If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast, you can't predict anything.
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We're just trying to interject with some quips, some observations.
Please Mo. Mo Fallen Man uh uh, I'm trying to think of where to begin. Well, Mo, found was the original so a billion years ago. Mo, I'm gonna give your I'm gonna help you with your bio. Then you fill it in.
Okay, go for it.
No, how does it okay? Most longtime producer cinematographer. If you've seen the movie I know this. When you were a youngster, you worked on the movie Ali Michael Man's Alia.
I was Michael Man's assistant on Ali. Wow.
MO filmed a million episodes of Biggest Loser.
Yes, ninety six episodes.
MO. I did a show many years ago on travel Channel. MO filmed all of that. MO filmed all of the first met Eaters. Yeah, a bunch, Ye traveled all over Hell for three years. Yeah, MO made MO made me eater look like what me eater looks like? Yeah, you designed the show. Yeah, I mean a handful was did, but you like put you made the look.
Yeah, yep, I guess so. Yeah, with the camera for sure. Yeah, the way the camera interacts, you know, with you on the show for sure.
And at that time you were already doing were you already working on Boordain at that time?
Yeah? So I started working with Bordain in two thousand and eight, so it predated when we met. But that was the reason I was able to meet you was because I had done that and that had gone pretty well. And so zero point zero, the company that produced Boordaen, they called me when they hooked up with you.
Talk about tell everybody about just tell the whole story of the years you spent on the Boordain show. The whole story was I mean, like I don't know, give me like ten minutes worth man.
Ten cool?
Yeah, I mean why, I like what, because that's going to land us where we're landing. That's going to land us with us, you know. I mean unfortunately it lands us with us being so like reunited on our new project. But I mean you had like you lived like a whole you lived a whole lifetime.
Yeah, I mean yeah, it gets into all kinds of complicated stuff, man, because like I mean, I'll start at the beginning. I got called randomly by a by a friend of mine who's the chief cinematographer, one of the two chief cinematographers for Bordei and Zach Zamboni, and they had had a camera operator cancel last minute on a trip to Egypt, and it was the phone call was basically like, you know, do you have a passport.
That was your in Yeah, a cancelation.
Yeah. They're like, do you have a that's a tough show to get on sure. I mean, like, dude, I was clicking my heels. Man, They're like, do you have a passport? Can you go to Egypt next week? And I was like one hundred percent, there can go and uh and I went and it went really well with Tony, which is which is rare, you know, like it's these like a very kind of particular person. It was a very set, you know, kind of particular set of criteria that you kind of needed to meet to work on
that show. Like you had to be able. He had to be able to hang out with you. You had to be cool enough to hang out. You had to not be a dick. You had to treat the people who are taking us into their lives as if they're as if you're a guest in their world and not you know, some arrogant TV producer who comes in and is just gonna, you know, stomp all over them.
So he was sensitive to how he was sensitive to how you guys behave to the people you were around.
I think that was actually like the number one criteria man. But but if you think about it, it sets the tone for the whole show. The show is not us sitting you know, five thousand miles away and my you know office in Los Angeles and saying like, what is the story I can tell about these people's lives? You know, it was like the the show was like we are going to go here and we're going to figure out what the story is of these people lives and they're the ones that are going to tell us, you know.
And I think that whole tone was set by this idea that you're you're a guest, and you are a guest. You know, you're traveling around the world and absorbing other people's lives in a commercial enterprise. You can't be considered anything but a guest, right, And so those were a couple of like the just criteria he had set forth for like people who kind of fit on the show and worked well. I got that called I did. The
show went really well. I think he particularly liked me because I was willing to risk my physical well being and or life for a shot. You know, at the time, I was young and didn't have kids, so I was able to make a lot of stupid decisions I wouldn't make now.
But you should at some point tell the story about Brazil.
Yeah, I mean that was probably more me overreacting than anything.
What's the example that comes to mind though.
Well, I mean that first show we went across the western desert or a big portion of the western desert in Egypt with the Bedouin, right, and they all uniformly drive these late seventies land Cruisers, which is a super cool car. But then this is a weird little footnote. There some places in the world where you go where they drive land Rovers, and there's some place in the world where you go there where they drive land Cruisers, you know, and a lot, a lot of the world
can be got two automotive choices. Right there are a land Cruiser country. And I had no idea what we were doing. I had never been on the show. It's like my third day on the show. I had never been, you know, worked on the show before. We're driving out into the desert and I was like, oh, hop on the top of the car and you know, shoot shots of the cars, you know, slowly picking their way through the dunes, and you know, like five minutes later, we're
going eighty five miles an hour. I am hugging for my life this four post bed that they for some reason had strapped to the top of the car, which I still can't explain. I think they thought Tony was some kind of like Prima Donna that was going to need a four post bed out in the you know, the desert. That's man. Anyways, I'm like holding onto this thing with one hand shooting with the other and we get to we get to where we're camping and I've got this just massive bicep size hematoma you know, on
my arm. Oh, and Tony saw it and that was it. Man. It was like he was like started talking to me, he started asking me a question, he looked at me, you know, these like kind of novel things at that point. And I got a call from Chris and Lydia, the owners of ZPZ after, and they're like, Tony likes you, which is super rare, so like, you know, we're going to do this a bunch more.
And that started.
Ten ten years of traveling with him. Now that's that's intermingled with when I got called to first work with you, which was christ and Lydia called me and they're like, well, you know, maybe this guy will like you too. And they showed me that original presentation piece of you sitting in the park in Brooklyn. You grab the squirrel, right, pigeon pigeon, sorry.
You.
Grab a pigeon, You take it home and cook it, and they're like, we want to this, we want to make this a show. And it just like it immediately for me, like I felt like it immediately clicked. I was like, oh yeah, that's like that's super cinematic, super dynamics, a really interesting philosophy. It's totally unlike anything I'd ever seen before. And they called me to come and do that original presentation piece we did where we're we're in the you know, in the swamp up by your house, yep.
And it was like I think we met in like a out back parking lot or something, and within half an hour we were like neck deep in a swamp and I was like totally hooked, man, totally hooked.
That was the Miskegan River Marsh, Yeah, yeah, and Miskegan. That's that's the county I grew up in, a Michigan Miskegan. I should go fact check this. I've heard it my whole life. Song of trust. It is true. Miskegan means it's it's a native word that means big swamp. M I hope there you go. That's well, you know, I can say this, I can say that's what they told me. They told me that.
But the thing but you know, the important thing about that and the reason I remember that moment so well, it's just like it all it just all clicked, you know, you're like, oh, this is like, this is kind of the best of both worlds, because you wanted to make TV that was about like ideas, you know, and at the same time like it had the inherent kind of action and dirtiness and kind of throwing yourself into a swamp. That that that makes for good TV.
It's from an Algonquin word meaning Marshie River.
Enough, very like.
Phil could get his paycheck just for doing a little ship like that, just saving the day. Tell me again what it means, Phil.
It's an Algonquin word meaning Marshi River.
God, that's exactly what it is too. Yeah.
I wonder where they got it.
Never thought look that up. Good job, Phil, Oh yeah anytime. Yeah, they really gone through life saying it meant big swamp, and you would have been right sort of. Do I want to tell the No, I'm not gonna tell the joke. Growing up? What it meant? You were through everything we've talked about so far. You're you were a camera guy. Yeah, and you like you don't uh for listeners, Moe is the most most kind of bashful, modest You were an exceptional camera guy.
Yeah, this at this particular little niche of this World.
Yeah, yeah, very much. So, Yeah, Mo was a exceptional cameraman, was uh combining. Nominated an Emmy, but I should just say nominated for Emmy. Did you ever win an enemy? Did you win one?
I've got yeah, I've got two in two different categories and ten nominations.
Geez, what did you get the two?
It one for cinematography and one for producing.
Oh okay, yeah, okay, I knew you were nominated, but I guess I spaced the fact that you won one. Yeah.
Oh, I sat through a lot of long ceremonies without one, so you get to the end, like over four and a half hours. In my life, I think the best example of that is what we got nominated up against Free Solo. And so when we're sitting next to the you know, we're sitting next to them, and the whole time just being like, I mean, there's.
Yeah, it's just like that was going to play out.
Oh yeah, I mean it's like take a canoe out against like the USS Lincoln. Yeah, you can paddle a good canoe, man, but it's only so much you can do.
And then uh, you moved out of that eventually got into producing, yeah, and then produced like a bunch of episodes.
Yeah, yeah, that was kind of twofold. You know, like I came up always in camera because during that original job working for Michael mann I, he had just handed me a camera at one point he was just like, shoot everything that happens, you know, backstage, which was like not a normal film for cool shit happening backstage. It's like you're hanging out at the gym with like all e and those kinds of things.
So I started.
I filmed a bunch of behind the scenes stuff and they used a bunch of it to make this HBO documentary about the film. And that's what got me started shooting. It's like it never required cameras, never required any real training or effort. I pick them up and it just inherently understood everything I needed to understand to be an exceptional camera operator. And it just clicked for me, you know.
And the ninety six episodes The Biggest Loser. It's funny now, but that show shot me to you taught me to shoot. You know. It's like you're ten hours a day, you got the camera on your shoulder and you're just constantly having to figure out the geometry of camera blocking and movement and telling characters stories and tying things in together, all the stuff that you need to do to be a good camera operator. We were just practicing it every day.
And so when I got out in the field with you, and I got out in the field with Tony, I was able to use all of those like narrative tools as well as just Yet at that time in my life was like a total athlete and a badass. Not anymore at all.
Yeah, you know, you should, you know, you should tell people Box it's interesting about you is a mo your your folks taught at a boarding school. Ye, and then you went to the boarding school. So you were like a towny yeah, and a student.
Yeah.
Yeah, if you know what I.
Mean, Yeah I do. I totally know what you mean.
And if for any I don't mean you, I mean folks. Oh, no, you were a town student, right, for anyone.
Who grew up in a town with a boarding school, you'll understand the dynamic, especially an East Coast boarding school. It's uh, it's it's an interesting it is an interesting dynamic. I got the worst of both worlds.
Oh, I thought you maybe best. I think you got the best.
Of both worlds. I didn't get the best of.
Both worlds ha and the students.
To the townies, I was, I was like, you know, I was like a stale prep schooler yea. And to the you know, to the students, I was like a faculty brat Towney. You know, I didn't really so it was miserable for the first three years. And then like and then I realized, like, wait a second, I have a car, and I can go wherever I want. And uh, you know, I I can. I can exist with all the benefits of being from town.
Uh.
And I can. I can you know, choose from the flock.
Of of of of all these you know, really beautiful, blue blooded you know prep school girls got that.
It ended up working out pretty well in the And this is in New Hampshire.
It's in New Hampshire.
Yeah, did you grow up around ken Burns like in his zone?
Now? I mean, well, if you grow up in New Hampshire, you grow up around everyone else who's in New Hampshire, you know, just by proximity the size of the state. So he was about an hour away.
Yeah. And what was that lake you guys are.
On We're on winnipes hockey. Yeah, it was great lake beautiful. Yeah, it stunning.
How was when you when you got out of being a camera guy, Yeah, and you you moved into producing, How did you ever get over the feeling of wanting to yank the cameras away from the camera guys.
Yeah it was. It was really hard for a long time and created quick a fair amount of conflict with camera sure, cinematographers on set, but.
Give me that thing.
Yeah, and that was a lot fiery, Yeah, a lot more fiery then at that point my lex stomp over and grab the camera and pull it off the tripod,
and you know, not not not good behavior. As I've gotten older and I've become more seasoned as a producer and director, I've learned to be much more mellow about the mistakes I see in camera, and much more constructive, and you know about how how kind of interact with with camera folks and and use the fact that I can speak their language in a way that isn't just like completely insulting and demoralizing to them.
Yeah. Yeah, so uh. In total, how many years as you spent working on the various bord Ain properties?
Ten ten years with Tony It's like it comes out to like seventy five shows or something that were that are either produced or shot directed. I for a couple of the shows. At the very end, I was co directing with my wife, which was awesome, kind of the best part of the experience.
And then that ship was just all of a sudden, uh, just over. I mean, you know, we've talked about it a little bit, but if you wouldn't mind, it's kind of giving people an idea of what, you know, the degree to which any job for ten years, but not only you know, any job you have for ten years, and so abruptly and so tragically, but the way it was, the way that kind of work really created a they created like a complete lifestyle.
Yeah, yeah, a lifestyle that was, like say, I mean, incredibly awesome at times and in certain way is not super healthy, and an absolutely extraordinary opportunity to see the world in a way that only a very, very very small handful of people get to see it. I try to tell the story of what it was like, and you can only really do it by, you know, in a million different little pieces anecdotes and this and that, But you can't really ever, you can't really, I can't
really ever articulate the full experience. I try to tell people this thing that I think some people get and a lot of people don't. But there's a scene at the end of Lord of the Rings, right the new movies, where they've just gone on this like unbelievable adventure that like really only the four of them understand, and they go back to the Shire and they're they're sitting back in their favorite bar and the Shire and everyone's carrying on around them, and they just kind of sit there
in silence and look at each other. And I guess that's how I feel about It's a there's a very small group of people who went through that experience with me, and when I'm with them, we understand each other and implicitly understand the experience. We went through, the highs and lows, the ending, all of the all of the things that
came with it. But I can't really I can't, you know, the world around that goes on in a way that I can't really see in the same way anymore, And I can't really explain it to the people, even the people I love. Luckily, my wife got to work on it, so she understands. My dad asks about it all the time.
I can't really fully explain it. It's I think I would imagine and in no way am I comparing myself to a soldier, but I would imagine it's the same kind of thing that soldiers go through, where they they can only really fully understand the experience between themselves, you know, and when they're together, there's a comfort that comes by that kind of shared experience, and outside of it, there's
a kind of discomfort. You know. I believe we went through very similar things, you know, on the on Mediator and on wild Within before that, where as we try to figure things out, how do you really how do you really explain you know, those experiences.
Yeah, at that at that age, you know, at that age and time, it sounds so weird. But I would have a hard time. Uh, I would have a hard time bouncing from the one world to the other.
Between the two worlds.
Just going like I wanted to be home and loved being home, but it was it was the pacing was so different.
It was super hard.
Yeah, it would become weird.
It was super hard. And for a long time I'd come home and like, you know, my wife would getting fights and there's all kinds of like and I'm like oh, so, you know, eventually you realize it's like it's all me and what I'm bringing back into the house. I learned over time how to decompress in the hour ride from the airport to home and not bring it in the house.
But it took me a long time and some more maturity to be able to figure that out, because for a long time I'd carry all of that energy back in the house.
Yeah. Years ago, my wife told me, just detecting that little bit of uh that travels a lot for work. Probably aren't stand it, but like coming out of one's pacing, coming out of one thing and then moving into a household, especially little kids, and you're with these kind of you're with like really high performing people and a fast paced thing, and you're focused on a single thing and you're kind of like camping out or living out, and all of
a sudden you're in and like little kids. And she I'd never called her bluff, but she would say, hey, if you need to, why don't you when you come home go stay in a hotel for night? Yeah then come yeah, And I got the message, and I never did that totally. I think that would have been the one worst thing you know, but it's like, but when you come in the house, man, you're walking into an active household like little kids, you know what I mean,
you got to transition quick. And their thing that she'd always said is she's like, if it's not a big deal when you go away, and you don't want it to be a big deal when you go away. You want to just slip out the door. It's not gonna be a big deal when you come home. Right, it's not gonna be like balloons and shit. Right, You're walking into an active environment and you gotta get with the program.
Well, you're working. I was just gonna say, you're walking into a program. And I think that's the difference. And when you talk about like documentary, you know, making documentary content, I think it's actually particularly different than other kinds of
work too, because you're in such a reactive environment. You're constantly reacting to sensory input that's coming in in the environment, and so you're super high key, you know, trying to figure out all of all of these things and what does it mean and how do you navigate this to tell the story. And then there's logistics and physical just the sheer physical nature of going out and shooting in
these environments. All of it has you in this very visceral mode and then you're like walking back into like a program with like really specific you know, structure and guidelines and it needs to be that way.
Ton of night, Like let's go get an ice cream.
It's hard to code switch.
Nope, not going to get an ice cream ten o'clock totally.
So yeah, I mean that's a big that's a that's definitely a big part of it, A big part of it all along in terms of making a relationship and like a household work.
And you filmed the you did the last correct me if I'm wrong, but you're you directed the very like the last ever board in episode because the last one didn't become one, right.
The last two didn't become one, so.
So they never they didn't finish your Italy one.
No, it was shelved.
It was you wrapped the episode.
Yeah, we shot the whole thing. It was it was it was. It was probably from a selfish perspective, best episode of TV. I.
I guess it makes sense because all the post production everything, and yeah, well it's.
We produced shows after Tony had died, Like I did a show in Marfa and in West Texas. It was all inspired by the time we had spent down there and that show. Tony died before we finished that show, and so you can watch that show and there's none of his kind of very famous voiceover the show is it's it's looser. It doesn't have that connective tissue because
he wasn't around to record it. In the case of Florence, like, there were things in the show that were just simply too painful to the people in his immediate orbit, or we thought could have been too painful to people in his immediate orbit to release the show, and so a decision was made just to shelve that footage. It was used in Morgan Neville's documentary Roadrunner. We used some of that footage, but it was I mean again, it was probably the best show.
Like we had.
We we like had the Alfizi Gallery shut down. We had it all to ourselves.
You know.
The Fizi Gallery is one of the most famous museums in the world. It's like, yeah, you think of like the very famous Bodacelli's like Primavera, and uh, all of the those those paintings are there. It's like the one of the pre eminent museums in Italy. And you can, you know, just imagine from there what that means.
They're therefore the world.
Therefore the world, you know, he's talking about the heart and soul of you know, Renaissance artwork is all contained right there. And say, and we had that, we had the place to ourselves, and we went to some crazy places, standing like standing at the South Pole was pretty amazing. But standing in the Bodaicelli wing of of Thefizi Gallery alone, like I took a selfie, is no one else there that's about us unless you wax floors for a living.
That's about as rare as I guess, you know. And that's what I mean about, like this opportunity to see the world in ways that you know, who gets to do that, you know, like you'd have to be in the very very very upper echelons of society, which I'm not to be able to do that on your own. Millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of funding to shuttle our asses around the world, you know, and see the things that we got to see.
So when when you walked away from that, what did you start doing? I'm kind of getting to the part where you and me worked on our new project together. But did you just take some time.
Off when I walked away from that and not.
Walked away whatever it ended, you know, I mean that was your job, right, that.
Was my job. Yeah. Yeah, if there's some stuff in the middle there though, that's like that we've never talked about. That's like, it's probably shit we should talk about. Like I had to make a decision at one point to leave like meat Eater and everything that we had created doing this in order to do that, and and it was like a super super difficult decision because here, like I didn't create that show.
M M.
I was a participant in that show. I didn't create it.
Like yeah, like if we were like but that's like the equivalent of the you and me are like roommates and all of a sudden someone buys you a house. I'm gonna be like, yeah, it's a bummer that you're moving out, MO.
But I mean, I mean, this is yeah, but this is where your humility comes into plate man, Like it was, it's more than that, Like I remember.
No, I remember being I remember you like struggling with it. But to me, it wasn't a you know.
Yeah. Well in the end, like it's a it's a decision I had to make right, Like again, I knew what I knew what was on the line. I had been on the show before, and when the show moved from Travel Channel to CNN, Tony was like, I like, I want you to come like full time, and you just like, you just can't. You can't pass up that opportunity. You just you can't pass up that opportunity to see the world like that. And uh. And there were a couple of like career things, I like boxes I wanted
to check too, you know. Yeah, but it was it was hard, man, and it was hard to go like in that direction and go do that and then watch everything that you've built, you know, subsequently. So when I got the call to like to come back to work, I was, I was stoked. It was great.
A the timing well, I don't want to say the timing was good because it was such a because the things we discussed, like the fact that you were I mean this is years ago now, but that you were you became like a free agent after doing after working on board.
A for extausely I had been I had been with ZPZ on staff for fourteen years, which is still amazing to me. But then, you know, after Tony died, I worked I did another three years with w camal Bell doing United Shades of America, which was kind of an interesting thing too, because like that was very much focused not only on like American culture and like domestic issues, but a pov on American culture and domestic issues that I could literally never attain myself. So I'm just not
I'm just I'm not a black dude in America. And so I was able to go and travel around with Cabal and and see things from his perspective, which was really profound. And then once we wrap that show up with another two Emmy nominations us on that one, I left. I left zero point zero and went out freelance and started show running and uh and so yeah, there's a little time in there, which is good because I needed to learn how to show run.
Before you called no good, I'm glad you learned.
I learned a little bit.
So just for uh, for listeners, a little bit, MOA's talking when probably I probably explained this for Hi'm sure something's in the air and everybody's got like, are you having like a throat.
Film clear nominated for an Emmy.
No film Randall. They don't come together, but doctor Randall, I have not been nominated. We got nominated for James Beard Award, which you didn't get.
I was, I was, I was at that.
We were at that dinner.
No, it wasn't at the dinner. I didn't go to dinner. But I remember when we got the nomination a couple of fort We were in Mexico when we got that first one. We were hunting turkeys in Mexico. Oh really, yeah, I remember down on that that ranch down there we got we went, we shot a buffalo and uh and a bunch of turkeys.
Yeah. Uh. Give a brief bit of history here for for for folks, Moo is the story. But Mo's been talking about zero point zero Production, So just try to explain a little bit of a little show business education. Generally, like zero point zero Production is a television production company. How it generally works in TV production in the old days? Is it the production company winds up being like a contractor building a house. Right, a homeowner comes, they said,
I want a house, I got plans for it. It looks like this, I'm handing it over to you. You're the contract. You come in and build the house. Once you build the house, it's all set. You hand the keys over to the person that bought it and you walk away and it's their propert. They might do more houses with you, but that's how it goes. Do you finish the house, hand it to them For all you folks. I'm sure everyone listening, I'm sure has seen episodes of No Reservations
and Parts Unknown. So this company, zero point zero Production, produce all of those shows.
And it's important to note develop the original concept too.
Which was Cook's Tour.
Right.
So if you go way back and I like remember, I vividly remember this happening is Anthony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential. I remember it coming out. I remember being excerpted in the New Yorker, and like they took, they came in, optioned it, made a deal, started building this whole thing. When we started making Meet Eater with zero point zero, we built media where we just owned we owned Meat
Eater and just license it out. So in the old days, in many many, many of the first years of Meat Eater, I made Meat Eater as a joint venture, like we were fifty to fifty business partners and we owned me Eater as a joint venture between me and Zero point zero Production. Later we had the opportunity I was approached by a company that that invested in digital media properties. So one you might know is uh, they were invested in Barstool Sports and kind of were a majority owner
and bar our Stool Sports. It was with the guy that had been the chair of news Courts, so Fox News, and they had a group called TCG, and we took an investment from TCG to build me Eater and do a thing, and then over time didn't have involvement with Zero point zero anymore, and overtime MO didn't have involvement with Zero point zero anymore. This is all a long rambling way of leading into this project that we're working on now that Mo and I are just putting a
rap on. Our work on all these episodes is coming out of all those years of making me Eater. I started talking to a friend of mine, Mark Pierce, who owns warm Spring Productions, and some of the guys on his team, and we started talking about this idea of doing a show around outdoor mysteries, wilderness mysteries, and we had baked it along pretty good, made an arrangement with History Channel. We're gonna you know, we're gonna call it
Hunting History. We're gonna do it in partnership with History Channel. And eventually we needed, like, what's called a showrunner? You should explain what a showrunner is. I wasn't even really clear on what a showrunner was.
I mean, you can think of it.
I almost asked that a minute ago.
It's basically like a project manager, you know, so you're you just have oversight over the whole project tip to toe, which requires, you know, it requires a lot of different kind of skill sets.
Does that include like creatively, what's an episode? What's note from that?
Yeah? Okay, very much. Moe was originally hired to be a director, and then it moved up to being from a director that moved up to being the showrunner the kind of like primary driver of all things, and still directed the show, still directed the show.
Yeah, it seems like it should be a more prestigious sounding title a showrunner. To me, it would be like a I think of like a bike messenger, and it should be called to mind a very different set of responsibilities.
I know, it should be seriously you branded, yeah, showrunner Like he's like a dude that runs around. Yeah.
The title that people would see on screen as executive producer gotcha.
Yeah, but anyone that knows show business knows that could mean a variety of things.
That's a wide, wide cash all phrase.
A tip for people watching, for all you people that love watching credits and movies. When you see EP, yeah, apply like a healthy dose of skepticism because you a lot of activities can capture you the EP. A check, right, A check can get you EP. Or it's that you spent twenty years bleeding for a project, right yeah, put your life savings, mortgaged your house. In the end you're an EP. Or later it's all done and you're like, oh, I'd like to be involved in that. I can be helpful.
And then all of a sudden there's a EP too, and those two people are like, oh, mate, you have you're what I am? You're not what I am?
And those are getting long because he shows now these are like ten EPs, but two of those people worked. Yeah, everyone else was just attached to those people. Bled why in in Well, I guess in all all productions. So it's not specific a documentary, but like fighting for those like the producer credit, Like that's what people that's what people want. If you want to be like Oscar eligible, you need that producer credit.
Oh got it? Really?
Yeah?
God man, I know that.
Right, some epis, you know, some EPs will have it, but producers that's where it's at.
Oh so executive is like a downgrade. You just want to be regular producers.
Yeah, you want to be on that. You want to be the the producer. It's usually a one producer.
Because I was just saying, it's probably not too late for me to angle for EP on the new show, but it is too late for the producer, and that's the.
One you want. Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, this to lady the way, Randall, I do have a checkbook. When we started, when we started on Hunting History, when Moe came in, we hadn't we didn't have our subjects.
We had a few of them. They had done development work you know, leading up to that, and uh and it developed some good concepts. Yeah, so like we ran with a bunch of those. Yeah, we certainly weren't going to throw those out.
Let's do it? Should we should? We should we lay out the mysteries like well, let me first lay out the kind of overriding premises. So so on hunting history we explore eight uh outdoor wilderness mysteries. I'll tell you some things that I would say are true of all of them. Okay, they could be that there, they could be they could be mysteries that are forty or fifty years old. Some of them. They could be mysteries that are over three hundred years old. Yeah, so that there.
Are many thousands of years old or or millennia.
Yeah, you're right. They could be vastly different timeframes, but they share in common that these are mysteries that are set in wilderness, backwoods environments like some of the wildest, most beautiful landscapes in the country. They are things that people will have I'll be following all these riddles or these clues. There are things that most Americans will have some little thing in the back of their head that goes, oh, I've heard of that. Yeah right, there's like a oh yeah,
I heard of that. They're all things that are still being actively argued about.
Yep.
Oddly, and this surprised me. They're all things that have obsessives. Yeah, yeah, they all have living obsessives who have dedicated their life or major portions of their life to push a theory, and there are usually other obsessives with a different theory.
Yeah, And are constantly new theories.
Yeah yeah, constantly new theories, constantly new theories coming up. And so we found those. And to give you what we're getting into some of these, but to give you a sense of the range would be some of the mysteries are like some of the mysteries are just definitionally a mystery. Meaning in the nineteen seventies we had this kind of blows your mind to think this is true. In the nineteen seventies, we had a rash of global
and also national skyjackings. It seems so hard to picture now in a post nine to eleven world, but there was a legitimate problem with people hijacking airplanes globally and nationally, hijack an airplane, get ransom money, try to get away with the ransom money.
For either economic gain or political.
Yeah. Became some currific ideological yes, it became some political political hijackings, you know, the famous t w A hijacking. And then there also been just like some lone wolf financial hijackings just for personal financial gain. Only one of these skyjackings, as they call him. Only one of these skyjackings remains unsolved, and it is the story of a
guy that identified himself as Dan Cooper. In the early days of the investigation, a journalist misheard a communication between some investigators misheard dB Cooper ran an article using dB Cooper as a suspect name. It was misheard dB Cooper did not use dB Cooper used Dan Cooper. He's on a plane that takes off out of Portland to Seattle. But what do you buy his ticket for?
It's like twenty bucks.
It's so funny. Yeah, buys a ticket, gets on it with walks in. Buys a ticket for twenty bucks, gets on the plane. He's dressed in a suit. He's wearing loafers. He hands a flight attendant a note that he's got a bomb. He opens up a suitcase. It's got a bunch of wires and shit looks like a bomb. Demands a couple hundred thousand dollars in twenties. The plane lands at sea tack. He lets all the passengers go, He lets he keeps some hostages on the plane. Flight crew
lets a flight attendant go. She comes back with a big sack full of all his twenties. I can't remember we calculated how many pounds of twenties. It was not as much as you'd think.
No, I'm trying to remember, like twenty two pounds or something.
Shocking.
Ask for four parachutes. This is like some key stuff here. Ask for multiple parachutes, creating the idea that he's going to jump with the flight crew. Yeah, because if he says, give me.
One shoot, like sweet.
Give him yeah, yeah, why are you going to cut every rope in there? Then give him the shoot? Ask for four shoots. They they take off out of They take off out of seattack. He wants to go.
Mexico City.
Yeah, he wants to go to Mexico City. They argue with him that you can't. There's not enough fuel on the plane. They debate. So this all this is important detail because he he's taken off out of sea attack and he already knows what he's gonna do. He knows he's gonna jump out of the plane, and he has a destination in mind. They're already taken off and they're arguing about you can't do that. They suggest they suggest like landing in the Bay Area or something. They suggest
going to San Francisco. He's like, it's too busy. He's like, let's go to Reno and refuel. So now time has gone by, he's in the air. He wants to go one place. They changed their mind. They're going in another direction. Point being there's like people argue this that he had like he knew what was up and had an accomplished waiting the dude. This is one thing I'm sure about this dude does not know. No, no rational person can argue that he knew where he was when he jumped
out of that plane. It was the kind of plane that had the back door that opens up. Yeah.
I mean, even if you do where you were, even if you had known what route you were on, you wouldn't know where you were.
Cloudy night, a storm, No, there's a storm, overcast, heavily overcast, gys raining, and he's jumping out. At where he's jumping out, it's like negative zero seven degree. We we said negative seven I think is the number we came negative at the elevation he's at and he's got suit on.
Loafers going two hundred miles an hour. Yeah, negative seven.
There's a really funny part of this where so the put all on the hole from excited explaining a funny part of this. When we're filming it, we're in the town of We're in this area of the FBI's drop zone, and we're we just are going to eat in this town at Cougar, Washington, just going does we just like made plans to going to Cougar to eat And we're sitting there and we're like, we're kind of outside the trucks and some guys got some cameras and here comes
a dude driving buying a bike. Is then listen, here comes a guy driving buying a bike and it's just killing them. He sees the cameras and it's killing them, you know, and he's like he drives and you can see him change his mind. And he comes back and he's got some shorts on and he's got a shirt, a heavy like a big shirt on, but suspenders under his shirt, like suspenders under his T shirt. And I said, he'said,
what are you guys doing? You know dB Cooper, you know, he gets all fired up about Dbie Cooper And I said, what do you have? Why you got your suspenders on it? Under your shirt, and he tells me that holds up my pistols. To give you a sense of how much like this story lives, right, we didn't get an interview with this guy, but to give you a sense how
much the story lives, this individual races home. This is just a guy on the street, races home on his bike and comes back with like evidence okay about who DV. Cooper is. It introduces us to a thing that totally mess with our heads because in all of our research, I was just talking about what he had on. Right, he's got on a jack, he's got loafers, okay, And all our research we never see any mention to this.
But he's describing he's describing one of the last known moves of dB Cooper, which was to slip a packet of twenties into his wetsuit. So we get done talking to him, we're like, the wetsuit. W how did we miss the wet suit? But then we went and reviewed there's no that man. As far as I know, that man, and only that man knows about that the Cooper was wearing a wet suit.
But I mean, but that's what's so cool about the story and the reason that the story is so enduring is it invites all of this you know, you're you're left with so few clues that paints such a vivid picture of what this guy did that it's open to all this interpretation. As we talk about in the show, it's like a it's a perfect story, and like what a fun thing to be able to just like dive into a perfect story and just let your imagination goes. He had a wet suit on. He was jumping in
the lake. Manna.
Look like idiots, We never talked about a wet suit. Scratch the wet suit. That's just a dude down the streets. That's the dude down the street wearing shorts with pistols hanging from his suspenders. So, uh, Cooper goes on the back. There's always a little details. He lights he uh, here's a crazy part. Smokes a cigarette. Yeah, smokes a couple of cigarettes. Put him in the ash tree. You know how even today you'll see planes and still have that
little ash tray. Put some cigarettes in the ash tray. He was one of the biggest screw ups the FBI ever made in not being able to anticipate and not being able to anticipate that you would pull DNA off the cigarettes, which would now be a blink of an eye process, Like the FBI lab would have the genetic profile of this person within minutes. They check them out, Yah, burn them. Do you believe this? No, Like you're like
an archaeology. It's very common in archaeology, Like if you're out of sight, you dig a little square, you'll dig a meter square, and then the rest of it you don't touch because you're like, I don't know. In one hundred years, they'll be able to dip a stick in that dirt and tell you what happened here, So let's not mess with the rest because technology improved. But no, they're like, yeah, what are you gonna do? These old
cigarettes gone gone. At some point he takes apart one of the four parachutes and gets some cord out of it shit and fashions himself a little bundle of money and lowers that back door down and spends some amount of time messing around on the back.
Yeah, we should, we should specify that it's it's at a time when some planes had the the staircase that lowers from the tail of the plane, So we're not talking about the side door at the back of a plane. We're talking about a staircase that lowers directly off the tail of the fuselage.
Yepp. He he expects the flight attendant to open the door, realizes that the flight attendant is not instructed on opening door and in flight can't open the door, and sends the flight attendant up front. So now he's in the back of the plane. This is this is key to He's in back of the plane by himself. He gets the door down and at some point climbs down, puts
on a parachute, and climbs down the steps. How the FBI would later determine what they would call their drop zone is based on like trajectory, flight time and all this. But one of the key pieces is the pilots feel a pressure change in the cabin, suggesting to them that that pressure change was that he's putting weight on the back step. Yeah, and when he jumped the backstep the door goes fo Yeah. Just a few folks listening at home. I just took my hand and inflected it at the wrist.
I did like a little wrist flick. That was the door coming up. And so they go like, huh, maybe that was him jumping out. Let's take note of where we're at. That's the FBI drop zone. I'm not kidding. That's the FBI drop zone somewhere between the Sea Tac and Reno, but like sometime around there. Because eventually they get like, well, shit, let's go look. Yeah no, no, they didn't. They not look till they landed or did they go look.
They did not get a They did not get resources out in the field to look.
No, no, when did the flight crew go to look to see that he was actually a long time? Yeah?
Yeah, because well, I mean you can kind of offend that. Guys know the guy's got a bomb. Man.
Oh yeah, every go up front, go up for No, I'm not blaming anybody, but they're saying that became this hotly contested FBI drop zone. Earlier were talking about everybody's got like a little bit of awareness of the story. I know, I knew the story. I didn't know any of the detail. I knew there was a skyjacker, and I knew jumped out of the plane, and and and when we got into it, and Mo and I are like talking, and other guys we work with are all talking.
I would often say on the calls, I'll tell you what happened. You know, have not been there, yea, and knowing nothing about it. I was like he he burrowed into the ground, didn't know what he was doing, had a bad shoot, whatever. And the reason he's never because we should jump to this. He's never turned up.
Nothing has ever turned up, well, well except yeah, one thing.
Some money turned up. We'll get to that in the minux. We went, we went to the site. Some money turned up into Columbia River.
In the eighties, nothing of his body, parachute or anything like that.
And people thought that, you know, one investigator said, well, come deer season, we'll find him, because he thought something, you know, like some guy's gonna be like, oh my god, a parachute hanging in a tree with the dead guy from it, and it would be over right. That was the assumption early on. It's like, he's just dead somewhere
and they'll find the shoot. They never did. And I would have thought, well, his shoot never opened, you know, and and he burrowed into the ground, and and you know all that soft rainforest moss, and you're hitting at one hundred and seventy miles an hour or something like that. Terminal boity. Yeah, somewhere and right and unless someone looks in the right little divot and that's where the money is,
that's where his body is. And we kind of begin our exploration with that idea and then quickly have special forces guys, military parachuters, a parachute instructor with like fourteen thousand jumps in his history who was actually interviewed by the FBI after the dB Cooper thing. Them all say no, he's probably fine. Yeah, no reason to think he's not fine. Like in their mind, it's like, no, no landing, the trees don't matter, land in the mountains don't matter.
Yeah, it's a parachute. They're like designed to work.
Yeah, he's like no. I was like, what if you hit a treat it doesn't matter. Yeah. We couldn't get any major parachute dudes to tell us that he was dead, as much as I wanted to community, but they're like, the shoots work, you pull the cord, you're landing.
And I think the other interesting thing is like we had like an opportunity to get you in the air and get you like, you know, doing a tandem jump, and your immediate reaction on the ground went from like before we went up on the plane, like he's he's burrowed into the ground, to like, I know, he's he could of course he could survive that.
Now you're part of the community.
And I think, and that's what's so fun about the show is like you you you get to unfold these mysteries and kind of pressure test one variation or one possibility or one theory at a time, and over the course of it you come out with a completely different understanding or a completely different viewpoint on it. None of it based on empirical evidence, all based on experiential evidence.
And I think that's what's what you know, That's the reason that like, as a concept, I think this show is so cool is that you were out there experiencing things and then making you know, assessments of a mystery based on those experiences.
And if and if he lived and I think he did, if he survived the jump, think about how you think he did. Yeah, well, now I think you did, right, Yeah, But then but then just like invite yourself to think about this for a minute, that you're somewhere south of Seattle, you're not quite sure where, and you've jumped in the dark and keep in mind he never got caught. You're landing in the dark, and not toward dawn, You're landing in the dark in the evening. Yeah, it's a lot
in your loafers, not rigged up in the rain. Yeah. What then there's talk of accomplices, and maybe there were, but like not to that point. But there's there's no way. There's no way you could have coordinate it with someone on the ground.
Now, he'd need to get to a payphone at that time and make a call and say, well, I think I'm just somewhere out in the Cascade range, you know.
And you're walking around and as far as you know, there was this kind of laughable delay in looking for him on the ground.
It's because it was partly because it was Thanksgiving night. Yeah, everyone had to finish there. Yeah, they had to finish their dressing and pumpkin pie and ship and they got the posse rounded up. He didn't know this that, he doesn't know this. No, so no, like in all this time since and they did. They brought out the army.
I mean the army to do shoulder to shoulder was like five foot spacing, I think Fingertip Fingertip spacing shoulder to shoulder, and they they spent months grid working everything. No parachute, no sack, nothing, nothing.
So oh man, they were doing fly over is in was it the SR seventeen or the.
Seventy one seventy one?
You know blackbird? Yeah, they brought that up.
Yeah, use that to try to find the shoot big reconnaissance aviation guy here, like, I got it right, my.
Favorite bat too.
They nothing. Ever, we'll get to this money. Then we'll kind of move one hundred another one of these, just to give people example. We'll get to this money. So here's the crazy, weird part. And this is what really like the money. If the money hadn't happened, the story'd be different. But the money up ends everything. Yeah, in the eighties, right near Phil's backyard, Phil Phil Phillison on this.
That's right Vancouver, Washington, on the shores of western Vancouver, I believe.
Do you know the name of the bar.
I don't know the name of the bar, so, yeah, I can't fill you in. Sorry. It's an Algonquin word meaning marshy swamp, Tina bar, Tina bar.
So.
The original the the Skyjacking was in seventy two seventy three, seventy two.
I was not yet born. I wasn't even conceived yet, Randall, where was I? Oh the money? So check this out? Eighty one? Was it a somewhere eight nineteen eighty one? Somewhere early eighties? Some kid, Now this is that this is the surface I'm telling you the surface level true part. And you can read in all the conspiracy theories the surface level true part. Okay, everyone agrees is this. Some kid goes down on the Columbia River and they're going
to make a fire, and he's scratching out with his foot. Yeah, a little fire pit, Okay, on the bank of the river, just like you would. And lo and behold, here is a bundle bundles, bundles, bundles of rotten twenties. When they gave Cooper all of his currency, when they gave his ransom money, I knew they knew the serial numbers. Okay, here's a whole other wrinkle. I'm gonna get into this wrinkles. This is interesting wrinkle I knew going as we did
our research. It was like they knew the serial numbers of the money. I thought they were sequential, meaning I thought they gave him blank to blank numbers, which would make it easier.
To find sell a list of serial number, but.
It was all random numbers, so you couldn't notify banks. If you see any money come in between one one zero zero zero zero and one one zero, they keep your eye out for it. It's like thousands of twenty thousand random ass serial numbers, so you could never get in your head what numbers you're looking for. Because I used to be like, the money never turned up, so the money must be gone. But someone' say, how do you know the money's gone? If he took have money
and spent it wherever the hell. Yeah, took it to the Caribbean, took it to Mexico, took it anywhere, took to grease whatever and exchange the money. And then the fact that someone down the road is gonna check that serial number against the list of twenty thousand random ass serial numbers and find it. But anyhow, the money that comes out of team to borrow the corners is all rotten away. But it's the numbers.
They know for a fact that that is the money. It's the money from the ransom.
But here's the deal, Like the crazy part of it is that you'd say to yourself. If you're thinking, man, you're now saying to yourself, well, yeah, he lost some of the money. He's drowned in a river and it flowed. It was in a little creek, float out of the mountains, float into a tributary, float into the Columbia on a flood. You got deposited on the bank. Covered in sentiment. But here's the problem the money. If you drained the FBI drop zone, it doesn't flow to that spot.
It's up river. That spot it's up.
The money was found up drainage from the entire FBI drop zone, which brings in the question it didn't get like he didn't. It's either he didn't land in his drop zone, the drop zones wrong, or someone and here he did enter all conspiracy idea.
So the next logical conclusion you say, well, the drop zones are on again. He landed in some tributary, whatever it washed down, got caught in a sandbar. That's totally reasonable to assume. Here's why the money being in three different packets is important because they were not bundled together, meaning the statistical probability of the three of them ending up in one level in the billions.
Unless something was holding them in it. He okay, this is what's claimed. He there's a couple of little details here, he uh says to a flight attendant. The flight attendant, he asked her, do you want some of this money? Okay? She says no. Did some amount of that money, like we don't know what happened for a long period of time. Did some of that amount of that money wind up Like he's got like a bag, but he puts not
in his wetsuit. But like some of it goes here, some of it's in a different envelope, some of it some you know, like it sat there so long and rotted so much, something could have decomposed around it. What was holding it together. But but people that are way obsessed about this have given up on the idea that it washed there. Yeah, they think the money was buried there.
And what's so funny. We went there with a guy who's like he actually had some of the money, like some of the money that came out of the bank.
Yeah.
Hm. He wrote his name though, Eric Eric Ericulis.
Yeah, he's like he's like the foremost you know, kind of citizen sleuth. What they what they refer to themselves as citizens. Salu, he's a serious and best investigator.
We go there, we're standing around the river bank and I'm like, so it's right here, and he goes, well, it was about nine feet up feet out because of erosion. It was like the money was like over your head when you're standing there. Now, he feels that that money, because of all this stuff I won't get into, he feels that money was buried. He feels it was buried
by D. B. Cooper. Conspiracy theories are that dB Cooper later placed the money to throw off the trail, that he uh lift, got a ride from someone like dude, get me out of here, and that guy freaked and buried the money. No, no, but that is the last There's a neck tie that he took off and left on the plane. There's this cigarettes that are gone. There's the money in Tina Bar. And they've investigated, I don't know,
some ten thousand people. Yeah, they really focus heavy on disgruntled special forces guys coming out of Vietnam.
Yeah, and and people with an engineering background or some exposure to Boeing or people who would have proximity to understanding how the plane works in a basic way. And you know, it's fascinating there there are there are thousands of these little micro theories of how little portions of the mystery. And the fact is like no one actually knows anything nothing.
The flight attendant asked him. According to her, there's no witnesses of the conversation. She asked them, do you have a grudge against the airline? And he said, I just have a grudge, But I mean, those are the things like and this is an important part of this, of the the whole story is he's like he's become he became like a folk here.
You know, he didn't didn't hurt anyone, you know, in in in in our imaginations, he gets away with two hundred thousand dollars, you know, and uh and disappears into the night. It's awesome. He's a he's a hero. He's yeah yeah, uh.
If you watch the news, there's always claims. There's been many, many claims. There's a theme people's parents die. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, people's parents die, and then they come forward to say it. And recently some people came out and there there's there's these kids whose dad actually did a there's these kids whose dad actually did a copycat skyjacking and then later died in a shootout with the cops, and a lot of suspicion fell that it was it was his own
copy cat, like that was his second skyjacking. Some people say they these kids come out and they produce this this parachute all the way in North Carolina or something across the country.
Across country.
They're like, hey, we found a parachute in our shed. Then you got to ask you a question. But there's so many claims like this, they mostly get debunked. Yeah, I asked your question. So you're telling me that he that night brought his parachute. He that night bundled that parachute up no way, and then brought it home to North Carolina and put it in his shed.
I use this again, no no way.
I like that one.
Rubbed that fabric between your fingers and thinking a good old day.
It was like so many of my friends sent me that article when that came out, because I was just that was after we after we filmed, they sent me that article. And then by that point I was like well versed in all the claims, just like there's there's a claim more than every year does a claim Yeah, my boyfriend was Dbie Cooper.
Yeah, a lot of deathbed confessionals. You know, you like to add grandpa was Cooper. We should make a buffer sticker, man, it you think about that. With the parachute, we tried to walk through, Like one of the things we do in the show is like we walked through in the Pitch Black. We walked through those mountains and it's staggering how difficult it is to walk through those mountains. I
mean we're talking about like the Cascades. The best best guess of the drop zone is that it's in the Cascades just west, like southwest of Mount Saint Helen's right prior to Mount Saint Helens erupting, So it's like thick old growth forest and really steep and uh and just trying to walk through there in the dark with came it was impossible. You're gonna drag a You're gonna drag a parachute.
We did a we did a thing like we know you don't really know what you have, but we did like a no, we did a no flashlight because yeah, just limited stuff. Like he's not like he's got big he doesn't have a big tool bag. Maybe yeah, flash, it's on. No. But one thing I never did in my whole life was strike a match to look around. It doesn't work as good. Ear. We're talking about Indiana Jones. He goes into a cave and strikes a matches like a spot light.
It's not like all of a sudden you're in the Lincoln Tunnel.
Yeah, you strike that match and you're like, you don't see much of anything. Man, it was fun. Okay, I want to let's talk about Donner Party. Yeah, that's a good one. I want we just talked about Rowing Oak and Donner Party. There's one hundred, one hundreds eight to talk about. Where them. I want to talk about Rowing Oak or Donner Party.
That'll start with Rono.
Okay, I'll lay the groundwork. You should quiz Randall on on rowing Oak.
Yeah, what do you know about Rono? Yeah?
Randall? How many? How many settlers? Oh, doctor Randall?
Thirty one seventy two fifty four, one hundred and thirty nine. You just went too high twenty four.
I won't. No, I'm not going to continue to humiliate you. One hundred and seventeen. Gotta do it rough.
I had it in there somewhere rough one hundred seventeen promise.
We're gonna go way back in time. We're jumping out from the from the nineteen seventies to the fifteen nineties. All these all your European superpowers, Spain, France, England, Portugal, they're all vying for colonies New World colonies. The Spanish were earlier to the game, and they are getting loaded on gold and everybody's like, but down south, everybody's got bad fomo. Everybody's got bad fomo. They want their own chunk of the pie.
Well, Portuguese are killing it in South America too.
Yeah, so people are tearing it up, and the English are feeling like they're missing the whole party, and they they don't want to go too far south because the Spanish at at this point have a major toll hold and like jealously guard their areas. In fact, the Spanish are so worried about other countries getting a toe hold did They got like warships cruising up and down the US coast hunting for anyone who'd have the audacity to try to get a toe hold in the New World.
England had sent some like expeditionary trips poking around and prodding around, they map parts of the shoreline and they get an idea that they're going to establish their first permanent colony in Chesapeake Bay. So they take these one hundred and seventeen settlers, kids, wives, young people, right, and they haul them over and the intention is to bring them up into Chesapeake Bay. There's like some weird stuff that we get into in the episode. And and they
don't bring them where they're supposed to bring them. They're just like kind of like just them. It sounds like a little like unceremonious because it was. I mean, they dump them out on an eye island in the outer North Carolina. This will have to do see you later, Like it won't work forever, but it might work for a minute.
We'll see you next year.
But it wasn't.
But it's also important to note who these people are because like they're not this is not a military expedition. These are like these are like farmers and craftsmen. They're not people who are who are equipped or used to going out and and.
No experience building an.
Outpost from a military standpoint.
Yeah, these are people who buy and large have probably spent their life and within like some small radius of a handful of miles. Probably you can't generalize, but like mostly these are like yeomen people. They drop them on this island. And then their leader as this dude, John White, Well, they realize how precarious their situation is. And he can't
even hang for long. And he's like, hey, I'm going to run back to England and get some supplies and I'm gonna run back hang to He goes back to England and like a war breaks out and the queen says, no one's doing ship with any ships. All ships are fighting the war and all this other stuff happens, and it's three years and keep mind this is John White, dude. Here's an important detail. This John White dude. His wife and daughter are there. No, no, no, his daughter and got
his daughter's pregnant is there? Comes back three years later, is they able to do a quick check on Roanoke? And they're not there? They're gone. But then there's a hurricane coming and he can't he can't even really look around. But as the story goes, carved down a tree. They made a plan. Hey, if you got to go somewhere, carve on a tree crow it where you're going. And they and they carve the word crow a tone, which was a tribe that lived on modern day Hatteras Island.
A hurricane comes, he leaves, and then no one comes back for a decade or something like that. A decade. By the time someone comes in seriously looks for these colonists, it is just like they are.
Absolutely gone but gone gone, Like there's just rumors. It's not like there's a bunch of bones. No, yeah, there's nothing.
Gone gone, just rumors. And it's so long has gone by that now there's like, oh, you know, it's like it's this common thing that pops up in history. I'm sure you even countered at rantal Oh. I did see a blue eyed Indian right suggesting that they like integrated but just gone but there. But people are actively looking
for their stuff. And what's funny about it is like, of course, their stuff's get scattered around, because even if they had all died right there of some disease, if they'd all died of the flu, their shit's still going to get scattered around because this is like a vibrant this area is full of all these different Native American groups. So they're going to take the stuff and scatter anyway.
And they show up, The English show up with stuff that is like highly highly, highly valuable because there's no way for Native Americans who are here to get you know that iron. You know these things that they had guns, so you think like it's not just like a bunch of random crap lying around. These are like highly valuable.
Items, stuff that people want. So the search has been by and large, the search is archaeologists looking for their little trinkets and shit, right, but finding a trinket and we went to it. We went to an active dig site where they're finding like really old English stuff. But it's like they get excited about it, but it doesn't mean that in my mind, doesn't mean it much because their shit's gona wind up there anyways, because people are
going to take this stuff and trade it. We talked to one researcher on it and he's like this, We're like, what would satisfy what would sad by you about what happened to someone? And he said it's cool because it's like identifiable. He's like a Christian burial, a Christian burial not on Roanoke m someone because all the tribes had burial rituals where the bodies would be buried in a curled up and fetal positions, you know, very different ways.
He goes to find a because he's like, they might have you know, they might have been integrated into a tribe. The last thing to go would be religious practice. Yeah, you know in his mind, the last thing to go would be burial rights and a mother bearing her child, a child bearing its mother or someone would would would have laid them out on their back, flat prone head to the east.
Yeah, a Christian style burial done by Christians is what they're looking for.
And he's like, if someone can present that, they can say here's where here's where they ended up.
Uh.
A detail about that we get into is to kind of show you what's gonna happen to these people when they land. It's within days. One of them goes out to get oysters. They got they got like nothing. They got their heart up from the minute they're there. They got very little food resources. Crabs, right, he goes crab, he goes blue crabbing. It just gets filled full of arrows.
His head smashed.
Now because the dudes that were there before him, the English explorers that were there before him, do all this ham handed antagonistic ship to the tribes and piss off a bunch of the tribes, and then you later bring a bunch of women and children and turn them out on an eye.
Let him go.
You see anybody, uh, I don't know, don't mention me.
And there aren't any like oral true from those communities around there.
About the strangers, I'm kind of shocked by how it's kind of shocking how how little there is, how little there is there.
Again, there are those rumors of like you know, blue eyed.
Right, square houses too, tribes like like traders would encounter people and they'd be like but in wild places, you know, they'd be like hundreds of miles inland, there's there's people in square houses living with such and such a true and to have a square house. But it's just just like it's ephemeral. It's like rumors and glimpses as we dug into it. Like I'll tell you one of things
for certain, and I can't say much of certain. One hundred and seventeen of those guys didn't go somewhere and like set up shop and build houses.
That was too much of an imprint.
It was whatever happened was like quick. It was ugly, and I think it was scattered.
They panicked and scattered to the wind.
And I'm sure some of them because they did write on a tree. They wrote on a tree and on a fence post, crow atin and then kro on one signe. They finished it on one sign. One sign did and now was the agreement. If you go somewhere write it down. But then like did they make it? How many of them made it? How many went to crow at five? Right? Yeah, you don't know. And then there's been fraudulent evidence, like, uh, there's this thing that came out called the Dare Stone.
This woman Elizabeth Dare wrote this like fairly plausible on a rock. Don't laugh, No, I writes a rock like some shit, right, And a guy finds the rock. But the timing of him finding the rock was that a timing of like heightened the public curiosity about this is when the legend started to emerge. And then you have a dozen copycat rocks. So all the copycat rocks are obviously, and then the one rock is suspicious, and now people
don't accept that rock to be true. But that rock basically said like we've been whittled away and killed and kidnapped.
Yeah, it's like it was written to her father and to me though the love I like, I like the you know, so wait, like she was running around running from these hostile Native American tribes.
No, she was in their captivity at the time and.
Carrying a scratching rocks the pound rock around slowly story into it.
Yeah, you know, it seems implausible.
We need to go quickly get the rock.
It seems implausible. We talked to these one authors. They they kind of laugh about that. It's called the Dairstone. They laugh about the Dairstone. You gotta have a pretty sophisticated understanding of the language at the time. But one of the things they laughed about the Airstone is it like a decent analogy would be, let's say I were to talk to you in a Southern accent, right right, and a Southerner doesn't think I have a Southern accent.
They're writing on the Dairstone is so like stereotypically.
Ye old English, Yeah, yeah.
And yeez, you know, like all over the place. They're like, it's just it's like someone who's like read some Shakespeare or something trying to write a note in Shakespeare language. You know or whatever. And that's one of the better indictments of the other indictment to be this play comes.
Out right right at the same time.
Yeah, this very popular performance comes out. It's still running today and and and the fervor of the popularity of this they're low and behold as the daarstone.
Yeah, but again, I mean like, these are not selected because they're like finite mysteries. They're they're selected because they're they're there's they're mystery with all kinds of possibilities, and that's what makes it fun, you know.
Yeah, I don't think that one will be solved, and just a spoiler alert, that's what I say. In the end, I'm like, I don't think there's like a thing when you look at it, like there's a lot of people looking and a lot of people ask the question, but there's not it's too there's not a clean answer. I don't think there is a clean answer, right, but.
In the questions I'm asked for a long time. But I think what was like, what was really cool about this concept and really unique to this concept is no one's really asked those questions from an outdoor standpoint. So these are all mysteries that have a element of the outdoors right in the in wilderness, and no one's really
approached them from from that point of view. And it's a lot of what we spend our time in the show doing is like living these things and and going through to the best of our ability, the things that those people went through, or it's suspected that they possibly went through.
Yeah, going but going to the real places kind of blows your mind because there's this one theory that emerged. They said, even though they had written that stuff on the thing, there was also an expression of intention that they moved fifty miles to the main which you can take it different ways. One interpretation is they went fifty miles inland, which lands you in this place we went to,
which is called the Great Dismal Swamp. And you go into that stuff, you're like, oh, yeah, you guys under like kids and stuff, and you're all wearing like petticoats or ever the hell they ran around it, and like you're navigating that, you know, you're like wading to the Great Dismal Swamp.
And what's kind of amazing though, is when when we went you go there now and there's a bunch of dry land. There a bunch of agricultural land, but all of that land was was drained. That was all just swamp. When you think of the prototypical swamp like Kermit the Frog at the beginning of the Muppet movie, level swamp, like that's what it was. Lily pads and cypress trees that whole area.
Yeah, we I mean, you know, it's an hour long show. You can't explore any avenue of this and this would have been like way down the list for how sort of outside of the story it was. But that area some of the most harshest slave conditions, Yes, in the history of slavery in the South, some of the most harshest, like high death rate slave conditions was making that dry land. Yeah, they were put to work draining that land. Yeah, and these mallarial you know, and mallarial conditions.
Those canals are also just criss crossing the land. You see those canals that they dug, and the imagine the conditions under which they were.
Looking at just many many, many many square miles upon square miles upon square miles. It was hand dug trenches to drain that ground. It was just like a disposal place for humans that you just pour into like you like you're pouring them into a war, pouring slaves into that job, which, like I said, wasn't a lot of
room too. Maybe a future maybe a future episode. Uh. Another one of going to the spot, we'll talk about this one, we'll wrap it up, is going to Donner Pass where the Donner Party, where that all went down. And one of the funniest things just happened in a parking lot. It's not in our show because it just happened in a parking lot. Someone we ran into some guys. They were filming. They were doing like some ski stuff or something. I think what they're doing. We got talking
to them. They were talking about So this is like a third third hand story because we're out filming a dinner Pass and they're filming like some skis nothing to do with Donner Party. We're feeling about the dinner party and they're filming some ski stuff and they share it with us. These people that they hadn't counter who were in Donner Pass because they were doing a thing about places with Christmas names, right, you know, Donnor and Dancer.
That's the funniest thing the world. Amazing. Uh, that was pretty amazing background on Donner Party. Donner Party was well, first off, I'm gonna talk about what before I get into what it was, I'm gonna talk about However, what everybody knows, including me, what I know about the Donner Party is it was an American horror story where people ate each other full stop. Right, They're like, yeah, they got stuck in the mountains and ate each other. Mm hmm, yeah, right,
that's the story there there in the story. It's a very short episode. That's the story of the Donner Party. That's what That's what I went into it knowing about. You know, I was actually like a little skeptical because I was like, what is it? You know, what is it really to do? You know?
So no, I think we were all like that was a show that we pitched many times, like a concept that we pitched many times. And the question we all had was like, well, like what's the story? Like what's the mystery? What's the story? You know, they got snowed in, they ate each other. I don't you know, what are we gonna do?
Seems pretty straightforward?
It ain't. It ain't. There's a lot like who's to here's the questions who's to blame and what could they really have done different? Right? And why did what happened happen? And now I'm gonna say a little bit of the scene is like eighteen forty six, so pre Gold Rush, Like everybody's heard of the forty nine ers, ye, right, member, we had Elliott west On, he goes. Everybody's to talk about the forty nine ers, But the lucky ones were the forty eight ers. The forty eight ers got all
the gold. The forty nine they were late. We're a little late.
So these folks were hopeful forty eight ers.
Yeah, so these guys, uh, the dinner party, they're coming over in eighteen forty six. And the way these emigrant trains worked, as I learned through this project, is like they're they're like there's a fluidity to how these groups come together. You know, there's a kind of rough timeline. Like if you're going to cross the Great Plains, across the Rockies and across the Sierra Nevada, it's like you gotta get going as early in the spring as you can to have the maxim amount of time so you
can cross the continent and get there before snow. But you can't leave until the ground dries out. So it's hard to get going in March because you're gonna encounter flood swollen rivers. Right, there's mud everywhere, so you gotta be like, shit's got to dry out, and there's a race. It's like stuff dries out, water levels come down from snow melt, and all of a sudden, it's a good time to go, and then you haul ass. And then on the other end, you're bracketed in by the coming
of bad weather. So there's like you pick your window and and groups come together and they meet in these certain spots and uh, what was the big town everybody took off? These guys all took out of us, not Springfield, Springfield, Missouri. Yeah, what's that independence? Yes, I think that's it where they took off from. Anyways, you come together and you form your your parties come together in family groups. Family groups form up, right, so you when you cross in a
wagon train, you might be with your extended family. It's it's you, you know, it's your brother, it's your brother's wife and kids, it's your mom and dad, it's your uncle and his family. But then you you join up with all these other family units. So you're in a party, but you're loosely bound.
Family units and bachelors and you know, all all kinds of different.
Things and guides and hopefully a guide it's been there before, and there's like, uh, you're literally taking votes to to to put forward like a leader. So when we say the Donner Party, you know, winds up being it winds up being ninety some individuals of like two primary clans, but then a bunch of other people kind of surrounding these clans. And they get all the way out to uh, they get all the way out to Fort Bridger, and they are fed some bad information about a thing called
Hastings cut off. It's super funny about Hastings cut off, as it was billed to them as shorter and easier. Okay, this is this is the great part of this. It's way harder and now that you can like measure stuff accurately, it's not stronger Hastings cut off, which is shorter and easier. It's longer and harder.
Pretty rare in the world of cutoffs.
It's like a shitty long cut. Yeah, and they have a lot of an internal division. Donner's wife, for instance, is like I don't think we should do it. But this is crazy because Jim Bridger gets rolled up in this whole thing. Jim Bridger. He all these wagon trains are taking a route that's causing them to bypass Fort Bridger. Bridger who's already a compromised individual in some ways because famously it was Jim Bridger who abandoned Hugh Glass and
the whole Revenant incident. Right, so Bridger is or isn't, like the world's greatest guy. Bridger is like, shit, now no one goes by my fort anymore. And he's like, Hastings cut Off sounds great. It goes right past my fort. You guys should definitely take Hastings cut Off and stop by well trade, I'll sell you some shit. And they do this and uh and when they leave on Hastings
cut Off, here's the crazy part. So like other wagon trains at the time they go south on Hastings cut Off, which is going to go over the wall Satch Range and then through Dinner Pass. Well it joins back up before Donner Pass. Anyways, when they there's other wagon chains that they're with, the wagon chains they're with that don't take Hastings cut off, make it to California just fine
going over Donner Pass. So they do this south loop and it sets them back so far and encounter so many weird problems that they wind up behind other parties when they go up Donner Pass. So they're not pioneering Donner Pass. Donner Pass has successfully been used.
Been used in years prior.
Yeah. Yeah, and they start up in the snow and they get uh the.
They well, it's it's like important to note to you. It's not that they actually don't arrive at the bottom of Dinner Donner Pass particularly late, despite all of their problems. It's it's the end of October.
Yeah, it's an early storm.
Right, parties had crossed as late as December.
And yeah, you're in years past. I forgot that detail. Yeah, that's anar thing. Is like, that's a great point because you also start there's this kind of narrative that they were like I was just laying out like stupid to go up there. Yeah, they were late, they were late, but it had been done. They were late, but it had been done. But then they got up in the mountains in a situation where it was just insane snow. It was an abnormal snow year. Yeah, and they lingered,
they got up there. It was an early snowstorm. Perhaps they could have backed out, but they felt that they would get a thaw. Right, what are the odds that's going to keep happening? Right all the time, like living in the Northern Rockies, you know, also in October, like what big old storm, and then like a month later, it's like seventy degrees and you're like hunting in your t shirt and you're like, God, it isn't that weird. It was like, you know, two feet of snow here
a couple of weeks ago. They thought it'd be that, but it just got worse, deeper, worse, deeper, and they lingered too long, and then it became impossible to back out.
And when you talk about worse and deeper, like the numbers are astounding, like the amount of snowfall in that area, they'll get sixty feet a snowfall in Donner Pass.
They're climbing, they make these all these little shelters. We'll talk about those in a minute. They're getting to where they're climbing tunnels up out of their shelters. You climb out and pop out on the surface and they're cutting wood. There's pictures later where there it be a dude standing on dry ground. Yeah, and way up above his head is a cut off tree, Yeah, thirty feet and he realized that's where they were cutting wood, walking around on
top of all that snow. But here's where all this whole Donner party shit changes for me, is it's ninety people over half a little kids. You never think about that, yeh, No one ever thinks about it's little kids.
Yeah, And.
Like, statistically the little kids were more likely to survive, and also statistically parents of little kids were more likely to.
Survive, and statistically women were more likely to.
Survive, more likely to survive.
That the people who did who fared the worst were unattached bachelors.
Yeah, a handful of reasons, like supposed reasons why they were already working their.
Ass saatigued from the trip out that far that.
They were assuming all this work, doing all this stuff, so they're going into it very lean. Meanwhile, people who had been able to ride in the wagons weren't as physically depleted. There's also like a little bit of a psychological element there winds up being this group decides eventually to make a break for it, and it's called the Forlorn Hope Party. And they make a break for it in the California direction. They're going to cross Dinner paths.
They're almost to the top of Donner Pass. They're going to cross the pass and go for it on foot. Yeah, on foot. They make no issues. They think they'll do They think they'll be there in some number of days. It takes weeks. Of the people that left on that Forlorn Hope Party, parents lived, people with, people with relatives
at the camp. Yeah, other people just are like fuck it and just died, you know, because they probably got where there was no point, you know, And there is cannibalism, but it's like, you know, these people were condemned for a long time for it, but when you start looking at it, was like you start getting it. Like they did everything they could possibly do, everything they could possibly do to keep their families alive. And I don't think anyone would do anything differently.
I think the only thing that would be done differently in a modern context, and I mean this in all seriousness, is that cannibalism would have started much earlier. I think that you're talking about a time when people are you know, we talk about in Roanoke like the last thing to go,
or religious practices. These are peopleeople who are highly religious and highly driven to live by that code, and that code is very specific about eating other folks, you know, and they hold on for what would seem like forever, just a torturous amount of time of starving to death, trying to scrape food together in any way they can before they before they start eating people.
Yeah, there's one dark element to it. They it seems like no one really knows all the details. But if you look at all the journals and evidence and all that, it seems like cannibalism with one exception. Cannibalism was limited to people eating people who had starve to death. Okay, they're eating people would starve to death. But there's a guy in the dinner party who's kind of like, throughout the whole story kind of emerges as a real asshole.
He murders two Native American guides that they have. But at that time that was not illegal. It would have been illegal to shoot someone's cow, it was not illegal to murder two Native Americans. He outright murders two Native Americans to eat them, and then later everybody knows that he did. He just lives his life.
Yeah, not picked up.
They talked about doing something. No one ever did anything to that dude. And there's also all these other crazy stories, like one of the search parties, as it's told, like it was quite a sight when search parties started to come. But when search parties came, they had to kind of ferry them out. Like a search party shows up and they can only take a handful of people, so they're like, okay, everybody wait here. They take a handful of people to California.
Come back one time. They come back and as the story goes, here's a guy holding walking along with a human leg and sees the search party people and has the wherewithal to throw it down in the snow. My dog tries that trick, like you got busted. We met with an archaeologists that dug one of the camps. They were at two different camp two primary camp locations, and they dug one of the camps and found the remains
of all kinds of stuff that they were they were eating. Uh. At one point early on, they killed a bear, they killed a grizzly early on, they killed dogs, They had oxen they killed.
They had lots of small games, deer.
Rodents and stuff they were killing, and they were they One of the things they were doing is they were eating animal hide. So early on they had no way to feed their oxen, so they were killing the oxen and just eating the meat. And then later they started revisiting it and they started eating the bones. But when they killed them, they used the hides to help them make roofs and doors on structures. They were making like
ten like structures with hides. We made one of these structures with this rotten ass cow hide, uh, and slept in there. It was one of the worst smelling rotting cowhide, and we use it for a shelter. It was a great shelter. I mean, you could keep a lot of warmth in that thing with a fire, like you could make a warm in air. But stank. We got like a little chimney and stuff coming out there. Uh So how was I getting in with that?
We were talking about the animals that they.
They started eating the hides, and then they started boiling the bones and crushing the bones and boiling and eating the bones. And there's a thing I read after the fact that I really wish I had read before we did it. A guy happens to give me. One of our podcast guests, Randy Brown, gives me a book called Death on the Barren Ground, and it's this journal of of It's a journal of one guy who was in a party of three people and they all starved death.
The youngest guy lives longest, and he keeps a meticulous journal chronicling the starvation death of his two companions and then chronicling his own death of starvation. Okay, and they all die in the nineteen twenties in the Canadian Arctic
along the Thelon River. It's so crazy because they wind up eating that exact same diet they had been trapping, so they had wolverines and stuff, and they're eating wolverine hides, weasel hides that they had built up before they started to starve to death, and they're eating bones and what's killing them Like they're dying of starvation, yes, but what's really killing them is these terrible bottle obstructions because they're
eating that boiled, crushed bone. In the absence of other stuff, they're trying to build makeshift enema devices and they're literally digging out of each other's rectums, dried gobs of crushed bone and like that are forming in of these gelatinous balls from that boiled animal hide. And then the hair follicles, because you're eating, you're scraping the hair away, but there's all that hair follicle, and that hair follicle is joining
up into balls of hair. When they find these guys' bodies a couple of years later, the Royal Mounted Police do like a report. They are nothing but skeletons, but there's still what he describes as a plate of excrement in the cabin of this bone ball.
Concrete.
Yeah, they talk about And so we met with an archaeologist who worked on this bone project. And then I later was like after we met, after we got done film in our episode, I sent her, I was like, hey, for your work. Here's this great journal of like what happens when you eat these diets, and like that's what killing that's what's killing those guys, these guys, these Canadian
Arctic guys, what's killing them? They would have died anyway, But what's like the immediate biggest problem them is that that the bowel obstruction and digestive problems of eating, like non edible. Yeah, needing eating non digestible stuff in a state of desperation.
Yeah, they talk about, you know, in in dinner, they talk about boiling those bones so many times boiling and reboiling that they get something called pop polish, which is like they basically turned to porcelain in that pot as they try to extract whatever nutrients they can out of out of what's left of the bone.
We boiled up some raw hide. Yeah, and its like you can make it pretty edible, man, when you boil it. Actually it's actually not that. It's like, why is it being like quite flavorless and has a most out of umi.
More of the broth that that wasn't the rotten that.
We talked about.
It safe for consumption.
Yeah, we had had. We had a handful.
If you're starving out there, you need it.
Yeah. We did some snow shoes. They made snow shoes. We mocked up some snow shoes. We worked with the guy that spent some time, spent a lot of time hiking the path.
You know.
But uh yeah, man, being in the dinner pass, you're like there eight, I can tell you one thing ain't ship to eat here.
We tried to hunt like you know, squirrels, small game. You end up like in an hour, you burn more calories than you could possibly hunt, you know, for the whole day.
It's just like it's just it's like it's a subalpine.
It's like like it's rocket.
Yeah, it's it's not like that. It's but it's i mean, at a certain point it's like almost like what's the difference.
Yeah, it's like it's subalpine. It's like fifty percent of every surface is rock and you got little like dwarfed up spruce and fur and there's some there's some pond of roses here and there, but it's just like a very poor ground. And you talk to guys there, like we talked the hunters there, and hunters are like, dude, the first whiff of snow, yeah, everything they do not.
Snowf on the country.
Yeah. Yeah, they're like you come up in the summer, but they're gone, they're gone early. Yeah, you know, this is nothing. There's nothing. I mean they killed like a like a some crows whatever here and there.
Yeah, but again nothing nothing that was enough to replace the calories they were burning on it. So it's a it's what was fascinating to me about that story is like you go in, you know, and I think this is like throughout the series, you go in like with one concept. Yeah, you're like dinner party, you know, cannibals, like I get it, Like you don't get it at all.
And you when you when you do the research, and in conjunction with doing the research, spend time in the place trying to do the things that they have done, you have a completely new perspective on it. And so you go into the story being like, Wow, what a bunch of like fools that ended up eating each other in the mountains, And you come out of it being like, well, what a bunch of heroes. Yeah, you know, this is the level of heroics that went into saving those kids.
There's a great story about one of the women who stayed back at h at one of the two sites, which was Donner Lake. Is right at the at the end of Donner Lake, she's basically responsible for all these kids. You know, she delivers as the story goes, she delivers the last kid to that rescue party and then just leans up against the cabin wall and and dies, you know.
And it's and it's the story is like full of these little, these little sub stories like that that that just I find like incredibly moving and like a total rewrite of what I understood of of that history.
Now, I kept vowing that I was gonna stop making any and all Donner jokes, Donner Family, Christmas, Donner Dinner Party. No I stuck to it. Now, you know, we were joking like, did you know that Saddam Hussein has books of poetry? So just like you could say, like, you know, the poet Saddam Hussein. No one says that, right, he has a novel, so you can say the poet novelist Saddam Hussein. You'd never say that. So now when someone say from now on, I might actually yeah, when we
overthrew the poet novelist Saddam Hussein. Uh So, now you know you'd be like Donner Party. You know, I'm gonna start doing something similar, but the opposite. I'm gonna say, oh, the heroes the Donner Party. Yeah, I'm not gonna say, oh, dirty cannibals. I'm gonna say, you know, the heroes the Dinner Party saved all those kids, saved all those children, wonderful story of hope.
You know, one of our finest moments.
There's an half of them died, half of them.
Lived, almost half of them died, more than half of them lived. And the other little sub note, And you don't make this the last thing on this, but like I love the fact that his name the Donner, you know, the Donner Party and Donner Pass, and we know it as the Donners when you get into history. George Donner stopped because he had he had wounded his hand trying to trying to build a wagon wheel. He cut his hand, and uh, and it was festering, so he stopped six
miles short. George Donner after which the entire fiasco is named, never even saw the pass. YEA.
He died of an infection. He got a somewhat superficial caught on his hand. He thought he'd be fine. Dies of an infection, that's great, and never lay his eyes on the pass. Gets rich and there's there's a lot, I mean, there's so much more like they had. You know, they had gotten into an internal fight on the way and had like a fatality from internal squabbling, and they the I believe it was the Piute as they were approaching the past, the Piute in Nevada where really whittling
the way on their livestock. They had all these all these normal problems, should say no, yeah, yeah, all the problems typical of people trying to cross right. They weren't. They weren't like exceptional in any way. And then then doing during the gold Rush, people resumed flooding over that thing, man flooding over that past. And now you're standing there and there's like the highway doesn't go that way, there's a highway that goes over it. There's another highway over it.
And you standing look and be like, who in the hell would think you could get a wagon through here?
Yeah, I feel like I've seen the signs.
It is a wicked it's unreal pass.
It's unreal. I mean they they took the wagons apart and block and tackle pulled them up, the pulled them up those cliffs. And now it's like, you know, you're within earshot of people going eighty five miles an hour on a freeway.
That's just so funny, just driving in to do our work, driving into film, Like I get into the airport, find arena, Yeah, find arena and start driving up the highway and you get to a sign and it says like Sacramento seventy two miles.
Yeah, like what fuck?
Yeah, better make a reservation. What's exactly problem?
Af chang there?
Yeah, seeing that signe it'd be like in your mind like, oh shitting hour will be there. Yeah, we'll be over the mountains and out the other side and down in the valley of the hour. You know, imagine the ship that like what that seventy two miles meant? Back then? It's so funny you're on that highway. Also, I had this like deflated feeling. I'm like, oh, cool story, what pansies? Anybody could make it over there? Watch over there in an hour? Man. That was great. So that that's we covered three.
Yeah, yeah, there's five more.
So. We did one on the oldest shipwreck in the Great Lakes, the first ship to sail the Upper Great.
Lakes, another fascinating story.
We did one on the mysteries of the first Americans. We did one on we should have got well, we should have got into cattle mutilations.
Cattle mutilations is a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun too, because like that. There's another one where I like, I know I went in with one perspective, it was like bullshit, like you walk away man, Like oh oh boy, yeah.
Yeah, you know, I was thinking about if we wanted to do a podcast on cattle mutilations. I can't think of which one of the people we talked to be best to have on. Oh all good. We had to get a cam, a panel.
Enough here for most of the people in the Yeah.
True.
I don't know if you can.
Say community, but uh what else we got?
Man, it's a big community. I mean, there's a lot of people out there that have had these experiences.
Here's one for people. We did one. We did one on a thing now known as the Alaska Triangle, which is a portion of Alaska that some argue has like this insane rate of disappearances aircraft, missing people, ships. But we we examined it through the lens of a particular flight called the Beggage Bogs flight again from the seventies, where the speaker of the house Hailbogs. Who if you're an NPR fan, the journalist Koki Roberts who recently passed away,
Kochi Roberts. Have you ever listened to NPR news and you heard the journalist Cookie Roberts her father was Hailbogs. He was the Speaker of the House. Alaska had one Congressman, Nick Beggage, and the speed of the house. So like the Speaker of the House, who's it now, Johnson uh Baggage and Bogs? Or on a plane with a congressional aid in a pilot and the plane goes missing and is still missing today has never been found. Most of
the search area focused around. The search area for long time focused around a glacier that they thought perhaps it had gone into a glacier, and you'd be like, what do you mean by that? But we went to in doing it, we went to a place where a plane, a much bigger plane with many many more passengers, did get eaten by a glacier and then many years later regurgitated at the toe of the glacier.
It's absolutely fascinating. They crashed this, this globe master, you know, big prop plane, military transport members on it, on top of this mountain. It falls into a crevass, snowed over, and seventy years later, this massive glacier, colony glacier spits it out the bottom just as just piece shredded pieces of metal.
Every year the military every summer, the military goes and they scoured the tour of that glacier and there's still identifying it would be just finger bones, and there's still identifying service members. And when we went, we flew over in a helicopter. We didn't want to land there because it's like, oh you know, it's almost like a gravesite. We flew over after it did this summer's work and
there's orange spray paint circles. Wow, all along that glaciers, not all on, but through good chunk of that there's like orange spray paint markers and arrows and circles where they were recovering debris. The engines came out in big pieces, but a lot of it's just it's just like it pulled, it pulled, rides it to gravel.
Yeah, so you know, just a massive garbageposal and you think what it does to mountains. Yeah, yeah, there's this a little plain man made a small aircraft.
But what's crazy is what's crazy is on this one, the baggage Bog's flight, the glacier they were looking at. They spent a lot of time on this glacier. The glaciers receded so much and it's been so long that when you look at the rate of flow of the glacier, you can now rule out that it was in that glacier, because it was in that glacier to spit it out by now, but except the bottom of it.
So this is this is what like, and this is what's so cool is each one, each little facet of each one of these mysteries has all these permutations, all these possibilities. Like what's cool about that is that glacier as as it as it, you know, kind of came down the mountain and into the basin, dug out a lake that's eight hundred feet deep, dude, just.
Like you can paddle a canoe crosses like some bitches, eight hundred.
Feet eight ft pep.
It's in one edge of it is just a wall of ice. So yeah, it could have spat it out into eight hundred feet of water and a little crumpled up pieces. My guess to spoiler alert, I think it's a Prince William sound, yeah, which is deeper, yeah, and muckier and way bigger. Yeah, I think it's a Prince William sound. And I'm not like out on a limb when I say that, But Uh, they focus very heavily in one pass and one glacier at first and this doue.
This pass we go through it with a plane. There's a pass where you're like going it's like the worst pass in the world, like you know, a passion everything like a straight thing. It's a pass where you like when you're the worst part of the past, you gotta take a forty five. You gotta not sorry, you gotta take a ninety degree turn. So you're going like sharp left, sharp right, get out there into a head wall and it's takes incredible you fly.
To the end of this this you know of turning and arm right, this massive kind of valley. It's first at first a body of water and then this valley Portage pass and then and then Portage glacier and Portish Lake who we were talking about. And as you get to the very end of it, you make a ninety degree turn and only then can you see whether or not the pass is open. And if it's you.
Gotta check for oncoming aircraft too, Yeah, And if it's not open, you just got to keep turning and and and do a one eighty and.
Go right back to anchorage.
When we're sitting there. In the past. We hiked up in the past and we went down this lake. We're sitting there. After a while, we watched a plane. He gets up there, comes back, comes back and his head's back to anchorage. He's like, Nope, not today, closed up that day the sketchy pass. Yeah, but yeah, man, on the what date? Yeah, January twenty eighth, if you want to watch the show.
If people are listening to this, the day it drops it is the twentieth, So it'll be weekend a day from now, the twenty eighth.
Yeah, molds gonna do credits.
It wasn't quite the it wasn't quite the setup. I was like, I was like kind of hintings, like, let's kind of steer the last part of.
The contents poved in this and I'm not listening. I want to say for you, I want to still yeah Mo, and I'm joking yeah, talk about who, talk about who he worked with.
I mean it is again as we talked about it, like the beginning of the show, I'll try to make a seguay. Now you're not going to do the work. As we talked about the beginning of the show, it's like there's a lot that goes into these shows. This is not just like it's like, oh, you got to show greenlit, you go out and make it. This is years and years of like grinding in what's called the
development process. You take a show concept and you develop a deck on it, and you pitch it to various networks and and so I like, it's we got to give credit to the people who did that work. It's the hardest part of making TV.
Like going way back would be the constant attention of Ben Ford and Mark Pierce.
Exactly ben Ford, Mark Pierce, Bridger Pierce, Chris Richardson and all the people over at Warm Springs who really like shepherded this project from concept to like something that actually has funding and you're gonna go.
Out And on my end, it was my wife Katie. Yeah, that's right, drove it on my end for a long time.
So I also I need to thak because she's the one that called me.
I's like, God, don't call.
You know. So you have this tremendous group of people here that we got to partner with and work with and like the part that we do, like that's the that's the fun part. And got on the field and hang out and go to the cabin and you know, get to do all the fun stuff fly around on you know, glaciers and and all that. But on the other side, when we talk about the network, like, what was really great about this experience in this show is like we had a tremendous team at the network too.
I've had a lot of network experiences. It often is the case that you're getting network notes that are like, don't like this, don't like this, don't like this. It don't like provide any constructive path forward. What's really unique here is working with like Max Mcaliffe, Mary Donahue, Alexander Hicks, Eli Lair. Their notes are their notes are very, very pointed and very constructive, and it's a huge part of
what has made this show successful. So I've never worked for this network before, you know, and instead of coming in and having to like just operate in the blind and figure things out, this is like incredibly you know response of an adept team that's got a blueprint for how you make these you know, these shows. And it was a real, like real learning experience for me telling these kinds of narratives.
That's great, man.
So it was all around. It's just been It's been an awesome experience. I hope we get renewed and you can do it again.
It comes out the show's hunting History comes out on History Channel ten pm Eastern. I could do the math all across the whole country, nine Central, What happens eight miles Mountain, seven dollars.
Ten o'clock in the Lost Colony.
Five or something like that. You figured it out, You'll figured it out Alaska on the History Channel, and it follows the show. That was funny is a lot of most people we talked to when we're working on our show and we talked about working with History Channel, they bring up how they can't. They don't like to miss Curse of Oak Island. So it's right after curseve oak Island on his channel premiere January twenty eight. Then you can watch for eight weeks.
Yeah, next year we'll make eight more.
You'll watch the whole thing and never get to ce Mo. So you have to watch here if you want to see Mo, check him out. I trust that Moe was there.
It's actually technically not true. I'm really I'm really bothered by one shot in uh Alaska Triangle where I'm like I'm in this sweatshirt. I'm trying to I don't know if I can get over my headphones, so I'm trying to trying to hide in the back of the helicopter like this as we're had a cameo.
Yeah, that's cool.
And you can see. Man, it's just like, who is that. There's a weird dude in the helicopter.
Your lives are at risk. There's a skyjacker. He's gonna joke. Thanks everybody for tuning in man, and I hope you check out the show, and I hope you have as much fun watching as we had putting it together. Thank you and thanks, thank you,