The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1395

00:00:03.000 Boom.

00:00:03.000 Here we go.

00:00:03.000 What's up, Glenn?

00:00:04.000 How are you, man?

00:00:05.000 Hey, Joe.

00:00:05.000 Nice to meet you in person.

00:00:07.000 Good to come down here.

00:00:08.000 Good to meet you.

00:00:09.000 Dude, you're one of my favorite characters on that show.

00:00:12.000 It was always weird watching you.

00:00:16.000 For people who don't know, Life Below Zero, it's this crazy show where people live...

00:00:21.000 You know, in this very rugged terrain.

00:00:24.000 And you, you had the most interesting life.

00:00:27.000 Because you, when you would live up at the cabin, you would live by yourself.

00:00:31.000 Just you, in a very small room, just hunting all your food and hiking around.

00:00:37.000 You didn't use any vehicles.

00:00:39.000 And you just kind of had a rifle and a frying pan and a pot and a place to sleep.

00:00:45.000 And you seemed really happy up there.

00:00:48.000 Oh, yeah.

00:00:49.000 I'm having a good time.

00:00:50.000 I just wanted to strip everything away that I could dispense with, you know.

00:00:55.000 I got the idea I wanted to go back to living like a hunter-gatherer.

00:00:58.000 Back in 97, I just got this idea.

00:01:00.000 I was actually living in a tent in the woods down in Vermont, having such a good time.

00:01:04.000 I thought, where could I go with this?

00:01:05.000 What could I do with this kind of lifestyle?

00:01:07.000 And I decided to move to the Brooks Range of Alaska.

00:01:10.000 What made you go live in a tent in the first place?

00:01:15.000 I just always like the outdoors.

00:01:16.000 I just love nature.

00:01:17.000 And, you know, I was doing other things too, but there was this one summer when I was in my 20s when I found this really cool spot in the woods and I thought, hey, I'll set up a teepee over there and I'll just hang out there this summer as much as I can.

00:01:29.000 And I just had a great time.

00:01:31.000 So I started thinking more about, you know, instead of just living in the woods kind of as a recreational thing, I started thinking about, hey, how could you actually make a life living like this?

00:01:44.000 You know, get up every morning with the animals around, the sky, the water.

00:01:49.000 I started thinking about it.

00:01:50.000 I started reading anthropological stuff about hunter-gatherers that summer.

00:01:55.000 And I started getting ideas and it took me seven years to make it to the Brooks Range and to get out to that lake that you've seen on TV and to actually start living that way.

00:02:07.000 It took me a few years just to organize my life enough to move up to Alaska and then once I got to Alaska I was kind of in Fairbanks for about four years before I could really spend long periods of time in the wilderness.

00:02:16.000 But once I got it all arranged I just drove up the Hall Road, which is this industrial road that goes up to the North Slope oil fields.

00:02:24.000 It's very, very unimproved in areas, just gravel road for hundreds of miles.

00:02:29.000 I drove about 300 miles north of Fairbanks.

00:02:31.000 I parked my van and I walked 60 miles off of that road by myself out into the wilderness and started figuring out how to live off the land.

00:02:39.000 How did you know where to go?

00:02:41.000 Oh, I had found the spot a few years before.

00:02:44.000 I had actually found that lake flying around in a little bush plane.

00:02:48.000 Because part of my plan originally, when I formulated this idea back in Vermont, I thought, I'll become a bush pilot.

00:02:54.000 That'll be a thing I can do in Alaska, you know?

00:02:57.000 So I was...

00:02:59.000 Thinking about starting an air taxi service.

00:03:01.000 I had been studying flying for a few years.

00:03:02.000 As soon as I got my private license, I jumped in the plane and flew to Alaska.

00:03:06.000 But then when I got up there, I was getting my commercial and all that.

00:03:09.000 And in the meantime, as much as I could, I'd go out and explore, look around.

00:03:13.000 And I discovered this lake one day when I was flying across part of the Brooks Range.

00:03:18.000 And I set up a little tent camp there that summer, 2000. But it took me another four years before I could actually walk out there and start living.

00:03:26.000 60 miles walking.

00:03:27.000 Yeah.

00:03:28.000 That's a long fucking way.

00:03:30.000 Hey, I walked the length of Vermont when I was 13 years old.

00:03:33.000 I walked from Massachusetts to Canada.

00:03:36.000 Did you really?

00:03:36.000 But the difference is when you're 13?

00:03:38.000 Yeah.

00:03:39.000 I actually started when I was 12, gave up.

00:03:42.000 I was with my uncle.

00:03:44.000 We went for about a week, and then the next summer I convinced my mom to drive me back down and drop me off alone where we had given up the year before.

00:03:51.000 Just you by yourself?

00:03:53.000 Yeah.

00:03:53.000 When I was 13, I was alone.

00:03:54.000 But that's a trail.

00:03:56.000 That's called the Long Trail.

00:03:57.000 And it's marked.

00:03:58.000 There's a little paint mark, you know, on the trees up ahead of you telling you where to go.

00:04:02.000 Yeah, but still, you were 13. Yeah.

00:04:06.000 That's a little kid.

00:04:07.000 Yeah.

00:04:07.000 And your mom's like, go.

00:04:09.000 Go ahead.

00:04:10.000 It was amazing.

00:04:11.000 I was given a lot of freedom.

00:04:12.000 I guess so.

00:04:13.000 I mean, I'd already quit school by the time I was 13, you know?

00:04:16.000 Really?

00:04:16.000 I went back a few times, but, yeah, I mean, I never finished the fourth grade, to tell you the truth, but I went back.

00:04:25.000 I went to one year of high school.

00:04:27.000 Eventually, I was curious about what was going on over there.

00:04:29.000 Did you ever get a GED or any of that, Jazz?

00:04:31.000 No, I never needed a GED for anything I did.

00:04:34.000 But I went to ninth grade, and, you know...

00:04:38.000 I did my own thing after that.

00:04:40.000 But you seem like an educated guy.

00:04:41.000 Are you self-educated?

00:04:43.000 If I got any education, it's self-educated.

00:04:45.000 I like to be learning all the time.

00:04:48.000 Whatever I'm doing, I like to learn.

00:04:49.000 But if I'm making a TV show, I want to learn everything I can about it.

00:04:53.000 If I'm flying airplanes, I want to learn a lot more than I need to know to do what I'm doing.

00:04:58.000 And it's the same thing with going out there and living.

00:05:01.000 Just learning as much as I could.

00:05:03.000 There's so much to learn out there.

00:05:05.000 Now, how long did it take you when you were 13?

00:05:07.000 And like, what did you do for food?

00:05:10.000 Oh, well, that was easy.

00:05:11.000 Buy it at the store and carry it on your back.

00:05:13.000 I never hunted when I was a kid.

00:05:15.000 Oh, okay.

00:05:16.000 I mean, I remember going once or twice with some uncles of mine.

00:05:19.000 We never got anything.

00:05:20.000 I didn't have any real hunting experience until that summer I walked out to the lake.

00:05:25.000 Really?

00:05:26.000 Yeah.

00:05:26.000 So you really just had a rifle and didn't quite know what you were doing?

00:05:31.000 I'd read a lot about what to do.

00:05:34.000 The biggest thing, Joe, I got out there, I had two months food.

00:05:39.000 I left two months worth of food at the lake, okay, to get me started.

00:05:43.000 And I walked out there in July.

00:05:44.000 Can I pause you for a second?

00:05:46.000 When you say two months food, like, what did you bring?

00:05:48.000 Oh, I had left basic stuff, grains, some beans, some rice, a jug of oil, some flour was out there.

00:06:00.000 And I left that the year before when I had a plane.

00:06:04.000 My whole plan to become an air taxi and do the bush flying, at that time I realized this doesn't Go together with living off the land in the wilderness.

00:06:13.000 So I actually sold that plane that summer and drove up the road and walked out to where I had left these supplies the year before and decided that's what I really wanted to, just go live off the land.

00:06:25.000 I don't need an airplane anymore.

00:06:27.000 I don't need to fly.

00:06:30.000 So, when I got out there, there was a 55-gallon barrel and it had some food in it.

00:06:33.000 It had a few supplies.

00:06:35.000 I had a tent.

00:06:36.000 It was insulated, but it hadn't really become a cabin yet.

00:06:40.000 It's the same place that you've seen, but it was just a little less solid back then.

00:06:47.000 And the cabin as it stands, you built?

00:06:49.000 Yeah.

00:06:50.000 Well, I flew in the plywood and stuff, and then when I got out there, I put...

00:06:55.000 I had a wall tent originally.

00:06:56.000 I'd had a tent camp out there since 2000. I built a plywood cabin under the wall tent, basically.

00:07:02.000 That's what I did.

00:07:03.000 But...

00:07:05.000 When I got out there, I had some food.

00:07:08.000 I had my rifle.

00:07:10.000 I had fishing equipment.

00:07:12.000 I started living.

00:07:13.000 I started improving that little cabin, you know.

00:07:15.000 And by September, I ran out of food.

00:07:19.000 I had one bag of flour, this little plastic bag of flour.

00:07:23.000 It was all I had left when it got cold enough that I figured I could start moose hunting.

00:07:27.000 So that was my plan.

00:07:29.000 I got to get a moose.

00:07:30.000 Why did you have to wait till it got cold?

00:07:31.000 There's regulations?

00:07:34.000 Bugs.

00:07:34.000 You've got to preserve the meat.

00:07:36.000 I've got no freezer.

00:07:37.000 I had to wait until, like I still do when I hunt moose, my moose hunting season starts the day I can leave a piece, a scrap of meat out on the ground all afternoon and go look at it and there's no fly eggs on it.

00:07:54.000 That makes sense.

00:07:57.000 Wow, that's crazy.

00:07:58.000 So you have to, other than the rifle aspect of it, I mean, you're really living like a primitive hunter-gatherer.

00:08:04.000 I would have used a bow and arrow if I thought I could have survived.

00:08:07.000 There's your spot right there.

00:08:08.000 There it is.

00:08:09.000 Well, if you only want to gather meat, the rifle's the way to go.

00:08:12.000 You know, I was always trying to just let go of everything I could do without, but I never got to the point where I thought I could make it with just a bow and arrow myself.

00:08:25.000 You know, people used to survive out there before they even had archery.

00:08:30.000 They survived out there with spears, but there were groups of people.

00:08:33.000 They would build a fence, they would corral animals, they would put nooses up between trees to get a moose, things like that.

00:08:39.000 There was also probably a lot more animals.

00:08:43.000 I don't know that to be the case.

00:08:45.000 Maybe not Alaska.

00:08:46.000 Alaska, probably not too much different, but throughout North America, if you listen to, or you read, rather, the tales of Lewis and Clark, when they made their way across the country, they found a lot of game.

00:09:02.000 There was a lot of animals.

00:09:03.000 I mean, it was just an abundance of animals.

00:09:05.000 And then, of course, if they ran into Buffalo, obviously, there was millions and millions of Buffalo.

00:09:11.000 Unbelievable.

00:09:12.000 That's the difference between Alaska and down here.

00:09:14.000 Down here, we've modified everything.

00:09:16.000 Yeah.

00:09:16.000 We've paved everything over.

00:09:18.000 Alaska's still wild.

00:09:19.000 Northern Alaska's the most wild place left in this country.

00:09:23.000 That's why I went there.

00:09:24.000 It's barely this country, too.

00:09:25.000 I mean, it's not even attached.

00:09:27.000 Yeah, some people don't really think of Alaska as the United States.

00:09:29.000 It's not.

00:09:30.000 Yeah.

00:09:33.000 It's way up there.

00:09:34.000 It's not even connected to us.

00:09:36.000 It's one of those weird ones.

00:09:38.000 But it is wild.

00:09:40.000 And you see, actually, that's what drew me to it.

00:09:43.000 The first time I ever saw the Brooks Range was years before I moved to Alaska.

00:09:47.000 I was on a flight.

00:09:48.000 I used to get jobs as a courier.

00:09:50.000 When I was in my 20s, I was real interested in traveling.

00:09:54.000 And I found out this way I could travel all over the world as a courier.

00:09:57.000 So I would go to New York City.

00:09:58.000 I'd get these jobs as a freelance courier and take off to wherever they need me to go.

00:10:02.000 And one time I got this flight to Tokyo, and I'm flying right across the whole length of the Brooks Range.

00:10:08.000 Great circle route, New York, Tokyo takes you right across it.

00:10:11.000 600 miles of mountains from the Canadian border over to the Chukchi Sea across from Siberia.

00:10:19.000 And there's one road across it in 600 miles.

00:10:21.000 And I was just glued to the window the whole flight looking at that.

00:10:25.000 Wow.

00:10:25.000 I thought, someday I'm going to go check that place out on the ground, you know?

00:10:28.000 I mean, it's incredible when you see those mountains.

00:10:31.000 They're big mountains.

00:10:31.000 They're up to 9,000 feet high.

00:10:33.000 And that one road is the hall road?

00:10:35.000 Yeah, the Hall Road, also known as the Dalton Highway.

00:10:37.000 That was built in 1974 just to construct the Alaska pipeline to get to the oil up at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope, the oil fields up there.

00:10:47.000 They built that road in one summer.

00:10:49.000 It's an amazing story in itself.

00:10:50.000 Wow.

00:10:51.000 Yeah, they started in April and they had the whole thing done in one summer from the Yukon River all the way up to the Arctic Ocean.

00:10:58.000 So when you got down to one bag of flour, was there a part in your head where you're like, what am I doing here?

00:11:05.000 No, I never wondered what I was doing there.

00:11:07.000 No?

00:11:08.000 No.

00:11:08.000 It always felt right for you.

00:11:10.000 Oh, yeah.

00:11:10.000 What I was doing there was looking for a moose.

00:11:14.000 Yeah.

00:11:16.000 And you already had that whole shed built for meat?

00:11:19.000 Oh, there's no shed for meat.

00:11:20.000 Well, what's that thing that you do where you have everything like covered up?

00:11:24.000 The sod house.

00:11:24.000 The sod house?

00:11:25.000 Yeah.

00:11:25.000 No, that came like four years later.

00:11:28.000 Oh.

00:11:28.000 Yeah.

00:11:29.000 No, no, I didn't have that yet.

00:11:31.000 I didn't even have a meat pole.

00:11:33.000 Really?

00:11:34.000 No, I built the meat pole after I got the moose.

00:11:36.000 The same meat pole that's still there that you've seen is 20 feet high.

00:11:39.000 And I built that with a piece of parachute cord and a little block and tackle that you can fit in the palm of your hand that just had parachute cord around it.

00:11:50.000 I'm actually talking about that platform that's right beside the meat pole.

00:11:55.000 The meat pole is 20 feet high.

00:11:56.000 Let's explain to people what a meat pole is so that they know.

00:12:02.000 That's like my freezer.

00:12:03.000 I don't have a freezer out there, so I just hang meat up and I live in the freezer.

00:12:08.000 The Arctic's your freezer from September until usually sometime in May.

00:12:14.000 I can keep meat without anything other than the open air around it.

00:12:19.000 That's a long time.

00:12:21.000 Yeah.

00:12:21.000 It's most of the year.

00:12:23.000 Yeah.

00:12:24.000 The lake's only thawed out from June until most years around the first of October it freezes over.

00:12:32.000 So you get about four months open water, about eight months of ice.

00:12:34.000 So you're basically living off of fish for those months?

00:12:37.000 No.

00:12:38.000 There was one year when I caught a lot of fish there because I stayed there one time 15 months without going to town.

00:12:49.000 Just by yourself?

00:12:51.000 No.

00:12:52.000 I was only there for four months totally by myself, but I'm not totally crazy.

00:12:57.000 I went back out and I got my woman to come in there with me after.

00:13:02.000 She's totally crazy.

00:13:04.000 That may be true.

00:13:05.000 I got divorced from her later, but actually, no, most of the time I've been out there, I've had a family.

00:13:15.000 With me, most of the time.

00:13:17.000 I went out there, you know, I actually was, I got married before I went out there.

00:13:25.000 I went out there for four months, I went back, I got Sylvia, my ex-wife, and...

00:13:30.000 We were out there for years.

00:13:31.000 We would go back and forth.

00:13:33.000 We would go to Fairbanks for six months or sometimes a year.

00:13:37.000 We'd go out there for a year.

00:13:39.000 We would go back and forth.

00:13:41.000 And then what happened was after we split up, I was out there one winter totally alone.

00:13:48.000 And that's when I got on the show, right after that.

00:13:53.000 The timing was perfect.

00:13:56.000 I'm up there by myself.

00:13:59.000 I'm living real close to the land.

00:14:03.000 I mean, I'm sleeping under caribou hides that winter, and I'm eating just caribou.

00:14:08.000 Like, I had a little tiny bit of store-bought food with me, hardly anything.

00:14:12.000 And I hadn't seen a human being in four and a half months.

00:14:15.000 Wow.

00:14:16.000 And the executive producer of the show flies from L.A. all the way up there to meet me and lands.

00:14:21.000 How'd they know you were there?

00:14:23.000 The summer before, I was in Fairbanks.

00:14:26.000 And for a few years, I was trying to figure out, how can I share this stuff I'm experiencing?

00:14:30.000 Because it's incredible.

00:14:32.000 I'm realizing that this is not ordinary life anymore.

00:14:36.000 And there are a lot of people that don't even realize what's going on out here in the middle of the wilderness.

00:14:42.000 So I'm talking to people.

00:14:44.000 I'm trying to find some kind of a filmmaker or somebody, and I don't know anything about it, but I'm trying to find somebody to help me do something like a documentary or something like this.

00:14:55.000 So, my friends know this.

00:14:57.000 Somebody handed me an email address.

00:15:00.000 They said, you should write to this person.

00:15:02.000 They're looking for people like you.

00:15:03.000 They told me it was a filmmaker.

00:15:05.000 I didn't know what it was.

00:15:06.000 I sent off an email.

00:15:07.000 I said, hi, you know, I live in the wilderness.

00:15:10.000 I'd like to talk to you about if you're interested in making a documentary.

00:15:14.000 And a few days later, I started walking from the road again to get back to my camp.

00:15:19.000 So, I left them a satellite phone number.

00:15:23.000 I said, this is my only means of communication.

00:15:25.000 It's a satellite phone.

00:15:26.000 I don't keep it turned on because it runs on a battery.

00:15:30.000 You can send a message to it.

00:15:31.000 I check it once in a while.

00:15:33.000 It's basically for emergencies only, but you can communicate with me this way.

00:15:35.000 And I put that in the email, how to do it.

00:15:38.000 Well, that whole winter went by.

00:15:40.000 Eight months went by.

00:15:41.000 I hadn't heard from them.

00:15:42.000 I had forgotten about that person.

00:15:43.000 I'd send emails to a lot of people.

00:15:44.000 And then one day, I turn on my phone and there's this message there.

00:15:48.000 They want to talk to me.

00:15:50.000 So I called them up.

00:15:52.000 And we start talking.

00:15:54.000 And they tell me it's a reality TV show.

00:15:57.000 And I had literally never seen a reality TV show in my life.

00:16:01.000 I hadn't watched TV for many, many years.

00:16:04.000 So you had no idea what that even meant?

00:16:06.000 Not really.

00:16:07.000 I talked to them about that.

00:16:08.000 But they mostly wanted to talk about me, not about them.

00:16:11.000 And I kept trying to get information.

00:16:13.000 Like, what is this?

00:16:16.000 Exactly.

00:16:17.000 You know?

00:16:19.000 Because I remember, I kept saying, what I really want to do, I want to talk about nature out here.

00:16:24.000 And they're like, well, we don't want to make a show about nature.

00:16:27.000 We want to make a show about you.

00:16:28.000 But in any case...

00:16:30.000 I learned what reality TV was over the next few months.

00:16:35.000 Because after we talked for two weeks, the executive producer flew all the way up from L.A. He flew from Fairbanks on a little ski plane out there to meet me.

00:16:44.000 And he landed and met me to make sure that I wasn't the biggest bullshitter they'd ever talked to.

00:16:48.000 They had no idea.

00:16:50.000 I mean, they were just talking to me on a satellite phone.

00:16:51.000 And I was telling them, okay, right now I'm living off these two caribou I killed last month.

00:16:57.000 And they came out there and they saw that it was real and they were like, yeah, we want you in the show.

00:17:01.000 Wow.

00:17:01.000 And a few weeks later, we were making TV. So they had to come out just to check to see if your story was legit.

00:17:07.000 Yeah.

00:17:08.000 So they had to come out to the actual lake where you're living.

00:17:12.000 I couldn't give them references.

00:17:13.000 I mean, I was all alone out there.

00:17:16.000 Wow.

00:17:17.000 That must have been very surreal for you.

00:17:19.000 The guy lands out there, some Hollywood jack-off.

00:17:22.000 Yeah.

00:17:22.000 Comes out to visit you.

00:17:23.000 It was great.

00:17:24.000 It was like getting out of solitary.

00:17:25.000 I hadn't seen anybody in four and a half months.

00:17:27.000 That's a long time.

00:17:28.000 When I say jack off, I mean with all due respect.

00:17:30.000 I just mean a Hollywood person.

00:17:32.000 You know, like an L.A. television producer flies out to meet you when you're doing your wilderness thing.

00:17:38.000 Like, what a convergence of worlds.

00:17:40.000 There's no world that's more removed from the world of living by yourself in the woods than Hollywood.

00:17:47.000 That's like the most opposite of it.

00:17:50.000 In some ways.

00:17:51.000 But we're all human.

00:17:52.000 Yes, we're all human.

00:17:54.000 And we had a great afternoon together.

00:17:56.000 We had an awesome afternoon together.

00:17:58.000 So did you take them and show them your routes and all the places where you go?

00:18:01.000 It was in April.

00:18:03.000 I had a packed trail on the snow.

00:18:05.000 That's still winter where I am.

00:18:07.000 And I took him out for a walk up onto a mountainside so he could get a view of the whole country there.

00:18:13.000 And it just happened that the first grizzly track I'd seen that spring that had come out of hibernation was right there in front of us.

00:18:22.000 The bear had hit my trail and was walking down my packed trail right in front of us.

00:18:27.000 It was that day, totally fresh track.

00:18:30.000 So that was exciting.

00:18:33.000 Did you see the bear?

00:18:34.000 No, we didn't see the bear.

00:18:35.000 It had headed up the mountain.

00:18:38.000 It was walking a lot faster than we were.

00:18:40.000 But we saw a lot of beautiful things that day, and he shot a sizzle reel, and he brought it back for the network to see and everything.

00:18:51.000 Wow.

00:18:52.000 So what were you thinking when the guy left?

00:18:55.000 I was thinking, that was fun.

00:18:57.000 That was cool.

00:18:58.000 I got to show somebody around out here, you know, because other than my immediate family that had been there with me, my wife, and we had two kids by then, you know, that they hadn't been there since the year before, but nobody had ever seen it with me.

00:19:11.000 I never had had anybody out there to walk anywhere all these years.

00:19:17.000 By the time this happened, I'd been out there for nine years off and on, you know.

00:19:21.000 I'd had my camp out there since 2000, actually.

00:19:24.000 And I'd been kind of living there at least half the time for nine years.

00:19:29.000 I'd gotten to know that country so well.

00:19:31.000 All the mountains.

00:19:32.000 I'd walk some days 20, 25 miles, over 5,000 foot mountains and everything, hunting sheep, hunting caribou, and just looking around, trapping sometimes, but always alone.

00:19:44.000 Why was this life so appealing to you from such a young age?

00:19:48.000 Like the fact that you're 13 years old, you make that walk all the way across Vermont.

00:19:54.000 I mean, that's a long ass walk.

00:19:56.000 You know, I grew up in a small town right near the base of the highest mountain in Vermont, Mount Mansfield.

00:20:02.000 And some of my earliest memories are looking at that mountain wanting to go up there.

00:20:08.000 And I got to the top of the mountain by the time I was nine, but it took me nine years just to get up there.

00:20:12.000 Things take time.

00:20:13.000 So this has always been something that you're drawn to for some reason.

00:20:18.000 You're drawn to being in the wilderness.

00:20:20.000 I'm drawn to a lot of things, but the wilderness is definitely one of them.

00:20:23.000 When you get there, do you feel like everything's right?

00:20:27.000 Like, when you finally got to your place and you finally started, when you walked 60 miles out there and started living, did you finally feel like, I'm in my spot, this is where I'm supposed to be?

00:20:38.000 Oh, yeah.

00:20:39.000 Like, you knew?

00:20:40.000 I had literally been planning to do exactly that in the Brooks Range for seven years.

00:20:46.000 Like, that's what I was doing every day, was preparing to do that.

00:20:54.000 Wow.

00:20:54.000 But what was it about it that was so compelling?

00:20:57.000 Why was that a thing that you were so drawn to?

00:21:02.000 Because when I was living in the woods before that, when I was in the teepee in Vermont, every single day I'd wake up with a smile on my face.

00:21:11.000 I'd just be excited what was going on.

00:21:14.000 Get up, look out, see the fog coming up off the water on the lake.

00:21:19.000 You know, oh wow, there's something over there.

00:21:21.000 There's a loon, whatever it is.

00:21:24.000 I was just excited about what was going on out there and I just felt really connected to it.

00:21:30.000 And there are a lot of really positive aspects to being out in the woods.

00:21:35.000 I mean, just the physical part.

00:21:37.000 Like, I like to stay in shape.

00:21:38.000 I like to be active.

00:21:39.000 And you can't help but be active out there.

00:21:42.000 You can't help but stay in shape.

00:21:44.000 I like the diet.

00:21:46.000 I mean, once I started eating animals I killed myself and food that I collected myself, you know, plant food too.

00:21:52.000 It was, that was the best food I ever ate in my life.

00:21:56.000 When I ate that first moose I killed, I mean, I never had anything better.

00:22:04.000 That's a crazy way to live, man.

00:22:06.000 It's interesting because most people would tell you, hey, you've got to get a job.

00:22:10.000 You've got to be a normal person.

00:22:12.000 You can't just go out there and live.

00:22:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:22:15.000 Well, and that's what I told them.

00:22:18.000 I said, I'm going to make a career out of this.

00:22:20.000 I didn't know exactly how it was going to play out, but I was always confident that it was a valuable thing to do and that it would not only benefit me, but in the long run, that I would be able to share this with people and that it would pay off.

00:22:35.000 And it did.

00:22:36.000 It just took time.

00:22:38.000 Now, what did you do for money?

00:22:40.000 What I did for money was two things.

00:22:43.000 One is I didn't go out there until I was 30 years old.

00:22:46.000 I didn't go to Alaska until I was 30 years old.

00:22:48.000 I had to have some savings.

00:22:50.000 And number two is I arranged everything in my life so I had literally no expenses or almost no expenses.

00:22:59.000 I never had any debt.

00:23:00.000 I didn't have student loan like I said.

00:23:01.000 I left school early.

00:23:02.000 I didn't have a mortgage.

00:23:04.000 When I got to Fairbanks, I found one acre of land on the edge of town.

00:23:09.000 For $6,500, I built a little log cabin myself, 200 square feet, no plumbing, just a wood stove to heat it with.

00:23:17.000 I lived in a tent all winter before that cabin was done.

00:23:22.000 40 below zero, that wasn't easy, and that was right on the edge of town.

00:23:25.000 And then moved into that cabin.

00:23:28.000 I had everything arranged.

00:23:29.000 I got a vehicle, but it was all paid off.

00:23:32.000 When I went to the Brooks Range, I literally didn't have any expenses except about $300 property tax a year for that little cabin in Fairbanks.

00:23:39.000 What were you doing for jobs before that?

00:23:41.000 You said you worked as a courier?

00:23:42.000 I did a lot of courier flying.

00:23:44.000 That was mainly because I wanted to travel.

00:23:47.000 But when I was in my 20s, I was managing some real estate in Vermont.

00:23:50.000 It was timberland.

00:23:51.000 And that wasn't something that I was interested in doing as a long-term career.

00:23:56.000 But I was able to make some money from that.

00:23:59.000 And then the next thing that I was planning to do was to get into the aviation.

00:24:03.000 But the thing with the aviation is, if you're gonna have an air taxi service, you're not gonna be living out in the bush.

00:24:10.000 I didn't realize that when I started down that path.

00:24:14.000 You see, I also did a lot of other preparation in terms of studying.

00:24:19.000 And one of the things I did, too, was I made these shorter forays into the wilderness.

00:24:23.000 The first place was in northern Canada.

00:24:25.000 And I went up to northern Quebec five different times.

00:24:29.000 One time, my girlfriend at the time and I, we spent six weeks canoeing across a part of northern Quebec.

00:24:35.000 Never saw a single person in six weeks.

00:24:38.000 During that canoe trip, we would see these small planes flying over.

00:24:43.000 And that's when I started getting the idea.

00:24:44.000 These little float planes, I started thinking, okay, I'm going to become a pilot.

00:24:47.000 That's one reason it took me seven years to move to Alaska, because I had to study aviation.

00:24:51.000 There was a lot of different things I had to do.

00:24:53.000 But that's when I got that idea.

00:24:55.000 After that trip to Canada, I started studying flying.

00:24:59.000 And that did slow me down moving to Alaska.

00:25:01.000 But that was a good thing, too, because now I can actually afford an airplane.

00:25:04.000 I just got back into flying last year.

00:25:06.000 And the next stage of my life, I think that's going to be quite important.

00:25:11.000 So...

00:25:12.000 When you first got there and you set up your shack, you're living out there, you're hunting food, and did you feel like...

00:25:24.000 I mean, this has been something that was like a calling for you for a long time.

00:25:29.000 It had to feel very strange that you were actually making it happen.

00:25:33.000 Like, it must have felt cool.

00:25:35.000 Oh, it always does when you do something you've been dreaming about for a long time.

00:25:39.000 Like, what was it like to wake up there and go, I'm actually doing it?

00:25:43.000 Like, this crazy pipe dream of living in the woods next to a lake.

00:25:48.000 Yeah.

00:25:48.000 Now it's real.

00:25:49.000 Yeah.

00:25:50.000 Yeah, and I was...

00:25:52.000 I just felt super fortunate.

00:25:53.000 Yeah.

00:25:55.000 And that's still how I feel.

00:25:56.000 Like, all these things that I've experienced out there, I realize how few people in this day ever get to experience these things.

00:26:05.000 Oh, yeah.

00:26:06.000 I mean, you're right next to grizzly bears.

00:26:10.000 Wolves, grizzly bears, wolverines, these animals inhabit the same area that I do, and I have a lot of interactions with them because I'm out there so much.

00:26:19.000 You know, over the years, a lot of things have happened.

00:26:21.000 I've spent a lot of time around wolves.

00:26:26.000 Amazing things, you know, that if you had asked me, I never would have thought would have happened, could have happened.

00:26:32.000 I mean, there have been times when I ran out of food, and I've literally tracked wolves and taken food away from them when they've killed caribou.

00:26:41.000 What?

00:26:42.000 Yeah.

00:26:43.000 How many wolves were there?

00:26:46.000 One time there was a lone wolf that got a caribou just ahead of me.

00:26:50.000 He didn't have time to do anything except gut it for me, literally.

00:26:54.000 That's what they started eating is the guts and he had opened up its belly and pulled the guts out and the whole caribou was there.

00:27:00.000 What happened that day?

00:27:04.000 I was really hungry.

00:27:05.000 We had run out of food.

00:27:06.000 I was out there with my ex-wife.

00:27:08.000 And your kids?

00:27:10.000 I had one baby at the time.

00:27:11.000 So you're out there with a baby and you don't have any food?

00:27:14.000 The baby was fine.

00:27:15.000 She was nursing.

00:27:17.000 And your wife doesn't have any food.

00:27:19.000 Yeah.

00:27:20.000 Well, we always had something to eat, just not enough.

00:27:25.000 But I never, ever have been out there when I didn't have something to eat every single day.

00:27:31.000 Some days it was just one rabbit.

00:27:33.000 Some days it was just one time again, which is very little food.

00:27:38.000 But I've always been able to get something to eat.

00:27:41.000 But this particular year, it was kind of early on.

00:27:43.000 This was the winter 2006, 2007. I hadn't been out there that long.

00:27:48.000 Made a miscalculation.

00:27:49.000 I was counting on caribou showing up because so far I'd always seen a lot of caribou in the winter.

00:27:53.000 That winter they didn't come.

00:27:56.000 If I had known, I could have prevented the situation.

00:27:59.000 But we had taken one moose in the fall.

00:28:02.000 I had killed a moose in September.

00:28:03.000 And I thought, man, we've got 500 pounds of meat.

00:28:06.000 We're set.

00:28:06.000 The caribou will come later in the winter.

00:28:08.000 But it's amazing how much meat you can eat when you're not eating much of anything else.

00:28:12.000 And all that I was eating at that time really was meat, fat, and maybe a cup of berries a day that I had gathered in the fall and froze.

00:28:23.000 So the moose, we went through that pretty fast.

00:28:25.000 Found out that two adults can eat a large bull moose in three months if that's all you got to eat.

00:28:31.000 Wow.

00:28:32.000 I've eaten by myself a large bull moose in six months.

00:28:37.000 Yeah.

00:28:39.000 For people that don't know, a large bull moose is about 2,000 pounds.

00:28:44.000 I don't think they're quite that big, but they're probably 1,500 pounds.

00:28:46.000 You probably get 500 pounds of meat.

00:28:48.000 So a Yukon moose is like 2,000 pounds?

00:28:51.000 People exaggerate.

00:28:53.000 They exaggerate a lot of things, Joe.

00:28:56.000 But a big one, like a 60-inch bull?

00:28:58.000 How much is that?

00:29:00.000 That's actually what that bull was.

00:29:02.000 It was about a 60-inch bull.

00:29:03.000 Wow.

00:29:04.000 That one was actually 57 if I remember.

00:29:06.000 I don't pay too much attention to the exact measurements.

00:29:09.000 So somewhere in the range of 1500 pounds, which is like how many pounds of meat you think that is?

00:29:15.000 I would guess that you probably are getting five, six hundred pounds of meat out of there.

00:29:21.000 Are you taking the femurs and getting bone marrow out of them and doing all that jazz too?

00:29:26.000 Oh yeah.

00:29:27.000 That's a really important part of my diet when I'm living off an animal is I like variety.

00:29:36.000 And the animal has a ton of variety in it.

00:29:39.000 One caribou will give you There's so many different options in terms of food if you know how to utilize it.

00:29:46.000 I've eaten everything out of a caribou except the poop, literally.

00:29:49.000 You can even eat part of the antlers when they're...

00:29:52.000 Oh yeah, in the spring when they're growing, they're soft on the ends.

00:29:54.000 It's like a pickle.

00:29:55.000 You skin them, you take the velvet off, and the last inch or two, it's got the consistency of a pickle.

00:30:01.000 They're great.

00:30:02.000 Really?

00:30:02.000 You eat it raw?

00:30:03.000 Yeah.

00:30:04.000 I eat a lot of animals raw.

00:30:05.000 I eat a lot of parts of a caribou raw.

00:30:08.000 But anyway, you get a lot of variety because you eat all the organs, you eat the eyes, you eat the brain, you eat the liver.

00:30:13.000 You eat the brain?

00:30:13.000 Oh, yeah.

00:30:14.000 Really?

00:30:14.000 Spinal cord.

00:30:15.000 Whoa.

00:30:16.000 Like I said, I've eaten everything except the poop out of a caribou, literally.

00:30:19.000 I mean, you can even...

00:30:19.000 The cartilage...

00:30:21.000 You can get all kinds of variety, and it's nutritious.

00:30:23.000 It's good for you.

00:30:25.000 I mean, I learned about all this from the old people that used to eat this way.

00:30:28.000 I would have been reluctant to eat certain things if I hadn't been educated by other people that you can do this.

00:30:36.000 I was talking to this 90-year-old woman in Fairbanks, and I asked her, so you eat the brains?

00:30:41.000 Because I'm thinking mad cow disease, prions.

00:30:44.000 Right.

00:30:44.000 She's like, oh yeah, the brains are great.

00:30:45.000 And then I did a little research.

00:30:47.000 They've never found prionic disease in Alaska in any of the animals up there.

00:30:50.000 So I was like, okay, I can start eating the brains.

00:30:52.000 That's an issue that's happening more and more here in the lower 48. You're getting a lot of CWD, which is another prion disease.

00:31:01.000 Very scary stuff.

00:31:02.000 You know, there's parts of Wisconsin where my friend Doug Duren lives where, you know, 50% of the deer they test, test positive for CWD. Yeah.

00:31:13.000 Which is a real fatal disease and hasn't made the jump to humans yet, but they're very concerned.

00:31:19.000 And, you know, this is...

00:31:23.000 Coming from the deer.

00:31:24.000 Like you said, there's a lot of deer.

00:31:25.000 And where deer and moose live together, the moose get it.

00:31:27.000 We don't have any deer.

00:31:28.000 So, other than moose and caribou, that's why we don't have the prionic disease.

00:31:31.000 You have no deer up there at all?

00:31:34.000 Well, moose are a deer.

00:31:35.000 A type of deer.

00:31:36.000 Caribou are a deer, but we don't have anything other than moose and caribou.

00:31:38.000 You don't have blacktail.

00:31:40.000 Those are much further south.

00:31:41.000 Down in southeast Alaska, I don't know their exact range, but nowhere near where I am.

00:31:45.000 That's interesting.

00:31:47.000 It's too harsh of a country.

00:31:49.000 It's not the right habitat.

00:31:52.000 Wow.

00:31:53.000 So, when you take this caribou away from the wolf, how does that go down?

00:32:01.000 What happened that day was...

00:32:03.000 Thanks for reminding me.

00:32:04.000 I'd forgotten that story.

00:32:05.000 That's what we were talking about.

00:32:08.000 I had a trail up the mountain.

00:32:09.000 There's a lot of snow in the winter, you know, two, three feet of snow.

00:32:12.000 So you've got to have packed trails to walk efficiently, pack them down with snowshoes and stuff, and pretty much follow the same routes.

00:32:18.000 I'm following my trail to go up the mountain looking for food that day, and I came on.

00:32:22.000 There were no caribou around.

00:32:23.000 I couldn't find a caribou anywhere.

00:32:25.000 I didn't see caribou track for, like, months.

00:32:29.000 They're migratory.

00:32:30.000 And if they happen to migrate 10 miles away, I'm not going to see them.

00:32:34.000 That's out of my range.

00:32:38.000 I come on a track of one caribou.

00:32:41.000 It's wounded.

00:32:41.000 It's bleeding.

00:32:42.000 It's being chased by one wolf.

00:32:44.000 And it crosses my trail.

00:32:47.000 So I start chasing.

00:32:48.000 It was real fresh.

00:32:49.000 It was snowing out.

00:32:50.000 And I could tell that this has just happened.

00:32:52.000 This injured caribou, this wolf is chasing it up this mountain.

00:32:55.000 They're right ahead of me.

00:32:56.000 I've got to follow this.

00:32:57.000 Do you have a rifle?

00:32:58.000 Yeah.

00:32:59.000 Yeah.

00:32:59.000 My rifle is my constant companion.

00:33:01.000 I mean...

00:33:03.000 That rifle goes just about everywhere I go up there.

00:33:06.000 So I start just jogging up the mountain as fast as I can go.

00:33:11.000 It's a 5,000 foot mountain and this caribou is wounded pretty badly.

00:33:17.000 He's bleeding almost continuously.

00:33:20.000 And it's clear to me that We're good to go.

00:33:42.000 Yeah, they'll jump on their back.

00:33:45.000 I see a lot of them injured on the big muscle right here on the back leg.

00:33:50.000 Is that what you mean?

00:33:51.000 The hamstring right in here?

00:33:52.000 Yeah, they'll get them in there.

00:33:53.000 You find a lot of caribou injured real bad that get away.

00:33:57.000 They get away with big pieces of hide ripped off of them.

00:34:01.000 I killed a caribou once that only had two good legs.

00:34:04.000 It couldn't even walk anymore.

00:34:05.000 But anyway, I start chasing them up the hill.

00:34:09.000 They're kind of zigzagging up the hill.

00:34:11.000 And this caribou obviously doesn't know this mountain.

00:34:13.000 It doesn't know where it's going.

00:34:15.000 It heads in a direction where there's some cliffs on the other side of this ridge.

00:34:21.000 And...

00:34:23.000 I'm getting real hopeful at this point.

00:34:25.000 And I still haven't seen them.

00:34:27.000 They're ahead of me on the mountain.

00:34:30.000 And sure enough, the tracks come right up to the edge of the cliff, both the caribou and the wolf, and go right over the top of the cliff.

00:34:37.000 And I'm like, there's no way that caribou survived getting down.

00:34:40.000 Because I know this mountain like the back of my hand.

00:34:44.000 And I just sat down there and I listened.

00:34:47.000 And I sat there at the top of the cliff.

00:34:50.000 And sure enough, it's real quiet out there in the winter.

00:34:53.000 The Arctic is just like dead silent.

00:34:54.000 And I start hearing the crunching in the snow of this wolf.

00:34:59.000 He's down in the ravine and he knows I'm up there.

00:35:02.000 He can sense that I'm up there at the top of the cliff.

00:35:05.000 And he wants to bug out of there at that point.

00:35:07.000 And he just walked up the other side of the ravine.

00:35:09.000 I'm looking across the ravine and I see the wolf going up.

00:35:12.000 And I know, hey, that caribou's down in that ravine somewhere.

00:35:14.000 So he's just getting away from you.

00:35:16.000 Yeah.

00:35:17.000 Did they already know you by then?

00:35:19.000 Because you had shot quite a few wolves, right?

00:35:23.000 I trapped a few.

00:35:25.000 I shot a few, not tons, but...

00:35:26.000 You shot a few on the show.

00:35:28.000 The one time on the lake where it's frozen and...

00:35:32.000 Yeah, I didn't have a cameraman with me.

00:35:34.000 That was actually, that story was told on the show and I documented it a little bit as much as I could with my little camera at the time.

00:35:42.000 That day I shot three wolves, but that was a very unusual situation.

00:35:46.000 That was, those wolves were actually trying to get me, which is almost unheard of.

00:35:50.000 But this was years before that.

00:35:52.000 This wolf and like almost every other wolf encounter I've ever had, every other wolf encounter I've ever had, the wolf wants nothing to do with you.

00:36:00.000 I mean, the wolf knows I'm dangerous.

00:36:03.000 How do they know you're dangerous?

00:36:05.000 Are they having any interactions with other humans?

00:36:09.000 Wolves?

00:36:12.000 I've only been able to find two documented bona fide cases where wolves have killed humans in North America in recent times.

00:36:22.000 There was this one guy, young guy up in Saskatchewan several years ago.

00:36:26.000 There was one woman in Alaska that apparently was killed by wolves.

00:36:28.000 It almost never happens.

00:36:31.000 They just know that people are dangerous.

00:36:34.000 They've been persecuted.

00:36:35.000 I mean, there were bounties on wolves.

00:36:37.000 I think it's in their DNA now.

00:36:39.000 Hmm.

00:36:40.000 You know?

00:36:40.000 All wild animals.

00:36:42.000 Grizzly bears.

00:36:43.000 They don't want anything to do with people, 99.9% of the time.

00:36:47.000 It's interesting you saying that grizzly bears, where they're hunted, don't want anything to do with people.

00:36:52.000 They're having a real problem with grizzly bears in places like Montana, where they don't hunt them, where they don't have any fear.

00:36:58.000 Many, many generations of no fear of human beings, and you're getting a lot of maulings because of that.

00:37:04.000 Yeah, I wouldn't be crazy about walking out in a national park where you're not allowed to bring a gun.

00:37:08.000 Yeah.

00:37:09.000 Well, Montana in particular, they have a lot.

00:37:12.000 But in this case, the wolf wanted out of there.

00:37:15.000 It walked up the other side of the ravine.

00:37:16.000 I watched it.

00:37:17.000 It was about 300-400 yards from me.

00:37:18.000 When he got up to the top of the ridge, he stopped way, way up high above.

00:37:22.000 I remember looking at him through binoculars.

00:37:25.000 Or maybe it was the scope of my rifle.

00:37:27.000 I just remember him giving a yawn.

00:37:28.000 He laid down on the ground when he knew he was safe way up there and he just gave a yawn and I could see his tongue.

00:37:33.000 It was just like a dog.

00:37:35.000 I could see him give this yawn like he had just climbed up this big mountain in about 10 minutes, you know.

00:37:40.000 So I just walked around the cliff, went down in there.

00:37:43.000 Got that caribou.

00:37:44.000 I actually made a backpack out of his ribcage to carry it home.

00:37:47.000 Wow.

00:37:48.000 It was cold.

00:37:49.000 It was like 25 below.

00:37:50.000 That was pretty brutal, getting that thing back to the camp from up on the mountain there.

00:37:55.000 How heavy was it?

00:37:58.000 I don't know.

00:37:59.000 A lot of things I don't weigh, but I'd say a caribou like that probably weighs about 250 pounds, something like that.

00:38:05.000 I obviously don't take all of that weight at one time with me.

00:38:09.000 I carry as much as I can.

00:38:11.000 Did you have a backpack, like a pack frame?

00:38:13.000 I had a frame, and I just stuffed everything in the...

00:38:16.000 I remember it was so cold, and I was so tired up there running up this mountain in the winter.

00:38:20.000 And it's dark.

00:38:21.000 It's dark up there.

00:38:21.000 There's no sun in the winter.

00:38:24.000 I just remember...

00:38:26.000 Getting the head off that thing, throwing the legs and stuff in the rib cage and throwing it onto that frame I had.

00:38:34.000 It was all inside of the big rib cage.

00:38:36.000 Still had the skin on it and everything.

00:38:37.000 Was the wolf watching the whole time?

00:38:39.000 He was up on top of the mountain.

00:38:41.000 I wasn't paying close attention to him after that.

00:38:43.000 I don't know how long he hung out up there.

00:38:45.000 I would think that you would want to keep an eye on that fucker.

00:38:49.000 He knows you're stealing his food.

00:38:50.000 I've done this other times.

00:38:52.000 Wolves...

00:38:53.000 I spent a lot of time around the wolves.

00:38:55.000 This isn't a lot of time.

00:38:56.000 When the snow conditions are just right, you can actually keep up with wolves, believe it or not.

00:39:01.000 I've stayed with wolves all day long going 8 or 10 miles.

00:39:05.000 When the snow is deep enough, they start walking single file and every wolf in the pack steps in exactly the same track.

00:39:12.000 And their stride when they slow down to a walk like that is just right for me.

00:39:16.000 I can step right in their tracks.

00:39:18.000 I don't even need snowshoes.

00:39:19.000 If there's less snow, you can't keep up with the wolf.

00:39:22.000 Their normal gait, they're trotting.

00:39:25.000 You can't even come close to that speed.

00:39:26.000 But when the snow gets deep and they get single file, if you're in good shape, you can jog behind wolves all day long.

00:39:33.000 And I followed wolves.

00:39:34.000 I followed a pack of 12 wolves one time, 8 or 10 miles.

00:39:37.000 They were hunting caribou right in front of me.

00:39:39.000 There was another time I remember taking caribou meat away from a pack of wolves, which I didn't even see.

00:39:45.000 They had killed the caribou, but, you know, there's a lot of brush and different stuff around.

00:39:48.000 I discovered it because ravens flew up off it.

00:39:51.000 I went over there, and judging by the tracks, there were half a dozen wolves around.

00:39:54.000 I took that caribou that time, brought it home, and ate it.

00:39:57.000 But I had a lot of interactions over the years with the wolves, and I never had wolves act aggressive to me.

00:40:03.000 I've had them act curious.

00:40:06.000 I've had them act scared.

00:40:07.000 I've had them act indifferent.

00:40:09.000 I never had wolves act aggressive to me until that time, January 2012, when a pack of 20 wolves literally took after me out on the lake, and I did shoot three of those wolves.

00:40:19.000 And what was that about?

00:40:20.000 Why do you think they were taken after you?

00:40:23.000 It was a very unusual situation.

00:40:25.000 First of all, there were 20 wolves in one place.

00:40:27.000 That's unheard of up there.

00:40:29.000 That's totally unheard of.

00:40:31.000 The largest pack of wolves I've ever heard a count of that far north was 17 wolves, and that was back in the 1970s.

00:40:39.000 Usually, there's five, six wolves in a pack up there.

00:40:42.000 It's a real hungry country.

00:40:43.000 It's hard for them to feed themselves if the pack gets bigger than that.

00:40:45.000 They have to split up and go somewhere new.

00:40:48.000 But I don't know what happened that year.

00:40:50.000 I don't know if two packs combined.

00:40:52.000 I don't know if the pack just grew to that size, but it was unheard of.

00:40:56.000 Anyway, I'm up on a mountain.

00:40:57.000 I look down at the lake.

00:40:59.000 It's in January.

00:40:59.000 It's just twilight in the middle of the day.

00:41:01.000 I see this big brown spot on the ice.

00:41:03.000 I'm like, what the hell is that?

00:41:05.000 It's like out in front of my cabin about 500 yards.

00:41:08.000 This big brown spot.

00:41:09.000 First, I thought it was water overflow that comes up through the ice sometimes when you get a crack.

00:41:15.000 I get out the binoculars, I'm looking, and holy cow.

00:41:19.000 That's a giant pack of wolves that just took something down on the lake.

00:41:23.000 I can see, like, one of them is breaking off, one of them is breaking off, and then coming back over, and I realize what's going on.

00:41:30.000 There was very little snow that year.

00:41:32.000 Even though it was January, it had been cold since September, but very little precipitation.

00:41:36.000 There was only about maybe four or five inches of snow, so I could literally run down the mountain.

00:41:40.000 I was down at the lake within 20 minutes.

00:41:44.000 And I went right to my cabin.

00:41:45.000 I got my camera.

00:41:47.000 I got my tripod.

00:41:48.000 I'm like, this is phenomenal.

00:41:49.000 I got to document this.

00:41:51.000 And I start walking across the lake out to where they are to get pictures of this.

00:41:56.000 So I get about 350 yards from these wolves.

00:41:59.000 I still don't know what the animal is that they got there.

00:42:02.000 And, you know, I can hear them.

00:42:04.000 You can hear bones breaking and stuff.

00:42:06.000 The wolves, you know, it's just amazing.

00:42:08.000 Yeah.

00:42:08.000 And I start taking pictures and I run out of batteries.

00:42:13.000 I'm like, oh shit, I ran out of batteries.

00:42:16.000 So I got to go back to the cabin.

00:42:18.000 That's like 150 yards behind me, you know.

00:42:20.000 And I turn around and I start walking back to the cabin.

00:42:24.000 When I get about 30 yards or so from the cabin, I look back over my shoulder and the whole goddamn pack of wolves is racing across the lake straight toward me.

00:42:33.000 I'd never seen anything like it.

00:42:35.000 I sprinted like Jesse Owens through the door of that cabin.

00:42:37.000 I was only 30 yards from it.

00:42:39.000 I turn and I look back out the window and these wolves came right up into my yard.

00:42:43.000 They were 50 yards from the front door.

00:42:45.000 20 wolves.

00:42:47.000 Whoa.

00:42:48.000 Yeah.

00:42:48.000 Like this is unheard of.

00:42:50.000 Wolves are usually hightailing it out of there when they see people.

00:42:55.000 So, I get my new batteries.

00:42:58.000 I get the camera set back up.

00:43:00.000 I go back out.

00:43:01.000 By the time I get back out in the yard, they're back over at this thing they've killed like 500 yards away.

00:43:06.000 And I want to get more pictures of this.

00:43:08.000 I got my rifle too, of course.

00:43:09.000 So I start heading back over.

00:43:11.000 When I get about 350 yards from them, I start taking more pictures.

00:43:15.000 I got a great picture.

00:43:15.000 You can pull it up, maybe.

00:43:17.000 Yeah, I'm going to see that.

00:43:18.000 In the notes section on my Facebook page is a story, an unusual occurrence with the wolves.

00:43:23.000 Anyway, they're all eaten, and I start taking pictures again.

00:43:30.000 And after I take some pictures, first one, then two, then three, the wolves, they're like, I can see they stop eating and they're looking at me.

00:43:39.000 They're like 350 yards away, but I can just see that they notice that I'm back out there on the lake.

00:43:43.000 And they're sizing me up kind of.

00:43:45.000 And then I see some of them are just really slowly moving toward me, like walking a few steps and stopping.

00:43:50.000 And I'm thinking, hmm.

00:43:51.000 Yeah, I got my rifle and everything, but there's a lot of wolves there.

00:43:54.000 How do I know they're going to stop when I start shooting, you know?

00:43:59.000 So I decided maybe it's best to just make a slow retreat.

00:44:02.000 And I started backing up and walking back toward the cabin.

00:44:07.000 And the wolves, it looked like they were slowly walking towards me as I'm walking toward the cabin.

00:44:12.000 When I got about, if I remember right, it was 100 yards from the cabin.

00:44:20.000 Those wolves started galloping.

00:44:24.000 All 20 wolves started galloping towards me.

00:44:26.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

00:44:28.000 Oh, wow, look at this picture.

00:44:29.000 Yeah, those wolves right there.

00:44:31.000 They start galloping towards me.

00:44:34.000 And I dropped that tripod right there where I was.

00:44:38.000 I was 100 yards from the cabin.

00:44:40.000 They were 400 yards from me.

00:44:41.000 And I ran as fast as I could for the cabin.

00:44:44.000 Because I thought, hey, if I start shooting, what if they don't stop?

00:44:49.000 It's 20 wolves there.

00:44:50.000 I got four or five rounds of ammunition.

00:44:52.000 If I had one in the chamber, I had five rounds of ammunition there.

00:44:56.000 I ran for the cabin.

00:44:57.000 I go in the door and just like the time before, they're right there in my front yard.

00:45:01.000 I look out and they're 50 yards away.

00:45:02.000 They're all milling around, 20 wolves.

00:45:04.000 I'm like, Jesus Christ, this is amazing.

00:45:06.000 I've never seen anything like this.

00:45:09.000 But I'm safe and sound in the cabin.

00:45:12.000 So I just collect my thoughts.

00:45:14.000 I'm like, man, it's time to teach these wolves a lesson.

00:45:16.000 If I let those wolves leave now, they're going to think I'm just food.

00:45:22.000 I run away when they see me.

00:45:23.000 I mean, I could be out there in the night, in the dark, not even know wolves are around and get ambushed by them or something.

00:45:29.000 So I had to shoot some of those wolves.

00:45:32.000 Yeah.

00:45:32.000 So I loaded up the gun, made sure everything was perfectly right, you know, put some extra ammunition in my pocket, checked everything out.

00:45:41.000 Okay, I'm set to go out there with this gun and talk to these wolves about this situation.

00:45:47.000 And I go back out and they were back at the moose.

00:45:50.000 It turned out to be a moose they'd killed.

00:45:52.000 They were back over there at the kill.

00:45:55.000 So I thought, well, it'd be a lot safer if I shot from close to the cabin, you know, rather than go out there on the open ice.

00:46:02.000 So I'll just see if I can lure them back over here.

00:46:04.000 And I started running back and forth right in front of my cabin on the ice just to get their attention.

00:46:09.000 And sure enough, it worked.

00:46:10.000 That whole pack of 20 wolves started racing across that lake in a full gallop straight toward me.

00:46:15.000 I couldn't believe it.

00:46:17.000 I was right in front of my cabin.

00:46:18.000 I'd just run back and forth like 50 yards out to my little water hole in the ice and back to the cabin a few times, and they just started running right at me.

00:46:25.000 So I sat right down there on the bank on the shore, right, you know, 15 feet in front of my porch, and started shooting.

00:46:33.000 I think if I remember right, the first one I hit was 264 yards.

00:46:36.000 I measured it all off the next day.

00:46:37.000 It was kind of interesting just checking out the tracks and seeing what had happened.

00:46:40.000 I hit three of them.

00:46:42.000 Yeah.

00:46:44.000 What happened when one got hit?

00:46:47.000 The closest tracks to me were about 40 yards.

00:46:52.000 When it was happening, it was happening so fast.

00:46:57.000 I was just sitting down, braced, shooting.

00:47:01.000 I remember reloading after I shot five times.

00:47:04.000 It all happened so fast.

00:47:06.000 But then the next day when I had time, I went out there and looked at all the tracks and measured everything and sized up the situation, figured out where I'd hit different wolves and stuff.

00:47:13.000 And I wrote that all down.

00:47:14.000 That's what I was mentioning in the notes section there on my Facebook page, that story.

00:47:18.000 Because I wanted, when it was fresh in my mind, to really have the details.

00:47:21.000 Because I knew right then that something happened to me that...

00:47:24.000 It doesn't really happen to people.

00:47:26.000 I mean, to have a pack of wolves come after you is a very unusual occurrence.

00:47:32.000 You could read all over the place that wolves don't attack humans.

00:47:37.000 I've read that many times.

00:47:39.000 But they have.

00:47:40.000 They have, at least a couple times.

00:47:42.000 Particularly historically.

00:47:44.000 Historically.

00:47:44.000 The whole Little Red Riding Hood, that's all because they were trying to warn children about wolves.

00:47:50.000 Do you know the story about World War I and the wolves?

00:47:55.000 The Germans and the Russians had a ceasefire in World War I because so many of them were getting killed by wolves.

00:48:02.000 They decided to stop killing each other and kill the wolves because they were losing so many guys.

00:48:09.000 And then, you know, if guys got shot on the battlefield, the wolves would find out and the wolves would tear the guys alive.

00:48:14.000 Yeah, it's a crazy story.

00:48:17.000 If you go to TheMeatEater.com, this was a story that I had told before.

00:48:22.000 Steve Rinello, my friend who runs a media, those guys were a little skeptical of it, so they historically researched it.

00:48:28.000 It turns out to actually be accurate, and there's a lot of stories from the New York Times and James Poynting, what?

00:48:34.000 There has been an update on the story as of April of this year.

00:48:38.000 I'm finding an article about it where they're talking about that, and it links back to an article from the New York Times in 1917. And this team researched it a little bit farther, and before you got too far, it turns out they debunked it in some way.

00:48:50.000 In some way?

00:48:50.000 Trying to figure out exactly...

00:48:53.000 How?

00:48:53.000 It says there's no mentions of any wolf truce in some Russian stuff.

00:48:57.000 The Christmas Truce of 1914, I guess is what it was called, or something close up.

00:49:01.000 I think that's a different truce.

00:49:03.000 Yeah, they just said there's no...

00:49:04.000 I guess there's no...

00:49:05.000 They couldn't find anything in the Russian sources, I guess, to prove that.

00:49:09.000 They couldn't find anything in the Russian sources, but didn't they find things in the German sources?

00:49:12.000 I mean, there was absolutely recorded instances of people getting killed by wolves.

00:49:17.000 And I think they definitely did have some sort of a ceasefire.

00:49:21.000 To kill the wolves.

00:49:22.000 Like, the guys at meateater.com, they went over this really thoroughly with many sources.

00:49:27.000 It says the information found its way into newspapers at the time, but no one dared to check the New York Times sources.

00:49:33.000 The New York Times might have bullshitted?

00:49:36.000 It says, Meanwhile, Russian hunting scientist Sergei Matveitchuk said there were no Russian sources for this information.

00:49:43.000 Their latest information appeared February 15, 1917, in the Bridgeport Evening Farmer newspaper.

00:49:49.000 Hmm.

00:49:51.000 Which would be an American newspaper, I guess.

00:49:53.000 Go to themeateater.com story on it.

00:49:58.000 I think it's themeateater.com.

00:50:00.000 How the fuck do they not have meateater.com?

00:50:02.000 I don't understand that.

00:50:03.000 Buy that, please.

00:50:06.000 But anyway, wolves have killed people.

00:50:09.000 It's difficult, though, to get to the truth.

00:50:12.000 I mean, there's so much BS. Who knows what's true, what's not sometimes.

00:50:15.000 But I know that historically there are a lot of reports of wolves in Russia killing people for some reason.

00:50:22.000 And, you know, in maybe Scandinavia in the older times.

00:50:25.000 Do you know about Paris?

00:50:26.000 Do you know about the wolves of Paris?

00:50:27.000 No.

00:50:28.000 It's a very famous story.

00:50:30.000 Apparently, at one point in time, and now they're starting to see wolves around Paris again.

00:50:35.000 But at one point in time, wolves had actually invaded Paris.

00:50:38.000 And there's an historical account of the townspeople getting together and spearing these wolves.

00:50:45.000 Wow.

00:50:45.000 Yeah.

00:50:47.000 Google the Wolves of Paris.

00:50:49.000 Their article on the mediator was updated in August of this year, and their takeaway at the end of that, because they said it was actually mentioned in multiple newspapers, but it might have been a barroom tale, but there are reports of people dying from wolves.

00:51:03.000 Hundreds of people killed wolves in the war.

00:51:05.000 There was a ceasefire of some kind, but the actual events all being together at that exact one may not be accurate, but...

00:51:11.000 I think what had happened was, what they were saying was, because of war itself, all the gunfire, these wolves had moved away from certain areas and then they had found wounded soldiers and they started eating the wounded soldiers.

00:51:26.000 So then they started to associate gunfire with wounded soldiers.

00:51:32.000 We're good to go.

00:51:51.000 People claim that, yeah.

00:51:53.000 Well, they have rules in certain places where if a grizzly bear finds your elk, you have to leave it alone.

00:51:59.000 Right.

00:51:59.000 You're not even allowed to scare it off.

00:52:01.000 You have to get out of there.

00:52:02.000 It's not yours anymore.

00:52:03.000 Yeah.

00:52:04.000 Which is a fucking bummer.

00:52:08.000 Yeah, and I have that issue.

00:52:09.000 You know, bears find kills.

00:52:12.000 Oh, I'm sure.

00:52:13.000 When you're working alone, you've got to leave meat.

00:52:15.000 You've got to make multiple.

00:52:16.000 Yes, of course.

00:52:17.000 I mean, with a moose, I have to make ten trips.

00:52:18.000 Oh, of course.

00:52:19.000 Now, when you found these wolves, when you start shooting and you hit one, Did the other ones freak out?

00:52:29.000 Did they realize what's going on?

00:52:31.000 They started putting on the brakes, but like I said, the first wolf I hit was over 250 yards.

00:52:38.000 I think it was 264 yards, something like that, from me.

00:52:41.000 And some of the tracks came about 40 to 50 yards from me before they had stopped.

00:52:46.000 They were doing U-turns, you could see, in front of me.

00:52:49.000 They were all just milling around.

00:52:50.000 When I was reloading, I just remember seeing all these wolves milling around in front of me, like running around in circles, and I was like, holy cow, and I'm reloading.

00:52:57.000 And I remember shooting one more time as they were headed away, but they all took off.

00:53:02.000 They headed into the woods, and one of the wolves that I had hit was paraplegic, but he was still going on two legs.

00:53:11.000 So I ran in.

00:53:12.000 Yeah, I ran in the cab.

00:53:14.000 The other two had just dropped immediately.

00:53:15.000 One of them was hit right in the head.

00:53:16.000 But I ran in the cab and grabbed my.22 because I didn't want to put a big.30-06 hole in this wolf that was paraplegic.

00:53:23.000 I chased him down, caught up with him, shot him with.22.

00:53:27.000 Then...

00:53:28.000 I could hear all the other wolves howling and howling.

00:53:30.000 They're like, you know, probably almost half a mile away from me.

00:53:33.000 By then they were up in the woods on the other side of the lake.

00:53:35.000 And I just ran over to that, what they had killed.

00:53:40.000 And this was the first time I saw it.

00:53:41.000 It was a year and a half old bull moose.

00:53:43.000 And it was still all there.

00:53:45.000 The legs were still on it.

00:53:46.000 I got pictures of it and stuff.

00:53:47.000 They had just started eating it not long before I started photographing it.

00:53:49.000 Are the pictures on your Facebook page?

00:53:51.000 Not of that moose.

00:53:53.000 They put those on LBZ, I think.

00:53:55.000 What's LBZ? Life Below Zero.

00:53:57.000 Oh.

00:53:58.000 When they showed that story, that was like six years ago.

00:54:01.000 That was one of my first stories.

00:54:03.000 That's a different move.

00:54:04.000 I got charged by one out there one time.

00:54:10.000 So, when you find the wolves that you did shoot, and you shot and killed three of them, do you eat them?

00:54:17.000 You know, I ate some of those just because I was law on food.

00:54:20.000 I don't like to eat wolf meat, if I can help it.

00:54:24.000 To me, there's cleaner meat and there's dirtier meat.

00:54:29.000 I don't really like to eat bears.

00:54:31.000 A lot of people eat bears.

00:54:32.000 I've eaten the one grizzly bear that I ever shot.

00:54:35.000 I didn't shoot him because I wanted to eat him.

00:54:36.000 I shot him because I needed to shoot him.

00:54:38.000 But if I have caribou and moose, I don't really want anything else.

00:54:44.000 Really, ungulates is what I like to eat.

00:54:45.000 Right.

00:54:46.000 Of course.

00:54:47.000 They're cleaner.

00:54:48.000 If you see the stuff that bears eat, I don't know why people are so crazy about bear meat.

00:54:52.000 Some people really like bear meat.

00:54:53.000 But I've seen what bears eat, and I don't really want to be eating bears.

00:54:56.000 It's rotten food a lot of times, right?

00:54:59.000 Oh, yeah.

00:54:59.000 And I mean, you know, they just got a lot more parasites that can actually harm you.

00:55:04.000 Like a caribou is a clean animal.

00:55:06.000 There's a couple things they can have that can hurt you not too bad normally.

00:55:11.000 But a grizzly bear, I mean, you're skinning them and there's worms this long crawling out their ass.

00:55:18.000 And those worms can hurt you.

00:55:21.000 They're bad.

00:55:22.000 If they get into a person, they can cause serious problems because they don't stay in your intestines.

00:55:26.000 They go into your brain in different weird places.

00:55:29.000 If the eggs get into you and they hatch because they're an unfamiliar host, they don't know where to go.

00:55:33.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:55:34.000 They go into spinal cord.

00:55:35.000 They go all over the place.

00:55:36.000 What do they do if that happens to you?

00:55:39.000 A lot of kids have had big problems.

00:55:41.000 The same kind of, very similar kind of worm lives in raccoons.

00:55:45.000 So kids playing on the playground, you know, raccoon feces has the eggs in it.

00:55:48.000 Oh, wow.

00:55:50.000 Baylis ascaris is the genus of worm.

00:55:54.000 It's like a roundworm.

00:55:56.000 Normally, it doesn't cause the bear too much problem.

00:55:59.000 It just lives in their intestines.

00:56:00.000 But if that larva, if you get an egg in you and the larva doesn't know where to go, he's an unfamiliar host and they act differently, they'll migrate into weird places in your body, like nervous tissue.

00:56:12.000 They get in your eyes and stuff.

00:56:13.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

00:56:15.000 Yeah.

00:56:16.000 Oh, look at that.

00:56:18.000 Someone's got one in their eyes.

00:56:20.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:56:21.000 The parasite on the playground.

00:56:23.000 Roundworm.

00:56:24.000 Wow.

00:56:25.000 Look at that, man.

00:56:26.000 In the eyeball.

00:56:27.000 What do they do?

00:56:29.000 Well, I've never got one in my eyesight.

00:56:34.000 Fuck that.

00:56:34.000 Look at that thing.

00:56:36.000 Traveling around inside this person's eyeball.

00:56:38.000 Fuck that, man.

00:56:39.000 There's a lot of parasites out there.

00:56:41.000 That's the thing people don't realize.

00:56:44.000 Humans used to have a lot of parasites in them.

00:56:46.000 How many people have them in their eyes?

00:56:48.000 Look at all those pictures of the eyeballs.

00:56:50.000 Yeah, I killed this one bear one time, and those worms, they were- That one on the left, Jamie, right at the left of your cursor, right there.

00:56:56.000 Click on that.

00:56:57.000 It says 15 worms in that one.

00:56:59.000 Click on that.

00:57:00.000 Oh my god!

00:57:02.000 Their eyeballs overcome with fucking worms!

00:57:06.000 Yeah, I've had to deal with those worms, but not in me.

00:57:09.000 15 centimeters, that's what it says.

00:57:10.000 Oh, okay.

00:57:11.000 That's so long.

00:57:12.000 Yeah, they're long.

00:57:13.000 They're about as big around as your pinky.

00:57:16.000 Oh, God.

00:57:18.000 There's 14 worms in this little woman's eye.

00:57:20.000 Oh, my God!

00:57:21.000 Look at her fucking eye!

00:57:24.000 Oh my god, that's so insane.

00:57:27.000 Fuck parasites, man.

00:57:29.000 There's so many parasites, it's creepy.

00:57:31.000 Like, I've seen a lot of parasites, but most of them won't hurt a human.

00:57:34.000 Those are one that will.

00:57:35.000 And the one that's in the grizzly bear is just a slightly different variation from that one that's in raccoons.

00:57:40.000 It's Bayless Ascarus Transfuga lives in the grizzlies up there.

00:57:44.000 So are you wearing rubber gloves when you cut them open and everything?

00:57:47.000 No.

00:57:47.000 Hell no.

00:57:48.000 No?

00:57:48.000 No.

00:57:49.000 But I did build a big bonfire right there because it was right in my yard.

00:57:52.000 And I just burned the ground because I got little kids up there and they were crawling around that time playing and stuff.

00:57:58.000 And I just built this huge bonfire because I want to make sure no eggs.

00:58:00.000 The eggs are very resilient.

00:58:02.000 They can last for years and years in the environment.

00:58:04.000 They can survive being frozen all winter.

00:58:06.000 Really?

00:58:07.000 Oh yeah.

00:58:07.000 They're microscopic eggs.

00:58:08.000 That's what you got to worry about.

00:58:09.000 Not the big worm.

00:58:10.000 You got to worry about the eggs.

00:58:12.000 Fuck!

00:58:13.000 A lot of bear hunters don't know this.

00:58:15.000 When you're handling a bear skin, those eggs are on the fur.

00:58:19.000 Yeah.

00:58:20.000 If you're playing around with a bear skin before it gets tanned and then you go like this or something, all of a sudden you've got those eggs in you.

00:58:28.000 Scary shit.

00:58:29.000 Dude.

00:58:31.000 Fuck that.

00:58:34.000 Oh, that's one of my number one fears.

00:58:36.000 Something creepy crawly growing inside me.

00:58:40.000 Getting in my eyeballs and into my brain tissue.

00:58:42.000 I have a buddy of mine, my friend Justin Wren.

00:58:45.000 He does a charity called Fight for the Forgotten.

00:58:48.000 And he builds wells for the pygmies.

00:58:51.000 And we help sponsor him and we do some things with him.

00:58:54.000 And he goes back and forth to the Congo like a couple times a year.

00:58:58.000 And he went there recently and and like six months ago and has caught a parasite that they can't identify and they think it might be in his brain they don't know where it is but like he'll work out really hard and then he'll be shivering with like pale skin and you know they're trying to do all these different things to him to try to eradicate the parasites they don't even know exactly what he has because he's so deep into the jungle he's so deep in the Congo he's going where a lot of Western people don't go

00:59:28.000 so they're They're really baffled.

00:59:31.000 They're like, we don't know what the fuck you have.

00:59:33.000 And he's had it for months.

00:59:35.000 Months and months and months of suffering.

00:59:39.000 It's taken a toll on him across the board.

00:59:41.000 Every aspect of his health has deteriorated because of this.

00:59:45.000 It's really creepy.

00:59:47.000 I've heard of people dying from parasites they picked up in the tropics.

00:59:52.000 So, when you eat the wolf, what do you eat?

00:59:55.000 Do you eat the back straps?

00:59:56.000 Do you cook the hams?

00:59:58.000 How do you eat a wolf?

01:00:00.000 The only way that I like to eat a wolf is to boil it for a good long time because wolves, too, will have parasites.

01:00:05.000 They'll have trichinosis.

01:00:07.000 They're meat eaters.

01:00:07.000 Anything that eats meat, you want to make sure it's thoroughly cooked.

01:00:10.000 I like to boil it.

01:00:12.000 Boiled wolf.

01:00:13.000 Yeah.

01:00:13.000 I haven't eaten a lot of wolf.

01:00:15.000 I've eaten wolf, you know, three or four times when I didn't have much else.

01:00:18.000 And I figured, hey, I better take advantage of this food I got here rather than give it to something else to eat.

01:00:23.000 Do you feed it to your family?

01:00:25.000 They've probably eaten wolf like my kids when they were little maybe once or something.

01:00:30.000 That is hilarious.

01:00:31.000 How many people could you ask that to?

01:00:32.000 And they go, yeah, my kids have probably eaten wolf.

01:00:36.000 I don't know.

01:00:36.000 I met these Mongolians once, and they were like, oh, you shoot some wolves?

01:00:40.000 We want wolf meat.

01:00:41.000 We love wolf meat.

01:00:42.000 The Mongolians, they're all into it.

01:00:44.000 Yeah, a lot of Native Americans were into wolf meat.

01:00:46.000 I don't like it.

01:00:47.000 A lot of trappers were into wolf meat.

01:00:49.000 Well, that's what they had to eat.

01:00:50.000 Yeah, but some of them actually preferred it.

01:00:53.000 Really?

01:00:53.000 Yeah.

01:00:53.000 Yeah, there was something from the Lewis Clark exhibition.

01:00:55.000 There's another thing that...

01:00:57.000 Expedition.

01:00:59.000 There was something from...

01:01:00.000 Ranella was telling me about it.

01:01:01.000 Some guys actually preferred wolf meat.

01:01:03.000 It was like their favorite meat.

01:01:05.000 Domestic dog.

01:01:06.000 Lewis and Clark expedition, they would buy dogs from the Indians and eat them because they didn't want to eat salmon.

01:01:11.000 They had fish, is what I heard.

01:01:13.000 They could have eaten, but they'd rather eat dog because they wanted red meat.

01:01:17.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:01:18.000 Yeah.

01:01:19.000 Wow.

01:01:20.000 When they got way out, like the Columbia River area.

01:01:24.000 So did you eat these wolves that you shot?

01:01:27.000 I ate a little bit of it because I was short on food at that time, that winter.

01:01:31.000 You know, not like the whole thing, but a few meals of it.

01:01:34.000 So you boil it and how do you do it?

01:01:36.000 Like onions, potatoes, make a soup?

01:01:38.000 I didn't have anything like that.

01:01:39.000 No?

01:01:40.000 I mean...

01:01:40.000 No, I'm out there all winter long.

01:01:42.000 That was 2012, 2013. I didn't have any vegetables.

01:01:48.000 Do you know where I get the vegetables?

01:01:49.000 Out of the caribou's stomach.

01:01:50.000 What the caribou eats for plant food, that's what I get for plant food in the winter.

01:01:53.000 That's the only...

01:01:54.000 So you'd actually eat their stomach contents?

01:01:56.000 Yeah.

01:01:56.000 Really?

01:01:57.000 Sure.

01:01:58.000 People's done it for thousands of years.

01:01:59.000 I believe you.

01:02:00.000 I believe they have.

01:02:02.000 Not only that, but I'd pickle meat in it.

01:02:03.000 I'd take tenderloins off of caribou who are great pickled in their stomach contents.

01:02:08.000 Yeah.

01:02:08.000 Pickled in your stomach contents.

01:02:10.000 Explain that to me.

01:02:11.000 How do you do that?

01:02:12.000 Well, you got to learn about caribou's stomach because you don't want to go too far downstream.

01:02:16.000 It starts turning brownish.

01:02:19.000 Right.

01:02:19.000 But like the first, the big chamber, the rumen, when they eat these lichens, in the winter that's what they're feeding on.

01:02:27.000 Mm-hmm.

01:02:29.000 You can't eat those lichens off the ground.

01:02:31.000 They're harsh.

01:02:33.000 But when it's partially digested in a caribou stomach, it actually is an edible food.

01:02:37.000 And the old people used to eat these a lot.

01:02:39.000 I read about it.

01:02:40.000 And I even talked to some people who had done it, you know, when they were kids and stuff.

01:02:44.000 And sure enough, it's not bad stuff.

01:02:47.000 I got hooked on it, man.

01:02:48.000 One winter, I was eating a lot of caribou stomach contents.

01:02:51.000 And yeah, my family wasn't into that.

01:02:53.000 They were like looking at me like, and I was like, oh man, it's like salad.

01:02:56.000 This stuff's good.

01:02:57.000 Yeah.

01:02:58.000 I don't eat much of that anymore.

01:03:00.000 Basically, I went as primitive as I could go, and I satisfied my curiosity about living that extreme of a subsistence lifestyle.

01:03:09.000 So now, I eat much more store-bought vegetables.

01:03:13.000 I eat normal foods.

01:03:17.000 But for a time there, for a few years, I got down to where I was eating caribou stomach contents.

01:03:23.000 I was doing anything.

01:03:24.000 I just wanted to...

01:03:28.000 Just immerse myself in that whole environment out there.

01:03:31.000 I wanted to get my food right there.

01:03:33.000 What I could see.

01:03:34.000 What I could get myself.

01:03:37.000 Just get right into it.

01:03:39.000 You know, 15 months without even going out to town, not talking to other people.

01:03:43.000 I mean, that time I had my wife there.

01:03:46.000 But just to really get into a different state of consciousness.

01:03:51.000 It puts you in a different state of consciousness, and it's a beautiful thing.

01:03:54.000 And when you said pickled stomach contents...

01:03:58.000 How are you pickling a tenderloin in the stomach contents?

01:04:02.000 You just take the caribou.

01:04:04.000 You get to the right chamber of the stomach.

01:04:07.000 They've got four chambers on their stomach.

01:04:10.000 You just cut a little slit in it.

01:04:12.000 Just after you've pulled the guts out and you just slip the meat in there.

01:04:16.000 You slip it right into the rumen and the contents there.

01:04:20.000 And what happens is, assuming the temperature is about right, it will retain a lot of heat.

01:04:26.000 It creates heat.

01:04:27.000 I think the micro organisms in there create heat because if you just bury that in snow, and the snow of course insulates it, it'll stay warm for quite a while.

01:04:40.000 And if it was really cold, it might not work out.

01:04:43.000 It might freeze solid before it pickled.

01:04:44.000 But if it's the right temperature, the meat will turn brownish color over time and it'll be pickled.

01:04:50.000 Old people used to do this all the time.

01:04:52.000 I read about this, you know, 20 years ago.

01:04:54.000 And then I talked to people and I said, yeah, this is safe to do.

01:04:58.000 So I tried it and there was a winter there where that's where I got a lot of my vegetables was out of the caribou stomach.

01:05:04.000 And the meat will just, it'll turn brownish first on the outer part of the meat and then all the way through it and it gets pickled.

01:05:12.000 I've done a lot of different things with meat.

01:05:13.000 You know what I like to do with meat?

01:05:14.000 A lot of people don't realize because you live in the modern world and just like me when I grew up, right?

01:05:21.000 Meat's dangerous if it's raw.

01:05:24.000 You've got to be careful.

01:05:24.000 You've got to wash everything, be careful.

01:05:27.000 Actually, what I've found is that it just all depends on the conditions.

01:05:31.000 Once you learn how to handle meat properly, you can do a lot of things with meat that most people would be scared to death of, and it's completely safe as far as I'm concerned.

01:05:39.000 I never had any problems with it, but...

01:05:41.000 Like moisture is very important.

01:05:43.000 If you buy meat in the store, it's wrapped in plastic.

01:05:45.000 That keeps it moist.

01:05:46.000 You let it sit around for a while, it spoils.

01:05:47.000 And it doesn't take long.

01:05:48.000 Leave meat out of your refrigerator, it'll be spoiled in a day, right?

01:05:51.000 But if you take a muscle out of an animal and you butcher it properly, you separate the muscle as one piece.

01:06:01.000 You don't make a bunch of cuts in the fascia.

01:06:04.000 You can take a muscle that's two or three inches thick.

01:06:08.000 Don't put it in plastic.

01:06:09.000 Don't wrap it up.

01:06:10.000 That'll cause it to spoil.

01:06:11.000 You leave it right out in the air.

01:06:13.000 Two or three inch thick mussel.

01:06:15.000 I set them on a rack up high above my wood stove.

01:06:18.000 It's like 100 degrees up there sometimes.

01:06:20.000 Other times it's cold up there.

01:06:21.000 It just varies during the day depending on how the fire is stoked, right?

01:06:25.000 I'll let it sit there for a week, 10 days, and then I'll eat it.

01:06:29.000 Never cook it.

01:06:30.000 Just let it sit there.

01:06:31.000 Really?

01:06:32.000 Yeah.

01:06:32.000 Never cook it?

01:06:33.000 No.

01:06:34.000 Just let it sit there.

01:06:36.000 So it gets a crust on the outside?

01:06:38.000 It gets a crust on the outside, but it's too thick of a piece to dry, like you would dry jerky or something.

01:06:44.000 Right.

01:06:44.000 It stays moist inside.

01:06:45.000 It's like making cheese.

01:06:47.000 It turns into something like cheese.

01:06:49.000 It gets different flavors.

01:06:51.000 You're aging it.

01:06:52.000 Yeah.

01:06:52.000 You're aging.

01:06:53.000 It's actually fermentation that's taking place.

01:06:56.000 I believe it's actually a fermentation process.

01:06:59.000 But it takes on different flavors.

01:07:01.000 I really like it.

01:07:01.000 I call it gummy meat because that's what my kids used to call it.

01:07:04.000 Gummy meat?

01:07:05.000 Gummy meat because it gets kind of gummy.

01:07:08.000 Oh, God.

01:07:09.000 No, it's good.

01:07:10.000 It's good.

01:07:11.000 Yeah.

01:07:11.000 It really is.

01:07:12.000 I wish I had some.

01:07:13.000 I was saying when I left Alaska, I wish I had something like that to bring Joe down, but I didn't have anything like that.

01:07:21.000 So, what's going on here?

01:07:23.000 I was looking for something about the caribou stomach, and there's this thing called the Polar Manual made by the government, I think the Navy.

01:07:29.000 It says the caribou back fat is better than chewing gum.

01:07:33.000 I think this was made in 1961, so it might be even older.

01:07:36.000 Look at this.

01:07:37.000 Old-timers from the north mention many interesting Eskimo Indian and Siberian foods.

01:07:41.000 Pemmican.

01:07:42.000 I've heard of that.

01:07:43.000 It's the meat of bear, seal, caribou, and walrus mixed together with fish, eggs, and dried into a hard frozen block.

01:07:51.000 Trapper's peaches and cream is chewing dried beaver tail.

01:07:57.000 Caribou back fat is better than chewing gum.

01:08:00.000 Don't overlook the contents of a seal's stomach for a fresh-fried fish dinner, nor the contents of a caribou's stomach mixed with the trip lining as a tasty, in quotes, salad of reindeer moss and lichens.

01:08:18.000 Properly, how's that word?

01:08:19.000 Acidulated?

01:08:20.000 I guess, yeah.

01:08:21.000 Acidulated?

01:08:21.000 Yeah.

01:08:22.000 I like the next one there.

01:08:23.000 Walrus milk that death gives 16 quarts of milk.

01:08:26.000 I love dairy products.

01:08:28.000 You know, you can't get them out there.

01:08:30.000 16 quarts of milk from a walrus.

01:08:32.000 I have one time.

01:08:33.000 I was thinking about milking a caribou after I killed her, but I didn't just because she was in bad shape.

01:08:39.000 She had been attacked by the wolves, and she had an infection in her leg, and I was afraid that somehow I might get sick.

01:08:45.000 But I just remember this lactating caribou that I had killed, and I was thinking...

01:08:49.000 I'd never heard of people doing that, but milking an animal after it died until you just read that, but...

01:08:54.000 So you were worried you would have taken the milk, except for the fact that she had been infected?

01:09:00.000 She was the one that only had two good legs, and her back leg going right up there towards her udder.

01:09:05.000 Oh, it was in terrible shape.

01:09:07.000 It was full of pus.

01:09:12.000 Damn.

01:09:13.000 I encountered that with an elk shot once.

01:09:16.000 He had been stabbed.

01:09:18.000 By another elk, like in one of his back legs, and it was just all filled with pus.

01:09:24.000 Like when we were quartering him and taking it apart, there was this one section that was just all pus.

01:09:30.000 It was fucking nasty.

01:09:32.000 I've seen the same thing in a moose, stabbed in the back, like in the haunch there, by one of the tines.

01:09:38.000 So when you boiled the wolf, how are you eating that?

01:09:45.000 Just plain.

01:09:46.000 Just chopping it up?

01:09:47.000 You can fry it after you boil it, give it a little extra flavor.

01:09:49.000 Is that what you do?

01:09:50.000 If you've got some fat, yeah.

01:09:51.000 Was that what you were doing or were you just eating it boiled?

01:09:54.000 Both.

01:09:55.000 What is it like?

01:09:56.000 Is there something you could...

01:09:58.000 Tastes a little wolfy.

01:09:59.000 Wolfy.

01:10:01.000 I'm not much into wolf meat.

01:10:03.000 Right.

01:10:04.000 It's a desperation food, right?

01:10:05.000 Yeah.

01:10:05.000 Is that how you would look at it?

01:10:07.000 If I didn't have something else, I'd eat wolf, but...

01:10:09.000 Yeah.

01:10:09.000 You know, I got other things.

01:10:11.000 There's all kinds of stuff you can do with food.

01:10:14.000 You can...

01:10:15.000 You know, you can get as primitive as you want.

01:10:19.000 Yeah, I can imagine.

01:10:20.000 But there's so much else going on.

01:10:22.000 Like, for me now...

01:10:27.000 If you want to live that primitively off the land, that's all you do.

01:10:33.000 It takes all your time.

01:10:36.000 If you want to share that life with other people, like what I've been trying to do the last six years, you can't just do that.

01:10:46.000 Yeah, because you don't really have the amount of time to hunt and gather like you would.

01:10:51.000 I wouldn't even have the ability to communicate.

01:10:53.000 Right.

01:10:53.000 I wouldn't even be able to arrange to be on your show if I was out there living the way I was living, you know, six, seven, eight years ago.

01:11:00.000 Right.

01:11:01.000 So, I want to, like...

01:11:05.000 How long did it take before you got it down where you knew what to do?

01:11:09.000 You said when you went out there the first time, you really had never even hunted before.

01:11:12.000 Correct.

01:11:13.000 So how long did it take before you had a system down where you're like, okay, I got this.

01:11:18.000 I know what I'm doing.

01:11:20.000 Well, I did my homework.

01:11:21.000 I did a lot of reading before I went out there.

01:11:24.000 What did you do?

01:11:27.000 You know, I picked it up pretty fast.

01:11:30.000 Like that first moose I killed, the biggest thing I had ever killed before that was a snowshoe hare.

01:11:35.000 But I did alright.

01:11:36.000 I mean, I salvaged that whole moose, and it was 600 yards from the lake.

01:11:39.000 I got it all down to the lake.

01:11:40.000 I got it back to the camp.

01:11:42.000 I just believe in approaching problems in a measured way.

01:11:45.000 Don't rush into it.

01:11:46.000 It could be dangerous.

01:11:48.000 You know, kids have gone out there.

01:11:49.000 They want to live off the land.

01:11:50.000 They've starved to death.

01:11:51.000 People have died.

01:11:53.000 But if you do your homework, if you want to do something like that, Not just going and living in the wilderness.

01:11:59.000 If you want to do anything dangerous, do it carefully.

01:12:04.000 So I studied so much before I actually started putting it into practice that it came pretty fast, you know.

01:12:12.000 Within a couple years, I felt like I pretty much had things together out there.

01:12:17.000 A couple years is a long time, though.

01:12:20.000 So for a couple years, you're just kind of piecing it together?

01:12:23.000 Well, I was on a steeper learning curve the first couple years.

01:12:26.000 I'm still learning.

01:12:27.000 I mean, we're all learning all the time.

01:12:30.000 But, yeah, like that winter that I learned that you can't count on the caribou.

01:12:35.000 You know?

01:12:36.000 If you got two people out there, you better get two moose in the fall because a caribou might not show up.

01:12:43.000 So would you, like when you shot a moose and you knew you had enough meat, you would stop right there?

01:12:49.000 You'd say, okay, I'm good.

01:12:50.000 Yeah.

01:12:51.000 I mean, in the fall, normally, you know, like 14 falls I've spent out there, I've always gotten a moose in September.

01:13:01.000 Always.

01:13:02.000 And normally, if I'm alone, that's all I need is one moose.

01:13:08.000 That'll last six months, even if I didn't get caribou.

01:13:13.000 If I'm with a woman or I got two little kids out there like I did some years, that's not going to be enough to go through the whole winter.

01:13:22.000 So you would get another moose?

01:13:24.000 Some years I did get two moose.

01:13:26.000 What are the regulations?

01:13:28.000 The regulations?

01:13:30.000 There's different regulations for assistance hunting, right?

01:13:33.000 First of all...

01:13:34.000 Not really.

01:13:35.000 In that particular area, there really isn't much difference at all in subsistence regulations.

01:13:41.000 There are a lot of myths about that.

01:13:44.000 The only difference where I was in terms of subsistence regulations was federal regulations as they applied to migratory waterfowl.

01:13:54.000 So I can legally, when I'm living there, hunt ducks in the springtime.

01:14:00.000 But all the other seasons are exactly the same.

01:14:03.000 But the truth of it is, Joe, when I first went out there, I couldn't even have a hunting license.

01:14:08.000 The hunting license expires in December.

01:14:10.000 How the hell am I going to get a new one?

01:14:13.000 I mean, January, February, March, April.

01:14:15.000 Sometimes I'd go to town in the summer and get a new hunting license.

01:14:20.000 I didn't even have a calendar.

01:14:25.000 I didn't have a watch.

01:14:26.000 There's times I didn't know.

01:14:27.000 I figured, okay, it's around the equinox.

01:14:30.000 It's late September.

01:14:30.000 That's the moose hunting time.

01:14:32.000 But what mattered to me was that the flies were no longer laying eggs.

01:14:35.000 Then I could hunt moose.

01:14:36.000 It was legal because the legal season actually started even earlier than that, but I didn't care about the legal season.

01:14:41.000 What I cared about was when I can preserve the meat.

01:14:44.000 And, you know, the caribou season is pretty much all winter long, pretty much all year long.

01:14:49.000 I think they've got a month or two in the summer now you can't hunt them, but the season didn't affect me too much.

01:14:54.000 I mean, one difference in my life now is that I play by the rules.

01:15:00.000 I didn't used to play by the rules.

01:15:01.000 It was illegal for me to even live there.

01:15:04.000 When I got up to Alaska, I discovered that, hey, you can't just go live out in the bush legally, you know?

01:15:10.000 I went and talked to the state.

01:15:11.000 I said, this is what I want to do.

01:15:12.000 They said, that's actually illegal.

01:15:15.000 Well, it's actually illegal, but things were loosely enforced 20 years ago, too.

01:15:21.000 I got away with it for 17 years before I had a permit to live there.

01:15:25.000 So when you had to get a permit, do you have to tell them, hey, I've been living there for 17 years?

01:15:29.000 Oh, no, they flew out and told me, hey, you've been living here 17 years, you've got to start paying for a permit.

01:15:35.000 Really?

01:15:35.000 Actually, you can't get a permit to live there.

01:15:38.000 They flew out to visit you?

01:15:38.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:15:39.000 I'd been waiting for 17 years.

01:15:42.000 I built the camp, you know, the original tank camp in 2000. So I occupied that spot since 2000. It was a known thing.

01:15:50.000 I had told people at the agencies that are managing that land that I was going to go out there and everything.

01:15:55.000 But yeah, 20 years ago, it was just a little looser, I think.

01:15:59.000 And also, I wasn't hurting anybody.

01:16:01.000 Who cared?

01:16:01.000 There was nobody else out there.

01:16:03.000 It wasn't like there were other people that wanted to do something with that spot or anything.

01:16:06.000 So...

01:16:09.000 You know, some years there would be a state trooper that would land there in a little ski plane and check on me.

01:16:16.000 Ask me, hey Glenn, you need anything?

01:16:17.000 I can bring you some toilet paper next time I come by or something.

01:16:23.000 It was never a problem, but as time went on, of course, and once I got in a TV show, I mean, I thought when I got in the show, I was like, okay, I'm going to, you know.

01:16:30.000 Blow your cover.

01:16:31.000 Blow my cover, for sure.

01:16:36.000 I remember saying, hey, can we do this show without telling people where I am?

01:16:38.000 No, no, no, we can't do that.

01:16:40.000 Oh, no.

01:16:41.000 So do people come to visit you?

01:16:42.000 People discovered where I was the first week I was on TV. I had people writing to me saying, hey, is this your camp?

01:16:48.000 And they had a satellite photo of it.

01:16:49.000 They're like, we tracked you down.

01:16:50.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

01:16:52.000 That had to feel weird.

01:16:55.000 That had to feel so weird.

01:16:56.000 I tell you, I kind of was like...

01:16:59.000 I was like, wow, congratulations, you found it.

01:17:01.000 I thought it was amazing, like, the skill.

01:17:03.000 Because we didn't say exactly where it was on TV. These guys figured it out.

01:17:07.000 Like, looking at the footage on TV, the mountains, and just knowing that it was somewhere in the Chandelier area, which is a huge area.

01:17:14.000 And then they started looking at satellite photos, and they tracked me down.

01:17:17.000 I was, like, complimenting them, like, good job.

01:17:20.000 Well, I mean, 60 miles off the hall road, all they have to do is make a grid.

01:17:25.000 Well, 60 miles as you walk, not as the raven flies.

01:17:28.000 Oh, okay.

01:17:28.000 We don't have any crows up there.

01:17:33.000 Yeah, it changed things.

01:17:35.000 And, you know, there was one day just a couple years ago when I was out there with Trisha, my partner now, and heard a plane coming in the distance.

01:17:44.000 And you just don't hear planes coming in low, like, going to land very often.

01:17:48.000 Like, maybe three, four times in 20 years I've ever had a plane come out there and land when I was out there.

01:17:54.000 Well, except the state troopers landed maybe a half a dozen times.

01:17:57.000 But...

01:18:00.000 I hear this plane coming, and I was like, they're landing here.

01:18:05.000 And I said to Tricia, I said, this could be the day I've been waiting for for 17 years.

01:18:09.000 It's probably the state coming to talk to me about the situation here, and it was.

01:18:15.000 You've been waiting for 17 years.

01:18:17.000 Well, I mean, yeah, it had been a long time.

01:18:21.000 So, I mean, I just believe in being honest about stuff, you know?

01:18:26.000 It's like, there's no point.

01:18:27.000 I mean, I told everybody what I was doing.

01:18:29.000 Right.

01:18:30.000 But just because it happened to be technically illegal, I wasn't going to give up my dream of living in the Alaska wilderness.

01:18:39.000 So what's the first thing they say to you when they land?

01:18:42.000 Hey Glenn, saw you on TV. Hi, how's it going?

01:18:46.000 The pilot who brought him felt real bad, you know, because he knew me.

01:18:49.000 Oh.

01:18:50.000 And they had hired him, but...

01:18:52.000 No, I didn't mind.

01:18:53.000 I mean, what the hell?

01:18:55.000 I was living on state land.

01:18:56.000 I didn't have a permit.

01:18:56.000 I needed a permit.

01:18:57.000 Right.

01:18:58.000 So how does that work?

01:19:00.000 How much does it cost?

01:19:02.000 I paid $1,000 a year after that.

01:19:04.000 I had to pay some back fees.

01:19:07.000 But honestly, you can't get a permit to live on public land.

01:19:10.000 You can get a permit to do certain things there.

01:19:12.000 I was given a permit at that time for a commercial trapping permit or trapping cabin permit, they call it, for the purpose of making television.

01:19:22.000 I paid $1,000 a year for that.

01:19:26.000 I paid all my back dues.

01:19:27.000 I paid everything off.

01:19:28.000 I'm okay.

01:19:29.000 You're clear.

01:19:29.000 I'm clear.

01:19:30.000 But what about hunting licenses?

01:19:31.000 I talk about it even if I'm open.

01:19:35.000 I got no secrets.

01:19:37.000 But there's no risk of them taking away your hunting license because you've hunted without one for a long time?

01:19:43.000 I don't know what the statute of limitations is on that one, but I play by the book now.

01:19:50.000 Ever since six years ago, I pretty much got on TV, and by that time, there was no problem getting a hunting license because I got a lot of planes going back and forth.

01:19:59.000 I mean, I always buy my hunting license.

01:20:02.000 In the early years, there were times when I literally had no way to get a hunting license when it would expire in December.

01:20:07.000 When I got to town the next time I bought a hunting license, I mean, I always paid every year.

01:20:10.000 Right.

01:20:13.000 But, yeah, I mean, I try to do it by the book now.

01:20:17.000 Did you ever eat any raven?

01:20:19.000 No.

01:20:20.000 I heard raven tastes good.

01:20:22.000 I heard crow.

01:20:23.000 I heard crow tastes good.

01:20:26.000 I heard it's very similar to like diver duck.

01:20:28.000 Like if you prepare correctly, you know, diver ducks.

01:20:32.000 Yeah, like them are gansers.

01:20:33.000 More of a fishy taste to them.

01:20:35.000 Oh, you mean like, yeah, like some of them, you know, like a scoter.

01:20:40.000 Yeah, but apparently raven, a crow, you can eat it.

01:20:45.000 It's good.

01:20:45.000 Oh, you can eat anything.

01:20:46.000 It's whether or not you want to.

01:20:48.000 What's the weirdest shit you've eaten?

01:20:49.000 Weasels.

01:20:50.000 Weasels.

01:20:54.000 No question.

01:20:55.000 That was the weirdest.

01:20:56.000 Yeah.

01:20:57.000 It was like that hand-to-mouth period when ran out of moose meat, caribou didn't show up.

01:21:02.000 I was starving.

01:21:03.000 I was literally starving.

01:21:04.000 And I was getting a little bit to eat every day, but I was running all over the mountains hunting, burning up lots of calories.

01:21:08.000 And I can eat three or four pounds of meat a day.

01:21:10.000 Some days all I was eating was a grouse or something.

01:21:12.000 Mm-hmm.

01:21:13.000 And there were a couple days when the only thing I brought home were a couple weasels.

01:21:19.000 You know, I was trapping Martin.

01:21:20.000 I had Martin traps out, and sometimes weasels go into him.

01:21:23.000 And I've eaten weasel.

01:21:25.000 And I'll tell you something about weasel.

01:21:26.000 They smell like a skunk.

01:21:28.000 They've got a scent gland.

01:21:30.000 They're terrible.

01:21:30.000 If you ever want a weasel for food, you've got to skin it real carefully.

01:21:35.000 You don't want to hit the scent gland.

01:21:37.000 And then the other thing about a weasel is if you just fry them up real hot, they're so small, you can eat just about every bone in them.

01:21:44.000 Like the legs, just crunch, crunch, crunch.

01:21:46.000 Really?

01:21:47.000 Oh, yeah.

01:21:47.000 Yeah.

01:21:48.000 And weasels are probably carnivorous, right?

01:21:51.000 So you probably have to cook right through them, right?

01:21:53.000 They live on voles.

01:21:54.000 Oh, yeah.

01:21:55.000 Oh, I fried them right up until they were like black.

01:21:57.000 They live on little mice, right?

01:21:58.000 Yeah.

01:21:59.000 Well, voles are mouse-like rodents that live in the Brooks Range.

01:22:02.000 We don't have real mice.

01:22:03.000 Oh.

01:22:04.000 So a vol's like a cousin of a mouse or something?

01:22:07.000 Yeah.

01:22:07.000 They're related.

01:22:08.000 So you just fry it until everything's dead?

01:22:12.000 Yeah.

01:22:13.000 Hopefully.

01:22:14.000 That was not good.

01:22:15.000 That was the weirdest stuff I ever ate.

01:22:17.000 How does it taste like?

01:22:19.000 It's not good.

01:22:21.000 It depends on how good a job you do skinning them.

01:22:23.000 They smell like a skunk.

01:22:24.000 I mean, you know, flavors mostly smell.

01:22:27.000 Is your family eating this weasel too at the time?

01:22:30.000 Sylvia at the time was out there with me.

01:22:31.000 She ate weasel?

01:22:33.000 Yeah.

01:22:33.000 What was the look on her face while she was eating weasel?

01:22:38.000 What?

01:22:45.000 Yeah.

01:22:57.000 Wow.

01:22:58.000 Why get that?

01:22:59.000 People are always telling me, like, you're never going to find a woman to live like that out there.

01:23:03.000 But actually, it's appealing to certain people.

01:23:06.000 I think a lot of people, that's why people watch it on TV, people want to be free, right?

01:23:10.000 Yeah.

01:23:11.000 And people want to be alive.

01:23:13.000 Yeah.

01:23:13.000 And a lot of people don't feel it today.

01:23:15.000 It's true.

01:23:16.000 If you spend your whole life in an office or a courtroom, and before that you were in school, you've never really...

01:23:25.000 Yeah, you just feel trapped.

01:23:28.000 Yeah, and that grind.

01:23:29.000 The grinder just keeps showing up at the office every day, and cases are piling up.

01:23:36.000 Next thing you know, she's living with Glenn.

01:23:40.000 By the side of a lake, dodging wolves.

01:23:43.000 What?

01:23:45.000 I get it, man.

01:23:47.000 The appeal of it is why those shows are so successful.

01:23:50.000 Yeah.

01:23:50.000 I mean, that show is really successful.

01:23:52.000 I had Sue Akins on the podcast before.

01:23:54.000 She's a really fascinating human, too.

01:23:56.000 Really, really enjoy talking to her.

01:23:58.000 Like, what a tough broad.

01:24:00.000 I'm not on the show anymore, you know.

01:24:01.000 Yeah, I know.

01:24:02.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:04.000 What happened with you and the show?

01:24:06.000 Did you guys have a falling out?

01:24:06.000 Good question.

01:24:07.000 Yeah, we had a falling out.

01:24:08.000 What was the falling out about?

01:24:09.000 They never told me exactly.

01:24:11.000 They just got rid of you?

01:24:13.000 They renewed my contract.

01:24:14.000 We went out and filmed one episode and I never heard from them again.

01:24:19.000 Really?

01:24:19.000 Yeah.

01:24:20.000 I mean, not about working on the show anymore.

01:24:22.000 Do you think they just decided you weren't a storyline that was as successful?

01:24:28.000 I think I'm very popular with the fans.

01:24:31.000 Everybody that I talk to, I mean, the viewers...

01:24:35.000 No, you were my favorite guy.

01:24:36.000 I love it because people tell me that I really made a difference in their life.

01:24:41.000 Like they learned something, they got inspired, they actually made changes in their life, and I hear this all the time.

01:24:46.000 Like yesterday, traveling, you know, I had four different people come up and talk to me about it.

01:24:52.000 But I think I went about as far as I could go in this show because I was always pushing to tell stories or to share things that didn't fit into the concept they had.

01:25:05.000 When you make a TV show, you got a concept before you find the people to put in it, right?

01:25:10.000 Mm-hmm.

01:25:12.000 Life Below Zero is a show about supposedly people living a subsistence lifestyle in the bush.

01:25:21.000 And that's part of my life, but there's a lot more to it.

01:25:25.000 And I'm a person who's always trying to learn and grow and do new things and expand.

01:25:31.000 So when they met me, I fit into their show like a hand in a glove.

01:25:37.000 But I wanted to do more.

01:25:39.000 And I wanted to share more.

01:25:41.000 So I get bored.

01:25:42.000 I think I'm in 85 episodes of Life Blows Zero.

01:25:45.000 I made a lot of TV. I wasn't satisfied just to show people what it's like to search for your food and chop down a tree.

01:25:55.000 For your firewood.

01:25:56.000 I wanted to do more.

01:25:58.000 So I was always pushing to do stories that were a little bit out of the range or the scope of what they envisioned for me to do in the show.

01:26:10.000 I wanted to fly on a little eight-pound paraglider off the top of the mountain to get back to my camp.

01:26:17.000 I've been dreaming about it for years.

01:26:19.000 And, you know, I said, hey, I'm going to do this.

01:26:22.000 I'm going to paraglide off this mountain.

01:26:23.000 I got a lot of resistance from the producers about stories.

01:26:26.000 You did something like that, though.

01:26:27.000 I did it.

01:26:28.000 And I was like, I want to film this.

01:26:30.000 And, you know, hey, if you guys don't want to film it, they didn't want to film it, I'll get somebody else to film it.

01:26:34.000 I am going to film this and I'm going to do this because I was excited about it.

01:26:37.000 They put it in the show, but I got a lot of resistance, and I wanted to teach people all the time about things, and that wasn't really maybe the best vehicle for it.

01:26:47.000 I mean, I had a blast doing the show.

01:26:49.000 I had an awesome time.

01:26:50.000 I learned a ton of stuff about making TV, about all kinds of things, and I made awesome friends.

01:26:56.000 The cameraman I worked with were some of the best people I've ever met in my life.

01:27:02.000 Overall had a great experience, but I was always pushing the limits of what they really wanted to do, I think, because I wanted to make a story, for example, about finding a site where Stone Age people had lived.

01:27:14.000 That was very unpopular with the producers.

01:27:17.000 But we did it.

01:27:19.000 I mean, I was just adamant.

01:27:20.000 Why would that be unpopular?

01:27:22.000 That's so interesting.

01:27:23.000 They said, you look like you're just walking around.

01:27:24.000 You look like you're just out there exploring, walking around.

01:27:26.000 We want to see you finding something to eat.

01:27:28.000 Go chop some.

01:27:28.000 Can you cut some more trees for us?

01:27:29.000 I was like, no.

01:27:30.000 I've cut enough trees on camera.

01:27:31.000 I want to do something worthwhile.

01:27:33.000 You know, I wanted to teach people things.

01:27:35.000 There's all kinds of stuff out there.

01:27:36.000 Nature.

01:27:37.000 I just wanted to climb the highest mountain anywhere around.

01:27:39.000 I'd never been up there.

01:27:39.000 I'd been looking at it for years and years.

01:27:41.000 Those were the kind of stories that I had to really twist people's arms to get on the show.

01:27:46.000 The fans loved them, but the producers for some reason didn't.

01:27:49.000 Now, this Stone Age site, did you find it?

01:27:52.000 Yeah.

01:27:52.000 Yeah?

01:27:53.000 Where was it?

01:27:54.000 It was amazing.

01:27:55.000 It was like...

01:27:56.000 Do you have photos of that?

01:27:59.000 Not that we can get to right now.

01:28:02.000 It was like...

01:28:03.000 We made a whole story on TV about it.

01:28:05.000 It was amazing.

01:28:05.000 I found the stumps.

01:28:07.000 I heard about it from somebody that had been there in the 1970s.

01:28:11.000 He said, there's a place where you can find stumps that were cut with a stone axe.

01:28:15.000 I was like, that's totally amazing.

01:28:16.000 Now, you've got to understand, the Stone Ages in Alaska was, we're talking like, what, maybe?

01:28:20.000 50 years ago?

01:28:21.000 Maybe 100, 150. Not that long ago.

01:28:24.000 Really?

01:28:25.000 And everything's frozen eight months of the year, so stumps last a long time.

01:28:30.000 These stumps were old.

01:28:32.000 They were still standing and you could touch them and you could knock them over.

01:28:36.000 They were like right on the edge.

01:28:37.000 They might not be there in 10 years.

01:28:39.000 It was amazing.

01:28:40.000 But yeah, this gentleman I know who grew up as a little kid out there with his dad.

01:28:46.000 His dad was a hunting guide.

01:28:47.000 They had been all over in this area.

01:28:49.000 And he told me that there was this place where people had camped and they had found rings of stones where they had had their skin tents and they found these stumps that were cut with stone axes and whatnot.

01:28:59.000 So we actually made a show.

01:29:01.000 It was awesome.

01:29:02.000 I went with two cameramen.

01:29:03.000 We walked for a couple days just to get there from my camp.

01:29:06.000 Wow.

01:29:07.000 And then just going by this verbal description that he had given me.

01:29:12.000 I was able to locate.

01:29:13.000 He told me about a game trail, and it was still there.

01:29:16.000 Like, the animals are still following the same route, you know?

01:29:19.000 And he said, you get there, you turn this way, you're going up, and the mountain's going to be there, and off to the side, you're going to see these stumps.

01:29:25.000 And sure enough, I found the stumps on camera.

01:29:27.000 It was amazing.

01:29:28.000 Wow!

01:29:29.000 I got one of them in Fairbanks I brought down with me.

01:29:32.000 That's so wild that it was just off of someone's description.

01:29:35.000 Yeah.

01:29:35.000 From the 1970s.

01:29:37.000 Yeah, Jack Recoff, he's an amazing man.

01:29:40.000 He still lives in the Brooks Range in a small village called Wiseman, and he was somebody that I learned a lot from after I got to Alaska.

01:29:46.000 Wiseman was on that show as well, wasn't it?

01:29:48.000 Didn't they film some stuff from that part of it?

01:29:52.000 Eric Salatan.

01:29:53.000 That's right.

01:29:54.000 Actually, the only person on the show that I knew prior to the show.

01:29:57.000 You knew him?

01:29:57.000 Eric and I had known each other for 10 years.

01:30:01.000 I met him not long after he came to Alaska.

01:30:03.000 He's another really interesting guy.

01:30:05.000 He is.

01:30:05.000 Yeah.

01:30:06.000 Unfortunately, Eric and I were friends and I kind of replaced him on the show is what happened.

01:30:12.000 But you guys were on the show together at the same time.

01:30:16.000 For a little while, there was a little overlap.

01:30:18.000 First, Eric was on for a year before me.

01:30:20.000 Then they found me.

01:30:22.000 Then we overlapped for a little while, and then they got rid of Eric.

01:30:25.000 So they would just get rid of you if they decided they were bored with your storyline?

01:30:29.000 There's other people living up there like that?

01:30:31.000 They'd just find them?

01:30:32.000 Office politics, I think.

01:30:34.000 Was it?

01:30:34.000 And also, just differences in creative vision.

01:30:38.000 I mean, I was not satisfied to just do the standard, I'm starving, I'm looking for firewood or whatever stories over and over.

01:30:44.000 I was always trying to push it.

01:30:46.000 I was doing paragliding, I was doing, you know, just exploring, showing people where Stone Age people lived, climbing mountains just for the joy of climbing them and sit up on top and philosophize about life.

01:30:57.000 Those are the kind of stories I like to do.

01:30:59.000 And that really wasn't the vision they had.

01:31:01.000 I think that was a lot of it.

01:31:02.000 But honestly, they didn't talk to me about it after they stopped working with me.

01:31:06.000 I still haven't talked to them about it.

01:31:08.000 So they just stopped?

01:31:10.000 Yeah.

01:31:10.000 They didn't call you up and say...

01:31:12.000 No, they renewed my contract.

01:31:14.000 Right.

01:31:15.000 They had an option to renew for one more year.

01:31:18.000 We shot one episode...

01:31:22.000 Radio silence.

01:31:23.000 After five months, I sent him an email and said, hey, what's up?

01:31:26.000 You guys planning on filming something or what's going on?

01:31:28.000 And I got about two lines back from it that said, sorry, the schedule's all full.

01:31:32.000 We don't have any plans to film with you.

01:31:34.000 Wow.

01:31:35.000 Yeah.

01:31:36.000 That must have been weird.

01:31:38.000 No kidding.

01:31:39.000 Seems like that's a lot of episodes to just sort of brush you off like that.

01:31:46.000 Were you difficult to work with?

01:31:47.000 The show producer told me a couple years ago he'd fire me if he could, but he couldn't.

01:31:51.000 Really?

01:31:52.000 The showrunner.

01:31:53.000 Why did he say that?

01:31:57.000 First of all, I didn't work with producers in the field.

01:32:00.000 After the first year and a half, I said, hey, I can produce myself in the field.

01:32:03.000 I don't need to work with producers anymore.

01:32:05.000 And they went along with that.

01:32:07.000 So I'm responsible for my own stories.

01:32:09.000 As far as I'm concerned, I'm the author of my own stories.

01:32:12.000 It's me and a couple of cameraman.

01:32:13.000 And we're out there and I'm making what I consider real TV. I'm sharing what I want to share.

01:32:18.000 Nobody's feeding me lines.

01:32:20.000 Nobody's telling me what I gotta do.

01:32:23.000 I'm producing myself.

01:32:25.000 I'm working with awesome cameramen and we were doing incredible things.

01:32:28.000 I made whole episodes of LBZ in the field with just one cameraman.

01:32:33.000 And then we send all the footage back to LA and they work all their magic and edit it and everything and do what they want with it.

01:32:38.000 But yeah, I've made several episodes with just me and one cameraman out there.

01:32:42.000 But that's a lot of...

01:32:45.000 A freedom that's not normally given to people on reality TV from what I'm told, and of course that caused some tensions.

01:32:51.000 So they wanted to control you more?

01:32:54.000 Oh yeah.

01:32:55.000 Yeah.

01:32:56.000 So why did he say that he would fire you if he could?

01:32:59.000 Guess he didn't like the kind of stories that I was creating out there.

01:33:02.000 Is that what it was?

01:33:02.000 Really?

01:33:04.000 Because I don't remember the details of that conversation, but there was just a general tension a lot.

01:33:10.000 I got a lot of negative feedback about what I was giving them.

01:33:15.000 And it was weird because people were loving it.

01:33:18.000 I mean, you know.

01:33:19.000 Like people that you would contact with on social media and… Man, yeah, I didn't even have the internet when I started this show.

01:33:25.000 I didn't have a cell phone when I started this show.

01:33:28.000 I just got all modern in the last years.

01:33:29.000 But yeah, I got on Facebook and I got thousands of people giving me positive feedback.

01:33:35.000 And when I travel anywhere or even go to Fairbanks, I was getting all this positive feedback.

01:33:39.000 So it seemed to me like the viewers really liked what I was doing.

01:33:41.000 But I did get a lot of negative feedback from certain particular people making the show that that wasn't what they really wanted.

01:33:50.000 They have a formula, right?

01:33:52.000 And the formula is survival.

01:33:53.000 It's really the formula.

01:33:55.000 Subsistence, survival, finding enough food to eat, chopping wood.

01:33:59.000 It's really appealing.

01:34:01.000 It's one of the more interesting things about those kind of shows.

01:34:04.000 It's like, what is it that's tapping in?

01:34:06.000 Or what is it tapping into?

01:34:08.000 What part of your ancient memory where this is really exciting to people is?

01:34:13.000 Because I think there's a lot of folks out there, like your lawyer friend or your opera friend, that there's something about the idea of getting away from everything and just living a way more simple life.

01:34:30.000 It seems like the antidote for them.

01:34:32.000 So when you watch this on television and you see these people just chopping wood and living by the land and dealing with the dangers of living in the bush, it's like there's something about it.

01:34:42.000 It's like make you tune in every week.

01:34:45.000 Yeah.

01:34:46.000 And I mean it is – it's beautiful stuff to share.

01:34:49.000 I think it's awesome.

01:34:51.000 Just for me – I don't think it's the perfect vehicle to share exactly what I want to share because I want to go a little deeper.

01:35:04.000 I want more than, you know, like a four-second soundbite.

01:35:09.000 And that's what I like about this show, Joe.

01:35:11.000 When I discovered your show, I was like, wow, there are people that just sit down and have a normal conversation rather than everything being chopped up and edited into little soundbites.

01:35:21.000 Yeah, and you get a chance to really talk about stuff.

01:35:25.000 You know, if you're sitting around just having a conversation with someone for three hours, you get to really expand on your ideas.

01:35:31.000 And if you said something that you think maybe you didn't say it right, you get to say it better.

01:35:36.000 Or, well, what I was saying was this.

01:35:37.000 You get to explain yourself, expand, and really get a thought across.

01:35:41.000 There's not a lot of places where you can do that in this world.

01:35:44.000 No.

01:35:45.000 And those reality TV shows, I mean, your situation sounded like it was pretty much you producing it, which would give you as much reality as they left in with editing.

01:35:58.000 But a lot of reality shows, you know as well as I do, they just set things up.

01:36:02.000 Like, hey, you're going to pretend like you lost your keys in that lake.

01:36:05.000 Fuck!

01:36:06.000 My keys!

01:36:07.000 Where's my key?

01:36:08.000 And you see bad acting like, oh my god.

01:36:10.000 And I know how it works.

01:36:11.000 I've done those shows before.

01:36:13.000 I know that there's someone who's always trying to set up these scenarios.

01:36:17.000 They're scripted.

01:36:18.000 It's like sort of non-scripted scripted.

01:36:20.000 Like they have a place to go to.

01:36:23.000 And you see them on these shows.

01:36:25.000 You can tell when people are acting.

01:36:26.000 It's like a weird feeling that you get.

01:36:28.000 Yeah.

01:36:28.000 When you know this guy's opened up this storage shed before, and he's opening up now, whoa, what do we got here?

01:36:34.000 Like, come on, man.

01:36:35.000 You're a terrible actor.

01:36:36.000 This is awful.

01:36:37.000 But there's something about these formulas that these people have created.

01:36:41.000 Reality television's a very strange animal.

01:36:43.000 Yeah.

01:36:44.000 Because it's not reality.

01:36:46.000 A lot of times, at least.

01:36:47.000 And one of the things I think that's really exciting about those shows like Life Below Zero, and your situation in particular, was that there's only so much of that you can fake.

01:36:57.000 I mean, just the actual...

01:37:01.000 The undisputable reality of your existence is so fascinating.

01:37:05.000 You have this tiny little fucking house that you built yourself on a lake and then wolves are trying to kill you.

01:37:11.000 Like, that shit is real!

01:37:12.000 You know what I mean?

01:37:13.000 And you're out there walking in the snow.

01:37:16.000 All you have is like a rifle and some snowshoes and a backpack.

01:37:19.000 That's as real Yeah.

01:37:30.000 Yeah.

01:37:32.000 Yeah.

01:37:43.000 Just being straightforward and honest can get you a long ways.

01:37:46.000 But a lot of people think for some reason that it's better to bullshit.

01:37:52.000 Why do you think that is?

01:37:54.000 Because in the short term it can work.

01:37:56.000 For some people it even seems to work for quite a while.

01:37:58.000 I mean, come on.

01:37:59.000 You're talking about the president?

01:38:00.000 Yeah.

01:38:01.000 That's what I was thinking about.

01:38:03.000 You can go a long ways on bullshit.

01:38:05.000 But I don't know.

01:38:07.000 I mean, to me, how do you feel inside about yourself if you're Making some false story up about yourself.

01:38:16.000 Yeah.

01:38:17.000 Right.

01:38:18.000 Yeah, there's something about it, too, that when someone gets caught, like that Jussie Smoulet guy, when he got...

01:38:26.000 Am I saying it wrong?

01:38:27.000 You said it like Dave did.

01:38:28.000 I did.

01:38:29.000 I did say it like Dave did.

01:38:31.000 No, he said juicy smoothie.

01:38:34.000 Is it Jesse Smollett?

01:38:35.000 Jesse Smollett, yeah.

01:38:36.000 Smollett.

01:38:37.000 Do you know who he is?

01:38:38.000 No.

01:38:38.000 Good for you.

01:38:39.000 I should not even tell you.

01:38:40.000 You don't need to know this nonsense.

01:38:42.000 No, I'm trying to get up to date.

01:38:43.000 It's a guy who was an actor on the show Empire.

01:38:46.000 He was actually in one of the Alien movies, too.

01:38:48.000 He was in...

01:38:49.000 Which one was he in?

01:38:51.000 He was in the one with...

01:38:54.000 It was a good one.

01:38:55.000 He was in a good one.

01:38:56.000 He was one of the people on the ship.

01:38:58.000 Anyway, he was in one of the more recent alien movies.

01:39:03.000 What?

01:39:04.000 He's in the Mighty Ducks, too, apparently.

01:39:05.000 Well, there you go.

01:39:06.000 I didn't know that.

01:39:07.000 He's been in a bunch of shit.

01:39:08.000 Anyway, he's an actor, and he made up a story, allegedly, seems like he made it up, of getting beat up by these white supremacists with Trump hats on, MAGA hats on, they put a noose around his neck, and We're good to go.

01:39:30.000 We're good to go.

01:39:40.000 And then the two guys that he got to rough him up, he got these two guys to rough him up, and then they came out and said, no, this is bullshit, this guy paid us.

01:39:49.000 And then the Chicago Police Department, they're prosecuting him, and they're trying to get him to pay for their investigation.

01:39:58.000 There's lawsuits, and he's still...

01:40:01.000 It's the most obviously fake story.

01:40:06.000 Ever.

01:40:07.000 And it's coming out of a guy who is a really successful actor.

01:40:11.000 So it's so crazy.

01:40:13.000 It's this, you know, racial hate, this hate crime story that this guy concocted for attention.

01:40:22.000 Apparently...

01:40:24.000 The thought is that he wasn't happy with his role on Empire, but it was a huge national story.

01:40:30.000 Because everybody knew, kind of right away, that it was fake.

01:40:34.000 Everybody was like, wait, what?

01:40:36.000 He's got the noose around his neck, and he was holding a Subway sandwich.

01:40:38.000 He went to a Subway, so he still had the sandwich.

01:40:42.000 Right?

01:40:42.000 Somebody smacked him in the head a couple of times, and he had a noose around his neck.

01:40:45.000 He's telling this crazy story, and he wants to hold press conferences.

01:40:48.000 He said he was the black Tupac, or the gay Tupac he called himself.

01:40:52.000 Sorry.

01:40:52.000 It was just complete nonsense.

01:40:55.000 And there's something about him talking, telling his story, where you know it's bullshit.

01:41:00.000 And you're like, what are you doing?

01:41:02.000 Like, what is this?

01:41:04.000 It's so compelling.

01:41:06.000 When you see someone lie like that about some crazy, wacky, made-up story, it's so compelling.

01:41:12.000 It's like, because you know, when I was a little kid, I would lie about shit.

01:41:17.000 I'd make stuff up.

01:41:18.000 Every little kid will tell you a lie.

01:41:21.000 And I remember thinking, this guy never stopped.

01:41:25.000 He lied when he was a little kid, and he just kept lying.

01:41:29.000 That happens to some people.

01:41:31.000 Yes!

01:41:32.000 Yeah.

01:41:32.000 Yes!

01:41:33.000 That's the dangerous thing about lying.

01:41:35.000 Oh, yeah.

01:41:35.000 If you lie enough, I think some people actually start believing it.

01:41:38.000 Oh, for sure.

01:41:39.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:41:40.000 There's a psychosis involved, for sure.

01:41:42.000 Yeah, some people, when they lie about their past, you know, like, one of the weirder ones is, like, when guys get caught with stolen valor.

01:41:51.000 Like, they have a crazy lie, made-up story about their military history and war record and...

01:41:57.000 That happened with somebody in reality TV that was working with Cody Lundin.

01:42:02.000 Wasn't there somebody working with him?

01:42:04.000 Dual Survivor or something?

01:42:05.000 Oh, one of his guys was a Stolen Valor guy?

01:42:09.000 I shouldn't say it.

01:42:11.000 I don't know.

01:42:11.000 I never watched the show, but if I remember right, I heard that.

01:42:14.000 He's a weird one, huh?

01:42:15.000 That guy just walking around barefoot with his disgusting feet?

01:42:17.000 I like to go barefoot.

01:42:19.000 Yeah, but his feet, they look like the monster's feet.

01:42:22.000 He would show them.

01:42:23.000 It'd be like a thing, like a badge of courage.

01:42:25.000 He would show these gigantic, calloused feet.

01:42:28.000 Like, what?

01:42:29.000 Because he didn't have any shoes.

01:42:31.000 Because everywhere he walked, he worked barefoot.

01:42:33.000 So the bottom of his feet was like the top of his table.

01:42:36.000 Like this hard, crusty, fucking...

01:42:39.000 Look at that.

01:42:39.000 Look at that guy's shoe.

01:42:40.000 Look at his foot.

01:42:43.000 Look at that.

01:42:44.000 But here's the thing, man.

01:42:45.000 Mine don't get like that, even when I go.

01:42:47.000 He's out there in the fucking desert constantly.

01:42:51.000 That's not his foot, dude.

01:42:52.000 That's a little kid's foot.

01:42:53.000 Really?

01:42:54.000 It says Cody's flip-flops.

01:42:55.000 Oh, it's like a flip-flop that he made?

01:42:57.000 He made it for someone, yeah.

01:42:58.000 Oh, okay.

01:42:59.000 Yeah.

01:43:00.000 There's something about walking around barefoot that seems really fucking gross.

01:43:05.000 Oh, I love it.

01:43:06.000 In the summer, the first thing I want to do is get my shoes off.

01:43:09.000 Yeah?

01:43:09.000 Oh, yeah.

01:43:10.000 I climb up the mountains barefoot until I get to where the rocks are, you know?

01:43:13.000 Really?

01:43:14.000 Oh, yeah.

01:43:14.000 I've walked, like, the 60 miles from the road to my camp, two-thirds of the way barefoot.

01:43:19.000 Really?

01:43:19.000 Yeah.

01:43:19.000 Got a blister on my foot after about 20 miles, so I took my shoe off, and I realized, hey, the foot without a shoe feels a lot better than the one with a shoe, so I took them both off.

01:43:28.000 Really?

01:43:28.000 Oh, yeah.

01:43:29.000 I'm big into walking barefoot.

01:43:31.000 But you got like soft pack ground up there right?

01:43:35.000 The ground's spongy.

01:43:36.000 If it's damp, if it dries out, then those lichens get abrasive.

01:43:40.000 Then it's hard to go barefoot.

01:43:41.000 They get very abrasive.

01:43:43.000 But if they're damp, man, they're soft.

01:43:45.000 You can use them for toilet paper.

01:43:46.000 Believe me, I do.

01:43:47.000 You use lichens for toilet paper?

01:43:48.000 I've used all the different stuff for toilet paper, but lichens are one of the best.

01:43:51.000 If they're moist.

01:43:53.000 If they're dry, they're good for fire starter.

01:43:55.000 That's about it.

01:43:56.000 So that lake where you live, you live right off...

01:43:58.000 You fish in that lake a lot?

01:44:00.000 There have been years I fished there.

01:44:04.000 Like I said, there was one year when I never went out.

01:44:06.000 I stayed for 15 months, and I fished a lot that summer.

01:44:09.000 I probably caught like 75 fish or something that summer, if I remember right.

01:44:15.000 But I don't eat a lot of fish.

01:44:16.000 I'm not a big fish eater.

01:44:18.000 But you eat a weasel?

01:44:21.000 Those desperate times.

01:44:23.000 I wouldn't eat one now.

01:44:24.000 Is that the lake right there?

01:44:25.000 Hey, there's my camp.

01:44:26.000 Oh, that's so pretty, man.

01:44:28.000 Wow, look where you live.

01:44:30.000 Well, I mean, lived.

01:44:32.000 I don't live there all the time.

01:44:33.000 Right.

01:44:35.000 That's the other thing.

01:44:36.000 The situation's changing with my permits.

01:44:38.000 You can't get a permit to live there.

01:44:41.000 And I can't even get a permit to make TV there now.

01:44:44.000 I don't have a TV show anymore.

01:44:45.000 Really?

01:44:46.000 Yeah.

01:44:46.000 Why can't you get a permit there anymore?

01:44:49.000 I'm not making TV. So, right now, I'm in the process of losing my permit for commercial use.

01:44:59.000 I have a trapping cabin permit, but honestly, I'm not interested in trapping.

01:45:02.000 I did some trapping when I first went out there, but it's not something that I'm going to do to sell fur and make money, and that's what that permit's for, so I'm probably going to be giving that up.

01:45:14.000 So you're not allowed to even keep that cabin up there?

01:45:17.000 That cabin, I had to take it down.

01:45:20.000 Really?

01:45:21.000 Yeah.

01:45:21.000 I had to take that cabin down.

01:45:23.000 Right now I have a tent up there.

01:45:25.000 Because that cabin was illegal, when they gave me my permits just last year, I had to remove the illegal cabin and then I had a permit to build a new cabin.

01:45:37.000 What's the difference between the new cabin and the old cabin?

01:45:40.000 The new cabin was going to be legal because it had a permit.

01:45:43.000 They can't give you a permit for an illegal cabin.

01:45:46.000 So they can't give you a permit for a cabin that already exists.

01:45:49.000 They're bureaucrats, okay?

01:45:50.000 They're bureaucrats.

01:45:50.000 Why don't you tell them, listen, come back tomorrow.

01:45:52.000 I'm going to take this apart and put it back together again exactly the same way.

01:45:55.000 So tomorrow when you come back, it'll be the new cabin.

01:45:58.000 Exactly.

01:45:58.000 This is the old cabin.

01:46:00.000 It was time for an upgrade.

01:46:02.000 I've got four kids now, Joe.

01:46:04.000 That place is 100 square feet.

01:46:06.000 I was kind of excited about building a new cabin.

01:46:08.000 Get a 200 square foot model, right?

01:46:11.000 Something huge.

01:46:12.000 I was thinking 400. They said I could go up to 400. Is that what they said?

01:46:15.000 Yeah.

01:46:16.000 How big is that?

01:46:17.000 Is that the size of this room?

01:46:18.000 Right now, we live in a...

01:46:20.000 What is this?

01:46:22.000 This room is bigger than 400 feet?

01:46:24.000 Wow.

01:46:25.000 So you're living in something smaller than this whole room.

01:46:28.000 Right now we live in a 600 square foot cabin in Fairbanks.

01:46:33.000 That's huge for me.

01:46:34.000 We lived in a 200 square foot one until just, well, I think it was like a year ago.

01:46:39.000 So you're living in the place where you built when you bought the piece of land?

01:46:43.000 Yeah, except I've expanded over the years.

01:46:44.000 I started off with one acre and then as I could afford it, I bought up my neighbors.

01:46:48.000 I got six acres and three cabins now.

01:46:50.000 Oh, nice.

01:46:51.000 Now, do the neighbors look at you weird because you're that guy who lives in the woods on TV? Not that I know about.

01:46:59.000 They didn't mention it.

01:47:01.000 Maybe they do.

01:47:02.000 Do they know?

01:47:04.000 Yeah, they know.

01:47:05.000 You tell everybody what you do.

01:47:06.000 No.

01:47:07.000 They know.

01:47:07.000 They just know.

01:47:08.000 They watch TV a lot.

01:47:09.000 I mean, Fairbanks, Alaska is dark when there's nothing to do.

01:47:11.000 Right.

01:47:13.000 Are they weirded out by you?

01:47:15.000 See you on TV and see you right there?

01:47:17.000 I don't think so.

01:47:18.000 No?

01:47:19.000 I mean, I'm just a normal person.

01:47:22.000 Yeah, but even if you're a normal person, if you're a normal person on television, you're not a normal person.

01:47:27.000 People get weird.

01:47:28.000 They mention it.

01:47:29.000 They mention, hey, you're on TV. In the beginning, I mean, I've been on TV now for six years.

01:47:35.000 It's not like we talk about it normally.

01:47:37.000 Like the people in your town, like Fairbanks is a real city.

01:47:40.000 It's about 40,000 people, I think.

01:47:42.000 It's a small city, but it's as big of a city as you got in northern Alaska.

01:47:46.000 The only place bigger is Anchorage, and that's an eight-hour drive away.

01:47:49.000 Yeah, and how many people is Anchorage?

01:47:51.000 That's quite a few.

01:47:52.000 It's got to be, what is Anchorage now, 300,000 maybe?

01:47:56.000 400,000 almost?

01:47:57.000 Somewhere in there.

01:47:58.000 I love Anchorage.

01:47:59.000 Like half the people in Alaska live in Anchorage, I think.

01:48:01.000 Really?

01:48:02.000 I've only been there once.

01:48:04.000 Spent a couple days there.

01:48:06.000 We did some gigs, me and my friend Ari Shafir, and did some salmon fishing up there.

01:48:11.000 Comedy gigs?

01:48:12.000 Yeah, we did comedy up there.

01:48:13.000 Oh, cool.

01:48:14.000 Yeah, we just had on a whim.

01:48:15.000 We said, hey, let's book a gig where we can fish during the day and then do stand-up at night.

01:48:21.000 So we did that for a couple days.

01:48:23.000 It was fun.

01:48:24.000 Oh, yeah.

01:48:25.000 But it's just the people up there were really cool, man.

01:48:29.000 There's something about people that live where nature is inescapable.

01:48:35.000 Like, nature and the wilderness, and it's like, it is impossible to not be aware of where you are.

01:48:42.000 Like, where we live here in California is so alien and so non-intuitive.

01:48:50.000 It's just not how human beings have evolved.

01:48:53.000 And it's a really recent thing that any human beings ever live like this.

01:48:57.000 But there's something in your DNA that sort of cries out, To the times that make sense, to the places that make sense.

01:49:06.000 And that's one of the appeals of your show.

01:49:08.000 That's one of the appeals of living very close to the wilderness, living very close to the woods.

01:49:14.000 Because these tasks that you have to do, just acquiring food and water and staying warm and dealing with nature, all those things are enormously appealing to people that are stuck in a situation like I am.

01:49:29.000 I don't say I'm stuck like I'm in some terrible place, but it's great.

01:49:32.000 I love it.

01:49:44.000 And it definitely has an effect.

01:49:46.000 We gave up a lot for comfort.

01:49:49.000 Yeah.

01:49:49.000 We gave up a lot.

01:49:50.000 We gave up a lot of our vitality.

01:49:53.000 You know, I love to jump in the lake and swim every day from the time I can get in the moat next to the ice.

01:49:59.000 And that water's like 32 and a half degrees.

01:50:01.000 Woo!

01:50:01.000 And it's so invigorating.

01:50:04.000 Yeah, it's great for you.

01:50:04.000 It's amazing.

01:50:05.000 Ice baths.

01:50:06.000 I mean, it's the reason why athletes do them.

01:50:07.000 Yeah, and just little things, like if you don't have a toilet, which I still don't have a toilet, even in Fairbanks.

01:50:13.000 I mean, if you squat to poop...

01:50:15.000 You don't have a toilet in Fairbanks?

01:50:16.000 No, no.

01:50:17.000 Why don't you build a toilet, bro?

01:50:19.000 A toilet's a big thing, man.

01:50:21.000 I don't know if I can afford a toilet.

01:50:24.000 You've got to have a septic system.

01:50:25.000 You've got to have plumbing.

01:50:26.000 I don't have any of that stuff.

01:50:28.000 But you're buying all this land.

01:50:30.000 You're buying all this land.

01:50:31.000 You can't buy a toilet?

01:50:34.000 Land's cheap, toilets are expensive.

01:50:36.000 You've got to have the right kind of land to have a septic system.

01:50:39.000 Yeah.

01:50:40.000 The land that I buy is boggy.

01:50:43.000 It's spruce forest.

01:50:44.000 It's like you'd have to...

01:50:45.000 It's complicated.

01:50:46.000 Then you leave town.

01:50:48.000 I like to be able to go to the bush for six months in the middle of winter.

01:50:50.000 Your pipes freeze.

01:50:51.000 You've got to have a house sitter then.

01:50:52.000 You've got to have a furnace for 21st day.

01:50:55.000 All I've got is a wood stove.

01:50:56.000 Right.

01:50:57.000 It gets complicated, man.

01:50:58.000 I like to keep it simple.

01:50:59.000 Yeah.

01:51:00.000 Wow, really simple.

01:51:01.000 I mean, maybe...

01:51:02.000 I always tell people when they say, why don't you have a toilet?

01:51:04.000 I'm like, I can't afford a toilet.

01:51:05.000 They're like, come on, you can afford a toilet.

01:51:07.000 You got an airplane, you got this, you got that.

01:51:08.000 I was like, maybe if I had, I don't know, $5 million, $10 million, I might think about getting a place with a toilet.

01:51:17.000 I don't have that much.

01:51:19.000 That's so crazy.

01:51:21.000 I'm serious.

01:51:21.000 That's your number.

01:51:22.000 If I had $5 million, I'd get a toilet.

01:51:25.000 Maybe.

01:51:26.000 Maybe not.

01:51:27.000 $5 million...

01:51:28.000 I have to think about it.

01:51:29.000 Wow.

01:51:31.000 Because it's a huge change.

01:51:33.000 First of all, I couldn't live on that land where I live, really.

01:51:35.000 I mean, I could, but it would be way too complicated.

01:51:37.000 Like I said, I don't want...

01:51:40.000 Worry about house sitters, freezing pipes, oil furnace.

01:51:44.000 So what do you have outhouses?

01:51:45.000 You have outhouses?

01:51:46.000 You know, my favorite way to go, I don't like outhouses.

01:51:49.000 I like to squat and just poop on the ground.

01:51:52.000 And I'll tell you something.

01:51:54.000 Okay.

01:51:55.000 If you want to poop inside, five-gallon bucket with plastic bag in it.

01:51:59.000 You poop in your house?

01:52:01.000 In a bucket?

01:52:01.000 Yeah.

01:52:01.000 There's times.

01:52:02.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:52:03.000 Look.

01:52:03.000 But you're in this tiny little house.

01:52:04.000 Look.

01:52:05.000 You're in a 600 square foot house.

01:52:07.000 Oh, that's big.

01:52:07.000 The little one, 100 square feet?

01:52:08.000 No, I don't usually poop in there.

01:52:10.000 Usually.

01:52:12.000 Sometimes you got it when it's like 30 balls.

01:52:14.000 No.

01:52:14.000 I go outside.

01:52:15.000 When I'm in 100 square, always.

01:52:17.000 Look, people, I think the UN's working against open defecation.

01:52:23.000 I think that's what they call it.

01:52:24.000 They spend millions of dollars a year trying to get people to stop pooping on the ground.

01:52:28.000 In the Brooks Range, all over the world, India, Bangladesh, I don't know.

01:52:32.000 Yeah, but that's because there's people living next to this raw sewage.

01:52:36.000 There's too many people.

01:52:37.000 That's the only problem.

01:52:39.000 Population density.

01:52:40.000 If you have enough land, it's not an issue.

01:52:43.000 In the Brooks Range, I've been pooping in the same spot.

01:52:48.000 For the last 20 years.

01:52:49.000 Probably about a quarter the size of this room and you can't even tell I've ever pooped there.

01:52:53.000 Really?

01:52:53.000 It goes back to nature.

01:52:55.000 I don't even compost.

01:52:56.000 I don't even do anything.

01:52:57.000 I just poop on the ground in the same area and it just goes back into nature.

01:53:01.000 The only thing- Were you trying to make a little mound?

01:53:03.000 No, it doesn't build up.

01:53:05.000 Just animals or something.

01:53:07.000 We're rats, right?

01:53:08.000 Rats eat a lot of shit.

01:53:10.000 Gray jays.

01:53:10.000 Gray jays eat it.

01:53:11.000 Gray jays?

01:53:12.000 What's a gray jay?

01:53:12.000 They eat shit.

01:53:13.000 Wolves.

01:53:13.000 I've had wolves come eat my shit.

01:53:14.000 Oh boy.

01:53:16.000 First wolf I ever trapped, set the trap right in front of my poop pile.

01:53:19.000 Oh, God.

01:53:21.000 He came in for your shit and got killed.

01:53:23.000 Yeah, he'd eaten shit before there.

01:53:26.000 Oh, God.

01:53:27.000 Let me lure him in with this tasty treat.

01:53:32.000 No, but it really does, you know, that's the thing, is people are separated from nature now, and so something simple, like a simple solution to a problem, pooping on the ground, if you're in a rural area, if you've got space, there is no problem with that,

01:53:49.000 really.

01:53:50.000 It goes back into the earth.

01:53:52.000 Where do you think the bears, the moose, the caribou, they all go underground.

01:53:56.000 It's not a big problem.

01:53:57.000 It goes back into the earth.

01:53:58.000 Well, you're living in a largely uninhabited place.

01:54:02.000 Yeah, that's in a largely uninhabited place, yeah.

01:54:05.000 Yeah, so when you dropped a log next to the trap for the wolf, you knew what you were doing?

01:54:12.000 You were doing that on purpose to lure him in?

01:54:14.000 Well, I always poop in the same place, the same general place, but a wolf had come and eaten the poop.

01:54:20.000 You'd noticed?

01:54:21.000 Yeah, I see the tracks.

01:54:22.000 I go up to poop.

01:54:22.000 Oh, a wolf came here last night and ate my last poop.

01:54:24.000 Oh, how'd you feel about that?

01:54:27.000 Just normal?

01:54:30.000 You feel different when you live out in the woods, Joe.

01:54:32.000 You get a whole different mentality, different ethics.

01:54:35.000 You don't think about, that's no big deal.

01:54:37.000 There's poop, there's blood, there's guts, there's poop, there's wolves and caribou with their legs ripped open.

01:54:43.000 It's different.

01:54:45.000 So were you trapping and selling the skins?

01:54:48.000 I usually was trapping for my own family use, you know, like the kids had mucklucks and mittens and ruffs and all this stuff.

01:54:59.000 Trapping?

01:55:00.000 Out of wolf, out of wolverine, out of martins, you know.

01:55:06.000 Those are the main things up there.

01:55:08.000 Wolves, wolverines.

01:55:09.000 There's some martin.

01:55:11.000 There's a few fox around.

01:55:13.000 Have you ever eaten a martin?

01:55:14.000 Yeah.

01:55:14.000 I've eaten just about everything.

01:55:15.000 What's a martin taste like?

01:55:17.000 Like a weasel?

01:55:18.000 Or more like a wolf?

01:55:19.000 They're better.

01:55:20.000 They're better.

01:55:21.000 To tell you the truth, to me, a martin's just about as good as a snowshoe hare, but I don't really like snowshoe hares.

01:55:27.000 Like I said, I like to stick to ungulates.

01:55:29.000 Why don't you like snowshoe hares?

01:55:32.000 I don't think they're very good compared to a caribou or compared to a moose.

01:55:35.000 Just taste-wise?

01:55:37.000 Taste-wise, they're small, tedious.

01:55:41.000 I'm just not big on small game.

01:55:44.000 Tedious in terms of removing little bones?

01:55:46.000 Well, in terms of the amount of effort, the time to go catch them, to skin them.

01:55:51.000 Some people, they really get into it, but for me, okay, I have caribou usually most years in that area.

01:55:57.000 I have moose always in the fall.

01:56:00.000 I mean, I go out hunting maybe five, six days.

01:56:03.000 I got a moose.

01:56:04.000 I got 500 pounds of meat.

01:56:05.000 There's not very many snowshoe hares around where I am.

01:56:08.000 There's not that much brush.

01:56:09.000 I'm up high in the mountains.

01:56:11.000 So how many bullets are you bringing with you when you go out there for long periods of time?

01:56:16.000 Oh, I'll have a few packs of ammunition.

01:56:17.000 It's a funny story, though, because when Trisha came to meet me the first time, you know, we had a long-distance meeting, right?

01:56:24.000 We met over Facebook, over the internet after I got on the show.

01:56:29.000 Did she slide into your DMs or did you slide into hers?

01:56:33.000 DMs?

01:56:34.000 You don't know about that?

01:56:35.000 No, I don't know.

01:56:37.000 Keep you in the dark.

01:56:39.000 I'm trying to get up to speed.

01:56:41.000 Like I said, I didn't have to...

01:56:41.000 Direct messages.

01:56:42.000 Oh, direct messages.

01:56:43.000 Right.

01:56:43.000 I have heard about that.

01:56:45.000 What happened?

01:56:45.000 She sent me a friend request and, you know, I was looking for a woman.

01:56:49.000 I mean, that's why I went on Facebook, actually, in the beginning.

01:56:53.000 Really?

01:56:53.000 That was one of my motives for doing the show.

01:56:55.000 I remember when the producer came up there and met me, I was like, hey, you think this would help me find a new woman?

01:57:00.000 I'm looking for a woman.

01:57:00.000 I mean, I just spent the whole winter by myself.

01:57:04.000 Right.

01:57:04.000 I get it.

01:57:04.000 I'm only human.

01:57:05.000 I get it.

01:57:07.000 Trying to find a woman out in the woods.

01:57:09.000 It isn't easy.

01:57:10.000 I mean, every day I get up, you know, fix up my hair and stuff, go out and didn't see any.

01:57:14.000 I mean, you think it's hard hunting moose and caribou up there.

01:57:17.000 Try hunting for a woman up there.

01:57:18.000 Yeah, I would imagine.

01:57:19.000 Very few and far between.

01:57:21.000 So I had to...

01:57:22.000 Slim pickings.

01:57:22.000 I had to get modern.

01:57:24.000 Yeah, I get it.

01:57:25.000 Anyway...

01:57:27.000 Trisha came for our first date.

01:57:29.000 We had one date, a four-day date, before she decided to move up and live with me.

01:57:33.000 Jesus Christ, that woman's crazy.

01:57:35.000 You got a good one.

01:57:36.000 And she told me she wasn't adventurous.

01:57:38.000 She wasn't adventurous.

01:57:40.000 That's what she said.

01:57:41.000 She hangs out with you for four days, then moves in with you.

01:57:44.000 She quit her job?

01:57:45.000 Oh yeah, she gave up her apartment, sold most of her stuff.

01:57:50.000 Jesus Christ.

01:57:51.000 But we talked every day for, what, three months before the date.

01:57:57.000 Wow.

01:57:58.000 We were communicating every day a little bit.

01:58:00.000 Was this while you were at the shack?

01:58:02.000 No, I was down at Fairbanks.

01:58:04.000 At that time, I didn't even have internet up at the shack.

01:58:06.000 I did get internet in 2017 eventually.

01:58:09.000 At the shack?

01:58:10.000 Yeah.

01:58:10.000 How the hell did you do that?

01:58:12.000 I had to actually get certified as a satellite internet installer.

01:58:19.000 Really?

01:58:20.000 Yeah.

01:58:20.000 So you had to take a class?

01:58:21.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:58:22.000 I'm a certified satellite internet installer.

01:58:24.000 Maybe that'll be my next career.

01:58:26.000 Wow.

01:58:27.000 If I can't get another gig in TV, maybe I'll take up installing satellite internet.

01:58:30.000 So you got certified, and what are you using to power it?

01:58:33.000 Solar?

01:58:34.000 No, battery and a generator.

01:58:36.000 I run a generator once in a while, and it doesn't take much electricity.

01:58:39.000 I got a big battery.

01:58:40.000 And then you link up with the satellite.

01:58:43.000 It's real slow.

01:58:43.000 I can never post video or anything, but it was cool because then I could start doing Facebook posts and other social media.

01:58:48.000 I could put pictures from right there right then rather than the next time I came to town.

01:58:52.000 Oh, wow.

01:58:53.000 So your upload is extremely slow, right?

01:58:55.000 Yeah.

01:58:55.000 It's really slow.

01:58:57.000 I don't think I'm even going to maintain that system, but...

01:59:01.000 I don't even know if I'm going to maintain my camp, to tell you the truth, but I'm going to keep going to the wilderness.

01:59:04.000 I'm going to keep having experiences out there and I'm going to keep finding ways to share it with people, but I don't know exactly the future of that particular spot and that particular satellite.

01:59:16.000 Have you had anybody visit you up there?

01:59:19.000 You mean just random?

01:59:20.000 Yeah.

01:59:21.000 Just people that knew about you from the show?

01:59:22.000 No.

01:59:23.000 They always say they're going to come or something.

01:59:25.000 Yeah.

01:59:26.000 Good luck.

01:59:29.000 If anybody straggled in, I'd help them out.

01:59:33.000 No, it's a big project.

01:59:35.000 Who knows how close they've gotten before they turned around.

01:59:38.000 Maybe somebody drove all the way up the hall road and chickened out after the first day walk and I got no idea.

01:59:42.000 Yeah, I guarantee you some people have thought about it.

01:59:45.000 Yeah.

01:59:47.000 How many bullets do I carry?

01:59:49.000 How much ammunition?

01:59:50.000 How many bullets?

01:59:51.000 So, Tricia comes up for a four-day date after we'd communicated for three months.

01:59:56.000 And...

01:59:57.000 Tell her to bring some bullets?

01:59:59.000 She had tons of ammo in her apartment down in Boston.

02:00:02.000 Really?

02:00:02.000 Oh, yeah.

02:00:03.000 She's a wild lady.

02:00:04.000 She had guns and ammo and everything.

02:00:07.000 But she came up to visit, and after a day or so together, I decided that I want to take her out to the camp.

02:00:15.000 I said, hey, got any plans for tomorrow?

02:00:17.000 Want to go to the Brooks Range?

02:00:20.000 So I wanted to fly her up there so she could see the place and know what she was getting into, right?

02:00:25.000 And we were packing and I like, I think I threw in like 10 rounds of ammo.

02:00:31.000 We're just going to go for the day.

02:00:32.000 She had to be back at work, you know, she just came for a long weekend.

02:00:36.000 And she was like, what?

02:00:37.000 That's all you're taking?

02:00:38.000 10 rounds?

02:00:38.000 I'm like, we're not even going hunting.

02:00:40.000 This is just like in case.

02:00:43.000 In case a bear happens to attack us.

02:00:46.000 I mean, 10 rounds, that's a lot.

02:00:48.000 Like, I go months without shooting 10 rounds of ammunition.

02:00:52.000 So, she convinced me to take a full box, I think, but I don't carry a lot of ammunition.

02:01:00.000 No.

02:01:02.000 I think I started carrying a little more than I used to.

02:01:05.000 I think usually when I go moose hunting, I'll throw in a box.

02:01:07.000 I'll have 20 rounds of me, but I never use...

02:01:08.000 I mean, I've never used anywhere near that much.

02:01:11.000 It would seem to me that you would need...

02:01:12.000 Do you have a tool or anything to sight in your rifle, just in case something goes wrong with the sight?

02:01:18.000 You're talking about a target?

02:01:19.000 Yeah, I got a target.

02:01:20.000 Okay, you have a target.

02:01:21.000 Yeah.

02:01:21.000 But there's tools, you know, where you don't have to fire off a round.

02:01:25.000 Oh, no, I don't...

02:01:25.000 Like a bore sighting.

02:01:27.000 Yeah, it's like a bore sighting.

02:01:28.000 It's like a laser sighting.

02:01:29.000 And it has it set up.

02:01:31.000 Like, literally, you can have your rifle zeroed in at 100 in, like, two shots.

02:01:36.000 I usually get it zeroed in, you know, three or six or something.

02:01:40.000 But it never goes far out.

02:01:44.000 Yeah, I shoot 200 yards.

02:01:46.000 I have my target at 200 yards.

02:01:47.000 Right in front of my camp, I shoot across the lake there when it's dead calm.

02:01:51.000 Mm-hmm.

02:01:52.000 And I hardly ever have to adjust that scope.

02:01:56.000 I'm so happy with that gun.

02:01:57.000 That's the only rifle I have ever killed a large animal with in my life.

02:02:02.000 Wow, what's the caliber?

02:02:04.000 30-06.

02:02:05.000 I bought that gun for $550 in 2003, and I never needed another centerfire rifle.

02:02:15.000 That's a classic rifle, 30-06.

02:02:17.000 Ruger.

02:02:18.000 There it is.

02:02:19.000 M77, what is it called?

02:02:21.000 M77 Marked MK2. What kind of sight are you using on that?

02:02:25.000 It's got a 2-7 power scope.

02:02:28.000 The difference is that's an older picture.

02:02:31.000 There was nobody up there with me.

02:02:32.000 I actually took that picture myself, but that was before I got my suppressor.

02:02:37.000 Oh, you got a suppressor.

02:02:38.000 Oh, I'm all about suppressors.

02:02:39.000 Yeah, I wish they were legal in California.

02:02:41.000 They're not.

02:02:42.000 No, they're not.

02:02:43.000 I mean, I think they're worried that people would be sniping people or something like that.

02:02:46.000 It's kind of stupid.

02:02:47.000 It's ignorant.

02:02:49.000 Because for hunting purposes, like one of the biggest problems, like I have a friend of mine, my friend Cody, his ear's blown out because he was working as a guide and someone fired off a shot right near his ear.

02:02:59.000 Now he has to wear hearing aids.

02:03:01.000 So all it takes is one shot.

02:03:02.000 If you're close to the muzzle, that's why I got a suppressor.

02:03:06.000 I really think this is a very important thing.

02:03:08.000 So many people are damaging their hearing without even realizing it.

02:03:11.000 Yep.

02:03:11.000 Yep, 100%.

02:03:13.000 A lot of guys did it when they're young.

02:03:17.000 A lot of my friends, they go with a suppressor.

02:03:20.000 That's actually a different gun, but that one I've never killed anything with, but that is the suppressor.

02:03:26.000 The problem is...

02:03:28.000 When you're hunting, it's not practical to use ear protection.

02:03:32.000 Right.

02:03:33.000 And if you hunt regularly, that adds up.

02:03:36.000 Over time, it adds up.

02:03:37.000 You shoot a rifle, that's 160 decibels.

02:03:40.000 Why are they making a law that you have to damage your hearing to go hunting?

02:03:45.000 Right.

02:03:45.000 Why are they making a law where you have to cover your ears with something?

02:03:49.000 But the reason being is because they're worried about urban situations.

02:03:52.000 They're worried about people shooting at people.

02:03:54.000 And, you know, you're not hearing anything.

02:03:57.000 But...

02:03:57.000 You do hear something, though.

02:03:59.000 Yeah, you hear a pew.

02:04:00.000 Oh, no, you hear a lot more than that.

02:04:01.000 Have you ever shot a suppressed rifle?

02:04:03.000 Yeah, it's like a crack.

02:04:04.000 Well, it depends on what you're shooting, but assuming it's hypersonic, supersonic, it's still loud.

02:04:10.000 Like a.30-06 without a suppressor is about 160 decibels.

02:04:17.000 That's deafening.

02:04:18.000 You put a suppressor on it, it's like 130. It knocks it down about 30 decibels, more or less.

02:04:23.000 It's still very loud.

02:04:25.000 Are there different levels of suppressor?

02:04:27.000 I bought the best suppressor I could get.

02:04:29.000 If you want to make a gun shoot like in the movies, just silent, like a little pop, you have to shoot subsonic.

02:04:37.000 That's not practical for hunting.

02:04:40.000 Oh.

02:04:41.000 Now I'm questioning whether or not I've actually used a suppressor.

02:04:47.000 I feel like I did, at one point in time, someone somewhere...

02:04:52.000 Let me shoot their rifle that had a suppressor on.

02:04:55.000 But it might be a false memory now.

02:04:57.000 You can put subsonic ammo in there.

02:04:58.000 Yeah, I've shot subsonic.22s.

02:05:01.000 I know that sound.

02:05:02.000 You can buy.308 ammunition subsonic and it's very quiet.

02:05:07.000 But it's going so slow that it's not effective to hunt moose or caribou with.

02:05:11.000 Right.

02:05:12.000 Yeah.

02:05:13.000 But yeah, they're still loud.

02:05:16.000 Pretty loud.

02:05:17.000 Yeah.

02:05:18.000 I have a muzzle brake on my 7mm.

02:05:21.000 That's really loud.

02:05:22.000 Boom!

02:05:24.000 It's a cannon.

02:05:25.000 Yeah.

02:05:26.000 But I actually met a person once who was just about deaf.

02:05:29.000 He was like stone deaf from one shotgun blast.

02:05:32.000 He was in a canoe and somebody shot kind of in a position where the muzzle was right next to his ear.

02:05:38.000 Yeah.

02:05:39.000 That's how it always is.

02:05:40.000 It's always someone shooting near you.

02:05:42.000 Just blows your eardrums out.

02:05:44.000 It's terrible.

02:05:46.000 Yeah, but so in California, you cannot have suppressors.

02:05:50.000 But again, I think that's what they're worried about.

02:05:52.000 And I think it's just, there's a lot of ignorance.

02:05:54.000 It's a lot of people that just don't know enough about firearms that are making the regulations.

02:06:00.000 But I think that would be the worry, that people would be shooting and you wouldn't be able to hear it.

02:06:05.000 Well, I think that there might be other ways to deal with that.

02:06:10.000 For hunting, I think it's super reasonable.

02:06:13.000 To be able to have something where you don't have to have ear protection on all the time and you can make it look just less disturbing for all the people also that are in the mountains.

02:06:22.000 If you're on public land and you're hunting deer and you hear boom like over the side of the hill it's kind of gross.

02:06:29.000 Even in countries that have more regulations on firearms, there are places where you can use suppressors, from what I've heard.

02:06:36.000 I mean, I haven't researched it extensively, but I think in Britain, even people have suppressors, and in New Zealand, Australia, different places.

02:06:46.000 Yeah.

02:06:47.000 I do 99.9% of my hunting with a bow and arrow.

02:06:50.000 That's awesome.

02:06:51.000 But it's not a, I'm not doing it because I need, you know, it's not like a subsistence thing.

02:06:56.000 I don't need it, absolutely.

02:06:58.000 It's just, I love archery.

02:07:00.000 I love hunting archery, too, because you have to get close.

02:07:03.000 Yeah.

02:07:04.000 You know, that's where it's at.

02:07:05.000 That's what I love doing is getting close.

02:07:07.000 Like some guys will brag about, oh, I shot this moose 600 yards away.

02:07:11.000 I always like to get close.

02:07:13.000 It's just more interesting, isn't it?

02:07:14.000 Because you learn more about the animal.

02:07:16.000 Yeah, it's more intense, too.

02:07:18.000 It's also, it requires more skill.

02:07:21.000 I feel like, I mean, this sounds fucked up, but I feel like the animal has more of a chance.

02:07:26.000 If I'm inside, you know, 60 yards shooting at an animal, that animal has way more chance to get the fuck away from me, way more chance for me to blow it, to step on a twig, or it to catch my wind, or...

02:07:39.000 It makes it more difficult.

02:07:41.000 And it's just, archery is...

02:07:46.000 There's nothing.

02:07:48.000 Rifles, for sure, are the best way to gather meat, for sure.

02:07:52.000 No doubt about it.

02:07:53.000 Boom!

02:07:53.000 One shot, they're down.

02:07:55.000 You hit them in the bread basket, boom, it's over.

02:07:58.000 But archery requires way more discipline, and there's so many ways it can fuck up.

02:08:04.000 There's so many ways it can go wrong.

02:08:09.000 But there's that requirement that you have of yourself to practice and to be able to execute when the time is now.

02:08:20.000 It's hard.

02:08:21.000 It's very, very difficult to do.

02:08:22.000 And because of that, it's like that, from my brain, I find that very appealing.

02:08:28.000 I gravitate towards difficult things like that.

02:08:32.000 But it's also, like people say, it's not as humane.

02:08:36.000 Listen, man, people wound deer and elk and moose all the time with a rifle.

02:08:41.000 If you make a bad shot, and people make a bad, and I've made bad shots, people make bad shots.

02:08:46.000 It's bad no matter what.

02:08:48.000 But with a bow and arrow, you'd be amazed how lethal it is.

02:08:52.000 Oh, I'm not surprised because you've got that big, broad, cutting edge going right through their lungs.

02:08:57.000 They hemorrhage quick.

02:08:58.000 They die quick.

02:08:59.000 I mean, I shot an elk at a Tohono Ranch last year, and it was down in four yards.

02:09:05.000 It stepped one, two, three, four, boom, dead.

02:09:08.000 Just shot it in the heart.

02:09:10.000 And I've shot moose through both lungs and had them go 50 yards sometimes.

02:09:14.000 They're so tough.

02:09:16.000 Incredibly tough.

02:09:16.000 They're so tough.

02:09:18.000 Moose is such an enormous animal, too.

02:09:19.000 When you see one down and you look at the bones on that thing, you're like, good lord.

02:09:24.000 What an enormous animal.

02:09:27.000 Just out there eating twigs and trying to stay the fuck away from wolves.

02:09:32.000 What a crazy existence they have.

02:09:35.000 But there's an amazing amount of respect and appreciation you have for them, too, when they're down.

02:09:40.000 When you're looking at it like, this is my food.

02:09:43.000 I'm going to eat this.

02:09:44.000 There's going to be a lot of food.

02:09:47.000 I feed my dog with elk.

02:09:49.000 My dog mostly eats.

02:09:51.000 You're allowed to do that?

02:09:52.000 Yeah.

02:09:52.000 That's legal?

02:09:53.000 Why wouldn't that be legal?

02:09:54.000 In Alaska, you can't feed game meat to dogs.

02:09:57.000 Why?

02:09:59.000 Because they're trying to allot the game to people who want to eat it.

02:10:03.000 There's so many dogs up there, you know, dog teams.

02:10:06.000 You used to be at one time in history, but you can feed the guts or something, but you can't feed meat to the dogs.

02:10:11.000 But you can feed salmon to them.

02:10:14.000 Yeah, fish.

02:10:14.000 People catch gigantic amounts of salmon just to feed their dogs.

02:10:18.000 Because there are more fish than there are caribou and moose.

02:10:22.000 Oh, I see.

02:10:24.000 Well, the way I look at it, it's like he's a member of my family.

02:10:27.000 Yeah.

02:10:27.000 I mean, my dog is, like, he's my buddy.

02:10:29.000 You're not feeding a whole dog team.

02:10:31.000 Well, yeah, and also, I guess that's what it is, right?

02:10:34.000 In Alaska, they have giant sled teams.

02:10:37.000 They're a lot of dogs, yeah.

02:10:38.000 Yeah.

02:10:39.000 That's interesting, though, that it's illegal.

02:10:41.000 It seems like you should be able to do whatever you want.

02:10:43.000 I mean, you could feed your dog steak if you wanted to.

02:10:45.000 You can go to the grocery store and buy your dog a hamburger if you really wanted to.

02:10:49.000 Why couldn't you feed them game meat?

02:10:52.000 If you've got a tag, as long as the food gets utilized...

02:10:56.000 There are all sorts of rules and regulations.

02:10:58.000 They discriminate against dogs.

02:10:59.000 That's what it is.

02:11:00.000 They discriminate against all sorts of people.

02:11:03.000 Anybody that's not there making the rule...

02:11:07.000 I guess there weren't a lot of dog owners around that day.

02:11:10.000 But no, I mean, think about it.

02:11:12.000 Every rule we make, it's just a game now.

02:11:15.000 The technology exists.

02:11:17.000 If you wanted to use a guided missile, you'd kill every animal, right?

02:11:21.000 Yeah.

02:11:21.000 So you've got to have limits on the technology.

02:11:24.000 For you, you personally prefer to use a bow and arrow.

02:11:26.000 For me, I use a rifle.

02:11:29.000 I would definitely use a rifle if I was in your situation.

02:11:31.000 Right.

02:11:32.000 Some guys want to go hunt with a helicopter, right?

02:11:35.000 And they've made that illegal in Alaska because there aren't that many people that could afford to go hunt with a helicopter.

02:11:41.000 That's the way I look at it.

02:11:42.000 There's not that many people that could afford to go hunt with a helicopter.

02:11:44.000 Therefore, they didn't have much power in making the regulations.

02:11:49.000 When you say hunt with a helicopter, you mean hunt out of a helicopter?

02:11:52.000 No, you can't even use a helicopter to transport hunters, game meat, hunting equipment, anything.

02:11:57.000 Really?

02:11:57.000 Right.

02:11:58.000 So the idea is to make it more difficult for them to get to some place like the Chugash or something like that, some place that's difficult to get to the mountains.

02:12:09.000 The idea is the people that don't want to use helicopters are the ones that get to vote.

02:12:18.000 Don't want people to use helicopters.

02:12:20.000 I understand.

02:12:21.000 I mean, I'm not saying I want people to be able to use helicopters.

02:12:24.000 I'm just saying maybe if a lot of people wanted to use helicopters to hunt, you know, because you've got a certain number of animals that can be taken and maintain the population.

02:12:34.000 Right.

02:12:35.000 So the technology to take them, it doesn't matter in terms of the animals don't care.

02:12:39.000 They don't care if they're getting shot with a machine gun.

02:12:41.000 They don't care if they're getting hunted out of a helicopter.

02:12:43.000 Right.

02:12:43.000 You've got a herd of so many thousand caribou.

02:12:46.000 You want to take a certain number out every year.

02:12:48.000 It's going to maintain the population.

02:12:49.000 But now it's all got to be regulated.

02:12:52.000 So it's like some people want to hunt on foot.

02:12:55.000 Maybe they would prefer that you couldn't use an airplane because the people that are flying with airplanes are then going to be competing against this person on foot, right?

02:13:03.000 Yeah.

02:13:05.000 But the way it all balances out, a lot of people like to use fixed-wing airplanes.

02:13:08.000 They're relatively economical, so you can use that.

02:13:10.000 You cannot use a helicopter in Alaska to transport hunters, meat, or hunting equipment.

02:13:16.000 What about scouting?

02:13:17.000 Can you use on a scout?

02:13:19.000 A helicopter?

02:13:20.000 I don't believe so.

02:13:21.000 That would be a problem if you were on the ground, if someone's...

02:13:25.000 Flying above you in a helicopter, spooking things.

02:13:28.000 I have heard people say that that's happened to them before.

02:13:31.000 The regulations are getting so thick, I don't even keep up on every detail that doesn't apply to me, but I believe that now there's some regulations you can't even scout out of a fixed-wing airplane, at least in certain situations.

02:13:45.000 I know there's places like that in the United States, or in the lower 48, rather.

02:13:49.000 Yeah.

02:13:49.000 Because a lot of people were doing that for sheep.

02:13:52.000 I mean, I would see that even in such a remote area where I am.

02:13:55.000 There's a lot of guided sheep hunting.

02:13:57.000 And you'd see these little super cubs flying around the mountains looking for the sheep.

02:14:01.000 That's the ultimate rich guy trip.

02:14:04.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:14:04.000 They go sheep hunting in Alaska.

02:14:06.000 It's very, very expensive.

02:14:10.000 It's like their ultimate adventure.

02:14:13.000 They have the Wild Sheep Hunting Federation and all these guys.

02:14:18.000 They spend shit tons of money to go to these really remote areas, get someone to take them in to get a big sheep, get a big ram.

02:14:26.000 And some people don't like that, but on the other hand, aren't those people that are spending $20,000 to go get a sheep or whatever?

02:14:33.000 They're tapping into the same basic desire that I have or that anybody that goes hunting has.

02:14:42.000 I mean, they want that experience.

02:14:45.000 Of getting out there into the wild, hunting, doing something primal.

02:14:49.000 I think people have an issue with anything that's really expensive that only a few people get to do, you know, as soon as you hear about that.

02:14:55.000 And it's also, it's like, it becomes a, it's a, sheep hunters are like a, it's an interesting breed of people.

02:15:02.000 You know, they're really into sheep hunting.

02:15:05.000 And apparently it's a lot of the factors, like the danger, you know, you're hiking on shale and like extremely, very, very like steep heights and real big drop-offs and very steep cliffs.

02:15:19.000 And it's like, I've never done it, but the people that say it, they're like, it's the ultimate.

02:15:23.000 Oh yeah, it's exciting.

02:15:25.000 Really exciting.

02:15:26.000 They live in these really remote places.

02:15:28.000 It's hard to get to.

02:15:29.000 And once you're successful, it's so difficult to do that once you're successful, it's a huge relief.

02:15:34.000 It feels very exciting and happy.

02:15:37.000 The food's delicious.

02:15:39.000 I've had wild sheep before.

02:15:41.000 My friend Remy gave me some back straps.

02:15:44.000 Yeah, I love sheep.

02:15:46.000 Yeah.

02:15:48.000 What other animals were you hunting when you were up there?

02:15:51.000 Anything unusual?

02:15:53.000 For big animals, the only thing around is moose.

02:15:57.000 You said you shot one grizzly?

02:15:59.000 I shot one grizzly that was becoming a problem that night.

02:16:04.000 I had a moose in the camp.

02:16:08.000 My wife and the little baby were there at the time, too, and my daughter was only three years old.

02:16:15.000 My son was just months old, and this moose was hanging there.

02:16:19.000 I had just killed it a week or so before, and a grizzly was coming around.

02:16:24.000 That night trying to get that moose meat and I chased it away a few times and it kept coming back and Eventually, I shot right over the bear, trying to scare it off, because sometimes that'll work if just chasing him off doesn't work.

02:16:37.000 But it was walking toward me at 16 yards when I shot it.

02:16:40.000 Oh, God.

02:16:42.000 16 yards?

02:16:43.000 They could run 16 yards so fast.

02:16:46.000 Yeah, he was just walking.

02:16:48.000 He wasn't running.

02:16:48.000 Thank God he wasn't running.

02:16:49.000 Yeah, he wasn't trying to get me, but I just couldn't have that bear hanging out there trying to get that moose that I had there in the camp.

02:16:55.000 Yeah.

02:16:57.000 So you shot him and ate him?

02:16:59.000 Yeah.

02:16:59.000 What was that like?

02:17:01.000 Oh, the fat was unbelievably good, man.

02:17:06.000 For me, bear meat, like I said, is not my first choice.

02:17:09.000 I liked it, but I'd only have a desire to eat it once every four or five days.

02:17:14.000 It's not like something I wanted to eat pounds of every day the way I can eat caribou or moose.

02:17:19.000 It's just different.

02:17:20.000 The fat was unbelievable.

02:17:21.000 It stunk terrible.

02:17:23.000 Like, I took all the fat out of the internal, the abdominal fat and all that stuff too.

02:17:29.000 And boy, did it smell bad.

02:17:31.000 Just like bear guts, you know.

02:17:32.000 It just stunk.

02:17:33.000 And I remember Sylvia saying, are you going to eat that stuff?

02:17:37.000 And I was like, I don't know.

02:17:39.000 Try it.

02:17:41.000 So I rendered it and, you know, just heated it up until it liquefied.

02:17:47.000 And when that cooled back down, no bad flavor at all.

02:17:51.000 It was like almost tasteless.

02:17:52.000 It was the mildest fad you've ever had.

02:17:55.000 Really?

02:17:55.000 Yeah, that cured the bad smell.

02:17:59.000 How many people get past that, though?

02:18:01.000 Probably not a lot.

02:18:03.000 And it's different.

02:18:05.000 Bare fat's real soft.

02:18:06.000 It's real soft at room temperature.

02:18:09.000 It's not like, you know, sheep fat's hard.

02:18:12.000 Moose fat, caribou fat is slightly softer maybe than sheep fat, but it's still hard fat.

02:18:17.000 Bare fat is soft and creamy.

02:18:20.000 So it was nice variety that winter to have all that bare fat.

02:18:23.000 It was really nice variety.

02:18:25.000 Yeah.

02:18:26.000 But I learned something from that, just a practical thing, that for some reason, I don't understand the chemistry behind it.

02:18:32.000 If you've got some fat that's tasting funny, if you heat it up really hot and cool it back down, it'll take that away.

02:18:37.000 I had it happen with moose fat once.

02:18:39.000 It was getting old, so it was getting a little rancid, and I tried it.

02:18:41.000 I heated it up until it got just about to the smoking point, cooled it back down, and it tasted way better.

02:18:47.000 Really?

02:18:48.000 Yeah.

02:18:48.000 What do you think is doing that?

02:18:49.000 I don't know.

02:18:50.000 I never looked into it.

02:18:52.000 I think that would be something you'd want to look into.

02:18:55.000 Not really.

02:18:55.000 Just a little practical Boy Scout trick.

02:18:57.000 Once you know, you know.

02:18:59.000 That's it.

02:18:59.000 You don't need to know the magic behind it.

02:19:01.000 So what did you do with the bear hide?

02:19:05.000 Turned it into a blanket.

02:19:06.000 Still have that hide.

02:19:07.000 Wow.

02:19:08.000 It's a beautiful bear.

02:19:09.000 It really was.

02:19:10.000 How big was it?

02:19:11.000 I think it was just over six feet.

02:19:13.000 It wasn't huge because the bears up there don't get as big.

02:19:16.000 I mean, they don't have salmon up where I am.

02:19:17.000 They're way up in the mountains.

02:19:19.000 But it was a real light-colored bear.

02:19:21.000 There's a picture of that one you might pull up.

02:19:23.000 Yeah, that's it.

02:19:24.000 There's another picture right after I shot it on the beach there.

02:19:28.000 But in the photos right on the first page there, whatever they're called, those ones that you can keep.

02:19:38.000 Is this Facebook?

02:19:40.000 Oh, you're just...

02:19:41.000 Because of the Facebook page, I can't zoom in for some reason.

02:19:45.000 So, that bear was super light-colored.

02:19:47.000 All its claws are white.

02:19:49.000 They're almost white, yeah.

02:19:51.000 It's this beautiful hide.

02:19:52.000 And you keep the claws on the hide when you make the blanket?

02:19:55.000 Yeah, it was the only bear I ever dealt with.

02:19:58.000 I skinned it all out like taxidermy.

02:20:00.000 I left all the claws and the lips and the eyelids and everything.

02:20:04.000 It took a long time, and then I tanned it myself.

02:20:06.000 It was a big project.

02:20:07.000 I built a big stretcher and had it all.

02:20:09.000 What do you use to tan it?

02:20:11.000 I use the same thing I use on Wolf or Wolverine, which is like a diluted battery acid, basically.

02:20:17.000 Really?

02:20:17.000 Yeah.

02:20:18.000 What's the old way they used to do it?

02:20:19.000 They used brains, right?

02:20:21.000 Yeah, you can tan with brains, I hear, but I never got into that.

02:20:25.000 Somebody showed me this battery acid tanning system way back when I first went up there and started trapping, and it worked really well for me, so I stuck to that.

02:20:34.000 How does that work?

02:20:35.000 It's been a long time since I did it, but you just dilute...

02:20:38.000 The battery acid is very diluted, and I forgot the exact proportions because it's been a while, but...

02:20:44.000 It's very, very diluted.

02:20:46.000 And then you add a lot of salt also.

02:20:49.000 And you want to get the proportions right, so you want to look into it before you try it.

02:20:51.000 But that's all that's in it.

02:20:53.000 The solution is just battery acid, water, and salt.

02:20:57.000 And so you brought battery acid up there just to have it on hand?

02:21:01.000 It's so concentrated.

02:21:02.000 It's like a little package.

02:21:04.000 I flew it out there.

02:21:05.000 One time is enough for five years or something.

02:21:07.000 And you flew it out there just for tanning?

02:21:09.000 Yeah.

02:21:09.000 Oh, wow.

02:21:10.000 Yeah.

02:21:11.000 And that system, then the other thing you need is baking soda.

02:21:16.000 You have to neutralize it.

02:21:17.000 You have to get the pH back to neutral after you're done tanning it.

02:21:20.000 Here it is.

02:21:21.000 Seven gallons of water.

02:21:23.000 Two pounds of bran flakes.

02:21:25.000 Wait a minute.

02:21:26.000 That's not the one I used.

02:21:27.000 Sixteen cups of plain or pickling salt.

02:21:30.000 Salt's good.

02:21:31.000 Okay, but there's the battery acid.

02:21:33.000 Three and a half cups battery acid from auto parts store.

02:21:35.000 Two boxes baking soda.

02:21:37.000 Yeah, that's pretty much it except you can skip the bran flakes.

02:21:40.000 What about foot oil?

02:21:42.000 What the fuck is foot oil?

02:21:43.000 Neats foot oil?

02:21:44.000 You ever use that stuff?

02:21:44.000 Oh, yeah.

02:21:45.000 Well, you've got to soften the hide afterwards.

02:21:47.000 You've got to put the oil back into it.

02:21:48.000 Is that what foot oil is?

02:21:49.000 Yeah, Neats foot oil.

02:21:50.000 It's for people's feet?

02:21:52.000 No, what do they make that from?

02:21:53.000 Sheep feet or something?

02:21:54.000 Oh, really?

02:21:55.000 I can't remember.

02:21:56.000 No, I don't know.

02:21:56.000 They call it Neats foot oil, but it's just an oil that you use to preserve leather.

02:22:00.000 Oh.

02:22:01.000 You put it on your baseball glove.

02:22:02.000 Neats foot is supposed to be one word.

02:22:05.000 Neats foot?

02:22:05.000 At least when I just Googled it.

02:22:06.000 Oh, Neats foot?

02:22:06.000 Yellow oil rendered from Bob.

02:22:08.000 Purified shin bones and feet of cattle.

02:22:11.000 Oh, wow.

02:22:12.000 How weird.

02:22:14.000 So...

02:22:14.000 Go ahead.

02:22:16.000 What were you going to say?

02:22:16.000 I was just going to say, we're talking an awful lot about traffic, hunting, stuff like that, but there's so much more out there.

02:22:21.000 Oh, yeah.

02:22:21.000 I'm sure.

02:22:22.000 It's like the whole...

02:22:26.000 That was my problem in reality TV. When they hear that you've been attacked by wolves, that's all they want to hear about.

02:22:31.000 Oh, for sure.

02:22:32.000 Yeah, for sure.

02:22:34.000 But there's so much more.

02:22:36.000 It's a whole different experience.

02:22:40.000 Consciousness, you get into a whole different space.

02:22:42.000 Space is different.

02:22:43.000 I mean, look at how confined we are now.

02:22:45.000 What you think about as space down here.

02:22:47.000 I mean, you're riding an airplane now, you just got a few feet around you.

02:22:50.000 Right.

02:22:51.000 And out there you've got space as far as you can see.

02:22:54.000 You stand on the top of a mountain, you look hard enough, you can see the back of your head just about.

02:22:58.000 I mean, those mountains stretch for 600 miles, and it changes your perception.

02:23:05.000 Because not only is there all that space, but it's not all chopped up into little pieces.

02:23:08.000 You can basically walk anywhere you want.

02:23:10.000 You can go anywhere your legs will carry you.

02:23:12.000 You feel very free.

02:23:14.000 Did you ever run into another person while you were out there?

02:23:18.000 One time when I was walking from the road to my camp, I met another person.

02:23:24.000 Really?

02:23:24.000 Headed the opposite direction.

02:23:26.000 We were both traveling along a creek, of course.

02:23:27.000 You follow natural routes.

02:23:29.000 How weird was that?

02:23:30.000 Walking to gravel bars.

02:23:31.000 How weird was that?

02:23:32.000 It was very weird.

02:23:33.000 And this is the thing.

02:23:34.000 When you live without many people around and you spend periods of time totally in isolation, you really appreciate humans.

02:23:41.000 That's one of the great benefits of it.

02:23:43.000 You appreciate anything you go without.

02:23:45.000 You go without food, you go without sex, you go without people.

02:23:48.000 And me and this guy, we sat down and we talked for a couple hours.

02:23:52.000 Really?

02:23:53.000 What was he doing?

02:23:54.000 He was just going for a hike.

02:23:55.000 He had hired a plane to fly him to a place that was a long ways away.

02:23:59.000 He was walking, I think, 100 miles back to that road that I had left.

02:24:03.000 And we just happened to be following the same creek, just walking down the gravel bars, and we met up.

02:24:08.000 Middle of nowhere.

02:24:09.000 So we sat down and we talked and talked, and then we went our separate ways.

02:24:13.000 Wow.

02:24:14.000 Did you exchange numbers or anything?

02:24:15.000 No.

02:24:16.000 I think I still remember his name, though.

02:24:17.000 But this was years and years and years ago.

02:24:20.000 A long time ago.

02:24:21.000 That must have been really weird.

02:24:22.000 It was.

02:24:22.000 All those different times you're out there by yourself and all of a sudden you see a guy.

02:24:26.000 Yeah.

02:24:28.000 That's the only time I'd met somebody at random on the ground ever.

02:24:33.000 I've had one time when some hunters flew there and landed.

02:24:40.000 They were thinking of hunting there, but after they talked to me for a while, I convinced them to go somewhere else.

02:24:46.000 There's plenty of space.

02:24:47.000 There's no reason for two people to be hunting in the same area.

02:24:49.000 Yeah, especially out there.

02:24:50.000 But yeah, I mean, I almost never meet anybody.

02:24:53.000 So it's different.

02:24:54.000 You really appreciate people, and that's something that I've always noticed when I was out there a long time.

02:25:01.000 If you see anybody, if it's a state trooper that stops in and you haven't seen anybody for three months, I mean, it's great.

02:25:06.000 You invite them in.

02:25:08.000 You talk to people.

02:25:09.000 It's not like...

02:25:11.000 When you've got a lot of people around, you can't communicate with everybody.

02:25:13.000 You have to ignore people.

02:25:15.000 I know you liked a lot of aspects of living up there, but is there one thing that really stands out?

02:25:24.000 One thing would definitely be the autonomy, the independence.

02:25:29.000 I think it's just a natural...

02:25:32.000 Need that humans have.

02:25:34.000 You watch a little baby.

02:25:36.000 When they learn to crawl, they start separating from their mother a little bit.

02:25:40.000 Then they start to learn to stand up, but they're still holding on to the wall.

02:25:43.000 Then they start taking their first steps.

02:25:45.000 And it's like, wow, I can stand on my own feet.

02:25:47.000 You know, they get all excited and start running along for very long.

02:25:53.000 And I think we just need that feeling of independence, some people more than others.

02:25:59.000 But it's the same basic thing for me.

02:26:01.000 It's just like to be out there totally independent on my own.

02:26:06.000 Nobody else is going to help me if I have a problem.

02:26:09.000 You know, if I'm up on a mountain and I don't have a satellite phone with me, I got to be able to walk back to my camp.

02:26:17.000 I have to be able to.

02:26:18.000 There's literally no choice.

02:26:21.000 And just to have that degree of responsibility that in modern society you don't have.

02:26:30.000 You can't have that degree of responsibility in modern society for yourself.

02:26:35.000 You can't have that level of independence standing on your own.

02:26:39.000 Is it hard for you to come to a place like L.A.? Is it weird?

02:26:44.000 What's the feeling when you're driving on the 405 from the airport headed over to the studio?

02:26:48.000 You have to be like, why the fuck would anybody live here?

02:26:52.000 No, no.

02:26:53.000 No?

02:26:53.000 I find it fascinating.

02:26:55.000 It's interesting because it's a different environment.

02:26:57.000 I mean, I'm very curious about the way people live everywhere.

02:27:02.000 But I do find myself realizing why I don't live in a big city.

02:27:10.000 I find it really nice, interesting to me.

02:27:13.000 I have a shower.

02:27:15.000 It's like, whoa, this is cool.

02:27:16.000 The water comes out hot.

02:27:18.000 I don't like toilets.

02:27:19.000 We have two toilets here.

02:27:20.000 Did you use one yet?

02:27:21.000 Yeah, I used one in the hotel, but they build them too high.

02:27:23.000 I'm used to squatting.

02:27:24.000 Oh, squatting.

02:27:25.000 You can get a squatty potty.

02:27:27.000 You know what that is?

02:27:28.000 No, they make them?

02:27:29.000 Yeah, it's like a thing that they put underneath the toilet.

02:27:32.000 You put your feet on.

02:27:33.000 Oh, yeah.

02:27:34.000 So it sort of puts your butt in the right position.

02:27:36.000 I'll ask...

02:27:36.000 I'll ask the front desk if they got one tonight.

02:27:38.000 I don't think they will say yes.

02:27:40.000 But that's what you're supposed to have, right?

02:27:42.000 You're supposed to be in a position where you're squatting.

02:27:45.000 That's the natural position for humans to shit.

02:27:48.000 It works for me.

02:27:49.000 That's another thing I like about it out there.

02:27:52.000 Okay, there's the autonomy, the independence is very important.

02:27:57.000 And I think a lot of people are missing that, and that's why they're attracted to learn something about that life.

02:28:03.000 But also just, like I said, when you do these basic things, it could be taking a crap, it could be taking a shower, whatever, in a different way out in nature.

02:28:13.000 I mean, you can't, a lot of people can't bathe outside if they wanted to.

02:28:17.000 They don't have the privacy.

02:28:20.000 But when that's your normal thing, I mean, it becomes a totally natural thing and it's like very healthy.

02:28:29.000 And it's beautiful.

02:28:31.000 You're out there looking at mountains all around in nature, little Tweety birds flying by while you're bathing.

02:28:37.000 You're not sealed off in some little fiberglass cubicle.

02:28:42.000 Yeah.

02:28:44.000 You're connected to everything.

02:28:45.000 Yeah, it's a 100% different way of living life.

02:28:48.000 And your perceptions change.

02:28:50.000 Your senses change.

02:28:51.000 In the modern world, there's a lot of extraneous noise and imagery that we're filtering out all the time.

02:28:58.000 You can't pay attention to everything.

02:29:00.000 Did you ever get injured while you were up there?

02:29:03.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:29:07.000 But you can't pay attention to everything.

02:29:09.000 I'll get to it.

02:29:09.000 Okay.

02:29:10.000 You can't pay attention to everything.

02:29:11.000 So you're filtering stuff out all the time, right?

02:29:13.000 Right.

02:29:15.000 And when you're out in that environment, it's very quiet.

02:29:18.000 You're not getting inundated with all of this extraneous noise.

02:29:23.000 And you're, instead of filtering, you're tuning in.

02:29:25.000 You're really tuning in.

02:29:27.000 Like one little bird that hasn't been around the valley flies through.

02:29:31.000 I'll know it.

02:29:32.000 I'll hear it.

02:29:33.000 Wow!

02:29:33.000 Hey, that was a pine groves because I haven't heard one of those for a while.

02:29:37.000 You're paying attention to everything.

02:29:41.000 And that's really different.

02:29:42.000 It changes.

02:29:43.000 It changes the way you think.

02:29:45.000 There's a feeling that you get when you're in the real wilderness.

02:29:50.000 Like, particularly, we did some hunting on Prince of Wales.

02:29:53.000 Yeah.

02:29:54.000 And, you know, when you're out there, it's raining.

02:29:57.000 It rains every day.

02:29:59.000 And there's this feeling of beautiful isolation.

02:30:08.000 You're really isolated.

02:30:10.000 I mean, you're really alone.

02:30:13.000 You don't see anything, you don't hear anything, and there's this indifference that nature has towards you that's really humbling.

02:30:21.000 It's like it puts you in your place.

02:30:23.000 Yeah.

02:30:24.000 Humans need that.

02:30:26.000 They need to be put in their place.

02:30:27.000 I always say that some of the nicest people live near mountains and live near the ocean.

02:30:32.000 I think the reason being is the ocean just lets you know, hey bitch, look at that.

02:30:36.000 You ain't shit.

02:30:36.000 Look at that water.

02:30:38.000 You can't survive there knowing that there's something right there that you can't survive in.

02:30:44.000 It checks you a little bit.

02:30:45.000 The mountains check you.

02:30:47.000 The sheer beauty and the vastness.

02:30:50.000 If you're looking out at the continental divide and you see the The Rocky Mountains, it's like, it's humbling.

02:30:57.000 It's humbling.

02:30:58.000 On the one hand, you feel really strong being able to do what you're doing there, but on the other hand, you feel really small.

02:31:04.000 Yeah, really vulnerable.

02:31:06.000 Really insignificant.

02:31:07.000 Tell me about how you got injured.

02:31:09.000 Um...

02:31:11.000 I've had problems with tendons a few times.

02:31:15.000 I've had some weird medical issues at different times, like things that most people wouldn't have down here.

02:31:21.000 Like what?

02:31:27.000 It's okay if we diverge from injury to illness?

02:31:29.000 Sure, sure.

02:31:32.000 Well, one time I was starving, the time I ate the weasels.

02:31:35.000 This was a protracted starvation.

02:31:38.000 Like, I literally was having a famine for a couple months where I was always getting a little bit of food, but not enough.

02:31:43.000 How much weight did you lose?

02:31:44.000 A lot.

02:31:45.000 I didn't have a scale.

02:31:46.000 Right.

02:31:46.000 But I got real skinny.

02:31:48.000 Real skinny.

02:31:49.000 Like, first I lost all my fat, then I literally lost my muscles, and I got really weak.

02:31:53.000 I was still going out looking for food every day, but I couldn't go as far.

02:31:56.000 I couldn't climb up the 5,000 foot mountains anymore.

02:31:58.000 I got that weak.

02:31:59.000 And this is over months?

02:32:01.000 Over months.

02:32:02.000 Wow.

02:32:02.000 Didn't have enough food for a couple of months.

02:32:04.000 And you couldn't fish?

02:32:06.000 This was in the winter.

02:32:07.000 Ice?

02:32:08.000 The ice is very thick.

02:32:10.000 Back then, the ice used to get thicker back then.

02:32:12.000 It was usually about four feet of ice on the lake by late winter.

02:32:15.000 Now, some winters have only had two and a half feet.

02:32:18.000 But anyway...

02:32:20.000 I would try fishing, but there's not that many fish there.

02:32:23.000 This is a little lake a mile across, isolated in the mountains.

02:32:26.000 The fish that are in the lake stay there.

02:32:29.000 They're also smaller.

02:32:30.000 They don't grow as fast.

02:32:32.000 You can expend a lot of effort chiseling through.

02:32:34.000 Remember, I don't have a power auger or anything.

02:32:37.000 Chiseling through three, four feet of ice, trying to catch fish that are this long and this big around.

02:32:44.000 So I was, you know, trying to be as efficient as possible.

02:32:46.000 I had out a lot of snares for snowshoe hares.

02:32:49.000 There are not many snowshoe hares.

02:32:49.000 There's not much small game, but I was catching a little bit every day.

02:32:52.000 Like, I'd get a grouse, I'd get a pyrmine, I'd get a rabbit, but I was gradually getting weaker and thinner and weaker and thinner.

02:33:02.000 So, what happened to me health-wise, though, was that eventually, when I got food, I just ate as much as I could eat.

02:33:17.000 For three or four days, all I did was eat, sleep, and shit, literally.

02:33:22.000 And I got refeeding edema.

02:33:25.000 Whoa.

02:33:26.000 Which, at the time, I didn't recognize.

02:33:28.000 I didn't even know what it was.

02:33:30.000 But you can actually die...

02:33:34.000 If you refeed yourself too fast, like World War II, when they were liberating concentration camps, soldiers didn't notice they were giving prisoners all the food they wanted to eat, and some people got this refeeding edema.

02:33:46.000 They get pulmonary edema and literally die.

02:33:49.000 And, you know, disastrously, people that go into, like, famine areas and whatnot, they know about this now.

02:33:55.000 You can't give people unlimited food.

02:33:57.000 I didn't know about that.

02:34:01.000 So I got edema and it was weird.

02:34:04.000 I just thought like I was getting fat or something, but I was actually retaining fluids.

02:34:08.000 And I didn't find out for months later.

02:34:10.000 I was talking to a doctor about what had happened to me.

02:34:11.000 He said, you got refeeding edema.

02:34:13.000 So you were just living with it.

02:34:15.000 Yeah, it didn't last that long.

02:34:17.000 How long did it last?

02:34:17.000 But like, I don't remember exactly how long it lasted, but within two weeks of when I got food, I was like all puffy, and I'm like, what the hell's going on?

02:34:25.000 I couldn't put on weight this fast, but it was actually just fluid that my body was retaining.

02:34:29.000 Like, my chest was, I remember Sylvia pushing on and saying, you're all like spongy.

02:34:33.000 And I was like, yeah, isn't that weird?

02:34:35.000 Because I had been like, you know, skin and bones.

02:34:38.000 How'd you feel?

02:34:41.000 I just felt hungry.

02:34:43.000 Still?

02:34:45.000 Well, not for two weeks, but man, for days all I did was eat.

02:34:48.000 I'd eat until my stomach just couldn't take anymore.

02:34:50.000 Wow.

02:34:51.000 What had you gotten?

02:34:52.000 Is that when you had gotten the caribou from the wolves?

02:34:55.000 No, that's when I got store-bought food.

02:34:57.000 A friend of mine flew in.

02:35:01.000 The thing that had happened was we had had this arrangement where somebody was supposed to come partway through the winter that we knew that was going to bring in food and some supplies.

02:35:11.000 I kept thinking, like, I just want to survive.

02:35:13.000 I want to get through it.

02:35:14.000 Like, my goal is to live off the land as much as I can, and we got this arrangement anyway.

02:35:19.000 Tim's going to bring us some supplies later in the winter.

02:35:21.000 I'm just going to see the best I can do, you know, and I just kept going out and getting small game.

02:35:26.000 Then what happened was, even when you got a plane coming, it's hard sometimes to get in up there.

02:35:32.000 And also, you know, my friend was working during the week.

02:35:34.000 He could only come on weekends.

02:35:35.000 The weather was bad this weekend, and then he couldn't come, or maybe there was some other issue with the plane or something.

02:35:41.000 It just kept getting delayed, and it got to be a real problem.

02:35:44.000 Finally, I was like, I sent him a message on that sat phone.

02:35:46.000 I was like, hey, Tim, you know, like, I'm starving up here.

02:35:48.000 I've been living on muskrats and snowshoe hares and not enough of them.

02:35:52.000 You got to come next weekend or make sure somebody else gets in here, because I was really worried about my health at that point.

02:35:58.000 Yeah.

02:35:59.000 So then he did get in there and he dropped off all this food and I just pigged out.

02:36:04.000 Wow.

02:36:05.000 And I got refeeding edema.

02:36:07.000 What kind of food?

02:36:09.000 I always just would get basic food.

02:36:13.000 I'm talking like...

02:36:13.000 Beans and rice.

02:36:14.000 Oats, rice, legumes, powdered milk, something I used to get, you know.

02:36:22.000 Yeah, and then not long after that, in February, in the middle of February, the caribou showed up that year.

02:36:28.000 And I got five caribou at one time out on the island on the lake.

02:36:33.000 And then, you know, we were all set again.

02:36:35.000 Feast or famine.

02:36:36.000 Yeah, it is.

02:36:36.000 It's like a hungry country, but...

02:36:40.000 There are a lot of animals, but they're different places.

02:36:43.000 You can fly over the Arctic all day long and not see hardly anything.

02:36:47.000 Yeah, that's the weird part about it, right?

02:36:49.000 You would think there's animals everywhere.

02:36:51.000 No.

02:36:51.000 It's almost like a desert.

02:36:52.000 It is.

02:36:53.000 It's like the Sahara Desert up there a lot of times, but...

02:36:57.000 There are a lot of animals concentrated.

02:36:59.000 The caribou are concentrated.

02:37:00.000 There's herds of 100,000 caribou.

02:37:02.000 100,000?

02:37:03.000 Yeah.

02:37:04.000 Really?

02:37:04.000 At certain times of the year when they all congregate, there can be 100,000.

02:37:08.000 Wow.

02:37:08.000 That's insane.

02:37:09.000 Yeah.

02:37:09.000 I didn't know they ever got that big.

02:37:11.000 Some of the big Arctic herds, I mean, they don't all get in one place at one time, but they are recognized as a herd.

02:37:20.000 They get into the hundreds of thousands.

02:37:22.000 Mm-hmm.

02:37:28.000 We're good to go.

02:37:53.000 Yeah.

02:37:54.000 We're looking at an enormous pack of caribou.

02:37:58.000 What do they call them?

02:37:58.000 They call them packs?

02:38:00.000 Herd.

02:38:00.000 Herd?

02:38:01.000 Enormous herd of caribou.

02:38:03.000 Look at all those.

02:38:04.000 Yeah, it's in the summer.

02:38:06.000 In the summer, they're up on the north side usually.

02:38:08.000 God, that's insane.

02:38:11.000 It's so big.

02:38:12.000 It's delicious meat, huh?

02:38:13.000 I've sat there at the cabin looking out at the lake, and caribou walking across the lake, moving all the time, and I estimated at one moment I could see 800 on the lake.

02:38:25.000 Wow.

02:38:26.000 Yeah.

02:38:27.000 A lot of caribou.

02:38:29.000 Like, the way I hunt them sometimes is to run around out there on the lake with them.

02:38:34.000 Really?

02:38:35.000 Yeah.

02:38:36.000 Like...

02:38:39.000 Can you pull up a picture on Facebook or you can't do that?

02:38:41.000 There's one of me running in a caribou herd.

02:38:44.000 In your notes section?

02:38:45.000 It's right on the front page there where it's like the pictures that you can leave up all the time.

02:38:49.000 What do they call them?

02:38:50.000 Not in the notes section.

02:38:51.000 No, it's right on the...

02:38:52.000 You ran with them and that's how you were hunting them?

02:38:56.000 Echo chasing the car.

02:38:57.000 I told you how I used to study a lot of anthropology.

02:39:00.000 I used to listen to anything that I could hear about how people used to live in the old days, and especially the Inuit and people living up north.

02:39:10.000 There was this anthropologist, Austin Balixi.

02:39:14.000 He made some films back in the 1960s of the Netsilik people.

02:39:18.000 The Netsilik Eskimo series, it's called.

02:39:20.000 It's fascinating.

02:39:22.000 He went up Boothia Peninsula in northern Canada and filmed people that still knew how to do things in very primitive ways.

02:39:31.000 And one thing I learned from those films was how they would hunt caribou.

02:39:34.000 And the way these people would hunt caribou is there'd only be, you know, a few hunters.

02:39:40.000 They'd build the little stone inuksuks, they call them, it's like a scarecrow, make a line going down toward the lake so it looks like people.

02:39:50.000 Then the few hunters would move around and they would use their voice and they'd yell and they'd echo their voice around and confuse the caribou and chase them into a lake that way.

02:39:58.000 They could use their voice to get them down there and then one guy in a kayak could overtake the caribou and spare them.

02:40:04.000 It's amazing.

02:40:06.000 But you were by yourself.

02:40:08.000 Yeah.

02:40:09.000 But this is something you can use by yourself.

02:40:10.000 You can use this technique of using your voice to confuse caribou and herd them where you want them to go.

02:40:16.000 You echo.

02:40:17.000 Mm-hmm.

02:40:19.000 Out on the lake, if they're caribou, it's wide open.

02:40:22.000 They can see me a half a mile away, and they'll go out in the middle of the lake in the day and stand around out there.

02:40:28.000 If I try walking up to them a few hundred yards away, they might just take off.

02:40:34.000 Yell as loud as I can yell and project my voice over to an island or shoreline, depending on where I am, and it'll bounce back and they'll stop and they'll run straight back at me.

02:40:43.000 Wow.

02:40:44.000 I've had them come running by me where Tricia was like, oh my God, she thought I was going to get run over.

02:40:48.000 She was filming once and I could hear her when I watched the video and she's like, oh, I think he's going to get run over.

02:40:53.000 You know, she was like really weird.

02:40:55.000 You see that picture there, Jamie?

02:40:57.000 I can't find it.

02:40:58.000 It's right on the...

02:40:59.000 I'll pop up so you can see it.

02:41:02.000 Yeah, scroll up to the top.

02:41:03.000 Right there, the upper leftmost picture.

02:41:05.000 Yeah.

02:41:07.000 Okay.

02:41:08.000 Trisha took that picture.

02:41:10.000 Wow.

02:41:10.000 Now, those caribou, they were running away from me before this picture was taken.

02:41:17.000 And I was screaming and hollering, echoing my voice off the shoreline, and they'd turn around and run back.

02:41:24.000 And I do it many times.

02:41:25.000 I had these caribou run back and forth like five, six times.

02:41:28.000 I could stay within 50 yards of them a lot of times just by yelling as loud as I could.

02:41:32.000 You look really close right there.

02:41:34.000 Yeah.

02:41:36.000 Well, Tricia thought I was going to get, you know, trampled.

02:41:39.000 And so this is how you hunted them?

02:41:40.000 This is a technique I've used for hunting, but on this particular day I was just demonstrating it.

02:41:45.000 Oh.

02:41:47.000 Now, did you run into any issues where you really didn't have any vegetables other than the vegetables in the stomachs of the animals you ate?

02:41:55.000 You were just eating meat.

02:41:56.000 Did you run into any health issues just living off of meat?

02:42:00.000 I've eaten a very high protein, high fat diet for long periods of time.

02:42:08.000 I think that there's a lot more to food than nutrition.

02:42:12.000 The reason I was eating that way had nothing to do with me thinking that it was the best diet.

02:42:16.000 The reason I was eating that way is because I just wanted to live as close to that environment as possible, and that's what was available.

02:42:28.000 So I know some people are thinking, well, this is a really healthy diet.

02:42:31.000 Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

02:42:32.000 But that wasn't my motivation.

02:42:34.000 Did you feel healthy when you had a good amount of it?

02:42:36.000 What I felt was that if I ate too much meat, it had bad effects.

02:42:45.000 What kind of bad fat?

02:42:46.000 My body started to feel weird.

02:42:48.000 I believe that you can only handle so much protein, but you can handle a lot of fat.

02:42:53.000 What I found is I had to eat most of my calories from fat.

02:42:55.000 I would eat a half a pound of solid pure fat a day when I was eating just meat and fat.

02:43:01.000 I might eat two or three, even four pounds of meat a day, but like a half a pound of it was pure fat.

02:43:08.000 But was it the form of it?

02:43:10.000 Was it bare fat or where are you getting your fat from?

02:43:12.000 It would be moose fat.

02:43:14.000 It would be sheep fat.

02:43:15.000 One year it was bear fat.

02:43:16.000 Their fat is weird, right?

02:43:17.000 Because it's a different...

02:43:19.000 Caribou fat?

02:43:20.000 Chewy fat, like a deer fat.

02:43:22.000 Chewy?

02:43:23.000 But you know what I'm saying?

02:43:25.000 It doesn't render down like a beef fat would.

02:43:30.000 Moose fat?

02:43:31.000 Yeah.

02:43:32.000 Oh, sure.

02:43:33.000 You can render it if you want.

02:43:35.000 I rendered a lot of it.

02:43:36.000 The way you look at it on the animal, it just seems different.

02:43:40.000 What's different about it is that those game animals do not put on fat within the muscle.

02:43:47.000 Right.

02:43:48.000 It's separate.

02:43:49.000 Right.

02:43:50.000 If you get a fat moose, he'll have a big fat layer on his back.

02:43:54.000 And so you would render that fat?

02:43:55.000 Sure.

02:43:56.000 That's how you do it?

02:43:56.000 I mean, I'll eat it all the way.

02:43:57.000 When I'm butchering the moose in the field, I start eating the fat right there.

02:44:00.000 Really?

02:44:01.000 Sure.

02:44:01.000 Wow.

02:44:02.000 Grab it off the kidneys and stuff and start eating it.

02:44:04.000 So that was the key for you, was to get enough fat?

02:44:06.000 I had to eat a lot of fat, and then I would feel better.

02:44:10.000 If you're just eating protein, for me, it didn't work.

02:44:14.000 How did it make you feel?

02:44:15.000 It made me feel like I'd drink an awful lot of water.

02:44:18.000 Like you had to drink an awful lot of water?

02:44:20.000 Yeah, I'd drink a lot of water or I'd feel kind of like just a weird feeling inside.

02:44:25.000 I mean, I also was working really hard physically at those times, but I was definitely drinking more than a gallon of water a day, sometimes almost two gallons of water a day when I'd be in real cold weather, climbing mountains and everything, eating meat and fat all the time.

02:44:40.000 Yeah.

02:44:41.000 Yeah.

02:44:43.000 I've been drinking a lot of water.

02:44:44.000 And the other thing that was really important to me, like when I hear people talking about how they eat a high meat diet or ketogenic diet now and they're just eating beef, I wonder, you know, what they're doing for variety.

02:44:59.000 Because for me, I was eating all different parts of the animal, all the different organs and things.

02:45:03.000 And also...

02:45:05.000 A lot of it I'd eat raw or half-dried, for example, was one of my favorite ways to eat caribou meat when I was eating this meat-fat diet.

02:45:14.000 Now I eat more vegetables and fruits, and I still like to eat a lot of meat, but I do eat more vegetables and fruits.

02:45:20.000 Do you feel better that way?

02:45:22.000 Personally, yeah.

02:45:23.000 I like variety.

02:45:25.000 I like a mix.

02:45:26.000 I mean, I felt good when I was eating that stuff, but like I say, I would not feel good if I was just eating steaks every day.

02:45:32.000 Right.

02:45:33.000 If I was just eating steaks every day, I would feel strange.

02:45:36.000 But if I took a caribou backstrap and I just sliced it up thin and hung it over the wood stove and left it there for half a day or something, it would get a little dry on the outside, but it would still be raw inside, that stuff was delicious.

02:45:49.000 That would be like candy for me.

02:45:50.000 I'd just pig out and I'd love that.

02:45:52.000 And what would you do with the crust?

02:45:54.000 Eat it.

02:45:54.000 Oh, you mean the crust on big pieces that have been hanging around all winter?

02:45:58.000 Yeah.

02:45:59.000 That gets turned into bait.

02:46:01.000 That gets fed to the animals.

02:46:02.000 Oh, okay.

02:46:03.000 If it's...

02:46:03.000 Did you ever try to eat that?

02:46:05.000 The only crust that...

02:46:08.000 Because that's where the oxidized blood is, basically.

02:46:10.000 It turns really dark.

02:46:12.000 It'll get almost black.

02:46:15.000 Yeah.

02:46:35.000 I would not consider that food.

02:46:37.000 It's not the same as dry meat, that you take a fresh piece of meat and dry it for a few days.

02:46:44.000 This is coming from a guy who ate the contents of animal stomachs, so I trust you.

02:46:51.000 Try it sometime.

02:46:52.000 When you say it's not meat, it's not food, don't eat it.

02:46:55.000 Not that black crust.

02:46:57.000 It's just oxidized blood.

02:46:59.000 Yeah.

02:46:59.000 Blood's good, but you want your blood real fresh.

02:47:02.000 Right.

02:47:02.000 Yeah.

02:47:03.000 Like, that's the thing with blood is...

02:47:06.000 A lot of times, I haven't even been able to eat the blood from an animal because I'm just too busy.

02:47:10.000 But that's the thing.

02:47:11.000 You can eat the stomach.

02:47:12.000 You can eat the intestine.

02:47:14.000 You can eat the colon.

02:47:15.000 I've eaten the colon of a moose.

02:47:16.000 You can eat the lungs, even.

02:47:18.000 You can eat spleen.

02:47:19.000 I've eaten all this stuff.

02:47:20.000 But the truth is, if you're one guy working alone butchering a moose, you have a hard time getting all that stuff preserved and prepared.

02:47:28.000 Yeah.

02:47:29.000 Because if you want to eat the colon, you want to get the shit out of it fast before it gets hard.

02:47:33.000 Oh, boy.

02:47:35.000 What does the colon of a moose taste like?

02:47:37.000 Oh, like the colon of a donkey?

02:47:39.000 No, it's great because, well, when you do it right, all it is is fat.

02:47:42.000 It's like donuts.

02:47:44.000 It's like fat donut.

02:47:45.000 You slice it.

02:47:46.000 What you do, if you want to eat the colon of moose, an old guy that was married to an Eskimo told me this, and it works.

02:47:52.000 You've got to work fast.

02:47:54.000 When you take the colon out of your next elk, try this out, Joe.

02:47:57.000 Okay.

02:47:57.000 Turn it inside out.

02:47:59.000 Like a sock.

02:48:00.000 Turn it inside out like a sock.

02:48:01.000 Okay.

02:48:02.000 You've got the inside out.

02:48:04.000 It's all smooth.

02:48:05.000 Right.

02:48:06.000 You know how the outside of the colon or the large intestine is full of fat, like on any animal.

02:48:12.000 There's all this fat all over it.

02:48:13.000 That's going to be on the inside.

02:48:15.000 Now, you just wash that.

02:48:17.000 Take it home and wash it good.

02:48:18.000 Get the lining all nice and clean.

02:48:21.000 Then you slice it like donuts and fry it up.

02:48:25.000 What'd it taste like?

02:48:26.000 Delicious.

02:48:28.000 Is there anything that resembles that would resonate with people?

02:48:31.000 Fat.

02:48:32.000 It's like good moose fat.

02:48:33.000 Wow.

02:48:34.000 I mean, there's all different kinds of fat.

02:48:35.000 I have a hard time describing exact taste.

02:48:37.000 What does it taste like?

02:48:38.000 People always ask me that.

02:48:40.000 Well, you might be- Tastes like a moose colon.

02:48:41.000 Yeah.

02:48:42.000 I'm saying there might be four other people that know what that tastes like.

02:48:46.000 Oh, no.

02:48:47.000 No, you go up in some village in northern Alaska and talk to old people.

02:48:52.000 You find old people that eat stuff that have grown up.

02:48:56.000 70, 80-year-old native people.

02:48:58.000 There's a lot of people today that follow a carnivore diet and that they just eat animal products and meat, but they're eating mostly domestic steak and it's got a lot of fat in it already.

02:49:09.000 Yeah, that's true.

02:49:11.000 That would be different.

02:49:12.000 I haven't tried that.

02:49:15.000 But I will say that I feel very different eating beef from wild animals.

02:49:18.000 There's a huge difference.

02:49:20.000 Huge difference.

02:49:21.000 Huge.

02:49:22.000 And you just look at beef cattle.

02:49:27.000 They look lethargic compared to a wild animal.

02:49:31.000 They're obviously overweight.

02:49:33.000 They've been pretty much just bred and fed to be fat.

02:49:38.000 And you look at that and it's somehow...

02:49:42.000 It doesn't feel like that animal's gonna be as healthy to me to put into my body as a caribou running around wild like those ones we were just looking at a picture of.

02:49:52.000 No, it's not as healthy.

02:49:54.000 Gram for gram, ounce for ounce, you take a caribou or a mousse, it's much more protein.

02:50:02.000 It's much more dense material, much denser meat.

02:50:08.000 It's way less fat.

02:50:10.000 It's just a completely different experience.

02:50:12.000 It makes you feel different when you eat it.

02:50:14.000 There's a feeling that you get from Wild Game that's almost like a stimulant.

02:50:19.000 There's like a little bit of a woo!

02:50:22.000 And it's what you did to get it.

02:50:24.000 Yep, that too.

02:50:25.000 It's connected to it.

02:50:26.000 I mean, you get that back.

02:50:27.000 It just tastes so good after you did all that work.

02:50:29.000 Yeah, there's nothing like it.

02:50:31.000 There's nothing like it.

02:50:33.000 I guess the closest you could get is to bison.

02:50:37.000 If you buy store-bought bison, it's pretty close to what it would be if it was wild, if it's just grazing.

02:50:44.000 As long as it has that yellow fat that they get when they're grazing.

02:50:48.000 Do you know anybody who's tried that for their carnivore diet?

02:50:50.000 Only eating bison?

02:50:51.000 No.

02:50:52.000 Get something closer to a wild animal?

02:50:53.000 No, I only know a couple people that are doing it, and they're all doing domestic ribeyes and stuff like that.

02:50:59.000 They're just getting a lot of fatty meats.

02:51:01.000 I love ribeye steak, but to just live on that, I don't know how that would be.

02:51:05.000 I never tried just living on that.

02:51:08.000 Yeah, I'm watching these people waiting for the shoe to drop, waiting for them to develop health issues, waiting for this...

02:51:16.000 It's weird.

02:51:17.000 It's very much like vegans in a way, where they're completely committed to this idea and any other idea is stupid.

02:51:27.000 And they're just the ideological hardliners with meat.

02:51:31.000 And they think that vegetables are bad for you and you shouldn't be eating vegetables, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

02:51:39.000 And then the same thing with vegans.

02:51:40.000 Vegans want to think that this is the only way to eat.

02:51:43.000 The only way to eat is with vegetables.

02:51:44.000 If you eat meat, it's bad for you.

02:51:46.000 Meat kills you.

02:51:48.000 I'm like, alright.

02:51:49.000 People have been eating meat for literally all of time.

02:51:53.000 97% of the population of the planet eats meat.

02:51:56.000 It's crazy to think that meat's bad for you.

02:51:58.000 Meat is one of the reasons why we're human.

02:52:01.000 What's bad for you, most likely, according to basically every study they've ever done, when they look at meat eaters versus people not eating meat, what they don't dissect is what are the other things these meat eaters are eating.

02:52:12.000 And what kind of meat are they eating?

02:52:14.000 Are they eating a sandwich from a fast food place, a cheeseburger with fries and a shake and soda with a lot of sugar in it?

02:52:22.000 Is that the meat eater?

02:52:23.000 Or are they doing what you did?

02:52:25.000 Are they eating fresh caribou?

02:52:28.000 What are they eating?

02:52:29.000 After spending a whole winter out there living primarily on meat and fat and very small amount of wild plant food, gathered maybe...

02:52:38.000 15-20 gallons of berries in the fall.

02:52:40.000 Had some dried leaves from the spring before, willow leaves.

02:52:44.000 Had a few roots, but the roots there are very small.

02:52:47.000 So I'm eating 90% meat and fat, at least, of my calories.

02:52:54.000 I got my cholesterol checked next time I came town.

02:52:56.000 I was just curious.

02:52:57.000 I hadn't had it checked for many years.

02:52:59.000 And I thought, what am I doing, you know, eating all this fat?

02:53:01.000 I'm eating like half a pound of fat a day.

02:53:03.000 Might be really bad.

02:53:05.000 And my total cholesterol level was 138. Is that good?

02:53:10.000 That's really low.

02:53:12.000 In fact, the doctor who checked it said 200 I think is like high.

02:53:15.000 200 is borderline high or something.

02:53:19.000 And the doctor who checked it said that's the lowest cholesterol I've ever checked.

02:53:24.000 Because I told him I'm a little bit scared I've been eating so much fat this year.

02:53:26.000 Like unbelievable amounts of fat.

02:53:28.000 Yeah, but you're spending so much time burning energy.

02:53:32.000 The amount of energy that you must get from hiking 20 miles a day in the mountains, you know, at elevation, wandering around the woods, stepping over logs, all the kind of stuff you have to do, you're burning off an incredible amount of calories.

02:53:46.000 It has to be.

02:53:47.000 Just routine activities, too.

02:53:50.000 You want to get water?

02:53:51.000 Yeah.

02:53:51.000 You go out there and open up that hole through the ice with a chisel.

02:53:56.000 You know, and carry your water every day.

02:53:58.000 Do you have to boil that water too?

02:53:59.000 No.

02:54:00.000 You don't?

02:54:00.000 No.

02:54:01.000 No beavers up that high?

02:54:02.000 I saw one beaver in that lake in 20 years.

02:54:06.000 You take a risk?

02:54:07.000 There are a few beavers in the general region, but it's like the limit of their habitat.

02:54:12.000 Oh, okay.

02:54:13.000 So far north and so far up in the mountains.

02:54:16.000 Yeah, when we were at Prince of Wales, we drank right out of the lake.

02:54:19.000 Yeah.

02:54:20.000 Just dunk your cooler or your thermos into the lake and just start drinking.

02:54:24.000 I was like, that's crazy.

02:54:26.000 I feel so weird.

02:54:28.000 I drink out of puddles.

02:54:30.000 Do you really?

02:54:31.000 Up in the mountains.

02:54:32.000 There's no other water.

02:54:33.000 Sometimes you find a little puddle in the tundra.

02:54:35.000 I never got sick from drinking water out there.

02:54:37.000 It can happen.

02:54:39.000 I know two people that got Giardia, but they were both like old-timers that had lived most of their life out there in the Brooks Range, and they each had had it one time.

02:54:48.000 What do you want to do now?

02:54:51.000 Good question.

02:54:52.000 Now that you're not doing the show anymore, they sort of...

02:54:55.000 Yeah, good question.

02:54:57.000 You know, my contract just ran out two months ago.

02:55:00.000 And I've been thinking a lot about this.

02:55:04.000 Because I love the wilderness.

02:55:05.000 I love nature.

02:55:06.000 And I absolutely love sharing it with people.

02:55:10.000 And I want to find new ways to do that.

02:55:15.000 And there are a lot of new ways now.

02:55:17.000 I mean, that's what inspired me seeing your show is like, wow.

02:55:20.000 I mean, I presume that you don't have to ask anybody about what you put on here, right?

02:55:26.000 No, I don't have to ask anybody.

02:55:27.000 You can do what you want.

02:55:28.000 Well, that's why you're here.

02:55:29.000 That's why I'm here.

02:55:31.000 I mean, I didn't have to go through a series of producers, and I would never do that.

02:55:35.000 If we ever got to a point where they wanted to offer me a gigantic chunk of money to put it on a network, but they had to pick the gas, I'd be like, there's no chance.

02:55:43.000 There's no chance.

02:55:45.000 This is not a chance in hell.

02:55:46.000 The beautiful thing about the freedom that comes with this show is I can talk to people that I find interesting.

02:55:52.000 I found you incredibly interesting.

02:55:54.000 Your story's amazing.

02:55:56.000 When I would watch you on the show, I'd be like, wow, I'd love to talk to that guy.

02:56:00.000 Really?

02:56:00.000 Yeah, man.

02:56:01.000 So when you reached out, I was pumped.

02:56:03.000 Oh, really?

02:56:04.000 Yeah.

02:56:04.000 Cool.

02:56:04.000 Yeah, because what a crazy life.

02:56:06.000 I was like, man, is Joe Rogan going to want to talk to me?

02:56:08.000 He's talking to all these big-time celebrities.

02:56:11.000 Oh, I would like to talk to you probably more than a lot of the big-time celebrities.

02:56:15.000 Some of the big-time, air-quote, celebrities that I talk to, it's just like, okay, I'll do it.

02:56:21.000 So that's my feeling on it.

02:56:22.000 I don't do...

02:56:25.000 The show by itself has become popular for whatever reason.

02:56:31.000 I don't know how it happened.

02:56:32.000 It just did, right?

02:56:34.000 But I never think, like, oh, if I get this guest, that'll be really popular.

02:56:40.000 This'll help the show grow.

02:56:42.000 This'll bring me to another level.

02:56:43.000 I don't think that way ever.

02:56:45.000 That's awesome.

02:56:46.000 My thought is always, that guy would be cool to talk to.

02:56:49.000 Like, ooh, I'd like to talk to her.

02:56:51.000 She seems interesting.

02:56:52.000 Oh, that guy's got a weird life.

02:56:54.000 What the fuck was that like?

02:56:55.000 Like, it's all 100% genuine curiosity.

02:57:01.000 That's awesome.

02:57:01.000 You're doing something that most people don't get to do, which is what you really want to do.

02:57:06.000 You do what you want to do.

02:57:07.000 Yeah, that's the beautiful thing about it, is that I've found out a way to also do it where people enjoy it, where it actually provides a service.

02:57:16.000 So if folks are driving, they have a long trip, or they're on a flight, they can actually get it, it's free, and it gives you something.

02:57:24.000 And there's a lot of wisdom being conveyed by some of your guests.

02:57:27.000 I mean, that's what got me interested in the show is I'm hearing these people talking.

02:57:31.000 You know, today...

02:57:32.000 Well, you just did too.

02:57:33.000 There's a lot of free education out there for people on the internet.

02:57:38.000 Yeah.

02:57:38.000 And, you know...

02:57:42.000 It opens up whole new possibilities.

02:57:44.000 It does.

02:57:45.000 And conversations like this, although, you know, they're not technically education, they expand your horizons.

02:57:51.000 Yeah.

02:57:52.000 They expand your understanding of how people are living their life.

02:57:55.000 And just hearing people genuinely talk, hearing people have real conversations without anybody interfering or anybody to, like, hey, Glenn, maybe it'd be interesting if you're just, like, a little bit more mysterious.

02:58:08.000 You know?

02:58:10.000 You know what?

02:58:11.000 We're going to get you an outfit.

02:58:12.000 You're going to show up to the Joe Rogan show with a fur coat that you made yourself.

02:58:17.000 Isn't it interesting that all the time I was on TV, and that show did really well, I never came down to talk to you, but then on our own we connected.

02:58:27.000 Yeah.

02:58:28.000 It is interesting.

02:58:29.000 It's interesting.

02:58:30.000 Yeah.

02:58:30.000 Well, life's weird.

02:58:32.000 The way things happen and when they happen and why they happen that way, it's like...

02:58:36.000 But as far as what I'm going to do next, I want to keep experiencing these things, which to me are precious and rare.

02:58:46.000 I want to keep going out into the wilderness.

02:58:48.000 I want to keep experiencing it, and I want to share it with people.

02:58:51.000 It doesn't mean anything to me if I don't share it with people anymore.

02:58:52.000 I have no desire to go live by myself in the woods and not talk to anybody.

02:58:56.000 It seems like you could have a skeleton crew of cameraman, editor, you.

02:59:02.000 Yeah.

02:59:02.000 And put it on, like, YouTube.

02:59:04.000 That's what I've thought about, yeah.

02:59:05.000 I think that's a move, man, because you can make real money off of YouTube now.

02:59:10.000 I mean, obviously, you see these YouTube celebrities, they're very wealthy, and they're just doing things on YouTube.

02:59:15.000 And you could just transfer your show over to YouTube.

02:59:19.000 And I guarantee you people would watch.

02:59:22.000 I mean, 100%.

02:59:23.000 I definitely would need a cameraman editor.

02:59:26.000 Yeah, a cameraman and editor.

02:59:28.000 So it's like a three-person crew.

02:59:30.000 So all the stuff that you had to deal with with all these other folks that weren't even there, these producers that were saying they wanted to fire you and all that other shit, you wouldn't have to deal with that at all.

02:59:38.000 And if you had an idea, like, hey, I want to try this.

02:59:41.000 I want to make my own bow and arrow and go shoot a caribou with it.

02:59:44.000 You know, and do it with traditional methods and use the tendons from animals to make the strings and all the stuff that like the Native Americans did.

02:59:51.000 You could do that.

02:59:52.000 You could do whatever you want.

02:59:54.000 You could do whatever you want.

02:59:55.000 And that's what I think would be really appealing to people because just like if you started a podcast or just like anything else where there's no one telling you what to do, you get to find out who the person really is.

03:00:06.000 I think that would be a great way to give you all the freedom that you want.

03:00:14.000 I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to get enough advertiser dollars to pay for an editor and pay for a cameraman and put it up there and start generating revenue.

03:00:23.000 Yeah, some guys are really good.

03:00:25.000 Like, you know, Les Stroud used to film himself a lot.

03:00:27.000 Yeah.

03:00:28.000 I tried that a little bit, but I can't film myself.

03:00:30.000 It's like, I need the interaction.

03:00:32.000 Yeah.

03:00:32.000 Les is, I mean, he's the only one that really did that without any horseshit.

03:00:39.000 Yeah.

03:00:39.000 That live in the woods for seven days and survive off of whatever scraps he could find and find some sort of scenario that they piece together for the show.

03:00:47.000 You know, the reason why Bear Grylls happened The whole reason why that guy got a show is because they were trying to tell Les to fake things.

03:00:55.000 Oh, really?

03:00:55.000 And he wouldn't fake anything.

03:00:57.000 And he's like, I'm not going to do it that way.

03:00:58.000 So they got...

03:00:59.000 Let's get this fucking guy.

03:01:00.000 So he would just go along with them.

03:01:03.000 Bear Grylls just slept in a hotel.

03:01:05.000 He'd pretend he'd drink his own piss.

03:01:07.000 All that stuff.

03:01:07.000 I mean, all...

03:01:08.000 Les was out there really surviving that way.

03:01:10.000 I mean, you would see he would do like a seven-day trip and maybe he would find no food.

03:01:15.000 And by the end of that seven days, you could see how much weight he had lost.

03:01:19.000 I mean, he looked terrible.

03:01:20.000 And then he would get rescued as per, you know, how he would have to go to a drop-off point or a pickup point.

03:01:25.000 But now he's all Bigfoot.

03:01:27.000 Les has gone crazy.

03:01:29.000 Bigfoot.

03:01:30.000 100% Bigfoot.

03:01:30.000 I get more questions about Bigfoot.

03:01:33.000 What is it?

03:01:33.000 You live in the woods and you're supposed to be running into Bigfoot?

03:01:36.000 You're supposed to be a Bigfoot authority?

03:01:37.000 Two questions people are always asking about.

03:01:40.000 Global warming, I'm not a scientist, and Bigfoot.

03:01:44.000 Right.

03:01:44.000 I'm not a scientist, but you said you did notice that the ice is thinning.

03:01:48.000 Yeah, anecdotally I can say that it's definitely warmer where I am compared to what it was 15 years ago.

03:01:56.000 The winters have been warmer.

03:01:57.000 How many years in a row have they been warmer?

03:02:01.000 Oh, I didn't keep the data because I know there are a lot of scientists keeping it, and those are the people I'm going to defer to on global warming.

03:02:07.000 Right.

03:02:07.000 And I believe in global warming.

03:02:08.000 I mean, I believe in the consensus of scientific opinion.

03:02:12.000 What I have seen personally is just, overall, the ice is thinner on my leg.

03:02:17.000 And that's a sign that over the whole course of the winter, there have been milder winters.

03:02:21.000 Fifteen years ago, I'd get around four feet of ice.

03:02:24.000 Now, the last few winters have been times when I went out there in April, which is when it's had its thickest, and there's only two and a half feet of ice.

03:02:29.000 And I'm like, Wow, that's crazy.

03:02:31.000 I never saw that, you know, 10 to 15 years ago.

03:02:35.000 The other thing is the absolute coldest temperatures since I've been out there.

03:02:40.000 Three times it went to colder than 60 below zero.

03:02:43.000 They were all the first couple of winters, first two or three winters.

03:02:45.000 I don't know if that was just, you know...

03:02:47.000 Coincidence or what?

03:02:48.000 I'm not saying this is global warming.

03:02:49.000 I'm just telling you what I've seen.

03:02:52.000 And, like, there have been recent winters where the coldest it ever got was, you know, once or twice to 45 below.

03:02:59.000 One of the first winters I was out there in March for, like, two weeks, it never went above 40 below.

03:03:04.000 I haven't seen anything like that in the last four or five winters.

03:03:08.000 Since I got on the show, the coldest temperature we ever saw was one time it went down to about 50, 55 below.

03:03:18.000 I've seen times, like I said, where it would literally not go above 40 below for two weeks in March.

03:03:27.000 That was first or second year I was out there, so...

03:03:30.000 Anecdotally, at least.

03:03:32.000 Yeah, that's just...

03:03:33.000 Look, we've got to defer to science on this thing.

03:03:37.000 I mean, they're collecting data all over the world.

03:03:41.000 You can see the Arctic oceans.

03:03:43.000 There's less ice.

03:03:44.000 You can measure the temperature of the ocean by sending sound waves through it.

03:03:47.000 There's all different methods.

03:03:52.000 So it doesn't really matter what one person sees in one place, but there's a consensus of opinion.

03:03:56.000 That's what matters.

03:03:57.000 Yeah, but it is interesting, your own anecdotal experience, seeing that the ice is that much thinner and the winters are warmer.

03:04:03.000 I'm sure the National Weather Service has all kinds of data on Alaska.

03:04:08.000 For instance, in Fairbanks, Alaska, We're good to go.

03:04:37.000 And you actually see times when it gets up to freezing.

03:04:41.000 Even freezing rain events in the winter, which didn't used to happen hardly ever.

03:04:46.000 And now that's not that outlandish to have it, you know, get up to freezing in the middle of the winter some days.

03:04:54.000 Bigfoot.

03:04:56.000 What about Bigfoot?

03:04:58.000 I just can't believe people waste their time talking about stuff like that.

03:05:05.000 Well, for someone like you who actually lives in the wilderness, and you actually live in Alaska, which is one of the places where people supposedly spot Bigfoot.

03:05:14.000 Yeah.

03:05:15.000 It's because a lot of nutty people go to Alaska.

03:05:17.000 They call them end of the roaders.

03:05:19.000 Yeah.

03:05:20.000 You drive until you can't go any further, and then you camp out in the woods for a while and see Bigfoot.

03:05:24.000 Yeah.

03:05:25.000 Does Les Stroud really see Bigfoot?

03:05:27.000 I don't think he's ever seen it.

03:05:28.000 But he believes it's out there?

03:05:30.000 His show's sad.

03:05:31.000 It makes me sad.

03:05:32.000 Because he was like a really respected guy doing the survival thing, and I think it was a really interesting educational show, and it showed people how hard it is.

03:05:40.000 But then he got hooked up with this guy, and he was filming these Bigfoot shows, and the guy was completely full of shit.

03:05:48.000 He's wearing a mask, pretending to be Bigfoot in the woods.

03:05:51.000 Filming it.

03:05:52.000 High resolution.

03:05:53.000 It looks so fake.

03:05:55.000 You should see the...

03:05:55.000 Show the fake, because it's so dumb.

03:05:58.000 It's so dumb it hurts your feelings.

03:06:00.000 Like, you're like, what?

03:06:01.000 You're doing this?

03:06:04.000 But it's real popular.

03:06:06.000 That's the problem.

03:06:07.000 If you have, like, a Survivor show, you might get X amount of people to watch it.

03:06:10.000 If you have a Bigfoot show, you might get double the number.

03:06:14.000 What does that tell you about our culture?

03:06:15.000 Not good.

03:06:16.000 Look at this.

03:06:17.000 This is the video footage.

03:06:18.000 This is...

03:06:19.000 He says...

03:06:20.000 He said this is a close-up, high-resolution of Bigfoot.

03:06:24.000 Look.

03:06:24.000 Look at that thing.

03:06:25.000 How fake is that?

03:06:27.000 He's going to zoom in on it.

03:06:29.000 It says, Todd's standing Bigfoot video as seen in Survivorman Bigfoot show with Les Stroud.

03:06:37.000 What's going on?

03:06:38.000 Are the people that are watching this stuff...

03:06:42.000 Actually believing it or they just find it entertaining?

03:06:44.000 There's people in a food coma, sitting on their couch, sitting in front of the TV, thinking about when they're going to go to bed.

03:06:51.000 Look how dumb that looks, man.

03:06:52.000 Look at this fucking stupid fake Bigfoot face.

03:06:57.000 And they're sitting there going, they wish it was real.

03:07:00.000 They wish it was real.

03:07:02.000 Yeah, they wish it was real.

03:07:03.000 They want it to be real.

03:07:04.000 They want there to be some large primate living by itself in the forest, a small number of them.

03:07:12.000 Not that many.

03:07:13.000 Just a small number of them.

03:07:15.000 I've seen some crazy stuff, but it wasn't Bigfoot.

03:07:18.000 Well, here's the thing.

03:07:18.000 If there were Bigfoot, why wouldn't there be thousands of them all over the place?

03:07:22.000 What's going to stop Bigfoot from breeding?

03:07:24.000 Bigfoot would beat the fuck out of a bear, kill a mountain lion.

03:07:28.000 Like, what would stop a Bigfoot?

03:07:30.000 You're talking about an 8 to 10 foot tall gorilla?

03:07:33.000 What the hell would stop that?

03:07:35.000 That would be the king of the forest.

03:07:36.000 And what would stop us from seeing the thing?

03:07:38.000 And what would stop us from finding a body?

03:07:40.000 Yeah.

03:07:40.000 What would stop us from finding...

03:07:41.000 The bones.

03:07:42.000 Yeah.

03:07:43.000 The skeletons.

03:07:44.000 How about an ancient one?

03:07:45.000 You know, in a sight.

03:07:47.000 Like, you know, when they find these mastodons and saber-toothed tigers and things that existed here 10,000 years ago.

03:07:54.000 Why don't they find a Bigfoot?

03:07:55.000 Huh?

03:07:56.000 Feminine.

03:07:57.000 I can't believe it.

03:07:58.000 It's amazing what people – just think how productive it would all be, the society, if people were putting their energy into something more worthwhile.

03:08:06.000 Than Bigfoot.

03:08:06.000 Yeah.

03:08:08.000 Well, you could say that same thing about just surfing Twitter.

03:08:11.000 How many people are just reading just mindless tweets over and over?

03:08:15.000 You're looking for something that's going to stimulate them that never comes their way.

03:08:19.000 Hours a day.

03:08:20.000 I looked at my phone the other day.

03:08:22.000 I was embarrassed.

03:08:23.000 I had four hours of screen time during the day.

03:08:26.000 Four hours.

03:08:28.000 I'm like, what could I have?

03:08:29.000 Some of it was answering text messages.

03:08:32.000 Some of it was answering emails.

03:08:34.000 But let's be honest, that might have been an hour.

03:08:35.000 So like three hours of me just fucking off.

03:08:39.000 I could have been writing jokes.

03:08:41.000 I could have been, you know, researching things.

03:08:44.000 I could have been doing a million things.

03:08:47.000 I could have cleaned this desk.

03:08:50.000 Could have done a lot of shit.

03:08:51.000 It's kind of cluttered.

03:08:52.000 Oh my god, dude.

03:08:53.000 People keep bringing me things.

03:08:55.000 Just stack them up there.

03:08:57.000 You know what?

03:08:57.000 I used to really like Charlie Rose.

03:08:59.000 You remember his show?

03:09:00.000 Sure.

03:09:01.000 It's two guys sitting around a table talking.

03:09:03.000 Yes.

03:09:03.000 When I discovered you, I thought, I wonder if this guy ever saw Charlie Rose if you were inspired by him.

03:09:08.000 No, I never watched his show.

03:09:09.000 I always thought it was really interesting because he had interesting guests.

03:09:13.000 I've seen clips, I'm sure.

03:09:16.000 I've seen clips of him talking.

03:09:18.000 I think he got in some trouble.

03:09:19.000 Yeah, he liked the show's hog.

03:09:21.000 He was being a little loose with the ladies.

03:09:24.000 Yeah.

03:09:24.000 I think it was like women he's working with said he was harassing them.

03:09:27.000 Yeah.

03:09:28.000 Shocker.

03:09:29.000 Yeah, it's too bad.

03:09:30.000 Yeah.

03:09:31.000 It was an interesting show.

03:09:33.000 It was one of the few TV shows I used to like when I was younger, when I had TV. Well, there was a time where, you know, I think it was really difficult to get people to sit down and have a conversation.

03:09:46.000 And so a show like his or any kind of show where people are just sitting down having a conversation, particularly without an audience.

03:09:53.000 Like a lot of these talk shows you see...

03:09:55.000 It's the most unnatural environment of all time.

03:09:57.000 You're sitting sideways, facing a crowd of people that you don't know, with lights and cameramen everywhere, and you're supposed to act normal.

03:10:05.000 It's the least normal you're ever going to act.

03:10:08.000 But those are good, too.

03:10:09.000 Like Phil Donahue, remember him?

03:10:10.000 Oh yeah, sure.

03:10:11.000 Did you used to watch him?

03:10:12.000 Sure, yeah.

03:10:13.000 That was the same idea.

03:10:14.000 Talk about something.

03:10:15.000 Dick Cavett.

03:10:16.000 You ever see the old Dick Cavett shows?

03:10:18.000 It was really interesting from the 60s and 70s.

03:10:20.000 Yeah, it's a little bit before.

03:10:21.000 Yeah.

03:10:21.000 Well, there's videos of it.

03:10:22.000 I've watched almost all of them on YouTube.

03:10:25.000 But it's cool.

03:10:28.000 People like conversations because they like to know how other people are thinking and they kind of decipher that and piece it together through listening to people talk.

03:10:36.000 Yeah.

03:10:37.000 Listen, man, I hope you do your thing on YouTube or somewhere else like that where they give you control.

03:10:41.000 I think that would be really the ultimate thing for you is to not have producers.

03:10:47.000 Look, if I had what you were going through at any point in this podcast, I'd probably quit.

03:10:53.000 If I had producers telling me what to do and I had to argue with the network about what kind of guests to have on or, you know, what, you know, like we have to review a show.

03:11:02.000 Why did you talk like this?

03:11:04.000 Why did you say that?

03:11:05.000 I would have never got here.

03:11:06.000 It would have never happened.

03:11:08.000 The only reason why this happened was because the time I created it aligned with technology and it aligned with the ability to get things out in this way, mass scale, that just didn't exist previously.

03:11:21.000 And I think that could be expanded to what you do easily, especially YouTube.

03:11:27.000 Something like that, or Vimeo, or many of these other streaming services.

03:11:31.000 Doing something like that We just have a cameraman, and you just have an editor and you, and you're out there.

03:11:38.000 I mean, it'd be magic.

03:11:40.000 Perfect.

03:11:41.000 And you can give the 100% full vision of you.

03:11:45.000 You don't have to have anybody else's input.

03:11:49.000 Give the vision of what's out there.

03:11:51.000 Yeah, and then you also have a direct line to your fans, like if you put it on Facebook.

03:11:55.000 And the people that like it or don't like it, hey Glenn, I'm tired of seeing you shit in the woods.

03:11:59.000 You know?

03:12:00.000 That's the amazing thing about this world, is that people can connect.

03:12:03.000 Yeah, yeah.

03:12:04.000 It's phenomenal.

03:12:06.000 Yeah, it's amazing.

03:12:07.000 Listen, man, it's been cool to connect with you.

03:12:09.000 I really enjoyed this.

03:12:10.000 It was a lot of fun.

03:12:11.000 We did like three and a half hours.

03:12:12.000 Thanks for having me down.

03:12:13.000 Oh, really?

03:12:13.000 I wasn't paying attention.

03:12:14.000 It's almost 3.30.

03:12:15.000 It's a long show.

03:12:16.000 Yeah, it's great though, man.

03:12:17.000 I really enjoyed it.

03:12:19.000 If people want to find you on Facebook, please tell them how.

03:12:22.000 Yeah, I'm on Facebook, Glenn Villeneuve, V-I-L-L-E-N-E-U-V-E. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram.

03:12:29.000 I got everything, but I'm most active on Facebook.

03:12:30.000 That's what I'm in.

03:12:31.000 What is your Instagram?

03:12:33.000 Instagram.

03:12:34.000 Under my name.

03:12:35.000 Everything's just under my name.

03:12:36.000 Everything's just your one name.

03:12:37.000 Okay.

03:12:38.000 Thanks, Glenn.

03:12:39.000 That was fun.

03:12:40.000 Thanks a lot, Joe.

03:12:40.000 All right, man.

03:12:41.000 Bye, everybody.

03:12:44.000 We did it, man.

03:12:45.000 Wow, that is different when you...

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 07, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1395 - Glenn Villeneuve

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