(upbeat synthesizer music) – Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I’m Link-uh. – And I’m Rhett-uh. – I did add a syllable. – Rhett-uh, you wanted to stretch it out-uh. – Why you gotta notice? – Joining us this week at the round table of dim lighting, Link I am so excited, I am so excited. We have a bonafide, real life paleontologist. – Bone digger. – We did it, man. We’re gonna meet a paleontologist. – He’s so exited, I mean this is at your request. – Yeah. – And I’m excited to just be here and watch your bubble be burst. No, I don’t, we haven’t talked to her yet– – But you know it’s my dream job, it’s my backup job. – Have you said who she is? – Doctor Emily Lindsey, she is currently stationed at the La Brea Tar Pits. Local. – I don’t mean, when I say burst your bubble, I just think your expectations of this is the best job on Earth, that– – Don’t ruin it for me. – I just don’t want her to bring you back down to excavation level, you know? – It is the best job on Earth. – By the end of our conversation, we don’t know yet ’cause we haven’t had it, the operative question is how are you gonna feel about it? Are you abandoning our efforts here in order to tag along with her without pay, or are you gonna just say all right, I’m happy for you, but I realize it’s not my calling anymore. – It is an unknown at this point. – We’ll see how it pans out. – A lot of times we have already talked to the person, to the guest, and then we record the intro, we’re mixing it up. We’re recording the intro before we talk to the guest. – I am so mixed up. We carpooled into work today, and as happens many times, we began a conversation that then, bop, no, I’m not gonna tell you about that. I’ll tell you about that during the podcast. – Yeah. – Because we keep it real for you guys, we don’t like to have conversations we’ve already had, we don’t recreate conversations. – Who does that? – We’re moving at the speed of real conversation here. So what was the first, oh this is what you said, you were like, there was a lull in our convo, and then all of a sudden you threw out there “I almost got in a fight with somebody.” On the street. – Uh-huh. – And before I could perk fully up and be like what, you were like but… – Save it for later. – So let me have it. I mean loyal Ear Biscuiter, we discussed this and we discussed how we would approach any type of road rage situation moving forward. – I definitely believe that… – [Link] It factored in? – If you were the one that this happened to. – Oh gosh. – That you may not be sitting here with me today. – Oh really? – Yeah, because it got that intense. – What? – Okay, so– – Where was I? – I was driving by myself, as I like to do. – That explains why I don’t remember this. – And I was on the west side. Don’t make it over there that often, but I am driving along on Hollywood Boulevard, for some reason it was sending me, I was going to the west side, around UCLA area. – That’s highfalutin area. – It was sending me not on the 405, like the 101 to the 405, but it was sending me to Hollywood Boulevard. – You sound like an episode of The Californians. – And then through town, basically if you’re gonna take Hollywood– – Trust it, just trust it. – Yeah, I mean I’m trusting the navigational system. But that’s what they call the surface streets. Surface streets, there’s a lot to see, but there’s also a lot more decisions to be made about, oh, ’cause LA is one of those places where you’ll get up to this intersection and all of a sudden there’ll be like four options as opposed to just a left and a right and a straight. There’s also another road that’s like oh look, they connected that road too. So it was that intersection on Sunset somewhere where there’s– – Oh, are you talking about, there’s that really famous one. – Not the one with eight roads that come into it and there’s no stoplight or anything. – The bird’s eye view of that intersection, in basically residential Beverley Hills, a bird’s eye view of that is it looks like a daggone asterisk and everybody has a stop sign. – But there’s no lights or anything, you just go and navigate. – But it’s literally that many roads coming together. – It was a normal light, but I get up there and I realize that I’m in the turn lane to go left which would send me down one of those squirrelly roads, and I actually wanted to go– – Not left left, or left, but just half left. – I wanted to go left, but it was technically straight. Because it was a left turn, but it wasn’t as left as, it’s one of those weird intersections. – Yeah, yeah. – So I’m in the left turn lane and I’m already, I feel like I’m gonna be late to where I’m going, which is another story for another time, where I’m going. – Well this makes, that statement right there makes you wrong. This is all your fault now. You’ve just admitted to that just by saying I was late. I think that means this was your fault, but don’t tell me. It’s just now I’m predicting that no matter what happens in this story, it was your fault because you were late. – I think we’re both at fault for the initial incident. – How many incidents did this birth? – I had my left blinker on to turn left, but then the people going straight get the green light. So they start going and I’m thinking is there gonna be another opening where I can pull out of the left lane and get back into the straight lane and go through the intersection. And I’m looking at my rear view mirror, side mirror, and I see, dude, that dude’s totally lagging. That dude’s texting or something. He left me a five car gap. – That is nice. – He wasn’t even pulling out, he was asking me come on, come on, ’cause I had my blinker on. To go to the right. – That’s like on a platter. Oh, you switched your blinker over? – I switched my blinker to the right to let people know that I’m trying to get over. This guy, text boy, is giving me this big gap, text boy gives you a big gap, you take advantage of the gap. – Oh yeah. – So I pull in and I’m like home free. – You’re like screech. – What I did not see was a motorcycle. – Oh no! Oh, whoa. – But because he was behind text boy. – And he saw the gap. – And he was splitting lanes, as is legal to do that in California. – As is done. – So basically I get out there and he’s making up the difference behind text boy. – Coming around text boy. – Yeah, what ends up happening is as I basically get completely into the lane, and up to speed, he gets right beside me, continuing to split the lane, but he’s mad. – On the passenger side. – On the passenger side, but he’s mad because I just did what I did, right? ‘Cause I pulled backed into, I don’t think I did anything illegal, I just did something that was unexpected and quick and when you’re on a motorcycle you’re sensitive to those things, which I recognize. But he was so mad that I had done this. – How did you tell that he was so mad? – Well just wait. So as I’m going, he comes up next to me and is literally, it felt like what he was trying to do was trying to tap me with his leg, with his bike, trying to initiate contact with me to basically say you did that, and then you hit me, but actually I really hit you, but I’m trying to make it look like you hit me. – Oh really? You thought he was taking a fall? – But I had no idea, I mean I didn’t feel anything, he just got really close to me. Then he pulls out in front of me and turns around and waves and says pull over. Pull over. This dude in a leather jacket. – What kind of bike? – He’s on a crotch rocket, but he looked like he was ready to race. – Full helmet. – Full helmet. – But glasses that I could see, clear glasses. – He didn’t have a visor. – Like glasses like, not what you have on, but glasses, I could see his eyes. – Spectacles. – And he’s turning around, he’s like pull over. And he gets so slow, he gets down to one mile an hour, and I’m right up on him and all these people start honking. He’s trying to take me down and take me off of the road. – Are you kidding me? – Yeah, and so I’m thinking lots of things. I’m thinking I’m a lover, not a fighter. I’m a big guy, but I probably don’t actually want this to come to blows. How do I diffuse the situation? At the time I had no idea what he was thinking. I think he was just mad and he wanted to pull me over and tell me off. – “What are you thinking?” – So this goes on for a couple of minutes, slowing down traffic and getting me to pull over and I’m just like continuing, I got my sunglasses on, I’m just continuing to go one mile and hour not stopping. – Oh gosh, this is crazy. – And I’m not thinking oh I’m gonna try to get around him or something like that, I didn’t wanna do anything rash that would suddenly hit him, you know? So I’m giving him space. – You’re giving him a gap. – He… – Did you shake your head no like nuh-uh? – No, then we come to a stoplight. – Oh yeah. – At that point I come to a stop and he comes up. – He backed up? – He didn’t back up, I was like I don’t care, I ain’t scared. So he stops and I pull out right beside him and I roll my window down. – Yeah. – ‘Cause I was like I’m going to engage in a human way here. – A human way. (laughs) I’m so nervous right now. – So I rolled down the window and I look at him. – I know you lived. – And he says “You hit my leg.” “You hit my leg,” he had an accent that I couldn’t place. “You hit my leg.” – Well that’s irrelevant. – I’m just giving you full pictures here. Then he said “You hit my leg when you pulled out” or something like that and I was like how am I gonna play this ’cause I definitely did not hit his leg, if anything he hit me and it’s like one of these insurance things where he’s, oh, totally left out, the whole time he got behind me he took all these pictures of my car and my license plate, and then he got in front of me and turned around and took pictures of me. – With his phone? – He’s got lots of pictures of me with his phone. Then when I stopped and he said that thing, “You hit my leg,” he was taking a bunch of pictures, he said “You hit my leg, I’m taking pictures.” “I’ve taken pictures, I got pictures of you.” – As you’re talking to him? – Yeah, but then I was like what am I gonna say because I’m not gonna admit that I hit his leg ’cause I didn’t. – You should’ve been like dude, take video. Let’s put this on record. – But then I said hey man– – You’re gonna piece the pictures together to form a stop motion animation of your defense. – I said hey man, I am really really sorry about this. – About what, hitting his leg? You admitted to it. – I said I’m really sorry that I pulled out into that lane, I didn’t see you. Because I was just like what am I gonna do, ’cause he wasn’t doing video or anything, I was like what can I do to get out of this situation. – Yeah. – He was like “But you hit my leg.” And then I was like you know, I don’t think I hit your leg, I think you ran into me. – You had already apologized. – But I was like, but listen, I’m really really sorry that this had to happen, that this happened. – But it did have to happen. – And then he looked at me and he was just like, shook his head and sped off. – Oh you got him! – Got him. – Were you thinking about our podcast conversation for a split second at all? You were like I can’t, after lecturing the Linkster about this road rage– – I can’t match his level– – I can’t match his level– – I brought it down, I brought it down– – Did you think that at the time? – No, no, I just naturally knew that that was how I was going to engage. – You gotta give me a little credit. That you learned from me. – I brought it down and I came in apologizing. Not admitting guilt. – Apology guns blazing. – And also basically calling him out and saying I think you hit me. I was letting him know that I had a difference of opinion about this. – Was he ever yelling? Did he give you a level that you could’ve matched? – He was very mad, but he was talking aggressively. – Man, I would’ve matched his level. I have not learned the lesson. I felt it as you were telling the story. – And I think that– – It would’ve been like why are you yelling, I’ll be like I’m just matching your level, and then I would be like oh, did I just say that again? – I would’ve been worried about you. I would’ve been worried about you because he seemed– – I wish I was there. – He seemed a little off. – I wish I was there because it would’ve been what I needed. It’s like the one time I’m not there is the time I needed to be there so that we could’ve tested. You didn’t need to be tested, I mean– – [Rhett] No, but it just proves that my– – Just like you’re telling the story, I know, we don’t need to prove that you’re right. – It proves that my theory works in action. – Well I agree with it, what I’m trying to prove is that I’m a different person based on the conversation, so I could see us right now, it’s like he’s up there, I’d be like man, pull up beside him, roll down the window, or you’d be like all right, I’m gonna pull up beside him. I ain’t scared, you shouldn’t be scared, but don’t match his level, I’m gonna roll the window down. Here’s your chance, Link. – Go in apologizing. – Apology guns a-blazing. You disarmed him. – Yeah, but I still don’t know if I’m gonna get some sort of letter from the cops. Can you take a picture of somebody’s car and be like– – Well if you didn’t do it, they can’t prove that you did it. I don’t think, I have that much faith in– – Oh I have my whole story ready. I’d be like well I’ll tell you what happened. – They usually have video, these motorcyclists. – I didn’t do anything illegal and he came up and ran into me and then said I ran into him. First of all, no one ran into anybody ’cause there was no contact. He may have brushed my car with his pant leg, but that’s not hitting his leg. But anyway, wherever you’re at, motorcycle man. I’m sorry we couldn’t work things out. – You already apologized, don’t apologize again. – I didn’t hit you, man. – Don’t grovel. – You hit me if anything. (laughs) – Hey guys, if you wanna support internetainment, the way to do that is to go to mythical.store and get some of this merch, you gotta merch it up, we’ve got these Ear Biscuits jars that, they just look, they’re so drinkable. It’s like biscuit batter. – So drinkable. – Biscuit batter made into a jar. We’ve also got brand new Good Mythical logo action. – Look at that shirt. – Navy t-shirt with orange, boy that’s sharp, and black hoodies with the Good Mythical logo on the front and the back. – Double, double your money. – Cody wants one. – Yeah, look at him, he’s got the old GMM honey. Honey, he’s got the old GMM honey on over there. – Mythical.store. Now it’s time to gear up for the conversation with the doctor of bone digging. – Let’s have it. (upbeat synthesizer music) – What did they tell you when they reached out to you and said that we wanted to talk to you? Was it weird? Like hey, these guys wanna question you incessantly about paleontology. – No, I get it all the time. – You get it every day of the week. – Get it all the time. – So what you’re saying is that my personal interest in paleontology, and my impression that it would be a dream job, is just something that, it’s not that uncommon. – A lot of people have that illusion, yeah. – Illusion? – No, I’m just kidding. – It’s romanticized, I mean you should go all the way. Give her the full context of your… Your admiration. In your brain, what is this like? – When I think about– – This is like a big moment for you. – It is, ’cause I don’t think I’ve ever actually, besides at a museum, had a legitimate conversation with a paleontologist. But I’ve spoken often about how much I wanna be one. Now you tell me where I’m wrong. I just have this picture in my mind. I’m in all khaki, okay? (laughs) – Okay. Okay, first thing’s first. – Short sleeve, no no no no. – No. – Rolled up sleeves. Khaki shorts. Boots. Khaki socks for some reason in the picture that I’m in. And a hat. – You’ve already said all khaki, now you’re saying the same thing but more specifically. – And my beard is as big as it can get. – And it’s khaki? – Because of the sun, and being out there for the summer, it’s turned blood and my skin has turned red. I’m just out there patiently chipping or brushing. That’s my happy place. I’ve never been to that place, I don’t think I’ve ever worn a khaki top and bottom together. I don’t know if that’s what you wear. Is that your happy place? Do you think it would be my happy place? And where am I wrong? – It’s pretty great. You probably wouldn’t have shorts on, you’d probably have long pants. – Okay. – I knew that. – ‘Cause you’re gonna be out in the field, it’s rocky and sharp. – I can do that, as long as they’re khaki. – They can be any color you want, that works. – Okay. – It can be hard, it can be boring. It takes a certain type of personality, I think, to wanna sit in the dirt all day and very slowly chip away at the rock, but it can be very zen-like, I mean I feel like people who surf can get into that zone and people who dig up fossils can get into that zone. – I just pictured a surfer in all khaki. I’ve never pictured that before. – That’d be cool, we could start that. My fear is that I have this picture, but then I would get bored, and they’d be like oh we shouldn’t have brought the tall guy. He thought he was gonna find a T-Rex on day one, look at him over there. – Talking to himself, mumbling. – Now he wants a latte. Khaki guy wants a latte. – He’s like on his phone. – You think that would happen? – I don’t think you’d be on your phone ’cause you probably wouldn’t have very good cell phone reception. – That’s good, so the zen-like part of it. Let’s attach the theory to some practical reality here. When’s the first time you did this? When did it click into place for you? How do you know that this is what you wanna do? – Were you a hole digger as a child? – No, so actually I explicitly was pretty sure I didn’t wanna be a paleontologist for most of my educational career. I was interested in archeology, but I came to the conclusion that that was maybe, people were a little too messy, so I didn’t wanna do archeology. I completely fell in love with ecology when I was in college and decided that that was what I wanted to do, the direction I wanted to go, ’cause it works with systems and I really liked that integrative system level nature of oh, here are all these things that are living together and here’s how they’re interacting with each other and with their environment, if you change one aspect of that, if you take away a species, you add a new species, you change the temperature, you change the precipitation, what does that do to that whole system, I found that really compelling and I actually became a marine biologist for a while. – That’s like everybody else’s dream job. You’re just going from one dream job to the next. What every kid wants to be. – You’re picturing… Riding dolphins. – No, I’m not talking about Sea World, man. I’m talking about if you poll a class of first graders. – Animal ocean life. – 56% of the class will wanna be a marine biologist. 28% of the class will wanna be a paleontologist. – But none of them followed through with it except you and the other people who did. Which is pretty awesome ’cause most people don’t. And then what did you end up doing as a marine biologist? – She rode on a dolphin, you did didn’t you? – I didn’t, I actually, I studied invertebrates, the squishy little things you can barely see that live underwater, but I got to scuba dive for a living for a few years and that was great, and I got to go to Antarctica and work there which was great, so I had some great experiences. – You’re scuba diving in Antarctica, how thick is a wet suit in order to be able to– – It’s a dry suit, man. – It is a dry suit. – It’s a dry suit? (laughs) – That’s right, look at that, I just dry suited you. I know a thing or two about scuba diving in Anarnic… (laughs) – He can’t pronounce the continent. – I can’t pronounce it, but I’ve watched Discovery Channel a few times. – How cold do you get in your dry suit? – So full disclosure, I actually wasn’t scuba diving in Antarctica, I scuba dove in New England. But I did get to work in Antarctica off of a boat. – You’re going in and getting a picture of the way things are at the time that you’re there. You may not necessarily know exactly what you’re contributing, but you’re bringing this data back and then someone is running it against, for this 30 year period being like well they’re finding this many whatchamacallits in this area and that’s how it’s changing. – Pretty much, yeah. And this is what they’re eating and this is how fast they’re growing and how many babies they’re having and all of those different things. I was there for the small time slice of this much larger picture. – And then somebody’s like well the birthrate of whatchamacallits has gone down with every degree that the Earth has heated up. See, I can do this, man. You just throw in, you put something, instead of whatchamacallits, right? It’s that easy. – I’m staying out of this. But how did you move from marine biology to paleontology, was there something that made you jump tracks? Was there a moment of inspiration? – Yeah, there were a couple moments. One was I became a little bit disenchanted with marine biology, not as a discipline, but I felt like the type of research I was doing was a little bit narrower than what I wanted, it was, I mean there’s nothing wrong with it, it was really important research, but I have a lot of interest, I’m a really integrative person and I wanted something a little bit broader, and then throughout college people have been telling me hey, you like dead things ’cause you go on all these archeological digs, but you also like animals, you should be a paleontologist and I would say no, it’s just people describing new species of dinosaurs, I don’t think that’s really interesting, that’s not where I wanna go. But then I was working at this site in Patagonia, in southern Chile, and it was a cave site and it had some of the earliest human skeletons in South America, it had 11 human skeletons buried in this cave that were around 10,000 years old. – Whoa. – We also had bones of extinct giant mammals in the cave, the coolest one being one of my favorites, the giant sloth, so there were all these giant sloth bones in the cave and there’s this question of were the humans at this cave site at the same time the megafauna were living there, these big extinct animals. – They were eating giant sloths? – Maybe, that was one of the questions. Also it’s this– – Were you there when they discovered it, or did you show up… – I showed up later. – Which is still exciting just to see that. I mean some of the oldest humans in South America you said? – Some of the earliest skeletons in that region, yeah. – ‘Cause people didn’t get down there to that part of the world until 10,000 years ago or so? – Actually some of the earliest sites we have in the Americas are in South America, the oldest one being about 14,500, but we don’t have skeletons there, we just have evidence that people were living there. – Right. – But there’s been this debate in paleontology and archeology for more than half a century now of why don’t we have any of these cool big animals around anymore. If you think about the African Savannah, what do you think of? – You think of the giraffes and you think of elephants and rhinos. – And khaki. – You think of the zoo. – Right, so what most people don’t realize is that until about between 10 and 50,000 years ago, pretty much every continent on Earth looked like Africa. So for 50 million years there have been a lot of big animals on all the continents on Earth. – So not that it all looked like Savannah, but that it all had big animals crawling around. – Can I throw out a layman’s theory and then you tell me if I’m right or wrong? – You bet. – So the reason that those animals are still in Africa is because they co-evolved with the people there, but all these other big animals that you find in North America, they evolved and then modern man showed up and killed them all. – That is one of the theories. Good job. (laughs) – Yeah, dry suit! – Let’s just pipe down a little bit. – Dry suit boy is back! I wanna keep doing, I’ll keep doing that. If I have an idea I’ll throw it out. – Yeah, no, that’s good, that’s one of the ideas. – Are you on the same page as that theory? – She’s not gonna hire you, this is not a job interview. – You don’t know, man. The internet is a fickle freakin’ place. – Oh, well I mean if you wanna, if this ends with you, tail between the legs, following her into the digs, then so be it. I’m not threatened. – Tail in-between my khaki legs. – Yeah. – Okay, but what’s the other idea? – So there were two things happening at that time. So one of them you’re absolutely right, humans were spreading out across the world, evolved in Africa, and then somewhere around 60,000 years ago, maybe a bit earlier, started heading out of Africa into Eurasia and then down to Australia and eventually over to the Americas, and you do see on a lot of these continents those extinctions often coinciding with the arrival of humans on those continents. And on major islands too, so Madagascar, until about 3,000 years ago, had giant lemurs on it, and then humans show up and they all go extinct. – Why we gotta just kill big stuff? It’s like the big sloth, like 20 feet tall, wasn’t it like that big? – There were some that big, yeah. – I mean I understanding looking at something– – It’s so slow, it’s just begging to be brought down. – Like I wanna eat that, man, but then why doesn’t the other guy be like yeah, but don’t we also wanna have it to see? Okay, let’s eat that one, but let’s not eat that one. Why can’t they just not eat them all? Why we gotta eat everything? – There’s this idea that people have that in order to drive a species to extinction humans have to go out and hunt down every single one. And we don’t actually have to do that, right? You just have a kill a little bit more than are being born. – Right. And then they just die off. – And then they just die off, it doesn’t take that long. – Right, so these people, they weren’t thinking about ecology at the time. That was not an area of thought. – Probably not. – [Rhett] Until pretty recently. – But to bring it back to this cave, which really sparked your paleontology shift, I mean what’s the conclusion, or the prevailing theory at this point? Was it a burial ground, all these people dying and falling in a cave? – Yeah, it was a burial ground. – Oh, 11 of them huh? – Right. – And when you go there, how excavated was it? Are we talking like oh I can see that arm sticking out there, let’s dust it, or whatever you do. – There have been some excavations there I think back in the 60s, and then Chile had dictatorship for a while and the guy that was in charge of the excavations, a lot of the academics and intellectuals ended up fleeing the country during the dictatorship. So this was the second round of excavations, they decided to go back and do some more work there. – It was like half done. – Yeah, it was partly done and then we went in and did some more. – But where are the people? When you show up, I mean is it, you walk up to the edge, or you go down in the cave, and then there’s still, you’re still dusting and chipping and pulling out people? ‘Cause that seems pretty exciting. – Yeah, and occasionally we’d find new skeletons ’cause they’re underground, they died what, eight, 10,000 years ago, and so there’s been dust blowing into the cave and dirt washing into the cave over thousands of years, they’re a couple feet underground. – How intact are the skeletons? – They were pretty complete. – Complete. – [Emily] Yeah. – But I guess what I’m after is the most euphoric moment, I assume, is when you discover a new person. For you, joining that excavation, what’s the most memorable moment? – Well so for me I think– – There’s a new skull. Everybody come over here! I don’t know, is it like a party? – I think there’s a bullhorn. – Yeah, no, it’s very exciting. – Air horn right? You hit the air horn when you hit the new… – There are only eight of us, so we don’t really need– – Well I’m gonna bring an air horn, I’m sorry. I’m gonna draw a lot of attention to myself when I find something new because I feel like I wanna make a big moment out of it. – Okay. – I’ll think of other options. – Maybe they do make a big moment, that’s my question. – Well so for me, I mean we got to this because you were wondering when my aha moment was, and that cave was really my aha moment, was realizing that you could ask these ecology style questions that I liked in ecosystems that didn’t exist anymore. – Give me an example of that question. – Well so this question like how did humans and these big animals and the environment they were living in interact, and what does that tell us about why there aren’t that many big animals around in North or South America anymore, and what might be happening today when we have a lot more big animals being threatened with extinction because the other factor, we talked about this hypothesis of humans coming and killing off the animals ’cause they were big and tasty and slow. – Right. – But the other thing that was happening at that time was climate change, so we were coming out of the last Ice Age, and the world was getting warmer, it was the last major episode of global warming. You had these open, dryer Savannah ecosystems being encroached on by forests which may not have been as hospitable to some of these animals that were there. So there’s been this debate and in some cases kinda acrimonious, antagonist debate between these two camps, the climate camp and the human hunting camp. And trying to figure out okay, well we’re in a situation today where we’ve got increasing human populations, industrializing societies, increasing pressures on the remaining wild lands, and we’re in the middle of another major climatic warning event, so what can we learn from this past event that happened that might help us to not have a whole bunch more big animals go extinct? – So are you engaging in those kinds of questions today? Are you getting this many, let me get into like what you’re doing at the tar pits here, but how much of your time is spent looking at these things from the past? Are you always making that connection to the present day? Is that just a personal thing, or is that like no, that’s actually part of your discipline is making these connections to today’s situation? – So that is a big part of my research program, and an increasing number of paleontologists, I would say, are trying to use this deeper time perspective of these really longterm ecological changes to inform our understanding of what’s happening today and inform conservation practices even. That’s something that, the La Brea Tar Pits where I am now is really uniquely positioned to do because we have the record of essentially an entire ecosystem going from 50,000 years ago through the peak of the last glacial, so major global cooling and then major global warming and the arrival of humans in the Americas and this big extinction event where 70% of the big mammals in North America disappeared. – Right, and so, and we’ve both been to the tar pits and took the tour. I don’t know if we took the tour together. – No. I’ve been a couple times though. – But explain the dynamics of why it’s such a good spot and why there are so many animals and so many intact fossils there. – And first of all, I mean just for just the passing experience, like okay, I’m just gonna visit for a few minutes, you don’t even have to go inside and you’re like well there’s, the thing that shocked me at first was like these aren’t ancient tar pits, like now, there’s no evidence of that that I could see with the naked eye, it’s like there’s a pond out there that’s got tar, black asphalt, bubbling up out of it. – [Rhett] Yeah. – There’s also some fake woolly mammoths in it. – Yeah. – Which is really cool. – They’ll catch you the first time you go. – Yeah, I was like real? – Hey guys, air horn, there’s a mammoth emerging right now. – But it’s basically asphalt coming up out of the depths, to this day, that animals were falling into and dying so that you could dig them up later and analyze them. – Yeah, pretty much. – But so that being said, you can go there and it smells like someone’s paving a road. – Yeah. – It literally smells exactly like that. – Do you still smell that? – All the time, yeah I do. – You haven’t adjusted yet. – No. No, in fact– – I don’t know if you can. – So I used to work, when I was in Graduate School I spent three years excavating a tar pit site down in Ecuador, and when I started working at the tar pits I would walk through the park and be like smells like home, smells like Ecuador, I’m excited, I’m in the field, even though I spend most of my days these days inside my windowless office in front of a computer, whenever I’m out at the site I get that sense of excitement like I’m in the field now. – What is the process of getting something out of a tar pit though? I mean that’s… I mean that’s not like just going up to a cave and digging, right? Are you digging through the tar? – Yeah, so it depends, we have more than a hundred tar pit deposits that have been found in the park, and they’re all a little bit different, so some of them are super gooey, like there’s this big one you can look down into called Pit 91 that’s 15 feet deep now. That’s just very liquid inviscid, and you can’t actually step in it or you would sink in too, so anyone excavating in it has to be on these catwalks that we build over the top of it and they have to either sit or lie on their stomachs and dig the asphalt out and measure the bones out that way. On the other hand we have another set of excavations that are in these giant wooden boxes that we brought up when LACMA, the art museum next door, was digging their parking garage, and they had to, we had to get the fossils out so they could finish building their parking garage. – So you couldn’t sit there and meticulously do it. – [Emily] Right, so and they– – They took it out in huge cubes right? – Right, right, so they were found 10 years ago, we’re less than halfway done with the fossils, so you can imagine how annoyed LACMA would be if we were down there ourselves doing it, so yeah, we hired a tree boxing company and they brought them up in these big wooden boxes, just like if you were transplanting a big oak tree or a big palm tree, and so we have these big takeout boxes of bones that are all exactly in the same position that they were when they were deposited underground, only we’re excavating them above ground and those are older deposits and they’re much harder, the asphalt is more oxidized and stuff, so that it’s more like a typical paleontological dinosaur dig where you’re hammering and chiseling away the hard matrix to get the bones out. – But they basically just arbitrarily decided okay, this is the grid, we’re gonna hack through this stuff, or how did they know where to cut because it’s basically like cubes, so you’re not cutting half of a major find and cutting it in half or something. – So they’d come down, I mean they were digging and you’d come down on it either from the side or the top and then you’d feel around and figure out where the extent of the deposit was. How far did the bone deposit go, and then add some extra buffer zones around that and that’s where you build your box. – Oh, and then they take that, they put, and then the dirt all around that that’s not a deposit, they just excavate it normally, but then they oh, we found another thing, let’s box this thing up. – [Emily] Yeah. – So you get fully, intact deposits. That’s crazy. What’s the craziest thing that’s been found in a box? – I don’t know that we found anything particularly crazy, or unexpected in the box, so people have been excavating the La Brea Tar Pits for more than a hundred years. – More of the same, like another mammoth, another saber-toothed tiger, another what? – Yeah, I mean that’s, you would get a lot of those dire wolves, camels, we found some cool things like Zed, one of our more famous mammoths, he was found in one of these deposits and he’s one of the only articulated specimens we have, that’s to say we actually have almost all of his bones and they’re all together in the places they should be, you don’t usually get that in a tar pit because in the tar there’s methane bubbles coming up and that tar’s sorta oozy and gooey and you have the bones churning around. Zed wasn’t like that, Zed died and was washed into a stream, and then later the asphalt came up and preserved his bones, so you’d actually got him laid out pretty nice, so that’s a cool one that we’re able to really identify oh, this is all one animal and we can ask questions about that animal and how he lived and how he died and what he ate and the environment he lived in that you can’t when you just have one piece of bone or one element. – What about getting DNA from these fossils? What’s the, how old, or how young does it have to be before you can actually get DNA? – So people have gotten DNA out of fossils this old, but nobody has ever gotten DNA out of fossils from a tar pit. We don’t completely know why. It could be that the asphalt itself destroys the DNA, or it could be that the types of chemicals and processes we have to use to get the asphalt out destroys the DNA, but we’ve tried, we have an active project working on it, but no luck so far. – But the places that they’ve gotten the mammoth DNA, do they have the whole sequence? – No, and I don’t think anybody has the whole sequence, but a lot of the mammoth DNA is coming out not as bones, per se, but out of actual flesh of mammoths that have been preserved in the Arctic that are now thawing out. – Right, okay, so you’re not gonna typically get that out of a, you’re gonna get in your frozen mammoth section. – Right. – You think that they’re gonna make the mammoth again? They’re gonna bring it back because that dude said he was gonna do it three years ago. – “That dude?” – Yeah, that dude was like I got the stuff, man, I can do it. And then he made a big deal about it. – I did hear. – I’m like where’s that mammoth? Where’s the mammoth park, where’s the mammoth zoo? – So that’s being worked on. There’s a couple of different groups I think that are working on it. The question is at what point do you call something a mammoth? I mean we have, so we have a partially complete mammoth genome that we can splice with an elephant genome that we can put into an elephant egg, that we can grow inside an elephant and raise by humans in a world with no other mammoths and with an environment and plant community that’s very different from where mammoths live, so is that a mammoth? I mean we can raise fuzzy elephants. – Right. – Is that where you land on the topic? You don’t want them to do it? How do you feel? – I mean of course there’s this gee whiz factor, like all of us that go into this field, that don’t grow out of it when we’re four, we’re in it partly because of that inspiration and cool factor of wanting to be transported back to this other time, so that’s super compelling. And from a scientific standpoint, I mean there are certainly things to be learned. The justification that most people cite for wanting to bring back a mammoth is that it’s going to serve some sort of ecological function, like there used to be mammoths, humans went and ate them all, and so now there are no more mammoths in The Arctic, and The Arctic has lost all these important biological functions. That’s problematic on a couple of levels, first of all it’s not really a mammoth, second of all even if you bring back the mammoths, what about all those other things that aren’t living there anymore, and how about the fact that we’re not in the Ice Age anymore, and third, for all of those resources that you’re going to be putting into trying to bring back the mammoths, maybe it would be better to put those into conserving the elephants we don’t have to be trying to de-extinct the elephants in another 20 years. – I bet there’s a justification. When you’re talking about let’s keep the elephants here instead of bringing the mammoths back, well if you brought a few mammoths back, there’s a lot of people who would pay a lot of money to visit, see or own, maybe ride a woolly mammoth. – Yeah. – That’s a lot of money you could then put in, you gotta, you know, saving the elephants. – You could charge 500 bucks for a mammoth ride probably. – Now I don’t advocate the exploitation of mammoths, I’m just saying this is, it’s probably an argument that’s been made. A lot more hair to grab onto. – Well I think what you’re getting at is the… – Capitalist conversationalists. – The irony of you have to conduct your science in the context of our culture, right? So you gotta do it in a place where a lot of people don’t even really care about science or are ignorant of it, believe things that are completely counter to it, but you gotta somehow get the funding that you need to do the science that we all need, right? But there’s all kinda of ironies, just the fact that most of, I would assume that most of the excavations that you’re a part of, or a lot of them are these oil and gas companies ’cause they’re the ones that are digging all over the world right? So you got these guys who are doing all kinds of horrible things for our environment, but it’s also your opportunity to learn things about the environment. How do you engage with that sort of irony? – I don’t know, that’s a tough question. But yeah, I mean you’re right, especially in more rural places, like I do a lot of work in South America, a lot of fossils are found in the extractive industries, right? They’re found in mines, they’re found on oil land, they’re found, I was on a project in Kiana where they were finding bones while they were washing away basically the entire rainforest substrate and looking for gold, and so they do find a lot of fossils for us. (laughs) – And they call you in? – Sometimes. – Sometimes they’ll let you get stuff out. – Do they do that because, are they obligated? Are there local laws that obligate them to like okay, we found a dinosaur, we can’t just throw it in the other truck, we have to call a scientist? – In a lot of places there are. – What about the Black Market? Like is there, are there completely shady outfits out there, like fossil hunting and you can run up on them at a site and stuff, does that happen? – I haven’t encountered it at any sites. Certainly not at tar pit sites because those bones smell bad, nobody wants them in their house, but yeah, I mean fossil hunting, private collecting, can be certainly a problem for science. It can also be a boon for science, it’s a complicated topic, so I come out of a school of thought that any kind of support of the fossil collecting industry is ultimately more bad than good for science because it encourages people who don’t necessarily know what they’re doing, don’t necessarily have the best interests of the scientific community or the fossils at heart to go out and find stuff and then sell it for money. – Right. – And we lose a lot of information that way, we don’t know necessarily exactly where that fossil came from, we don’t know what else it was found with, so we lose a lot of the important information that you would usually get for a fossil. – Oh. I got something. To help with this. – Oh I think I know what he’s gonna go get. Oh yeah, I know what he’s gonna go get. Well there’s a couple of choices. There’s a few things that he might get. (door slams) – Okay, okay, now… – Yeah, that’s mine. – Rhett brought this in. We put it on a shelf, and you know what? – What? – I’m confiscating it and I’m giving it to you. I want you to have it and I want you to learn everything you can from it starting right now. – I feel bad about this. Got that on the Black Market. – Well it looks like a cast of a saber-toothed cat skull. – A cast? – It is a saber-toothed cat. – The people at Restoration Hardware, I knew– – No, she said it is a cat. It is a cat of a saber-toothed… Cat, I don’t know what that means, it’s a cat of a cat? So tell us more. – It’s not– – This is all the fossil hunting Rhett has, well it’s not. – I hunt a lot of times. – He looks around when we hike. – Anytime we go out to Death Valley, I’ll look around. – Tell us about Betty. – This is Betty? – How do you know, well first of all, can you look at the skull and tell if it was a male or a female? – No. – Tell us about our fake skull that’s been on our shelf. – So… – Is it accurate? – It’s pretty accurate, it’s… It’s frozen in its mouth open position. Yeah, I mean you can tell that it has these incredibly long teeth which scientists have spent a lot of time mulling over and trying to figure out the purpose of them, and the current thought is that it was used to slash the jugulars of prey, so we know that saber-toothed cat, these smilodon, this species had extreme strong, beefy forelimbs and they would leap out and probably wrestle prey to the ground and then they’d use these sabers to kill the animal. – That’s amazing. Now these come out of the tar pits right? – Yeah, we have more than 2,000 saber-toothed cats that we found in the tar pits so far. – Is that the largest, I mean are there more saber-toothed cats at the tar pits than any other place? – Oh absolutely. – Yeah, like by far right? – By far. – Why? – Oh, because so the tar pits, the way they worked was you have this asphalt bubbling out of the ground, because LA is on top of oil fields, and it’s tectonically active, so we have earthquakes and sometimes fissures open up and the oil seeps up to the ground and when the lighter hydrocarbons evaporate from that you end up with a sticky, dense asphalt that traps a bunch of things in it. What it appears happened at the La Brea Tar Pits is you would get say a sticky pool, and it tends to get covered pretty quick with leaves and dirt, and you would see this, I’m sure you guys noticed this when you were walking around the grounds of the tar pits, you have these fenced off areas where we have active tar seeps, and a lot of it you can’t even see the tar seep that well because you’ve got plant material on top of it. It seems that what happened was occasionally a big animal like a giant sloth or a mammoth or a bison or a horse or a camel would get stuck in one of these asphalt seeps, and when it was stuck it would of course attract a lot of predators, and so we have two types of predators that are super abundant at the tar pits, we have saber-toothed cats and we have dire wolves. Both of these were– – Like from Game of Thrones. – Like from Game of Thrones, but a lot smaller. – Oh. – Same name though. – How big were they? – They were like a bigger, beefier, linebacker version of a modern gray wolf. – Okay. – Did you know that The Grateful Dead have a song called Dire Wolf that’s about the La Brea Tar Pits? – No. – Is it good? – It’s pretty good, yeah, I mean you should check it out. – I will. – See them live and they stretch it out. Could be 30 minutes live. – Yeah, definitely. – They just can’t get off of it. Once you get caught in that tar pit you can’t get out of it, you just gotta noodle your way, I’m trying to make a musical analogy. – Yeah, I get it. – But these dire wolves, I see where you’re going, and the smilodons, they cannot resist this pitiful, huge prey. It’s like why is it just sitting there? It smells funny, but I gotta bite it, I gotta get out there. – Right, right, and so going back to the African ecosysteM analogy, so a normal African ecosystem you’ve got lots of elephant and zebras and wildebeest and impala and giraffes and the big herbivores walking around, then you have a smaller number of lions and cheetahs, the bigger carnivores right? The La Brea Tar Pits is exactly the opposite. We have a much much much larger number of carnivores than we have of herbivores, it’s like this inverted pyramids of an ecosystem and we think that’s why, we think it was because one stuck herbivore would attract a ton of carnivores to eat it, and a whole bunch of those guys would get stuck too. – And they’d be like man, Charlie’s over there. Look, he’s got it, what, oh now Dale’s going in there, Charlie and Dale are both over there, I definitely gotta get over there. – I’m gonna eat Charlie and Dale too if they’re stuck. – Yeah, you know, next thing you know, there’s so many analogies, it’s like you need to take your kids to the tar pits and be like– – And leave them. – And be like this is what, when one of your friends does something questionable, it’s like getting stuck in a tar pit. Next thing you know, you go over to find out about that, you’re stuck in the tar pit of life and you’re gonna die and we’re gonna find you years from now and put you on display in a museum, son. Don’t do drugs. – Excellent, is there… The evolution of the saber-toothed. I guess the saber-toothed got bigger over time, so can you see that? If you go deep into the pit you’d see like oh, you got really old, you got some normal, non-saber-toothed cats. – Well we do, we have all kinds of different cats, but the tar pits, they only go back 50,000 years, so you’re not gonna see major– – You’ve seen a snapshot. – Evolutionary change in that, but the saber-toothed morphology itself evolved a bunch of times, and we actually have two different kinds of saber-toothed cats in the tar pits. The main one is this one, Smilodon Fatalis, or sometimes called Smilodon Californicus. – Sounds like a Red Hot Chili Peppers album name. Smilodon Californicus. – But there’s another one called Homotherium that’s sometimes referred to as the scimitar cat that had different shaped sabers. But there’s also, there’s been other saber-toothed cats, saber-toothed other animals, there were saber-toothed salmon back in the Miocene up in Oregon. – Saber-toothed salmon. – Whoa. – That’s crazy, right? – Probably still eat it. – It’s crazy. – I would’ve thought that only the males had it or something and it was some sort of mating thing, but both males and females have it huh? – Both males and females have it. And in addition to those two saber-toothed cats in the tar pits, we’ve got the American lion which is the biggest cat that’s ever lived, there were these two lions, one in Europe and one in America, and they were the biggest cats, they’re just enormous. And we’ve got a species of jaguar, subspecies of jaguar that’s now extinct in North America, and then last but not least we’ve got the mountain lion. That’s the only one that made it, yeah. – That’s still around. And how public facing is your job? Are you talking to people coming in there? Are you in your office most of the time doing research? How often are you interacting with just the public coming to experience the tar pits? – You know, it’s on different occasions, so I do public talks and things like that and I sometimes drive to Burbank to do podcast interviews, things like that. – It’s beautiful here isn’t it? – Occasionally when I go out to the excavations to look at the site and talk to the excavators and stuff, people are always coming by and asking questions and I love that part of my job where I get to talk to people informally in that way too. And we do tours and we had a summer camp recently that we ran at the tar pits and I talked to the summer campers and that was fun, so there’s a lot of, it’s a very diverse job, it’s a lot. – Right, so something that I’m curious about as you deal with the public, there’s an interesting dynamic in America where you’ve got a very large percentage of people, I don’t know, half or whatever, that don’t even believe that evolution happened, right? When you say oh these tar pits go back 50,000 years and they’re like well 50,000 years ago there wasn’t anything. What is your, being that it’s such a crazy thing that we know so much about all the stuff that is happening, you’re finding new information all the time, but there’s a lot of people who just don’t buy it, so what is your interaction with that, when you’re interacting with the public? Do you deal with that kind of thing? Do you run into that? – You know, I haven’t so far, but I know that we do get those sorts of questions at the tar pits, the gallery interpretor staff and some of the lab and excavation staff certainly field those types of questions a lot. I think one of the advantages is that museums are generally considered to be pretty trusted institutions, it’s actually where a lot of Americans get their scientific information, more than school, more than television shows, they actually trust museums to give accurate information about science, and so I think that’s one of the big advantages we have, being such a public and well known institution, is to try and do that in a really profound way and a really sort of welcoming and open way to try to explain concepts that some people are really uncomfortable with. – What are you maybe most excited about in terms of a compelling way to help people understand or, I don’t know, feel climate change when they come in, if that’s part of your plans? How do you encapsulate that? – You could turn the heat up. You could bring them into a room and you could slowly turn the heat up and it could be like did you know that it raised two degrees centigrade in the time that you were here and they’d be like I didn’t really notice, it doesn’t feel that much different, I guess global warming’s not really that big a deal. You don’t wanna do that because people won’t– – Have you thought of that? – They’ll think, I hear people say that all the time, they’re like one degree? I mean it was 90 degrees yesterday and then 95 the next day and it wasn’t really that big of a deal. – Well– – So don’t do that idea, that was a bad one, that was just the first thing I thought of. – Yeah, I mean the difference of five degrees– – Unless you’re doing it, and then maybe it’s a good idea. – The difference of five degrees average centigrade, it doesn’t sound like much, but that’s the difference between having half of North America covered in ice and where we are today. – Right. Stuff like that, see? Put that on a t-shirt. Make it a little catchier. – But you are figuring out specific ways to present that information, the facts, in a compelling way. – Absolutely. – That compels people to change their minds or to appreciate or even take action. I guess what is the goal? How do you wanna move the needle in visitors’ lives? What do you want them to change? – That’s the million dollar question, that’s the next three years of my job there. – Yeah, don’t give it all away, then you’ll get laid off. – I think at the tar pits, we have the ability to tell a story because of what we have there, but the other thing that we have there that you don’t find at most museums is we have the entire process of a scientific discipline happening in one place, so in one visit, I mean you guys have been there, you know, you can come and you can see scientists, paleontologists out in the field finding fossils and excavating them, you can see those fossils, same fossils in the lab being worked on by the lab preparers and being researched by people at our museum and visiting researchers from all over the world, and then you can see the presentation of what we’ve learned from that research in one place, so I think there’s a real opportunity to empower people to think about how the scientific process works which seems to be something that’s pretty mysterious to a lot of people, and foreign, and maybe even a little bit threatening. – Yeah. – And have people recognize oh, this is just the same type of empirical inquiry that I do in my life every day. Science is not that mysterious. Everybody can do it, I can do it, and now I have a better understanding of why this is important and why it is trustable. – Yeah, and I mean it’s exciting that you’re doing that ’cause I mean I think the thing that you see quite a bit is you’ll see somebody who can go to a place like the tar pits and they’re like oh yeah, I get it, mammoths fell in there and that’s cool and now their bones are here, the saber-toothed, that’s a really cool, crazy animal that existed at some point, it doesn’t exist now, but then as soon as you suggest something like well and that happened 50,000 years ago, or this gives us this particular insight into climate change or evolution or whatever and all of a sudden something that they hold sacred is threatened, they put a wall up and it’s like well I’m not gonna go down that trail. Now you’re getting into some stuff that makes me feel uncomfortable. That’s a very, very difficult battle to be fighting, but a really really important one, especially in this country. – Right. – So we commend you. – I also commend you. – Well I said we. – I’m part of the we. – I said we, man. – And I’m excited, yeah, as we go back and visit, to see you work over the next few years as you, I mean it was so exciting to see people at work, things happening. People wrestling with evidence and then presenting it. It was very cool. But you’re not just there because you recently came off of a trip to, was it Utah and Texas? – Yeah, I was just– – Both of those? – Both of those. Actually I visited every state in the American southwest in two and a half weeks with two small children. – Whoa. – I feel pretty good about that. – And you took two child scientists with you? – Yeah, I mean all children are basically scientists I think. – Your children. – Your children too, I mean you see someone like– – You didn’t take his children. You took his children? – You took your children. – I think if you see a child that throws a spoon off a table and wants to see if it happens every single time they do it, that’s scientific. – Okay, got it. Right? – Or lack of discipline. Need more discipline in their lives. – So what’d you find? – So the trip to Utah was actually part of a Natural History Museum trip, it wasn’t my research, it was my first dinosaur excavation, it was really fun. It was a sorapod site, so sorapods are like the biggest dinosaurs, like what we used to call brontosaurus back when I was a kid. So they had, I mean huge leg bones and vertebral columns, like the spine. – The tail of that thing, we were just in the Natural History Museum in New York a couple weeks ago, and they had to revise the sorapod skeleton based on– – The posture of it. – 2009 findings or whatever, and one of the things they did was extend the tail. The thing, it’s comical how long it is. It gets to a point where it definitely is like this would be a really long tail and you’d be totally okay. Then it goes another 30 feet to the point where it’s these little teeny vertebrae just in a line like toothpicks just right next to each other, like why did you have to be so long man, god. We get it, you got a long tail. (laughs) – You helped dig one of these up? – Yeah, I worked at that site, it was really fun. – Wow, was the head out yet? – We had a couple of skull fragments, and it wasn’t just sorapods, we actually had a jaw bone from something, some sort of meat eater, so it might have been an allosaurus or something, we’re not sure. – Where is this, is it in the middle of nowhere, Utah, in a state park, or is it beside a gas station? Are people moseying out of their hotel rooms underdressed? – No, no, the La Brea Tar Pits is one of the only places I think where you’re right in the middle of a major urban area. No, it was a little bit middle of nowhere-ish, it was a couple hours south of Moab. Beautiful country, big sky, crazy red rock formations, mesas, really gorgeous area to be, really hot. – You gotta take a helicopter in there or– – No, no, we were able to drive in with a hearty pickup truck. – And what are your kids thinking about this when they’re seeing you brush around? – So I wish my four year old was a little bit more excited about dinosaurs like most of his peers, I think I spoiled it for him ’cause by giving him overly accurate scientific information from the beginning, because I asked him when we were going, I was like are you excited to go dig up dinosaurs, you know what dinosaurs were, and he looked at me and said yeah, they were birds. (laughs) – Which is true right? – Which is true, or rather birds are dinosaurs. – Yeah. – So, but he was a good sport about it, and the baby, he’s just happy as long as everything’s, there are people around and things are changing and interesting, he couldn’t be happier. – And what about in Texas, what was coming out of the ground there? – So that was actually related to my own research, so back to the Ice Age. Remember I said we have these two species of saber-toothed cats at the tar pits, there’s the one that everyone knows, the smilodon, and then there’s this one other one called a scimitar cat, Homotherium. This was a Homotherium den, so there were saber-toothed kittens, there were babies mammoths that the mama saber-toothed had been dragging in for their kittens. It’s got tons of fossils, it’s actually, I found it referred to multiple times as the “La Brea Tar Pits of Texas,” so that’s a place that we’re looking into maybe partnering with and maybe I’ll be doing some research there with some other scientists. – So you’re gonna keep going back there maybe? – Maybe, yeah, so these were my first scouting expeditions for it and we’ll see what comes of those two projects. – Are you taking into account the nightlife in the area, or oh, they got a good barbecue restaurant down here, or is it all about the cave? – It’s pretty much all about the cave. (laughs) – Okay, I respect that. – Hey, yeah, I mean that’s why you’re a scientist. – I like a good barbecue restaurant. – I’d be like is there a good barbecue close? Eh, let’s see if we can find another cave. That’s my problem. I gotta learn to subsist on, do you bring your own food in there? What are we talking, freeze dried REI food, what’s happening, ’cause I need to prepare ’cause I know that I’m gonna go on one of these before I die, I got to. – Well you know, most people, most paleontologists learn pretty quickly, it’s like the old saying an army runs on it stomach, so you’ve gotta, if you’re gonna have people working for you for not a lot of money and harsh conditions and uncertain– – Oh you got food trucks? – We bring a lot of food and a fair amount of booze and we feed people well and people generally have a good time. – Is there like, it’s almost like it’s catered? Is there somebody who’s just there for the food? – Some digs run that way. – Oooh, maybe. – You might wanna look into, might be one of the boxes you wanna check when– – That’s how you could get in on it. – I want my dig to be catered. – No, the only way you’re gonna get in on it is to be the caterer. – Well I’d have to be able to cook really well. I could bring a bunch of packaged foods. – You could be the snack guy. – Snack guy, yeah. I’ll be the snack guy. – Snack guy coming around! Tall guy, all khakis, coming around with granola! – He definitely looks like he wants to be on the dig, but he’s just bringing me Doritos right now. – That’s the only way you’re getting in. – You gotta get a foot in the door, man. – Tail between his legs delivering Doritos. I didn’t know that the thing that was gonna burst your bubble was not having a barbecue restaurant nearby. – I just– – I thought it was gonna be just– – You know what my needs are. – All the hours of just brushing and chipping away meticulously. – I think that’s it, it’s just I would wanna be the guy that found something, but I understand that most of the time you’re going to a place you’re just, a lot of stuff is already found and you’re just getting more, getting more of it out? – Well yeah, I mean so there’s two types of paleo projects, one is basically prospecting where you’re somewhere where you know you should find fossils because the rocks are the right age, because people found fossils nearby and so you’re looking for a new site. – Okay. – And then other ones are people who have found a site, and you know there’s stuff there, but you don’t know how far it goes, you don’t know everything you’re gonna find, maybe you need more of those specimens to figure out what was going on at the site or learn more about those animals, and so those are the sites that I generally work at, I mean the tar pits being the quintessential one, right? People have been excavating there for more than a century. – The gift that keeps on giving. – And we’re still digging every day because we still feel like there’s more that we can learn. – Maybe there’s a business idea here. So you got people like me who have got this interest in this subject, but I’m obviously not gonna go back and get the education required to do this legitimately at this point, but I really want to experience the feeling of finding something. Easter egg hunt, think about how that works right? You got these Easter eggs, you place them all over the backyard and kids find them. You can hide them a little more, make it a little more difficult to find for the older kids or whatever. What if you go to one of these prospecting sites and then you find the thing that confirms that this is the site and then you cover it back up. And you call me. – You sell tickets. – And you get me and you’re like listen, the T-Rex is over there. – Warmer! – Yeah, give me a map, you know? Give me a map. Give me a map that’s not too difficult that has like 30 paces East. – You want an X at the treasure chest sort of map. – Yeah yeah yeah. – Like a pirate map. – I want the feeling, and I would pay good money for this, I think a lot of people would. – Start at the barbecue restaurant. Take 48,000 paces. – Here’s the cool part. Once I find the T-Rex, you cover it up and charge the next fool the same amount that you charged me. – The T-Rex. – You know what I’m saying? You could make a million bucks off of one T-Rex that you never completely dig up. – But, and it’s not a lie. – Fund everything with it. – By the way, I’m at full agreement in that this will work. – Can we start this? We need you to start a business like this. – Here’s the thing, you don’t have to lie to anybody. You can tell them you’re covering it up every time. – Yeah, I know that it’s just a– – People don’t care about that. – Don’t care, I want the satisfaction. – They just want the experience, and they want everyone around it. – It’s like West World, man. – As long as everyone around plays along. He discovered it! He did it, let’s all get back to the barbecue restaurant! – You can charge an extra 20 bucks for the air horn rental, so that when I find it I’m like hurrrr, and they’re like the tall khaki found it! You know? – Yeah. – You know what, Rex? Rhett? (laughs) – Rex, exactly. – And your name will be changed to Rex! – T-Rhett. You can call me T-Rhett or Rex McLaughlin. – You know, you could just come and volunteer at the tar pits. I guarantee you you will find fossils every day and we’ve got 150 restaurants probably within walking distance. – Dude, there’s a lot of really good eating in that area. – Can I send him over there and you’ll watch him for me? – Yeah, if he passes the tests. – Okay. – The tests? – Yeah. – Well I’ll tell you right now– – It’s not a height test is it? Sometimes I get kicked off of rides ’cause I’m too tall. – My seven year old, he bought the little Lego Statue of Liberty when we were in New York City, and he brings it back home, and there’s a little Lego flame that comes off of the Lego torch of Lady Liberty which is a magnet. We get home and he drops the flame into the big box of Legos. – She lost it, Lady Liberty is extinguished. – He was upset, he was crying. He comes to me and I thought to myself I know how to find this Lego torch. I’ve seen the paleontologists grid it out, lay it all out, grid it all out and meticulously, systematically, over time pour over every piece of the Legos until they find the torch. – You didn’t actually do this with string did you? – I thought this. What I said was it’s gone, son. It’s gone. – You lied to him. – Well he knew it was in there. If he wants to find it, he can do it. But I’m not gonna sit there and do it. – I thought you were about to tell a wonderful story about putting them all out on a giant checkerboard and going meticulously through each square, but you told him it was gone. – That’s my point exactly, man. You go off and have your fun, or come to my house, I got a job for you. (laughter) It’s just– – You want me to come and find your friggin’ Lego. There will be no satisfaction in that, but I will blow an air horn when I find it. (laughter) – So I respect what you do for that reason, because as much as I love my son, I couldn’t even do it for him. – I’ll just come volunteer. I’ll be there at some point. – Just one day a week is all we ask. – Okay, whoa, wow, that just got a lot more serious. – For the rest of your life. – Right. – Kahkis provided. – As long as I can name the thing after me. If it’s a new species. How about that? – Well… – Just give it to him straight. – So we do, if you work in the fossil lab and you prepare a skull, which can take months of effort, even years potentially, you prepare an entire skull, we let you name the skull. – Oh, just that skull. – We let you name whatever animal was associated with that skull, so we’ve got Fluffy, we’ve got Zed, we’ve got Little Timmy, we’ve got… All kinds of individuals. – But no whole species. That’s difficult. – So we’re sorta, again, once you’ve been working at the same site for, what, 120 years, you’re not super likely to find new species, except now we’re starting to look at some of the smaller animals that we find at the tar pits, so things like the rodents and the rabbits and the lizards and stuff, so it’s possible that in there we could find… – Could name a rat. – [Emily] A new species. – The Rhett rat. – You should name it something totally profane, so no one feels comfortable saying it. Just to test their limits. – Okay, I’ll do some thinking on that. Emily, thanks so much for coming and talking to us. I still feel like this is something I wanna do. You haven’t– – You did it! – You haven’t ruined it, you haven’t bursted my bubble. – “Bursted.” – You just inflated it a little bit. – Well it was a pleasure being here, I enjoyed talking to you guys. – Yeah. – Yeah, that’s success, man. – Yeah. – All right, run along. – Thanks for– – Not you, Rhett. – You’re telling me to leave. – Run along to the tar pits. – Okay. – Go run. – I’ll be back. – We’ll be happy to have you. – [Rhett] To hear this Ear Biscuit in its entirely, so you don’t miss a thing, follow the links in the description to ART19, Apple Podcast, Spotify and anywhere else podcasts are available. – [Link] To watch more Ear Biscuits, click the video on the left. – [Rhett] To watch more from This is Mythical, click the video on the right. – [Link] And don’t forget to subscribe by clicking the circular icon. – [Rhett] Thanks for being your mythical best.