#2502 - David Paulides

**Joe Rogan** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Jamie** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:12)
David, welcome to the show. Pull on up to the microphone to get that sucker up like a fist from your face.
I first heard about you from that guy, or Bill, the goat.

**Joe Rogan** (0:24)
The greatest.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:24)
Yeah. He was...
I used to love listening to his show, coming home from the comedy store. We'd come home at like one o'clock in the morning, coast to coast with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nigh. It was awesome. And that's when I first got turned on to your work. So tell everybody, you started off in law enforcement, right? That's your background.

**Joe Rogan** (0:46)
Correct.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:47)
How did you get involved in this mystery of people going missing?

**Joe Rogan** (0:54)
So I had already written a couple of books. And I was at Yosemite National Park doing some research on another topic.
And two rangers are following me around. And I went back to my room that was at the park. And about an hour and a half later, one of the rangers comes to my room, and he's in plain clothes, and he knocks on my door, and he says, hey, Dave, I'm Ranger so-and-so. I'm here off duty. I want to talk to you about some missing people. I said, come on. So we start talking. And he says that he knew about me, probably the way he knew about me. And he says, I know you're from law enforcement. Somebody needs to look into this. About an hour and a half later, his partner shows up at the door. And they said that they've worked at different parks over the years. And while they were working at those parks, there were missing people. And he said, at the beginning, there was a lot of publicity, a lot of people interested, a lot of activity. And then with time, within about 10, 15 days, all of that would end.
And he said, we got concerned, and we did a Freedom of Information Act against our own agency to get the reports, and we couldn't get the reports. And then we did a Freedom of Information Act request on other cases, and we couldn't get the reports.
And we got concerned, because after that initial 10, 14 day period of searching is all over, there's nothing else that happens. That's it. And he said, somebody ought to look into this. Because there's a lot of people missing, and the Park Service doesn't talk about it.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:32)
Now, what was he assuming? Was he assuming something nefarious was going on, or was he assuming that it was a lack of commitment to finding the bodies? Because you've got to assume most people after 14 days lost in the woods are probably going to die.

**Joe Rogan** (2:47)
I think all of the above. He thought that there were too many people going missing, there wasn't enough follow-up being done, and nobody seemed to care.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:57)
So if you were being pragmatic, and you weren't diving into mysteries, and the stuff that I like, the fun stuff, you would say, well, they don't have any resources.
There's not enough people to go looking. When you think about the actual square miles that you would have to cover to find a body, and then also the reality of predators and all these different animals that are going to eat bodies if a body is there, there's not going to be much left. You spent, obviously, you spent time in the woods. Have you ever seen a dead mountain lion?

**Joe Rogan** (3:28)
No, I've never seen a dead bear.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:33)
I've only seen dead bears because I was hunting.
I've never seen a dead bear. Well, no, that's not true. No, I did, we did find one. But I think it's very rare, but that one was recently dead. He was killed by another bear. I think most of the time when you find dead animals, it's very recent. And if an animal is dead and it's left alone in the woods within a certain amount of time, something's going to eat it. Everything's going to eat it, including the bones. There's almost nothing left by the time they get done with it.

**Joe Rogan** (4:04)
A hundred percent.
But one thing I learned from being around rangers in all these years now is that there's few things that belong to us, that we go into the woods with, that are always going to be there. Namely, our shoes, belt buckles, leather anything, the rubber waistband of your underwear. These kind of things stay forever. A rifle, a pistol, a bow. And those things you're going to find. But getting back to the point of these guys, there were too many people going missing in a short period of time that no one seemed to care about. That was really their main focus.