On this week's episode of The Meat Eaters, the boys are joined by their good friend and podcast co-host, Ben O'Brien. The boys talk about the new MeatEater t-shirt, their favorite tequilas, and the time Ben and Sam shot a moose in the middle of the night in British Columbia, Canada. They also talk about how to make your own tequila and what to do if you don't have access to a liquor store. Also, the guys talk about what they would do if they were in charge of the world's most successful hunting party and what they'd do with all the booze they were drinking that night. And, of course, there's a little bit of food... The MeatEaters is a podcast about eating, drinking, and generally having a good time in the outdoors. It's a bunch of fun and a lot of good times. If you're in the area, be sure to check it out! and don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review! Cheers, Cheers! CHEERS! -Jon & Ben Intro Music: "Rye Brain" by D'Andrea ( ) Outtro: "Ladies and Gents ( ) Outro: "Feat. Me ( )" by Jon & Sam ( ) by Chad ( ) outtro: ( ) "I'm Too Effing Highlighted" by ( ) and & - "I Can't Stop Drinking" by Joe ( ) ( ) & ( ), , . We'll Talkin' About It ( ) - "The Best Thing I've Ever Had ( ) . , ( ) is a song written and performed by , and ( by ) - is a tribute to the late, great singer-songwriter, and . . . & ( ) , and ( ) in honor of our first ever birthday! , we'll be doing a live show! ( ). And we'll see you next week ( ) on , so don't miss it! ! Thank you for listening to us! and we'll send you back to us next week with a review of our new song, in the next episode! --Jon & Sam Soholt ( ) !!
00:00:39.000Yeah, so what people, you know, I had Steve on, Steve Rinella, our good friend, and we were talking about what they're doing, what MeatEater's doing.
00:00:48.000But it's this very strange thing where this giant multimedia corporation has stepped in and they're throwing a ton of money.
00:00:57.000At MeatEater and all these different companies that are involved in the outdoors.
00:02:37.000Remember that we went and we shot your bull, right?
00:02:40.000But then we took the heart and the liver and we started drinking heavily and you were up there just cooking liver and onions, cooking up a giant moose heart.
00:02:48.000So we had like the fuel of organs of an animal you just killed.
00:08:10.000The guy that was responsible for selling them to people sold one to a guy for $500 and inside was a safe that had $7.5 million in cash in it.
00:12:17.000What is that, do you think, and here's, coming from a person that's been on a bunch of life-changing experiences, and I know you have, and I want to talk to you about some of them.
00:12:49.000Like, what can't I do in my real life?
00:12:51.000So when you watch TV and you watch murdering and you watch this evil thing come to life, it really is something that you can be transported.
00:13:03.000You can't do that in your regular life.
00:13:04.000Well, for sure, with Westworld, what you're getting is basically a real live version of that Red Dead Redemption movie.
00:13:10.000So, when you play that, we were talking about the other day how this guy got in trouble because they have all these things in the game that you can do to people.
00:13:18.000And this guy, like, tied this hooker up and threw her off a cliff and shit.
00:14:13.000It's immersive to the point where you can't even explain what you're experiencing when you're watching these shows.
00:14:18.000Yeah, so if you go and you see some great comedy from the 1990s, like you watch a Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock special from the 90s, that holds up 100%.
00:15:58.000Did they go not good enough, or was it like porn?
00:16:04.000If you watch porn, and you watch some porn from the 1980s, and then you flip through like you porn, not that I would ever do that, but if you did do that and looked at all the different categories, you'd be like, what the fuck happened?
00:16:16.000Why is gagging something people are looking for?
00:17:15.000Well, but we're progressing with our storylines for, like, humanity in a weird way in media, but we're also, like, suppressing a lot of our—we're trying to suppress through social justice a lot of the same things, right?
00:17:26.000Well, some people are, but I think it's a small, very vocal minority.
00:17:30.000I think in reality, there's—the vast majority of people who find out about said suppression are upset by it.
00:17:36.000And they're like, what in the fuck are you talking about with this safe spaces and all this nonsense?
00:17:41.000Most people that hear that stuff are going, oh, this is just nonsense by a few really loud activist types.
00:17:48.000Even on my podcast, it's something as serious as hunting is, because you're killing stuff.
00:17:52.000You're going out into the world and plucking something that you didn't put there.
00:18:28.000You have people that can survive in fire.
00:18:30.000Yeah, but there's parallels to real life and then these ridiculous fantasies, but then these parallels to real life that travel along the same path.
00:18:41.000You don't get to choose between the dragons and the incest.
00:22:33.000Jennifer Lopez, obviously, besides being beautiful and having a body like some sort of a test tube person, some lab-created super freak, obviously, she knows how to throw that thing.
00:27:33.000Listen, I think the way that I came up with it is because in the hunting world, there is this, speaking of conservative, there's this like, there's a conservative traditionalist, right?
00:28:13.000But what I also like is healthy ecosystems and environment.
00:28:17.000And I like habitat for wild game to live and public lands and access.
00:28:22.000Well, it just so happens that a lot of the A-plus rated politicians for the NRA are like F-minus or D-plus rated in protecting wildlife and wild lands.
00:28:33.000And a lot of that's around extraction and different things like that.
00:28:36.000Extraction of minerals and oil and natural resources from those lands.
00:29:21.000It hardly leaves room for those beliefs in normal conversations with people, unless you absolutely know that the person's going to be objective and, as your shirt says, pro-nuance.
00:29:31.000The idea that you shouldn't be able to defend your family is where it gets crazy.
00:29:38.000It doesn't get crazy that you want to be able to defend your family.
00:29:51.000So the idea that you should just be a sitting duck because there's so many crazy fucks out there that want to shoot up schools and go on mass shootings that somehow or another you're being conflated with them.
00:30:03.000That you're being confused with them or categorized with them.
00:30:37.000On the other side of the coin, when it comes to environmental issues around hunting public lands and things of that nature, I want coal miners to have jobs.
00:30:58.000And there's got to be other jobs out there if the government put its resources instead to propping up old ways of doing business that pollute the environment versus new ways of doing business with subsidies and with government programs.
00:31:54.000When I had him on the podcast, it was interesting because he seemed like he had been attacked a lot for it and even misunderstood some of the questions I was asking.
00:32:12.000You're watching some aspects of it, like when they're lighting their water on fire, and then someone tried to say, oh, there's some places where you've always been able to light your water on fire.
00:32:47.000I would think to be confident about that, and I'm not confident about it, but to be confident about what that guy said to me when he was saying that it's always been like that, you would have to have done massive research.
00:32:58.000You would have to have spent time there.
00:33:01.000You would have to have been working either directly or indirectly with the scientists that are collecting the data.
00:33:11.000Or you have to be a person who is not interested in the actual truth.
00:33:17.000They just have an idea that they want to push through.
00:33:19.000And this is a weird thing with certain right-wing folks.
00:33:23.000There's a weird thing they want to push through that business is good and environmentalists are all pussies and hippies and weirdos and losers.
00:33:31.000And these things don't jive in the world of someone who actually loves and appreciates the actual earth.
00:33:53.000To me, access could be, I like wilderness, where the only way you can access it is on foot, via trailhead.
00:34:01.000Someone else might say, access to me is elderly folks or disabled folks be able to get into a car and drive through a road on public land or get into an ATV and drive.
00:34:14.000Politics, being what they are, politicians take this term of access.
00:34:19.000It happened around national monuments.
00:34:21.000They take one side said the president is stealing your land and the other side says the president is giving back your land.
00:34:29.000Somebody there, either both sides are full of shit or one of them is.
00:34:33.000I remember when this came up, Patagonia, which is a giant company in the outdoors, had a big ad on the internet that said the president just stole your land.
00:34:42.000And then I heard Ronello talk about it and he said, I'm going to paraphrase, but he basically said, if you say that the president stole your land, you're not being careful with your words.
00:35:19.000Culturally or socially, emotionally culturally significant pieces of land.
00:35:25.000All the way to things like the Grand Canyon, right?
00:35:28.000And so, spin it up to the end of, there's a lot that I just skipped over, but I'm going to spin it up to the end of the Obama administration.
00:35:37.000President Obama used his executive power to protect large swaths, millions of acres around Bears Ears National Monument, to protect not only the significant places for Native Americans and for Native tribesmen around Bears Ears,
00:35:56.000but many millions of acres around that.
00:35:59.000And so, then it becomes, the problem I have and why that t-shirt exists, it becomes a political football throwback and forth.
00:36:07.000It's not, at this point in time, what's best for Bears Ears, what's best for that national monument, what's best for it to be federally owned, what's best for the people, the jobs, the place.
00:36:18.000It becomes what's best for each side and their rhetoric.
00:36:23.000And so President Trump asked former Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke to review, I think it was like ten monuments, to see if they should be reduced based on the predictions that Obama had put into place.
00:36:38.000So he reviews these ten monuments, he cuts out eight of them, and hones in on two places, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante.
00:36:48.000They then say we're going to reduce the size of these monuments.
00:36:52.000When you say cuts out eight of them, what do you mean by cuts out?
00:36:54.000They review the other eight and say...
00:37:17.000President Obama wielded his powers corruptly to protect, to be as an environmentalist, to protect lands that didn't need protected under the Antiquities Act.
00:37:27.000Because the Antiquities Act does say it should be the smallest acreage possible to protect.
00:37:31.000So now you get into stuff that I'm not an expert in around legal jargon and going back to things that were written in the 1930s.
00:37:41.000We get to a point where one side's saying, here is the Republicans trying to shrink down these monuments so that they can then go, companies that are, can then go and lease these places for mining, but they can't currently do under protections as a national monument.
00:37:59.000The other side is saying, we're trying to protect culturally significant lands and these millions of acres need protected.
00:38:06.000They need protected for lots of reasons.
00:38:07.000So you end up with those two sides talking.
00:38:12.000Now, it's easy to sort of make a hyperbolic argument one way or the other, right?
00:38:55.000I'm sure I fumbled through some of the details on that, but to me, the bottom line is something like that Why I like to live in the center is because something like that becomes, it becomes a thing that, it becomes a PR hit.
00:39:10.000It becomes a thing that people are throwing back, they're throwing bear's ears back and forth because at the end of Obama's administration he made the designation and they repealed it or reversed it a year later.
00:39:22.000Or some amount of time around a year later.
00:39:24.000So it was only the way it was for a year.
00:39:26.000And everybody's making it look like the government stole your land.
00:39:29.000They just brought it back to exactly where it was before.
00:39:31.000But they did open up the possibility, which is why Obama did it in the first place.
00:39:35.000They opened up the possibility for drilling and natural resource extraction.
00:39:39.000And that's what scares the shit out of people.
00:39:43.000In these situations, there always seems to be spin on both sides, and being a part of these debates on a daily basis, and bringing in this information on a daily basis, it's tiresome.
00:39:58.000You get tired of being pandered to by people.
00:40:02.000You get tired of having to hear that this value system is right or this value system is right and there's no room to be anywhere close to the center around this stuff.
00:40:44.000But when it comes to, like, federal land, the problem is if these states get into debt, and this is what people need to understand, they can sell it off.
00:40:51.000So if Utah is in debt, I'm just not picking on Utah, but if they just, for some reason, they wind up in debt, which states do all the time, and then they sell off a giant chunk of land to some oil company, now you can't camp there anymore.
00:41:07.000And by the way, that's your fucking land.
00:41:28.000There's a guy named Senator Mike Lee out of the great state of Utah, which you rightly put that a lot of these things revolve around Utah for some reason.
00:41:38.000They have a lot of, the percentage of it, it's like something that's 70% of their acreage is controlled by the federal government, that's why.
00:41:52.000So, Senator Mike Lee comes out and says, right, this is like the perfect way to spin this type of thing.
00:42:00.000He calls back to, and Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah has also done this, he calls back to the Sagebrush Rebellion and things like that, saying that wilderness is akin to the European aristocracy.
00:42:16.000Because only a certain few can go there.
00:42:18.000Because you have to have two working legs that can get you up into wilderness.
00:42:24.000Part of the basis of a speech he gave, and he's given it several times, is that public land and wilderness specifically...
00:42:50.000What he's right in is that if you put roads through, anybody could go through anytime they wanted.
00:42:55.000On a car, if they had no legs, if they can barely walk, if they are in a wheelchair normally but they can drive a car, yeah, they can go in deep into the woods and they can enjoy all of the wilderness that has stopped.
00:43:33.000I live an hour from there and I've taken my family there and it just feels like I used to feel like, oh man, this is an illicit place.
00:43:40.000As somebody who's gone into the wilderness and tackled these big challenges and hiked around in crazy places, this Yellowstone is like, nah, it makes me feel uncomfortable.
00:43:49.000Then somebody said to me, I feel like it was this guy named Cody Rich who has a podcast called The Rich Outdoors.
00:43:55.000He said to me, It's like it's an ambassador for real wilderness.
00:44:00.000It's like a way to present to people that this thing exists without them having to actually strap on a pack, get some trekking poles, and hike miles up into the wilderness.
00:45:02.000It is real easy to get on that train and lose your critical thought around what is the idea of wilderness.
00:45:08.000I mean, because when I think of my hunting now, like we first went hunting like five or six years ago, you would ask me this question, I would have given you a whole different answer.
00:45:38.000So what do you think you would have called it then?
00:45:41.000So what I probably would have said like when we first went hunting in BC together for moose, what I probably would have said would have been around, it would have been less value based and more like I do it because my dad did it.
00:45:53.000I do it because it connects me to my dad, like my dad, my family, my people.
00:46:15.000So your skills that you acquired as a hunter made you important to the culture, the society, the everyday life.
00:46:23.000I would have probably called back to that.
00:46:25.000Not that I would say that's wrong now, but what I've come to find out over some other years of hunting in a lot of places is that I think my hunting is more about healthy ecosystems now than it is about anything else.
00:46:38.000I think all of my efforts should be around clean water, clean air, places that we can go and explore.
00:46:48.000And what that brings to our world, that brings more wildlife, that brings places for my son to go and experience these things.
00:46:55.000And so I've changed over this very short time and the way that I do it.
00:47:00.000Well, the more you experience the wilderness and then go back to the city and then go back to the wilderness, the more you realize how special it is out there.
00:48:21.000Well, I think there's some perspective, and I think honey has a lot going for it around the fact that as urbanization happens, you know, as jobs, even for me, like as jobs become more prevalent in urban places and people have to travel from wherever they're growing up to these urban places and live so removed from wilderness,
00:48:40.000so removed from sustainability, I think...
00:48:44.000For a long time, because hunting peaked in 1982. There was like 17.5 million hunters around that year.
00:49:20.000And I will always say that, like, the three things that I think happened were urbanization, so people are getting removed from, they're getting moved away from having hunting in their lives on a daily basis, right?
00:50:11.000There was a dude recently who was caught poaching in Missouri, and the judge said that he had to watch Bambi once a month during his entire sentence.
00:53:45.000The reality of baboons, and I've studied the work of Robert Sapolsky, who's a guy who's been on the podcast before, and it's really pretty amazing stuff.
00:53:56.000What they found out about baboons that he studied, actually, because he actually studied a baboon tribe that the alpha males died off.
00:54:04.000They were all eating out of a poisoned garbage patch.
00:54:07.000There was a garbage patch that had sick food in it, just bad food, and the alpha males who got to eat first always chased everybody out.
00:54:17.000They wound up dying off, and for more than one generation, I think it was several generations, They became really peaceful and calm, and they weren't the vicious, violent baboons that are the norm.
00:54:30.000If you Google it, Sapolsky studies baboons, and Radiolab also had a podcast about it, which is where I first heard about it, and then I read what Sapolsky wrote about it.
00:54:59.000But baboons, for the most part, I mean, maybe he shot the nicest baboons ever, but for the most part, they're a bunch of baby-eating cunts, and they'll steal your fucking kid.
00:55:07.000That little two-year-old that you love so dearly, that little motherfucker would be on a porch somewhere, and if there's baboons around, they'll snatch him and eat his head.
00:55:14.000Well, that's like, when I was in Africa, I hunted Africa one time in my life, and...
00:55:23.000The structure is like there's a professional hunter, which is essentially your guide, and then there's trackers, which are usually native folks that help track in the game, spotting the animals, things like that.
00:55:32.000But our PH... He was like, if you see a baboon, shoot it.
00:55:35.000He's like, we have lots of irrigation here to maintain this ranch, and they rip it up, and they're basically terrorists around coming around our camp, messing with our fires, messing with our food.
00:55:47.000He was like, if you see one, shoot one.
00:55:48.000And that was the instruction that I got.
00:55:51.000And I never did, but, you know, given that instruction from somebody like that, like, hey, this is a good thing for our landscape.
00:58:12.000It's different if you're living around them.
00:58:14.000It's just, these things are different.
00:58:15.000Like we, we were talking about around the old meat eater incorporated offices the other day around how do you, how do we as hunters who are around these animals all the time and shit, how do we, and something happens, somebody gets mad about this guy killing all these, these baboons.
01:03:56.000You wouldn't tolerate that, but these are cute.
01:03:58.000Is our, like, the endangered species has come into play here in a weird way, because is our caring for animals dictated by the number of the animal that there is?
01:12:08.000And a lot of folks wrote in and they said, I'd be interested to hear what you think about this.
01:12:14.000If an animal is wounded, and say you're up in a tree stand or you're hunting spot and stalk, or in the case of Randy, hunting over a waterhole, if you're doing that and you're a hunter, you hold a tag, you can choose which animal you'd like to kill.
01:12:31.000You have a buck or a doe, a male or female tag, you can choose which one.
01:12:37.000If an animal comes by you that has been wounded, clearly been wounded, clearly struggling, you know, in the case of Randy Newberg, he was sitting on a waterhole, and I believe he was in Arizona, with a trophy tag, which means there was a lot of big mule deer walking around,
01:12:55.000a lot of big antelope walking around in that situation, pronghorn.
01:12:58.000Well, let's explain to people that are listening that don't know what we're talking about.
01:13:01.000When he says a trophy tag, what he means is there's some units that are designated as trophy areas.
01:13:07.000It doesn't mean you don't eat the animal.
01:13:08.000What it does mean is that it's very difficult to get into this area.
01:13:13.000You have to have a certain amount of points, which means you're putting in to the pool of money that is for conservation, for habitat protection.
01:13:23.000You're putting in every year to try to get a tag.
01:13:48.000What an over-the-counter unit is, is they know that there's a large, healthy population of animals, and either the wildlife biologists and the state representative, they choose to just let anybody go in, and when they think that the animals are diminishing too much,
01:14:04.000then they'll put a cap on it, but for now, it's an over-the-counter unit.
01:14:07.000And then they have places that are very difficult to draw units.
01:14:10.000And those difficult-to-draw units is one of the places where Randy Newberg was because he was looking for a big, old, mature animal that had spread its genetics.
01:14:37.000Yeah, limited draw unit, hard to get area.
01:14:39.000Once in a lifetime hunt where you're never going to hunt there again and you're looking for the most unique animal that you can find, the most mature animal that you can find.
01:15:08.000I can eat this antelope just the same as I would any other one, but to exercise some mercy around this antelope that's clearly suffering, clearly injured, who knows how it got injured, limping up to a waterhole,
01:15:23.000he's having this ethical pondering in his head, like, should I dispatch this thing and it's suffering, fill my tag this way.
01:15:33.000Because with a tag in that nature, if you have a tag, you can then choose to do anything you want with it in legal bounds.
01:15:39.000You didn't wound this animal, so you could let that animal pass and choose a larger, more mature, more impressive animal.
01:15:44.000And you can let nature take its course, whether predation or not in the case of this one, but winter kill or something may take that animal.
01:15:51.000Or you can end its quote-unquote suffering.
01:17:16.000Another argument is you really should do nothing because those are the animals that are designated to be taken out by the predators and you want to keep the predator population healthy.
01:17:24.000That was more my answer, Randy's answer.
01:18:26.000And part of his describing his growing up is like, there's a term, and I'll butcher the pronunciation of it, but miklovik is the term that he used to describe a hunter.
01:18:37.000It's like hunter or the one who thinks.
01:18:40.000And the way he described the cultural significance of a hunter when he was growing up in the late 80s in Czechoslovakia was that the hunter was the judge and jury.
01:18:54.000So there was like a reverence around hunting, a reverence around a hunter because that hunter got the privilege in his culture to be the judge and jury for what animal gets taken out of the herd.
01:19:07.000Making that very serious decision to say this animal is wounded, this animal is too old, this animal is young enough.
01:19:17.000You've talked about it a lot on this podcast with some other smart hunters.
01:19:22.000I think what hunting needs to become now that it isn't is...
01:19:28.000This exalted status in our society where we're giving somebody with a hunting tag or a hunting license, you're giving somebody the opportunity to make a decision about something's life.
01:19:39.000Well, you say exalted status, the problem is you don't have to earn that status, right?
01:19:43.000It's like you can just go out and do it.
01:19:45.000And one of the things that I've found out about hunting that is, I don't know if it's necessarily surprising, but it's very difficult to express is Without personal experience is that the consequences are so different than what you would think.
01:20:26.000There's something that we, and I don't think this is a learned thing.
01:20:30.000I think there's a connection to difficult to acquire mammals that goes deep in our DNA. And I think this is the reason why we, I think one of the reasons why we enjoy fishing is Is because those reward systems were put in place by people that survived by eating fish.
01:20:48.000By all those generations of people that did catch fish, and that was how they ate that day.
01:21:09.000So even though it's recreation to you, it's a thrilling recreation.
01:21:12.000But then the consequences aren't as grave.
01:21:16.000There's something about a wounded deer or a wounded elk that is so horrific and a merciful killing that it's such a relief that There's something powerful about it.
01:21:31.000Like I told you, I shot that elk that it's out there that it walked four yards.
01:21:55.000But if I catch a fish and I pull him out of the water and throw him on the ice and he's flopping around for a few hours, I'm just happy I got him.
01:22:09.000And in it, he just said, basically, and I'm paraphrasing, but he said, hunting is so different from the inside than it is from the outside.
01:22:17.000It's so easy to view hunting in the lens of like, there's a dude sitting behind a deer smiling and grabbing its antlers.
01:22:23.000There's also the problem that malnutrition in this country is almost non-existent.
01:22:29.000Fat people are poor people in this country, which is fucked.
01:22:32.000Like, poor people are fat, which is one of the weirder things about our society.
01:22:37.000This has never happened in the history of human beings that the poor people were the big fat ones.
01:23:31.000So when you would get a roast, even if you went to a butcher and you got a roast and you brought it home and you were making roast beef and you're cooking it, or your uncle shot a deer.
01:23:42.000When was the last time milk was delivered to your door?
01:24:45.000And accelerated when railroads could take meat from the Great American West back to the cities in the East Coast.
01:24:52.000And so those things accelerated, that technology and those things accelerated market hunting and the depredation of things like the whitetail deer and the buffalo as we all, famously the buffalo.
01:25:03.000I'm just trying to flavor this in the context of most people that hear these conversations don't really know what we're talking about.
01:25:11.000You're obviously well versed in this but for a lot of folks they don't understand that what happened was after the Civil War in particular There's a lot of soldiers that weren't fighting anymore in the war, and they got jobs as hunters, and they would just go out with no rules and shoot as many animals as they wanted.
01:25:30.000The term we call that is market hunting, and market hunting means that they're out hunting for marketing the meat or marketing the hides or marketing parts of the animal to themselves.
01:26:38.000At the time, at the turn of the century, at the height of the market hunting crisis in this country, there were enough whitetail deer that they probably would have been on the endangered species list or been close.
01:26:53.000So the model of conservation that we then enacted, I don't want to say, I don't want to overexert this for people who have never heard of it, but if you look up, Jamie, the North American model of wildlife conservation, There was a ton of key figures in taking what America had at that point,
01:27:12.000which was basically the Wild West, where animals are dying at mass.
01:27:15.000And with railroads and refrigeration, like we said, they're then feeding and clothing at that time the masses in the urban settings, you know, in New York and different places.
01:27:26.000But as these centuries turned over and as you get into the teens and the 20s, guys like Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinochet, John Muir, there was a bunch of figures who essentially kicked off what is America's conservation movement.
01:27:45.000The movement to conserve not only the wildlife populations but wild lands and wild waters and significant places in this country that we needed to protect.
01:27:55.000Because around the turn of the century, we did not have that feeling of value as a society.
01:28:00.000There wasn't like, we have to go value that thing we've never seen because you could never see it.
01:29:14.000State holds them in trust and manages them in trust for us.
01:29:18.000Now, for people that have a problem with that as an idea that we would own a living thing, the only reason for that is to protect those living things.
01:29:27.000I understand on semantics that you would have issue with, you know, humans shouldn't own life, man.
01:29:33.000We don't, and maybe own is the wrong word to use, bro.
01:29:38.000Maybe own is the wrong word to use, but it's like manage and cohabitate with.
01:29:42.000Maybe that's the better way to say it.
01:29:43.000By being, by, look, whether we protect them or whether we decimate them, right?
01:30:48.000There's a law to say how many animals you can kill.
01:30:52.000Just like that fellow in Missouri that's got to watch Bambi, if you kill more than you're supposed to kill, you're a poacher now, you've broken the law.
01:30:58.000And the law is dictated in most really good states, like Montana, by wildlife biologists, conservationists, and people that understand the population, what's a healthy population for the area, and how to maintain a correct balance.
01:31:14.000And there's a real science to that, folks.
01:31:49.000What we talked about was the actual science behind this one particular issue, but you grow to appreciate, when you hear someone like him talk, you grow to appreciate the complex nature of wildlife biology and maintaining the populations of animals,
01:32:04.000keeping them healthy, and making sure that these habitats are preserved.
01:32:25.000But really what we should be talking about is in really what most wildlife managers are looking at is this biodiversity and health of all wildlife populations.
01:34:24.000And for whatever reason, we get it in our head that if, and I think this comes from this whole idea of trophy hunting, that if you kill something like that, you're only killing that thing because you have a little dick and it doesn't work and you want to be a big man, so you kill this thing that's better than you and you ruin this beautiful animal.
01:34:41.000It's the definition of a surface level.
01:36:22.000And in some ways I agree with that in comparison to other ways of hunting, right?
01:36:26.000But at the same time, I can tell you this.
01:36:29.000There's no more ethical, if the idea is to kill the animal, kill the right animal, especially in bear hunting, you're trying to kill a specific boar, a male bear, that is older, past breeding, anybody who's bear hunted will tell you one of the hardest things to judge while it's living is a bear.
01:36:49.000Whether it's a male or a female, how big it is, how old it is, they are hard to judge.
01:36:54.000Because they're black, they slide through the forest, they all look, they don't stand, there's no markers.
01:37:00.000Like, if the bear is standing next to a Volkswagen bug, you go, oh, okay, I know how big a bug is, I know how big the bear is.
01:37:08.000If the bear is next to some tree that's 100 yards away, you really can't tell.
01:37:13.000So spotting and stalking, what we call spotting and stalking, which is like walking around, trying to find a bear, looking at it far away and getting close enough to kill it, whether it's with a rifle or a bow.
01:37:21.000There's a lot of problems with what seems to be a fair way to achieve the pursuit of that animal.
01:37:27.000There's a ton of problems around that because they're hard to judge.
01:37:31.000You can come up on a sow, a female bear that has cubs in a bush, not see the cubs, not know that it's a sow, you're far away with a rifle, you crack, you kill it, two cubs run out of the bush.
01:37:42.000That is not what you were trying to do.
01:37:54.000You get to look between its legs, see if it has a dick or not, and then determine it's the animal you want to dispatch and dispatch it ethically because it's closer to you.
01:38:06.000A lot of times it hopefully doesn't know you're there rather than doing it from further away or having to stalk close to it.
01:38:13.000So I say all this to say, like, this is complex.
01:38:16.000What you think might be fair chase, what you think you might want to apply your own, you know, levels of fairness to, doesn't always equal the reality of pursuing that animal if the end game is to dispatch it fairly and kill it fairly.
01:39:19.000You listen to my podcast, I got a guy named Cole Kramer who I've hunted on Kodiak Island with.
01:39:25.000He's seen male bears chase down sows, run them into a cave, rip, I mean he's watched them rip cubs and rip them in half and eat them and spit them out.
01:39:37.000You know, and once you've seen that, you're, you know, no matter how many bear cartoons we show, no matter how many times a bear has suspenders on and is talking to us, it doesn't change, no matter how many times we name a bear, it doesn't change the bareness of the animal.
01:40:04.000I'm sure somebody way more educated than me can tell you exactly what's happening there, but we know, you and I both know, that they're killing those two, they're killing as many cubs as they can to get the sow to come back and heat.
01:40:15.000They're doing that and they're also doing it for food.
01:41:14.000Again, that guy Dushan, he was explaining in Czechoslovakia, to go hunting, you had to go take a class and learn flora and fauna and learn how many pheasant eggs were in a nest.
01:42:16.000So I think what non-hunters want from hunters is for us to say, listen, we get it's complex, we get it's a serious thing, and we're doing our best to unpack the moral and ethical entanglements in what we do.
01:43:21.000So they get a close up ethical shot on a difficult to pursue animal.
01:43:25.000Yeah, and it always goes back to the reasons we do what we do.
01:43:29.000But again, I would hope that everybody listening to this, lots of people do that don't hunt, that they would ask themselves, what do I expect from hunters?
01:43:37.000What is the thing that I expect you to do to earn?
01:43:40.000Because I very much feel as a hunter, I need to earn the respect of the non-hunter.
01:43:44.000I have a duty to my hunting community to actively earn the respect of every non-hunter I run into.
01:44:52.000And if you do like to eat elk, and if you do like to eat deer, and if you do like to eat moose, it's really your responsibility to hunt bear.
01:45:43.000If you wear leather shoes, you've got leather clothes, you've got a leather interior in your car, you're eating cheeseburgers, you should probably shut the fuck up.
01:45:57.000But the reality of the situation for me is I've tried to, not stray away from, but try to add on to the pragmatic arguments for hunting.
01:46:05.000To try to examine the emotional issues we have around caring for the single animal over caring for the entire species of that animal, or in any case, subspecies of that animal.
01:46:15.000That, to me, is something I've tried to add on.
01:46:18.000Let's first start with pragmatic arguments.
01:47:55.000And over time, whether it's mass media or just the way hunting has been marketed and the poor PR agent that we've had, we've kind of walked away from each other.
01:48:05.000We both care about animals and we've kind of walked away from each other.
01:48:09.000And over time, we've been unwilling to turn around and face each other and be like, remember when we started out thinking we all value these animals?
01:50:55.000Now, if you're one of those people that has an organic garden and you pluck one by one, you take your rotten apple cores and your fucking orange peels and you throw it all in a compost pile with some dead leaves and you use that as fertilizer, You're going to run out of nitrogen because you need fish,
01:51:19.000When you're buying fertilizer, it's dead fish.
01:51:21.000Look, there's a fucking unusual cycle.
01:51:24.000It's really weird, but the cycle is that dead animals actually fuel the plants that you consume.
01:51:31.000So if you're a person that is, you know, even if you're eating wild plants, right, you want to eat some wild plants, I guarantee you some dead fucking squirrels and rats and pigeons and anything else went to fertilize that shit.
01:52:15.000My own, this into my own hands, and actively go and do the thing that I know to be enriching to my life, to make me a better person, to make me a more skilled person, to give me more perspective on the world.
01:52:26.000But at the end of the day, the byproducts of all that activity is a healthier ecosystem and more wildlife, because that's proven via the model we've said, and I feed my family with that.
01:52:37.000And I'm just trying to do what you're doing in a more tangible way.
01:53:48.000This is true because eggs are full of cholesterol and saturated fat and because every year over 100,000 people in the US contract salmonella from eggs, they cannot legally be advertised as healthy or safe or nutritious.
01:56:02.000Not only is it true, it's from 2010. Maybe it's different in 2018. 142,000 people in the United States are infected each year with salmonella enteritis from chicken eggs and about 30 die.
01:56:59.000One egg has only 75 calories with 7 grams of high-quality protein, 5 grams of fat, and 1.6 grams of saturated fat, along with iron, vitamins, minerals, and carotenoids.
01:57:11.000The egg is a powerhouse of disease-fighting nutrients like lutein and zeaxithin.
02:02:42.000I ran into him three years ago at a concert and went backstage, and we were chatting, and he had huge ice packs on each one of his knees, and he had just had surgery on one.
02:02:52.000I don't know what the surgery was for, but he was clearly in pain, and he just looked run down.
02:02:59.000But then we went out in the crowd, he came on stage, and he looked like a 25-year-old rock guy.
02:03:16.000Whatever the fuck he said that you didn't like, that either he shouldn't have said, or maybe you didn't understand what he meant, or maybe it's out of context.
02:03:25.000Anything that hurts anybody's feeling, unfortunate, and I don't support it.
02:03:36.000One of the things that we're doing when we're screaming out and calling out someone and we want someone deplatformed and dismissed and never to be heard from again, part of us are worried that that's going to happen to us.
02:03:49.000We're worried that we would ever exhibit that sort of reprehensible behavior or language, and we want to put a stop to it in ourselves, in other people.
02:03:59.000We want to eliminate it from our society and culture.
02:04:02.000We want to do it harshly and ruthlessly, and we're terrified that it's going to be done to us.
02:05:35.000They fucked up and they should never be heard from again.
02:05:37.000And also, I think, and this is my own bias, I think it's a product of a shitty way of distributing information that has existed all of our lives until recently.
02:05:48.000And I feel like the long-form conversation...
02:05:51.000It's the only way to get to know somebody.
02:05:53.000And when I sat down with Ted, after the three hours of talking, I'm like, I like this guy.
02:05:59.000Well, like you always say, I love when I get off of a good podcast, when there's an episode of The Hunting Collective and I sit down with somebody and they're like, oh my god, this person is what they just brought to my life in two hours.
02:06:10.000I'm so fucking happy to have had that.
02:06:14.000It's a legitimate high because you say this all the time.
02:06:17.000You don't get to sit down in your life and take two hours or three hours with somebody and just talk and exchange ideas and disagree and agree.
02:06:48.000I have made a vested interest in long-form conversation, not just on the podcast, but in my life really over the last five or six years.
02:06:58.000Yeah, who better than you to say that and be like, this has informed the way that I think, the way that it's impacted our society and our culture, this show?
02:07:05.000It's changed the way I feel about people.
02:07:07.000It's changed the way I feel about what communication is.
02:07:11.000I have convenient perceptions of people.
02:08:08.000All the things I said about myself, how great I was before this, now you're opening up this chasm where I don't know the things I said I knew.
02:08:15.000But I could, for a 30-second or one-minute TV spot, I could train, I could read the lines, and I could come off like I look like I know what I'm talking about.
02:08:24.000There's no way to escape this freaking thing.
02:08:41.000And then that podcast gets broadcast to the world, and the whole world gets to watch their fucked up, dysfunctional relationship and how it plays out.
02:09:04.000And then there's this, like, the guy does something douchey, or the girl does something cunty, or whatever the fuck it is, and then you're like, whoa!
02:09:11.000It first starts to trickle out in this passive-aggressive way, and then eventually, if you're there long enough, it just becomes aggressive.
02:09:19.000If you're around them long enough, and that's one of the things about alcohol, it's so beautiful how that aggression just comes out of people.
02:09:33.000That's basically what we're doing right now.
02:09:34.000Is that I would do a show about ethics around, like, hunting and the outdoors and things.
02:09:38.000But it would just be called Drunk Ethics, where I would just be drinking with people and having intelligent conversations that would increasingly get...
02:16:57.000The government decides who can touch your penis.
02:17:00.000If the massage therapist said, hey, I really enjoy giving you a massage, let's go somewhere afterwards of my own free will and I'll jerk you off.
02:18:10.000Like I'd much rather the stress of an airport with a kid and a wife is not, I'd much rather just drive it and take the time because you get this like connection.
02:18:18.000If you can get the phones out of the way for the passengers, you just get this connection that you wouldn't get otherwise.
02:18:36.000And we've all seen that happen, right?
02:18:38.000We've all seen relationships where the girl's just like, check, please.
02:18:42.000And the guy's like, baby, I'm different.
02:18:44.000But it's a 50, like you said, it's a 50-50 thing.
02:18:46.000So, like, you have been married for quite some time, and we were talking about prior, when we were shooting our bows out there, like, there's things you've done to make it work.
02:18:55.000Like, you like your wife, and she likes you, and it works.
02:18:58.000And it's been working for a long time.
02:19:01.000And, like, the percentages say that's, what'd you say, 50-50 is...
02:20:33.000I sent it to my dad, but he won't listen to this book.
02:20:36.000I wrote this letter that was like, listen man, because I had seen recently his developing relationship with my son.
02:20:45.000It put this thought in my head that my relationship with my dad, his caring for me, the fact that he stayed with my mom and they developed this place for me to grow and nurture me and allow me to become a person in that environment.
02:21:01.000It was a north star for me when I left that environment.
02:21:03.000I never wondered What my path was going to be.
02:21:07.000I always could look up and be like that bond that I developed with my family, their love for me is like the thing that I'm always, you know, I'm looking back to but also looking forward to because that's what defines me.
02:21:18.000And regardless of what I do, I can always fall back on that, that my dad loves me, my mom loves me, I love them, and I grew up like with this strength of soul because I knew, I don't have, I have friends that came from the same place that I did, same town I did in Maryland, and That OD'd on heroin.
02:21:36.000They lived in the same little suburbia community that I did.
02:21:40.000They had parents that were the same age.
02:21:48.000And I truly do feel that me going down that way is the way that my parents built this structure around me that was always about that bond and that love and the things that they provided.
02:22:01.000Me being able to later on in life see how fortunate I was to have that drove me to not fail and to not let whatever other failures creep into my life around.
02:23:16.000I know people that were good parents that had kids that OD'd.
02:23:20.000Yeah, and listen, I'm not trying to generalize in any way about any one situation.
02:23:26.000My situation was that I could always, I felt like, and I told my dad at some point in my life where I said, I went to him and I was like maybe 20 or 19 and I said, I'm going to get all A's now.
02:24:24.000No, but there was a time in my life, there was a legitimate time in my life where I said, And my dad, I don't remember it, but my dad remembers it.
02:24:30.000Or I just came to him like, alright, it's over now.
02:24:33.000It's time for me to just buckle down and get it done.
02:24:35.000Well, the difference between a child that you're taking care of and then someone who has to be on their own is 10 years.
02:25:15.000We're like nothing I'd ever experienced in my life.
02:25:18.000So I realized like, okay, to get really good at something, you have to be able to put in the kind of energy that most people are not willing to do.
02:25:25.000And that's what separates you from them.
02:25:27.000To find a discipline, put a massive amount of energy and focus into that discipline, and then be obsessed with it.
02:25:35.000If you analyze it correctly and pursue it with everything that you have, you're going to figure out how to get better as long as you don't get really fucked up along the way.
02:25:43.000And there was a real possibility of that.
02:25:44.000So what I realized early on, and very lucky, was that all these people that I saw around me that were engaging in all this really risky behavior, really crazy violence and drugs, what they were doing was looking for thrills.
02:26:43.000Yeah, but I've seen so many people that didn't find a discipline and they just bounce around like a cork at sea forever.
02:26:50.000Yeah, man It's one of the reasons why I push it so much I was like whatever the fuck it is that you can do that you like to do that's competitive like one of the things about competition is not just that you prove I'm the fucking man know what it is is hard and It's fucking...
02:27:04.000Competition is one of the hardest things.
02:27:06.000Because if someone's trying to do it and you're trying to do it, it's like, how much do you want it?
02:27:10.000How much more do you want it than they want it?
02:28:26.000You know, I mean, you have an awareness.
02:28:28.000You figured out what you can do and where this can go wrong.
02:28:33.000And you recognized it and you decided to make some changes.
02:28:37.000I'm sure it'll have ups and downs, but hunting is a thing that enriched my life, truly did.
02:28:42.000And as much as it is problematic in the way that's presented in society, in the way that people see it when they look at it through a shallow lens...
02:28:55.000I can say truly that it's enriched my life in ways I'll never be able to truly...
02:30:10.000Yeah, I mean, if you listen to this podcast and you never hunted, like, I would encourage you to go and find these people on the internet, on social medias and things, and understand that each one of them represents, in my opinion, a layer of hunting, right?
02:30:23.000John Dudley represents, to me, I mean, he's a wonderful human being, but, like, at his core on social media, he represents the expert archer.
02:31:07.000And one of the things when I got into it that was interesting that Steve said to me, he said, you're going to really like this because it has so many layers to it.
02:31:15.000It's like there's a lot of room to learn and grow.
02:31:30.000I mean, you get lucky a couple years in a row, but eventually you're going to run into some sort of a situation where the wind catches you or something goes wrong.
02:32:28.000I don't know what happened, but I've sent a very sharp object into the rump of a big elk and it ran off and never to be seen again.
02:32:36.000Well, the consequences of that one motion, the one movement that's going to release that arrow are so significant that it fucks with your head.
02:32:49.000That's the realization of the anticipation of the moment and the consequences, the understanding of the potential negative consequences, and they're overwhelming, and they haunt you.
02:33:35.000And that's why I say, like, one of the reasons why I continue to do what I do is because this thing is complex, and I see other people's confusion around it, and I appreciate their confusion, and I understand that it's hard to get.
02:33:51.000And I desperately want to find ways to, like, to make it easier.
02:34:42.000It includes riding a roller coaster is thrilling, but the third dimension isn't there because when you get off, nothing happened, really.
02:34:50.000You got the thrill, but there was no consequence of the thrill.
02:34:53.000Really, that's kind of the point of buying a ticket to ride on a roller coaster, getting a thrill without having to take part in anything substantial.
02:35:24.000To someone who doesn't know what it is, one thing that's going on is you just accomplished something that's insanely hard to do and you're relieved that the animal died.
02:35:33.000And that relief manifests itself in exuberance.
02:35:37.000You high-five, you hug, you go, fuck yeah!
02:35:42.000You're happy that it happened, that it died quickly.
02:36:22.000Grip and grin just means you're with the animal, you're gripping its antlers or gripping a part of the animal and you're smiling and you're happy that you did that.
02:42:47.000One example, but that's what ends up happening around these images.
02:42:50.000Now, when I posted this thing the other day, half people would say, like, don't stop doing what you're doing if you feel it's right and you feel...
02:42:58.000Respectful as a hunter and you're telling the entire story and part of that story is to sit behind the animal and smile and signify how great you feel about it, then go for it.
02:43:09.000Don't let someone else change your behavior.
02:43:11.000The other side of things is like every hunter has a chance to impact somebody that doesn't go hunting.
02:43:16.000Every hunter, there's 11 million hunters, they have a chance to impact the millions and millions of folks who aren't exposed to hunting at any point in their lives.
02:43:26.000And so, I can really see both things, but for me, it's an issue of, if I want hunting to continue in the way that it does, and I want my social media privileges to make hunting better, I would probably choose not to put that out there unless it was in the context I felt very comfortable with.
02:44:16.000You're not getting the full context of where the food came from or how the animal was raised and how it was killed and turned into a burger.
02:44:23.000You're just getting the burger real quick.
02:44:24.000And this is like what you're getting with the photo.
02:44:26.000You're not getting the full context of the experience that led up to you shooting this deer that might be like this 200-inch mule deer that's the deer of a lifetime.
02:44:34.000You have this giant smile on your face because you can't believe you outwitted this old monarch of the forest and put an arrow in his ribcage.
02:45:07.000But if I was to say, like, I always, I said in the very beginning of the whole me not liking grip and grins conversation, I said, if someone had said, Ben, can you give that up for the betterment of hunting?
02:45:17.000Like, could you just give that one thing up that's traditionally, it's been done for decades, where a guy kills a thing and sits in front of it.
02:45:24.000Would you be willing to give that up if, for some way, shape, or form, even if you didn't agree with it, it made for a better hunter-to-non-hunter relationship?
02:45:45.000I'm not sure I have the answer to that.
02:45:46.000I think for anybody who's listened to this three-hour conversation and sort of gets an understanding of where we're coming from, they'll appreciate that there's a lot of thought involved here.
02:45:54.000For anybody that sees that photograph of you smiling with a dead bear, they're not going to appreciate that.
02:45:59.000It's going to be real quick, and they're going to have this...
02:46:01.000How many people are willing to sit here and listen to this whole conversation to get an understanding, rather, of how your mind works and how you think about things?
02:46:12.000We'll look at a photo and go, that guy's a cunt.
02:46:15.000And that's the Ricky Gervais tactic, right?
02:46:18.000As much as I do enjoy Ricky's comedy, and when he looks at these things, first of all, that fucking giraffe one, that giraffe one was super complicated.
02:46:28.000And Glenn Greenwald and all these other people, they sicced a lot of people on that lady.
02:47:56.000I want the conversation between, not between Ricky Gervais.
02:47:59.000Ricky Gervais acts like an asshole in this context.
02:48:03.000He enjoys getting angry at people, but in his defense, the stereotypical hunter that is in his mind, what he's fighting against, is an asshole.
02:48:49.000With Cecil, they enacted real change, but unfortunately, a lot of it has been negative.
02:48:53.000What people don't understand is how much it costs the people that live there.
02:48:58.000And about these hunting concessions get closed down, and then these animals go wild, and then what happens is poachers just take over, and a lot of the animals get decimated the same way they did in the United States before market hunting was outlawed.
02:49:10.000Well, you look at what a concession is, right?
02:49:13.000A concession, and this happened, I want to say it happened in like the late 70s and early 80s in Africa, where there was, you know, especially antelope and African antelope and all these other species that were there.
02:49:23.000They were not at the brink of extinction, but they were suffering.
02:49:27.000A concession is essentially a bunch of landowners get together and be like, let's put a fence around our stuff to keep poachers out and keep the animals in.
02:49:36.000In Africa, especially South Africa, when concessions became prevalent, wildlife populations skyrocketed.
02:49:43.000You know, tripled, doubled, times ten.
02:49:46.000Hundreds of thousands of antelope that weren't there before.
02:49:48.000Unfortunately, because that's the only way they could have value.
02:49:51.000They had value because they had monetary value.
02:51:31.000As much as you find lion hunting distasteful, you have to understand that if you remove it, it's like when you take a dictator out and then you have like a power vacuum.
02:51:43.000Well, and it's just like, there are just some on-the-ground things that happen too around, look, if you want to do wildlife viewing, you gotta cut roads.
02:51:53.000If you want to do wildlife viewing, people are going to pay less.
02:51:56.000So it means you have to have more people encroaching on these places where these wild animals are.
02:52:01.000You have to make parks where humans can't go.
02:52:04.000And you have to be prepared when humans get attacked by animals, which is going to fucking happen.
02:52:08.000And so it's never as simple as it seems.
02:52:11.000It is as simple as it seems to say, like, the numbers say that African trophy hunting is benefiting the wildlife.
02:52:17.000Now, is it benefiting in the way that everybody thinks is best?
02:52:31.000It'll hurt your feelings, but it's the reverse.
02:52:33.000What's going on right now in Africa with the exact area that Cecil the lion happened in is that they had to call 200 lions.
02:52:42.000They had to shoot 200 lions, which means they had to pay someone to go and shoot these lions because their population had gotten so high they were decimating the ungulate population.
02:52:51.000So all the antelope and all the different animals that the lions were hunting, they were destroying them.
02:54:31.000And the way they kill them is they have to hire people, and they have to use public funds, these tax dollars, and they hire a guy with dogs to go catch these fucking cats and kill them.