Name: Joe Rogan Experience #565 - Trevor Valle
Uploaded: 2014-10-23T17:24:25.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #565 - Trevor Valle' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-10-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #565 - Trevor Valle' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-10-23. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #565 - Trevor Valle

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day
trevor vallee welcome buddy how's it going man good man when we were i
sometimes when people sit
down and you know you just start talking you're like shit shit stop talking we
got to record
trevor's a paleontologist and explain to me the job site thing like when
someone's digging you have to
you they need a paleontologist on site in certain places uh well it it all
depends on on really where
you are so here in the state of california we have a uh a law called sequa it
was started in 1970 and
that mandates mandates that any archaeological or paleontological stuff so like
dead bodies of of you
know early californians or glassware all the way up to woolly mammoth bones or
not woolly mammoth but
mammoth bones saber-toothed cats stuff like that or even older has to be mitigated
they have to be
protected so my job right now i work work for a company called swca
environmental consultants
we go out and we make sure that the glassware and the fossils and the bones and
all that that get
found by 40 ton excavation machines when they're building new hotels in
downtown wow so yeah i'm
standing next to things that could very easily kill you so when they do that
how do they keep from
fucking something up like what when they're digging in is it just dumb luck oh
no they they they fuck
stuff up that's how we find it so because we we don't have x-ray vision i can't
like look in the
ground hey there's a whale there um so the bulldozers going by the excavators
scooping stuff up and you're
just scrambling to check yeah wow it's like it it's it digs this big hole dumps
it over i'm looking in
the hole and i'm looking over at the spoil pile where they're mounding
everything up and trying to
hop back and forth and all of a sudden you hear this sickening crunch and you're
like oh you wave
everybody off and there's like this bone sticking out you sweep it away and
like oh crap it's a mammoth
okay and then you shut the shot i shut the job site down did they get mad at
you oh yes really yeah
what's like the biggest thing you found and how pissed were they um i can't say
exactly where but
somewhere here in los angeles uh i was part of a team so the job site i was
working on they found a whale
a whale a fossil whale a five million year old whale whoa where there's no
water right now holy
shit think like downtown la whale wow that's why how long five million years
old about five million
years old holy fuck we were finding shark's teeth and stuff like that hanging
around um and the the
owner of the company was uh the the owner of the uh the construction company
the the forgot what their
name is uh supervisor um the general contractor uh he's like oh you're just
finding teeth i'm like
well you know where you find really big shark teeth you occasionally find their
food and they ate whales
he's like oh you won't about three weeks later oh yep look whale rib cage wow
the whole rib cage
yeah so how big is that five million year old whale the jacket's about three
quarters the size of this
table a jacket yeah um sorry i'm like thrown out terms we wrap uh fossils in
plaster to protect it
because we're taking the dirt out with them so we can prep it later so i'm
going to like take out
hammers and chisels in about a month and try and work all of the bones out of
this big block of dirt
so we wrap plaster around it we call it plaster jacketing oh so we put all that
on there and so
yeah it's about three quarters the size of this table i mean it's like 1920
ribs like three or four
verts some other random bones we don't know what it is and what what makes like
some of it stay in
the dirt and the rest of it deteriorate like what's the dumb luck just dumb
luck yeah absolute dumb luck
it's uh we get a lot of uh you know paleontology it's still a young science it
started in the 1800s
in england pretty much before that yeah before that was natural philosophy
natural philosophy
natural philosophy wow so uh like in the 1860s when darwin released uh origin
of the species
his big book on evolution he was saying oh you know we don't have that many
things in the fossil
record because paleontology was still new like three years later they found
archaeopteryx that big
that big uh lizard bird yeah archaeopteryx early bird they found that and then
everyone went nuts
it's like oh crap look evolution fossils this is awesome so it was this huge uptick
in in study
and now it's one of the i mean ross on friends was a paleontologist how many
people do you know
saw jurassic park or 10 000 bc and all that yeah paleontology we're kind of
getting into a getting
into its own swing again it's kind of cool right now we're kind of cool right
now we've got piercings
we're covered in tattoos we're kind of we're cool people you're a hipster you
could you could easily
be like a chef somewhere or a comic well i've i've seen that uh i have a lot of
visible tattoos i'm
wearing jeans today but i'm like i've got them all over my legs too and they're
all like science
either science or geeky oh cool and i've seen chefs with like spatulas yeah
carrots and minor minor like
fossil shark teeth and saber-toothed cats yeah what is that a turtle the top
one oh it's a frog type
uh it's a horn lizard oh yeah it's uh my favorite horn lizard it's uh the regal
horn lizard from the
desert southwest i'm a nerd man i'm a total i'm the world needs nerds it's
important i love nerds
legos transformers lizards you know that's where you lost me you lost me in the
transformers i never
got that fucking goofy ass robots are turning the cars fuck off
but so when you find like a giant rib cage of a wheel how do you know when to
stop looking how do
you know like we found like five or six bones how do you know i think we got it
all when the bones run
out we stop and then we dig underneath but sometimes when we dig underneath to
like pop what we think is
everything out we find more and then we have to go down and then one jacket can
turn into five so do
you have time constraints like when you press that red button you shut it down
no you could go on for
years yeah if it's big enough yeah wow do you ever worry about getting assassinated
like i would think
like these fucking assholes that build parking structures you know they can be
seriously man they can
be dicks do they put you in a room with a cigar smoking asshole no they don't
they we we close down the site
so they can't even get near us unless we let them wow yeah i mean at that we
limit it to foot traffic
only and we're the first ones in and the last ones out during the day because
we need to make sure
everyone else is gone so nothing happens to the because we're also we're
safeguarding whatever it
is we find what's like the most adamant that anybody's ever gotten with you
about keeping a job site
open um the other week i was uh working an archaeological site and a guy yelled
at me because i was trying
to salvage an 1800 sears catalog that was buried in sand and uh yeah he was
getting kind of savage with
me he's you're stopping my guys for a piece of trash i'm like i'm sorry man
this is a dateable catalog
that has hand illustrated things in it and it's necessary from the 1800s yeah
he couldn't see that
that's kind of cool nope i was getting i was getting in the way of his excavator
it's like wow
so i closed that part of the site five feet of the site for three hours and he
gave me a lip you're
holding up my guys it's trash wow dude chill man trash from the 1800s is kind
of cool yeah it's like
bottles and horseshoes and people have their own agenda people have their own
agenda everybody has
their own agenda i've always been fascinated by the idea of a fossil because
when when we started
learning in school about the fossil record and started learning about fossils
and now you look at
something and it's actually not even the bone anymore it's like the minerals
have replaced the bone
like i had a conversation with a friend of mine once about that he had a um um
megalodon tooth
on his desk yeah you've got one right there yeah i found some in la too oh
really yeah in la that
the whale site i was talking about we actually found meg teeth before that whoa
that's what i'm
saying is like yeah when you find big sharks like that you can find their food
yeah megalodon in
downtown la is it megalodon is that how you say it or is it megalodon megalodon
your emphasis is
on a different syllable it doesn't same thing oh okay yeah it's like nuclear
nuclear no that it's that's nuclear it's that's spelled new clear um don't you
remember how bush
used to say oh yeah no no no no you know nuclear nuclear nuclear yeah nuclear
bombs it's like uh was
it uh california when uh schwarzenegger used to say california yeah yeah yeah
um the scientist not a
politician huh the bones like or the the teeth rather when they you see them
and they're all black i was trying
to tell them i go that's not really the tooth i go that's sort of the minerals
have kind of taken over
where the tooth was you're absolutely right and he was like no it's a tooth i'm
like dude
it used to be a tooth but that's why it's black how many black teeth do you
have he's like it's
just old like i don't think it works like that mineralization yeah it so all
the calcium gets
replaced by heavier minerals in the bone the tooth all that that's been uh it's
been replaced it's been
petrified just like petrified wood still looks like wood right right you know
instead of weighing two
pounds it weighs 15 and it's right it's a rock it's cool looking yeah petrified
wood is the weirdest
shit ever but the let me tell you man i used to be that kind of paleontologist
and i started working
at the tar pits and then i went to siberia with these woolly mammoths they're
not petrified yeah this is
what they were saying in the press thing i found so incredibly fascinating yeah
you're finding
completely flat flash frozen animals yeah there was skin hair like i played
with its lips wow it had
undigested food in the stomach real clear when you say played with like yeah
what are you doing yeah
front mouth yes yeah yes um but it's like yeah it had the the whole mouth
structure was still there
the lower lip the root of the tongue the root yeah the like where it connects
yeah the base of the tongue
where it connects in the back of the throat it was like still in this animal it
was an animal it wasn't
bones yeah it was creepy man wow i'd never dealt with something like that
before and how did it
how was it so well preserved did it fall into a glacier or something we think
uh the way that it was
preserved i mean you'll you'll see you'll you'll see in the show um we only
kind of have half of a
mammoth because the top half has been exposed to weathering and all that but
the bottom half stayed
in frozen mud and permafrost so it probably got trapped in either a mud bank a
pit something like
that and got stuck died got buried in snow the whole thing froze and then maybe
the back end of it got
eaten away it got scavenged dogs came on and went hey look free meat right yeah
that that kind of it's
it's just it's crazy i did a podcast with a guy named randall carlson have you
ever heard of him
the name sounds familiar he's an expert in astro um in astroidal impacts and
yeah yeah he was oh um
he had one um example of a woolly mammoth that died almost instantly and he
believes that the impact
of some sort of a large body like killed this thing and not not just killed it
but broke its back like
upon impact like so just some massive impact like you know x amount thousands
of years ago they think
like 12 plus thousand years ago whoa yeah and he had uh he had actually he had
photos of it right he had
photos of the the woolly mammoth and it's broken position and they had found it
very similarly it was like
very well preserved and uh sort of perma-frozen weird yeah i would think
something falling from
space and then falling from the sky at terminal velocity if it's like 