On this week's episode of the WDFA podcast, the boys are joined by the man who started it all along with his wife, the woman who runs the company that makes the elk shank bourbon and the wild game cookbook "Wild Game Cookbook". They talk about the history of the company, how it came about, and what it's like to be a Wild Game cookbook author. They also talk about how much money they have in the pantry and why they don't drink as much as they did when they were growing up. Also, the guys discuss the NBA and the NBA team the Milwaukee Bucks and what they do to celebrate their birthdays. And, of course, there's a little bit of NBA and a whole lot of booze. Enjoy the episode and remember to stay tuned for the next episode of WDFA! Music: Fair Weather Fans by The Baseball Project, recorded live at WFMU and produced by Riley Braydon Brown and the Baseball Project Thank you to Pale Fire and Mossy Creek Brewing Co. for sponsoring the show. Thanks again for supporting the show and making it great! -Your support is so appreciated and appreciated. -The Baseball Project is a great place to support the game! and we can't thank you enough. Thank you so much for your support and support the team enough. Love ya, Giannis! -Giannis and the guys at the NBA Podcast! - Thank you Giannis, too! - and the boys at the Bucks and the Bucks at the way more than you can count on this episode. -- Thank you for supporting us! -- we really appreciate you, we really, really appreciate all the support we can do it! -- we appreciate you! -- thank you, guys! -- and we really do appreciate you. -- the support us, we're really appreciate it. -- Thank ya, we appreciate all of you, much much, really, much, much more! -- -- -- and see ya. -- we love you, Thank you, bye! -- Thank You, bye. -- bye, bye, Jon! -- Jon and Brett, Jon & Mike, Kristy, -- Cheers. Jon and Mike, - - Cheers, Jon & Pete, Sarah, RYAN AND KYLE & JUICY. Mike, MURDERER. "A. ( )
00:00:50.000And it was revelatory to find out about it.
00:00:53.000And then it's the thing that I became, I started to proselytize, you know.
00:01:00.000I found out about eating it because my brother found out about eating it because he has this old cookbook called the L.L. Bean It's like the Ella Bean Wild Game Cookbook by a guy named Angus.
00:01:13.000First name of Angus, if I remember right.
00:01:15.000And he's got a shank recipe in his book for antelope shank.
00:01:23.000That's the funny thing about wild game cooking that you've probably picked up on is that you could have a thing where you could say, like, hey, here's a recipe for a whitetail deer heart, right?
00:01:36.000And someone will be like, but do you have one for a mule deer heart?
00:01:45.000Like when we did our cookbook, I tried really hard to steer away from things that would be elk recipes, deer recipes, and just take it from a cut basis.
00:01:51.000The cookbook is excellent, by the way.
00:01:57.000We got away from saying, like, here's an antelope recipe or whatever, because it's just like the cut is more important Especially with all these ungulates, like horned and antlered game.
00:02:07.000What it is is more important than what it came from.
00:02:10.000So by putting elk shank on that bottle, I'm kind of like going against my own advice.
00:02:16.000If I just put shank, people might not know what you're talking about.
00:02:19.000Well, it could be like lamb shank, but it's just a cool name.
00:02:22.000We're going to do a limited run of those where we write all kinds of weird stuff in there that it pairs well with.
00:03:13.000I think his wife was explaining to me there's a lot more disposable income around the house now because she's like, I never realized how much boozing takes up.
00:03:22.000How much all those fancy beers adds up to.
00:03:28.000When you run your tab at the end of the week and then add that times four and then add that times 12, that's real money.
00:03:36.000Yeah, and I don't know if you remember, you probably liked this when you were younger where It was impossible that you'd have leftover booze in your house.
00:03:47.000You know, because everybody just drank so much.
00:04:43.000I know that you will have, knowing you and how good you are at what you do, I know you'll have done it, but I don't understand how you could have had a novel thought about the missionary who got killed.
00:04:56.000Just to refresh people's memory, there's an island, East Sentinel.
00:05:01.000What's funny, by my fish shack, there's an island called Sentinel Island.
00:06:21.000He was the pervert that traveled around from island to island measuring guys and taking weird photos with them, dressing them up like Roman soldiers.
00:06:30.000I read a big piece about this, which I actually sent to you to see if you'd read it, too.
00:06:35.000You said you'd read everything about it.
00:06:37.000Yeah, I'd read quite a few things about it, because there was a guy on Twitter, his name is Respectable Law, at Respectable Law, and he posted a whole series of things.
00:06:44.000He'd actually been studying this case, or this place, before, because of this pervert guy.
00:06:50.000And so when this man, this missionary, showed up on that island and got murdered, he knew all about the history of this island, so he made a chain of posts on Twitter, which were really interesting and informative.
00:08:55.000Yeah, some tribes, like the Chimane...
00:09:01.000And the Mikushi and Wapashan are all tribes in Northern and South America who have a long, long history of contact and engagement with the outside world.
00:09:13.000But individuals who can still very much, like hanging out with individuals who aren't that old, who in their youth were...
00:09:25.000Very much like living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with a mix of native materials and also some western materials.
00:09:39.000Make their bows from native materials.
00:09:42.000People that grew up using canoes that were made, like hand-dug dugouts, using plant toxins to kill fish, but also other very modern stuff.
00:09:54.000One of these guys that I really appreciate hanging out with, I mean, this guy's got an email address, but...
00:09:59.000I might have told you this story before.
00:10:02.000He's got an email address, but he also told us about...
00:10:07.000We interviewed him on our show, on our podcast, and he's telling me about how their peccaries, their white-lipped peccaries, aren't around right now because there's a shaman in another village who's jealous of their village for being so prosperous and has locked their peccaries up inside of a mountain and that they're training their own shaman to free the peccaries from the mountain And
00:11:04.000These people have a somewhat agrarian lifestyle.
00:11:07.000They hunt fish and also have farms scattered throughout the jungle.
00:11:12.000And they'll just come in and ravage farms in groups of, like I said, groups of 100, 200. I should be honest here and say I've never laid eyes on a white-lipped peccary.
00:11:21.000There's a third peccary, a chocoan or chocoan peccary that is much more rare than the collared and white-lipped peccary.
00:14:09.000It's one thing that's made for bow hunting, because I think that with rifle hunting, and people do hunt with rifles, and I've shot them with rifles, but it can feel like a little bit of a gimme, because they're not...
00:15:46.000You know, one of the things, I think it points to a certain amount of sociopathy that I have, but when I hear about someone losing a cat or dog to wild creatures, my initial instinct isn't to be sad.
00:17:18.000Well, I went once when I was a kid, but I went once recently with my family, and it was...
00:17:23.000Very weird that you could take selfies with elk.
00:17:25.000These big herds of elk are so confident that people won't shoot them when they're in the public tourism area that they just go and hang out near the vending machine.
00:17:34.000So I'm getting a Diet Coke and there's an elk like 30 yards away from me.
00:18:10.000So with that said, I do have this thing where you kind of root and I do feel sad when I see like in a place like Yellowstone.
00:18:20.000This is where it gets a little bit weird.
00:18:23.000When I see wild animals, especially animals that people hunt for, when I see that they've lost their fear of humans, some people would look and be like, oh, this is what naturally they should be like.
00:18:34.000So this is animals where they've had to give up their human, where they've lost their human fear because we've given them this wild place.
00:19:29.000So then we take like a 100-year break and the animals become very accustomed to people.
00:19:35.000It's shocking how quickly they can get it back.
00:19:38.000And oftentimes those same elk that live, like the same elk that will spend their summer in that park, will migrate out of there and go into National Forest and on ranch land.
00:19:48.000And then they'll be where they can be hunted.
00:19:52.000So the same elk that some dude could basically walk up and touch there...
00:19:57.000Will, just something in his head switches and they enter into a new mind space when they leave and they're still exposed to human predation.
00:24:42.000And they're in the car and they're looking at it through the window and him and his son, it seems like, are filming this thing going, Holy shit, look at this thing.
00:24:49.000It's right there in the street, a big-ass cat.
00:24:52.000And he was saying that somebody was feeding it, apparently.
00:24:55.000And they're trying to figure out what...
00:25:56.000That was about kids' attitudes to wildlife, and it was comparing rural people's attitude and knowledge of wildlife, kids, with urban and suburban attitudes about wildlife.
00:26:10.000And you can see the input of media when you look at this thing, because people who live in an urban or suburban environment When they tell you the top-of-mind wildlife that they know about, it's non-native stuff.
00:26:28.000Yeah, they're likely to know what's an animal, right?
00:26:32.000And an animal would be like, oh, it'd be like a giraffe, right?
00:26:35.000And people who have a more rural or remote...
00:26:43.000Viewpoint are much more likely, when they think of wildlife, to think of things that they interact with.
00:26:49.000And not like the things that are on your mobile above your crib when you're a little baby.
00:26:55.000And also, there's a slight tendency, I've got to look at this more carefully, but there's a slight tendency to have negative feelings or things that are dangerous or bad the more urban you are in terms of native wildlife.
00:27:12.000To more recognize it as like a negative or bad thing.
00:27:14.000And what they're pointing to is, again, I want to look at this much more carefully and pardon me to the authors if I'm messing this up.
00:27:21.000I was just looking at it this morning.
00:27:24.000What they're pointing to is the stirrings of there being a greater acceptance of decreased biodiversity.
00:27:34.000Meaning that you're kind of like okay with the bad things having gone and we're focused on like what are animals?
00:27:40.000Well, animals would be like a giraffe and hippopotamus and the things that Disney tells me about and not like opossums and raccoons which are kind of gross.
00:28:52.000If they caught it when it was a baby, and they just waited and measured it and then let it go, and it didn't have a collar, and I saw that deer, I wouldn't think twice about shooting it.
00:29:01.000But if I saw it and it was wearing a collar, I'm like, I'm out.
00:30:09.000You knew that ducks moved, you knew that they moved through here, but you didn't put all of the, you had no way to put all the pieces together.
00:30:19.000Over time, we wanted to understand animal migrations better.
00:30:23.000This is way pre-collars, like GPS collars and pit tags and shit.
00:30:30.000We started this banding system where you could go and catch a duck in its nesting area.
00:30:36.000There's like times a year when it's really easy to catch ducks.
00:30:38.000One, you can catch them when they're young and you can catch them when they molt.
00:30:41.000So people would go out and put a band on a duck and you could go up in the Arctic or the upper Midwest, anywhere, and throw a band on a baby duck.
00:30:48.000And that band would have a phone number on it.
00:30:54.000When you got a banded duck, it was like they made it be that it was a good thing.
00:30:59.000And you were encouraged to call that 1-800 number, or whatever the hell they were before 1-800 numbers, and give them the band, the band number.
00:31:08.000And then we started to really, with great detail, map out flyways, how ducks migrated.
00:31:15.000The ducks on the Arctic Slope in Alaska tend to follow along this path, and they tend to end up Here, at this date.
00:32:48.000I could tell you where I was standing.
00:32:49.000I was in my brother's kitchen in Miles City, Montana, beneath this crazy chandelier he bought online.
00:32:55.000And I remember everything about it, but I don't remember if I challenged him on the sense of being proud of having not contributed to our scientific understanding of waterfowl migrations and why.
00:33:07.000Maybe like a sort of anti-government sentiment, like some black helicopter stuff.
00:33:29.000I was like, those are cool, but collars are not.
00:33:31.000And we had a friend, there's a friend of mine who's a, she's a, does a lot of carnivore research and other research projects named Carmen Van Bianchi, which is a cool name.
00:33:39.000But She says that, you know, I'm someone that collars animals.
00:33:45.000And I even think that, she's like, when you get one with a collar on it, she said, it was cool, we talked about this the other day, she's like, someone has already got the best of them.
00:33:56.000That they become tainted when they've been held by someone else.
00:34:00.000And that's a little bit how I view it, where a wild animal, you want to imagine it being the wildest wild animal.
00:34:07.000And once it has a collar, it's all sloppy seconds, man.
00:34:12.000Well, isn't that why the allure of Alaska is so interesting?
00:34:16.000Because it's one of the rare places where, like, if you run into a caribou in Alaska, there's a high probability that- Never encountered a person.
00:35:59.000They're just very in tune to their predator being people.
00:36:03.000I imagine that they probably, the same way that we carry with us a sort of natural abhorrence of snakes, a natural abhorrence of spiders, I would imagine that they come from a...
00:36:22.000You probably know a little bit better than me because you spent more time with axes deer.
00:36:26.000They probably come from a very predator-rich environment, I'm guessing.
00:37:38.000From just a small set of experiences that happened over a couple days, it seemed like the pressure on the males had been extraordinary, where it seemed like you would see a hundred hinds.
00:38:19.000Like venison sticks and venison jerky and there's companies that are establishing these conservation efforts where they're going out and they're shooting X amount per year, like 6,000 per year, which doesn't even put a dent on them.
00:38:34.000Is the goal eradication or is the goal just to limit?
00:38:38.000But they eradicated them from the Big Island.
00:38:39.000Somebody had put them on the Big Island.
00:38:41.000Somebody had taken them from one of the other islands and put them on the Big Island.
00:38:44.000And they had spent millions of dollars to eradicate them.
00:38:47.000Forgive me, stop me if we spoke about this before, but there's kind of an interesting perspective that someone gave to me about Hawaii, where we have this list, you know, Hawaii is just dominated by non-natives, okay?
00:39:04.000I might be wrong about some of these, but I don't think I am.
00:39:39.000My mom's, I guess I would call it, you know, technically he'd be my stepfather, but it feels funny.
00:39:46.000My mom, my stepfather, my mom's husband, who she married after my dad passed away, he grew up snaring whitetail deer with garage door cable.
00:39:55.000But they were like, they were farmers and they just ate.
00:40:00.000And that was sort of his relationship with deer, setting garage cable snares.
00:40:27.000And I've spoke with some Native Hawaiians who feel that there's this uneasy relationship between what we're regarding and describing as non-Native wildlife, even down to pigs.
00:40:40.000Even though their ancestors, you know, 1,100 years ago, brought the pig to the island.
00:40:46.000And someone expressed to me very simply, he's like, how can I be Hawaiian?
00:41:07.000And he was kind of pissed about this attitude towards, because these are guys that like to hunt and eat a lot of wild game, about this attitude to access deer and this attitude to pigs.
00:41:17.000And you hear the same thing out of Australia.
00:41:19.000You hear the same thing out of New Zealand, which is guys who have this difficult relationship with...
00:41:26.000The things that they've come to hunt, and the things that have sort of been culturally accepted, culturally accepted as wildlife, right?
00:41:35.000Where people, you know, I don't want to use environmentalists here in a way that makes it be that the hunters aren't necessarily environmentalists, but in ways where some people with what they would describe as an environmental agenda want to see species eradicated.
00:41:50.000The people have been interacting with for 100 years, in some cases, Like in Hawaii, in some cases, perhaps a thousand years.
00:41:57.000They've been interacting with it on the landscape.
00:41:59.000But then someone wants to come and say, we want to get rid of it because it's not native.
00:42:06.000Where it creates a weird situation for people in some of these places is that hunters have long justified their actions to the public as being that we're controlling Right?
00:42:23.000We're like controlling non-natives, so we're doing a good thing.
00:42:26.000But then someone says like, oh, you know, I got a better idea.
00:42:51.000There's a great article about, or a podcast about that from Radiolab, where they kept sending this Judas goat to the Galapagos, and he'd find the other goats and like, da-da-da.
00:43:10.000And he'd go to find these other goats, and they'd follow the collar, the GPS on the collar, and find the new group of goats, and they'd gun them down, too.
00:44:24.000Like, what are you doing with a shark?
00:44:26.000You used to be able to buy Mako shark in a restaurant.
00:44:28.000Oh, you still see it, but I saw a thresher shark the other day on the menu.
00:44:33.000I did a magazine story about this long, long ago.
00:44:37.000It was right when I got out of school, and it was the first assignment I had to go write an article, and I was writing it for an outside magazine.
00:45:47.000And there was the general registration fee.
00:45:49.000So all these captains who had charter boats would join Mako Madness and they would book clients on their boats for Mako Madness.
00:45:57.000And you had to pay some amount of money to register your boat To be in the contest.
00:46:06.000But the real money was in all these side bets called Calcutta's.
00:46:10.000And so there was enough side betting going on around all the various captains that the biggest Mako could win $100,000, a couple hundred thousand dollars to catch the biggest Mako.
00:46:20.000But sort of the fatal flaw in this tournament, from a public perception standpoint, would be that there was a category for just biggest shark.
00:46:31.000And there was a category for biggest Mako.
00:46:35.000So, people going out, like, at a time, this is when shark populations are still, you know, and globally, they're still on a decline.
00:46:46.000But there was still a lot of shark bycatch from swordfish, longlining, and other things.
00:46:50.000And people were getting very worried about shark stocks and shark numbers.
00:46:55.000And at one time, Mako Madness, there was a lot more Makos.
00:46:57.000Like, people would be registered Makos.
00:46:59.000But there had been some years where Mako Madness had no Makos.
00:49:00.000Well, sort of the shark fisherman character in Jaws is based on this very real dude, Frank Mundus.
00:49:06.000And Frank Mundus used to fish out of Montauk.
00:49:08.000And at a time, Montauk was this premier destination for people catching swordfish and big bluefin tuna.
00:49:14.000And as those big pelagic fisheries had collapsed from overfishing, In the 70s, Frank Mundus, he'd go out and he'd just go out and find a, you know, he'd go out famously, he'd go out and find a beached whale, or not a beached whale, but a floating dead whale.
00:49:30.000And he'd anchor up on that whale and catch big ass great whites.
00:49:34.000And then come in and hang the bloody carcass.
00:50:08.000That'd be interesting if Frank Mundus did.
00:50:11.000Something took a bite out of that motherfucker.
00:50:13.000Yeah, so he's got the necklace, the dead shark, and Frank Mundus kind of like spawned this sort of thing where you'd want to go out and catch a big shark and hang it up and then throw it in a dumpster.
00:50:27.000And people look at, like, when people look at that history, they look at it being as like, it's like, in some ways, Mundus and shark hunting was symptomatic of declining fisheries.
00:50:39.000Look at that picture of him and the dude from the movie.
00:51:23.000Yeah, it used to be if you caught a shark, like, good for you.
00:51:25.000You're keeping it from killing someone who's swimming or someone who's surfing.
00:51:29.000The idea of shark's fin soup and its lure was driven whole new one time when we were in Berkeley and we were at a boat launch and we'd come off fishing and we'd been out fishing for leopard sharks.
00:53:42.000Whether you view something as sacred or not, it's hard to see that the individual engaging in that is viewing it as sacred.
00:53:51.000There's a lot of stories about even swordfish captains Burning blue sharks and stuff and effigy because they lose so much of their swordfish to catch the blue sharks.
00:54:01.000But to see people kicking them off, it speaks to something about animal suffering.
00:54:05.000It speaks to something about what is that person's view of the resource?
00:54:12.000But it also speaks to a general thing where you don't see things wasted.
00:54:18.000My understanding about one of the things that slowed in US waters, one of the things that slowed Finning was just, you used to be able to go out and you could fill your hold full of just sharp parts.
00:54:30.000If you were a fishing captain, you could just be like, oh, I'm just going to keep the fins.
00:54:33.000And eventually they made it, I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong here.
00:54:38.000They eventually made it that whatever you have for shark materials in your boat on a commercial operation, only a certain percentage can be comprised of fins.
00:54:48.000And since when you're on a commercial vessel, your hold, like the area where you keep iced fish is finite, it's limited, it wound up being not worth it.
00:54:58.000Because let's say only like 30% of your shark parts could be shark fins and you had to keep the rest.
00:55:04.000It wasn't worth it to fill your hold full of like shark meat.
00:55:08.000And so it sort of de-incentivized people to go out and fin in U.S. waters.
00:57:12.000And I think particularly for a creative person, for a person who writes and comes up with things, you need downtime.
00:57:17.000I just had a buddy of mine, we were having this conversation about that, where he was saying that he feels like he's just working too much, just doing too much comedy, he's not taking in enough.
00:57:26.000Just putting too much out, not taking in enough.
00:57:37.000Your physical diet is obviously very important if you're an athlete, but if you're a creative person, you have to have an awareness of your mental diet.
00:57:43.000If you're just taking in sugar all the time, just nonsense and junk food and bullshit, your brain is filled with uninteresting, uninspiring thoughts.
00:57:54.000And, you know, the same sort of typical narrative over and over and over again.
00:57:59.000Whereas if you can figure out a way to go to Thailand or something like that, you go, whoa, these people are living a totally different life.
00:58:05.000This is a totally different way to live.
00:58:06.000And even if it's ever so slightly, it broadens your perspective.
00:58:11.000I can only really relax when there's nothing I could possibly be doing.
00:58:40.000I can't remember how many minutes, but it's like a long, it's not like going to the doctor for a checkup where they just like take your pulse from it.
00:58:45.000Like he's really like checking your shit out.
00:58:47.000And I can hear my kids now and then like a little fight flare up upstairs.
00:58:53.000And I asked the dude, I'm like, can you see that?
00:59:24.000And he says, if you're going to measure me in terms of productivity, I'll actually do more on nine than, let's say, six.
00:59:35.000And you give me all those extra hours, but those extra hours aren't as productive anyways.
00:59:39.000I had a podcast with a guy named Dr. Matthew Walker, who's a sleep expert.
00:59:42.000He's written books on sleeping, and he talks about the vast amount of Americans that are under-rested and what an impact it has on your hormonal production, on your body's ability to recover, on your happiness, your body's ability to produce endorphins, and all these different variables that are extremely important to happiness and to productivity.
01:00:03.000And he's like, the vast majority of people are fucking themselves over.
01:02:24.000When you refer to how you fill your head up, what you fill your head up, if it's just junk and sugar and how much time you have to process stuff, One of the things I've noticed, and it's begun to startle me a little bit, is I used to find in social situations that I would be very interested in letting people know what I thought about stuff.
01:02:47.000Even shit that I had no business talking about.
01:02:51.000And I think that you see people, like when you see someone who's older, and we have this idea of an older, wiser person, and they're just taking in everything, and they've learned to be quiet.
01:03:03.000People don't really think about the fact that maybe they're just sick of hearing themselves talk.
01:03:09.000The saddest thing is, though, is an old moron.
01:03:14.000I want to say yeah, but I think you need to explain a little bit.
01:03:19.000Like an old racist, an old dummy, an old person who has ridiculous archaic views of women or ridiculous archaic views of society and culture and immigration, all these different things.
01:03:31.000Like a person without nuance, an old person who's not learned from the humbling experiences of life and has not looked at himself in his own folly and has a humorous take on it.
01:03:49.000I encountered a dude like that not long ago where we decided that we were going to take our kids We're going to take our kids out to eat, and I don't want to have to deal with any kind of added noise.
01:04:06.000I'm like, let's go to that taco truck and eat, because I don't want to talk to anybody and deal with anybody.
01:04:10.000My wife convinced me to go to this brew pub.
01:04:14.000So we go down to the brew pub and I'm already pissed off because I'm kind of half mad at my wife for making this be in a potentially social situation.
01:04:22.000And I'm sitting there and this old man walks past me on his way out of the restaurant and he's got a do not resuscitate bracelet.
01:04:29.000He's got a little, you know those four pegged canes?
01:05:04.000And I said, do you just feel that if it's your time, it's your time, and you don't want modern shit to interfere in sort of what you imagine to be the way things go?
01:05:14.000And he explains to me, he's like, no, he's pissed.
01:08:12.000And then I had made the mistake of having like a passing conversation with an orthopedic surgeon who's like, oh, you know, it's probably this or that.
01:08:20.000But then it got worse and worse and worse.
01:08:22.000And I finally go down to a doctor to do all the scans and shit.
01:08:27.000He's like, you know, you have some arthritis.
01:08:30.000You could probably solve the problem with some physical therapy.
01:08:33.000There's like a band that runs down from your hip and I think that's like flaring up and that's why the pain bounces around.
01:08:38.000And dude, it wasn't two days later that pain was gone.
01:08:42.000I said to Giannis, I'm like, man, I feel like psychologically frail.
01:08:46.000I feel like there's a very thin membrane that separates my brain from my body.
01:08:55.000And Giannis said, there is no membrane that separates your brain from your body.
01:08:58.000And I can't rule out now that I'm mentally pretty weak.
01:09:06.000Because the minute someone told me there's not actually a problem where I need to get a surgery, I now try to feel the pain, but I can't find it.
01:09:16.000And there's no corresponding hiking or anything that contributed to it where you weren't doing it once it felt better?
01:09:23.000Well, one day in the spring, me and my buddy Pete Munich went out looking for blackberries during blackberry season.
01:09:34.000And this was when I really thought I had a knee problem.
01:09:37.000And we went out, and we didn't hike a long ways.
01:09:41.000And I came back and noticed, but it was real mucky.
01:09:45.000You know when you're walking and your feet keep sticking in the muck and then your feet build up a layer of muck on your boot bottom and then it comes off and then you're walking cockeyed because your other boot hasn't shed its mud layer?
01:11:41.000Meaning, let's say you go hunting and you have feelings like it's never going to work out, we're never going to get one, but you do everything right.
01:11:50.000It doesn't matter what's in your head because your actions are such.
01:11:57.000He doesn't like to entertain the negativity.
01:11:59.000He doesn't like to entertain the negativity because he feels that...
01:12:02.000But I'm like, but what does it matter if we still hunt hard?
01:12:05.000What does it matter if I feel like it won't work?
01:12:08.000As long as we hunt hard, it doesn't matter.
01:12:09.000And I think that he feels, he would argue that that mental state affects outcomes.
01:12:16.000And so he applies this to all the aspects of his life.
01:12:42.000Whereas if you just are appreciating the fact that, hey, here I am living in America, you know, I'm healthy, I don't have cancer, Like, it could be so many things worse that are wrong with me.
01:12:53.000I could have been born with weird birth defects.
01:12:55.000I could have been born in, you know, El Salvador with no feet.
01:12:59.000I could have been, you know, living in some fucking drug-ravaged community.
01:13:07.000Like, if you had given the opportunity to be Steve Rinell, if you were some guy who was living in some terrible third-world country with, you know, awful...
01:13:19.000What would you give to be a regular guy living in Bozeman, Montana in a beautiful place and have a healthy, happy family and a great way to make a living?
01:13:54.000Yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of places like that anymore because people have fined those places and fucked them up and overpopulated them, but there's a few of them left.
01:14:02.000You just got to deal with extreme weather.
01:14:04.000The extreme weather is the barrier for pussies.
01:14:56.000I just leave little packages and I get the fuck out of there.
01:14:59.000You know what's funny about that picture?
01:15:00.000I found myself zooming in, trying to see what those people in those houses had going on.
01:15:05.000LAUGHTER I was like, oh, these guys look like they probably hunt.
01:15:09.000Well, Greenland has so much natural resources, and it's also probably a place that's going to be an awesome spot to live in 100 years when the fucking rest of the world's on fire.
01:15:37.000Because, you know, they huddle up to protect themselves against wolves, so they just stay in a spot when they see a threat, which is great for wolves, but not so good for projectiles.
01:16:43.000And there, the Chupik Eskimo, and a bunch of people would be like, you can't say Eskimo, but it was funny because I asked the Chupik man who I was staying with.
01:16:58.000I'm like, you know, I feel like I'm always told not to use Eskimo.
01:17:06.000And he said, what the hell else would you call me?
01:17:08.000So, I'm going to say, in deference to what this man prefers to be called, he's Chupik Eskimo, I'm not something else.
01:17:18.000I think the Canadian folks like to be referred to as Inuit or First Nation.
01:17:58.000I mean, you've been involved in a hundred of these conversations.
01:18:02.000This true big man was like, we prefer it to be tough.
01:18:08.000You know that tendon that, like, if you look at the spine of an animal, the vertebra above its shoulder will have like a, what's called a thoracic, a longer thoracic process, like that blade that comes up?
01:18:23.000There's a tendon that runs from the top of those thoracic processes out to the neck, and it allows like big animals.
01:18:30.000It's really exaggerated on moose, bison, muskox, where it's like the size of your wrist.
01:18:37.000This giant tendon that's moored to the top of those thoracic processes that allows this thing to hang its head.
01:18:45.000Which, I mean, the head is 80 pounds or whatever.
01:22:01.000I mean, if you find someone who's like a dismissive parent and is not interested, a disinterested parent, it's like one of the most disturbing and disappointing things.
01:22:10.000If you love someone, you care about them, and then you find out they're a bad person or a bad parent, you have to reevaluate your perspective on them.
01:22:17.000Because to me, being a parent, and my wife is huge on this, it's like it's everything to her.
01:22:23.000She will not talk to someone or hang out with someone.
01:23:01.000Well, he knew what he was talking about.
01:23:03.000You know, it's these most people are just living this boring ass fucking life, and I'm living this life where I'm telling jokes in front of thousands of people, and then I'm doing podcasts in front of millions of people, and then I'm hunting, and then occasionally I go off and I do cage fighting commentary.
01:23:22.000It's like a caricature of masculinity, really.
01:23:37.000One of the things that surprised me about you, but it sounds like asshole-ish, is how serious you take being a parent.
01:23:49.000Because I think that someone could look, like, someone could at a glance look, be like, oh, you know, discussion of drugs and, like, dirty humor, and sort of go like, those are not congruous with parenting, but you take parenting,
01:24:07.000But you don't, I don't think you, you're not like, you're not so concerned with, uh, People understanding a full package that you need to spend shitloads of time telling everybody about how good of a parent you are.
01:24:25.000As a kid who grew up with sort of a deficit of it, And it's very important for me to spread as much of it as I can, whether it's through my friends or through children.
01:24:37.000And children, it's like the most important responsibility because my friends, they're fine.
01:24:41.000I met them, they're grown-ups, they'll figure it out on their own.
01:24:43.000I'll help them when I can, but kids...
01:26:44.000I mean, his art is amazing, is what he did to the world.
01:26:47.000I mean, but what he didn't do was take care of his own backyard.
01:26:51.000What he didn't do was take care of his own children.
01:26:53.000I find that that creates some difficulty because there's some writers, not some, I mean, so many of them, writers, musicians, actors, who have blessed the world with what they've put out.
01:27:12.000But then you look at the destruction they sowed in their immediate vicinity.
01:28:01.000I want to think he's that dude who put the bandana on and just played Voodoo Child.
01:28:07.000When I worked with Phil Hartman, when Phil Hartman was a kid, I think he was like 17 or 18, Hendrix played at Whiskey, and he was there as like a roadie.
01:28:18.000And his job was to keep the speakers from falling over.
01:28:23.000So he stood there on the stage, and Hendrix was right there playing guitar in front of him.
01:28:29.000And the way he described it, it was like his eyes were alight.
01:29:01.000you know so i was trying to figure out a name for this podcast i was like man who the has affected me more in terms of motivation than hendrix because i'd listen to his music when i worked out i'd listen to his music oh that's great driving to gigs you know and plus he just seemed like so different you know just such a crazy anomaly in pop culture this african-american dude is like the greatest guitarist of all time you have all these rock guys and One of the things that eric clapton and said like he thought he knew how to play guitar Then he saw jamie
01:32:12.000You hear about guys that fish the Gulf Coast and Florida and shit and You've got to be very careful, because pulling a shark up on the beach, people will get pissed.
01:32:49.000If I was a different species, and I was trying to make my plan, my three-year plan, I'd be like, I want to elevate my species up to, I want to look at what the shark's done and get there.
01:33:05.000Because that shit, that's where safety lies.
01:33:07.000Right, like if you were an entertainer and you wanted to get to, I want to get to where Kanye is.
01:33:11.000Like, if you were an animal, I want to get to where the sharks are.
01:33:14.000Yeah, like if I was a possum, if I was a possum, I'd get with other possums and I'd be like...
01:33:20.000What does it take to get to what an elephant enjoys?
01:33:24.000I was discussing with my kids last night.
01:33:26.000Because right now people don't consider possums.
01:39:00.000But it's a thing I've learned from my interactions with you and a thing I've seen is you don't parade it around and you don't talk about it too much, but you do talk about that there are some things where you just – you put up some firewalls in your life and the people that you're around.
01:39:20.000And I have heard you refer to at times that something got too – In referring to people, it wasn't even like you were condemning them or thought they were bad, but you just referred to times when you've had to just sort of protect...
01:40:05.000I love you, respect you, whatever, but I gotta protect these other things.
01:40:09.000Well, some people get completely self-absorbed and they burn everything around them because they're only thinking about themselves.
01:40:15.000And even if you love them and care of them or appreciate what they're doing, like some people are amazing at certain things.
01:40:22.000Like, you know, we were talking about Hendrix.
01:40:24.000I mean, if Hendrix did beat his wife, I don't know if that's true, or beat his girlfriends.
01:40:27.000But it's like some people are so good at what they do that that's all they're thinking about.
01:40:34.000And they didn't develop these interpersonal skills or relationship skills or whatever.
01:40:41.000They didn't develop a sense of nuance in terms of their perspective of the world or a sense of introspective thinking when they're looking at themselves and being objective about how they interface with the people around them and life.
01:40:56.000Those people that are just like wholly focused on the self, especially pure narcissists, which you run into a lot of them in show business, and some of them it's not their fault.
01:41:07.000If you believe in determinism and you believe that they're a product of all the things that have happened to them and then you run down The list of all the things that have happened to them, it's fucking bone chilling.
01:41:16.000I mean, so many people that I know, particularly in show business, are there because of just a giant hole that they developed in their self-esteem and who they are as a child.
01:41:27.000They got too much abuse and hate and bullying and all these varying factors that made them push so hard to achieve success, to let everybody know, hey, I am special.
01:42:01.000Remember earlier I mentioned the collateral damage?
01:42:06.000Some people think you could develop such an inflated sense of what you're bringing to the world that you personally come to accept the idea that there is a price to pay.
01:42:51.000There's a lot of people that get involved in relationships, boy and girl, that they find that the person who is their soulmate is also the source of all their fucking problems.
01:43:01.000And they're the curator of this person's life.
01:43:04.000They're supposed to be helping this person along because this person has deemed them the person who's most important to them.
01:43:10.000And it's like you gotta find out what's the boundary where you won't cross, where you realize someone is becoming an impediment to your own happiness and success.
01:43:23.000It's amazing the degree to which people, deep down, do care about what someone is, quote, like.
01:43:34.000Where I find that because I've been on your show a number of times, People are curious about you.
01:43:41.000And people will often ask me, you know, what's Rogan really like?
01:43:47.000But they know what answer they want to hear bad.
01:44:08.000Like, people want a story about something bad, but what's funny about...
01:44:11.000What you've done and how you've done it is that, and this happens quite often, where people are like, they're like, he's a good guy, right?
01:46:15.000My friend Ron White, who's a good buddy of mine, is one of the best comedians on earth, is good friends with Jay McGraw, who's Dr. Phil's son.
01:46:24.000So I became friends with Jay before I became friends with Dr. Phil, and then I had Dr. Phil on the podcast.
01:46:30.000Dr. Phil's the fucking nicest guy ever.
01:50:12.000Well, it would prevent me from taking myself, you know, if I want to pretend I'm some sort of moody artist that has always followed the path of creativity and artistic expression.
01:52:49.000I really enjoy doing it, and I've tried to point out that if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't have gone into it.
01:53:00.000Well, you were really good as a guest, and I was like, man, this guy has so much unusual knowledge in his head, and you're so good at articulating thoughts, and you have a background in journalism, you're so eloquent.
01:53:17.000For people that enjoy hunting and enjoy the outdoors, there's, you know, and I don't mean any disrespect to anybody who's making podcasts, do your best.
01:54:00.000One of the things that I really appreciate about you is this idea of no shooting collared deer speaks to it.
01:54:07.000It's like there's something about this that's not just about shooting an animal and eating it.
01:54:14.000It's about the difficulty of their pursuit, what it means, and what you're getting out of it as a human being, and then also the recognition of what you're eating When you're eating this animal, this is a wild, beautiful creature that you respect and that there's a certain amount of a feeling of loss and sadness when that animal dies.
01:54:58.000And there's also like a pride of hard work.
01:55:03.000There's a pride that comes through that, which I think is very contagious.
01:55:09.000Like the feeling of appreciating and respecting hard work.
01:55:13.000The way that you were talking about Jason Phelps.
01:55:16.000It's like that kind of appreciation for ingenuity and hard work.
01:55:20.000I think it's very important for people.
01:55:22.000It's very important for people to hear.
01:55:24.000It gives you something that I don't...
01:55:26.000In terms of outdoor, the outdoor world, whether it's hunting and fishing and just appreciation for wildlife, it's not publicly articulated on a broad scale.
01:55:38.000You know when you referred to the camaraderie?
01:55:58.000I don't know what his show's like now.
01:56:01.000Remember the era when it was, I mean, he may even still be on there, like, he'd have all these dudes around that were kind of, like, funny.
01:56:27.000But the camaraderie, that's one of the things I like to see most when people write it and they feel like it's people sitting around shooting the shit.
01:57:07.000People that weren't fans of it back then, it doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately.
01:57:10.000It was an amazing hangout for comedians.
01:57:13.000We would all go there, and I would show up, and Ricky Gervais would be there, and Jim Norton would be there, and all these guys would be there, and Louis C.K. would be there, Bill Burr would be there.
01:57:22.000We'd just be talking shit, and Ari Shafir.
01:57:24.000We'd all be just laughing and chiming in, and even though it was 6 o'clock in the morning, you went and did it, man.
01:57:30.000You had a cup of coffee, you showed up, and everybody was happy to see you, and it was a hang.
01:57:34.000And it was a really loosely structured hang that they put together, and that inspired me to kind of do my podcast in a similar way.
01:57:42.000I don't know how comfortable you are pulling back the curtain or showing how the sauce is just made, but I was talking to someone recently about you and sort of how you do your deal.
01:59:20.000I will listen to recordings and conversations and debates that he's had.
01:59:24.000And I already am a big fan of the guy, so I'll get a good understanding of where I'm at.
01:59:31.000When we lead into the conversation, but then I won't have an agenda.
01:59:35.000I would just, like, let the conversation flow.
01:59:37.000And if there's a moment in time where I want to ask him, like, you said this thing about Islam once.
01:59:42.000Like, do you mean this in terms of, like, a general understanding of the religion itself?
01:59:48.000What about the individuals that are just trying to be good people that are born into this environment and this sort of a, you know, I will have some places to go to if we get stuck?
02:00:24.000There's no way you can have a perfect conversation because I don't know when the person's going to stop talking or I don't want to lose a thought and I want to jump in with it, but I'm way better at it now than I was five years ago and certainly way better at it now than I was ten years ago.
02:00:39.000And then I think that there's an art to the way the things you're saying sound and how they sound to people.
02:02:16.000I would see him in these little interviews, and I'm like, he just wants to give away everybody's money.
02:02:19.000Like, there's a picture with Bernie with my dog, and one of the fucking hilarious comments, like, he just wants to give your dog treats to other dogs.
02:02:32.000I mean, everyone has a caricature, right?
02:02:34.000The caricature of that guy is, he just wants to take money from successful people and give it to lazy people.
02:02:39.000That's the worst view of Bernie Sanders.
02:02:43.000And you get to see, instead of this narrative that gets established through these little short sound bites, these panel talk shows, there's three people talking over each other, or debates, or whatever it is.
02:02:56.000And what's interesting about it is all those are fueling podcasts.
02:03:00.000All those things that have for so long been thought of as mainstream venues for getting your ideas out, now they highlight all the problems with those and they highlight all the strengths of podcasts.
02:03:26.000I do not have a problem with giving up more of my money as a person who's made a lot of money if I know that it's going to benefit the greater good of mankind in a real way.
02:03:37.000You just don't want to see it squandered.
02:03:57.000It's filled with people that just got government jobs and they're not good at it.
02:04:02.000No one else wants that job, so they take that job and they do a shitty job with it and they squander resources.
02:04:07.000That's what drives people crazy and especially hardworking people that know how hard it is to make a living.
02:04:14.000If you're a fucking logger, you're giving away a certain percentage of your money, and you're tired of all these splinters in your hands, and you're exhausted, and some asshole is going to take away your money and allocate a certain amount of it to nonsense, gender research,
02:04:29.000and all sorts of stupid shit that you think is just fruitless.
02:04:34.000It's infuriating for people, for hard-working people with dirt under their fingernails.
02:04:38.000They don't want to think about anybody squandering their money.
02:05:10.000Yeah, that's instinctively where I belong.
02:05:13.000But the right, but I need them to move back my, when I say back my direction, because historically, I don't know, the right and left is confusing, but yeah, I need them to come my way on conservation.
02:05:26.000Well, I like the way you've described yourself in the past, that you're politically sort of alone, that you're kind of without a party, because the left wants to take your guns away, and the right wants to take your land away.
02:05:38.000And this is what we see fiscally, that the most disturbing aspects of...
02:05:45.000Right-wing administration says they want to sell off public land.
02:05:48.000They want to figure out a way, just a little bit, just a little bit.
02:06:28.000Dude, we've gotten hit hard for that kind of stuff, for pointing out that it's just not...
02:06:33.000You know, we as a company, like at Meteor, we've been hit hard for pointing out that it's unfortunate that someone's not speaking wholly for our concerns.
02:07:43.000I don't sit around at night thinking about you, but I love it.
02:07:47.000I don't think about you either if it makes you feel comfortable.
02:07:50.000But I think we need more people like that.
02:07:53.000Most people would think that I'm conservative, that I'm a Republican or an alt-right or something like that.
02:07:58.000I vote left on almost everything except gun control.
02:08:01.000I just don't think that people understand what they're talking about when they're talking about gun control.
02:08:04.000I don't think they understand the nuances of the Second Amendment.
02:08:07.000The nuances of taking away people's ability to defend themselves or to hunt or to own something that may or may not be used against someone else, but they never would use it.
02:08:17.000You don't have the right to tell people what they can and can't have just because some people abuse things.
02:08:25.000This is a very complex conversation that people on the left want to boil down to guns equal bad.
02:12:50.000And we went to see you, and it was just like, we went to see you, we watched your shit, and it was just for, you know, for this like glorious whatever, I don't know, 60 minutes, 45 minutes.
02:16:00.000Was it turkey hunting or was it Alaska?
02:16:03.000Turkey, but if you remember, I proposed to you not long ago, I was asking you about your availability to hunt elk in September, but it kind of petered out.