they want to keep counting in Arizona.

But what's the art like. I wish I understood what is going on. What do they mean stop counting. I don't know.

So it looks like Arizona has lost 51 percent to 47 percent. That's a big gap. Left 100000 gap with 80.

Well, it's only 84. So they have 16 percent of the possible vote out there.

Yeah, but what what's pissing off Trump, though, is what's pissing off his team. Is that what they're counting? Our Maylands and Maylands are Democrats are way more likely to vote. Maylin Yeah, right. So that's like I'm sure you already know. Yeah.

That that's his gripe about these things that are laying around. And I think that he thinks they're just going to start making them up.

He tweeted earlier, like these, like they keep finding Biden votes in all these states. Like, yeah, it's like someone's going to find four thousand Biden votes somewhere.

I don't know. Sure.

It's they're also made weird rules in some states where the signature on the envelope does not have to match the actual person signature. Like when you signed the envelope for a mail in ballot.

Really? I know my midterm ballot got thrown away because it didn't look like your signature. I got to know I was out of town.

I got a call. There was a problem. My ballot. By the time I got back, it was over and I didn't get counted.

And they say, why? Yeah, it was like I didn't I didn't sign and date it right. Or didn't sign and date where I was supposed to sign and date somebody.

And I thought I was I was like, quite pleased with democracy. The fact that they tried to call me to rectify the situation, I would have had to do a bunch of stuff.

There'd be no way I knew. There's no way I had enough time to do everything I need to do.

But the fact that some dude, like, placed a call to be like, bro, your votes not counting. Wow. You call back or do you got to do X, Y and Z in a hurry to get your vote in?

And I missed. Biden wins Wisconsin Fox News projects limiting Trump's chances of reaching 270 electoral votes. Wow.

So if Biden won Wisconsin, Wisconsin's in. So it's kind of over, right?

They're going to go to. Hamas lost three hundred bucks. It's interesting that Arizona went blue.

That's interesting. I mean, California always goes blue. Oregon always goes blue. That all makes sense. Washington, that makes sense.

You know, it's funny that what's not happening is when we set this date, Joe, we sat here and talked about that America would be on fire as we recorded this.

I think they're waiting to find out what the results are. And then then they light the fuse. They can't start the fire yet. They might have won like both sides. Yeah.

You know, like the Trump people, they're like, oh, I'm not sure if I'm mad yet. And then, you know, the Biden people won. What's happening here, no one knows.

Once decided, once it goes to court, that's going to be a shit show. Isn't it funny? Like the different way, the different camps, if there is like a court and a dispute, the different camps like that, the one impulse is to mount a giant flag on your truck and get other dudes and trucks to roar around.

But that's only the Trump people I don't like. That's one camp.

OK, one camp would be a I have a friend who has a student who has a husband in the military and he described these rolling motorcades as vanilla.

ISIS like Vanilla Ice is because he was he served and it reminded him of the ISIS flags in the back of trucks, vanilla ISIS. That's hilarious. That was his depiction of it.

But the other camp is that you in the other camp, when you're mad, like you go to like you go you march downtown.

You know, it's like the two sort of like Playbook's, you know, are just very different. Yeah, one's in a car, one's marching. Yeah, yeah.

One's like a display. Yeah. Like like I don't think that any no one that will get if no one is going to get mad about the bike like no Biden person will put a big Biden flag on their truck, you know, and drive aggressively on a highway.

No. Here's my take on Trump. People aren't going to go downtown. No, Marxian not without their cars.

I wonder what like who's what side is in worse shape to March? The Biden people, the Trump people like who would have like worse backs and fucked up knees. Oh, that's impossible to say. You know, I like right now to talk about that responsibility thing that I write. Like, I don't know if you feel like you probably don't feel this. I right now I'm kind of like grieving for America a little bit.

Not about how the election might twist, but I'm grieving for America about if the polarization is true and I sometimes question whether it's true or not, because when I go out, I just have like I've been about this all the time lately when I go out.

About in my community and elsewhere, sitting here right now, whatever I have, like very positive interactions with my fellow Americans, when I go to the gas station, they're going to buy some shit.

It's like I come away happy. That's most people. When I go talk to my neighbors, who I like, I legitimately, my neighbors around me, I have no idea who they're voting for. I really don't know.

I kind of actually don't care when I go and talk to my neighbors.

There is like a love, right, but then all I hear about is the ripping apart. And I'm like, either I'm in the dark and it's ripping apart and I'm like too stupid to notice it, but I do like I do.

Like, I'm a little scared, I'm a little scared as well. Did you watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix? We've been in our old people with kids way watching it in 15 minutes.

Yeah, it's like we have a TV in our bedroom. But now, like when I'm home, we, like, watch 50 minutes of it on a cell phone. I have no idea why my 12 year old daughter's this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

She hated it.

We tried to make her watch it because I just wanted her to understand the dangers and the dilemmas of social media. But to her, social media is awesome.

I like tick tock, tick tock and and chit chat with her friends. She only sees the positive sides of it.

What I was trying to get her to see is like obviously she has no interest at all in politics, says no one doesn't understand the division that's happening in this country because people live in these echo chambers and they argue ideas and the way social media exacerbates this with their algorithms that point you towards things that are outrageous points and point you towards things that piss you off and keep you in this this sort of ideological bubble. And the people are dividing further and further away from each other.

And you look at this shift in the way people view the other side, whereas there were so many more people that were sort of centrists or, you know, had, you know, a little bit of ideas from the left, a little bit of ideas for the right.

Now, it's very divided, very divided, and it's directly correlating with the invention of social media.

Yeah, but if if the division and hatred. Is only digital. But it spills out, obviously, it does spill out into the real world, knowing your cricket, Portland and Seattle, you lived in Seattle for a while. Did you ever have imagined that they would take over a six block area of Seattle?

Yes, you really did. You thought they could.

I felt like I could definitely see it because I when I was there, there was enormous an enormous amount of tension around the homeless crisis in Seattle, that loitering laws, camping laws were just suspended. And they would go into an encampment like whatever.

I only wish I knew the proper term from go into an illegal encampment or whatever and move everybody out, actually scrape the topsoil away because the needles and stuff, whatever, scrape the topsoil away, pull out and people just move back in. And there was a lot of tension about this and it was that some people were like, why or why don't why can't we enforce?

Like, why don't we enforce the law and people being like, well, you know, it's like inhumane to people who are in need.

And it was like an emerging tension there.

So to have it later be that you saw that kind of like blow up on this grand national scale, doesn't surprise me after seeing like that level of of of just consternation from people who had been there a long time about why do I have this feeling that there's like laws that I'm held to, but some people are just not held to a law.

And this is covid when you were living there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So like.

Being witness to that and hearing the amount of of griping about that and then seeing it, no, I'm not like, wow.

It felt very like almost not like not at all surprising that that it happened.

Yeah. I think there's places in this country that have, like, legitimate, almost unfixable issues with homeless people. Sure. Los Angeles is not one of them. Los Angeles, when I first moved there in 94, it was nothing like this. Nothing. There was no tents ever. There's no universal tents. Now, my friend sent me a video where she was driving down in Venice and she held her phone up out the window.

And it is a mile plus of tents, just nothing but tents. It's crazy. Like you look at it, you're looking at thousands of tents. Like this is insane. How do you put the lid on that? How do you get those people out of there? Where do you put them? How do you clean that area? I mean, it's disgusting.

And you're talking about Venice, which is like a very wealthy area. There's a lot of money in Venice, a lot of beautiful houses.

You're on the beach and they're fucked. It's fucked. I was going to a restaurant there with my wife and we stopped at a red light. And there's this beautiful house to the left, probably millions of dollars right to the right, ten tents right across the street from the fucking house like a small road and then homeless encampment across the street from this beautiful house, like, what the fuck?

And I talk to people that are there and like now we ring those little ring doorbell things with the videos, constantly seeing people stealing shit, constantly seeing people breaking into their yard, trying to get into their house, wandering around their backyard, trying to get into the garage. It's like and they they're there's no solutions. The government doesn't do a goddamn thing about it.

Yeah. I've got input on all kinds of things, but I'm like low on input on that. I have zero.

We did our company. We did a river like a river access park clean up, went picked up all kinds of garbage at a river, access near near where we work in our.

There was a homeless encampment there in the woods at the River Access. I remember being, like, very kind of scared because I was like. It's super rude. To go and like pick up garbage is sort of like act like there aren't people camped there, right. And and not acknowledge these human beings like you would.

And, you know, if there was people there fishing or people are having a picnic, you would engage. Right? Right. So I'm like, why do I feel like chickenshit about engaging me? So then I go up and guys, I know it's going to seem like we're kind of like up in your business.

We're doing cleanup projects, bagging up garbage and way dudes like, hey, give us a couple of bags so they take some bags full of garbage, set it on the trail all the way.

And like for a week I'd been like plotting how I'm going to.

And it was easy.

It's just like it's just, yeah, we have this it was like it was like I thought, this is a writer, Jeff Jeff guy. He wrote this book, Yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it.

Jeff Dyer, he was a humorist and he had this essay he wrote about struggling with his desire to witness great poverty.

When he would travel, he's a professional traveler, you know, and you'd go to India and he would he struggled with why do I want to go?

Like, is it bad?

Like, what is it that I want to go witness? Behold the spectacle of poverty. You know, yeah, instead of like most people don't put that in their travel itinerary. Hmm. So he would specifically do that on purpose? Yeah, he talks about in his book, why do I like this? Kind of why do I like that?

It's definitely a perspective changer. Right. You start thinking you have problems and you go see people with real problems. Well, OK. Yeah, yeah. But homeless people in this country. It used to be a different thing, you know, it used to be all people that were drug addicts or all people that were mentally ill, but I think with covid, you've got people that just had nowhere else to go. There's a lot of people that they might be homeless right now, but they don't want to be they just don't know what to do.

I think there's I think that number is bigger than it's ever been before. And that's what makes it even scarier. And that's one of the reasons why something like universal basic income is interesting to me. You know, I'm not interested in letting the government take our taxes and. And do things to like you don't get a receipt for your taxes, go right, you don't know how much your taxes are going to. Frivolous things are things that don't make any sense or things you don't agree with, but if I knew that my taxes were going to very specific things that I agree with, I wouldn't have a problem.

Pay more taxes. You remember Ross Perot. He used to make those charts showing where your money would scare the shit out of everybody.

He's a reason why Bush didn't win a second term Herbert Walker Bush. That was the first time. Unless Trump loses in modern history where a president didn't win a second term the first time. Well, Carter and then Herbert Walker Bush.

And because they saw that Ross Perot thing, he took it.

He bought a half hour of regular television back and there was no Internet is like, I'm going to show you what's going on here. Here, look at this chart, because we got the money house and he was talent. And people like, what the fuck? He opened up a lot of people's eyes to what the IRS is and where your money goes and why it's dirty.

You scare the shit out of people. So weird time to be alive, Steve, I'm not I don't I'm worried about the future of this country, too. I'm worried about in a way that I've never been worried before.

Yeah, I. I like. I just like like America so much, I was having a conversation with them recently where they were kind of like challenging, like challenging why? Challenging why you could be why you could feel proud about being. In a like a citizen of a country where you just were born there and you just live there because you're born there, it's like, how can you be proud of that? You're just born there, right? I'm like, man, I can't really suss it out.

But I feel like like I have like a sort of like a sense of pride and patriotism and.

Too, and so I like worry about the country in a way like what it feels like for people, like I worry about like what it feels like for people to be American and knowing that there are people at a point that are even challenging the idea of taking pride in that, like that's a sign of something bad.

And also people who, conversely, are taking their deep sense of pride and love and using it to leverage and diminish. Other people here say sort of like, I love it more or I have more of a right to love it and even like the fact that to to either lack patriotism or conversely, to weaponize patriotism at all makes me feel like a little like I'm a little skittish right now.

Right. I know you're saying I want to know if there's this is true, because someone is saying that Google and Facebook both remove the ability to have an American flag emoji.

That cannot be true.

I don't know, I just read it just Google that that's just just I don't know, just Google that Google like if you if you want to leave a commonality to have an American flag emoji.

Yeah.

Like you use Twitter, like you put a series of American flags and thumbs up. Yeah. Come on. Can't do it anymore.

I don't do it on stage decision. No. I literally don't know if it's true. I read it and I was like what. I was running out the door.

I was like, what look, I get where people would say, you had no say in being American.

Why would you be proud of that? You should be proud of things you've accomplished. You should be proud of things you worked hard towards.

But what America stands for, I feel super lucky to be an American.

I think America stands for an incredible amount of innovation, incredible contribution to music and art and comedy, and just just the overall impact that it's had on the culture of the world.

For a country that's just a little over 200 years old is phenomenal.

It's insane.

I mean, I think I think this is the greatest experiment in self-government and then getting a bunch of people to live together and then what what kind of impact it has on the rest of the world ever.

Yeah, I mean, it's it's an amazing place to be. I had a conversation sorry.

I was going to say I just think right now people are concentrating only on the negative aspects of it.

I had a conversation recently with someone who had built over the course of life, they built a billion dollar business and harshly critical of the government, highly critical of government while simultaneously building a billion dollar business, telling me he feels no patriotism. I'm like, fucking you don't feel the patriotism, dude.

You can't really do that.

You've hacked on the government the whole time and built a successful business. You know, there's a little magic in that. Yeah. To be in a place where that can go down.

Well, that's pretty cool. Government's not ideal. No, but it's pretty cool to be able to look. Oh, I'd be like, you know, I just feel like you'd be like, man, this place is so great. I hacked on the government my whole career and made a bunch of money and no one shows up to beat me up.

I did that in China. You'd be dead. Yeah, name it. There's places. Yes.

Places in the world right now. Or if you did the exact same thing, they'd literally come for you and kill you. You know, we we were talking yesterday on the podcast about this wrestler in Iran that is like a world champion wrestler who they executed because he participated in a peaceful protest and the UFC tried to please make a plea to the Iranian government to to not kill him. And they fucking killed him anyway. They wanted to send a nice message.

This guy was a national sports hero and they want to send a nice message. We don't give a fuck what you are.

You are you are under us now. We are a powerful theocracy and we'll fucking kill you.

And they did. Yeah. Yeah, that's happening right now, that's 20-20 somewhere else, you know, as bad as it is here and it is it's not ideal. Government's not ideal. It's not this is not perfect. Where you can get an old man who can't talk to another guy is full of shit and they're the only people who have to choose from.

No, that's not good. That's not good. You know, and then there are other choices. I voted for Joe Jorgensen. I voted for the Libertarian candidate, even though I knew she wasn't going to win. I mean, I voted for in California where she had no chances.

Yeah, I think that that's a that's a very I'm interested to hear you did that because I had an astonishing, astonishingly similar thought process as I filled out my ballot is to in like in a state where there's not any question about where it's going to go and to.

Try to support not necessarily like the Libertarian Party, but to try to support the idea that you'd have a viable third party of some sort. Did we need that?

It doesn't just happen.

It doesn't have to fall into this this crazy system of of like this like this like collection of thoughts and this other collection of thoughts. And you pick between those two. That's it. That's all you got.

So any I thought that like any effort you could lend to the idea of a third seat at the table would be good.

However, you know, you're pissing into the wind, Stillman. Yeah.

You have those two two schools of thought and these two schools of thought are both funded by the same fucking people. I mean, that's that's what's hilarious about it all. They're all funded by gigantic businesses. It's not ideal. It's not good. And the idea of a third party candidate gets mocked. I mean, all the way back to Ross Perot, just no one. I mean, he's about as close as anyone has come. You know, he at least took some votes away from the Gary Johnson I voted for him to Gary Johnson.

Didn't put a dent in it.

He, you know. He barely had a chance, and I don't think Joe did either, but it's one of those. Things where you got to you got to look at it go, did you agree with the system? Now you just keep going, keep going with it every four years? Well, you know, four years is eight and then 12.

And then next thing you know, you're dead. So it's over. You only get one hundred, right. If you're really lucky and you're not even voting for most of those.

Like when you get to the to the end, like what is when you step up. Yeah. When you say, I don't want to participate in this ridiculous duopoly anymore because that's what it is.

I mean, and they're both in cahoots with some branch of the media because it's gross.

And then there's so much money involved and so many people are saddling up to the table and influencing them, whisper in their ear. And they're making all these compromising deals.

And I like, do you think about how long you have left on the planet? I think you should. Yeah. Yeah.

I wake up, I try to think about that every day. You know, all like politicians, all in our office now make a clock set for like four years or whatever, and it counts down. I need to get one of those like her life for like roughly my life expectancy and counts down backwards.

Well, don't you think that your life expectancy I mean, you are one of the few people that I know that has almost been killed by a grizzly bear.

Well, that's well, you had a real in a situation like in a brush.

Yeah.

And it's a something enough where it was scary enough that I now know that I've studied it a fair bit, that I now know I had. I had a mental. I had I had a. I had like a like a near-death experience, mental a near-death experience, mental experience, even though I was unharmed.

But but it jarred my brain so hard it jarred by the minute the seconds that occurred jarred my brain so hard that as I started, as I try to be curious about study, about what happened to my brain, it's parallels are all found and it's discussed by people who discuss near-death experiences, which might just mean I'm not like I'm mentally not that I'm not as tenacious mentally as I'd like to be, but I my brain got jostled.

But don't you think that joggle the word is now, don't you think that when you're in contact with an animal that's that large I mean a predatory animal, that's how big was it, 10 feet.

How easily.

Yeah, I don't want to know. Like it was like struck all of us. And we've looked at a lot of bears as being like, you know, a mature brown bear. OK, so mature Kodiak brown bear.

Yeah. That's what we want to talk about. Talk about where you were at a fog Norfolk Island, which is a place that has enormous bears. That whole part of the world is known for some of the large brown bears on Earth.

Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's separated from Kodiak by a narrow strait. It's like so like the Kodiak brown bear being like the world's biggest barrows. It's a neighboring island.

But that specific specimen, you know, I don't know a mature animal, but just huge. Just huge. Yeah.

When you're around something like that, where there can be no doubt that you can't get out of the way, you can't you can't fight it off. You can't you're helpless. Like it must trigger something in your your mind where you you come to grips with the reality of predator and pray that you almost were on the menu.

Yeah. There's just no way around that.

You can't there's no there's no rationalisations you could play in your mind when you're confronted with such absolute superiority.

Are you familiar with the term playing possum? Yeah, obviously so.

Our understanding of opossums now is that they're not playing. They conk out, right? Yeah, yeah, stress he's not playing dead, he hits such like he hit such a stress level that he shuts off.

I'm like embarrassed to admit, but I think it's instructive to point out that. I was playing possum in that moment, and I don't mean playing yeah, like a possum to me out, let's tell everybody who doesn't know the story.

Oh yeah. So real quick feedback. Yeah.

Rusbuldt we've been yapp in a long time but we had, we were hunting and it hung elk up in a tree and left it for a day and a half, all the meat hanging in a tree and we're camped a few miles away from there and went back to retrieve, went back with a few guys to retrieve the meat out of the tree and buried.

Found it. And. We are very, very aware that this might occur and went up and investigated the area around the tree and determined that the bear hadn't found it yet, in fact, that the carcass of the animals land not far away was untouched.

In hindsight, there was a pile of bear shit that had been smeared on the on the ground.

And I remember looking at that pile bear shit and wondering if it had been smeared by a bear's foot or smeared by a boot.

And I determined that, look, I had been smeared by boot, which would mean we'd smeared the shit when we were hanging in the tree and then stupidly, like, sat down at lunch and. Within a couple of minutes to sit down, eat lunch, it came, you know, the bear came in and it's open-mouthed past just 18 inches from my head and I was facing away.

So I was last wanted to see it, ya know, so, you know, he had a pistol, he had bear spray, but he hit it in the head with a pair of black diamond tracking polls.

He had sat down, he's got spray and set his pistol on his pack, but then when I talk about like playing possum and all the shit that was there, his instinct is to smack it with a tracking poll.

Wow. Everything you spend, all you know. You spend all your time thinking about how are you going to handle this, that the other thing? And. Sometimes it's disappointing that you don't handle stress that well. You know, I just I don't know I don't know where I went. One of our guys I got run over by Bear wrote it down the hill. At that moment. I snapped out of whatever I was in, but I was it shut me down bad.

I even noticed.

I haven't noticed. There's a thing that happens to people when they get really cold.

They enter a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy mentality. When you start to get cold, you lose.

As you start to get really cold, like where you get like where you could be in a hypothermic situation, people stop doing the obvious things that you would do to get warm. And I is aware of that as I am as many times as I've experienced that, I still see it happen to me, I still have to snap myself out of it.

Like you, just like you're getting cold, you're getting lethargic, you're getting cold, more lethargic, the cold's getting worse. And I have to be like, you can stop.

You can step in right now and stop this. And that the it's still it's like it still doesn't come naturally. You know, when you talk to people who train like you taught me, we train for this kind of stuff that they have to train.

In a very realistic environment that the trained let keep your head. You know, just like make good decisions if you walk into, like an active car crash scene or whatever and there's a severed hand laying on the ground, right. Some people are just going to see that hand. And then I can see anything else, some people are just going to see chaos and they're not going to focus on any particular thing, but like the person come in, see the hand, see everything around them, like assess all that, it's like it's just from exposure to that super traumatic stuff.

Not to getting calls traumatic, but I do when I look at how I respond to things, I do catch that there's like a mentality to practice and learn.

Yeah, it's. It's understandable that something like a bear attack would trigger senses and trigger response that you're just not conditioned for, you're not. I don't know how you would ever get conditioned to a bear attack.

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, on that same island, these dudes at the same island, there was some guys, some the same island, I think it was later that same year. Some operatives, some military guys happen to be hunting there, they got attacked by a bear and killed.

Well, we got one.

We got messed up bad, but he killed my why'd he kill it? And I did.

Well, maybe they had their gun out, right.

You were a weird situation, too, because if you guys were relaxed eating lunch with your guards down, you're sitting there chewing on a sandwich.

I always laughed. You know, I was in the middle of saying what? Like I was in the middle of a sentence I'll never forget because someone was laughing about why we were putting some sandwiches together and someone was laughing about why my sandwich looks so much nicer than someone else's sandwich.

And I said, if you want, I was in the middle of saying, if you want a sandwich like this, get your own fucking TV show.

But I was never able to finish the sentence. But I know I was in the middle of saying that when all of a sudden the people around me erupted off the ground.

Is this like a landmine had gone off underneath us? Well, because they saw I didn't see it, I was looking the other way and it came in running off, I yeah.

Oh scary man. And I had like, you know, a fair bit of exposure. And I'm yeah. Like I mean, relative to most a ton of exposure to those things.

I got to expose my 10 year old kid doing this year a couple of times, you know, on Caribou in Alaska knows it was like cool to kind of see his thought process. You yeah, you've been exposed to more than ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the population.

Yeah, and for it to rattle you like that, it was disappointing, man, because we're always talking about going to do this now.

I'll do that. Everybody's like, yeah, you know, I actually prefer the 44 over to three because, you know, if I can't get it done with this 13, I got 13 reasons he doesn't want to charge me or this semiotic.

It's like all this, like, bullshit, you know, but also like hits and like, you know, swat it with a tracking poll.

I've only seen one grizzly ever in the wild up close. And it wasn't a big one. It was like a six foot pair. But it looked at me in a way that another bear has never looked at me before. Yeah, I've seen black bears, black bears.

Look at you like what are you who you what's going on? Can I walk by you? Like black players?

Look at people in a weird way. Yeah, they're like denizens of the underbrush. Man, the grizzly looked at me like this.

It is locked on me and I was like, oh, shit, like that is just a different thing.

I get it looked at me like, Yeah, am I hitting you? Am I going to eat you? Yeah. There's a mindset probably that comes from there's a mindset that probably comes from just not being challenged.

Yeah. And where I was at in Alberta, they you can't hunt them, so no one hunts them. So they're bigger, they're more fierce and they have no pressure.

Not you can still in Alberta Canyon, B.C., you can't anymore because you can't. But you cannot. Grizzlies in Alberta.

Yeah, I think Alberta I'm not I'm not saying everywhere, but I know that they I've had B.C. lost its B.C. lost its grizzly hunt.

This is my friends, John and Jen Revett. They were talking about how they're trying to get them to open up some sort of a season because they have a lot of them up there now. Oh, OK. And because the woods are so dense, they don't really know how many of them there are. But there are so many encounters with people.

Yeah, the B.C. shutdown was very it was political. It was very it was like it was a referendum issue. Yeah. That's a weird one.

Right. Because the people that are making that decision, they've never had any experience with bears. But you talk to the people that actually live in the bush and they'll tell you that there's a lot of grizzlies up there. And then there was also a thriving business and industry of people that were guiding up there. And, you know, they're constantly in contact with them and they're like, you know, this is not just not as an endangered animal. Yeah.

People that live in proximity, like people that live in proximity to things that are regarded as endangered, tend to have a tend to have a different perspective on the abundance than people who look at it from far away.

This is a good time to find this out. What happened in Colorado with the wolves?

Oh, I haven't had to the Depass Jamie can pull it up. It had to have passed overwhelmingly.

Yeah, I know it's on track, too. I know that Utah is right to hunt and fish passed by landslide constitutional right to hunt and fish.

What does that mean? Thirty some states have it now.

They're just like codifying that you have a right to hunt and fish and it doesn't usually have teeth, but it might in the future just give away to challenge laws. It's being used right now in like Montana has a right to hunt and fish.

You have a constitutional right to hunt fish, meaning that that, you know, a state has to recognize that renewable resources can be like should be allocated to hunters and anglers.

And it's one might ask, well, how is it ever coming to fruition?

There are there's a lawsuit right now in Montana.

There's a lawsuit against the governor in the state who they put a cap, they put a quota on the wolf harvest and they're being sued by a conservation group who's worried about the steep decline and outnumbers they're being sued by.

That conservation group that they're right to hunt is being infringed upon by a reticence to control wolf numbers to the detriment of big game herds.

People are usually I think people are supposed to act like apologetic for the fact that they want wild game resources.

Hmm. Like it's like, oh, you know, we talked about this one individual that you were curious about who is very instrumental in Wolf reintroductions. And he refers to hunters as the recreational big game killing industry.

And it's kind of like a swipe at people who sort of act like it's not a legitimate perspective to want there to be deer, elk, moose, cariboo to eat and use. I'm like very unapologetic about my view that I want there to be a lot of deer, elk, whatever game. What's most of your food, right?

Yeah, I want like I want that to be on the landscape. I want there to be abundant amounts of that. And I don't I'm not bashful about the fact that my desires, their influence, my feelings about predator management.

Like I don't view it as that bad. Wolves kill coyotes. Competition, yeah, yeah, let's see here pass, it's it's too close to call up 10 oh, shoot.

Wow. To that wow man. They were I think they were predicting that was a done deal. Holy shit. It's only now that to be clear, that is just that proposition one one four in Colorado is is Thursday saying restore great grails.

What it is.

It's making the state fish and game agency will need to craft a plan.

There's still a lot. It's not like it's not like that passes. And also here comes a helicopter full of wolves. It it doesn't go that way.

They have to craft a plan and that plan has to be approved. Yeah, it'll be in it'll be like you can imagine. It'll be like all kinds of lawsuits, all kinds of issues, a lot to be sussed out.

But it's forcing the state game agency to craft a plan and take seriously what it would look like, like there, because the argument is like, oh, you're making it a popular vote.

You're taking science out of the hands of scientists and putting it in the hands of the public.

But in all fairness, I hope it doesn't pass because wolves are showing up in Colorado on their own.

I think that's a better way to go. But, you know, I think like less social tensions, it'll happen slower.

It'll be like you're kind of like a sort of different sort of wolf that way.

So I hope it doesn't pass.

What do you mean by that? Generate a different sort of, Wolf.

I mean that. Wolves, that this is a little bit it's a little bit fuzzy, but it's like one wolves, when we established wolf seasons in Montana, wolf hunting seasons and trapping seasons in Montana and Wyoming and Idaho after a long period where there were no wolves season. So it had a really dramatic impact on how the wolves behaved.

It made them much more secretive, move them into different areas, kind of pushed them out of some of the bigger riparian zones. It just sort of changed their attitude, changed the way they interact with the landscape so that you're getting.

It might be true that by having wolves that have this instinct, they're already coming out of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, you know, passing down through southern Wyoming and going to Colorado, they might have kind of they might have developed a finer tuned instinct about avoiding trouble with people because there's like a lot of selective pressure against wolves and against grizzlies, a lot of selective pressure against those that are too ready to engage with.

Man, it's like a good way to end up dead when you engage with man and spend too much time around livestock, spend too much time around developments.

It's like it doesn't work out for those ones. The ones that shy away from it and avoid habitations, avoid livestock like that's the that mentality in a wolf gets rewarded.

So it could be that if we're headed down a path where it's it's.

Just going to happen that Colorado is going to have wolves and I'll say like it is going to happen because it happened, they showed up on their own.

How do they know what the numbers? But they think they're having pups.

So the people who are the people, the architects of this plan in Colorado would say it's just not going to happen fast enough. They want that real fast.

And do they have a specific reason why they want it to happen faster?

They they would say that that wolves are gone because of human manipulation, because of very intentional plan to shoot them and poison them off the face of the earth.

This was in the eighteen hundreds. Yeah. Eighteen hundred nineteen hundreds. And that is. Wrong. That's a sin against nature and that we have an obligation to rectify that crime, that sin and bring this animal back there, enthusiasm's don't extend to all sorts of imperiled wildlife.

But this is a highly to them a very symbolic one. It's very symbolic. People, you know, the black like why they don't have those passions around the black footed ferret.

I don't know. I would love black footed ferrets, they don't feel that way about black footed ferrets, but with wolves it's like. It means a lot to him. I think also that is bringing the wolves in is a little it's like also. No one's ever going to tell you this, I have a suspicion that I have a personal theory, that it's a kind of a way to sort of stick it to.

It's kind of a way to stick it to cattle. Producers. It's kind of a way to stick it to hunters.

There's there's a little bit of that that infuses it a little bit of a cultural antagonism that that that that itch isn't scratched with black footed ferret work like it is with wolves.

Just symbolic. So you think so?

Are they like vegetarians? They want to stick it to cattle producers because they don't want people growing cattle.

Oh, I mean, to speak in very, very general terms, the cattle industry has been historically quite hostile to environmental groups, not hostile to predators, hostile to wolves.

I'm kind of like, you know, if you if you could work into my brain on it and sort of just accept what I'm telling you, it's kind of a true thing.

Like I do like wolves to be on the landscape.

I. Recognize that there are real problems, the like real problems for real people that come with wolves, I don't think we should I don't think we can justifiably play God and eliminate species from the planet.

Like look at that feels very deeply wrong to me. I want wolves to be on the landscape.

But if they're going to be on the landscape, we're going to have to set what that looks like and then open up like pressure release valves and pressure release valves will take the form of hunting and trapping like state management. There should be a stable population of wolves. We should agree what that population looks like and they should be managed by the state as a renewable resource as like what I want is pretty clear. I'm not like an anti-war person.

What I am is an anti abuse of the Endangered Species Act person. So I'm not anti predator at all, man. I enjoy seeing them.

I enjoy conversations in Montana law.

You know, I got friends to see them a lot. I see them only very rarely in glimpses of them. But you can go find them quite easily in certain areas like in Yellowstone National Park, you can go find them.

They were people would like even before the hunting season started, you'd run into more.

I was with Ben O'Brien and B.C. for some. I met Ben and we we found a carcass of a moose calf that had been torn apart by wolves. It was wild. Yeah, it's pretty recent.

It was cool to see the other day. We were looking at a brand new this morning. We're looking at a brand new track and a big burn area, a brand new track and brand new powder stone powder snow and a big burn area.

And in looking around, you can feel like you could see everything, the snow is still falling. His brain is like, why can I see that thing?

And then I talk to a friend of a friend who knew that he was in that same area on that same day and had a couple of passes and 40 yards of them.

So, you know, it happens and it doesn't.

Yeah, there's such an iconic animal for the West, you know, glad they're there around. I'm glad they exist. I've only seen one in the wild once. And that was in Alberta. And it was just it was at dusk. Barely see it run across the road at dawn. What is. It was one of those things.

Yeah. I saw I saw a black one this year. And all the time I saw I was wondering if that's what I was seeing. Like, the whole time I actually spent looking at it, I was like, is that what I'm seeing? And then it was gone and I was like, Oh, that's what I saw. So I never even appreciated. It was so fleeting. I never appreciated the moment I spent the whole moment and wondering.

But I was looking at I had I had any idea I was like I said, oh, my God, there's a mountain lion. I'm like, oh, no, it's not. It's the back of a big sheep. I don't know why my head went mountain lion.

I saw a squirrel once in Alberta and I thought for a whole second that it was a wolf. Yeah, sort of wolf. To fucking squirrels, like what is wrong with you?

But it was just like in between trees and, you know, dense forest. Couldn't tell what the fuck I was looking at.

The Arctic explorer Viljoen or Stephansen describes sneaking up on a grizzly bear that was a marmot and he describes seeing a walrus head.

Sticking out of the water. And then realizing it was a hill on the land with two white snow chutes coming down these troughs in the hillside.

It's weird how the mind plays tricks on you like that. Yeah, that's why I don't trust it's walrus. Oh, no, it's not. It's the Earth.

When people talk about seeing Bigfoot, you know, I ran into one lady when I was doing this Bigfoot show and up in the Mount Rainier, and she was very adamant that she saw a gorilla. She saw a big gorilla walking through the woods, just like I'm looking at.

And I'm like, that's a gorilla. And I remember it's like, wow, this lady so sincere. I wonder what she really saw. But now I'm convinced she saw a black bear that was standing on two feet. But I bet in her mind I'm thinking about me seeing that stupid squirrel thinking it's a wolf.

People your brain plays little tricks on you and then your imagination fills in the blanks.

There are.

These online forums, people have found three bigfoots on our TV show because they don't realize that people are like Dorking to get out of a shot to Larry.

So some of them might like whatever someone might be doing something in, like realize all, you know, and they duck into a brush and lay down and people are like, oh, yeah, if you go to this moment in the second, you'll see it.

They don't even know it's there. The guys don't even know it's there. But you can see it in the bushes.

People love to find missing things, things that aren't real. You know, I always said this, that, like, if Bigfoot was 100 percent real, if everybody knew there was Bigfoot, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting as orcas like of orcas weren't real.

If people of orcas were a legend like the people have seen this thing, it's in the water, it's intelligent and it's enormous. And they can sing and they have different languages and dialects and they might be aliens. They might be from another planet. Apparently, they don't even hurt people.

They help people fall off boats and they actually rescue them. And these are all things that people have said about killer whales. But because we know killer whales are really seen like, oh, look, you could put them in a fucking swimming pool and stick them in a parking lot in San Diego.

And people come to see him and they think it's cool.

My kids, they have a lot of we get them a lot of animal books and they like the dinosaur books, especially the ones where there's, like always a picture of a dinosaur than a person.

Relative, right, so you get a relative sense, I find myself I probably have 100 times my children said. That's all that dinosaur book is, great dinosaurs, a great. The biggest thing to ever live on the face of the earth is alive right now, the biggest thing ever is alive right now. And they're just laying the tracks, man, as the fuck are you thirsty to be the biggest creature ever is now?

No, but they're like, man, if I could only visit the dogs like a shark.

Imagine if a shark wasn't real, you know, but then, you know, you could see one or they thought a shark was extinct.

Like everyone cares about Megalodon. Oh, my God. I think they think they might have found a Megalodon.

Megalodon might still be alive, but nobody cares about a great white like that's that's alive for sure. There's a lot of them. You know, you can go they fucking breed up in San Francisco, go in the water, they find them. There's this video. There's an amazing video of drone footage off of Malibu. These guys are surfing and you follow the drone footage. It's a couple hundred yards from the service. You see a great white swimming through the water.

Yes, right past these people. It's like, Jesus Christ.

I was looking at this radio tracking shit up a great way on the East Coast and maybe like hanging around the coast, you know, and also, like, beelines for Bermuda.

Hangs around their beelines back where it came from. Just like, yeah, they'll go over a thousand miles over this way. Yeah, they're incredible, man. Yeah, they're amazing and they're real and no one gives a shit if they care, if they see it.

If you see, like, whoa. But it's we're animals are native and non-native.

It's just such a strange conversation. I really enjoyed your your episode that you did with Jesse Griffiths where you were hunting Neal Guy.

Mm hmm. Which is Texas. Where we are now is a weird place. Yeah. It's my wife's on access to the other day. She's like near our house.

She's like, I saw this deer. It was like a full sized deer, but it had spots like a fawn. And I grew up as an axis deer, which she's like, they have those here.

I'm like, they must they have everything they have. We're laughing driving down the road.

Oh, a zebra could easily be a zebra. No, I'm not kidding. You were like, oh, a zebra. Yeah, you saw a zebra. And not only that, but a free range zebra. Wild zebra like like.

Yeah, I don't know that that's the one I'm talking about. I don't know. I would imagine that happens at some amount of them, like get away here and there.

But where us it was just wide open like like woods in between houses access deer. Yeah.

The zebra I'm talking about was like someone zebra but it's still dysphonia, like the climate supports it.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

So these Neil guy, I mean, you know they're from India and an antelope from, you know, Indian subcontinent animal.

Yeah. That's strange.

Look, Jessy's restaurant here in Boston, man. I mean he serves. Yeah. Shout out to die Douai. It's a great place. You know, tonight a dog on him about the name of that all the time.

It's, um but it like comes from like this he'll have to explain to you.

But Italian for something. Yeah.

It's like to eat from the both the kingdoms. It's something it's some kind of regret's name in this place that but because I was like, you know, know how to pronounce it.

But it's like eat from the kingdom of the land and kingdom.

It's some portion of this sort of like proverb thing saying like eat from the land, eat from the sea, which isn't bad advice.

Is he fully open now? Because when I went there, I believe so he just had the patio. I don't believe it's some kind of limited situation.

Yeah, Austin's interesting. Like some places are just open. Yeah. Yes. Like where mice come on in and then other places like his place is a little bit more protective.

He, um. Like yourself, he's a. Exceedingly generous person. Jesse is. Good men, we're talking all that shit about America, good Americans. Yeah, it seems like a real nice guy, like I've only met him once, but the restaurant's amazing. What is Neil Guy taste like?

You know, it's kind of funny the way describing wild game goes.

I think that that. It was described to me by people who are down there. We were on a ranch go famous ranch called Eatery. It's very limited access, but just through social connections and things, we're able to hunt on this property that doesn't get hunted very heavily. And the people there that have grown up, you know, on that property growing up in cattle ranching, they view it as they view it as superior to beef, meaning like Neil Guy for eating cattle or for selling.

Wow. Is the way someone explained it.

I mean, because there's like a great monetary value. It is like a market for cattle. There's a market for Neoguri, but it's different and more complicated. But it was like it was like, this is what we eat.

We eat the Neil guy, we sell the cattle like. So it's it's approachable, mild, reminiscent of beef, you know, it's very, very popular. It's very popular.

There's a handful of things in the US where.

We have filmed and talked about Sika deer a lot in the in Maryla Delmarva Peninsula, people in those areas as popular as whitetail deer are like America's deer, America's meat people in those areas like screw that man, I'm eating sika deer and people have exposure to access.

Deer feel that way and people have exposure to Neil guy like that's my animal. So it's, it's in that, it's in that collection of.

Yeah they're the same thing.

I got that hide tanned by a guy here, a guy here in Austin ran the process for me, got a tan and my daughter wanted it for her bedroom and there was some kind of custody battle wound up in my boys. Look at that picture.

That looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book. That doesn't include a real animal, the one on the right, the big picture. Know crazy man, aren't there vitals in a weird place, too?

Very far, very far forward. So you almost low and low and forward. And how far to the lungs go back? What do you mean the limbs go back, lungs, oh, lungs. Oh, I'm sorry, not as far as if you're accustomed to, not as far back as we accustomed to, dear. Yeah. You actually you got to aim like weirdly forward and weirdly low.

I shot one shot top of the heart off it, but I was aiming like I was under instruction from a person, a guide that we were with.

And he was like imploring me like, you have to listen to me. Like it has to go this way or you'll lose that thing in the brush.

Wow. Know, he said when they make it into the Brochmann, you get a sinking feeling like don't go down easy, Ashot.

It's what he's shooting and shooting. And I really I feel like I shot it again.

But they're worried about losing the strong, strong animals. But I mean, they run most Muslim around private land.

There are public hunting options, opportunities for him.

Is that an animal that gets hunted by tigers in its natural environment? I believe so.

I believe so. But I have no I have zero expertise on that.

That's the thing about access. Deer apparently was explained to me that they they do the in their natural habitat. They do get hunted by tigers. So there's so fucking far they're equipped to deal with it. Have you hunted access? Yeah. How fast are they? Fast.

But I have to hunt them with a ball where you don't really where it really comes to haunt you. Leopards play leopard, leopards prey.

There's no they like, you know, with American pronghorn or what we properly call antelope. The ridiculously fast, yeah, for anything they have to deal with, and it was like they you know, the theory is a coevolved with the American cheetah. Yeah.

And now you look like why does he need to be like he doesn't have any reason to be that fast.

Yeah. I got to get a hold of Dan Flores again. Yeah. I had him on two years ago to talk about his book American Coyote and lost contact with him.

He's still talking to me and I haven't. But I feel as though if I reached out to him, he would be as warm and inviting as he always is. Just great guy.

He's an intellect man. Very, very.

He was when I was in graduate school, I had to take like a out of discipline seminar or something like that.

And I took his I took his his history writing Western history, whatever the hell class I took of his. And he kicked my ass, you know, kicked my ass is very hard class to take. And I learned a tremendous amount from that guy.

He was a good professor.

I want to get him together with someone like Randall Carlson, who's an expert in the Younger Dryas impact theory. Yeah, because the two of them coincide like the the mass extinction of North American mammals. Yeah. Coincide timeline wise with the Younger Dryas impact theory. So, you know, Randall Carlson spent his entire life focusing on this impact theory, how it ended the Ice Age.

People talk about it being like the idea that never dies.

Yeah, I was at the Lindenmeyer site in Colorado, a famous Folsom site, Ice Age encampment.

And I was it was funny because I was I happened to be at that site that there was a guy there working in these certain sediment levels to find these little micro crystals.

These these like these things that were created during the impact because you had all this radiocarbon dating that had been done around.

LINDENMEYER So we knew all these ages and he was in there looking for these things and the anthropologists that I was with were very dismissive of him.

It was like, Oh. You know, but they're less and less so now. Well, yeah, well, they're very invested.

They're like we. I did an interview with the guy not too long ago and we were talking scientists. Oh, the entomologist Justin Schmidt, I think it was written about. Like, why do young scientists always make all the discoveries, not all, but, you know, the good idea, like some of the good ideas come from young scientists, he said, because people my age, all we do is defend our old shit.

It seems because we're so busy like that, we're so busy defending our old theories.

Well, so many people in the anthropology side want to employ the blitzkrieg theory, right.

Which is no, it's at this point, it's dead or dead, really. But we're not talking about I got an opportunity to revise my book after ten years. Yeah. Yeah.

I put some language in there around the blitzkrieg hypothesis.

So what's the replacement theory to explain the blitzkrieg theory?

Yeah, the blitzkrieg hypothesis held that. That it was the arrival of humans that led to the extirpation and extinction of a lot of the Ice Age megafauna.

So you'd look and it would be that why did mammoths go extinct in Europe, you know, 30, 40000 years ago? But they went extinct here 10000 years ago.

And your map like human migrations and you found this kind of compelling pattern of the fact that people show up and shit goes extinct.

Part, we did we did a podcast about this with the guy you should talk to sometime named David Meltzer, who knows this world better than anybody. And it's really elegant. It's a very elegant theory. It explains a lot very quickly.

It's seductive because I think it's seductive from a cultural perspective, because it allows you to fantasize that past cultures were as destructive as our own, which makes you feel good that they were hunting these things to extinction back then.

So we can't be that bad for driving things to extinction. Now, everything about it was a very packaged up and had a nice bow on it.

What started to eat away at the blitzkrieg hypothesis is that. More DNA work on extinct remains like more DNA work on bones and a greater picture of effective population size of these past populations, and you realize that things were in steep decline anyways, things were changing rapidly anyways. Maybe people came in and kind of like did the Akutagawa on some of these things.

But it wasn't that they blinked out. They faded out for a long time. But everything our old perspective of how we used to look at it made everything seem very compressed and very immediate.

And so just it's just gotten more complicated. It's just gotten more complicated.

As we understand more that you add that you had that mammoth populations were perhaps collapsing long before people showed up.

And also there's the problem. Gestation period. Yeah, yeah.

That was the idea, too, that you like people coming into a valley and you would kill some females and could have like four four pachyderms, you know, things like very low fecundity that you could come in and kill some females and have this impact on it.

There's also the problem that I remember criticism that people used to feel this way, the criticism you see, they call the bison boys where they had this fantasy of these like roving, highly effective big game hunters.

And then people point now to why is there not more evidence of like why is there such limited evidence of humans killing mastodons and mammoths?

Mostly. I mean, stuff's gone, right?

It's been a long time ago. But that's another thing.

When we used to do and archaeology, they would throw everything away except for the big bones. They would look for projectile points, look for big bones. Everything else just get washed away. And sluice boxes are through sieves, you know, and we weren't looking at the finer picture of, like, what people a what was there. They thought that any association of human artifacts and mammoth remains meant that it could only mean one thing. These people killed those mammoths.

Hmm.

You know, sites that are described as kill sites that now people investigating, like we have no reason to believe this is a kill site.

There's a thing that came out of Mexico not long ago with the like all the it was a big kill site.

They even flipped the bones over in order to do this and that, too. Yeah, I remember. Yeah.

And then these analysts come look at like, OK, there is no compelling reason to think that this is a kill site.

Because they'll now, like you, take an elephant, a dead elephant, dump it on the ground, look at it in a month, look at it a month later, look at it a month later. Look at it a month later. What happens to the bones? You know, and things that we used to think were Kilsyth are just not. It's a long time something die as time goes by, someone goes in camps, they're late, it all gets jumbled up.

You find a projectile point, a mammoth bone. Oh, my God. He killed it. Right.

And then other people are like, well, no.

Now that we've analyzed three thousand years, separated these two occurrences, there's only so much place on the planet. Shit happens in the same place time and time and time again.

So it's just it's fallen apart for four reasons he Meltzer would describe more eloquently.

To me, it is fascinating when they're trying to piece together what happened based on some bones and some fossils and based on tools and just whatever evidence that they find in the ground and that they're trying to put together a comprehensive portrait of history through this.

What a lot of anthropologists thought is that everything unexplained is always like of religious significance. How so, like, let's say you find a couple of buffalo skulls in a circle, like they're doing a dig and they find some buffalo skulls facing the same way in the circle.

Oh, I see what you're saying. It was like a ritual ritualistic or just might be like died there. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I might be cutting up deer.

My kids come in and do something, lying themselves up in some way, stick them in the snow. Right. Or whatever. Things just like freakish.

But yeah, like unexplained things are always like ritualistic, symbolic rereads stuff and stuff.

But yeah, the blitzkrieg hypothesis, I'm sure it was probably some hanger-on, but it's, it's.

It's as dead as the mammoths. I used to love it. It was so beautiful, especially because there's stuff like this, like Wrangel Island. That's where the woolly mammoths were survive. They lived there till three or four thousand years ago, and that's why. And then you'd be like, no one ever showed up there. They didn't get colonized by humans. Yeah, why did all this big shit go extinct in Australia forty thousand years ago? When people showed up, it's.

You've got to have that melted down. What's his name? David Jay Meltzer. He's at Southern Methodist University, where I went to visit him, you know.

He showed me is the the the Folsom type site where they first excavated falls and bones. I got to hold them. And you can see on the skull, this is no joke. This isn't like us making believe something is true. These are, you know, twelve thirteen thousand year old bison skulls. And you can see all the cut marks where they cut the tongues out.

Wow. Yeah. The knife. You can see the knife work on the bones. Wow. Yeah, he's that dude, is that dude, is he sharp man, he's written a bunch of books about this stuff.

He kind of blow your mind a little bit when we were in Nevada, when we went on that mule deer hunt for your show. Yeah, I found an arrowhead and I lost it. I don't know what the fuck happened.

Someone cleaned my office and, oh, disappeared. We're going to talk about. But yeah, you're supposed to be supposed to leave it there. Put it back. Yeah, I didn't. I was with some anthropologists one time and there we were finding sweet shit up in the Brooks range in Alaska.

And you had to leave it there. Man named photograph and sketch it and stuff and tuck it back into the tuck it back into the seams.

So crazy.

Tuck it back into the tundra. What did you find o old stuff. Old stuff, these guys are like, what kind of stuff, projectile points, big projectile points, like how old?

Well, the guy's worth. He's retired now.

A guy named Mike Kohn's, he had found a thing called the Mesa site. And he had identified like, you know, this is that kind of areas like mathematically the most remote area in North America.

If you factor in distance from roads and settlements, he had found this very prominent mesa where it wasn't a campsite. It was just a place that people would sit and wait for game to come by and found hundreds of projectile points up there. Wow.

You know, these things are like Ice Age projectile points because they had all kinds of radiocarbon dates because they built all these fires up there. Hmm.

And so he did this whole, like, book type thing about it. It's the academic community accepts it.

The academic consensus is that he's right during the Ice Age, whatever it was, 12, seven year, 12 thousand some odd years ago, whatever the hell it was, ten thousand seven hundred, like some Ice Age date, people camped up here made shitloads of projectile points.

This guy found them while we were doing a kind of a continuation of that work, of mapping out campsites. And we would find like unbelievable points, unbelievable points.

It just seems so fucked up.

Has it been picked over yet? I know, but it seems so fucked up to do, Tony.

Man, it was like against every bit of like Michigan elbow grease I've ever had laid out for me. I would fantasize.

I would be like, oh, I'd be like, you know, you might believe that there was some day I'm going to get me a helicopter.

It will be mine. Well, just the idea of holding on to one of those, just put it in your hand and just imagine what it was like when that guy used tendons to lace it to a stick.

Yeah. Bad dudes. Yeah. To get their food. A lot of know how they know they're bad.

They thought they had cool stuff. They're showing each other new shit. Yeah.

I new new techniques and strategies for like check this out and they're like oh you young guys, you know they're, they thought it was sweet.

Yeah. There's a lot of that out here. There's a lot of arrowheads apparently out here on ranches. People find them all the time. Yeah. My friend Gary Clark Jr. had a picture on his Instagram page. You probably find a Jimmy of a perfect arrowhead he found on this ranch. I mean, it's just perfect. And you just look at that arrowhead and you think, God damn, someone's sent that through the lungs of a white tailed deer probably hundreds of years ago.

So, yeah, that sweet. That's so awesome. Look at that thing. It's perfect. And it looks like someone just made it. Now and time travel, I know, could you imagine if there was ever a time where you could just go to view just to be a fly on the wall of history?

Do you know when you think twenty thousand years ago, Miles City, Montana, specific? Why?

Just because I just want to see how I'd want to see maybe not 20, whatever the hell it is.

I want to see how woolly mammoths interacted with that landscape. Wow, look at the scene, woolly mammoth in that and their habitat there at sort of the arrival of the first humans.

This is a guy I'm friends with online. I don't know him in real world, but he's contacted me and he's actually sent me some stuff from his site. But he's the Instagram handle is the boneyard in Alaska. Mm hmm. Do you know this guy? No.

Let me see if I could find it if I had already. There you go. The Boneyard, Alaska.

They they have this site that they found something there once, many, many years ago. And since then, they've been pulling all these. There's an Ice Age Cariboo horn. They've been pulling all these incredible pieces out. I mean, just over and over and over. You see that one picture of a bear track like that right next to his foot.

Is that a black bear? Or a small grizzly bear was to want to see the front foot better, but the front foot back behind his heel looks like a grizzly.

Now, if you scroll back to the page, Jamie, go down. They've had a bunch of like, look at the one, the upper right upper right hand corner. Oh, there's a forced glance on the podcast talking about it.

Know that well, know all the tusks they keep finding.

They're I mean, they've had it's a treasure trove. And this one area and it's not an enormous area. I mean, I think it's only a few acres that they've been excavating and finding all this shit, but it's just a massive amount of dead bones and skulls and and tusks.

And in this one area, on my first date with my wife, I took her to the library of tar pits and she knew what she was getting into.

Yeah, man. Yeah, my old stomping grounds. I've never been, but that's all you really know.

She tells a story where they had like a little miniature bronze of a mammoth and she said, oh, like a baby, they must have found a baby man.

And I was like, well, no, actually, you know that.

So she's like, yeah, no shit.

You know, this is like I was like, well, little lady.

Oh, let me set you straight.

That's a specific time. So you would want to see that more than anything else. Yeah.

If I could do a second, if I could take a second whack at it, I would go like a second setting, like back to the future part two. Yeah. I would go to join Daniel Boone on his first trip over the Cumberland Gap.

That had to be wild. Gave him a second trip, didn't the wolves?

I don't know, I know he's got a great story about a wolf coming into their camp and biting a guy, and what surprised these hunters was that the wolves seem very intent on one individual.

And bit this individual, he then later developed hydrophobia. And they were out jack lighting for dear. They burned pine nuts and the front of a boat and drift down rivers to shoot deer and he had a bout of what they called the hydrophobia.

And went berserk, he was he had rabies, yeah, he had rabies. So hydrophobia is like that fear of water, like I don't know what it is, but people, you know, freak out, had about had to be restrained. Took them home and he died. Wow. Yeah, that was in his that was in his social circle. So the wolf had given him rabies when it came into a camp. Seem very what alarmed them was how it seemed so intent on a person and eventually bit that person killed that guy.

And then eventually they have to Boone, where Bunz Boone's kid was tortured and killed by Indians and he was hastily buried.

And Boone went back to.

Brown went back to to find the bones of his son and the wolves had torn out the body.

And Boone, it was a rainstorm, Boone later described how he had lifted his boy out and held him, you know, sobbing and then heard some sounds in the distance and it was some Indians coming and slipped off. Into the night. Wow. And you think about like that moment for that guy, Jesus Christ, when he later in life, he. Would go on these long hunting trips, just him and his him and his slave. Together.

Go on, like like they're like old old men, old buddies. Or whatever. I don't mean I don't mean to say like bodies, because it was like. Right, but they were like they were like him and a slave would go on these long journeys hunting together or so they could be like a great play.

Right. It kind of would be, oh, when I retire, I'm going to work on that.

Just imagine being those people not knowing what was out there making their way across the country. And that's it. Just a type of mindset. It's a rare individual that I just don't think we grow people like that anymore.

No, it's over observed. It's over observed. But Lewis and Clark were supposed to keep their eyes out for mammoths.

Really? Wow. Yeah, it's like, oh, while you're out there, man, there was some consideration. Was there any stories of mammas people who had all the bones, all the bones that come out of stuff? Jefferson got really interested in some of these mammoth or mastodon bones that had come out of some of those lyrics and was like, hey, man, you know, in addition, all the other shit like keep your eyes off for big elephant.

It must have been fascinating to see what the wildlife was like before it was molested by modern humans.

You know, back in the sixteen, seventeen hundreds like dude read Russell Reider, also Osborn's Journal of a Trapper. What what year is that from his in the late 30s, early 40s? He was a meticulous journal keeper, one of the few people that wrote a journal who wasn't full of shit. Yeah, it's a great depiction of what it was like. And he was like, you know, 30 years after.

Contact in those areas, I think I mentioned this to you before, but like our idea of like pre contact contact, Elliot West is this historian and he describes how when Lewis and Clark hit the Great Plains, somebody told you this when he was a clerk at the Great Plains, there were Indians living on the Great Plains.

So here's Lewis and Clark discovering the Great Plains, right? Right.

There were Indians on the Great Plains who had been to Europe, met the king of France and returned.

Yeah, yeah.

At that time, he's like it is he has this essay is like, I can't hear what it's called, but it's like it's a muddled history. It is like you want to put it, you want to put it into like this neat chronology.

And there were hundreds of years of just touch-And-Go.

Of interaction, touch-And-Go interactions, hundreds, you know, we create this like linear idea about like, you know, that that all of a sudden we saw, like in this organized fashion went and found these areas.

But there's, like, crazy interplay.

I had no idea that anybody from back then from a Native American tribe had gone to France. That sounds insane.

Like how do they even get over there? You remember Jim Jarmusch is dead man. Yes.

Kind of similar that people would be brought like is like like, you know, delegations.

Hmm.

You know, like we'd be trying to manipulate the governments. France, Spain, England, you know, would be trying to manipulate tribes to participate and form alliances.

And, you know, that you would that that, you know, let's say that the French might ally ally with with a group and that group would stop the bleed of of of English colonists pushing into the, you know, appellations.

And there's all these just and it was you know, it wasn't a lot of it was self-serving to like, you know, the tribes. Absolutely. It was like they weren't capable of making the decisions for themselves. They got on board with these plans. But, yeah, they were wining and dining and man. To be like, you know, we're happy to join forces with you, come to see my palace. It's funny because we're in such a historic time right now, but we're in the middle of it, you know, one day they're going to look back on these days, post this crazy election when people are jockeying for position, who's going to be able to control?

They'll be like fucking podcast's Joe Rogan. I'm sure it's going to have a weird Joe Rogan debruin it all or not.

We're not. But they're going to be looking back at this time, what a chaotic time it is. I mean, this is this is a history time, like when people in the future, going over the 21st century and all the different turns and the trials and tribulations is going to be a pivotal moment.

We what's this, Jeremy? Oh, there you 17, five group of Indians, including one, how do you say that Atto and Osage, Osage, Osage one Missouri chief one Missouri young woman, one Illinois, one Chicago. How do you say that? Chicago. You. Oh, Chicago.

I have no idea. You don't know the pronunciation and one metric ass were sent to Paris, France. There they met with the director of the Company of the Indies and the Duke and Duchess of Bourbon. Chiefs were given a complete French outfit which included a blue dress coat, silver ornaments and a plumed hat trimmed in silver. They're presented to King Louis the fifteenth and they performed a dance at the opera. The French king gave each of the Chiefs a royal medallion, a rifle, a sword and a watch.

Wow.

Then it goes on anymore. More so that's seventeen, twenty five. Lewis and Clark, you four.

But those weren't those were like, you know, not Western ones of Western books that I read. I was listening to, I should say, on audio book about Native Americans. Maybe it was. Black Elk, Black Elk speaks. Yeah, well, they talked about him going over to Europe and taking part of those wild bill shows that they did over there. That that is one of the more fascinating things about the Wild West, was that these people that were involved in these historical battles then recreate them.

It would be as though. This isn't. The participants in the Battle of Little Bighorn, where they defeated the Seventh Cavalry under Custer and annihilated his command partisans, that battle would later get together. They would get together because, you know, there's other there was other like campaigns going on at the same time. So like we think about getting killed, but not too far away.

It was more soldiers that didn't remember participants that would later get together and play it out. It's hard to picture that we would have.

al-Qaida fighters rights re-enact and come and be like I survived the global war on terror and now we're going to show you like, no, I was sitting here when they kicked in the door.

Like, how that happened. Actual people from like Gettysburg would get together, right? Yeah, and retender. Hello. You know, I feel like if you weren't like my old man from World War Two, I feel like I've had you gone. I don't know, man, maybe he's older in life.

And they said, like, hey, do you want to get together with some of the, you know, what you'd like to call Krauts who were in the war? And you show what happened when your buddy got killed.

I feel like he might be like, no, no, no. That still feels a little fresh. Yeah, real fresh. Yeah, I mean, and these guys were doing this not long after two, they weren't even old men, you know. Yeah, half a decade or so, and we're talking about the level of animosity that these people would kill each other on both sides and then mutilate the bodies deep, deep, deep hatred, the likes of which is hard for us to comprehend, like.

The impulse to to desecrate the corpse of your enemy and then get together and have a Wild West show about it, one of the mutilating bodies you recommended, Sun of the Morning Star.

Have you read it? Yeah, yes. Heavy, heavy shit. The things that they did to each other, you know. Yeah.

And the crazy thing was that the Native Americans had no sense of. There was there was no quiting, there was no sense of turning themselves in.

There was no sense of like if you were captured, you were murdered and mutilated. So they would fight to the bitter end like they they knew there was no surrender because if you surrendered, you would be tortured and killed. Yeah. Like some of the depictions of the tortures from that and empire of the summer moon. Yeah. All the things that they did to the bodies, just like Jesus Christ. Like when did they develop such insane cruelty? And is this always been a part of being a human being or was this exacerbated by the hard conditions of the of the planes?

Like what what led them to be so vicious?

It it's a great question, man. There's things about like things that these great the Great Lakes tribes of like. Making people eat parts of themselves, you know. But a lot of that, you know, there's like things about how are you, if you could handle that.

And not crack. It was respected. It was like a testing, you know, but I don't know what it was like to live. I can't even begin to imagine what it's like to live with that level of stuff.

There's a I recently read a book called Planes in the Yellowstone, and it was a history of the Yellowstone Basin. And this guy takes that whole it's sort of like an antidote to some of the Morningstar because he takes that that Custer fight, which has become so emblematic of the West and like this, regard it as this big turning point in the history of the Indian wars.

And he treats it like just like a little kind of like inconsequential thing that happened one day. I just didn't really matter. The book was written Men. I mean, you know, I mean, it was like everyone knows how this story's going to end. And that day didn't have any bearing on how it was going to end. A guy did something stupid, got some people killed.

The war ground on. It'd be like if it was like it would be like if you're like imagining D-Day, right, it'd be like they were imagining D-Day.

And then we heard about some peripheral story that happened on D-Day where, like a weird thing happened and some soldiers got killed and some guy made a mistake and got some people killed and are telling of D-Day.

And let's say that incident was called the whatever the vacuum incident.

OK, now, when we conceptualize D-Day, when we talk about Custer, it's like this isn't his analogy. I'm presenting it this way. When we talk about Custer, we're sort of talking about D-Day as the back Hillerman incident.

And we've lost sight of D-Day. You know, it was like just a little blip is like a thing that happened that didn't matter. Hmm. The war ground on like they beat them. They knew they were going to beat him. No one wondered who was going to win.

The war is like they some guy screwed up, got some people killed. We subjugated the tribes. And then it became bigger over his over time, it became that we like that that story got infused with all this folklore, importance and symbol and it's like deeply symbolic.

I'm a sucker for it. I am a deeply symbolic.

Yeah, I'm just war was intimate that it was there was no other way. You had to be close and be close to each other to kill each other. Yeah.

It's a different world. Right. And with the Plains Indians even more intimate because you're just dealing with bows and arrows. Yeah. Lances on horses. It's a different kind of different kind of life and death. Yeah.

And flying a drone over the Middle East from Texas and then going home at night and having dinner with your family.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's it's interesting how we're more and more separated from that.

And also interesting that the the Plains Indians seem to take delight in it like it was it was fun. There was fun sport. There was an ever increasing ways to be more cruel and vicious.

And it seemed to be there was entertainment involved and yeah, some kind of honor code that I can't even begin to try to like, guess at and explain. But things that would land you in jail today for war crimes. Yeah. Were a matter of course. Yeah. Expected.

We've got to talk about your book.

Oh no, we don't need to talk about it. I'd love to have you mentioned.

I'm very proud of a meat eater guide to wilderness skills and survival. This is your how do you guys have written yet that the two books on Wild Game? Yeah, we have the guide book guide guidebooks like A Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering and Cooking, Wild Game Volumes, one and two, just big game, a small game.

And then did a wild game book, Wild Game Cookbook. And this is a very pragmatic, practical it's kind of almost a response to the sort of.

Fantasy land that the survival genre has become, it's a lot more.

There's a lot it's for people who actually spend time outdoors, avoiding avoiding trouble, managing trouble, conducting risk assessment, and then also just like how to think, how to behave, what to do.

What things matter, what things don't, what risks live in your head, what risks are real? Yeah, and it's it's yeah, it's comes out December one is you're going to be in preorder now.

Oh, I got a copy of it right here, baby. Is there going to be an audio version of this.

And I don't know, we haven't talked about it. It's illustrated. Yeah. That would be a problem, right. Yeah.

And it is more meant to be like a usable manual. Yeah. Yeah, like a usable manual.

But I'm quite happy with it. Thanks for bringing it up.

My pleasure. Thanks for being here man. It fun. Oh very much always. I'll come back in a year or two years.

Whatever. Please come back any time. Your podcast is the Meat Eater podcast. It's available everywhere. And then the show is on Netflix and sometimes it's on the Sportsman's Channel too, right? Yeah, that's right. How is that work?

You know, has to like this complex thing of like first window, second window stuff. So our episodes currently premiere on Netflix and then go to you know, you can find them on Sportsman Channel, Outdoor Channel, past episodes, but news stuff goes up and Netflix and winds up there.

And we have we just recently put our seasons one and two just on YouTube. You just go check them out on YouTube. All right. Well, we'll be adding to that YouTube stasch as well. All right.

Yeah, beautiful. Thanks for being here. Thanks a lot. Bye, everybody. Thank you, friends, for tuning in to the show and thank you to our sponsors. Thank you. To express VPN rated number one by PSINet Wired the VIRGE and countless more go to express VPN Dotcom Rogan and you can get an extra three months for free on a one year package. That's x p r e s. S VPN dotcom Drogon for an extra three months free on their one year package.

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