Beth Shapiro

Let me see if I can get it right.

You should look this up too because it's hilarious.

How mammoths made America great before.

And now when we bring our mammoth back, we're going to do it again.

So there was a guy in France who was writing a series of books.

He was like Comte Buffon.

Comte Buffon, I think, was his name.

I'm terrible with French, so I probably did it wrong.

But he was writing a series of books about natural history.

And the fifth, I think, of his books was called...

The theory of American degeneracy and what it was essentially about how all American animals were more shit than animals from everywhere else in the world.

And it was during the War of Independence.

And so it was really popular to hate on American stuff.

Right.

And so he couldn't have pissed off Thomas Jefferson more if he tried.

He didn't know anything about Thomas Jefferson.

He was busy fighting with Linnaeus and Linnaeus was busy classifying things.

And this guy was like, there's no more than 200 species of animals anywhere.

So why would you bother with that sort of academic silliness rather than think about like how the animals got this way in the first place?

In his mind, like discovering why American animals were so shit was the right way to be spending your time.