Joe Rogan Experience #1918 - John from The Boneyard Alaska

Narrator 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays)

Joe Rogan 0:12 Welcome aboard, Jon.

John Reeves 0:13 Thank you, sir.

Joe Rogan 0:14 (clears throat) Very nice to meet you, man. I've been, uh, admiring your Instagram page and all the social media stuff forever and it's crazy and perplexing, and so I couldn't wait to get you in here and see how the hell did you acquire this magical spot that you have in Alaska?

John Reeves 0:28 I'd have to give you some context.

Joe Rogan 0:30 Okay.

John Reeves 0:31 And, um, I grew up on an Indian mound in North Florida, to give you an idea of-

Joe Rogan 0:37 An Indian mound?

John Reeves 0:38 Yeah, my parents moved this family down from Ohio and bought nine acres on the St. Johns River in 1962. That's where I grew up, and it was on top of an Indian mound. We didn't know it at the time, so I was always out digging in the mound, looking for pottery and was always captivated by looking for treasure, and I did that as a kid and then, uh, did a lot of surfing and stuff like that, as you might think, in Florida and got to be pretty good at swimming.

John Reeves 1:09 Ended up in high school, uh, setting the American record in the 50-yard freestyle, and there was a fellow, an assistant coach at the University of Florida named Eddie Reese. You might recognize his name. He's the head coach at the University of Texas right here. Three-time Olympic coach, widely regarded now as the greatest swim coach of all time. I gave him a call before we came over here and just to say hello. We were in and out quick, but he, uh, rec- recruited me to Florida and I got recruited at a couple other colleges because I was a pretty quick swimmer. University of Alabama, I met, uh, Bear Bryant. The swim coach took me by the f- practice field and introduced me to him and he said, uh, "Can you catch a football? You should be a football player. You're too big to be a swimmer." And by the back... That was a couple of hundred pounds ago, by the way, I should mention.

Joe Rogan 2:03 (laughs)

John Reeves 2:04 (laughs) And, uh, he says, "Can you catch a football?" I said, "Yeah, I think so." He said, "Hey Joe, Joe, come over here. Throw this guy a pass." It was Joe Namath.

Joe Rogan 2:14 Wow.

John Reeves 2:16 He says, "Go long." I said... I start running down the field. Threw me a ball and I said, "You gotta catch this, you gotta catch this." And I caught it. He says, "Throw it back," and I did. And then, uh, went to the swimming pool and met all the swimmers and all that kinda stuff and then I got recruited by Florida, uh, Coach Eddie Reese and, uh, decided I wanna go to Florida. That was... Seemed like a lot more fun. I went to Florida and the, uh, first year I was there, I was, uh, All-American Swimmer and we... I got seventh place at West Point in the NCAAs. The next year, my coach... The NCAAs were in Aus- we were in, uh, Knoxville, Tennessee. He says, um, Coach says, "You don't win this, you're, I'm gonna send you to Alaska." "Alaska? What's that?" Never even thought about Alaska. I got second place, so, "Okay, I'm going to Alaska."

Joe Rogan 3:19 (laughs)

John Reeves 3:19 I didn't win it. Now here, here I am, full scholarship, great family. I had five sisters growing up and, uh, doing real good. I said, "Fuck it, I only got se- (laughs) I got second place. I'm going to Alaska." So I dropped outta college.

Joe Rogan 3:38 So just because he said that?

John Reeves 3:41 Yeah. Yeah, I- I- I was-

Joe Rogan 3:43 But obviously, he's probably fucking around, right?

John Reeves 3:46 Yeah, he was fucking around, but the thing is, I was such a shitty student, if I didn't drop out, I was gonna flunk out, and I talked to the registrar there, by the name of Wendy Smallwood, who took care of all the athletes coming in. She said, "You... Man, you... (laughs) If you don't get out of here, you're gonna flunk out." So I said, "Well, if I drop out, can I come back my junior year?" And she goes, "Oh, yeah. You can do that, but if you flunk out, no." And I said, "Okay, I think I will," and then I saw a movie called Jeremiah Johnson. I said, "You know what? I wanna be a mountain man."

Joe Rogan 4:21 (laughs)

John Reeves 4:23 And then after that, I went down to the registrar's office, took the dropout sheet, wrote "gone fishing" on it as my excuse-

Joe Rogan 4:31 (laughs)

John Reeves 4:32 ... hung it on my college door. I had played two, two-card gut poker game the night before. I had, you know, 50 bucks. I got enough. Put that, and the next morning, six o'clock in the morning, taped that to my door and out the door I went with a backpack, a shotgun and, and that's about all I had. Hitchhiked, got down I-75 and started-

Joe Rogan 4:52 Somebody picked you up with a shotgun?

John Reeves 4:54 It was in a case.

Joe Rogan 4:55 Oh. (laughs)

John Reeves 4:56 Got me in trouble in Seattle. I got arrested for being the I-5 sniper.

Joe Rogan 5:00 Whoa.

John Reeves 5:00 And that was, you know...

Joe Rogan 5:02 Sniper with a shotgun?

John Reeves 5:04 Well, they had, they had to look at the shotgun to find out I wasn't the sniper 'cause the sniper used a rifle.

Joe Rogan 5:09 Yeah.

John Reeves 5:10 And I just walked into that. I mean, it was like, I made a phone call at a gas station and pretty soon all the g- nearby where the sniper was shooting the day before, so all these cops showed up. It's the only time I've been arrested by 60 police officers and I was... He goes, "Okay, killer, where's the gun?" I go, "What are you talking about?" I forgot where I put the shotgun. So I'm wandering around the gas station looking for it. Found it tucked between the water cooler and a wall where I'd stopped to take a drink of water before all the action started. So they, "Yeah, that's a shotgun." They took me back to the University of Seattle. I told them I had been sleeping in the, in the brush or, you know, there was a, a board there that said, "Writers, uh, needed to Alaska. Must be mechanically inkind." So I called that number. I said, "Oh, yeah. Fuck yeah, I'm a, I'm a mechanic." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 6:02 (laughs)

John Reeves 6:05 No idea. But I said, "What do you got?" And he goes, "A Volkswagen van." Well, luckily, that was the only vehicle I'd ever turned a wrench on, 'cause earlier, like two years earlier or three years earlier, I went on a surfing safari from Florida to California in a Volkswagen van. We had to drop the engine out in Tempe, Arizona. It's only four b- four bolts, but we had a spare engine 'cause we figured that might happen. So anyways, I, I got a hold of the, the guy,

John Reeves 6:35 ro- rode up to, to Alaska with him and got about six jobs 'cause one thing I couldn't do as a swimmer is you're always working out, you know, swimming six hours a day for six years and never made any money. I got up there and I had like part-time job swim coach, working as a film editor from the University of Alaska. Some just different bullshit jobs that I could make money, man. I'm making money. I like this. And so I came back after that, Joe, and I went back to college and I mentioned, I think, that I was a shitty student. I didn't get any better my junior year. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 7:18 (laughs)

John Reeves 7:18 So junior year, I go, "I'm done." I went to the NCAAs in Long Beach, didn't do very well. And knew I was gonna go. They had the swim banquet at the end of the year and the coach, head coach told me... By now Ra- uh, Eddie Reese had moved on to another college. I think he went to Auburn. He looked at our team and he said, "Um, I'm gonna go places. I'm gonna, instead of being a assistant coach, I'm gonna be a head coach." And then he ended up at Texas where he's been an Olympic coach three times, countless national championships. Just a good guy. And, you know, I know you love sports. He's the winningest sport- or winningest coach in swimming history. If you ever get a chance to meet that guy, he's awesome. And so I went back. The coach said, uh, at the banquet, "You've been elected captain for your- the senior year." I said, "I ain't doing it. I'm going to Alaska. I'm out of here, man." So off I went, went back to Alaska and I've been there since, uh...

Joe Rogan 8:27 What made you want to go back?

John Reeves 8:29 Just Alaska's a big country, man. Big country and, uh, it just spacious. Just I wanted to be a gold miner too and I'd done some gold panning up there and, "I'm gonna go be a gold miner." Well, I got there in '74 and I got a job up there as a teamster. It was right before the pipeline. Started hauling freight as a teamster and put my money into a little gold mining operation on a creek that some guy sold me. He said, "There's a lot of gold on this creek." There wasn't shit on that creek, but he got my money. And so went out there and did, did our best for the summer and ended up going broke mining. And I said, "Well, I didn't do it right." So ended up getting a job running air freight, working prior to the pipeline. Then the pipeline started getting going and a buddy of mine who's a diver at the University of Florida, he came up to Alaska and, uh, he got on as a air freight driver for CF Air Freight, Consolidated Freightways. I was a teamster for him and he was driving a truck for, um, the terminal manager who owned the truck for the air freight division. And they said, "That's a conflict interest. You need to sell the truck to somebody else. Let them hire a company to do it." So he said, "Do you guys want to buy this truck, this business?" And, "How much?" "10,000 bucks." We had nothing. We went to every bank in town. Now you guys are, what, 20 s- 20-somethings, 24, you got no collateral. You want to buy a $10,000 truck. Yeah, but there's gonna be a business associated with it. Last bank we went to is, uh, was the First National Bank and the guy standing at the counter heard us talking to the manager and he goes, uh, "Hey, Bi-" Bill was the name of the manager at the bank. He goes, "Hey, Bill, I'll back their play." And we looked at the guy, he looked familiar 'cause we had delivered some windshields to him. He was a windshield guy. He had his junkyard and spare parts and stuff like that. So he co-signed a note. I knew him as well as I know you right now. And pretty soon the manager of the air freight company called us in. He says, "Boys, your life's about to change." And we said, "What's that mean?" He goes, "We just got the contract to handle all the air freight for the Alyeska Pipeline." We said, "What's the, what's the Alyeska Pipeline?" "Well, the big pipeline they're gonna be hauling, they're building up here." "Okay. What's that mean to us?" He says, "That means you're gonna get rich. Your first delivery's sitting over at Reed Tool." "What is it?" "Drill bits." "How many? H- h- how much?" "10,000 pounds." You gotta remember we're getting paid by the pound to deliver air freight. Generally speaking, a minimum piece of freight, less than 50 pounds was like $5.40 a pound or, or a delivery. We made 700 bucks or something in that, in minutes for them to drive a forklift up, unload the pallet and haul it off. And I looked at my partner, Ken, I said, "Man, we're gonna do good."And within a short amount of time, within a year and a half, we handled all the air freight north of the Alaska Range. We're bringing in 747 Flying Tigers into Anchorage every night, three of them solid freight. Trans- trans-ship the freight from the plane to a flatbed truck, get 10 or 12 trucks every morning before 8:00, take it over to the North Star terminals where it was unloaded, and we weren't allowed to touch it because those guys were a different union and we'd just drink coffee, and then they'd sign our bill of ladings and we'd be out of there every morning by about, uh, before the coffee even got cold with about 30, 40 grand worth of revenue. Now you give that to a couple of young guys that had never had money in Alaska during a pipeline, that's a recipe for disaster and boy, did we do. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 13:04 What did you do? (laughs)

John Reeves 13:05 Boy, did we go through it. You know, it was crazy. We'd, we'd walk into... A buddy of mine had a restaurant named Jack O'Brien, they called him Ivory Jacks up there in Fairbanks. Good man. And we'd go in and go... There'd be 200 people in that restaurant and I didn't know the guy very well, but we lived in the same area out in the woods nearby his restaurant. We'd go there on occasion. I'd say, "Hey, Jack. Dinner's on me tonight for everybody in here and drinks." He went, "Really?" I said, "Yeah, really." At the end of the night, it was like 40 grand. Boom. I'm telling you. All of a sudden, I had a little money. Didn't know any better and we spent it and we had fun and we built a pipeline. A lot of, a lot of stuff happened during that pipeline that people don't even realize. That thing was only supposed to cost $800 million to build. It cost $9 billion.

Joe Rogan 14:04 (laughs) .

John Reeves 14:06 It's... It seems like the companies that were building at this... They call them the Seven Sisters. You know, all the big oil companies were grouped together and the operating company was called Alyeska Pipeline. And it was like somebody flew over Alaska and said, "Let's drop $9 billion on these guys and see what they do with it." It was totally unbelievable.

Joe Rogan 14:32 Okay, so you got all this money.

John Reeves 14:34 Yeah. Got all this money and then at the end of the pipeline, told my partner, "You want to buy this company from me, or you want me to buy it from you? We'll flip a coin, come up with a fair price." Flipped the coin, he won, he bought me out and I said okay. Now I had a little money, went to work drilling for uranium for Exxon and Chevron up in the Seward Peninsula for a company called Resource Associates and was just a guy hauling a drill rig around. And from there, I started getting more interested in the mining end of things and keep in mind, I'm still a young guy, I'm not married yet and, um, we'd go to Costa Rica. I bought a farm down there, decided I'd be a coffee farmer. Wasn't worth a shit at that either. I had some lemon trees growing and the first deal I made, I sold 500 lemons for three bucks. I said, "I don't think I'm gonna make money not farming." So I go back to Alaska and I protected my... The little wealth I had, I was able to protect by going to Costa Rica and this... Costa Rica is named Costa Rica because of its beauty, not because it's got a lot of treasure. But when you have conquistadors going by going, "Let's call this place Costa Rica." These murderous guys going totally... And the Incas and the Aztecs can attest to this, they were there for its treasure. And so I got back to Alaska, started getting serious. My wife's name is Ramona, we got married when I was 28 and we have five kids of our own. You met the youngest out there, Elora and Drew is my CEO and her, her husband. And her part- her, uh, sister, you know, uh, just older than her, they own a company called Gold Daughters. And my wife and I bought a... an old dredge after I'd gone... I went... decided to go mining for somebody else as an equipment operator. So I went up and I drove a loader, 7-12s, and was able to get paid in gold and that would help get me through Costa Rica and the gold... price of gold when I started was 250 bucks an ounce and when I ended, it was 800 bucks an ounce and I said, "Oh, this is gl- this is glorious." So I was making money gold mining and learned a lot about gold mining and I learned a lot about how to do it and I learned a lot about how not to do it. And so after that, I decided, well, I got to get into something else and I was driving back to town and I was... had to stop, had been drinking some beers and I had not had a beer all summer and through the, through the, uh, trees, I see these big metal... big metal pipes sticking out of the ground. It was the fall time, so I walked back there and it's a gold dredge. Are you familiar with what a gold dredge looks like?

Joe Rogan 17:26 The machine?

John Reeves 17:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:27 Yeah.

John Reeves 17:28 It's a big, huge floating barge with a digging ladder and a tailing stacker and a trommel. This one was about... It's a six cubic foot dredge, meaning each bucket would hold six cubic feet of dirt. And while I was there, some other people drove in, they walked in and that was... I'd never seen one. I didn't even know it was there just outside of town and these people were going on it and I said, "Man, this, this would be a cool tourist attraction." So I found out who owned it and I got a hold of the guys that owned it and I said, "Hey, you guys want to buy... uh, sell that dredge?" And they said, "Sure, we'll sell it." We were gonna turn, turn it into a tourist attraction, but we bought some, uh, leases in a... in a place called Prudhoe Bay.... oh, okay. You guys don't, you guys don't wanna be in tourism anymore." He, they had some of the best leases in Prudhoe Bay where the oil was coming from. So I bought it, we bought it, moved a bunkhouse over there to it, turned it into a really nice tourist attraction. It's ... And then I said, you know, Carnival Cruise Lines owned a company called Holland America West tours. They came up and said, "Hey, you're..." I was in my 40s. And they say, uh, "You're a pretty young guy. We don't think you should ever have to work again." (laughs) I said, "I've been thinking the same fucking thing." So they bought it from us. Okay, now I'm out of tourism, and I wanna go mining. And I got to know the owners of a company called Alaska Gold Company, who prior to that was called Fairbanks Exploration Company, and the parent company to that was called United States Smelting, Refining, and Mining Company. So I was the next guy in line. It was a privately owned company all that time. And, um, at the, at the time I bought that company, I became the largest private landowner in Alaska with 10,000 acres of patented land with proven reserves close to 800,000 ounces, and gold was low. These guys were tired of it. They'd run it from 1925 until I bought it and took out over eight million ounces. Uh, I'm gonna say over eight million, but records indicate a little bit different. And in the process of that, I went down to Utah and got all their archive material, which included the, all the notes and the correspondence files and exploration files and stratigraphic files and the researches, all the, all the paperwork they had in Boston because Boston is where USSR&M was headquartered. So I had kind of a, an advantage of in the gold mining business because now I have 10,000 acres of land, a lot of it already mined out by the dredges, but the dredges only took what they could make at $20 an ounce. And when they stopped, it was $35 an ounce. And I didn't check today, but I think it's close to $1,800 an ounce, and they only mined what was good at that time. It's like if you imagine a, a chicken. You got the, the white meat, which is where all the pay was, and then you got your drumsticks and your wings on the margins, and this, that's the kinda stuff that was left, and it wasn't worth mining back when I bought the company, but it is now. So, now we have some really good properties and the exploration files that cover the entire state of Alaska. And Drew out there, he's got hard rock claims in Valdez that we picked a file out of the exploration files and identified an area that no one even knew about except our, our company engineers who died decades ago. Um, we're ... Our consultants are all dead. All these, all these, all these reports that we read were written in the '20s and '30s and '40s. The ... They're all gone, and they weren't trying to promote mining. They were trying to find gold. So if they say there's gold here, there's gold there.

Joe Rogan 21:36 Okay.

John Reeves 21:38 And that's what, that's what we're doing now. We're a mining company, but now we've morphed into a land management company because we- we've got a half a dozen mines that are on different pieces of our ground, mining, and we just manage the land, make sure that, you know, we got legitimate people mining.

Joe Rogan 21:58 Okay, so this is how you get to the land.

John Reeves 22:00 This is how-

Joe Rogan 22:00 Now how do you get these bones? How does this all start?

John Reeves 22:03 Well, I'll get into that.

Joe Rogan 22:04 Okay.

John Reeves 22:05 And, uh, the way I discovered the bones was after I bought the property. Uh, there was a, a stripping pile done by, uh, an adjacent miner that was dumping overburden on this, on these flat tailings, and I had a tour guide, and I ... A big guy. I said, "Josh, run over there and find me a mammoth tusk." I'd never found a mammoth tusk, but I'd heard they were finding 'em over there, and the ground they were dumping on was on my ground. So he, he went and he, he says, "What do they look like?" I said, "Well, they're ... They look like tree trunks, only they got a curve to 'em." So he went, and he was gone half an hour. He comes back with a seven-foot tusk over his shoulder. I went, "Holy shit." I said, "Go get me another one." He went and came back an hour later with another one about three feet long, a broken one. So I walked over there to look at this area where the mining was gonna take place, and they ended up mining it, and they had a right to mine it. The company took out about 3,000 ounces out of this one little area, and I was like, "Goddamn, this stuff stinks." So one day, we were walking around the area after they had mined it and moved on to another place, and we followed the smell. We walked around the side of this hill, and we got up in this little draw, and we were picking ... My kids were with me too. We were picking bones

John Reeves 23:36 off the, off the ground, little shards, little leg bones and stuff. So, we filled up a garbage bag with those. We went back again and again and again, and then I took a excavator back, built a little road around the side so we could get back to it with a machine, took a couple dirt digs out of the muck, found a mammoth tusk. I said, "Oh, boy. Let's get something going." So then we got a big floating barge and put a pump on it, 471 Jimmy, with a giant. They're, they're called giants, but they're ca- actually hydraulic monitors. They look like big long pipes that you spray water out of, and our pump was a eight-inch intake, six-inch outtake, and we nozzled it down to two, two inches, two and a half inches.We could fire the water way out there and wash the overburden away. And the overburden there is about 60 feet high. It's permafrost, silt. And underneath that, you have your gravel layer, and underneath the gravel, you have the gold and the bedrock. And the, uh, gravel layer and the muck interface is where most of the bones are. So, we started finding lots of bones. I mean, a lot of bones. And in the first three years, we found thousands and thousands of tusks and bison heads and bones. And by the way, your... all those skulls you got out there in your- in your building here?

Joe Rogan 25:00 Yeah.

John Reeves 25:00 You ain't got a steppe bison skull. I'm gonna fix that shit.

Joe Rogan 25:05 (laughs)

John Reeves 25:05 (laughs) Okay?

Joe Rogan 25:07 Okay.

John Reeves 25:07 I'm gonna. And then, uh... I don't even know how many we have. We've stopped counting. And mammoth tusks, same thing.

Joe Rogan 25:16 And when did steppe bisons go extinct?

John Reeves 25:18 12,000 years ago.

Joe Rogan 25:20 Wow.

John Reeves 25:21 And these- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 25:22 And so, the permafrost is slowly melting, and you're hosing it down and pulling it, so the stench is literally, like, this ancient, rotting biological material.

John Reeves 25:35 It stinks.

Joe Rogan 25:36 Wow.

John Reeves 25:37 It's organic.

Joe Rogan 25:39 But it's been frozen forever.

John Reeves 25:41 Thousands. 20,000 years, 30,000 years, 50,000 years.

Joe Rogan 25:44 So, this is, uh, you with the hose, spraying it onto the side of this wall.

John Reeves 25:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:49 So, the way you do it is you just spray the side of these... Like, what would you call that hill?

John Reeves 25:55 It's a muck bench.

Joe Rogan 25:56 A muck bench?

John Reeves 25:57 Yes, sir.

Joe Rogan 25:57 So, you spray that until you see something poking through?

John Reeves 26:00 Yes, sir. Well, you spray it, and then you walk up there and you turn the nozzle off to the side and you'll pick up the bones, the little pieces, leg bones, backbones, uh, vertebrae.

Joe Rogan 26:09 Why is there so much in this one area?

John Reeves 26:12 Nobody knows.

Joe Rogan 26:13 Really?

John Reeves 26:13 Nobody.

Joe Rogan 26:14 Well, that's what's so crazy. Like, when I watched the documentary on your place-

John Reeves 26:18 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 26:19 ... when, uh, you- you show this, uh, giant room where you have all these buckets of femurs and skulls and tusks and, and y- you have those paleontologists who are just like, they can't even believe what they're seeing.

John Reeves 26:34 Yeah. That's because a lot of those animals, they say, never lived up there during the Ice Age. So, when they see it, and they still think that, I just say, "Well, they sure as fuck died here."

Joe Rogan 26:47 Dude... (laughs)

John Reeves 26:49 (laughs) There you go.

Joe Rogan 26:50 So-

John Reeves 26:51 Tha- that's-

Joe Rogan 26:51 ... it's changing their ideas of what existed in that area.

John Reeves 26:55 Yes, sir.

Joe Rogan 26:56 Wow. And what's the oldest bones you guys have found?

John Reeves 26:59 We don't know. We- we've sampled maybe four or five of them. It costs 400 bucks a sample to do a carbon-14 test on them. If I was to sample my entire collection today, it'd cost $100 million.

Joe Rogan 27:13 Hmm.

John Reeves 27:14 'Cause we have a- close to a quarter million fossils now.

Joe Rogan 27:18 The whole place is crazy. I mean, it's- it's so hard to believe that this one area has so many bones. Is there... They have no idea of, like, did these animals fall into a muck pit? Was it... Why are they there? They don't know?

John Reeves 27:33 No.

Joe Rogan 27:34 'Cause there's so many of them, and we're talking bones. We're not even talking fossils.

John Reeves 27:39 Right.

Joe Rogan 27:39 Right? Because they froze-

John Reeves 27:41 Right.

Joe Rogan 27:41 ... which is very, very unusual.

John Reeves 27:43 Right. The- the- the, uh, documentary you saw with Dick Mol-

Joe Rogan 27:47 Mm-hmm.

John Reeves 27:48 ... the paleontologist.

Joe Rogan 27:49 What an unfortunate name, by the way.

John Reeves 27:51 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 27:52 Dick Mol?

John Reeves 27:55 You know, I see what you're saying there. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 27:56 I know you do.

John Reeves 27:58 Yeah, he, uh, he's one of the good ones. You know, he's, he, uh, he came up and spent a few days with us, with the filmmaker that made that film, by the way. The filmmaker is an artist purum, just through and through. And I met him when he was working for Nat- National Geographic. And then he came to me and he says, "Hey, I'd like to document, make a documentary about the Boneyard." So, I gave him unfettered access for four years. Just, "Do what you gotta do. Just stay out of our way. Don't make me worry about finding you under a muck bench or a tree falling on you. Just go do your thing." So, he did, and, um, the stuff that you're seeing there, and you saw in that, uh, video that you watched, the documentary, it's like nobody knows why any of that stuff is there.

Joe Rogan 28:46 I- is that the most unusual site that they've ever discovered, in terms of just the sheer quantity of bones?

John Reeves 28:52 Yes.

Joe Rogan 28:54 Wow. And you just found it by accident?

John Reeves 28:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:56 It just makes you think, how many more of those are out there?

John Reeves 28:59 Well, I know one more.

Joe Rogan 29:01 Really?

John Reeves 29:01 It's the next creek down. Yep.

Joe Rogan 29:05 So, this area where you're extracting these bones from, how big is the actual area where you're finding these?

John Reeves 29:11 Five acres.

Joe Rogan 29:11 That's it?

John Reeves 29:12 That's it.

Joe Rogan 29:13 Wow!

John Reeves 29:14 And I- I get blamed... Well, I have a... You've, you're- you're the... I- I gotta be honest with you on a little thing here. When you first mentioned the Boneyard, Alaska, and talked about our site, you... I don't know how you found it, but you found it. And you had, uh, uh, who'd you have on here?

Joe Rogan 29:35 I think it was Forrest Galante.

John Reeves 29:36 Yeah, it was Forrest Galante. And I picked up 5,000 followers on my Instagram account that day. And I said to myself, "The only guy I'm ever gonna talk to about this site is Joe Rogan. Ever." And I used you as a crutch for three solid fucking years-

Joe Rogan 29:58 (laughs)

John Reeves 29:58 ... 'cause I didn't want to talk to anybody about this.

Joe Rogan 30:02 (laughs)

John Reeves 30:02 But everybody's so interested in it and I said, "I'll talk to Joe Rogan. That's it." And I've had countless opportunities to talk to newscasters and- and network reality TV people that wanna do blah, blah, blah, blah. No, I ain't gonna do it. I'll talk to Joe Rogan about it.

Joe Rogan 30:19 Well, thank you for that.

John Reeves 30:20 No, thank you for that.

Joe Rogan 30:22 My pleasure. Well, it's just so unusual. At first, I just thought, "Oh, you probably found a couple things on this place." And then, as I'm going over your Instagram page and I'm seeing all the stuff that you're pulling out of there, I'm like, "This doesn't even seem real." Like, how could this one area have so many bones and so many tusks? Like, h- how many tusks do you have? Mammoth tusks?

John Reeves 30:47 We stopped counting. Not because we can't count that high. It's just because, what's the point?

Joe Rogan 30:56 Thousands?

John Reeves 30:58 I have a friend that says I got 10,000 dead wooly mammoth on my ground.

Joe Rogan 31:02 Wow! In five acres?

John Reeves 31:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:06 That's insane.

John Reeves 31:07 I-

Joe Rogan 31:07 Has, uh, have any of these paleontologists speculated on why this one area would have so many dead animals?

John Reeves 31:16 No. If they have, they haven't told me.

Joe Rogan 31:21 And w- so, you, you dated a few of them. And what were the dates from those few?

John Reeves 31:25 They went from as recent as 3,000 years ago to 22,000 years ago.

Joe Rogan 31:32 Wow.

John Reeves 31:33 And the reason this site is so interesting to 'em is because it's from all from one little area, so the context is there, and it spans what's called the extinction event. Y- uh, Graham is-

Joe Rogan 31:49 Yeah.

John Reeves 31:50 ... and Randall.

Joe Rogan 31:50 Yeah, the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.

John Reeves 31:52 Yeah. And so, I'm kinda going along with them because it would-

Joe Rogan 31:57 But that wouldn't make sense why they're all there.

John Reeves 31:59 Well, you gotta remember that the world, the Pleistocene started, what, two and a half million years ago.

Joe Rogan 32:05 Mm-hmm.

John Reeves 32:05 And stopped about 11,800 years ago.

Joe Rogan 32:08 Yeah.

John Reeves 32:10 So, that whole area was ice except for a ice-free corridor between Siberia and Alaska and the lower 48 that went right through where we're at. So, there was migration happening, coming through there. And these animals lived there for tens of thousands of years, the grazers. Well, wherever there's grazers, there's gonna be carnivores. You have the short-faced bear, you got the cave lions, you got... We found all that stuff.

Joe Rogan 32:40 You found short-faced bears?

John Reeves 32:42 Yes, sir.

Joe Rogan 32:42 Really?

John Reeves 32:43 Yep.

Joe Rogan 32:43 You got a f- short-faced bear head?

John Reeves 32:46 Yes.

Joe Rogan 32:47 What does that look like?

John Reeves 32:48 It's huge.

Joe Rogan 32:49 How big is it?

John Reeves 32:51 Probably about that long.

Joe Rogan 32:52 Oh. (laughs)

John Reeves 32:53 They stood, when they stood up on their hind legs, they were 12 feet, uh-

Joe Rogan 32:57 Yeah, we've shown-

John Reeves 32:58 ... to the top.

Joe Rogan 32:58 ... photos of, uh, these replicas standing next to people.

John Reeves 33:01 Yeah. No, it's, they're huge.

Joe Rogan 33:02 It's nuts.

John Reeves 33:03 Yeah. And, and not only that, but, you know, you have... A little mini factoid for you. How, you know, it takes a mammal 22 seconds, 21 seconds to take a leak. Did you know that?

Joe Rogan 33:14 No.

John Reeves 33:15 Check it out.

Joe Rogan 33:16 Okay.

John Reeves 33:16 And by the way, I hope you have your bullshit detector on. I know you got one. And any time you wanna throw it on, you throw it on me.

Joe Rogan 33:22 No, I believe you.

John Reeves 33:23 No, n- I'm just telling you.

Joe Rogan 33:25 Okay.

John Reeves 33:25 So, some of the stuff sounds no, no fucking way.

Joe Rogan 33:28 There it goes, 20 seconds. Empty their bladders in 20, about 20 seconds.

John Reeves 33:34 There you go.

Joe Rogan 33:34 There you go, the golden rule.

John Reeves 33:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:36 All mammals weighing more than 2.2 pounds empty their full bladders in about 20 seconds, unless you've been drinking.

John Reeves 33:44 I've gone 100 seconds before. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 33:45 I bet you have. (laughs)

John Reeves 33:49 It's a kind of a contest.

Joe Rogan 33:51 Yeah.

John Reeves 33:52 And, uh, so anyways, the, uh, you gotta remember also that a grizzly bear can cover about 100 yards in eight seconds. And they got some pretty powerful noses on 'em.

Joe Rogan 34:03 So, all these animals that stop to take a piss, they get whacked?

John Reeves 34:07 I have... That's my theory.

Joe Rogan 34:09 I don't think that's a good theory.

John Reeves 34:10 It... Probably not.

Joe Rogan 34:11 (laughs)

John Reeves 34:12 I have another theory, though, that I discovered in Florida.

Joe Rogan 34:15 What?

John Reeves 34:16 Uh, pelicans fly in groups of prime numbers.

Joe Rogan 34:19 They do?

John Reeves 34:21 It seems like that to me. I pay attention to shit like that, Joe.

Joe Rogan 34:25 Okay.

John Reeves 34:26 Now, if you say, "Look, there's a group. Eight pelicans flying over there." I'll go, "Bullshit. There's one and then there's seven behind it."

Joe Rogan 34:33 Hm.

John Reeves 34:36 "Lookit there, there's 23 of 'em." "Yeah, you're right, prime number."

Joe Rogan 34:40 Interesting.

John Reeves 34:42 But I, I threw that out on my Instagram one time to challenge people. Go find a group of pelicans, or pen- (laughs) pelicans flying in an odd number. And it was kinda hard for 'em. So, you ain't, you ain't got pelicans around here, but...

Joe Rogan 35:00 No. I'm not a fan. You ever see pelicans swallow seagulls?

John Reeves 35:04 No. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 35:05 They just grab a seagull, swallow it whole.

John Reeves 35:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:08 They're ruthless motherfuckers.

John Reeves 35:09 Oh, they are.

Joe Rogan 35:10 Like, people think of pelicans, "Oh, they carry... That's like a stork. They carry the baby, those big birds."

John Reeves 35:17 I, I saw-

Joe Rogan 35:17 No. That, that thing is to swallow giant things. That's why their mouth is so big.

John Reeves 35:21 I saw a pelican last year, Drew was with me, and it has a fish stuck sideways in its gullet. He couldn't hack it out, he couldn't get it out. And there wasn't another pelican around there to help it put his beak in there and pull it out. I mean, this thing was gagging on it, um, don't even know what happened to him.

Joe Rogan 35:39 They probably figured it out.

John Reeves 35:41 You'd think.

Joe Rogan 35:42 Yeah. I mean, they're evolutionarily designed to swallow enormous things.

John Reeves 35:47 Just think, they were, they were goddamn dinosaurs about 60 million years ago.

Joe Rogan 35:51 Yeah, for sure.

John Reeves 35:53 You know?

Joe Rogan 35:54 Yeah. So-

John Reeves 35:55 It's a, it's a wild place.

Joe Rogan 35:57 So, this mass extinction event theory does explain why there would be so many all in this one area. If they all died very quickly and then they just got sunk into the muck and permafrost... So, the, the Randall Carlson, Graham Hancock Theory, which is not th- really their theory, it's, uh, an actual scientific theory called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory that says that there's a certain period of time somewhere around between, uh, 12,800 years ago and then-... Graham thinks this probably happened multiple times since then, maybe not as big or may- but, but similar impacts, where we pass through this comet cloud. And the United States, uh, which was covered in, you know, half a mile of ice, or as much as a mile high of ice, half the, half the country, all that was wiped out almost instantaneously. And that these things hit all over the world, probably reset civilization, and probably caused the mass extinction of, in North America, it was like 65% of the megafauna died very quickly.

John Reeves 37:07 Geologically speaking, real quick.

Joe Rogan 37:10 Yeah.

John Reeves 37:11 But to add a little interest to our site, you know, we do have excavators, we do dig around. We have mining, gravel operations, and stuff like that, but in the Boneyard, we use the excavators primarily to keep the drains open. And we were digging one day and we found burnt bedrock, and-

Joe Rogan 37:32 Hmm.

John Reeves 37:32 ... you've probably seen a picture of that.

Joe Rogan 37:34 Yeah.

John Reeves 37:34 But the, uh, mat- bedrock is actually burned. I mean, you can tell it's burned. It's, you rub it, it's got charcoal. I mean, it's like ... And it, and the gravels right above it are burned. Now, to go along with that theory, we had sea levels that rose 300 to 400 feet in a relatively short period of time, and Beringia, which was that land bridge it came across, suddenly it was no longer a land bridge. It was under water. Worldwide, sea levels rose 300 to 400 feet around the globe.

Joe Rogan 38:10 Yeah, quickly.

John Reeves 38:11 Real quick, and might have been quicker than the megafauna could adapt to.

Joe Rogan 38:17 Hmm.

John Reeves 38:17 Megafauna had to have, they had to have the right ecosystem to live in, and it changed too quick and they couldn't adapt. That's my theory.

Joe Rogan 38:27 Adapt.

John Reeves 38:28 Adapt, yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:29 Yeah. Um, so tha- that's probably part of it too, right? 'Cause some of the things probably survived. They think a lot of things died on the impacts, or during the floods, and during ... If you found charcoal ... I mean, they found, um, this stuff that they call nuclear glass. It's cha- called, uh, trinitite, I believe is the way they, th- the way they pronounce it. But it's the same sort of, uh, material they found during the Trinity explosion, which is like from the i- immense impact of the explosion, it turns s- sand and, and, you know, particles into glass. And they found, they find that all around the world at that same, when they do core samples of that same time period. And so if there's impacts like that, there's most likely fires.

John Reeves 39:14 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 39:14 And so there's probably ... That's probably what you're looking at.

John Reeves 39:17 C- it could-

Joe Rogan 39:18 It could be.

John Reeves 39:18 ... be, yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:19 Or it could be some other sort of mass fire that hit that area.

John Reeves 39:22 But it's under 60 feet of silt.

Joe Rogan 39:25 Hmm.

John Reeves 39:26 10 to 15 feet of gravel, and where I'm, where this is located is the widest pay streak in, in the interior. It's about a mile wide, this pay streak, where the gold is. (clears throat) The mountains used to be, you know, s- couple, few thousand feet taller than they are right now, where the pay was coming out of that r- host rock. And gold's got a specific gravity of 19, meaning it'll displace itself 19 times in water. (clears throat) So, that's how sluice boxes work.

Joe Rogan 39:58 Hmm.

John Reeves 39:58 You ... Gold pans. You mix the dirt-

Joe Rogan 40:00 Mm-hmm.

John Reeves 40:01 ... with the water, the gold goes right to the bottom, same way at the, the pay streak. The gold's moving down the creek, it goes deeper and deeper and deeper. The gravel goes over the top of it, pretty soon it hits bedrock and can't, can't go any deeper, and that's where it stays. And the gravel just keeps moving down. So there was a lot of water that went through this valley. This creek th- there now is n- not 15 feet wide, but the valley itself with the pay gravels is a mile wide.

Joe Rogan 40:27 Wow.

John Reeves 40:28 And there's gold throughout the whole thing.

Joe Rogan 40:30 So at one point in time-

John Reeves 40:32 (clears throat) .

Joe Rogan 40:32 ... there could've been a river that's a mile wide that was running through there?

John Reeves 40:35 Could've been. I don't know.

Joe Rogan 40:37 And these animals that they said that w- aren't supposed to be there-

John Reeves 40:40 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 40:41 ... what, what animals are those?

John Reeves 40:43 Dire wolves being one of them.

Joe Rogan 40:44 Dire wolf. You found dire wolves?

John Reeves 40:46 Dire wolves.

Joe Rogan 40:47 Do you have photos of this stuff?

John Reeves 40:48 Uh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:49 Is it all up on your Instagram?

John Reeves 40:50 Yeah. Well, I-

Joe Rogan 40:53 Jamie's looking.

John Reeves 40:54 ... yeah, there might be some on that, uh, on my page.

Joe Rogan 40:58 So when you found dire wolves, like in what condition? Just the bones?

John Reeves 41:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:02 'Cause then you found some tissue too, which is cr- kind of crazy.

John Reeves 41:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:06 Like a lot of these animals died and you found little pieces of soft tissue and tendons and ligaments which those paleontologists were thrilled by. Like they couldn't believe it.

John Reeves 41:17 Yeah. Yeah, they had, uh, bones with marrow still in them.

Joe Rogan 41:21 Wow.

John Reeves 41:22 And, um, there's ... The carnivores had pretty strong jaws. They liked the marrow. That might explain why so many bones are broken where they're broken.

Joe Rogan 41:32 Mm-hmm.

John Reeves 41:33 You know, they chewed into these animals. And, um, y- one of the other extinct, not just dead but extinct animals we found up there is, uh ... We've never found elk before. Pe- well, we- we found some elk but the experts say they didn't exist up there. And I know you're, you like to hunt elk and s-

Joe Rogan 41:54 Yeah.

John Reeves 41:54 ... eat elk. But d- there-

Joe Rogan 41:57 But elk exist in Alaska.

John Reeves 41:59 They exist down ... I think they do. That's part of South-

Joe Rogan 42:01 They do. They do, um ... So that's a dire wolf skull?

John Reeves 42:04 Yep.

Joe Rogan 42:05 Wow. They have, uh, Roosevelt elk, uh, in Alaska. They have them, uh, on some of the islands on the coast. Uh, Fognek. If Fognek has Roosevelt elk on it-

John Reeves 42:18 Oh.

Joe Rogan 42:18 ... 'cause, uh, it's a, it's a very difficult hunt that people go on and the problem is there's enormous brown bears on there. And, uh, my friend Steve Rinella told a story on the podcast of how they shot an elk up there and it's, uh, an incredibly difficult hike in and hike out. You're going through very sti- thick brush and terrain at a very steep angle. It's very hard to get through with anything. So they, they take this elk, they hang it in a tree-... and, uh, they, they start, th- they come back the next day to start, uh, to cut it up and to take it apart. But by the time they get back, a bear has already claimed it, and they don't know this yet.

John Reeves 42:56 Uh-oh.

Joe Rogan 42:56 And they get rushed by this bear. He said it's the cr- it, it, like, ran straight through their camp, but it found so many people, didn't know exactly what to do, and it ran through. One of their guys winds up on top of the bear's back somehow, so it literally plows through the camp, and he's riding this bear's back for, like, 15, 20 yards and then falls off the bear's back. The bear runs into the woods, and the bear's huffing at him, and then they get out their rifles. Like, they were eating lunch.

John Reeves 43:23 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 43:23 They had no idea. So there are elk up there.

John Reeves 43:26 Yeah, but they're not in the interior.

Joe Rogan 43:28 Hmm.

John Reeves 43:29 And, and we're, uh-

Joe Rogan 43:30 Which is crazy 'cause they're on the island. Like, how are they on Afognak if they're not in the interior? How'd they get on that island?

John Reeves 43:36 How'd the little mini mammoths get down to one of the islands on the southeast? They say little, these miniature mammoths lived there till 3,000, 4,000 years ago.

Joe Rogan 43:45 Hmm, that's interesting. That's island dwarfism, right? That happens with elephants too. When elephants live on an island, they get smaller.

John Reeves 43:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:53 Yeah.

John Reeves 43:54 Yeah, no, there, there's a mystery up here, and, uh ...

Joe Rogan 43:58 So is that one you found?

John Reeves 43:59 That's not one we found. That's one they found in Siberia.

Joe Rogan 44:02 Oh.

John Reeves 44:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:03 But the same sorta situation.

John Reeves 44:04 Yeah, we, we found one-

Joe Rogan 44:06 So permafrost is melting. That one actually has tissue all over it.

John Reeves 44:08 Yeah. We have, we have a, uh, specimen that was found called Effie for Fairbanks Expiration that's a, you know, a mammoth trunk, and its leg, and its skull cap, and stuff. We have, we have a l- found a lot over the years, and they all ... You know, there was a deal with AMNH, and you might've heard me rant about that a little bit.

Joe Rogan 44:33 No, what's AMNH?

John Reeves 44:34 Alaska, uh, American Museum of Natural History. Back in 1920s, uh, when the company started hydraulicing, they started unearthing all these fossils, and the company had eight g- bucket line dredges running, so they were moving millions of yards. They moved 277 million yards of silt hydraulically, which was just 17 million more yards than they dug outta the Panama Canal. And so all those bones, there was a guy named Childs Frick in New York, his father was Henry Frick, the US steel magnate with, uh, Carnegie, they decided to get ahold of th- the USS R&M Company in Boston, and they said, "Hey, how about we finance to get these bones out of Alaska and bring 'em to AMNH?" So they worked a three-way deal with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, uh, President Bunnell up there, and a guy named Otto Guice started going out with a bone wagon, and they collected bones for, from 1928 till 1958. Now, they were only supposed to s- collect scientifically important bones, and for those, they were supposed to do research on 'em, and write reports, and submit 'em to my company. Well, they didn't do that. They collected the bones, sent 'em to New York City, where they just languished in the basements of AMNH. When I bought the company, I started going through my files, and I found this deal, and I got ahold of the University of Alaska, and I said, "These are, these are our company bones. Let's go find out what's, what's going on with 'em. They haven't done the reporting they're supposed to." So myself along with, uh, a guy named, uh, uh, what the ... I, I got the reports right here. Dick Osborn, who was the author of this report. I'm gonna give you this report, by the way, because I've told everybody that I'm gonna start a bone rush.

Joe Rogan 46:47 A bone rush?

John Reeves 46:48 Yes, sir.

Joe Rogan 46:50 What does that mean?

John Reeves 46:51 Well, they took 500,000 or so bones from Fairbanks to New York City, left 'em in the crates, and there's a picture on there someplace when I went there to visit, in crates that have yet to be opened. But in the '40s, they took about a whole boxcar load of these bones, they ran out of storage, and they dumped 'em in the East River.

Joe Rogan 47:22 What?

John Reeves 47:23 In the East River. And I've told everybody that, again, with Joe Rogan, it's the only place I'm gonna divulge that location.

Joe Rogan 47:32 So all that stuff in those pictures is all from your property?

John Reeves 47:35 Yes, sir.

Joe Rogan 47:37 What a crazy piece of land you stumbled upon.

John Reeves 47:40 It's unbelievable.

Joe Rogan 47:42 And so they dumped how much in the East River?

John Reeves 47:45 I'm told by Dick Osborn a boxcar load, 50,000, or 50 tons.

Joe Rogan 47:50 Just threw it in the water?

John Reeves 47:51 Yes, sir.

Joe Rogan 47:52 Is it still there?

John Reeves 47:54 I don't know. That's what-

Joe Rogan 47:55 Could it, could it be still there?

John Reeves 47:57 Could be.

Joe Rogan 47:58 Some of it maybe?

John Reeves 47:59 Certainly the tusks.

Joe Rogan 48:00 Do you know where it was?

John Reeves 48:02 Yes, sir. Let me t-

Joe Rogan 48:03 So you gonna hire some divers? What are you gonna do?

John Reeves 48:07 I've told a ... Now, you have a lot of people that follow you on your Instagram. I got, I got a lot of people that follow me thanks to you, and, uh, I said, "You know, those bones, as far as I'm concerned, that they dumped in the East River, they're, they're no longer mine." They're finders keepers, so if any of you guys wanna go out and find some bones, I'll tell you exactly where the fuck they're at, but I'll only tell Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan 48:34 So I have to tell people?

John Reeves 48:36 Tell 'em right now.

Joe Rogan 48:37 Okay, tell 'em right now.

John Reeves 48:38 Yes, sir.

Joe Rogan 48:39 Where's it ... (laughs) Do you know what street they pulled up to where they dumped 'em off?

John Reeves 48:43 Yes, sir.

Joe Rogan 48:44 Really?

John Reeves 48:45 Yeah. Would you like to announce it to everybody?

Joe Rogan 48:48 Yeah, go ahead. You do it.

John Reeves 48:50 You want me to?

Joe Rogan 48:50 Yeah, please.

John Reeves 48:51 Okay.

Joe Rogan 48:52 Only makes sense.Imagine, imagine if you see a bunch of divers pulling woolly mammoth tusks out of the East River.

John Reeves 49:02 The, uh, title of this draft report is Early Man in Eastern Beringia: Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, Artifacts and Associated Fauna Recovered from Fairbanks Mining District, Alaska. Authored by Richard Osborne, a quaternary center, University of Alaska Museum; Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Robert Evander, Vertebrae Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History; and a fellow named Robert Sattler, Tanana Chiefs, Fairbanks, Alaska. They wrote the introduction and the report, this associated (clears throat) draft never released goes through the history of the bone collecting in Alaska, in, at least off my ground. And so the part that I wanna reveal to people, 'cause I said I would, we'll see if anybody's out there got a sense of adventure. 'Cause if I was ... and I'm not gonna tell people you're allowed to do this. But if I was s- listening to your podcast, and I happened to have a boat, and I happened to have a scuba, little scuba equipment, 'cause I'm gonna tell them, everybody right now where the fuck they're at.

Joe Rogan 50:17 Where the fuck are they.

John Reeves 50:18 Okay.

Joe Rogan 50:19 (laughs)

John Reeves 50:28 Okay.

Joe Rogan 50:31 You looking for the address?

John Reeves 50:33 No. I'm just gonna take the part off where I had, I had this posted on my Instagram with the ... it was redacted, where the location was, 'cause I wanna make sure everybody in the world has a chance to hear it at the same time.

Joe Rogan 50:46 Okay.

John Reeves 50:47 'Cause this is gonna be a bone rush.

Joe Rogan 50:49 Okay.

John Reeves 50:51 Okay?

Joe Rogan 50:54 (laughs) You got it?

John Reeves 50:58 So, here we go.

Joe Rogan 50:59 All right, here we go.

John Reeves 51:02 Mistakes made in the field as to acceptable condition of the lar- of the bones shipped to New York City were dumped in the East River. Okay?

Joe Rogan 51:11 Mm-hmm.

John Reeves 51:12 The dump site at that time was off ... Here we go.

Joe Rogan 51:15 And there it's redacted.

John Reeves 51:17 Here, I'm gonna read what's red-

Joe Rogan 51:18 Okay. The dump site was off ...

John Reeves 51:21 The East River Drive at about 65th Street. The common New York City hospital dump site is well for difficult to dispose of materials. Potentially a challenging archaeological dig for archaeologists in the distant future. Now, I'm going to say this about that. These bones that we find, they're paleontological in nature. Archaeology is the stu- study of human stuff. What happened there? Did they mix a bunch of the bones in with a bunch of the stuff from the hospital? Is there stuff in the hospital, or is there even more stuff from the uni- uh, from AMNH that was dumped there, that they didn't have room to store?

Joe Rogan 52:07 Like human stuff?

John Reeves 52:09 Could be human stuff.

Joe Rogan 52:11 I just can't imagine that they just didn't have any room for it, so they dumped valuable bones.

John Reeves 52:17 They were of no value to these guys.

Joe Rogan 52:20 That is so crazy.

John Reeves 52:21 But you gotta remember, this was in 1928 to 1958.

Joe Rogan 52:27 Yeah.

John Reeves 52:27 People, you know, miners didn't collect the bones. That's what makes me such an oddball. I had friends going, when I first started this 15 years ago, going, "The fuck are you doing? There's a lot of gold under those."

Joe Rogan 52:40 Hmm.

John Reeves 52:41 "Go get the gold."

Joe Rogan 52:42 Right.

John Reeves 52:43 "Nah, the bones, man. We've gotta get the bones. Then we'll get the gold, don't worry about it." So, 15 years later, I'm saying, "We'll get the goddamn gold. Don't worry about it." I take a, I take a pretty long view of history, and I appreciate your view of history. And I'll tell you something else about history. History's just not about what happened in the past. History's about what's about to fucking happen. Now, what we just talked about is about to happen. Now, people are gonna go, and they're gonna go, "He just told us where the f- where it is." You can pull it up on Google Earth and find that site.

Joe Rogan 53:21 And how far into the water was it?

John Reeves 53:23 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 53:24 Did they dump it off of boats? Did they dump it right off the shore?

John Reeves 53:28 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 53:30 How wide is the East River?

John Reeves 53:32 The dump site at the time was off the East River Drive at about 65th Street.

Joe Rogan 53:39 So, that ain't that wide.

Narrator 53:41 Is that right? Is that what I'm looking at is the 65th Street, is the East River Drive?

Joe Rogan 53:44 I think so.

Narrator 53:45 Like-

Joe Rogan 53:45 It says right there 53rd Street Tunnel. So, that's the neighborhood.

Narrator 53:48 65th Street.

Joe Rogan 53:49 So, there's 65th Street. And so somewhere right off of that ...

John Reeves 53:55 I'd say right, right alongside.

Narrator 53:57 'Cause right here is the train bridge.

Joe Rogan 53:59 Do you know how crazy it would be if there's fucking mammoth bones right there in the East River? Tusks right there in the East River.

John Reeves 54:09 Dude, let me tell you something about mammoth bones, mammoth tusks. They're extremely valuable. And a complete set of tusks, like, the day ... Did you see that little video s- snippet I said about the day we found a full-grown woolly mammoth, I mean, all of it?

Joe Rogan 54:29 Yeah. Yeah, I did see that.

John Reeves 54:30 Okay. Well ... And thousands, thousands of bones within a week, and another mammoth the next day. Tusks don't float. They don't roll along the bottom. They sit where they're at. They're curved. They weigh a lot. They're very dense. Same with the leg bones, they're dense too. I don't know what kind of current that river has, if it even has a current. All I know is this is where they say they dumped them, and I gotta go with that. If this is where they say they dumped them, this is where they dumped them.

Joe Rogan 55:05 So, all it would take is just so- a well-healed expedition of guys who know how to scuba.

John Reeves 55:13 Yeah, I wouldn't even be well healed. I... you know, you can take an underwater camera and drop it over with your fishing pole.

Joe Rogan 55:20 Or, or like they have those underwater drones now, too-

John Reeves 55:23 That... none of this.

Joe Rogan 55:24 ... with cameras on 'em.

John Reeves 55:24 And they got the, they got the side-scanning sonar and stuff that you can use.

Joe Rogan 55:29 Oh, yeah.

John Reeves 55:30 Uh, we've, we've tried looking at, um, using those kind of things at the Boneyard, but they can't pick up tusks buried 10 feet down. Um, you know, they'd shoot pulses into the earth and it's supposed to refract back up. Um, just gotta find them where they're at. And, uh, I was g- I was gonna tell you, uh, how valuable these tusks are. The set we found on the day, we had an offer for $485,000 for the pair the next day.

Joe Rogan 56:00 Whoa.

John Reeves 56:01 And guess what, Joe? You and I both know what $485,000 looks like. What would you rather look at; a set of 12-foot mammoth tusks or a bunch of Hondos sitting on a, you know?

Joe Rogan 56:15 Depends on what phase of my life I'm at.

John Reeves 56:18 Yeah, well...

Joe Rogan 56:20 (laughs)

John Reeves 56:20 I think at this point in your life, you'd rather look at the tusks.

Joe Rogan 56:22 I'd look at the tusks.

John Reeves 56:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:23 Yeah.

John Reeves 56:23 Yeah, I think so.

Joe Rogan 56:24 12-foot tusks?

John Reeves 56:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:26 Jesus.

John Reeves 56:27 But I'm not inter-... I wanna see the tusks.

Joe Rogan 56:30 Yeah.

John Reeves 56:30 Now, I don't have as many sunsets in front of me as I do behind me, but I have an idea I won't have to sell those in my lifetime. I'll let Drew out there and Alora decide what happens to those things. We just built our own... You know, they said, "Well, storage is a problem." We just built, this fall, before we came down here, framed up a 5,000 square foot building to house some of the collection. We have so many bones. I've filled up four vans, uh, delivery trucks, big, you know, semi-trailer, filled. Started off with, eh, we got a few. Now we got a few hundred thousand.

Joe Rogan 57:11 And you're not even done digging.

John Reeves 57:13 Oh, fuck no.

Joe Rogan 57:14 That's what so crazy. In a five-acre parcel. Wow.

John Reeves 57:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:23 That is so wild. I mean, you must have spent many a night thinking, "How the fuck are they all here?" Like, "What is this?"

John Reeves 57:33 I wanna get-

Joe Rogan 57:33 W-

John Reeves 57:33 ... I wanna give you... This is your copy.

Joe Rogan 57:35 All right, thank you.

John Reeves 57:38 Hold on. Write your name on it.

Joe Rogan 57:38 Tell people, go get it. Go get them tusks. I mean, you know how amazing it would be if someone came on... Tell you what, if somebody goes there and they gets a tusk, I'll have you on the podcast.

John Reeves 57:49 Oh, yeah. There-

Joe Rogan 57:50 Wow.

John Reeves 57:51 A buddy of mine just sold a broken tusk for 100,000 bucks. (exhales)

Joe Rogan 57:56 That's wild.

John Reeves 57:58 So.

Joe Rogan 57:58 I mean, they're not making any new ones.

John Reeves 58:00 Nope.

Joe Rogan 58:00 It's just weird that you could even own them. You know?

John Reeves 58:05 Well, I got-

Joe Rogan 58:05 Like, I know a guy who, uh, was on a ranch in Montana and, um, um, I think the story was someone was elk hunting on the ranch and they saw something in the ground and they contacted the ranch owner. And it turned out there was a T-rex sk- skeleton. And they... someone purchased it for over a million dollars.

John Reeves 58:26 Yep. Uh, there's a guy on Instagram. Uh, I wanna say Bucky DeFingerlets or something like that.

Joe Rogan 58:35 (laughs)

John Reeves 58:35 That, um-

Joe Rogan 58:36 He should get together with Dick Moll.

John Reeves 58:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:39 Just... (laughs)

John Reeves 58:39 But he, uh, found the best-preserved T-rex I think ever found.

Joe Rogan 58:43 Yeah?

John Reeves 58:44 On his ranch or in the... You know, he's g- he raises cattle out west. And that's the funny thing about the Instagram is that... is we meet through Instagram people that we've never met personally.

Joe Rogan 58:55 Mm. Yeah.

John Reeves 58:56 There's a guy named Matt Slingsby up in Alaska. You follow him.

Joe Rogan 58:58 Oh, yeah, yeah.

John Reeves 59:00 Uh...

Joe Rogan 59:01 Slingsby AK.

John Reeves 59:02 You're goddamn right.

Joe Rogan 59:03 Yeah.

John Reeves 59:04 By the way, when I go to Florida in the wintertime, I always bring down some of his smoked salmon.

Joe Rogan 59:10 Oh, nice.

John Reeves 59:10 So I brought you a couple jars of it.

Joe Rogan 59:13 Oh, great.

John Reeves 59:13 He, he makes this stuff himself.

Joe Rogan 59:15 Oh, wow.

John Reeves 59:17 And, uh...

Joe Rogan 59:17 He makes his own smoked salmon?

John Reeves 59:19 Yes, sir.

Joe Rogan 59:20 And cans it. That's a big thing up there, right? People can salmon?

John Reeves 59:23 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:24 Oh, wow. That's awesome. I'll eat this. Thank you.

John Reeves 59:26 But yesterday, he posted a video that's no longer online of a grizzly bear that charged into a herd of musk oxen that had just laid down calves.

Joe Rogan 59:40 Whoa.

John Reeves 59:41 It killed all of them. One bear killed over 10 baby musk oxen.

Joe Rogan 59:47 Jesus.

John Reeves 59:48 And it's not... That video's not on today.

Joe Rogan 59:50 Why'd he take the... Did, did Instagram take the video down?

John Reeves 59:53 I don't know. I haven't, I haven't asked him, but I'm gonna find out.

Joe Rogan 59:57 Well, there's a lot of those sites like Nature's Metal. You know that, that website? I think they get their videos taken down. I think there's a lot of, uh, the, the faint-hearted amongst us that think that there's something wrong with watching videos of animals killing other animals, that somehow or another it's cruel.

John Reeves 1:00:15 Well, I know I get accused of climate change and global warms and stuff and...

Joe Rogan 1:00:20 You do?

John Reeves 1:00:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:21 'Cause of mining?

John Reeves 1:00:22 'Cause we're melting the permafrost.

Joe Rogan 1:00:24 Oh, that's hilarious.

John Reeves 1:00:25 It is, but they go and-

Joe Rogan 1:00:26 You're literally a part of one of the greatest paleontological discoveries ever.

John Reeves 1:00:31 I know. And-

Joe Rogan 1:00:32 Oh, you... but the global's warming.

John Reeves 1:00:35 Yeah, and, uh, I'm pretty s-

Joe Rogan 1:00:37 It's warming.

John Reeves 1:00:39 (laughs) It happens.

Joe Rogan 1:00:40 Yeah, well, but just people are just out of their fucking mind looking for things to complain about.

John Reeves 1:00:44 Yeah, it's cr-

Joe Rogan 1:00:45 I mean, it's 50 degrees below zero right now in Alberta. I just got a message from one of my buddies.

John Reeves 1:00:50 It was 50 below at our house two days ago in Fairbanks.

Joe Rogan 1:00:53 (laughs)

John Reeves 1:00:53 And it warmed up today to 14 below.

Joe Rogan 1:00:55 Nice.

John Reeves 1:00:56 Nice.

Joe Rogan 1:00:56 You brought a little of that weather here. It must be-

John Reeves 1:00:57 Here it is. Boy, this has been-

Joe Rogan 1:00:58 ... you're, uh, balmy 20. (laughs)

John Reeves 1:01:00 You know, one thing I notice about this town is you got some blue sky.

Joe Rogan 1:01:04 Oh, yeah. It's nice.

John Reeves 1:01:05 This sky here is really blue.

Joe Rogan 1:01:06 Yeah, it's beautiful.

John Reeves 1:01:07 And-

Joe Rogan 1:01:07 It's a great town.

John Reeves 1:01:08 ... it s- seems like good...... clean air.

Joe Rogan 1:01:11 Yeah, yeah.

John Reeves 1:01:12 You know? Just-

Joe Rogan 1:01:13 It's great here.

John Reeves 1:01:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:14 It's great. I love it.

John Reeves 1:01:16 And Eddie Reese lives here too, so, uh, next time I come down, I'm gonna go visit him.

Joe Rogan 1:01:21 Nice.

John Reeves 1:01:21 Make sure I have some time.

Joe Rogan 1:01:23 So, people give you a hard time, but th- that's just people. They're gonna ... Doesn't matter what you're ... If you're donating money, you're not donating enough. If you're, you're helping people, you're not helping enough. You're, or you're helping the wrong people, or you should be doing this instead. Or you shouldn't have the money to donate in the first place. Or, there's just, you, there's too much noise.

John Reeves 1:01:41 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:01:42 You can't ... But what, what you've discovered, what people should be concentrating on is the immense magnitude of that discovery and how crazy it is that they're literally discovering that there's animals that are in there that they didn't think existed there. Clearly they did. You've got an enormous number of them. You've got burnt ground below them. Like, what the fuck is going on? Like what is all that?

John Reeves 1:02:06 Well, the steppe bison, they're extinct. Short-faced bears, they're extinct. The c- the American lion, extinct.

Joe Rogan 1:02:13 You got American lions up there?

John Reeves 1:02:14 Oh, yeah. That, that one skull I got-

Joe Rogan 1:02:17 It's like you have everything up there. That's crazy.

John Reeves 1:02:19 It's, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:19 What, how much variety, like how many different animals have you found bones of? That's a American lion.

John Reeves 1:02:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:27 Wow, look at those teeth. That is so cool. Look how cool that tooth is.

John Reeves 1:02:31 My son and I, Kenzie were out there at the boneyard one day, and we were hydraulic-ing and then shut the pump down and went up for the final walkthrough on the muck.

Joe Rogan 1:02:41 That's insane.

John Reeves 1:02:41 And, you know, as the guys want to do at the end of the day, just piss against the muck bench, you know, just take a leak.

Joe Rogan 1:02:47 Right.

John Reeves 1:02:47 So, he's over there, I'm over here, we're taking a leak. And we both look at about the same time, and that thing is staring at us out of the muck.

Joe Rogan 1:02:56 Wow.

John Reeves 1:02:57 Just the top part, not the lower jaws. We had found the lower jaws to that thing two years earlier in two different pieces.

Joe Rogan 1:03:07 In the same area?

John Reeves 1:03:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:08 Wow.

John Reeves 1:03:08 Downstream. So, we don't sell anything from the boneyard that might go to another animal that we found or in the same animal.

Joe Rogan 1:03:18 Mm-hmm.

John Reeves 1:03:18 That's why we have so many. We don't... We pick them all up. We pick every little bone up, save them. They're all boxed.

Joe Rogan 1:03:26 How many people are involved in the ... Is there, is it categorized? Do you have it cataloged?

John Reeves 1:03:33 No. No.

Joe Rogan 1:03:35 What?

John Reeves 1:03:35 We just pick them up. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:03:37 (laughs) That's what it looks like. I was, I'm scared to ask.

John Reeves 1:03:40 It's like-

Joe Rogan 1:03:40 Because it looks like you just have so many stacked. What's in that box right there that, where it looks like skin below that, Jamie? One, one bull-

John Reeves 1:03:47 There's a short-

Joe Rogan 1:03:48 Right there.

John Reeves 1:03:48 Yeah, that's a, I-

Joe Rogan 1:03:48 What is that?

John Reeves 1:03:49 I think that's a caribou.

Joe Rogan 1:03:51 Wow.

John Reeves 1:03:52 A, um, mummified caribou. We find horses. We found a different species of horse.

Joe Rogan 1:03:57 Horse? What?

John Reeves 1:03:58 Yeah, yeah. The Harrington horse, we found that. The paleontologists come uncorked when they see shit like that.

Joe Rogan 1:04:05 'Cause it's not supposed to be there either?

John Reeves 1:04:08 It, it, they've never found them in ... They found them in the Yukon, but they didn't, they didn't-

Joe Rogan 1:04:14 What do they base whether or not an animal lived there on? Is it whether or not they found bones of them?

John Reeves 1:04:21 And was-

Joe Rogan 1:04:21 'Cause if you're dealing with something that's 20,000 years ago, how do they really know what was where unless they find a dead one?

John Reeves 1:04:28 Well, how do you know what they're telling you is the truth?

Joe Rogan 1:04:31 Well, how do they know what the truth is?

John Reeves 1:04:32 Th- they don't, but they're in a business. They go, "This happened 20,000 years ago, and I'm-"

Joe Rogan 1:04:37 Right.

John Reeves 1:04:37 "I've got a doctorate in this field. So, that's what happened."

Joe Rogan 1:04:40 Right. But they're only basing it on evidence that's been discovered. And when you have a place like yours, we're discovering an insane amount of new evidence. You could literally rewrite paleontological history.

John Reeves 1:04:51 I can't.

Joe Rogan 1:04:52 I know they can't, but your place can.

John Reeves 1:04:54 Well, looks like now I'm gonna have to accommodate somebody. It's only gonna happen if Joe Rogan's involved.

Joe Rogan 1:04:59 (laughs)

John Reeves 1:05:01 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:05:01 So, how many people do you have that are paleontologists that are involved in this?

John Reeves 1:05:07 Zero.

Joe Rogan 1:05:08 Oh, my God.

John Reeves 1:05:09 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:05:10 That's insane.

John Reeves 1:05:12 Here, here's the qualifications. Now, have you been to Fairbanks before?

Joe Rogan 1:05:16 No, I have not.

John Reeves 1:05:17 I'd like to invite you to Fairbanks.

Joe Rogan 1:05:18 I'd like to go.

John Reeves 1:05:19 And if you do, I want you to-

Joe Rogan 1:05:20 It's only summer, though.

John Reeves 1:05:21 I want you to come up in the fall-

Joe Rogan 1:05:22 (laughs)

John Reeves 1:05:22 ... so you can go moose hunting.

Joe Rogan 1:05:23 Okay.

John Reeves 1:05:24 Have you tipped a-

Joe Rogan 1:05:24 Okay.

John Reeves 1:05:24 You ever tip a moose over?

Joe Rogan 1:05:25 Yes. Yeah, shot a moose-

John Reeves 1:05:27 Do you like-

Joe Rogan 1:05:27 ... once in BC. Delicious.

John Reeves 1:05:28 Do you like moose meat? Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:05:29 I love it. I love moose meat.

John Reeves 1:05:30 We'll, we'll put you on your own creek. We'll give you a four-wheeler or a truck, whatever you need. Come up, bag a moose, take it to the boneyard. Within minutes, you will be a boner. All you gotta do is find one.

Joe Rogan 1:05:45 I'm sure.

John Reeves 1:05:46 But the people involved in this, just my family and some family friends.

Joe Rogan 1:05:53 Wow. That's incred- and Dick Mol. (laughs)

Narrator 1:05:59 Do, do we have to be called Boners? Can we call each other that?

Joe Rogan 1:06:01 Yeah, you have to, Jamie.

John Reeves 1:06:02 Oh. (laughs)

Narrator 1:06:02 All right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:02 Don't be scared of a name.

John Reeves 1:06:04 Uh, yeah. No, it's, uh, well, my kids are all master boners 'cause you ha-

Joe Rogan 1:06:08 (laughs)

John Reeves 1:06:09 In order to be a master boner, you gotta find 10,000 of them.

Joe Rogan 1:06:12 Oh, my God.

John Reeves 1:06:13 Y- you and I are gonna be there long enough to find 10,000.

Joe Rogan 1:06:15 No. Do you got a lot of moose up there?

John Reeves 1:06:17 Lot of moose.

Joe Rogan 1:06:17 Wanna hear my moose call?

John Reeves 1:06:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:21 Here we go. (moose call) Not bad, right?

John Reeves 1:06:25 That's pretty good.

Joe Rogan 1:06:26 That's not bad.

John Reeves 1:06:27 Wanna hear mine?

Joe Rogan 1:06:28 Yeah.

John Reeves 1:06:31 Moose!

Joe Rogan 1:06:34 (laughs)

John Reeves 1:06:34 (laughs) If I c- ... When we bag a moose, we wanna make sure it's near some place we can get a front end load or two.

Joe Rogan 1:06:43 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

John Reeves 1:06:44 You don't wanna try to-

Joe Rogan 1:06:46 No. No.

John Reeves 1:06:46 ... shoot ... I shot one in the U- off the Yukon in the Hazana River once, and it fell into the river.

Joe Rogan 1:06:52 Oh, my goodness.

John Reeves 1:06:53 Right as the sun set.

Joe Rogan 1:06:54 How'd you get him out?

John Reeves 1:06:56 I tried to chop him up in half with an ax underwater. It didn't work.

Joe Rogan 1:07:00 (laughs)

John Reeves 1:07:00 Spent the night on a gravel bar. The g- the guys I had upstream, they got caught in the dark, and they didn't come floating down till the next day. So, I started a fire by the bank, and they finally came down, and we got it out.... uh, I'd prefer a road hunt. I-

Joe Rogan 1:07:16 A buddy of mine had the same thing happen last year. He shot a moose and it, it ran into the river and died in the river. And they're like, "Fuck."

John Reeves 1:07:23 Oh, oh.

Joe Rogan 1:07:24 A 2,000-pound animal.

John Reeves 1:07:26 Oh, yeah. No, that's horrible when that happens.

Joe Rogan 1:07:28 It... But, th- they're so, they're so unusual. Like, when you see them, they don't look real. Like, they're so big and that you see these goddamn barn doors coming off the side of their heads. You're like, "That is a real animal?" And you shoot one of those, you're eating good meat for a year.

John Reeves 1:07:48 Wow.

Joe Rogan 1:07:48 Every day, you could have moose meat for a year.

John Reeves 1:07:50 That's right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:51 It's incredible.

John Reeves 1:07:52 I let guys... Um, I have different areas and I have one group of guys that likes to go to the certain area. So, my rule is you can hunt there, but I get a quarter of whatever you got.

Joe Rogan 1:08:02 Oh, nice. That's a good deal.

John Reeves 1:08:03 So, every time they... If they get a moose, I get a quarter of it. And then another group, same thing. So, last year, I got five quarters of moose. I never really went hunting.

Joe Rogan 1:08:12 (laughs) About...

John Reeves 1:08:13 But it helps me. I give the moose away to, you know, you got any on the pioneers or some food bank or some place.

Joe Rogan 1:08:19 Oh, that's nice.

John Reeves 1:08:20 Pass a little bit of it around to guys that can't hunt anymore that are no longer able to go hunting. I'll take some and give 'em some moose meat.

Joe Rogan 1:08:26 That's nice.

John Reeves 1:08:27 And, uh, we always have a freezer full of it, just in case.

Joe Rogan 1:08:31 That's so good for you.

John Reeves 1:08:32 Oh, it's great meat.

Joe Rogan 1:08:33 It's, it's the best meat, like wild game meat, in particular. And moose is unusual. It's a very different taste than elk, very different than deer. It's, like, similar, but not, you know?

John Reeves 1:08:42 I've never had elk.

Joe Rogan 1:08:43 It's delicious. I got some for ya. You got a little freezer bag?

John Reeves 1:08:47 Uh, no, I don't have it.

Joe Rogan 1:08:47 I think I have some. Hold on. I think we brought some freezer. We did, right?

Narrator 1:08:51 I think so, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:51 Yeah, we got freezer bags.

John Reeves 1:08:53 I'll tell you what, then.

Joe Rogan 1:08:53 When are you flying back?

John Reeves 1:08:54 Uh, tonight.

Joe Rogan 1:08:55 Okay, I'll hook you up.

John Reeves 1:08:56 Oh, that'd be great.

Joe Rogan 1:08:57 Yeah.

John Reeves 1:08:58 'Cause we're gonna, um... Go ahead.

Joe Rogan 1:08:59 I got summer sausage for the plane. You can eat it on the plane flight. I got some roasts for ya, some steaks.

John Reeves 1:09:06 No, no, no. Don't do all that 'cause-

Joe Rogan 1:09:07 Come on, man.

John Reeves 1:09:09 No.

Joe Rogan 1:09:09 Take it with ya.

John Reeves 1:09:11 I'll s-

Joe Rogan 1:09:11 It's the best meat.

John Reeves 1:09:12 I'll set you up with some moose meat, though. I'll, uh, I'll send you down.

Joe Rogan 1:09:16 Just set me up near a moose. We'll get our own moose. (laughs)

John Reeves 1:09:18 Oh, I'll put you on a moose.

Joe Rogan 1:09:20 Are there a lot out there?

John Reeves 1:09:21 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:22 The problem with moose is moose are usually around grizzlies.

John Reeves 1:09:27 That is a problem.

Joe Rogan 1:09:28 (laughs)

John Reeves 1:09:28 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:09:30 That's a fucking big problem.

John Reeves 1:09:32 I shot a black bear once. It was tearing a door off a cabin where my sister was the camp cook.

Joe Rogan 1:09:38 Oh, boy.

John Reeves 1:09:39 And the night before, I'd seen bear tracks all over the place and I said, "I ain't... I'm not gonna eat much for dinner. I'm just gonna be a light sleeper tonight." About 3:00 in the morning, I hear this, "Boom, Jon. Boom." Another rifle shot. I step up, my AR-6 was right there. I blasted that black bear right on the doorstep.

Joe Rogan 1:09:58 Phew.

John Reeves 1:09:58 And wounded it pretty good.

Joe Rogan 1:10:00 Jesus Christ.

John Reeves 1:10:01 They die hard, man.

Joe Rogan 1:10:02 Yeah, they're a, they're a big, strong animal. A big spooky animal.

John Reeves 1:10:07 And they-

Joe Rogan 1:10:07 And they're not... I mean, black bears, they're not even nearly as big as grizzlies.

John Reeves 1:10:11 Mm-mm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:11 But they're still terrible.

John Reeves 1:10:14 They s- They sound like a dying man.

Joe Rogan 1:10:16 Yeah.

John Reeves 1:10:16 When you're... If you don't kill them with the first shot, that shit, they're going, "Ahh."

Joe Rogan 1:10:20 A buddy of mine, Mike Hawkridge, he's got a place called, uh, uh, BC Outfit-... Uh, I think it's, uh, Big Country Outfitters. And, uh, I hunted with him up in British Columbia and he had a... One of them was coming into a cabin. A grizzly was coming into a cabin. He literally shot it at the doorstep of the cabin.

John Reeves 1:10:42 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:10:43 It's, like, right there, coming in. And he... They're, they're terrifying up there and they, they put a ban on hunting them, too, because all the people from Vancouver are like, "Don't kill the grizzly. The grizzly's your friend." It's, like, the biggest, scariest fucking thing in the woods. And it also... The wildlife biologists say they have to be managed. If you don't manage their population, then they decimate the population of deer and elk and moose and, and everything that lives up there. And so there's all these people that understand the balance of nature and these well-trained, well-educated wildlife biologists who make recommendations and then people vote on it, which is crazy 'cause you're having people vote who are never even in the woods. You got people voting in Vancouver and they're like, "Don't kill the bear. The bear is your friend. We don't want trophy hunters."

John Reeves 1:11:31 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:11:32 But what they don't understand is, like, that, that it... You're making life extremely difficult for all the people that live up there. If you don't manage those populations, you lower the amount of game that are there, the game animals. And also, you make it very dangerous for those people because now those bears are no longer scared of people because they used to associate people with gunshots and fear and, you know, people will hunt them. Now, they think of people as food.

John Reeves 1:11:56 Y- You know, when, when the wolves come into town, if you have a dog out on a chain-

Joe Rogan 1:12:01 Yeah.

John Reeves 1:12:01 ... you go out the next day and all you got is a collar-

Joe Rogan 1:12:04 Yeah.

John Reeves 1:12:04 ... and a head.

Joe Rogan 1:12:05 Yeah.

John Reeves 1:12:06 Wolves are unbelievable hunters.

Joe Rogan 1:12:08 Unbelievable.

John Reeves 1:12:09 They really are. I got a couple of creeks with different packs.

Joe Rogan 1:12:13 Phew.

John Reeves 1:12:13 They'll... If they get a moose, they'll camp there for a week and a half, eating it.

Joe Rogan 1:12:17 That must be so wild to see.

John Reeves 1:12:20 I was out at one of my creeks and there was a calf moose stuck down in a tailing pile. It couldn't make up the side of the tailings 'cause they're so loose. So, I called Fish & Game. I said, "There's a calf out here, if you wanna come rescue it." And it was towards the end of the day and they said, "Nah." I said, "Well, what about tomorrow?" They said, "It won't be there tomorrow." And I went out there the next day and it was just bones. Wolves came in, hit it, ate it.

Joe Rogan 1:12:45 How often do you see wolves?

John Reeves 1:12:47 All the time.

Joe Rogan 1:12:49 That's awesome.

John Reeves 1:12:50 I got, I got wolves within... I see wolves come into the boneyard.

Joe Rogan 1:12:54 Really?

John Reeves 1:12:54 They go, "Oh, fuck." They smell that and they go, "You got something to eat."

Joe Rogan 1:12:58 Ugh.

John Reeves 1:12:59 They like that rotten meat, man.

Joe Rogan 1:13:01 God.

John Reeves 1:13:01 We got lynx there that hang out. Drew was walking up the draw one day and there... He looked up and there was a big lynx about 15 feet away from him, just looking at him, like, "What the fuck are you doing, man?"... you coming up here in my neighborhood for? And he kinda backed away and, "I'm gonna get outta here."

Joe Rogan 1:13:20 I only saw a lynx once. I saw a link in a, uh, lynx in, uh, Alberta. Wild-looking cat.

John Reeves 1:13:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:13:28 Cool-looking animal.

John Reeves 1:13:29 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:13:30 So those wolves, uh, are they ever a threat to people up there?

John Reeves 1:13:35 When there's a pack of them, they're a threat to anything, you know? They-

Joe Rogan 1:13:39 But they generally don't fuck with people?

John Reeves 1:13:41 They, it, it's hard to see wolves. It actually is hard to find them. But sometimes, like, where we're at, y- you can hear them howling. You can, you can ... They're actually out there making noise.

Joe Rogan 1:13:51 Wow.

John Reeves 1:13:51 Looking for each other. And, um, you know, we're in their neck of the woods. They're not in my neck of the woods. You know, suddenly there's a road there and they're going, "What the fuck? Who put this in here? This is good walking."

Joe Rogan 1:14:03 Mm.

John Reeves 1:14:03 I, I can walk ... I got a picture in my phone of a pack of wolves that went by, an underground miner that was going one of my creeks. And there's, you know, they've got signs up that say, "No trespassing," and all that. (laughs) Wolves were just walking by like, "We don't care. Yeah, come on."

Joe Rogan 1:14:19 S-

John Reeves 1:14:21 Yeah, I asked the same guy, I said, "Y- you ever see bears out here?" Now, this guy did several tours in Vietnam as a sniper 'cause he liked his job. He, I said, "Do you, uh, see a lot of bears out here?" He goes, "I hate bears." I said, "Have you ever shot one out here?" He goes, "I've shot 57 of them."

Joe Rogan 1:14:43 (laughs)

John Reeves 1:14:43 (laughs) What the fuck?

Joe Rogan 1:14:45 Oh, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, you probably shouldn't say that on the podcast. That guy might be in trouble.

John Reeves 1:14:51 No.

Joe Rogan 1:14:52 No?

John Reeves 1:14:53 No. Life and property, man.

Joe Rogan 1:14:57 Well, and that, uh, they will take life and they will take property.

John Reeves 1:15:01 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:15:01 Yeah.

John Reeves 1:15:01 And he, uh, he will take their life. He doesn't like them.

Joe Rogan 1:15:06 Well-

John Reeves 1:15:06 I've on- I've only shot one bear.

Joe Rogan 1:15:08 Yeah.

John Reeves 1:15:08 I tried to shoot a grizzly once and my rifle jammed.

Joe Rogan 1:15:14 Have you ever eaten bear?

John Reeves 1:15:15 No.

Joe Rogan 1:15:16 Tastes good, believe it or not. Especially black bear. Black bear's good. Uh, my friend, Steve Rinella, um, said that some of the best meat he's ever eaten is black bear that had been eating blueberries.

John Reeves 1:15:27 Oh, I bet.

Joe Rogan 1:15:27 And he shot him up in Alaska, too.

John Reeves 1:15:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:29 That's where he got it.

John Reeves 1:15:31 I woulda probably eaten black bear f- ... That day I shot the black bear at the cabin if we had had more time, but we were running up to the cut to go to work and I cut a couple of his claws off and we buried it. Just didn't have time. But he was, again, life and property, tearing the door off to get in-

Joe Rogan 1:15:48 Yeah.

John Reeves 1:15:49 ... inside where the food was.

Joe Rogan 1:15:51 Yeah, well, they're predatory, too. They'll kill people.

John Reeves 1:15:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:53 Black bears will kill people. A kid got killed at Rutgers University and he was in the woods outside of Rutgers University a few years back in New Jersey. Yeah, New Jersey has the highest amount of black bears per capita in the United States. How crazy is that?

John Reeves 1:16:09 That's crazy.

Joe Rogan 1:16:10 Yeah, and they banned hunting. "We have to stop the bear hunt. The bears are your friends." And then bear-human encounters increased by over 200% over the term of this new governor, and then he finally relinquished and now reopened the bear hunt, and now they're gonna extend the bear hunt. They're gonna hunt more of them. 'Cause bears are not easy to hunt, too, un- unless you're in open fields in the v- in the spring where they're coming out and they're eating grass. Generally, they hunt them in thick shit with bait. And people are like, "Oh, that's so wrong, you're using bait," but it's literally the only way they control their populations. You won't find them. Like when, when we're up in Alberta, when you go through the woods, you hardly ever see black bears.

John Reeves 1:16:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:53 You hardly ... But they're everywhere. They're all over the place. They just smell you coming a fucking million miles away and they steer clear.

John Reeves 1:16:59 Yeah, they do. So, so do wolves.

Joe Rogan 1:17:01 Yep.

John Reeves 1:17:02 We got a lot of coyotes out there at the, uh, boneyard, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:06 I'll show you a picture that my friend, John Rivet, sent me from Alberta. He sent me this recently. A couple of weeks ago, there was, uh, wolves up there in front of one of his trail cams, and, uh, it's, uh, pretty fucking cool pictures. Let me find this. I know he sent it to me recently. Oh, he might have sent it with Jen, too. Uh, but they live in a very remote part of Alberta where it's, you know, it's all what they call crown land up there.

John Reeves 1:17:41 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:17:41 You know? So it's just ... Well, you know what? It might be on Instagram. I'm not gonna find it. I know he sent it to me recently, but it's pretty fucking cool. These bears that are up th- or these wolves, rather, that are up there, uh, they killed something, and they're all surrounding it, tearing it apart, and it just happened to be in front of one of his trail cameras. They caught it.

John Reeves 1:18:01 Wow.

Joe Rogan 1:18:02 'Cause they have, they have trail cameras set up-

John Reeves 1:18:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18:04 ... on all these various roads to see what's walking in and walking out, and they killed something right, you know, few hundred yard, or a, a few yards, rather.

John Reeves 1:18:12 Yeah, they, uh ... I let guys trap beaver on my ground. And beavers can fuck up a water system pretty quick.

Joe Rogan 1:18:21 Mm.

John Reeves 1:18:21 Especially if you have flowing water you need to keep flowing. They'll dam it up and then you got problems.

Joe Rogan 1:18:27 Mm.

John Reeves 1:18:28 So, we have guys that d- go out and trap beavers in the winter.

Joe Rogan 1:18:31 I ate beaver.

John Reeves 1:18:32 I've never had beaver.

Joe Rogan 1:18:33 I had beaver with Steve Rinella. He cooked it. He made, like, a beaver pot roast. It was delicious. It tasted almost like beef. It was very good.

John Reeves 1:18:40 Oh, that kind of beaver?

Joe Rogan 1:18:42 Yeah. Oh, you're talking about the other kind.

John Reeves 1:18:44 Right. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:18:44 Yeah, the other, the other thing they used to eat, but we, we tried, but it's disgusting, is the tail. They used to eat bea- ... Like, pioneers used to eat beaver tail.

John Reeves 1:18:52 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:18:52 The trappers used to eat it because it was-

John Reeves 1:18:55 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 1:18:55 ... a, a very good source of fat 'cause the tail's basically all fat, but it's pretty nasty.

John Reeves 1:19:00 Did you try that?

Joe Rogan 1:19:01 Yeah, I ate it.

John Reeves 1:19:02 I've never had that.

Joe Rogan 1:19:03 Well, it's kinda weird. It's not something you're interested in, but if you're starving-

John Reeves 1:19:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:19:10 ... you know, it'd be a source of fat, and I think that's what they were doing it for. But the, the meat itself, like I said, he, he braised it and then he slow-cooked it. It was very good.... was, like, surprising to me that people don't hunt beavers for food. It... That's how good it was-

John Reeves 1:19:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:19:26 ... because they hunt them primarily for their pelts.

John Reeves 1:19:29 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:19:30 Yeah.

John Reeves 1:19:31 It's a warm pelt, too, you know?

Joe Rogan 1:19:33 Oh, yeah.

John Reeves 1:19:33 It's great fur.

Joe Rogan 1:19:34 So, when you're up there, you have... You got wolves in that area, you have bears in that area, you got moose, you got all this wildlife, and then you have this piece of ground where all these animals from thousands of years ago died. That is a special place you have.

John Reeves 1:19:54 It is. It really is. And it's been fairly unknown about.

Joe Rogan 1:20:00 Till now.

John Reeves 1:20:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:20:01 Have you had a problem with people going up there-

John Reeves 1:20:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:20:04 ... and looking around?

John Reeves 1:20:05 Well, one of the things that we do, my company has a... We're in the solid waste business. We have a construction debris landfill close by, so we have really good access control.

Joe Rogan 1:20:18 Mm-hmm.

John Reeves 1:20:19 At one point in my life, when I had all this land, I was going, "Okay. I gotta somehow make a living with all this property if I'm not gonna mine it." And I had a piece that was all mined out. We got it permitted to be a construction debris landfill. I had... Looking around and going, "How does... Who owns the, who owns the solid waste business in this country?" Well, the mafia. "Oh, okay. I want to get in on what they're doing, 'cause that's where the money's at."

Joe Rogan 1:20:49 Solid waste?

John Reeves 1:20:51 Solid waste.

Joe Rogan 1:20:52 Landfills?

John Reeves 1:20:53 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:20:54 Wouldn't that be dirty? Isn't that, like... If you're dumping waste on your land, doesn't that leak into the ground and get into the water supply?

John Reeves 1:21:01 It's not a... It, it would, but we only take construction debris.

Joe Rogan 1:21:04 Oh, okay.

John Reeves 1:21:05 You know, we have the airport sitting in our landfill. The Fairbanks old international airport. 700 houses from Eielson Air Force Base.

Joe Rogan 1:21:13 You just chop them up, throw them in there?

John Reeves 1:21:15 No, the... We don't... We just-

Joe Rogan 1:21:17 Smash them?

John Reeves 1:21:18 We don't do the demolition. We just have the place where the guys that do the demolition can take them.

Joe Rogan 1:21:21 Mm-hmm.

John Reeves 1:21:22 So, that's, kind of, how our company... Even though we're a gold mining company, we're actually land managers, so...

Joe Rogan 1:21:29 But when you're digging a hole like that, are you concerned that maybe they could dig a hole and there would be woolly mammoths in there too?

John Reeves 1:21:36 Well, they're right next to where we're digging, so...

Joe Rogan 1:21:39 Yeah. I mean, wouldn't you think that it... Unfortunately, that they could smash and destroy valuable bones?

John Reeves 1:21:45 No. No. They're, they're just delivering the refuse.

Joe Rogan 1:21:48 Right.

John Reeves 1:21:48 Just-

Joe Rogan 1:21:48 But, I mean, to dig that hole, right?

John Reeves 1:21:50 No, the hole's already been dug.

Joe Rogan 1:21:52 Okay.

John Reeves 1:21:52 All that part has already been mined out.

Joe Rogan 1:21:55 And you're sure there's nothing in there?

John Reeves 1:21:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:21:58 Okay.

John Reeves 1:21:59 Yeah. There's stuff adjacent to it, but we don't impose on that.

Joe Rogan 1:22:02 So, what is it about this one particular five-acre area? Like, why are there so many animals in this one spot? And do you think there's multiple other spots? You said you know of one, but you have s-... 10,000 acres.

John Reeves 1:22:17 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:22:18 I mean, how many more of those are out there? And how many more in the surrounding land that's not yours might also hold these similar piles of these dead ancient animals?

John Reeves 1:22:30 We have no way of knowing.

Joe Rogan 1:22:32 That's crazy.

John Reeves 1:22:33 We, we... Listen, I've spent 15 years on this one piece.

Joe Rogan 1:22:38 15 years on five acres?

John Reeves 1:22:39 Yeah. And my wife... By the way, my wife calls it my adorable little hobby.

Joe Rogan 1:22:45 (laughs)

John Reeves 1:22:45 So, when she sees this, if she ever discovers how much money we spend on fuel and equipment, you know, I'm in trouble.

Joe Rogan 1:22:54 Yeah, but historically... I mean, it's so significant. I mean, it's, it's such an unusual place. Like, the... When I first found your page, I thought some... I'm, um, "Something's wrong here. I'm reading something wrong." Like, it can't all be coming from this one place. Like, this guy... Maybe this guy collects it, brings it in from other places. Maybe he's a paleontologist. And then I'm, I'm like, "No, this guy's just fucking finding this shit on his land," and the way you were going about it, it's like, "I just put it over there." I was like, "This is bananas." Like, these are huge scientific discoveries.

John Reeves 1:23:25 Yep. I'm not a scientist.

Joe Rogan 1:23:29 W- well, I guarantee you a lot of... Well, m- many must already know about you, right?

John Reeves 1:23:34 No.

Joe Rogan 1:23:35 No?

John Reeves 1:23:35 No. They might after this.

Joe Rogan 1:23:37 How do they not know? If you're a paleontologist and you're studying short-faced bears, or if you're studying, you know, these, uh, ancient deceased mammoths and all these animals, wouldn't you be... Wouldn't you be drawn to your place?

John Reeves 1:23:52 You would think. Now, the fellow that made that documentary film, um... He's really... He did a beautiful job on that documentary. He's won several, uh, film contests. The most recent was at Denali Film Con- Contest last summer. It's n-... It hasn't gotten really seen by anybody, but we went up to the Explorers Club in New York City for a screening of it, uh, several years ago when it was done, and those people were really interested in it. And, uh, I'm in the Explorers Club, Drew's in the Explorers Club. We do some pretty neat shit. But I don't know any... Uh, we don't... We're not looking for anybody to come out there. We're kind of like, "I'll only tell Joe Rogan about this."

Joe Rogan 1:24:41 (laughs)

John Reeves 1:24:41 "You've lasted three fucking years, and now look what happened."

Joe Rogan 1:24:44 But you're... I mean, I don't want to say you're obligated, but it's like... I think what you're sitting on is of immense historical significance.

John Reeves 1:24:56 Not only that, but it's gonna be very expensive for those guys, whoever does this kind of work, to do the proper research.

Joe Rogan 1:25:02 Mm-hmm.

John Reeves 1:25:03 Because it's a moving body of frozen ice and muck with trees that can topple down the size of your... Uh, chunks of ice the size of a pickup truck can fall out of no place. So, that's why we don't want a bunch of people out there wandering around.

Joe Rogan 1:25:19 Right. And you've developed a method to do it?

John Reeves 1:25:22 Yeah, we have, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:25:23 But you're just kind of doing it for yourself.

John Reeves 1:25:25 We're just...... doing it, it's like going Easter