Ep: 652: Hunting History

Steven Rinella https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork talks with Morgan Fallon https://www.instagram.com/fallon.morgan/, Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/, and Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en. "Hunting History with Steven Rinella" premiers on the History Channel https://play.history.com/shows/hunting-history-with-steven-rinella/season-1/episode-1/preview-hunting-history-with-steven-rinella on Tues., Jan. 28th at 10/9c and streams the next day. Topics discussed: How Mo's first film work was with "Ali"; years spent on Anthony Bourdain's show; being a gracious guest; Land Cruiser country vs. Land Rover country; multiple wins and nominations for an Emmy; "Hunting History with Steven Rinella" premiers on the History Channel https://play.history.com/shows/hunting-history-with-steven-rinella/season-1/episode-1/preview-hunting-history-with-steven-rinella on Tues., Jan. 28th; all of the unsolved mysteries; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 1:28Steven Rinella?

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• 2:41Speaker 02

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless severely bug bitten and in my case underwearless.

• 2:48Steven Rinella?

  We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F I R S T L I T E dot com.

• 3:13Steven Rinella?

  Joined today by Morgan Fallon and Dr. Randall. Dr. Randall's just here to look good.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:19Steven Rinella?

  If anything comes up that you need to talk about though, raise your hand.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  I'll try to interject with some quips, some observations.

• 3:26Steven Rinella?

  Please. Mo Fallon, man, uh, gosh, uh, I'm trying to think of where to begin.

• 3:34Steven Rinella?

  Well, Mo Fallon was the original, so a billion years ago, Mo, um, I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna help you with your bio, then you fill it in.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Go for it.

• 3:46Steven Rinella?

  No, how does it, okay. Mo's a longtime producer cinematographer. If you've seen the movie, um, I know this, when you were a youngster.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:55Steven Rinella?

  You worked on the movie Ali, Michael Mann's Ali.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. I was Michael Mann's assistant on Ali.

• 4:01Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, right out of film school.

• 4:03Steven Rinella?

  Mo filmed a million episodes of Biggest Loser.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Yes, 96 episodes.

• 4:09Steven Rinella?

  Mo, um, I did a show many years ago on Travel Channel. Mo filmed all of that.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:16Steven Rinella?

  Mo filmed all of the first Meat Eaters.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:20Steven Rinella?

  A bunch.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:22Steven Rinella?

  Traveled all over hell.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  First three years.

• 4:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Mo made, Mo made Meat Eater look like what Meat Eater looks like.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I mean.

• 4:30Steven Rinella?

  Well, you designed the look of the show. Yeah. We had a good chance. A handful of us did, but you like put, you made the look.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  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. Yeah.

• 4:43Steven Rinella?

  And at that time, you were already doing, were you already working on Bourdain at that time?

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, uh, I started working with Bourdain in 2008. So it predated when we met. Um, but that was the reason I was able to meet you was because I had done that and, uh, that had gone pretty well. And so 0.0, the company that produced, uh, Bourdain, they called me when they hooked up with you.

• 5:09Steven Rinella?

  God. Talk about, uh, tell everybody about, just tell the whole story of, of the years you spent on the Bourdain show.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  The whole story?

• 5:20Steven Rinella?

  I mean, like, I don't know. Give me like 10 minutes worth, man.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  10 minutes. Cool. Yeah. Um.

• 5:25Steven Rinella?

  I mean, what a, why, I like what, cause 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 sort of like reunited on our new project. But I mean, you had like, you lived like a whole, you lived a whole lifetime.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. It, I mean, yeah, it gets into all kinds of complicated stuff, man, because like, I mean, I'll start at the beginning. I, I got called randomly, um, by a, by a friend of mine who's the chief cinematographer, one of the two, two chief cinematographers for Bourdain, 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?

• 6:12Steven Rinella?

  That was your in?

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:13Steven Rinella?

  A cancellation?

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:14Steven Rinella?

  Pine titty.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  They're like, do you have a, well, that's a tough show to get on.

• 6:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, sure, dude.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  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? Like, and I was like, a hundred percent, I can go. And, and I went, and it went really well with Tony, which is, which is rare, you know? Like, it's, he's like a very kind of particular person. There 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.

• 7:07Steven Rinella?

  So he was sensitive to how, he was sensitive to how you guys behaved to the people you were around?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  I, I think that was actually like the number one criteria, man. But it, but if you think about it, it sets the tone for the whole show. The show is not us sitting, you know, 5,000 miles away in 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 show was like, we are gonna go here and we're gonna figure out what the story is of these people's lives. And they're the ones that are gonna tell us, you know?

• 7:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  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?

• 7:56Steven Rinella?

  Yep, yep.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  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, and worked. Well, I, I got that call, I, I did the show, went really well. Um, I think he particularly liked me because I was willing to risk my physical well being and or life for a shot, you know? Uh, at the time I was young and, uh, and didn't have kids. So I was able to make a lot of stupid decisions I wouldn't make now.

• 8:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you should at some point tell the story about Brazil.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, I mean, that was probably more me overreacting than anything.

• 8:38Steven Rinella?

  What's the example that comes to mind though?

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, that first show, uh, we, we went across the, um, the western desert or a big portion of the western desert in Egypt with, uh, Bedouin, right? And, um, they all uniformly drive these late seventies Land Cruisers, which is a super cool car. Uh, but then this is a weird little footnote. There are some places in the world where you go where they drive Land Rovers and there's some places in the world where you go there, where they drive Land Cruisers, you know? And, and

• 9:06Steven Rinella?

  That's the world in a nutshell.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  A lot of the world can be

• 9:09Steven Rinella?

  You guys figured that out?

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Two automotive choices, right? There are Land Cruiser country and, um,

• 9:16Speaker 03

  and I, we, I had no idea what we were doing. I'd never been on the show. It's like my third day on the show. I'd never been, you know, worked on the show before. Um, we're driving out into the desert and I was like, well, I'll hop on the top of the car and, you know, shoot shots of the cars, you know,

• 9:34Speaker 03

  slowly picking their way through the dunes. And, you know, like five minutes later, we're going 85 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,

• 9:57Speaker 03

  anyways, I'm like holding on to 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 sized hematoma, you know, on my arm.

• 10:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  And Tony saw it and that was it, man. It was like, it was like, started talking to me. He started asking me questions. Looked at me, you know, all 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.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  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 Chris 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?

• 11:00Steven Rinella?

  A pigeon.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Pigeon, sorry. You grab, 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, I like, I felt like it immediately clicked. I was like, oh yeah, that's like, that's super cinematic, super dynamic. It's 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.

• 11:36Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  And it was like, I, I, I think we met in like a outback 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.

• 11:50Steven Rinella?

  That was the Muskegon River Marsh.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 11:53Steven Rinella?

  And Muskegon, that's, that's the county I grew up in, Michigan. Muskegon, um, I should go fact check this. I've heard it my whole life, so I'm gonna trust that it's true. Muskegon means, it's, it's a native word that means big swamp.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 12:08Steven Rinella?

  Well, I hope.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 12:09Steven Rinella?

  That's, well, you know, I can say this, I can say that's what they told me. They told me that.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  But the thing, but you know, I, I, the important thing about that, and the, the reason I remember that moment so well is 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. Cause you wanted to make TV that was about like ideas, you know? Um, 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.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  It's from an Algonquin word meaning marshy river.

• 12:49Steven Rinella?

  That's a Phil, close enough.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Very accurate description.

• 12:52Steven Rinella?

  A little shit like Phil could get his paycheck just for doing a little shit like that. Just saving the day. Tell me again what it means, Phil?

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Uh, it's an Algonquin word meaning marshy river.

• 13:04Steven Rinella?

  God, that's exactly what it is, too.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. I wonder where they got it.

• 13:11Steven Rinella?

  Never thought to look that up. Good job, Phil.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, anytime. Yeah, they really had things figured out.

• 13:16Steven Rinella?

  Saying it meant big swamp.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  And you would have been right, sort of.

• 13:21Steven Rinella?

  Do I want to tell the? No, I'm not going to tell the joke growing up what it meant.

• 13:27Steven Rinella?

  You were through everything we've talked about so far. You were a camera guy.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 13:33Steven Rinella?

  And you like, you don't, for listeners, Mo is the most, most kind of bashful and modest. Mo, you were an exceptional camera guy.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, at this, at this particular little niche of this world, yeah, yeah, very much so.

• 13:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Mo was an exceptional cameraman, was, I'm combining nominated and Emmy, but I should just say nominated for Emmy. Did you ever win an Emmy? Did you win one?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  I've got, yeah, I've got two in two different categories and 10 nominations.

• 14:07Steven Rinella?

  Jeez. What'd you get the two in?

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Got one for cinematography and one for producing.

• 14:13Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I knew you were nominated, but I guess I spaced the fact that you won one.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I sat through a lot of long ceremonies without one.

• 14:23Steven Rinella?

  So you get to the end of your life, is it over?

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Four and a half hours of my life.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  I think the best example of that is when we got nominated up against Free Solo. And so we went and we're sitting next to, you know, we're sitting next to them and, and the whole time just being like, I mean, there's, yeah, it's just like.

• 14:44Steven Rinella?

  You knew how that was going to play out.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I mean, it's like taking a canoe out against like the USS Lincoln.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  You could paddle a good canoe, man, but there's only so much you can do.

• 14:58Steven Rinella?

  You, and then you moved out of that eventually, got into producing.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:03Steven Rinella?

  And then produced like a bunch of episodes.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:07Steven Rinella?

  For Bourdain.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  That was kind of twofold, you know, I, like, I came up always in camera.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Not a normal film for cool shit happening backstage. It's like you're hanging out at the gym with like Ali and 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, um, it never required, cameras never required any real training or effort. I picked them up and I just inherently understood everything I needed to understand to be an exceptional camera operator. And it just clicked for me, you know, and the 96 episodes of Biggest Loser, it's funny

• 16:08Speaker 03

  now, but that show shot me to, taught me to shoot, you know, it's like you're 10 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, yeah, at that time in my life, it was like total athlete and a badass. Not anymore at all.

• 16:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, you should, you know, you should tell people about, cause it's interesting about you is, uh, Mo, your, your folks taught at a boarding school.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 16:56Steven Rinella?

  And then you went to the boarding school.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  I did.

• 16:58Steven Rinella?

  So you were like a townie.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:00Steven Rinella?

  And a student.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. If you know what I mean.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do. I totally know what you mean. And for anyone.

• 17:07Steven Rinella?

  I mean, I don't mean you, I mean folks.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 17:09Steven Rinella?

  Like a town, you were a townie student.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Right. For anyone who grew up in a, in a town with a boarding school, you'll understand the dynamics, especially in East Coast boarding school.

• 17:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  It's it's an interest. It is an interesting dynamic. I got the worst of both worlds.

• 17:27Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I thought you maybe bet. I think I got the best of both worlds.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  I didn't get the best of both worlds.

• 17:32Steven Rinella?

  The townies hated you and the students hated you.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  That's right. To the townies, I was, I was like, you know, I was like a stuffy prep schooler. Yeah. And to the, you know, to the, the students, I was like a faculty brat townie, you know? I didn't real. And so I 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,

• 18:10Speaker 03

  you know, choose from the flock of, of, uh, of, of all these, you know, really beautiful, blue blooded, you know? Prep school girls.

• 18:22Steven Rinella?

  Got you. I got you.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  That, that it ended up working out pretty well in the end.

• 18:27Steven Rinella?

  And this is in New Hampshire?

• 18:28Speaker 03

  It's in New Hampshire. Yeah.

• 18:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Did you grow up around Ken Burns, like in his zone?

• 18:33Speaker 03

  No, I mean, well, if you grow up in New Hampshire, you grow up around everyone else who's in New Hampshire, you know? Uh, just by proximity, you know, the size of the state. So he was about an hour away.

• 18:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And what was that lake you guys were on?

• 18:46Speaker 03

  We're on Winnipeg. Yeah. It was great lake. Beautiful. Stunning.

• 18:50Steven Rinella?

  How was, uh, when you, when you got out of being a camera guy?

• 18:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:55Steven Rinella?

  And you, you, you moved into producing? How did you ever get over the feeling of wanting to yank the cameras away from the camera guys?

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, it was really hard for a long time. And, um, created quite a fair amount of conflict with camera.

• 19:11Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  With cinematographers on set.

• 19:14Steven Rinella?

  Uh, give me that thing.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I was a lot fiery, you know, a lot more fiery then at that point in my life. 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.

• 19:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 19:56Steven Rinella?

  In, in total, how many years did you spend working on, on the various Bourdain properties?

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Ten, uh, ten years with Tony. It's like, it comes out to like 75 shows or something, um, that were, that are either produced or shot, um, 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.

• 20:23Steven Rinella?

  And then that shit was just all of a sudden, uh, just over.

• 20:29Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you know, we've talked about it a little bit, but, um, if you wouldn't mind, just kind of giving people an idea of what, you know, the, the degree to which any job for 10 years, but not only, you know, any job you have for 10 years and so abruptly and so tragically, but the way it was, um, the way that kind of work really created a, um, it created like a complete lifestyle.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, yeah, a lifestyle that was like, I mean incredibly awesome. At times and in certain ways, not super healthy.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  And, um, and it, I don't, you know, 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, I, 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 of anecdotes and this and that. But you, you can't really ever, you can't really, I, I can't really ever articulate the full experience. I I try to tell people this thing that I 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?

• 21:52Speaker 03

  The the 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 in the Shire and everyone's carrying on around them. And they just kind of sit there in silence and look at each other and and I guess that's how I feel about it. There'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

• 22:37Speaker 03

  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 I think I 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, it it there's a kind of discomfort. You know, I I I believe we went through very similar things, you know, on the on Meat

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Eater and on Wild with Him before that, where as we tried to figure things out, um, how do you really, how do you really explain, you know, those experiences?

• 23:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, at that at that age, you know, at that age in time, it's 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.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Between the two worlds?

• 23:47Steven Rinella?

  No, just going like, I wanted to be home and love being home, but it was, it was the pacing was so different.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  It was super hard.

• 23:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it would become weird.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  It was super hard and for a long time I'd come home and like, you know, my wife would get in fights and there's all kinds of like, and I'm like, oh, it's, you know, eventually you realize it's like, it's all me and what I'm bringing back into the house. I, I, 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. Cause for a long time I'd carry all of that energy back in the house.

• 24:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, years ago, my wife told me, um, just detecting that little bit of, uh, anybody, anybody that travels a lot for work probably understand it, but like coming out of one's pacing, coming out of one thing and then moving into a household, especially with little kids.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:43Steven Rinella?

  Um, and you're with these kind of, uh, you're with like really high performing people and a fast paced

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:50Steven Rinella?

  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, but, but she would say, hey, if you need to, why don't you, when you come home, go stay in a hotel for tonight?

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:05Steven Rinella?

  Then come.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:06Steven Rinella?

  And I, and I, I got the message and I never did that.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 25:11Steven Rinella?

  I think that'd 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.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:16Steven Rinella?

  Like little kids.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:17Steven Rinella?

  You know, 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, um, it's not going to be a big deal when you come home.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:32Steven Rinella?

  Right? It's not going to be like balloons and shit. Right? You're walking into an active environment and you got to get with the program.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Well, you're working, you're, 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, I think it's actually particularly different than, than other kinds of work too. Because you're in such a reactive environment, you're.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  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, and physical, just sheer, 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.

• 26:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, 10 at night, like, let's go get an ice cream.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's hard to code switch.

• 26:36Steven Rinella?

  Nope, not going to get an ice cream.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  It's 10 o'clock. Totally. So, yeah, I mean, that's a big, that's a, that's definitely a big part of it. Big part of it all along in terms of making a, a relationship and like a household work.

• 26:52Steven Rinella?

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. There are a few days every year when big bucks are most likely to get gotten. And knowing that exact time stacks the odds in your favor when you're targeting a big buck.

• 27:33Steven Rinella?

  OnX Hunt's Whitetail Insights tells you what phase of the rut you're in and what tactics actually work for that phase, while the Deer Movement Forecast tells you when deer are most likely to be on their feet. Together, they tell you when to be in the tree and when to go to your kid's game instead. Get the most out of every sit with OnX Hunt. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens

• 28:16Steven Rinella?

  on the floor of your rig. If you got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.

• 28:48Steven Rinella?

  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 Bourdain episode. Because the last one didn't become one, right?

• 29:02Speaker 03

  The last two didn't become one, so.

• 29:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so they didn't finish your Italy one?

• 29:06Speaker 03

  No, no, it was shelved. It was.

• 29:09Steven Rinella?

  But you wrapped the episode.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, we shot the whole thing. It was, it was, it was, it was probably, from a selfish perspective, best episode of TV I ever.

• 29:20Steven Rinella?

  No, I guess it makes sense because all the post-production, everything, and yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Well, it's, we produced shows after Tony had died. Like, I did a show in Marfa in, 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

• 30:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  But it was, I mean, I, again, it was probably the best show. Like, we had, we, we like had the Offizi Gallery shut down. We had it all to ourselves.

• 30:31Steven Rinella?

  I know what that is.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  The Offizi Gallery is one of the most famous museums in the world. It's like, you think of like the very famous Botticelli's, like Primavera and, uh, all of the, those, those paintings are there. It's like the, one of the preeminent museums in Italy and you can, you know, just imagine from there what that means.

• 30:51Steven Rinella?

  They're, they're for the world.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  They're for the world.

• 30:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So he's talking about the, the heart and soul of, you know, Renaissance, uh, uh, artwork is all contained right there. And so, and we had that, we had the place to ourselves.

• 31:05Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  And we went to some crazy places. Standing like, standing at the South Pole was pretty amazing. But standing in the Botticelli wing of, of the Offizi Gallery alone?

• 31:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Like I took a selfie, because no one else there. That's about as rare, unless you wax floors for a living. That's about as rare as it gets, you know? So, and that's what I mean about like this opportunity to see the world in, 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, of society, which I'm not, to be able to-

• 31:44Steven Rinella?

  To do that on your own dime.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  To experience those things. Yeah.

• 31:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, to do it on your dime.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of funding to, to shuttle our asses around the world, you know, and see the things that we got to see. So.

• 31:57Steven Rinella?

  When, when you walked away from that, what did you start doing? I'm kind of getting to the part where, where you and me worked on our new project together, but did you just take some time off?

• 32:05Speaker 03

  When I walked away from that?

• 32:06Steven Rinella?

  No, I mean, not walked away, whatever it ended, you know?

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Uh.

• 32:10Steven Rinella?

  I mean, that was your job, right?

• 32:11Speaker 03

  That was my job. Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's some stuff in the middle there, though, that's like, that we've never talked about. That's like, I mean, 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 it was like a super, super difficult decision because here, like, I didn't create that show. Like, I was a participant in that show, but I didn't create it, like.

• 32:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but ever 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.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  I mean, this is, yeah, but this is where your humility comes into play, man. Like, it was, it's more than that, like.

• 33:01Steven Rinella?

  I remember, no, I remember being, I remember you, like, struggling with it, but to me, it wasn't, you know.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, in the end, like, it's a, it's a decision I had to make, right? Like, again, I knew, 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, I like, I want you to come, like, full time.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  And, and there were a couple, like, career things, like boxes I wanted to check, too, you know? 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 and work, I was, I was stoked. It was great.

• 33:56Steven Rinella?

  No, the timing was, 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 Bourdain for so long.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, cuz I, I had been, I had been with ZPZ on staff for 14 years. Which is still amazing to me. Um, but then, you know, after Tony died, I worked, uh, did another three years with, uh, W Kamau Bell doing, uh, 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, a, a POV on American culture and domestic issues that I, 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 Kamau and, and see things

• 34:53Speaker 03

  from his perspective, which was really profound. Uh, and then, eh, once we wrap that show up, um, with another two Emmy nominations.

• 35:06Steven Rinella?

  No wins though.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  No wins, no wins on that one. Um, I left, I, I left 0.0 and, 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.

• 35:24Steven Rinella?

  No, good. Uh, I'm glad you learned.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  I learned a little bit.

• 35:28Steven Rinella?

  So ju- just for, uh, for listeners, a little bit, um, Mo was talk, when, I probably, I probably explained this for him, sure. Something's in the air and everybody's got like, uh, are you having like a throat problem?

• 35:41Speaker 03

  I've got a little tickle in my throat.

• 35:43Steven Rinella?

  Phil, clear throat.

• 35:44Speaker 05

  Also never been nominated for an Emmy.

• 35:46Steven Rinella?

  No. Phil, or, uh, Randall.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  They don't come together, by the way.

• 35:50Steven Rinella?

  Dr. Randall, I have not been nominated. Um, we got nominated for a James Beard Award, which you didn't get.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  I was, I was, I was.

• 35:58Steven Rinella?

  Did you go to that dinner?

• 35:59Speaker 03

  At that.

• 36:00Steven Rinella?

  Oh, we were at that dinner together?

• 36:01Speaker 03

  No, I wasn't at the dinner. I didn't go to the dinner, but, uh, I remember when we got the nomination. I was super stoked. We were in Mexico when we got that first one. We were, uh, hunting turkeys in Mexico.

• 36:11Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 36:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 36:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, I'm gonna give a brief bit of history here for, for, for folks. Mo knows the story, but Mo's been talking about 0.0 production. So just try to explain a little bit of a. Little show business education. Um, generally like 0.0 production is a television production company. How it generally works in TV production in the old days. Is it the, the production company winds up being like a contractor, building a house. Right?

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:48Steven Rinella?

  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 contractor. 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 property. They might do more houses with you, but that's how it goes. You finish the house, hand it to them. Um, for, for all you folks, I'm sure everyone listening, I'm sure has seen episodes of no reservations and parts unknown. So this company 0.0 production.

• 37:20Steven Rinella?

  Produced all of those shows.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  And, and it's important to note, develop the original concept too.

• 37:25Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Which was Cook's tour.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 37:27Steven Rinella?

  Yep. So if you go way back and I, I like remember, I vividly remember this happening. Is Anthony Bourdain's book, um, Kitchen Confidential. I remember it coming out.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:37Steven Rinella?

  I remember being excerpted in the New Yorker.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:40Steven Rinella?

  And like they took, they, they came in, optioned it, made a deal, started building this whole thing. When we started making Meat Eater with 0.0, um, we built Meat Eater where we just, we owned Meat Eater and just licensed it out.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:55Steven Rinella?

  So in the old days, um, in many, many, many of the first years of Meat Eater, I made Meat Eater as a joint venture. Like we, we were 50 50 business partners and we owned Meat Eater as a joint venture between me and 0.0 production. Later. We had the opportunity, um, I was approached by a company that, that invested in digital media properties. So, um, one you might know is, uh, uh, they were invested in Barstool Sports and kind of were, were a majority owner in Barstool Sports. It was with the guy that had been the chair of News Corp. So Fox News and they had a group called TCG. And we took an investment from TCG to build Meat Eater into a thing.

• 38:38Steven Rinella?

  And then over time, didn't have involvement with 0.0 anymore. And over time, Mo didn't have involvement with 0.0 anymore. This is all a long rambling way of leading into this project that 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 Meat Eater. I started talking to a friend of mine, Mark Pierce, who owns Warm Spring Productions. And some of the guys on his team, 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

• 39:20Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  I mean, you can think of it. I almost asked that a minute ago.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  It's basically like a project manager. You know, so you're you just have oversight over the whole project, tip the toe. Which requires, you know, requires a lot of different kind of skill sets.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  Does that include like creatively, what's an episode, what's not?

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 05

  From that?

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, very much so.

• 40:02Steven Rinella?

  We Mo was originally hired to be a director. And then it moved up to being from a director to moved up to being the showrunner, the kind of like primary driver of all things.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. And still directed the show.

• 40:15Steven Rinella?

  Still directed the show.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  It seems like it should be a more prestigious sounding title.

• 40:20Steven Rinella?

  I know.

• 40:21Speaker 05

  A showrunner to me would be like a, I think of like a bike messenger or something.

• 40:26Steven Rinella?

  It should be.

• 40:26Speaker 05

  Calls to mind a very different set of responsibilities.

• 40:29Steven Rinella?

  I know. It should be seriously rebranded.

• 40:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, showrunner. Like, he's like a dude that runs around.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. The title that people would see on screen is executive producer.

• 40:40Steven Rinella?

  Gotcha. Yeah, but anyone that knows show business knows that can mean a variety of things.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  That's a wide, wide catch-all phrase.

• 40:47Steven Rinella?

  A tip for people watching, for all you people that love watching credits in movies. When you see EP.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:54Steven Rinella?

  Apply like a healthy dose of skepticism. Cause you, a lot of activities can capture you, the EP, a check.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:04Steven Rinella?

  A check can get you EP, or it's that you spent 20 years bleeding for a project.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah.

• 41:11Steven Rinella?

  Put your life savings, mortgaged your house.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:14Steven Rinella?

  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. Um, I can be helpful. And then all of a sudden, there's an EP too. And those two people are like, hold on, you have, you're what I am? You're not what I am.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  And those lists, those lists are getting long. You see shows now, there's like 10 EPs.

• 41:35Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Like, two of those people worked.

• 41:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Everyone else was just attached in some way.

• 41:39Steven Rinella?

  Those people bled.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  That's why in, in, in.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  Well, I guess in all, all productions, so it's not specific to 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.

• 42:00Steven Rinella?

  Oh, got it. Really?

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:01Steven Rinella?

  God, man, I didn't know that, Randall.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Some EPs, you know, some EPs will have it, but producers, that's where it's at.

• 42:08Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so executive is like a downgrade. You just want to be regular producer.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, you want to be on that, you want to be the producer. So usually a one producer.

• 42:17Speaker 05

  Cause I was just thinking, 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.

• 42:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 42:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's too late either way, Randall.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  I do have a checkbook.

• 42:35Steven Rinella?

  When we started, when we started on hunting history, when Mo came in, we had, we didn't have our subjects.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  We had a few of them. They had done development work, you know, leading up to that and, and it developed some good concepts.

• 42:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  So like we ran with a bunch of those.

• 42:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  We certainly weren't going to throw those out.

• 42:53Steven Rinella?

  Let's do it. Should we, should we, should we lay out the mysteries? We like, well, let, let me first lay out the, the, 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 they're, they could be, they could be mysteries that are 40 or 50 years old. Some of them, they could be mysteries that are over 300 years old.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 43:22Steven Rinella?

  So that

• 43:23Speaker 03

  Over many thousands of years old.

• 43:25Steven Rinella?

  Or, or, or millennia old.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:27Steven Rinella?

  You're right. They could be vastly different timeframes.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:31Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:43Steven Rinella?

  They are things that people will have. Hope you're 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.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 43:58Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 43:58Steven Rinella?

  There's like a, oh yeah, I heard of that. Um, they're all things that are still being actively argued about.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 44:08Steven Rinella?

  Oddly, and this surprised me, they're all things that have obsessives.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  Yep. Yeah.

• 44:14Steven Rinella?

  They all have living obsessives.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 44:17Steven Rinella?

  Who have dedicated their life or major portions of their life to push a theory.

• 44:24Steven Rinella?

  And there are usually other obsessives with a different theory.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they're constantly new theories.

• 44:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. Constantly new theories, constantly new theories coming up. Um, and so we found those and, and, uh, to, to give you, we're, we're getting to some of these, but to give you a sense of the range would be, some of the mysteries are like, uh, some of the mysteries are just definitionally a mystery. Meaning, um, in the 1970s, we had, this is kind of blows your mind to, to think this is true. In the 1970s, we had a rash of, uh, global and also national skyjackings.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:06Steven Rinella?

  It seems so hard to picture now in a post nine 11 world.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:11Steven Rinella?

  But there was a legitimate problem with people hijacking airplanes globally and nationally. Um, hijack an airplane, get ransom money, try to get away with the ransom money.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  For, for either economic gain or political.

• 45:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah. It became some like horrific.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Ide- ideological.

• 45:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It became some political.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:32Steven Rinella?

  Um, political hijackings, you know, the, the famous TWA 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 them, uh, only one of these skyjackings remains unsolved.

• 45:50Steven Rinella?

  And it is the story of a guy that identified himself as Dan Cooper. Um, in the early days of the investigation, a journalist misheard a communication between some investigators. Misheard DB Cooper, ran an article, um, using DB Cooper as a suspect name. It was misheard.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:13Steven Rinella?

  DB Cooper did not use DB Cooper, used Dan Cooper.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:16Steven Rinella?

  He's on a plane that takes off out of Portland to Seattle. Um, but what did he buy his ticket for?

• 46:23Speaker 03

  It's like 20 bucks.

• 46:24Steven Rinella?

  So funny. Yeah.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:26Steven Rinella?

  Uh, $20 buys a ticket, gets on, walks in, buys a ticket for 20 bucks, gets on the plane. Um, he's dressed in a suit. He's wearing loafers.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:35Steven Rinella?

  He hands a flight attendant a note, he's, uh, 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.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:46Steven Rinella?

  In twenties.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 46:48Steven Rinella?

  Um, the plane lands at SeaTac.

• 46:52Steven Rinella?

  He lets all the passengers go. He lets, he keeps some hostages on the plane, flight crew.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:59Steven Rinella?

  Lets a flight attendant go. She comes back with a big sack full of all of his twenties. I can't remember, we calculated how many pounds of twenties it was. Not as much as you'd think.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  No, I'm trying to remember, it was like 22 pounds or something.

• 47:12Speaker 05

  Hmm. Shocking.

• 47:14Steven Rinella?

  Asked for four parachutes. This is, this is like some key stuff here. Asked for multiple parachutes, creating the idea that he's gonna jump with the flight crew.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:28Steven Rinella?

  Cause if he says, give me one chute.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Like sweet.

• 47:31Steven Rinella?

  You're gonna be like, just give him, yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Give him the anvil from, uh, from Wile and Coyote.

• 47:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's like, why are you going to cut every rope in there, then give him the chute? Asked for four chutes. They, they take off out of, they, they take off out of Sea-Tac. He wants to go.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  Mexico City.

• 47:52Steven Rinella?

  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

• 48:04Steven Rinella?

  he ta, he's taken off out of Sea-Tac 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.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:18Steven Rinella?

  They suggest going to San Francisco.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:20Steven Rinella?

  He's like, it's too busy. He's like, let's go to Reno and refuel.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:25Steven Rinella?

  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 accomplice waiting. The dude, this is one thing I'm sure about. This dude does not know.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:43Steven Rinella?

  No, no rational person can argue that he knew where he was.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  No.

• 48:49Steven Rinella?

  When he jumped out of that plane.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  A hundred percent, yeah.

• 48:52Steven Rinella?

  It was the kind of plane that had the back door that opens up.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  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.

• 48:59Steven Rinella?

  No GPS.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Cloudy night in the middle of a storm.

• 49:02Steven Rinella?

  No, there's a storm, overcast, heavily overcast skies, raining, and he's jumping out at where he's jumping out, it's like negative zero.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, about seven degrees. We, we, we, we, we said a negative seven, I think is the number we came with.

• 49:17Steven Rinella?

  Negative seven.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  It's cold.

• 49:17Steven Rinella?

  At the elevation he's at, and he's got a suit on, loafers.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, going 200 miles an hour.

• 49:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Negative seven.

• 49:23Steven Rinella?

  There's a really funny part of this where, so, put all in the hole for me, so I can explain the funny part of this. While we're filming it, we're in the town of, uh, we're in this area of the FBI's drop zone.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:35Steven Rinella?

  And we're, we just are going to eat in this town of Cougar, Washington. Just going, there's a, we just like made plans to go into 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 by on a bike. This is the fun, listen, here comes a guy driving by on 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.

• 50:08Steven Rinella?

  Like suspenders under his T-shirt. And I said, he's like, what are you guys doing? You know? DB Cooper, you know, he gets all fired up about DB Cooper. I said, what do you have, uh? Why you got your suspenders on under your shirt? And he tells me, it holds up my pistols.

• 50:27Steven Rinella?

  So to give you a sense of how much like this story lives, right? Uh, we didn't get an interview with this guy, but to give you a sense of how much the story lives, this individual races home. This is just a guy on the street.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:40Steven Rinella?

  Races home on his bike and comes back with like evidence.

• 50:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay, about who DB Cooper is and introduces us to a thing that totally messed with our heads. Cause 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.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And all of our research, we never see any mention of 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.

• 51:12Steven Rinella?

  So we get done talking and we're like, the wet suit? 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 the the wet suit.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 51:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  That it's open to all this interpretation.

• 51:48Steven Rinella?

  Tons of interpretation.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  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 go. He had a wet suit on, he was jumping in the lake.

• 52:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm like, man, we're gonna look like idiots. We never talked about the wet suit. And we back up like, scratch the wet suit. That's just a dude on the street.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  See what else he knows.

• 52:11Steven Rinella?

  That's a dude on the street wearing shorts with pistols. Hanging from his suspenders. So Cooper goes on the back, there's always little details. He lights, he, uh, here's the crazy part, smokes a cigarette.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:24Steven Rinella?

  Smokes a couple of cigarettes, puts them in the ashtray, you know, even today you'll see planes that still have that little ashtray. Put some cigarettes in the ashtray. He was one of the biggest screw ups the FBI ever made. And not being able to anticipate and not being able to anticipate that you would pull DNA. DNA off the cigarettes, which would now be a, a blink of an eye process.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:46Steven Rinella?

  Like the FBI lab would have the genetic profile of this person within minutes. They check them out, nah.

• 52:55Steven Rinella?

  Burn them.

• 52:58Steven Rinella?

  Can you believe this? Like no one thought like, you know, like in archaeology, it's very common in archaeology, like if you're at a site, 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 a hundred years.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Safe for a later day.

• 53:13Steven Rinella?

  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 now they're like, yeah, what are you gonna do with these old cigarettes?

• 53:23Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, we should specify that it's at a time when some planes had 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.

• 54:00Steven Rinella?

  Yep, yep. In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. Go and ask any serious whitetail hunter what the best time of the year is to be out in a tree. And it's not a holiday, okay? The best time is not already on your calendar.

• 54:40Steven Rinella?

  It's the rut. It's the two or three week window that serious deer hunters plan everything else around. And OnX Hunt's rut calendar does this for you and helps take the guesswork out of your planning. It tracks the different phases of the rut as they move through your area. So you know when to book the time off, when to have the whole camp locked in and ready, or conversely, when it's still too early to burn out your best spots. You only get so many rut hunts in your life. So use the rut calendar within OnX Hunt to make the most of the whitetail rut this fall. I'll tell you one thing that binds together

• 55:20Steven Rinella?

  all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floorliners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person. Like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean and they'll get years and years of use out of a set.

• 56:03Steven Rinella?

  Visit weatherTech.com for your holiday shopping today.

• 56:11Steven Rinella?

  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 later determined 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. Yeah. Suggesting to them that that pressure change was that he's putting weight on the back step. Yeah.

• 56:57Steven Rinella?

  And when he jumped. Yeah. The back step, the, the door goes. Yeah. I just said for you folks listening at home, I just took my hand and, and inflected it at the wrist. Yeah. I did like a little wrist flick. That was the door coming up. And so they go like, huh?

• 57:17Steven Rinella?

  Maybe that was him jumping out. Let's take note of where we're at. That's the FBI drop zone. Yeah. I'm not kidding. That's the FBI drop zone. Somewhere between Sea-Tac and Reno. But like sometime around there because eventually they get like, well, shit, let's go look.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:34Steven Rinella?

  No, no, they, they didn't. They not look till they landed? Or did they go look?

• 57:38Speaker 03

  They did not get a, they did not get resources out in the field to look.

• 57:45Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  For.

• 57:46Steven Rinella?

  When did the flight crew go to look to see that he was actually gone?

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Oh, a long time.

• 57:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Because I'm, well, I mean, you can kind of, you can kind of defend that. As far as you know, the guy's got a bomb, man.

• 57:57Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. He says every go up front, go up front. Yeah. No, I'm not blaming anybody. I'm saying that became this hotly contested FBI drop zone.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:08Steven Rinella?

  Earlier we talked about, everybody's got like a little bit of awareness of the story. I don't, I, I knew the story. Kind of. I didn't know any of the details. I knew there was a skyjacker and I knew he jumped out of the plane. Um, and, and, and when we got into it and Mo and I are like talking and other guys we work with, they're all talking. Um, I would often say on the calls, I'll tell you what happened, you know, having not been there.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:30Steven Rinella?

  And knowing nothing about it. I was like, he, um, he, uh, burrowed into the ground.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:40Steven Rinella?

  Didn't know what he's doing, had a bad shoot, whatever. And the reason he's never, because we should jump to this. He's never turned up.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  Not, not, not, nothing has ever turned up.

• 58:51Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  Well, except.

• 58:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So, so money. Some money turned up. We'll, we'll get to that in a minute. Cause we went, we went to the site. Um, some money turned up in the Columbia River. In the eighties.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  Nothing of his body or parachute or anything like that.

• 59:04Steven Rinella?

  No. Um, and people thought that, uh, you know, one investigator said, well, come deer season, we'll find him. Cause he thought some, you know, like some guys can be like, oh my God, a parachute hanging in a tree with a 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 chute.

• 59:24Steven Rinella?

  They never did. And I would have thought, well, his chute never opened, um, you know, and, and he, he burrowed into the ground and, and, you know,

• 59:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 59:33Steven Rinella?

  All that soft rainforest moss and you're hitting at a, what, 170 miles an hour or something like that, terminal velocity?

• 59:40Speaker 03

  Velocity, yeah.

• 59:41Steven Rinella?

  Somewhere and you're just, right? And unless someone looks in the right little divot, then that's where the money is. That's where his body is. Um, and we kind of begin our exploration with that idea. And then quickly have, uh, special forces guys, military parachuters, a parachute instructor with like 14,000 jumps in his history, who was actually interviewed by the FBI after the DB Cooper thing. Um, them all say, no, he's probably fine.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Steven Rinella?

  No reason to think he's not fine. Like in their minds, like, no, landing in trees don't matter. Landing in the mountains don't matter.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a parachute. They're like designed to work.

• 1:00:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's like, no, I was like, well, what if you hit a tree?

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:00:26Steven Rinella?

  Doesn't matter.

• 1:00:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we couldn't get, we couldn't get any major parachute dudes to tell us that he was dead.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:00:36Steven Rinella?

  As much as I wanted to.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  No, they're faithful to their community.

• 1:00:41Steven Rinella?

  But yeah, they're like, the chutes work. You pull the cord, you're landing.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  And I think the other interesting thing is like, we had like an opportunity to go like, get you in the air, get you like, you know, do, doing a tandem jump and your immediate reaction on the ground went from like, before we went up in the plane, like he's, he's burrowed into the ground to like, I don't know, he's, he, he could, of course he could survive that.

• 1:01:07Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:01:07Speaker 05

  Now you're part of the community.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  And I think that, 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.

• 1:01:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  And I think that's what's, what, you know, that's the reason that like as a concept, I think the show is, is so cool is that you, we're out there experiencing things and then making, you know,

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  Assessments of a mystery based on those experiences.

• 1:01:53Steven Rinella?

  And if he, and if he lived, and I think he did, if he survived the jump, think about.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  Now you think he did.

• 1:01:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, I, no, now I think he did.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:02:01Steven Rinella?

  But then, but then just like invite yourself to think about this for a minute that you, you're somewhere south of Seattle, but you're not quite sure where.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Steven Rinella?

  And you've jumped in the dark.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Steven Rinella?

  And keep in mind, he never got caught.

• 1:02:16Steven Rinella?

  You're landing in the dark and not toward dawn. You're landing in the dark in the evening.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a long nine year loafers.

• 1:02:24Steven Rinella?

  Not rigged up in the rain.

• 1:02:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What then? There's talk of accomplices and maybe there were, but like not to that point.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  But there's no.

• 1:02:35Steven Rinella?

  There's no way, there's no way you could have coordinated with someone on the ground.

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  No, 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?

• 1:02:47Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was because it was partly because it was Thanksgiving night.

• 1:02:55Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Everyone had to finish their. Yeah. Everybody had to finish their dressing and pumpkin pie and shit. And they got the posse rounded up. He didn't know this, but he doesn't know this.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 1:03:05Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:17Steven Rinella?

  I think fingertip, fingertip spacing.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Steven Rinella?

  Shoulder to shoulder and they, they spent months grid working everything.

• 1:03:25Steven Rinella?

  No parachute, no sack.

• 1:03:29Steven Rinella?

  Nothing. Nothing. So.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  I mean, they were doing flyovers in the, was it the SR 17 or the?

• 1:03:38Steven Rinella?

  Seventy one.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  Seventy one.

• 1:03:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  Blackbird.

• 1:03:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. They brought that up.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Steven Rinella?

  Use that to try to find the chute.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Big reconnaissance aviation guy here.

• 1:03:47Steven Rinella?

  Hey, like you too.

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  Like on Dr. R.

• 1:03:49Steven Rinella?

  You got it right.

• 1:03:50Speaker 04

  Favorite band, U2?

• 1:03:54Steven Rinella?

  They are, nothing ever, we'll get to this money, then we'll kind of move on to another one of these just to give people example, we'll get to this, this money. So here's the crazy weird part, and this is what really like, the money, if, if the money hadn't happened, the story would be different. But the money upends everything.

• 1:04:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Steven Rinella?

  In the eighties, right near Phil's backyard, Phil, Phil, fill us in on this.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  That's right. Vancouver, Washington, on the shores of Western Vancouver, I believe.

• 1:04:21Steven Rinella?

  Do you know the name of the bar?

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  I don't know the name of the bar, no. So yeah, I can't fill you in, sorry. It's an Algonquin word, meaning marshy swamp.

• 1:04:30Steven Rinella?

  Tina bar.

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  Tina bar.

• 1:04:32Steven Rinella?

  So the original, the, the, the skyjacking was in seventy-two, seventy-three?

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  Seventy-two.

• 1:04:39Steven Rinella?

  Seventy-two, okay. I was not yet born. I wasn't even conceived yet, Randall. Um, where was I? Oh, the money. So check this out. Uh, eighty-one, was it? 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? The, the, everyone agrees is this. Some kid goes down on the Columbia River and they're gonna make a fire.

• 1:05:14Steven Rinella?

  And he's scratching out with his foot.

• 1:05:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Steven Rinella?

  Um, a little fire pit, okay? On the bank of the river, just like you would.

• 1:05:24Steven Rinella?

  And lo and behold, here is a bundle.

• 1:05:27Speaker 04

  Bundles.

• 1:05:28Steven Rinella?

  Bundles, bundles of rotten twenties.

• 1:05:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:34Steven Rinella?

  Um, when they gave Cooper all of his, uh, currency, when they gave him his ransom money, I, I I knew they knew the serial numbers, okay? Here's a whole other wrinkle. I'm gonna get into this wrinkle, because this is an interesting wrinkle. I knew, as we did our research, it was like, they knew the serial numbers of the money.

• 1:05:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:54Steven Rinella?

  I thought they were sequential. Meaning I thought they gave him blank to blank numbers, which would make it easier to find.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  They just said a list of serial numbers.

• 1:06:05Steven Rinella?

  But it was all random numbers. So you couldn't notify banks. If you see any money come in between 110000 and 110 the.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Steven Rinella?

  Keep your eye out for it. It's, it's, it's like thousands of.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  20,000.

• 1:06:22Steven Rinella?

  20,000 random ass serial numbers. So you could never get in your head what numbers you're looking for. Cause I used to be like, the money never turned up, so the money must be gone. But someone's like, how do you know the money's gone? If he took that money and spent it wherever the hell.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Steven Rinella?

  Took it to the Caribbean, took it to Mexico, took it anywhere, took it to Greece, whatever, and exchanged the money. And then the fact that someone down the road is gonna check that serial number against a list of 20,000 random ass serial numbers? And find it. But anyhow, the money that comes out of Tina bar, the corners is all rotting away.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Steven Rinella?

  But it's the numbers.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  They know for a fact that that is the money.

• 1:06:59Steven Rinella?

  It's the money.

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  From the ransom.

• 1:07:02Steven Rinella?

  But here's the deal. Like the crazy part of it is you'd say to yourself, if you're a thinking man, you're now saying to yourself, well, yeah, he lost some of the money. He drowned in a river and it flowed. It was in a little creek.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:07:14Steven Rinella?

  Floated out of the mountains, flown into a tributary, flowed into the Columbia on a flood, got deposited on the bank, covered in sediment. But here's the problem. The money, if you drained the FBI drop zone, it doesn't flow to that spot.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  It's upriver. That spot is.

• 1:07:33Steven Rinella?

  That's what I was wondering. It's up. The, 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 zone's wrong.

• 1:07:48Steven Rinella?

  Or someone.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  And here.

• 1:07:52Steven Rinella?

  And here, enter all conspiracy theories.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  So, so the next logical conclusion, you say, well, the drop zone's wrong. It, it, again, he landed in some tributary, whatever it washed down, got caught in a sandbar. It's totally reasonable to assume. Here's why the money being in three different packets is important because they were not bundled together.

• 1:08:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Meaning the statistical probability of the three of them ending up in one place is in the billions to one.

• 1:08:22Steven Rinella?

  Unless some thing was holding them in it. He, okay.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  This is, you got, this is what's claimed.

• 1:08:29Steven Rinella?

  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?

• 1:08:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay. She says, no. Did some amount of that money?

• 1:08:47Steven Rinella?

  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 wet suit, 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.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Steven Rinella?

  Um, can't remember his name, Eric, uh.

• 1:09:24Speaker 03

  Eric Ullis.

• 1:09:25Steven Rinella?

  Eric Ullis.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. He's like, he's like the foremost, you know, kind of citizen sleuth, what they, what they refer to themselves as citizen sleuth.

• 1:09:33Steven Rinella?

  He's a serious investigator.

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  Investigator.

• 1:09:35Steven Rinella?

  We go there, we're standing around the riverbank and I'm like, so it's right here? And he goes, well, it was about nine feet up.

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  And 20 and 25 feet out.

• 1:09:46Steven Rinella?

  Cause of erosion. It was like, the money was like over your head when you're standing there. Now, he feels that that money, um, because of all this stuff I won't get into, um, he feels that money was buried.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Steven Rinella?

  He feels it was buried by DB 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.

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  Paid paid someone eight thousand dollars.

• 1:10:18Steven Rinella?

  Dude, get me out of here.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Steven Rinella?

  And that guy freaked.

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Steven Rinella?

  And buried the money. Um, I don't know, but that is the last. There's a necktie that he took off and left on the plane. There's the cigarettes that are gone. There's the money in Tina bar. And they've investigated, I don't know, some 10,000 people.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Steven Rinella?

  They really focus heavy on disgruntled uh uh special forces guys coming out of Vietnam.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  Yep. Yeah. And and people with uh an engineering background or some exposure to Boeing. Or people who would have proximity to to understanding how the the plane works in a basic way.

• 1:11:03Steven Rinella?

  And you know.

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  It's fascinating. There there are, there are thousands of of of these little micro theories. About little portions of the mystery and the fact is like, no one actually knows anything. I don't know, nothing.

• 1:11:18Steven Rinella?

  The flight attendant asked him, according to her, there's no witnesses at the conversation. She asked him, do you have a grudge against the airline? And he said, I just have a grudge.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  But I mean, those are the things like, and this is the important part of this, the of the the whole story is that he's like, he's become, he became like a folk hero. You know, he didn't hurt.

• 1:11:39Steven Rinella?

  Victimless crime.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  Didn't hurt anyone.

• 1:11:40Steven Rinella?

  You know.

• 1:11:43Speaker 03

  You know, in in in in our imaginations, he gets away with $200,000, you know. And uh and disappears into the night. It's awesome.

• 1:11:52Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:53Speaker 03

  He's a, he's a hero. He's, you know.

• 1:11:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, if you watch the news, um, there's always claims. There's been many, many claims. There's a theme. People's parents die.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:07Steven Rinella?

  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 this kids whose dad actually did a copycat skyjacking.

• 1:12:22Steven Rinella?

  And then later died in a shootout with the cops. And a lot of suspicion fell that it was, it was his own copycat. 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.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  Across the country.

• 1:12:39Steven Rinella?

  They're like, hey, we found a parachute in our shed. Then you gotta ask your question, but there's so many claims like this. They mostly get debunked. Yeah, I asked you a question. So you're telling me that he that night.

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  Brought his parachute.

• 1:12:50Steven Rinella?

  He that night bundled that parachute up.

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  There's no way.

• 1:12:54Steven Rinella?

  And then brought it home to North Carolina and put it in his shed.

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  Like, oh, he used this again.

• 1:12:59Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:13:01Speaker 03

  No way.

• 1:13:01Steven Rinella?

  I like that one.

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  Sometimes you go out there and just rub that fabric between your fingers and think of the good old days.

• 1:13:08Steven Rinella?

  Feels like money. So many of my friends sent me that article and that came out. Cause I was just, that was after we, after we filmed. They sent me that article and it, by that point I was like well versed in all of the claims. Just like, there's, there's a claim more than every year there's a claim.

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Steven Rinella?

  My boyfriend was DB Cooper.

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and a lot of deathbed confessionals, you know.

• 1:13:31Steven Rinella?

  Anything you'd like to add, grandpa? I was DB Cooper.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  We should make a bumper sticker, man. Um, 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 walk through in the pitch black. We walk through those mountains and it's staggering how difficult it is to walk through those mountains. I mean, we're talking about like the, the Cascades, like the best, best guess of the, the drop zone is that it's in the Cascades. Just west, like southwest of Mount St. Helens, right? Prior to Mount St. Helens erupting. Um, so it's like thick old growth forest and really steep. And, uh, and just trying to walk through there in the dark.

• 1:14:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  With cameras, it was impossible. You're going to drag a, you're going to drag a parachute?

• 1:14:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. We did a, we did a thing, like we, we know, you don't really know what he had, but we did like a no, we did a no flashlight. Yeah. Cause he had just limited stuff, like he's not like, he's got, he doesn't have a big tool bag. Maybe he had flashlight, it's unknown, but one thing I never did in my whole life was, uh, strike a match to look around. It doesn't work as good. Earlier we were talking about Indiana Jones. He goes into a cave and strikes a match.

• 1:14:48Speaker 05

  You see his whole face?

• 1:14:49Steven Rinella?

  Spotlight.

• 1:14:51Speaker 05

  All of a sudden you're in the Lincoln Tunnel.

• 1:14:55Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:15:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, Donner's a good one.

• 1:15:06Steven Rinella?

  And what we should talk about Rowan Oak and Donner Party. There's a hundred of them, not a hundred, it's eight to talk about. We're not going to talk about all of them. Want to talk about Rowan Oak or Donner Party?

• 1:15:15Speaker 05

  I'll start with Rowan Oak.

• 1:15:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I'll lay the groundwork. We should quiz Randall on Donner, on Rowan Oak.

• 1:15:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, what do you know about Rowan Oak?

• 1:15:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Randall, how many, how many settlers?

• 1:15:25Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:15:26Steven Rinella?

  Dr. Randall?

• 1:15:28Speaker 05

  Thirty-one. Seventy-two.

• 1:15:33Speaker 05

  Fifty-four. A hundred and thirty-nine.

• 1:15:37Steven Rinella?

  You just went too high.

• 1:15:39Speaker 05

  Twenty-four?

• 1:15:40Steven Rinella?

  I won't, no, you just.

• 1:15:41Speaker 05

  Nineteen.

• 1:15:42Steven Rinella?

  And I'm not going to continue to humiliate you. Hundred seventeen.

• 1:15:45Speaker 05

  God, I knew it.

• 1:15:46Steven Rinella?

  Rough.

• 1:15:46Speaker 05

  I had it in there somewhere.

• 1:15:48Steven Rinella?

  Roughly a hundred seventeen.

• 1:15:48Speaker 05

  I promise.

• 1:15:49Steven Rinella?

  We're going to go way back in time. Uh, we're jumping now from the, from the nineteen seventies to the fifteen nineties. Uh, all these, all your European superpowers. Spain, France, um, England, Portugal. They're, they're all vying for colonies, new world colonies.

• 1:16:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Steven Rinella?

  The Spanish were early to the game and they are getting loaded on gold. And everybody's like.

• 1:16:17Speaker 05

  But down south.

• 1:16:18Steven Rinella?

  Everybody's got bad FOMO. Everybody's got bad FOMO. They want their own chunk of the pie.

• 1:16:24Speaker 05

  Well, Portuguese are killing it in South America too.

• 1:16:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so people are tearing it up and the English are feeling like they're missing the whole party. And, uh, they, they don't want to go too far south because the Spanish at this point have a major toehold and like jealously guard their areas. In fact, the Spanish are so worried about other countries getting a toehold that they got like warships cruising up and down the US coast. Hunting for anyone who'd have the audacity to try to get a toehold in the new world.

• 1:16:57Steven Rinella?

  England had sent some like expeditionary trips poking around, prodding around. They mapped parts of the shoreline. And, uh, they get an idea that they're going to establish their first permanent colony in Chesapeake Bay. So they take these hundred and seventeen settlers. Uh, kids, wives, young people, right? And um, 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 uh, and they don't bring them where they're supposed to bring them. They're just like, kinda like.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  Just drop them.

• 1:17:29Steven Rinella?

  It sounds like a little like unceremonious.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Steven Rinella?

  Because it was, I mean, they dumped them out on an island in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. This'll have to do.

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  See you later.

• 1:17:38Steven Rinella?

  Like, it won't work forever. But it might work for a minute.

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  We'll see you next year.

• 1:17:45Steven Rinella?

  But it wasn't.

• 1:17:46Speaker 03

  But it's also important to note who these people are, cause 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

• 1:18:01Speaker 03

  going out and, and.

• 1:18:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no experience.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  Building a, an outpost from a military standpoint.

• 1:18:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, these are people who by and large have probably spent their life in within a, like some small radius of a handful of miles, probably. Like, you can't generalize, but like mostly these are like yeoman people.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Steven Rinella?

  Um, they drop them on this island and then their leader is 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 gonna run back to England.

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Steven Rinella?

  And get some supplies and I'm gonna run back.

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:34Steven Rinella?

  Hang tight. He goes back to England and like a war breaks out.

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:18:40Steven Rinella?

  And the, the, the, the queen says, no one's doing shit with any ships. All ships are fighting the war.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Steven Rinella?

  And all this other stuff happens and it's three years. And keep in mind, this John White dude, here's an important detail, this John White dude, his wife and daughter are there. No, no, no, his daughter and grand, his daughter is pregnant, yeah, is there.

• 1:19:02Steven Rinella?

  Comes back three years later. Is able to do a quick check on Roanoke and they're not there, they're gone. But then there's a hurricane coming.

• 1:19:13Steven Rinella?

  And he ca, he can't even really look around. But as the story goes, carved on a tree. They made a plan, hey, if you gotta go somewhere, carve on a tree, crow at where you're going. And they, and they carved the word Croatoan, which was a tribe that lived on modern day Hatteras Island.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:19:30Steven Rinella?

  A hurricane comes, he leaves and then no one comes back for a decade or something like that. A decade. To by the time someone comes and seriously looks for these columnists, it is just like they are

• 1:19:44Steven Rinella?

  absolutely gone.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  But, but gone, gone. Like there's no, it's not like there's a bunch of bones.

• 1:19:49Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's nothing.

• 1:19:51Steven Rinella?

  Gone, gone. Just rumors. It, 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've encountered it, Randall. Oh, I did see a blue eyed Indian.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 1:20:06Steven Rinella?

  Suggesting that they like integrated.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Steven Rinella?

  But just gone. But there, but people are actively um, looking for their stuff. And what's funny about it is like, of course their stuffs get scattered around. Because even if they had all died right there of some disease, even if they'd all died of, I don't know, the flu, their shit's still gonna get scattered around. Cause this is like a vibrant, th- this area is full of all these different Native American groups.

• 1:20:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Steven Rinella?

  So they're gonna take the stuff and scatter it anyway.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  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, iron, you know, these things that they had, guns.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  So you think like, it's not just like a bunch of random crap lying around. Like these are like highly valuable items.

• 1:21:00Steven Rinella?

  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 a, we went to an active dig site, where they're finding like really old English stuff.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:16Steven Rinella?

  But it's like,

• 1:21:19Steven Rinella?

  they, they get excited about it, but it doesn't mean, in my mind, it doesn't mean that much. Cause like their shit's gonna wind up there anyways.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:25Steven Rinella?

  Because people are gonna take that stuff and trade it. In military families, service is more than a job, it's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. OnX Hunt is full of great features. I always say it's my favorite app. I use the thing on a daily basis. Here's a new feature I'm very excited about. OnX Hunt's location sharing puts your whole group on one live map.

• 1:22:08Steven Rinella?

  So you can look and tell where everyone is. And if at night it gets dark and someone's not back yet, you don't got to guess what happened to them or where they are. You can just look and tell where they are. It has implications for safety, coordination. I can't even list all the ways in which this is helpful. You opt in and then when you guys are done, the data goes away. It's not stored. Keep the folks in your deer camp on the same page with location sharing from OnX Hunt. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible.

• 1:22:53Steven Rinella?

  You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.

• 1:23:28Steven Rinella?

  We talked to one researcher and he's like, we're like, what would satisfy? What would satisfy you about what happened to someone? And he said, um, it's cool because it's like identifiable. He's like a Christian burial.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Steven Rinella?

  A Christian burial, not on Roanoke.

• 1:23:48Steven Rinella?

  Someone, because all the tribes had burial rituals where the bodies would be buried in a, curled up in the fetal position.

• 1:23:57Speaker 03

  Fetal position, yeah.

• 1:23:58Steven Rinella?

  You know, buried different ways. He goes to find a bear, because he's like, they might've, you know, they might've been, uh, integrated into a tribe. The last thing to go would be religious practice.

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Steven Rinella?

  You know, in his mind, the last thing to go would be burial rites. And a mother burying her child, a child burying its mother, or someone would, would, would have laid them out on their back, flat, prone, head to the east.

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, a Christian style burial done by Christians.

• 1:24:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  Is what they're looking for.

• 1:24:36Steven Rinella?

  And he's like, if someone can present that, they can say,

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  Here they are.

• 1:24:41Steven Rinella?

  Here's where, here's where they ended up.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Steven Rinella?

  A detail about that we get into is, um, to kind of show you what's going to 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, they're hard up from the minute they're there. They got very little food resources.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  Crabs.

• 1:25:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right? He goes crab, he goes blue crabbing.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Steven Rinella?

  It just gets filled full of arrows.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, his head smashed, yeah.

• 1:25:08Steven Rinella?

  Because the dudes that were there before him, the English explorers that were there before him, do all this ham-handed antagonistic shit 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 island.

• 1:25:24Speaker 03

  Just let them go.

• 1:25:26Steven Rinella?

  You see anybody, uh, I don't know.

• 1:25:30Steven Rinella?

  Don't mention me.

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  And there aren't any like oral traditions from those communities around there about the strangers.

• 1:25:40Steven Rinella?

  I'm, I'm kind of shocked by how it, it's kind of shocking how, how little there is.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Steven Rinella?

  How little there is.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, there again, there are those rumors of like, you know, blue eyed.

• 1:25:52Steven Rinella?

  Right. Square houses too.

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  Fair skin.

• 1:25:55Steven Rinella?

  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, um, there's people in square houses, living with such and such tribe and have a square house. But it's, it's just like, it's ephemeral.

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Steven Rinella?

  It's like rumors and glimpses. Um,

• 1:26:15Steven Rinella?

  as we dug into it, like, I'll tell you one of the things for certain.

• 1:26:20Steven Rinella?

  And I can't say much for certain. A hundred and seventeen of those guys didn't go somewhere and like set up shop.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:25Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. And build houses.

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  No, it was too much of an imprint.

• 1:26:30Steven Rinella?

  It was, whatever happened was like quick. It was ugly and I think it was scattered.

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  They panicked and scattered to the wind.

• 1:26:38Steven Rinella?

  And I'm sure some of them, because they, they did write on a tree. They wrote on a tree and on a fence post. Um, Croatoan and then Crowa, like on one side.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  C R O.

• 1:26:48Steven Rinella?

  They, they finished it on one side and one side didn't. And that was the agreement. If you go somewhere, write it down. Um, but then you're like, did they make it? How many have made it? How many went to Croatoan? Five? Right?

• 1:26:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:00Steven Rinella?

  You don't know. Um, 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.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  No, I love, I love this stuff.

• 1:27:16Steven Rinella?

  A rock like some shit, right? And a guy finds the rock.

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But the timing of him finding the rock was at a timing of like heightened public curiosity about this.

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:27:26Steven Rinella?

  It's when the legend started to emerge. And then you have a dozen copycat rocks.

• 1:27:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Steven Rinella?

  So all the copycat rocks are obviously phony. 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.

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was like, uh, it was written to our father. And to me though, the, I love, um,

• 1:27:56Speaker 03

  I like, I like the, you know, so wait, like she's running around, running from these hostile Native American tribes.

• 1:28:06Steven Rinella?

  No, she was in their captivity at the time.

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

  And carrying a.

• 1:28:10Steven Rinella?

  Scratching a rock.

• 1:28:10Speaker 03

  Twenty-five pound rock around. Slowly scratching her story into it.

• 1:28:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it seems implausible.

• 1:28:18Speaker 05

  We need to go quickly. Get the rock.

• 1:28:22Steven Rinella?

  It seems implausible. We talked to these one authors, they, they, they kind of laugh about the, it's called the Darestone. They laugh about the Darestone. You gotta have a pretty sophisticated understanding of the language at the time. But one of the things they laugh about the Darestone is, um, it like, a decent analogy would be, let's say I were to talk to you in a southern accent. Right?

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28:45Steven Rinella?

  And a southerner doesn't think I have a southern accent. The writing on the Darestone is so like stereotypically.

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  Ye olde English.

• 1:28:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. Add ye's, 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.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:29:05Steven Rinella?

  In Shakespeare language, you know, or whatever. And that's one of the better indictments. So the other indictment would be this play comes out.

• 1:29:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, right at the same time.

• 1:29:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, this very popular performance comes out.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  It's still running today.

• 1:29:17Steven Rinella?

  And, uh, and, and the fervor of the popularity of this, there low and behold is the Darestone.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  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 mysteries with all kinds of possibilities.

• 1:29:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  And that's what makes it fun, you know?

• 1:29:38Steven Rinella?

  I, yeah, I don't think that one will be solved. And just a spoiler alert, that's what I say in the, 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's a clean answer.

• 1:29:57Speaker 03

  Right. But, but in the questions, I'm asked for a long time, but I think what was like, what was really cool about this concept, um, and really unique to this concept is no one's really asked those questions from an outdoor standpoint.

• 1:30:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  So these are all mysteries that have a element of, of the outdoors, right? Um, in the, in wilderness and, 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.

• 1:30:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  Theorizing.

• 1:30:40Steven Rinella?

  Going, but going to the real places kind of blows your mind. Cause 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 50 miles to the main.

• 1:30:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:30:54Steven Rinella?

  Which you, you can take it different ways. One interpretation is they went 50 miles inland.

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:00Steven Rinella?

  Which lands you in this place we went to, which is called the Great Dismal Swamp.

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Steven Rinella?

  And you go into that stuff, you're like, oh yeah. You got a hundred like kids and stuff and you're all wearing like, petticoats or whatever the hell they ran around in. And like you're navigating the, you know, you're like wading through the great dismal swamp.

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  And what's kind of amazing though is when, when we went, you go there now and, and there's a bunch of dry land there, a bunch of agricultural land, but all of that land was, was drained.

• 1:31:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  That was all just swamp. Like 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.

• 1:31:45Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  That whole area.

• 1:31:46Steven Rinella?

  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, um, that area, some of the most harshest slave conditions.

• 1:32:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:32:04Steven Rinella?

  In the history of slavery in the South, some of the most harshest, like, high death rate slave conditions was making that dry land.

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Steven Rinella?

  They were, they were put to work draining that land.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Steven Rinella?

  And these malarial, you know, and malarial conditions.

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  Those canals are all still, they're just crisscrossing the land. You see those canals that they dug and the, imagine the conditions under which they were, they were.

• 1:32:26Steven Rinella?

  Oh, just how expansive it is. You're looking at just many, many, many, many square miles upon square miles upon square miles. It was hand dug trenches to drain that ground.

• 1:32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Steven Rinella?

  It was just like a disposal place for humans.

• 1:32:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Steven Rinella?

  That you just pour into like, like you're pouring them into a war, pouring slaves into that job.

• 1:32:46Steven Rinella?

  Um, which like I said, wasn't a lot of room to, maybe a future, maybe a future episode. Another one of going to the spot, we'll talk about this one.

• 1:32:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:57Steven Rinella?

  We'll wrap it up is, uh, going to, um, Donner Pass.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Steven Rinella?

  Where the Donner Party.

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:04Steven Rinella?

  Where that all went down. And, uh, one of the funniest things just happened in a parking lot. It's not in our show because it just happened in the parking lot. Someone, we, we ran into some guys. They were filming, they were doing like some ski stuff or something. I can't remember what they were doing.

• 1:33:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:19Steven Rinella?

  We got talking to them and they were talking about, so this is like a third, third hand story.

• 1:33:25Steven Rinella?

  Cause we're out filming in Donner Pass and they're filming like some skis, nothing to do with Donner Party. We're filming about the Donner Party and they're filming some ski stuff and they share with us these people that they had encountered, who were in Donner Pass because they were doing a thing about places with Christmas names.

• 1:33:46Steven Rinella?

  You know, Donner and Dancer.

• 1:33:50Steven Rinella?

  That's the funniest thing in the world.

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 1:33:52Steven Rinella?

  Uh,

• 1:33:53Speaker 03

  That's pretty amazing.

• 1:33:55Steven Rinella?

  Background on Donner Party. Donner Party was, well, first off, I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about what, before I get into what it was, I'm gonna talk about how, what everybody knows, including me. What I know about the Donner Party is it was an American horror story where people ate each other.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:08Steven Rinella?

  Full stop.

• 1:34:11Steven Rinella?

  Right? You're like, yeah, they got stuck in the mountains and ate each other.

• 1:34:15Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Right? That's the story. Their, their industry story. It's a very short episode. That's the story of the diner party. Um, 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, I mean, what is there really to do? You know?

• 1:34:31Speaker 03

  No, I, I think we were all like, that was a show that we, we pitched many times, like a concept that we pitched many times in the question we all had was like, well, like, what's the story? Like, what's the mystery? What's the story? I, I, you know, they got snowed in, they ate each other. I don't, you know, what are we going to do?

• 1:34:50Steven Rinella?

  Seems pretty straightforward. It ain't. It ain't. There's a lot of like, who's to, here's the, the questions. Who's to blame? And what could they really have done different? Right? And why did what happened, happened? And, uh, Nunga said a little bit of the scene is like,

• 1:35:13Steven Rinella?

  1846. So pre gold rush, like everybody's heard of the 49ers.

• 1:35:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Steven Rinella?

  Right? Remember we had Elliot West on? He goes, everybody likes to talk about the 49ers. But the lucky ones were the 48ers.

• 1:35:28Steven Rinella?

  The 48ers got all the gold. The 49ers.

• 1:35:31Speaker 03

  They're late.

• 1:35:32Steven Rinella?

  Were a little late.

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  So these folks were hopeful 48ers.

• 1:35:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So they, these guys, uh, the diner party, they're coming over in 1846. And the way these immigrant trains worked, as I learned through this project is like, they're, they're like, um, there's, there's a fluidity to, to, to, 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 and cross the Rockies and cross the Sierra Nevada, it's like, you gotta get going as early in the spring as you can to have the maximum 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 going to encounter flood swollen rivers, right? There's mud everywhere. So you gotta be like shit's got to dry out.

• 1:36:20Steven Rinella?

  And there's a race. It's like stuff dries out, water levels come down from, 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, you pick your window and, and groups come together and they meet in these certain spots.

• 1:36:41Steven Rinella?

  And, uh, what, what was the big town? Everybody took off, these guys all took out of us, not Springfield.

• 1:36:48Steven Rinella?

  Springfield, Missouri.

• 1:36:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:50Steven Rinella?

  What's that?

• 1:36:51Speaker 03

  Independence?

• 1:36:51Steven Rinella?

  Yes. I think that's it where they took off from. Anyways, you come together and you form.

• 1:36:58Steven Rinella?

  Your, your parties come together.

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  Thing I do.

• 1:37:00Steven Rinella?

  And 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.

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  Family units and bachelors and, you know, all, all kinds of different folks.

• 1:37:29Steven Rinella?

  And guides and hopefully a guide that's been there before. And there's like, uh, you're literally taking votes.

• 1:37:37Steven Rinella?

  To, to, to, to put forward like a leader. So when we say the Donner Party, it, you know, winds up being, it winds up being 90 some individuals.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46Steven Rinella?

  Um, of, 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 cutoff.

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06Steven Rinella?

  What's super funny about Hastings cutoff is it was billed to them as shorter and easier.

• 1:38:13Steven Rinella?

  Okay, this is, this is the, the great part of this. It's way harder. And now that you can like measure stuff accurately, it's not shorter. It's longer. Hastings Cut Off, which is shorter and easier, is longer and harder.

• 1:38:26Speaker 03

  Pretty rare in the world of cutoffs.

• 1:38:29Steven Rinella?

  It's like a shitty long cut.

• 1:38:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Steven Rinella?

  And they have a lot of 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 should definitely take Hastings Cut Off. And stop by, we'll trade. I'll sell you some shit.

• 1:39:19Steven Rinella?

  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 Wasatch range and then through Donner Pass. Well, it joins back up before Donner Pass. Anyways, when they, there's other wagon trains that they're with.

• 1:39:41Steven Rinella?

  The wagon trains they're with that don't take Hastings Cut Off, make it to California just fine.

• 1:39:47Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  Been used, uh, in years prior.

• 1:40:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Steven Rinella?

  Um, and they start up in the snow and they get, uh, the, they.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  Well, it's like important to note too, it's not that they actually don't arrive at the bottom of Donner Pass particularly late despite all of their problems. It's, it's the end of October.

• 1:40:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's an early storm.

• 1:40:30Speaker 03

  Right. Parties had crossed as late as December.

• 1:40:34Steven Rinella?

  And yeah, you're right.

• 1:40:35Speaker 03

  And been okay.

• 1:40:35Steven Rinella?

  In years past. I forgot that detail. Yeah, that's another thing is like, that's a great point. Cause you also start, there's this kind of narrative that they were, like I was just laying out.

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  Like stupid to go up there.

• 1:40:46Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00Steven Rinella?

  And they lingered. They got up there. It was an early snowstorm. Perhaps they could have backed out, but they felt that they'd get a thaw. Right? What are the odds it's going to keep happening? Right? All the time. Like living in the Northern Rockies. You know, all of a sudden October, like whap, big old storm. And then like a month later, it's like 70 degrees.

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20Steven Rinella?

  And you're like hunting in your T-shirt and you're like, God, isn't that weird? It was like, uh, 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.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  And when you talk about worse and deeper, like the numbers are astounding. Like the, the amount of snowfall in that area. They'll get 60 feet of snowfall.

• 1:41:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  In, in Donner Pass.

• 1:41:47Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:41:57Steven Rinella?

  Out of their shelters. You climb out and pop out on the surface and they're cutting wood. There's pictures later where there'd be a dude standing on dry ground. And way above his head is a cut off tree.

• 1:42:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, 30 feet.

• 1:42:10Steven Rinella?

  And you realize 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, um, it's 90 people, over half are little kids. You never think about that.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:42:24Steven Rinella?

  No one ever thinks about, it's little kids.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:28Steven Rinella?

  And like statistically, the little kids were more likely to survive. And also statistically, parents of little kids were more likely to survive.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  And statistically, women were more likely to survive.

• 1:42:44Steven Rinella?

  More likely to survive.

• 1:42:45Speaker 03

  The, the, the, the people who did, who fared the worst were unattached bachelors.

• 1:42:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. A handful of reasons, like supposed reasons why. They were already working their asses off.

• 1:42:59Speaker 03

  Very fatigued from the trip out that far.

• 1:43:01Steven Rinella?

  That they were assuming all this work.

• 1:43:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04Steven Rinella?

  Doing all this stuff. So they're going into it very lean. Meanwhile, people who've 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 Donner Pass. They're almost to the top of Donner Pass. They're going to cross the pass and go for it.

• 1:43:28Speaker 03

  On foot.

• 1:43:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, on foot. They make snow 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.

• 1:43:41Steven Rinella?

  People with, people with relatives at the camp.

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:45Steven Rinella?

  Other people just are like, fuck it.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  And just died.

• 1:43:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Cause they, 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, I was like, you start getting into it like they did everything they could possibly do.

• 1:44:09Steven Rinella?

  Everything they could possibly do to keep their families alive. And I don't think anyone would do anything differently.

• 1:44:15Speaker 03

  The, 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, are, you know, we talk about in Roanoke, like the last thing to go or religious practices. These are people who are highly religious and highly driven to live by

• 1:44:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:39Speaker 03

  that code and that code is very specific about eating other folks. You know, and, and they hold on for what would seem like forever, just a torturous amount of time of starving to death, uh, trying to scrape food together in any way they can before they, before they start eating people.

• 1:45:01Steven Rinella?

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• 1:45:46Steven Rinella?

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• 1:46:31Steven Rinella?

  It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.

• 1:47:03Steven Rinella?

  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 starved to death.

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:47:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay, they're eating people who starved to death. But there's a guy in the Donner Party who's kind of like, throughout the whole story, kind of emerges as a real asshole. He murders two Native American guides.

• 1:47:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:33Steven Rinella?

  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, and he just lives his life.

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:47:56Steven Rinella?

  Not picked up. They talked about doing something, no one ever did anything to that dude.

• 1:48:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:01Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:48:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:29Steven Rinella?

  And sees the search party people and has the wherewithal to throw it down in the snow.

• 1:48:36Steven Rinella?

  Not to see you.

• 1:48:36Speaker 03

  My dog tries that trick.

• 1:48:41Steven Rinella?

  Like you got busted. We met with the archaeologists that dug one of the camps. They were at two different camps, two primary camp locations. And um, they dug one of the camps and found um...

• 1:48:54Steven Rinella?

  The remains of all kinds of stuff that they were, they were eating. At one point, early on, they killed a bear, they killed a grizzly, early on. They killed dogs, they had oxen, they killed.

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  Like lots of small game.

• 1:49:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  Deer.

• 1:49:11Steven Rinella?

  Rodents and stuff, they were killing. And they were.

• 1:49:16Steven Rinella?

  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 like making like tent like structures with hides. We made one of these structures with this rotten ass cowhide.

• 1:49:39Steven Rinella?

  And slept in there.

• 1:49:41Steven Rinella?

  One of the worst smelling sleeps I ever had, dude. It was rotten 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 it warm in there, but it stank.

• 1:49:56Steven Rinella?

  We got like a little chimney and stuff coming out of there.

• 1:50:00Steven Rinella?

  So.

• 1:50:02Steven Rinella?

  The hell's that getting with that?

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  We were talking about the animals that they.

• 1:50:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh, 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, a book called Death on the Baron 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 to 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 1920s in the Canadian Arctic along the Thelon River.

• 1:50:50Steven Rinella?

  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,

• 1:51:08Steven Rinella?

  like they're dying of starvation, yes, but what's really killing them is these terrible bowel 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 into 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.

• 1:51:52Steven Rinella?

  They are nothing but skeletons, but there's still what he describes as a plate of excrement.

• 1:51:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:58Steven Rinella?

  In the cabin.

• 1:52:01Steven Rinella?

  Of this bone ball.

• 1:52:03Speaker 03

  Old timey concrete.

• 1:52:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, they talk about, they talk about.

• 1:52:07Steven Rinella?

  And I didn't, and so I, we met with the archaeologist who worked on this bone project. And then I later was like, after we met, after we got done filming 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 was killing them. They would have died anyway, but what's like the immediate biggest problem is that, that the bowel obstruction and digestive problems of eating like non edible.

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:42Steven Rinella?

  Needing eating non digestible stuff in a state of desperation.

• 1:52:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, they talk about, you know, in in Donner, they talk about boiling those bones so many times, boiling and reboiling that they they get something called pot polish. Which is like they basically turned to porcelain in that pot as they try to extract whatever nutrients they can out of. Uh, out of what's left of the bone.

• 1:53:06Steven Rinella?

  We boiled up some rawhide.

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:09Steven Rinella?

  And it like you can make it pretty edible, man, when you boil it down.

• 1:53:11Speaker 03

  It's actually not that.

• 1:53:12Steven Rinella?

  It's like, why is it being like quite flavorless? And um, it has a most out of umami quality.

• 1:53:21Speaker 03

  More the broth. That wasn't the rotten hide that's used for the shelter, was it?

• 1:53:26Steven Rinella?

  I could, we talked about it, we didn't.

• 1:53:29Speaker 03

  I don't think that would have been safe for for consumption.

• 1:53:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we had some, we had, we had a handful.

• 1:53:34Speaker 03

  Bet if you were starving out there, you'd eat it.

• 1:53:36Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, we did some snowshoes. They made snowshoes. We we mocked up some snowshoes. We worked with the guy that spent some time. Uh, spent a lot of time hiking the path, you know?

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:53:45Steven Rinella?

  Um, but uh, yeah, man, being in Donner Pass. It it. You're like, three, I can tell you one thing, ain't shit to eat here.

• 1:53:54Speaker 03

  No, man, we went out, 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.

• 1:54:04Steven Rinella?

  It's just like, it's just sub, it's like, it's it's sub alpine. It's like, it's rock, it's rock.

• 1:54:09Speaker 03

  Thousand feet?

• 1:54:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  No, no, it's not that high. 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?

• 1:54:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's like, it's sub alpine. It's like fifty percent of every surface is rock.

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:23Steven Rinella?

  And you got little like dwarfed up spruce and fir.

• 1:54:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:26Steven Rinella?

  And uh, there's some, there's some ponderosas here and there, but it's just like a very poor ground. And you talk to guys there, like we talked to hunters there and hunters are like, um, dude, the first whiff of snow.

• 1:54:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, everything vacates.

• 1:54:39Steven Rinella?

  Nothing is up here.

• 1:54:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, like.

• 1:54:41Steven Rinella?

  Nothing is up here.

• 1:54:42Speaker 03

  How did snowfall in the country?

• 1:54:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah, they're like, you get deer, deer come up in the summer.

• 1:54:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:47Steven Rinella?

  But they're gone, they're gone early.

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:50Steven Rinella?

  You know, there's just nothing, there's nothing. I mean, they killed like a, now like a, some crows, whatever, here and there.

• 1:54:56Speaker 03

  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, you know, you're like, Donner Party, you know, cannibals, like I get it. Like, you don't get it at all. When you, when you do the research and in conjunction with doing the research, spend time in, 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, wow, what a bunch of heroes.

• 1:55:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:40Speaker 03

  You know, this is the level of heroics that went into saving those kids. There's this great story about one of the women who stayed back at, at one of the two sites, which was Donner Lake, it was 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

• 1:56:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:56:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I kept vowing that I was gonna stop making any and all Donner jokes. Donner Family Christmas, Donner Dinner Party.

• 1:56:41Speaker 03

  Short, short-lived resolution?

• 1:56:43Steven Rinella?

  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 could say the poet novelist Saddam Hussein? You'd never say that. So now, when someone says-

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  The fine artist.

• 1:57:05Steven Rinella?

  I might, from now on, I might, actually. Yeah, when we overthrew the poet novelist Saddam Hussein. 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 Donner Party.

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

  Saved all those kids.

• 1:57:26Steven Rinella?

  Saved all those children. Wonderful. Story of hope.

• 1:57:31Speaker 03

  You know.

• 1:57:31Steven Rinella?

  One of our finest moments. Story of hope.

• 1:57:33Speaker 03

  There's another.

• 1:57:34Steven Rinella?

  Half of them died, half of them lived.

• 1:57:36Speaker 03

  Almost half of them died, more than half of them lived. And, and, uh, with the, the other little sub note, and I'll, you know, make this the last thing on this, but like, I love the fact that it's named the Donner, that, you know, the Donner Party and Donner Pass, and we know it as the Donners. When you get into the history, George Donner stopped because he had, he had wounded his hand, trying to, trying to build a wagon wheel.

• 1:58:04Steven Rinella?

  Rebuild a wagon.

• 1:58:05Speaker 03

  Axle.

• 1:58:05Steven Rinella?

  I think he cut an axle.

• 1:58:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:58:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he died.

• 1:58:20Speaker 03

  He died even within view of the pass.

• 1:58:22Steven Rinella?

  He died of an infection. He got a somewhat superficial cut on his hand. He thought he'd be fine, dies of an infection.

• 1:58:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's great. Yeah, never lays eyes on the pass, gets rich.

• 1:58:33Steven Rinella?

  And there's, there's a lot. I mean, there's so much more like they had, you know, uh,

• 1:58:39Steven Rinella?

  they had gotten into an internal fight on the way and had like a fatality, um, from internal squabbling and they, uh, the, uh, I believe it was the Paiute, as they were approaching the pass, the Paiute in Nevada, were, um, really whittling away on their livestock. They had all these problems, all these normal problems, I should say, no. Yeah. Oh, yeah. All the problems typical of people trying to cross, right? Um, they, they weren't, they weren't like exceptional.

• 1:59:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:08Steven Rinella?

  In any way. And then, um, then during, during the gold rush, people resumed flooding over that thing, man.

• 1:59:17Steven Rinella?

  Flooding over that pass. And now you're standing there and there's like, uh, the highway doesn't go that way. There's a highway that goes over it. There's another highway over it. And you stand there, you look and be like, who in the hell would think you could get a wagon through here?

• 1:59:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel like I've seen the signs.

• 1:59:32Steven Rinella?

  It is a wicked.

• 1:59:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's unreal.

• 1:59:34Steven Rinella?

  Pass.

• 1:59:34Speaker 03

  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 85 miles an hour. On a freeway.

• 1:59:50Steven Rinella?

  That's just so funny. Just driving in to do our work, driving into film. Like I get into the airport, find Reno.

• 1:59:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:57Steven Rinella?

  Find Reno and start driving up the highway. And you get to a sign and it says like Sacramento, 72 miles.

• 2:00:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:05Steven Rinella?

  Like, well, fuck.

• 2:00:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:09Speaker 03

  Better make a reservation.

• 2:00:10Steven Rinella?

  What's the exact problem?

• 2:00:12Speaker 03

  There's a PF Chang's there.

• 2:00:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Seeing that side, it'd be like in your mind, like, oh shit, an hour will be there.

• 2:00:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:18Steven Rinella?

  We'll be over the mountains and out the other side and down in the valley in an hour, you know, imagine the shit that, like what that 72 miles meant back then. It's so funny. And you're on that highway. Also, I had this like deflated feeling.

• 2:00:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:32Steven Rinella?

  I'm like, oh.

• 2:00:33Speaker 03

  Oh, this is a cool, cool story.

• 2:00:38Steven Rinella?

  What pansies? Anybody could make it over there. Watch.

• 2:00:43Steven Rinella?

  I'll be there in an hour.

• 2:00:45Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 2:00:46Steven Rinella?

  No, it was great. So that, that's, uh, we covered three.

• 2:00:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. There's five more.

• 2:00:50Steven Rinella?

  So we did one on the, um, oldest shipwreck in the Great Lakes.

• 2:00:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:55Steven Rinella?

  The first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes.

• 2:00:57Speaker 03

  Another fascinating story. Yeah.

• 2:00:58Steven Rinella?

  Um, we did one on the mysteries of the first Americans.

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:02Steven Rinella?

  We did one on, oh, we should have got, well, we should have got into cattle mutilations.

• 2:01:08Speaker 03

  Cattle mutilations is, is a lot of fun. Uh, it's a lot of fun too, because like there, there's another one where I, like, I know I went in with one perspective, which was like, ah, bullshit. Like you, you walk away being like, oh, oh, boy. Yeah.

• 2:01:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, you know what I was thinking about? If we wanted to do a podcast on, uh, cattle mutilations, I can't think of which one of the people we talked to be best to have on about.

• 2:01:32Speaker 03

  Oh, dude, there is.

• 2:01:33Steven Rinella?

  They're all good. I know we got a camera panel.

• 2:01:37Steven Rinella?

  Academy.

• 2:01:37Speaker 03

  You got enough seats here for most of the people in the.

• 2:01:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  I don't know if you can fit all their hats in this room.

• 2:01:43Steven Rinella?

  Uh, what else we got?

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a big community. I mean, there's a lot of people out there that have had these experiences.

• 2:01:50Steven Rinella?

  Here's one for people. We did one, um, 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. Um, but we, we examined it through the lens of a particular flight called the Begich Boggs Flight, again from the seventies, where the Speaker of the House, Hale Boggs, who, if you're an NPR fan, Koki Rob, the journalist Koki Roberts, who recently passed away, Koki Roberts, if you ever listen to NPR News and you heard the journalist Koki Roberts, her father was Hale Boggs. He was the Speaker of the House. Alaska had one congressman, Nick Begich.

• 2:02:32Steven Rinella?

  And, um, the Speaker of the House, so like the Speaker of the House, who's it now? Johnson. Um, uh,

• 2:02:43Steven Rinella?

  Begich and Boggs are on a plane with a congressional aide and a pilot, and the plane goes missing and is still missing today. Has never been found. Most of the search area focused around, um, the search area for a long time focused around the glacier. They thought perhaps it had gone into a glacier and you'd be like, how's, 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.

• 2:03:13Speaker 03

  Fifty-two.

• 2:03:14Steven Rinella?

  Did get eaten by a glacier and then many years later, regurgitated at the toe of the glacier.

• 2:03:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. They crashed this, this, uh, Globemaster.

• 2:03:27Speaker 03

  You know, big prop plane.

• 2:03:29Steven Rinella?

  Military transport.

• 2:03:30Speaker 03

  Fifty, fifty people on it.

• 2:03:31Steven Rinella?

  Service members on it.

• 2:03:32Speaker 03

  On top of this mountain. It, it falls into a crevasse, snowed over, and seventy years later, this massive glacier, call it a glacier, spits it out the bottom, just as just shredded pieces of metal.

• 2:03:48Steven Rinella?

  Every year, the military, every summer, the military goes and they scour the toe of that glacier, and they're still identifying, it would be just finger bones, and they're still identifying service members. And when we went, we flew over it in a helicopter, um, we didn't want to land there because it's like, you know, it's almost like a grave site.

• 2:04:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:08Steven Rinella?

  Uh, we flew or after they did this summer's work, and there's orange spray paint circles.

• 2:04:14Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:04:15Steven Rinella?

  All along that glacier, there's, not all along, but through a good chunk of that, there's like orange spray paint, and 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 the, the, it pulverized it, it pulverized it to gravel.

• 2:04:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, it's a massive garbage disposal. I mean, you think what it does to mountains, you know?

• 2:04:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:37Speaker 03

  This little plane, man, made a, you know?

• 2:04:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, small aluminum.

• 2:04:41Speaker 03

  Aircraft aluminum.

• 2:04:42Steven Rinella?

  But what's crazy is, what's crazy is on this one, the baggage box flight, the glacier they were looking at, they spent a lot of time on this glacier. The glacier's 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 if it was in that glacier, it would spit it out by now. But it could spit it out in the bottom of a deep ass lake.

• 2:05:07Speaker 03

  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, um, as, as it, as it, you know, kind of came down the mountain and, and into the basin, dug out a lake that's eight hundred feet deep.

• 2:05:33Steven Rinella?

  Dude, this lake, you could paddle a canoe across this lake, some bitch is eight hundred feet deep.

• 2:05:36Speaker 03

  Eight hundred feet deep.

• 2:05:37Steven Rinella?

  And one edge of it is just a wall of ice.

• 2:05:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:40Steven Rinella?

  So, yeah, it could have spat it out into eight hundred feet of water, little crumpled up pieces. My guess, out the spoiler alert, I, I think it's the Prince William Sound. Which is deeper.

• 2:05:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:55Steven Rinella?

  And muckier.

• 2:05:56Speaker 04

  And way bigger.

• 2:05:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I think it's in Prince Williamstown. And I'm not like out on a limb when I say that.

• 2:06:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:06:02Steven Rinella?

  But, uh, they focus very heavily in, in one pass and one glacier.

• 2:06:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:06:08Steven Rinella?

  That first.

• 2:06:10Steven Rinella?

  And this dude, this pass, we, we go through it with a plane. There's a pass where you like go, it's like the worst pass in the world. Like, you know, a pass, you know, everything like a straight thing. It's a pass where you're like, when you're the worst part of the pass, you gotta take a 45, you gotta not, if so, you gotta take a 90 degree turn. So they're going like, sharp left, sharp right to get out.

• 2:06:31Speaker 04

  It's like you're going up to a head wall and just take left.

• 2:06:33Speaker 03

  Incredible. You fly to the end of this, this, you know, of, of Ternigan Arm. Right? This massive kind of valley. Uh, it's first, at first a body of water and then this valley.

• 2:06:45Steven Rinella?

  Portage Pass.

• 2:06:46Speaker 03

  And then, and then Portage Glacier and Portage Lake, which we were talking about. And as you get to the very end of it, you make a 90 degree turn and only then can you see whether or not the pass is open. And if it's not.

• 2:06:59Steven Rinella?

  You gotta check for oncoming aircraft too.

• 2:07:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. And if it's not open, you just gotta keep turning and, and, and do a 180 and go right back to Anchorage.

• 2:07:08Steven Rinella?

  We're sitting there in the past, we hiked up in the past and we went down this lake. We're sitting there and after a while we watch a plane.

• 2:07:15Steven Rinella?

  He gets up.

• 2:07:16Speaker 03

  Not good.

• 2:07:16Steven Rinella?

  Comes back, comes back and his head's back to Anchorage. You know, he's like, nope.

• 2:07:21Speaker 03

  Not today.

• 2:07:21Steven Rinella?

  Closed up that day. Yeah. The sketchy pass.

• 2:07:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:25Steven Rinella?

  But yeah, man, um, I don't know what date, yeah. January 28th. If you wanna watch the show.

• 2:07:30Speaker 04

  If people are listening to this, the day it drops, it is the 20th. So it'll be a week and a day from now, the 28th.

• 2:07:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Mo's gonna do credits.

• 2:07:41Speaker 03

  It wasn't quite the, it wasn't quite the, uh, the setup. I was like, I was like kinda hinting to you. I was like, what's kinda steer the last part of the conversation?

• 2:07:48Speaker 04

  There's a lot of amazing people involved in this.

• 2:07:51Steven Rinella?

  There are, listen.

• 2:07:51Speaker 04

  Very talented people.

• 2:07:52Steven Rinella?

  And I'm not, listen, I wanna say, I wanna say.

• 2:07:55Speaker 03

  Still aiming for that EP.

• 2:07:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Mo, um, and I, I, I'm joking. Um, yeah. Talk about who, talk about who you worked with.

• 2:08:03Speaker 03

  I mean, it is, again, as we talked about at like the beginning of the show, I'll try to make a segue now. You're not gonna do the work.

• 2:08:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:08:11Speaker 03

  As we talked about at 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 Greenland, you go out and make it. This is years and years of like grinding.

• 2:08:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:24Speaker 03

  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, um, 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.

• 2:08:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like, like, yeah. Going way back would be the constant attention of Ben Ford and Mark Pierce.

• 2:08:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Ben Ford, Mark Pierce, Bridger Pierce, Chris Richardson, all of the people over at Warm Springs who really like shepherded this project from concept to like something that actually has funding and you're going to go out and make.

• 2:09:00Steven Rinella?

  And on my end, it was my wife Katie.

• 2:09:02Speaker 03

  Yep, that's right.

• 2:09:03Steven Rinella?

  Drove it on my end for a long time.

• 2:09:05Speaker 03

  I also, I need to say, cause she's the one that called me.

• 2:09:11Steven Rinella?

  I was like, oh God, don't call Mo. She's always like, Mo.

• 2:09:16Speaker 03

  You know, so you're 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 go out in 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. Um, but on the other side, when we talk about the network, like what was the 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, 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

• 2:09:54Speaker 03

  constructive path forward. What's really unique here is working with like Max McCallum, Mary Donahue, Alexander Hicks, Eli Lehr.

• 2:10:08Speaker 03

  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. It's like, 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, responsive and 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.

• 2:10:43Steven Rinella?

  That's great, man.

• 2:10:44Speaker 03

  So it was, it all around, it's just been, it's been an awesome experience. I hope we get renewed and can do it again.

• 2:10:54Steven Rinella?

  It comes out, the show is Hunting History, comes out on History Channel. 10:00 PM Eastern, I could do the math, all the way across the whole country. 9:00 Central.

• 2:11:09Steven Rinella?

  And what happens? 8 Mountain.

• 2:11:12Speaker 03

  7 Donner.

• 2:11:17Speaker 03

  10 o'clock in the lost colony and 7 o'clock in Donner.

• 2:11:21Steven Rinella?

  Or 5 or something like that, you'll figure it out, you'll figure it out up in Alaska. On the History Channel. And it follows the show that, what's funny is a lot of, most people we talked to when we were working on our show, and we talk 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 Curse of Oak Island on History Channel premiere, January 28th, and you can watch for eight weeks.

• 2:11:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:11:46Steven Rinella?

  Tune in.

• 2:11:47Speaker 03

  Next year we'll make eight more.

• 2:11:48Steven Rinella?

  You'll watch the whole thing and never get to see Mo. So you have to watch here if you want to see Mo.

• 2:11:54Speaker 03

  Check him out.

• 2:11:54Steven Rinella?

  But trust that Mo was there all the time.

• 2:11:56Speaker 03

  It's actually technically not true. I'm really bothered, I'm really bothered by one shot in Alaska Triangle where I'm like, I'm, I'm in this sweatshirt and 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...

• 2:12:14Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so you had a cameo?

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:16Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 2:12:16Speaker 03

  And you can see me and it's just like, who is that? Because the weird dude in the hood in the back of the helicopter.

• 2:12:23Steven Rinella?

  Your lives are at risk. There's a skyjacker.

• 2:12:29Steven Rinella?

  He's got a joke.

• 2:12:31Steven Rinella?

  All right. Thanks, everybody for tuning in, man. And I hope you check out the show and I hope you have as much fun watching it as we had putting it together. Thank you.

• 2:12:38Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 2:13:06Steven Rinella?

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• 2:13:50Steven Rinella?

  best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. The new Dual Threat Pro SD climber is the ultimate companion for both bow and rifle hunters. Thanks to its adjustable dual threat front bar.

• 2:14:36Steven Rinella?

  This innovative feature allows you to tailor the climber based on your preferred hunting method. So you can choose between two climbing modes and two hunting modes. So I like having something that's got this level of versatility. Get 20% off all tree stands by using the code MEATEATER at summitstands.com. That is a phenomenal deal. That's summitstands.com.

• 2:14:55Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.