Bill Thompson on Joe Rogan: How Pre-1840 Rules Rebuild Men

1. SPSpeaker0:02

   Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

2. JRJoe Rogan0:04

   The Joe Rogan Experience.

3. SPSpeaker0:06

   Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music]

4. JRJoe Rogan0:12

   What's up, Bill?

5. SPSpeaker0:13

   How you doing, Joe?

6. JRJoe Rogan0:13

   Good to see you, brother.

7. SPSpeaker0:14

   Good to see you.

8. JRJoe Rogan0:14

   This is, this might be one of the coolest things anybody's ever given me. So you gave me this knife. [laughs] Explain all this.

9. SPSpeaker0:22

   All right, so I mean, there's a larger explanatory reason behind this. My brother and I grew up... My father died when I was five. My brother and I grew up doing, um, these things called rendezvous. Have you ever heard of them?

10. JRJoe Rogan0:35

    Um, in what way? What is a rendezvous?

11. SPSpeaker0:37

    So there you go. So what a rendezvous is, is it's not... You know, you go to those like, uh, where I don't even know what they're called, but people do like reenactments.

12. JRJoe Rogan0:46

    Oh, okay. Like Civil War reenactments?

13. SPSpeaker0:48

    It's not like that.

14. JRJoe Rogan0:49

    [laughs]

15. SPSpeaker0:49

    So that's the closest thing, approximation to probably what it is. You get invited to them, or these days they're easier to get to, but my stepfather, my, the guy my mother remarried, brought us to them. All you do is camp, but you're only allowed to camp, and no one comes to the camp, or sometimes they might have people at the end, but while you're in the camp, everything in the camp has to be 1840 or prior. So there can be no modern appurtenances, nothing like a, you know, refrigerator, nothing like that.

16. JRJoe Rogan1:14

    1840. Why that year?

17. SPSpeaker1:16

    18... The end of the fur trapping. At the end, like that, that was considered like Jeremiah Johnson time, like peak fur trapping.

18. JRJoe Rogan1:21

    Oh.

19. SPSpeaker1:22

    So there's people, you know, they dress like either, you know, revolutionary, like American revolutionaries, or they dress like mountain men, or they dress like Indians.

20. JRJoe Rogan1:30

    How'd you guys dress?

21. SPSpeaker1:31

    Mountain men. So, uh, while we're there, you learn all kinds of stuff while you're reenacting. Like I learned how to brain tan hides. I learned how to traditionally ar- or do traditional archery, stuff like that. So anyway, this knife was a knife I had actually started working on with my brother a while ago. I do more of like the brain tanning, tomahawk quilling.

22. JRJoe Rogan1:51

    And when you say brain tanning, you're talking about using brains to tan animal hides, right?

23. SPSpeaker1:55

    Yes, yes.

24. JRJoe Rogan1:55

    Using animal brains.

25. SPSpeaker1:57

    Yeah.

26. JRJoe Rogan1:57

    What, what, what does brains do? Why does brains work?

27. SPSpeaker1:59

    It softens the leather in a natural way, and what's cool about it is every animal, no matter what animal you kill, has the exact amount of brain needed in order to tan the hide.

28. JRJoe Rogan2:08

    Oh.

29. SPSpeaker2:09

    So you don't need any additional... Like, people use egg yolks or mayonnaise or something like that. All you do is you take the brain out of the cavity, you grind it up, you mix it into some water, and then after you've, after you've cleaned the leather and you've scraped it clean, you stretch it. I usually use like a dull shovel. You stretch it over the dull shovel, and then you soak it in the brain water mixture, and then you just keep repeating that pattern, and the leather gets like a really nice soft, um, uh, feel to it.

30. JRJoe Rogan2:37

    What is it about the brain? Is it the fat?

Episode duration: 2:21:06