Joe Rogan Experience #1918 - John from The Boneyard Alaska

John Reeves tells Joe Rogan how he dropped out of the University of Florida on a swimming scholarship, hitchhiked to Alaska, got rich hauling freight for the Alyeska pipeline, then bought the old Alaska Gold Company and became the largest private landowner in the state. On his patented land he stumbled onto a five-acre site he calls the Boneyard, where hydraulic mining of melting permafrost has unearthed close to a quarter-million Ice Age fossils, many of species experts insisted never lived in interior Alaska. He recounts dating the bones to the Younger Dryas extinction window, eating cooked mammoth and other ancient meat, and the American Museum of Natural History dumping a boxcar of his company's bones into New York's East River. He publicly reveals that dump site to start a 'bone rush.' The conversation also wanders into Alaska wildlife, hunting, an Air Force nuclear-detection experiment on his land, and politics.

• After watching Jeremiah Johnson, John dropped out of the University of Florida, wrote 'Gone Fishing' on his dorm door, and hitchhiked to Alaska with a shotgun.
  00:04:12
• He and a partner bought a $10,000 air-freight truck and got rich hauling freight for the Alyeska pipeline, clearing roughly $30,000-$40,000 of revenue many mornings.
  00:13:30
• Buying the old Alaska Gold Company made him the largest private landowner in Alaska, with 10,000 acres and proven reserves near 800,000 ounces of gold.
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• The Boneyard is a single five-acre patch that has yielded close to a quarter-million fossils, including what he jokes is 10,000 dead woolly mammoths' worth of tusks.
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• The American Museum of Natural History collected roughly 500,000 of his company's bones (1928-1958), never wrote the required reports, and dumped a boxcar load into the East River.
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• John publicly reveals the East River dump site near 65th Street to launch what he calls a 'bone rush.'
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• He and about ten friends cooked and ate meat from a roughly 12,000-year-old woolly mammoth found with tissue still on it.
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• He let the Air Force run scaled explosions in his permafrost to gauge North Korea's nuclear weapons, earning a thank-you letter and later credit for '14 kills.'
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• Carbon-14 dating costs about $400 per sample; dating his whole collection would run close to $100 million.
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• Short-faced bears stood about 12 feet tall when they reared up on their hind legs.
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• Mammals heavier than 2.2 pounds empty their bladders in about 20 seconds.
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• New Jersey has the highest number of black bears per capita in the United States.
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• His self-described most significant find is a blue feather discovered inside a 10-foot mammoth tusk buried under 65 feet of overburden.
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• A 150-pound carved blue mammoth tusk by the artist Mammoth Mogul was listed for sale at $675,000.
  02:18:33
• A stone skinning tool found on his land is made of rock a geologist traced to Eastern Europe (Bulgaria or Romania).
  02:31:32
• The trans-Alaska pipeline was supposed to cost $800 million but ended up costing $9 billion.
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