So the other night, I got a phone call and it's one of those phone calls that you're like, okay, things have to happen like now, or maybe not now, but like in the near future. So it's not about to go down. I know that much. I want to tell you the story.
It kind of ends well, kind of doesn't end well, but it's pretty intense. As soon as it happens, I got to tell Matt about this. This is too crazy. You're in a situation with your wife where like things go sideways really, really fast and you get to see what each other's made out of.
You're in a situation like that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay, sure. Here's one. We wanted to go for a drive when we lived in Las Vegas. We were married and well, I'm fairly new and married and she was pregnant with our first child.
So we took our Saturn SL1 and we just drove way on the desert. Like I'll be fine. And up until this point in my life, I always made decisions for us like we're kids, whatever. We'll get out of it.
We'll figure it out. This is the first time that I realized I needed to start thinking differently. We didn't really have water or anything per se. We're just going for a drive.
We're going for a hike and she's pregnant. So we got out in the desert and there's this little washout area and I decided to just drive through it. It looks like it should be fine. It's a Saturn and what could go wrong?
It wasn't fine. And the sand and the silt had been deposited from all of the flash flooding or whatever that was through there and the rare occasions where there's moisture had piled up into a really soft bed of silicate. And so boom, I go through and we're just stuck up above the tailpipe. I mean, there's no going anywhere.
We're just stuck stuck way other than the desert. So it's like the moon dust kind of stuff. Yes. Excellent description.
Yeah. Yeah. It's not normal sand. It's weird material and we have nothing.
No supplies. Nothing never occurred to me for a second that we would get stuck in there, but we were buried, man. No cell service. How pregnant was Camilla?
Hmm. Seven months, maybe eight. Okay. So a lot.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Figured some stuff out.
We got through some tricky scrapes out in the wilds before. So I guess it wasn't that freaked out initially, but then it started to occur to me. Huh. She's getting real hot out here trying to help me.
And I think I do need her help, but she's pregnant and she can't really help me with physical things. She shouldn't help me. Okay. So she should be in the car with it running, but we're covered over the tailpipe.
So I got to solve that. But every time I try to move the vehicle, I'm covering the tailpipe again. We'd like dry dirt or like wet dirt. No, it's dry.
It's yeah, puffy and powdery and deep, deep, deep. Wow. So I did the thing where I found something, I ate some old rope or something I could tie with out in the desert and I scraped out with a flat rock and I sort of strapped something to my tires so it would get a little traction for half a rotation and then move it and do it again. And eventually we got out.
But here's what I learned about her in that super stressful situation. She's got ice in her veins. She did not care. She is fine.
Just fine. So I maintained that demeanor as well. But that was the first moment my dad instinct ever kicked in and I was like, oh, I've put us in a bad situation. And now I have to protect my family from the bad situation I put us in.
Yeah, I don't think that has ever turned off. Yeah, that's kind of, uh, that's kind of an interesting thing, right? Something about the, she's pregnant. There's something about that, right?
Mm hmm. Yeah. Was that what you were looking for? Is that kind of situation or is your thing different?
Well, kind of the pregnant part is the same. Except it's not my wife. It was a goat. Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah, right. Okay, got it. Wait, did you say goat? Goat.
Yeah, like G-O-A-T goat. Huh. I don't know. This kind of a big story, but let's do it.
Have my blessing. Go. All right. I'm going to start with a different story first.
Another body of mine, Jared, they said, hey, it's time for the sheep to have it's baby. And I was like, okay, awesome. I've got this little handheld slow-mo camera. I'm going to go to where the sheep's going to have the baby and I'm going to film it coming out of that sheep in slow-mo.
And it's going to be awesome, right? Oh, okay. So I got a portable light, get everything figured out. I'm like, man, it's going to be neat.
Wait, how slow-mo are we talking? Because it seems like that happens slowly enough that maybe the slow-mo wouldn't be totally necessary. Exactly. Yeah, it's not.
I don't know what I was thinking, dude. I don't know what that's going to contribute. I'm going to go. Oh, be excited.
No, it's a great idea. It's a great idea. Yeah, no. We go over there and this sheep's been in labor for a really long time and it's not coming out.
It's a U, E-W-E, it's a big U. Okay. And it's got this little lamb in there and it's stuck. Like it's bad stuck, dude.
I've never been around anything like that. We had a kid at the time, but it was in the hospital and everything was kind of, you know, Dr. Newell was going on and there was backup plans like C-section, if something didn't work or whatever. But when you're sitting there in the middle of a field with livestock, that thing's pregnant and the baby's not coming out, it gets dicey in a hurry.
Have you ever been in that situation? Yeah, I have. Really? Well, I've been in that situation a couple of different ways.
Well, I know you actually didn't have one of your children at the hospital, right? Oh, well, yeah, with humans, I've been in that situation three times. It went really well two of the three times, but my middle child, my second daughter, yeah, we ran into some stuff, but you know, we had YouTube and a pretty good idea of what we were doing. So I just figured it out.
Okay. Yeah, like I'm, I don't know, that wasn't meant to be a punchline. And just we kind of knew what the basic simple complications are and this is what you do if you're an into them. So, yeah, we had sort of an odd presentation in terms of the way the baby was positioned to come out and the umbilical cord was wrapped, but both of those things we were right up on and we knew what to do.
And in the moment, this is a recognizable problem. I just asked her, you know, do you want to go to the hospital or do you want me to just fix it? I think I know what to do. And she was like, yeah, no, I trust you.
Great. I was like, you know what? Hang on a second. And so she just kind of held everything in there and I ran to the other room and kind of cleaned off my hands and googled real quick and just made sure that under the pressure of the moment I wasn't forgetting what we'd studied and read up on.
I was like, okay, I don't want back in the other room. And I just did the thing that we had learned and then it said to do it worked out great. And it was perfect. It's just wonderful.
So I guess that was stressful, but more it was just exciting and not analogous to what you were describing. Those weren't the examples I was thinking of. For me, it was a puppy. We had a toy poodle growing up and the toy poodle Molly Brown, she got hit and so she had trouble giving birth to her puppies on Christmas night of my 17th birthday.
Oh, man. And we couldn't figure it out. I love this dog. I just adored this dog and we couldn't get the puppies out and I was watching my dog die and it's Christmas night and we're not even home.
We were in New Mexico visiting family. How do you get an emergency vet to come out on Christmas night and solve that? There's no internet back then. We had to use phone books and just hope somebody would return a call or answer and we got somebody and he came over and he solved it and he did a C-section on my dog right there in the back room at my aunt's house.
Yeah. Got the puppies out and yeah, I was pretty crazy man, but I just remember it's just a toy poodle, right? This isn't even livestock. It's a little toy poodle, but it was a stress desire.
I can remember ever being as a kid because I could not fix the situation. I couldn't figure out what to do and I was watching a living thing look at me for help and I could not help in this living thing that happened to care about very much was dying right in front of me. So yeah, that's where my head went when you described it. Yeah, I guess given birth at home is a little bit tricky too.
So just straight up C-section, your dog, that's awesome. Yeah. Was it a vet? Yeah, I hope so.
Might have just been someone posing to try to make us feel better, but they acted like they knew what we were doing and the mom dog got better and the puppy was fine. So I guess it worked out. Sounds like they knew what they're doing. That's awesome dude.
Yeah. So anyway, you're out there. Pressure's ratcheting up. So we're out there with the sheep and the baby's not coming and we go in and we're like, all right, we gotta figure this out.
So they go get gloves and I was like, oh yeah, yeah, get the gloves. They didn't get little gloves man. They got big, big, big gloves like up your arms and stuff. And they went in and tried to like move it and it couldn't come out because the head was bigger than the pelvis.
It wasn't going to happen. The lamb died. There was just no way to get the skull out. And so we tried to figure out, did all the things that we had a local guy knew what was going on.
He came over, wasn't able to do it. The you ended up coming. It was a big traumatic event. I remember the moment when she was sitting there taking her last breaths and you know, it was bad.
How old were you? Dude, this was five years ago. Yeah, I was thinking I knew you when this happened. The thing was I was wearing a GoPro on my head because I was like, oh, this is going to be easy.
And then the moment everything turned, I was like, whoa, and I put down the slow-mo camera and I was like, okay. So it's like a forbidden episode of Smarter Every Day, right? Like I have it all. Yeah.
It's like not going to be able in that. It was crazy, man. It was a bad deal. Well, there's a grief to that.
It's just cruel. It's irony because this is supposed to initiate and proliferate life. And instead it takes to. I mean, that's just absolutely crushing.
And obviously it doesn't happen very much anymore. I mean, it's still can. I don't want to minimize the tragedy of that. But when you read about all these characters from history, so many of them have some kind of story of their wife and their about to be born child dying at the same time under those kind of horrible circumstances.
And I've read some of the poetry and art, verse and philosophy musings, journal entries of people from the past who went through that. And it's just got wrenching is anything I've ever read emotionally. It's incredibly powerful to even try to understand what they went through. Yeah.
It's deep. I don't know how to describe it, but yeah, you feel this panic when it's happening, this panic you're like, I mean, there's a thing that has to happen right now. And there's literally a passageway and this thing needs to pass through this passageway. And if it doesn't happen, everything goes wrong.
If it does, everything goes right. It's a very crazy thing. So I want to see section started. I don't know the answer to that.
Maybe we'll look at that here in a second. But anyway, I have that looming in my head, right? Right. So I'm like, man, livestock kind of complicated.
You got four legs, you got a head. It's all weird. The joints work differently. So it's not like a human baby that is just really strange.
And so I get a call from what day was this Saturday, I guess my dad called and he's like, hey, there's a goat here and it can't have its baby. It's in labor, but the baby's not coming. There's a whole story there. So the goats are a topic of debate at our house.
I'm trying to figure out how to get the goats away from my parents house because it's a, you know, you buy two goats and you end up with 40. Okay. Goats do things. And so it's just really a complicated situation.
But anyway, this is where we're at. We've got this Nigerian pygmy. I think it's what they're called. Nigerian pygmy goat.
I could be wrong about that breed. It sounds beautiful. We got this goat and she's in labor. Dad tried to call vet.
No vets available at the time. We're like, what do we do? And so we give it some time. I show up and when I show up, my mom and my sister are right there with a goat trying to figure it out.
They've got gloves on, the goats laying down, you know the anatomy, you know how it works. They're trying to reposition the goat and all you can see is two little hooves coming out of the goat. Like a little if it's kind of long and like part of another one. Is that the normal way that goats give birth or is it head first usually?
Well, it's head first with the hooves. I mean, there's several different ways that a goat can come out, but I don't know how that works. You know, how does a goat position itself before it descends because in a human, you know, standing upright and the baby descends, but with a goat, it's a little different because you kind of have to go up and down if that makes any sense. You go uphill in the downhill.
So I don't know how goats do that, but I do know there's a very specific orientation that's required. Sure. We're sitting there trying to do this and it's very clear. It's not going to happen that there's an obstruction.
This is not going to come out. So we tried to and this goats are supposed to be in labor 30 to 40 minutes. This had been two hours and it's not working. The water had broken.
It's clear things are going really, really bad. So we try to put the baby goat back in the kid, you know, it's a just kidding. There's a lot of jokes here. You can get around about this.
We're trying to push the goat back in reoriented by maneuvering the belly on the outside, positioning mom in a certain way, all these things, you know, we look at the YouTube videos, all these things. And if you ever want to see some really sweet videos, go to these homesteading moms and she's like, well, Fern's going to have her little kid today and man, we're just so excited for momma and she's ready to go. And all these, it's really quite adorable. All these people have these wonderful goat birthing experiences and all this stuff, right?
We're on the scene of like a crime scene. It's awful. Because everybody flew it. You can imagine everywhere.
My sister, she's not even involved in this. She just knew there was a problem. She showed up to help because she's awesome. My sister.
And so we're sitting there trying to figure all this stuff out. And it's clear that the baby's dead. It's not working. And so finally I'm like, okay, I'm going to try to brute force this.
Like at this point, the exercise becomes can we save the mother? That's all we're trying to do at this point in time. We end up, you know, I try to all this stuff about glove up, make sure you blue, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A lot of it when things get desperate, things go out the window and you're like, yes, we're just trying to make things happen right now.
I tried to go in. I tried to put my hand in and reposition the goat. And the size of the pelvis, this is a little pigmy goat. The size of the pelvis is such that I can't get my hand past a certain point.
Like all my knuckles are just too big to go through there and I can't reposition. And Tara had spent all day in another city doing something with one of the kids and she gets home and she's tired and she's got her food in the microwave and I call her and I said, Hey, so here's the deal. Our hands can't fit to do this thing we have to do. Can you come over and help?
You have smaller hands. And she said, Okay, and then I heard the microwave shut and she's over there in like 10 and she shows up and we just go at it, dude. Like it's my mom, my sister, my wife and me all on the back porch. We're trying to do everything we can or my sister and I are using our engineer brains.
My mom is using her mom brain. My wife is using her physician's assistant. Knows a lot about anatomy brain. We called Ann Briggs and of all trades, you know her?
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. She's wonderful.
Yeah. We called Ann. We're like, Hey, here's our situation. She's like, Oh, yeah, here's the deal.
And so she's telling us all the stuff. It's just a really, really difficult bad thing. And says, Hey, not not to get weird, but you kind of need to know this. At some point, if they're so stuck, it is possible that you pull hard enough where you pull the baby's leg off.
She said, I've had that happened. Have you ever had anything like this? Like a situation this desperate real life. Never pulled a leg off of anything.
Maybe a fly when I was a kid. Uh, no, I mean, that's, that's pretty jarring to even hear that phrase, committee mouth. Oh, yeah. And so my brain went to really, really weird places, dude.
And like I'm thinking, I know very little about physiology. I know enough, but I don't, I don't know a whole lot, but I know more about mechanics. And so I'm pulling on this little goat's leg. Once we get it positioned like we think Tara had to go all the way in.
I can still remember what she said. She, she goes in, she's pushing in. She's feeling and she, she gets past the point that we couldn't get past. And she looks up and she goes, how far am I going?
And we're like, just do it. She goes, okay. So she just goes all the way up and she's like in there and she goes, I don't even know what I'm feeling. I don't know either.
I don't know either. Something. I'm like, well, there should be four legs, should be ahead and a placenta. There's all kinds of stuff in there.
She's like, but this, this isn't feel right. This is, and we all felt the same thing. We're like, for all we know, this is Siamese twin goats up in here. Man, we had no idea.
Yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry. I'm gushing so much. You're just the only person I wanted to tell this to as soon as it happened.
So we get to a point where we get it oriented correctly. We're looking at all the diagrams like, okay, we get legs out and we're like bending the legs, are these the front legs or the back legs? I mean, you think you'd be able to tell, but you can't tell, man. And so we're figuring it all out.
And we eventually got everything lined up and started coming out. And it was clear that the pelvis was so small that we could either get the head out or the feet out. We couldn't do both. It was the most bizarre thing.
Actually, we couldn't even get the head out at first. The shoulder and the head can't both. It was clear. Everything was not going to come out at the same time.
Oh, and the baby's dead at this point. Like the baby is dead. Mama's still alive. What do you do in that situation?
I've been sitting here asking myself that question the whole time. I mean, I guess you have to break bones and disassemble the dead baby goat to get it out. Yeah. Right.
That's the situation we were in, dude, and it has to happen now. Yeah, I did not enjoy saying that. Yeah. And so that's where we were.
At one point, my son was there, my youngest son, and he had very small hands and I was like, son, would you become a bull? And he looked at me in his face. I was like, yeah, just going inside, buddy. He's going to help and notice you got real small hands there.
Yeah. Long story short, I tried strings. Like I got some paracord. We went in there and we we tired paracord around different places and we tried to separate the pelvis as much as we could.
We made sure we were in the correct orientation because like if you orient the animal in a certain direction, everything lines up and it should come out. Okay. Now let's look around the back so you can pull it upward, which was rolling. Okay.
Okay, mama or you almost done, baby girl. Okay, hold on. And so it was a, it was kind of a helpless situation, dude. It was helpless, but what we ended up doing, I mean, I'll tell you, it's not great.
Okay. But this is what we ended up having to do. We ended up having to get the kid's body, like the baby goat kid. We got the body out, but we had to separate the head from the body in order to make it pass through the opening.
Oh man. But we were able to do it. That's a big head. Okay.
That might be her whole. He's the head. Might pass the canal. I expected you'd be able to do it, but what was the fate of the mama?
She lived. She lived. That was pretty awesome. How did you know that she lived?
Did she respond? Did she bounce back? Did she roll on her side? She's like, no, ma'am.
She's so tired, baby. What? You need a sweet feed. Number one, she was so fatigued.
She was incredibly fatigued. She just kind of sat there for a minute like, oh my goodness, what the heck does happen? She was bleeding the whole time, you know, the leading the whole time. And as it was all happening, she was just like, what the heck are you people doing to me?
And we're saying sweet things and we're giving her water and we're just trying to like keep her as comfortable as possible. If my sister said, I wish we just had something to knock her out. And my mom was like, well, we probably do. But the question is we probably wouldn't wake back up from now.
We would have to know how do we turn her back on. Exactly. So yeah, it made me respect vets so much more, dude. So much more.
Yeah. You can't reason the animal's hard enough for the person. I know, right. There was this moment where we realized we were at the decision point.
We realized the young baby coat was lifeless. We're like, we have to do this horrible thing. We have no choice. We have to do this.
And we looked around and looked at my mom, looked at my sister, looked at Tara. And Tara said, this is what we have to do, right? And we're like, yeah, how are we going to do it? And we're like, OK, here's the Leatherman.
Let's do it. We did it. We saved her. It was awful, dude.
It was horrible. What was the mood like? Oh, was there euphoria? Was there some sense of relief when everything was cleared and it looked like she would recover or was everybody just so emotionally exhausted from what you just done that it was more kind of just stunned and tired?
It was somber and mature. And while we were doing stuff, we were bickering just a little bit, you know, we were like, no, no, no, no, no, you've got her. Don't pinch her. You know, we were doing that kind of stuff.
And when we got done, it was just like the sense of camaraderie and like, man, we've seen things. That was a thing that just happened. That was not what we were expecting on Saturday night. And so it was just like this exhale and then everybody check on Mama Goat.
Yeah. We did all kinds of things to clean her up both inside and out. We fleshed her and did all kinds of stuff so that she would have the best chance and then she's fine. She made it.
I think the, uh, I think the consensus is that was awful. Will that change you in some way? I don't know, man. It makes me think about it.
And the reason the reason I want to tell you this is because it made me think about the fact that we live in the 2020s, right? And goats exist. They sure do. Meaning they have existed forever.
There was a man and a wife sitting in a field somewhere thousands of years ago, and they had that same situation and they got through it. They didn't have anesthesia. They didn't have scalpels and sutures. They didn't have any of that stuff.
They just got through it. Yeah. It made me realize how soft I am. You know, everything's kind of served up on a platter for me.
Like when when my child was my children were being born, it was like, oh, well, you know, we're here in the hospital. Boop, boop, boop, boop. That monitor tells me this monitor tells me that everything's going to work. And it's just, yeah.
And if things go haywire, we're just going to we're going to cut or open. We're going to do the C section thing right here because the miracle of modern medical, whatever, you know what I mean? Yeah. But we are the exception in the long tail of human history.
We are the exception for how it's been. I mean, I don't know, man. Yes. It made me think about my position and how privileged I am to live right now.
I'm talking to you from thousands of miles away. I'm sitting in the air conditioning, man. And I'm going to go to a store after this. I've already already know where I'm going to Schlatsky's.
Sure. I've decided I haven't had Schlatsky's in a really long time. Yeah, they do a good job over there at Schlatsky's. They do.
On the way to the basketball game, my kids basketball game, I'm going to get some Schlatsky's. I'm soft, dude. You know, I have experienced one goat birthing gone awry in my life. And I'm a 40-something year old man.
What does it say about us? Like I've smelled things that none of my friends have smelled. What does that mean? I don't know.
I just want to get your take on it. This episode of No Dumb Questions is brought to you by the patrons of the program at patreon.com slash No Dumb Questions. That's what they need to know. That's it.
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Thank you. Absolutely. I hung out with a bunch of high school kids this morning. We're doing a talk about sort of the big view of history, some of the stuff we've talked about before, the Strauss, how generational theory, we're having a conversation about our things getting better.
There's a book that they were assigned to read. And I think the book has an overwhelmingly gloomy outlook on things. And I think it's pretty reflective of how people think right now. It doesn't matter what your political persuasion is right now in our country and really the civilizational West in general, regardless of political orientation.
Statistically, you probably think things are not going well and are bleak for the future. That's kind of where the mood is at. It's where the mentality is that it's not at all how it was when our parents were kids and Jean Rothenberry's Star Trek was on TV and we're going to go to the stars and we're going to solve things and find solutions and there's going to be flying cars and we're never, ever, ever going to strap buckets to our face that augment reality and walk around with face helmets running into things, letting our self driving cars drive things and pinching things and midair regardless of how bizarre borderline offensive that looks. We're never going to do that.
Our parents thought they looked at that stuff and they imagined technology making this beautiful world where people are together and there's harmony and that is not the vibe right now. Some of what people are thinking. But I pushed them on that and I asked the students, well, what he's getting better. There's kind of a bunch of snarky remarks.
I think, sadly, that's probably what they thought I wanted was like, no, nothing's getting better. Now show me that you get that. But what I was driving at is now things are pretty good and a lot of things are getting better. We talked about that for 20 minutes or half an hour and it was a really encouraging conversation to sit there and brainstorm with a bunch of high school kids about things that are getting better and reasons for optimism about life and the trajectory of the world in general.
But also there was an agreement, a consensus without any prompting on my part that we are soft. Same thing you were just saying, soft haven't been tested, haven't been pushed on things like this. In my family, we've got a saying that I break out from time to time. It's the nothing can go wrong saying.
And that's one that I use whenever we're in such a scrutinized safety environment, maybe an airport or something that is behind a security barrier and your brain goes on autopilot and you're like, well, if the people in those outfits are acting like things are normal, things are normal and well, nothing can happen. There's Plexiglas right there. Nothing can happen. Nothing can happen.
And I say it as a way to tell my kids, stay frosty. Things can happen. This is still the world. Physics still apply.
Don't be lulled to sleep by this illusion of everything being under controlled and the untamed nature of the world is suddenly becoming tamed. It isn't. We're trying to give that impression here in this environment, but it isn't tame. And that's what I was thinking while you were telling me the story is for all the robots and tools and technology and all the things that are great and are getting better.
Still, it came down to that kid's head is that size. That goat mama's pelvis is that size. That head has to be intact for that kid to survive the birth process. It cannot be intact and go through a whole that size.
There you have it. It was so mechanical. That's it. And so what does that do in that moment?
It strips. I know everybody you're talking about there pretty well. It strips a competent, wildly competent group of people who are well traveled and well read and knowledgeable about the world and physics. It strips them out of all of that and brings them all together down to this very simple equation that you can solve it, but you can't solve it without breaking the thing you're trying to save or breaking the thing that's holding the thing you're trying to save.
There you go. It's just a good old fashioned conundrum that reminds us that things can happen. That's interesting. So tell me more about that when you say things can happen to your family.
What are you communicating now? Now you said it, but I don't I don't really understand what they hear when you say it. Yeah, I usually say it the other way. I say it kind of sarcastically like, Oh, we're in this place.
Well, we made it through security. Nothing can happen now. And they know what I mean, which is it's a farce. I mean, when no things can still happen.
Stailer. It's like when we talked about death by GPS. Well, the computer's got this. Nothing can happen.
Just do what the computer says. It'll work. Nothing can happen. Well, I mean, the government is going to protect you from these things.
I mean, that product couldn't hurt you. The government wouldn't let it be sold. Take the product. It couldn't possibly be bad.
The news said it's good. What could happen? And I think technology and media and this sense of security that comes from it creates this disconnect from the realities of the physical world that can cause smart, competent people to let their guard down and not think critically about what's right in front of our faces, because we just imagine nothing can happen. Well, nothing can happen.
They wouldn't like this gondola wouldn't be here if there weren't like a somebody who inspects it or something. So, you know, we're fine. But I don't know, maybe still pay attention while you're right on the gondola. Here's the kind of thing that I'm trying to communicate to my kids.
Like, hey, if something's weird or sounds weird or looks weird, I keep your eyes on that for a minute. Let's just let's just trust, but verify a little bit. Well, that was a communism reference. I don't know that I necessarily meant to go there.
But I think you know what I mean. Yeah. One of the things we said afterwards to Tara said, you know, as we were all going home and trying to wash that smell. Oh, gosh, man, that smell trying to wash it off of us.
That's well. It was a combination of fluids and feces and just everything and death and life. Yeah, exactly. And so we're trying to get all that smell off our hands and stuff.
And Tara sent a text to our little family group, the rich. She just said, good job, everybody. We learned stuff. So it's pretty funny.
We were all bickory and then we were all like, OK, we got through that together. Very, very cool. We learned things and we said that we said, well, we just learned things and it makes me realize that the struggle is important. For example, once the last time you killed your food, then potato, honey, probably the last time I actually ate a fish.
Yeah, I had walleye that I caught last summer. Yeah. So yeah, something like that. It's been a while for me.
I had some squirrel few years ago, few years ago we cooked up squirrel like, you know, Xander, yeah, with like a little buffalo wings, except they were squirrel. Ooh, it's delightful. Yeah, it's good. You're done by about eight.
You're like, OK, I've had them. Yeah. OK. But it made me remember, like there was a moment when I was pulling and my sister was holding mom a goat and we were trying to figure it out and it was like, OK, clearly that's not working.
There was a moment, just a very brief moment where I was like, OK, I'm transitioning my thought from how to get this baby out to how to butcher mom a goat. I had that thought and then I thought, well, she's been under duress. Is that going to change the taste of the meat? Is it because of all the lactic acid that's built up?
You know, is that going to change? So I had a very caveman thought there for a second and I was like, oh, I don't know that I've ever quartered up a goat. How are you feeling about that admission? What do you mean?
What are you like confessing to thinking that? Like you shouldn't have thought it. No, no, it was a moment that it was almost a moment where I gave up on. I'm like, oh, this isn't going to happen.
It's just not going to happen. So yeah, this goat that was producing other goats is now food. That was a thought. I mean, that OK, that's kind of the equation, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And that wouldn't have been there would have been a moment of hesitation in that process for anybody in human history prior to 50 years ago, 40 years ago, right? To even have a qualm about that.
Or for me to even ask, whoa, did you feel bad for thinking that way? That is a very recent question that would be reasonable to ask as a human being on this planet. Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that are comfortable with the idea of chickens in their backyard for eggs, but raising the chickens for meat is a different thought. That's a different thought experiment for people.
Like for a while we had we had chickens for eggs and we had this one chicken that was just mean, like mean. What was his name? Well, we had several. One was named Sesame and we had another one named Kung-Pao.
Literally what we did. See what you're doing. That's what we did. So it's OK.
Well, I like it. We did that. We had all kinds of different names and you can fill in the rest. I'm sure you can you can probably complete them all.
But we had we had one chicken. I forget the name of the one that was so bad. It was just mean. So anyway, we have this lady that goes to church with us.
Her name, well, it doesn't matter what her name is, but she used to live in Moldova. Oh, all right. And Moldova, they would raise their meat. Moldova, one of the smallest nations in Europe down there by it's on the Black Sea.
Anyway, she would just raise her chickens back home and they just kill them. So if you ever had an animal, you're like, Hey, we should call them this so and so to come get this because, you know, it's not really laying eggs or anything. She'd show up. She's like, Hey, how's it going?
I mean, you got four great and she just crap them. Take them home but you're them. Cook them up. She's like, Oh, this one's an old one.
Well, this will have to be a stew, you know, they're a little tough when they're sold. Yeah, I'll cook it up in some broth, you know, I think it's a good thing to cook your own food, to raise your own food, cook it, know where it comes from. I think it's good. I think it's a good thing.
I've been thinking a lot about that lately. And this experience has just brought me more towards that because if things go south, my family's going to have meat, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I have thought long and hard about what density of trout population in a stream is needed relative to what size of a stretch of stream I could patrol and maintain control over and how much I would need to provide for a family, how far would fish show in that kind of environment?
I've done that math. Have you thought about farming fish? Have you ever seen, I think it's called aquaponics, you have tilapia that go really fast? Yeah, absolutely.
When we went and did our semester or Spanish thing in Costa Rica a while back, the little place that we had, I mean, the sounds fancy, but it was not a fancy place at all. It had a natural tilapia pond in the backyard and the pond just for just from water that was on the property is not so special about it. That thing was chock full of tilapia and they were idiots. My goodness, those are the easiest fish in the world to catch on a fly rod.
Like, I would just go back and be like, yeah, I'm just going to get a tilapia and look at it again. I drop a fly on a hundred fish, we come and take that fly. I'm like, OK, there we go. We'll take a look at this one.
They're beautiful bright colors and everything, but whoever owned that little property that we rented, they had a pretty clever setup going and it didn't look like the big crazy indoor aquaponics farm kind of thing. It was really just a little bit of terraced land built into a naturally occurring hill with the naturally occurring movement of water. Then you're raising crops just below where the fish are and then you cycle a little bit of that water back around to make the nutrients, you have to get all the value out of that. It was very, very clever, very, very simple and obviously climate-wise, that doesn't work where I live, but put something like that indoors and make it very efficient, I think.
Wow. You should try it, man. I'd like to. Yeah, I need the right kind of setup.
Little pond. All right. So I just googled the history of the C section. All right.
Would you find out there's all kinds of information and I am not a doctor and I think the better thing would just be have a doctor on some time and just ask these questions. I think that would be interesting. No, that'd be all kinds of interesting, but it's old, right? Oh, it's very old.
Yeah. I think the rumor is that Caesar wasn't actually born by Caesarean section, even though it's named for him, but that that approach to birth existed long before Julius Caesar even, right? Like back in the Greek world and stuff. Yeah, until this very moment, I would have said Caesar was born BSC section, but reading a thing here said, what is my source here?
Obstetrics and gynecology. I don't know what this is. This appears to be a book called a, I don't know what this book is called. Anyway, it says in here, it was performed only when the woman was dead or dying as an attempt to rescue the fetus with few exceptions.
This was a pattern until the era of anesthesia in the 19th century. Wow, dude. That's how it was presented in House of the Dragon, the first season of that show had a really a C section in a crisis birth situation. And it was presented as you can pick the mom or you can pick the child and the king needed in there.
So it was pretty dark. I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine. Man, I just don't even understand that situation.
I mean, I do know I do understand it, but I emotionally can't I can't process that, dude. I'm so soft. I guess, well, especially if you're walking into that situation, you know, you call your parents like, Oh, it's happening. And like we were talking about the beginning about just the bitterness of this particular emotion, this particular situation is supposed to be the dawn of life.
And it ends up being the opposite. It's just the cruelest of losses, I think. Yeah. So now I know I can't imagine trying to process that.
Can't imagine trying to make those kinds of decisions. That's where we are on the email list. All right. Let me pull it up here.
Okay. As of today, there are 1,000 and 33 people that when we upload an episode of Notim questions, we just shoot them an email. And I think the email says something like, Hey, new episode. And that's it.
So that's cool. Okay. One, I'm simultaneously grateful for the 1,000 and 33 people who have signed up for that. Two, that number makes me think we should probably mention from time to time that there's an email.
Yeah, I know. Exactly. People that sign up for it. We haven't really talked about it much.
It's a good idea. Yeah. Let's see. Let me just dig into the data here.
Okay. So it says the last few times that we've done it when we blast out an email list. Oh, the number's going up. We haven't talked about it.
That's cool. The last few times that we have blasted out an email, it looks like well over 50% of the people have checked it out. So it looks like it doesn't just go to your spam and email or whatever. Maybe it does.
I don't know. I don't know how it works. All I know is 50% is pretty good. Over over 50% of the people that get the email, that's how they find out.
There's an episode apparently. So yeah, if you want to check that out, that'd be awesome. Go to notemquestions.fm and at the top, there's a little email list thing. We need to update the website, don't we?
It's been so long. Yeah. Do that. Yeah.
Well, it looks lovely. I like the art and everything, but the scroll is getting to be pretty long to go back to older episodes because we've been doing this for a long time. Yeah, we got to figure this out. Yeah.
Long story short, there's an email list. We would love it if you would check it out. Blood is coming up. Oh, yeah, the blood is so both of those.
But you said you said that you blast out an email. Is that the official verb for what you do with emails to multiple people at once? You blast it. I think you blast it.