In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, we discuss the life and career of Mark Twain, the first stand-up comedian, and the man who introduced chewing tobacco to the world. We also talk about the time Joe accidentally inhaled a whole bunch of chewing tobacco, and how that set him off on a lifelong addiction to chewing tobacco. And, of course, we talk about Mark Twain and his book, "Mark Twain's Adventures in the Old West" and how he was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, and why he should have been the first person to write a book about it. Joe also talks about how he got hooked on chewing tobacco when he was in 5th grade, and what happened when he tried chewing tobacco for the first time in his life. This episode is brought to you by Anchor.fm and the National Museum of American Indians and the American Colonization Movement. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art by Jeff Kaale. Please rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast on whatever you're listening to. It helps spread the word to other podcasters and podcasters across the country. Thank you for listening and share it on your socials! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review and tell a friend about it on Apple Podcasts. or wherever you re listening to this episode. and/or sharing it on social media if you re a podcast, and we can be reached by clicking the link. We re looking for more of your thoughts on the next episode! Cheers! - Cheers, Joe and Joe and his crew are looking out there. - Tom and his Crew! -- Timestamps: 1:00 - 2:00 3:30 - Mark Twain s Adventures in The Old West - 4:00s - 5:30s 6:40s 7: 8:15s 9:20s 10:30 s 11:00 szn 12:30 13:15 szn_ 15: 16:15 17:40 14:40 s 15 :00 18:20 19:00 +16:00 | 17:00 & 16:00_ 21:00 // 17:30 & 17:10 22:00+17:30 +17:00 / 16:50
00:00:53.000But I was explaining to them my version, and I feel like it traces to when I was in fifth grade, we had to make agricultural maps of the United States of America, and you had to glue the product, so you get to South Dakota and you glue a little corn kernel.
00:01:12.000And for whatever reason, for Virginia, we had tobacco, and someone had brought in, I can't even remember what it was, it must have been loose leaf or plug, and Me and my buddy, I don't even know if this dude remembers,
00:02:42.000I don't know how into history they are, but when you just get into the history of people and the history of people in the United States, those books are fascinating books in that regard.
00:02:56.000Mark Twain is widely regarded as the first stand-up comedian.
00:03:22.000So, well, recently there's been some controversy introduced into this, but Mark Twain had worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, so he had a very informed perspective for all of his characters.
00:03:36.000A riverboat required 12 feet of water.
00:03:41.000You know the big paddle wheel riverboats?
00:03:43.000Required 12 feet of water for safe passage.
00:03:47.000So, there would be a guy up on the front of the boat who'd have a rope with a weight on the end and every fathom, a fathom is a nautical term for six feet, he'd have a knot tied in the rope every fathom.
00:03:59.000And he'd throw the weight out, the weight hits the bottom, and you see how deep the water is.
00:04:09.000So, he describes like you're going through the fog or in the dark and there's some guy up front going, Mark Twain...
00:04:16.000Some other guy, we recently, someone sent in to us, because we were discussing this on our podcast, and a guy sent us in this book.
00:04:25.000I can't remember who the hell wrote the book, but he was saying the real thing is, Mark Twain, when he was out, I think when he was out visiting one of the silver mines in Nevada, maybe, he took to go into a bar, and the bar would log how many drinks you had on a chalkboard.
00:04:45.000In this book, this guy was saying what happened was Twain, whose birth name was Samuel Clemens, Twain would come in and order two drinks by saying...
00:05:33.000It's the nom de plume of Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news for the New Orleans McCain, and he died in 1963, and he no longer needed that signature.
00:05:44.0001863. So Twain sold it from Twain, from Captain Isaiah Sellers.
00:05:48.000He said, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor's remains.
00:05:53.000That is the history of the nom de plure I bear.
00:06:37.000Look at the size of that mountain lion!
00:06:38.000We stop the truck and I see the eyes glowing because it's about 7 p.m.
00:06:44.000It's just starting to get dark and I get the binos out and I got them like close up, big ol' pumpkin head, giant paws, terrifying, staring at us.
00:07:41.000It's standing there, like, big-ass paws and this giant fucking head.
00:07:46.000Ooh, all I was thinking is, like, if I wasn't in this truck, if I was out on the road, if I was out walking, and I saw that thing from that close...
00:07:54.000It scared the shit out of you a little bit.
00:08:13.000The states that, like Washington, used to have a hound season, and they lost it to the animal rights activists, but they still maintain their regular hunting season.
00:08:31.000I think that I think the states that manage them as a big game animal are on the right track.
00:08:41.000Yeah, the states that don't do anything about them, like California, then you get a case like a couple weeks ago, a five-year-old kid got bitten by a mountain lion in Calabasas.
00:08:50.000His mom had to punch the thing in the face.
00:08:52.000And, you know, the kids in the hospital, the thing bit his fucking head.
00:08:59.000Two summers ago, you and I might have talked about this, two summers ago, Oregon, Washington had its first mountain lion fatality in state history in the same summer.
00:09:09.000Oregon had its first mountain lion fatality in like 98 years in the same summer.
00:09:50.000And every time he gets to a good piece of bedding cover, like a grown-up clear-cut or a canyon, he gets to a good piece of bedding cover, he stops and turns his predator collar on.
00:10:17.000You can do a mouth-blown predator call, which mimics the sound, typically, of a dying animal.
00:10:24.000So, if you just went into a sporting goods store and walked up to a shelf and bought a mouth-blown predator call, it would probably mimic the sound of a dying rabbit.
00:10:34.000You can get, like, jackrabbit, cottontail rabbit, and it's just a horrific sound.
00:11:28.000And, you know, I actually say he turned his collar on.
00:11:30.000I don't know if he was using an electronic, like a battery-powered collar, or a mouth-blown collar, but either way, he said, you know, within a minute, there's the lion.
00:13:59.000And the Lions were kind of coming from behind off to his right side, and he's not certain whether they were going to pass by his right shoulder on the way to the real turkey, or if they were going to him.
00:14:14.000What else is funny that just happened this spring, he has this on video.
00:14:25.000He's got them on his Instagram, but he shoots a turkey, and And all of a sudden, I mean, no soon does that turkey get hit that a coyote has it and is running away.
00:15:18.000Sorry, a black bear, a bobcat, many coyotes come in to turkey calls, but I have never had the lion thing, but I got a few friends that have done lions, and I feel that that is the greatest.
00:17:16.000The problem is like the people that vote, right?
00:17:19.000Like a good example is British Columbia, right?
00:17:21.000Because British Columbia bans grizzly hunting because they think grizzly hunting is trophy hunting.
00:17:27.000Meanwhile, they're like overrun with grizzlies.
00:17:29.000They have a lot of grizzlies and they would manage them by controlling their population and would...
00:17:33.000You know, it would keep people from getting attacked, it would keep livestock from getting attacked, and the encounters were frequent.
00:17:40.000Like, my friend Mike lives up there, and he's like, there is no shortage of grizzly bears.
00:17:44.000Like, they're all over the place up here.
00:17:46.000He goes, and now what they've done is they've stopped people from managing them because the people in the cities, who never have any encounters with them whatsoever, think that it's unsightly to hunt them.
00:19:32.000If you're going to go around and determine what we should be allowed to hunt based on what might kill you if we don't hunt it, I would be worried about the future of duck hunting.
00:19:45.000I'm more inclined to be like, in my desire to sort of bracket things...
00:19:53.000I would say if you have sustainable, harvestable populations of wildlife, and you have a public interest in exploiting that wildlife, and it can be exploited without long-term detriment to the species,
00:20:35.000You see routinely the same thing around wolves.
00:20:39.000Just this morning, someone shared an article.
00:20:44.000Montana just rewrote some of their wolf hunting rules and expanded some areas.
00:20:48.000And they used to have, outside of Yellowstone National Park, they had hunting districts that had these very strict quotas.
00:20:54.000They liberalized wolf hunting in Montana because we have a lot of wolves.
00:20:59.000And there's a pack in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley, there's a pack of 24 wolves.
00:21:07.000And three of those wolves this year have been killed outside the park.
00:21:12.000So now you can expect renewed calls for the park's jurisdiction to extend further away from the edges of the park in order to protect that because people will routinely call them Yellowstone's wolves rather than Montana's wolves.
00:21:31.000Yeah, that is an interesting situation, right?
00:21:33.000Because you have this park that everyone visits.
00:21:36.000And, you know, I went there and I took a selfie with the elk.
00:21:39.000They're hanging out in front of a Pepsi machine because it's so bizarre.
00:21:42.000Did you get a bunch of social media backlash?
00:21:45.000No, I just took the picture because I just thought it was so strange that we're all just standing there and there's elk just lying down on the ground.
00:22:40.000This is not going to make a hell of a lot of sense to people, but I wanted to campaign to make Hunter's Orange laws standardized around the country.
00:22:49.000Not with a federal law, but just get all states on board.
00:23:29.000No, but when I do retire, I'm going to campaign, I'm going to make it my life's work to have Yellowstone National Park turned into a wilderness area.
00:29:57.000The one guy that shot him wanted to fight with him and blame it on him.
00:30:02.000The other guy that shot him felt so bad that he quit hunting and he had to befriend him And make him comfortable to go hunting again.
00:30:15.000So one person took an adversarial approach to the man he shot and one person was deeply repentant to the point where he gave up the discipline.
00:30:23.000I was watching a video yesterday of a woman who rear-ended this guy in a Lamborghini and then got out and started screaming and yelling at him that he hit her car and the guy was laughing.
00:32:15.000He was hunting, and he was sitting there listening for a gobbler, and there was a stump in front of him.
00:32:24.000And he said that he lifted his foot up and put his foot on the stump.
00:32:29.000And all of a sudden, BAM! Someone shoot him in the foot?
00:32:31.000Yeah, and in conversation with the man that shot his leg, the man said to him, when you lifted your foot up on that stump, it looked like a gobbler going into full strut.
00:32:44.000Oh my god, that guy's blinder than you.
00:32:46.000No, listen man, I'm only blind up close.
00:33:09.000When I hear something like that, though, to be honest with you, one of my first—I have twin feelings— One of condemnation of the individual and one of like some level of, you know, like a level of sympathy.
00:33:26.000Didn't one of your friends get shot through the backpack by a rifle hunter?
00:34:53.000So when I first heard that, a wildlife biologist in Arizona named James Heffelfinger sent me some information about that.
00:35:03.000When I first heard it, I was like, yeah man, but maybe it's something that was always there, but you weren't looking for it, or there's a false marker.
00:35:14.000And he wrote back with a bunch of information on it, and they had all these serums That they've banked from over the years.
00:36:26.000If I was in charge of examining this, a thing that I would be curious to look at would be captive cervids, which are in very close proximity to people.
00:36:36.000Which is also how they spread CWD. Yeah, CWD can be spread that way.
00:36:39.000They just had another deer farm that had shipped 100 and some CWD positive deer around the country.
00:36:45.000You could see that that would be a case where you had...
00:39:00.000Because then, you know, if you come up to me, then you're not supposed to go to school, and, like, I'm going to go out there, and they're, like, upset, and they're making artwork for me and bringing me food.
00:39:09.000And after a few days, they're just like, the fuck's that guy?
00:39:30.000It is interesting about the zoo animals, because the zoo animals may be close proximity, but all of it outside, and then also no real physical contact with zoo animals.
00:39:40.000What are you talking about no physical contact with zoo animals?
00:40:55.000Now we're scared of something that doesn't even harm kids.
00:40:59.000Zookeepers first noticed last week that the animals were displaying symptoms including decreased energy and appetite and coughing and sneezing.
00:41:06.000The animals are now being treated with anti-inflammatories, anti-nausea medication, antibiotics, the latter of which is intended to address a likely secondary bacterial pneumonia.
00:41:15.000God, I didn't even do any of that stuff.
00:41:17.000No, that's pretty crazy, though, that it's...
00:42:04.000You know, I wonder how much, like, if you could get a gauge of the overall anxiety of the world, how much it decreased yesterday when Facebook was down.
00:42:48.000I use it for work and have fun with it, but...
00:42:55.000Yeah, it blows my mind that for a long time, it would be that you were supposed to regard those individuals responsible for social media platforms, we were supposed to regard them as these heroes.
00:43:21.000If you watch the Social Dilemma, the documentary, The Social Dilemma.
00:43:27.000That guy, Tristan Harris, has been on the podcast and sort of explained a lot of it to us.
00:43:32.000He's going to come back on again and we're going to talk to him some more about it because it's...
00:43:35.000It's very disturbing because what they've done with these algorithms and they knew what was happening while they were doing it is they've accentuated arguments.
00:43:44.000They've accentuated all the division between people and that it's kind of like an unstoppable domino effect.
00:43:50.000It seems like at this point in time there's a clear division in our country that didn't exist in 2007. If you go back to the invention of the first iPhone and when social media started coming about, if you go from there to now, the change is palpable.
00:44:09.000And then when you add in the anxiety of a pandemic and real adversity, which is what people have encountered over the last 18 months, now it's through the roof.
00:44:19.000Now people are literally fucking insane.
00:44:23.000I hear that, but I know YouTube's not a social media platform, but I had a rare moment of just nothing going on this morning because I woke up in a hotel and I wasn't at work or messing with my kids.
00:44:34.000And so I was just dicking around on YouTube.
00:44:38.000And I was kind of pleasantly surprised to be like that YouTube understands that I like to watch Norm MacDonald videos and I like to watch stuff about catching bobcats.
00:46:03.000But these videos would show up in, like, if a kid was looking at cartoons, and if you're one of those parents that just, like, gives your kid an iPad, just go ahead.
00:46:13.000Your kid would watch normal cartoon videos, and then all of a sudden, in the feed, because of the algorithm, these, uh, it was, like, Spider-Man was a bunch of them.
00:47:11.000Yeah, they were using these comments like they would meet up on certain videos and they would communicate inside the comments of those videos with code.
00:47:21.000And that's how they got away with communicating publicly about certain things.
00:47:26.000And I don't know if they were child porn or what they were involved with, but I remember there was a lot of people that got in trouble for that.
00:47:33.000And then YouTube's trying to figure out, like, what are these videos?
00:47:46.000They seemed kind of normal, and then the cartoon characters would get drunk, and they would always wind up getting busted in the head with a bottle and blood everywhere, and you're like, what the fuck?
00:47:56.000So it goes from being like, yeah, weird shit.
00:47:58.000You don't let your kids just cut loose on YouTube, do you?
00:48:02.000Luckily, one of my kids, all she likes to watch on YouTube is a girl named Sniperwolf, who's very funny, and she does these reaction videos to stuff, but it's very G-rated, and she loves watching her.
00:48:16.000But I keep an eye on what they're doing, and I don't allow them to just start going crazy.
00:48:28.000I mean, one day, you just stumble upon an ISIS beheading video.
00:48:31.000And now you have your kids fucking waking you up in the middle of the night crying and screaming because they can't get this image out of their head.
00:51:47.000That's my only thing I knew growing up was like Wayne's World on the SNL was a public access show, but then we actually had public access, and that's where wild shit was happening after 10 o'clock.
00:51:55.000I had a friend of mine who had a public access show.
00:54:22.000Yeah, and trying to guide their experience.
00:54:26.000For me, I've found that exposure to nature, experiences in nature, understanding nature winds up being an avenue of approach that I have with them.
00:54:43.000It's like a common language, you know?
00:55:39.000He lets his kids wander around New York City.
00:55:42.000Like, he lets his kids walk home from New York City.
00:55:45.000And, you know, he was talking about one time his kid got a little lost and they were really, really scared.
00:55:51.000You know, it was like they were trying to find him and it's like a terrifying feeling.
00:55:55.000But that ultimately the development that the child receives from Being able to navigate the world on their own is very valuable, but there's a risk.
00:56:06.000And so you have to weigh this risk versus reward.
00:56:10.000And the opposite of that is people who helicopter parent, and we know how that turns out, right?
00:56:15.000That's not good when you overly coddle your kid and your kid is not exposed to any sort of adversity.
00:56:22.000Or any sort of danger or any sort of adventure or any sort of independence that it could be stifling.
00:56:28.000And then it takes a long time for the child to develop outside of that parental environment once they become free.
00:56:35.000There's different kinds of kids, right?
00:56:37.000There's kids that grow up in bad neighborhoods with very little parental guidance and they're 18. And then there's kids who grow up completely coddled and completely protected and insulated and they're 18. And then they run into each other.
01:00:12.000Right, they're gonna believe in Kuanan.
01:00:14.000You know, yeah, it's just like, we all find our ways to be, you know, we all find our ways to, like, try to find some way to be comfortable and try to find some way to not be overdoing something or underdoing something.
01:00:50.000And then dependent upon the kind of parenting that you received.
01:00:53.000It's not that it is a deal breaker, like you have to have sports in your life or you'll never be good at things.
01:01:00.000I think you have to have difficult things that you're attempting to do.
01:01:05.000You know, I think that's really beneficial for kids and for adults.
01:01:09.000I mean, I think that's a key part of my life is lessons learned through adversity and trying new things is a very important part of that because it forces you to really be a beginner.
01:01:21.000One of the things I found in martial arts, like when you would get guys who are world champion kickboxers and they start entering into MMA, they're really good at one aspect of fighting, which is kickboxing.
01:01:33.000And then they would have to learn wrestling and jiu-jitsu.
01:01:35.000They didn't like it because the wrestling and jiu-jitsu, the problem was they were getting fucked up a lot.
01:01:52.000So their development as a mixed martial artist was always limited.
01:01:56.000They always get to a certain level and they could never pass that because they never really developed the skills required to excel in the overall thing.
01:02:05.000There was always like this hole in their game.
01:02:25.000It's like you lose a part of your life.
01:02:27.000And, you know, I remember the first time I got my heart broken when I was like, I guess I was like 17 or 18. I couldn't believe how bad I felt.
01:02:35.000I was like, God, this is the worst feeling ever.
01:02:37.000Did you ever go look her up on Facebook or anything?
01:03:39.000When you see foster kids that don't have love, they don't have a family, they don't have real parents, or maybe even worse, they know their parents are out there, but their parents don't give a fuck about them and someone else is raising them.
01:03:58.000And it's like, how do you fix that ever?
01:04:00.000I think once a child has gone through a really bad emotional development and childhood development, it's like so difficult.
01:04:11.000To somehow or another get out of that space and become like a normal person, become a person who's balanced and who just gets their shit together.
01:05:48.000Because sometimes when you get a shitty hand of cards, you develop adversity and determination that a person who's been coddled doesn't have and that allows you to excel wildly beyond anything that you're capable of.
01:06:02.000Which is a hard thing for me as a parent because all of my favorite friends are fucked up.
01:06:08.000Like they all had fucked up childhoods and it made for the most interesting people.
01:06:15.000Like my friend Joey Diaz, one of my favorite people that's ever lived, found his mom dead on the floor of the kitchen when he was 13 high on acid.
01:07:20.000It's like with all things in life, there's a balance that can be achieved.
01:07:25.000But sometimes through imbalance, you develop spectacular abilities.
01:07:31.000You know, like some of the greatest fighters, like Mike Tyson is a great example, right?
01:07:36.000Literally didn't experience any love in his life until he was like 13 years old and he was adopted by this guy, Cus D'Amato, who just happened to be one of the great boxing trainers in history.
01:07:46.000And through this guy's mentoring and also through hypnosis, the guy hypnotized him to be this assassin inside the ring, he got his love through destroying people.
01:07:58.000And obviously that worked out really well.
01:08:03.000You don't make a Mike Tyson if birthdays are all on time and everyone's buying you a nice Christmas gift and you never run into bullies at school.
01:09:39.000Yeah, and I think that to go into it planning on, if you went into it thinking you were going to manipulate that system to produce a spectacular child, it would be, like, ripe for backfiring.
01:11:45.000And I'm not lazy, but I make sure to not be lazy and I make sure to like really, that we're just out doing stuff, doing stuff, doing stuff.
01:11:59.000Always going, doing something, always a plan.
01:12:01.000I mean, it can be relentless for people around and I've had, and I've Had people lobby complaints about that system of living.
01:12:09.000But that's how I like to run the program.
01:12:13.000Well, for what you do and, you know, for the company Meat Eater and for First Light, like, there's no better place for you to live.
01:12:20.000I mean, Montana's just an amazing place to live and run a company like your company, you know, that makes Netflix shows and videos and writes books and, you know, it's like, it couldn't be better.
01:12:36.000Yeah, it's a good—and then we have a very good network of folks there.
01:14:29.000I did some ads for Subaru and got this car for free.
01:14:34.000The way it worked, for some reason, it was these branded history things, okay?
01:14:40.000So I got to pick 13 things around the country that I thought were interesting.
01:14:45.000And one was like, I did this thing about this guy that there's this mountain range and a town and a path and a national forest all named after this dude.
01:14:54.000And all that's really known about him is he got killed by a grizzly bear.
01:15:02.000So there's the town of Lolo, there's Lolo Creek, there's Lolo Pass, there's Lolo National Forest, and all they know is there's like a dude that lived on a tributary to that creek, and he got killed by a grizzly.
01:15:12.000That's like really all I know about the guy.
01:15:14.000Anyways, they did a thing about where they think he might have been buried.
01:18:08.000So- This dude, he got into that vintage denim stuff, but he also would find old, old clothes and sell them to collectors, sell them to people making films,
01:19:08.000So he'll go in and he'd strike a deal with ranchers.
01:19:10.000He'd be like, listen, man, I'm going to...
01:19:11.000And a lot of times he'd be like, I'm going to look around in your old buildings and stuff and I find something, I'll buy it for me.
01:19:17.000They'd be like, bullshit, get out of here.
01:19:19.000And just to turn them on, he would all of a sudden look and whatever he could see, he would look and give them an insane price for nonsense.
01:19:33.000It's like we went to this guy and this guy had just junk everywhere and it was like he had a lot of junk and also be like there's the old cabin where grandpa lived.
01:19:42.000There's the old rundown house where my mom and dad lived and here's my house and everything was exactly they just would move across the property and build a new structure and leave the old ones in place so he's dying to get in here and look around.
01:20:34.000So we're on this place, and I was with him, man.
01:20:38.000He went through all the channels and talked to the ranch manager, got a hold of the ranch, or the rancher's like, have a look, let me know what you find.
01:21:08.000So, I don't know, there's like three feet of pipe above these pans.
01:21:13.000And it looked like tie-dye because that part that was up, just being exposed to the rain and whatever limited amount of sunshine ever shined straight down that chimney.
01:21:50.000So he would have designers, like clothing designers, would want to go to his warehouse full of all this crazy old shit he found to get inspiration.
01:22:02.000To get inspiration for, you know, like whatever, like Dickies, Carhartt, whatever, like different designers would go and look around his stuff to get inspiration for it.
01:22:11.000Jamie, send me this guy's Instagram page.
01:22:23.000I think all those old jeans were made out of hemp.
01:22:28.000I think before the 1930s, before hemp became a problem when they made marijuana illegal, then you have like a stamp to grow hemp, and then it become phased out with the cotton gin.
01:22:43.000You know, well, the decorticator actually was what brought it back.
01:23:17.000I had a friend of mine, my friend Todd McCormick, used to grow marijuana.
01:23:21.000He was one of the first guys ever to be arrested for it when they had medical marijuana, but they were still charging people federally because it was medical in California.
01:23:31.000But when you would go to jail, you would realize once you went to court that you couldn't bring up medical marijuana because you were in a federal trial.
01:23:38.000And the federal trials, they wouldn't even recognize it.
01:24:51.000Where our office is, like, my wife drives a car, and all of a sudden where our office is, there's all these bumper stickers that say, like, Ronella drives a Subaru on people's cars, but not my car.
01:25:05.000And so it's like someone, like, observing, you know, someone in this area, like, observing what my wife drives and, like, printing a bumper sticker.
01:25:24.000It was some dude that worked at, it was some event, like, it was, like, these dudes that worked at Sitka, and then I eventually found out which one of them did it, and he, like, tried to get a job with us, and that was, like, his, like, vengeance thing, which is, like, bizarre, man.
01:25:59.000No, just like, so there is like an observed quality, but I, you know, I mean, I hate to be negative about it.
01:26:06.000I mean, I have so many wonderful, wonderful friends, and it's a great, beautiful, great place to live, but there's, yeah, there's like a...
01:26:22.000And when people get rejected, I mean, imagine being a woman, you know, experiencing, like, some guy tries to hit on you, and you reject him, and then this guy's stalking you.
01:31:23.000Do you ever feel like it's difficult to keep track of everything and make sure that the quality is up to standard?
01:31:30.000I haven't felt that because I feel that primarily it's been able to sort of like Let me speak to it in the way of what I'm involved with.
01:31:45.000I'm involved in everything and I have awareness of what goes on, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I have a team of people that I work with on producing things that are my primary day-to-day responsibility, being that we just launched just a week ago,
01:33:31.000I've been wearing an FHF vinyl harness.
01:33:36.000I remember my late friend Eric Kern turned me on to FHF stuff a bazillion years ago when Paul was just stitching away in his basement or whatever.
01:33:45.000So to have it be that those relationships matured and we kind of came together under one company, it all seems very natural to me.
01:33:53.000It all seems like just things growing and getting better.
01:35:18.000When dealing with people in my age bracket, I can't step into a role—I can't step into a position of being able to not have it be very close and very personal.
01:37:09.000They're the ones who always like to go to dominatrix and get kicked in the balls.
01:37:13.000Because they're being so calculated all the time.
01:37:15.000Yeah, it's like they're so wrapped up in this thing that they're doing.
01:37:20.000If you're a person and you're running a company, you're essentially performing all day long, right?
01:37:27.000Because you can only be a certain amount of yourself.
01:37:30.000Most people like to tell jokes that are maybe inappropriate or use language that's maybe inappropriate or say things that everybody's thinking but you really shouldn't say.
01:39:49.000Well, leadership through example is always an interesting thing because it's like there's certain people that you admire and the way they live their life, like Jocko Willink is a great example, right?
01:40:03.000He shows leadership through example, the way he lives his life.
01:40:08.000Very disciplined, very fair, very smart, very open-minded and objective.
01:40:13.000Doesn't have any weaknesses in his social game, but also just a real prime example of discipline.
01:40:25.000And through that, you go, well, that's a leader.
01:41:28.000Well, having been on your show a few times, I've always admired the amount of work that's involved, like, for the cameraman and the folks that are running the show behind the scenes,
01:41:45.000sound, all that stuff, because those guys are there 24 hours a day.
01:41:49.000Like, if you're on a trip, and that trip is a seven-day trip in the backcountry, Yeah.
01:43:24.000Say if you're filming a television show, an adventure show, and you're filming an adventure show, and you're looking at mushroom specimens in the woods, You know, you're going to have a shooting schedule.
01:43:38.000Like at 8 a.m., we're going to have breakfast at 9.30.
01:43:42.000You know, Paul's going to go out and examine all these different mushrooms and show everybody.
01:43:46.000And then we're going to have dinner at 6 p.m., you know, and then, you know, we're going to wrap it up for the day.
01:43:55.000Plus, you might be seven, eight miles from camp.
01:43:58.000And then you gotta huff all the way back with fucking headlights on in the middle of the night, and then you're looking at your watch like, Jesus Christ, we gotta be awake in seven hours, you know, and you haven't even eaten yet, and then you eat, and then you crash, and then it's like, alright, everybody up, it's five, like, fuck!
01:44:13.000Yeah, we have a lot of what we would call death marches.
01:44:19.000And one day we were trying to define what a death march is, and Yanni feels that it's not a death march until there's a fight that breaks out.
01:44:44.000And for that professionalism and all that, it's doing that, you know, months for months, being together all the time in whatever, like in tents or in a rental house and in cars and just like,
01:45:33.000First of all, your show is fantastic because of your narration and because you have a very clear love of the wilderness and of animals and of the experience of hunting.
01:45:49.000It's hard to encapsulate a seven-day, really rigorous experience into an hour-long show.
01:46:01.000To people that don't experience, like to me who's done it with you, I can watch one of your shows and I can go, man, I wish I was there the whole time.
01:46:09.000Where I would really get a sense of how hard it was to find the bulls, and then you hear them in the distance, and then you've got to walk three miles through this valley and try to get to this other ridge, and then you glass them up, and then they're already gone because they caught your wind.
01:46:22.000There's so much the seesaw ride of the experience of trying to navigate your way through the woods and hunt, and then the wild thrill of it being successful or the failure.
01:46:54.000I don't have any experience doing that.
01:46:57.000They're watching and it's sort of encapsulated into this very brief moment of people laughing and hooting and hollering because they shot a deer.
01:47:36.000And you know that this guy punches that guy and that guy falls down.
01:47:41.000If that's all you see, if you're just like a highlight of a knockout, you're missing And the struggle and the people that are in the camp with them, they're the only ones that really know.
01:47:51.000If someone is in a camp with Roy Jones Jr. in his prime, they see all the training leading up to the fight and then the fight.
01:48:00.000Those are the people that get the real experience.
01:48:02.000And I feel like no one gets the real experience of hunting.
01:48:08.000And it's one of the reasons why it's so misrepresented and misunderstood in the general public.
01:48:17.000In the people that don't hunt, in our culture, hunting has gotten this very bizarre bad rap And even amongst people who eat meat.
01:48:27.000And I think a lot of it is because of that.
01:48:29.000I think your organization and what you've done with Meat Eater, with your writing, particularly with your show, is the best thing that's ever happened to hunting in the modern era because it explains it and displays it.
01:48:42.000In a well-thought-out, intelligent way that's filled with emotion and it's filled with introspective thought and articulate discussion and in a way that people get a chance to see,
01:48:58.000oh, maybe I had the wrong impression of what this is.
01:49:02.000We made many of our episodes that were 22 minutes long.
01:49:07.000And we still, on Sportsman Channel, Outdoor Channel, 22 minutes.
01:49:14.000When you watch a half-hour show, you're watching 22 minutes of stuff.
01:49:17.000And traditionally, we would produce it in a four-act structure.
01:49:21.000So you have an enormous amount of constraint on how you put this thing together.
01:49:26.000Premiering episodes on Netflix, you're not held to that.
01:50:25.000They were people who were very interested in story.
01:50:29.000They were very interested in sort of like the rhythm of the story, how a story got captured, how a story got laid out.
01:50:35.000And so they weren't coming from a lifetime of watching hunting media.
01:50:41.000They were coming from a lifetime of how do you do this thing, which is take people on an emotional, like create an emotional journey for someone doing something.
01:50:52.000With me, who had a level of subject matter expertise and had my own understanding of narrative that I developed as a writer, but come in and apply that universal storytelling principles to this thing that other people might have felt was beneath them.
01:51:11.000But they had the generosity of spirit in those early days.
01:51:15.000They had the generosity of a spirit to take this thing and see some kind of beauty in it.
01:51:22.000And help develop it into a thing where they were like applying their expertise to it.
01:51:26.000Then kind of the only time has ever been done before.
01:51:31.000I don't think before you, anybody had ever done it that way.
01:51:34.000I mean, for context, like Mo Fallon went on to direct Parts Unknown with Bourdain.
01:51:41.000He was an assistant to the film director, Michael Mann.
01:52:31.000So he'd be the last guy that would ever be like, he wouldn't call himself a thing, but Mo's been exposed to during those years that he worked with us.
01:52:40.000Moe was exposed to more action than most people that hunt are ever going to be exposed to.
01:52:46.000He just exposed an enormous amount and processed it in an interesting way.
01:52:50.000When you see the landscape of hunting media, have you seen the level of it come up since Meat Eater?
01:53:47.000So people that wanted to make good material might before, they hadn't fallen into...
01:53:55.000They didn't line up with what people felt should be broadcast.
01:53:59.000And now they're able to put out what they want to make.
01:54:01.000So it's hard to untangle what might have happened in outdoor media from what is just happening in media.
01:54:13.000With the ability of creative individuals to come out, make a thing, and then have the thing be seen by other people without it needing to be something that someone decided on.
01:54:23.000And you're seeing that in all aspects of everything.
01:54:28.000So have I seen big changes in hunting media?
01:54:32.000Absolutely, because even in our own ability to put out material, I've seen enormous changes.
01:54:38.000We do tons more, and we're able to do stuff without having someone say that it's okay to do it.
01:54:43.000Yeah, that's such an important point, because without that point, I mean, without that ability, podcasts would have never existed.
01:54:50.000No one would have ever let you do something like this.
01:54:54.000Yeah, you wouldn't have gone and pitched it and had someone say yeah.
01:55:01.000I think that the celebration of the culinary aspects of hunting and fishing, absolutely, they're far more represented now than they were 10 years ago.
01:55:46.000There's a mix of things covered that...
01:55:53.000We cover a sort of recipe or a formula of things that hadn't been covered quite the way we cover them.
01:56:01.000Is there an issue now with YouTube where I know they have new guidelines for hunting where you're not allowed to show The kill you're not allowed to show like the impact of a bullet or of an arrow and I don't think you're allowed to show any kind of suffering And you may not be able to show butchering.
01:57:22.000Upon closer inspection, the YouTube ad-friendly content guidelines was found that in July of 2021, the policy was updated to make it clear that footage of animals in distress induced by human intervention may not run ads.
01:57:38.000Naturally, the hunting and killing of animals fall within the new guideline, meaning that hunting content as we know it can no longer be used to make money on YouTube.
01:57:50.000Hunting content where there is no depiction of graphic animal injuries or prolonged suffering.
01:57:56.000Hunting videos where the moment of kill or injury is indiscernible and no focal footage of how this dead animal is processed.
01:58:06.000For trophy or food purposes, which is crazy.
01:58:10.000Well, it says, while they don't go into much detail, it seems clear that any impact shots or footage of an animal after it's been shot is no longer acceptable to make ad revenue.
01:59:02.000Whereas the creators don't get money, but there was an ad on it.
01:59:06.000Hasn't that been a complaint that people have levied before?
01:59:09.000I don't necessarily think that's happened to us, but I do believe that has been a complaint, that people have said, hey, my video's demonetized, but it still has an ad on it.
01:59:23.000And in fairness to YouTube, I mean, I always say this and it's an important point.
01:59:29.000YouTube is managing at scale in an impossible volume.
01:59:33.000The amount of people that are uploading videos to YouTube on a daily basis and to even hire people that are supposed to watch all that shit as it's being made is impossible.
02:00:18.000YouTube will put ads on non-partner videos but won't pay the creators.
02:00:23.000Yeah, YouTube said an update to its terms of services this week that it has the right to monetize all content on its platform.
02:00:31.000As such, it said it will start putting ads on videos from channels not in the YouTube Partner Program, which shares ad revenue with creators.
02:00:41.000I mean, it did for 15 years or whatever it was for a long time.
02:00:44.000Well, that was the crazy thing about YouTube, right?
02:00:47.000Was that YouTube, in a remarkable, fair move, decided to share revenue with the people that are creating content, encouraging people to create content.
02:00:55.000Because I feel like if they didn't do that, people would still have created content.
02:00:59.000Like, they really didn't have to do that.
02:01:01.000And I remember when they first started doing it, when we first started making money, we were like, you can make money?
02:01:06.000Yeah, we had a podcast episode the other day with an early YouTuber, a dude named Jared Outlaw, an early YouTuber, and he talked a lot about that being a major transition point.
02:01:15.000As an early YouTuber, it was when monetization became possible that it just really transformed the YouTube community.
02:02:44.000But I had people on the podcast in April of 2020 saying that and I was labeled a dangerous conspiracy theorist by like these different left-wing media platforms that had decided that there was only one narrative despite the fact that I had evolutionary biologists that were explaining in detail why when you study these viruses it appears they've been manipulated.
02:03:20.000And the fact that it broke out in the very exact town, in the exact neighborhood where this fucking level 4 lab is.
02:03:30.000But that was part of the problem with having a president like Trump, who is so fucking polarizing.
02:03:35.000That anything that he agreed with, people immediately disagreed with it.
02:03:39.000I mean, he could have agreed with some of the most amazing inventions in the history of the world, you'd be a racist if you agreed with them, because of the fact that Trump was a proponent of them, that he was promoting them.
02:05:55.000If there was subjects that were taboo that I found profoundly interesting and I didn't discuss them because I thought I would be demonetized, I would be fucked.
02:06:05.000I would be like, why am I doing this then?
02:06:07.000Because I want it to be just like if you and I were having a conversation, if we were sitting across a fucking dinner table or we're hanging out at your house and we just start talking about stuff and it's interesting, I want to just talk about it.
02:06:19.000I just want the cameras to be on it so other people can be in on the conversation.
02:06:22.000But I'm not going to change how I do this.
02:06:25.000I'm never going to change how I do this.
02:06:26.000So we were in this situation where I was like, okay, well, should we start putting stuff on?
02:06:29.000We put stuff on Vimeo for quite a while.
02:06:32.000I'm like, should I start expanding and looking for other online video platforms?
02:06:51.000It's one of those things where we're in such a strange time when it comes to media because everybody is sort of making the rules up as they go along and the amount of censorship that these companies are allowed to employ With no real regulations in terms of like,
02:07:15.000you know, the First Amendment or- Yeah, they're privately held companies.
02:07:19.000I know they are, but they're so big that they're not really- it's not simple anymore.
02:07:25.000Like, Twitter is responsible for an enormous portion of the world's discourse.
02:07:38.000They're the people that are allowed to decide based on their own policies, which is based on their own ideologies, what is and is not acceptable.
02:07:47.000But you're one of the country's biggest media personalities.
02:08:21.000If I have an opinion on things, I always think that the answer, and I've been wrong before, and if I'm wrong, I always try to correct myself if I find out that I'm wrong.
02:08:30.000I'm not one that tries to bury an incorrect statement.
02:08:33.000I will try to expose it and try to explain how I was incorrect.
02:08:38.000I don't think anybody would trust you if you don't do that, especially when you're doing something like this where, you know, we don't talk before this.
02:08:44.000This is one subject that we did talk about before this.
02:08:49.000The deer having COVID. I was like, let's not hold that.
02:08:51.000Let's talk about it on the podcast because I knew it was interesting.
02:08:53.000Deer having COVID. But we don't have like a set agenda.
02:08:57.000So when you don't have a set agenda, there's oftentimes you're going to come across things, and thank God Jamie's the best one-handed Googler in the business.
02:09:03.000I don't know what the fuck we're gonna talk about while we're talking.
02:09:06.000That's part of the fun of the show is that it is just a conversation.
02:09:10.000As soon as I micromanage that and change, it's like it's gonna lose whatever appeal it has to me.
02:09:16.000Because the appeal it has to me is like to be able to have conversations.
02:09:20.000I want everybody to be able to do that.
02:09:22.000The problem with People that have rigid ideologies that also have the power to decide what people can and can't do is that you get situations like the lab leak hypothesis where they're wrong and they're banning people and they're censoring people and it goes on for months and months and months and it destroys people's faith in free expression.
02:09:41.000It destroys the ability to have conversations about the subject that are important because you have to say, well, why do you believe that this leak hypothesis is probable?
02:09:51.000When then you have an evolutionary biologist or a virologist or an epidemiologist, and they start explaining things or debating it in a way that it seems like it's not possible.
02:10:01.000And you can't have those conversations if someone has an ideological opposition to an idea based on a person who's a proponent of that idea, like Donald Trump, saying it's the Chinese virus, and then all of a sudden everybody says, well, if you discuss it, having leaked from a lab that you're a racist.
02:10:27.000You can't have a person who decides, you can no longer talk about this subject because this subject has detrimental effects on X, Y, or Z. Well, it says who?
02:10:38.000Because some people would say it doesn't.
02:10:40.000And some people would say, well, X, Y, and Z are problematic because you can't have that discussion.
02:10:45.000So they're these sacred topics that you can never really get an understanding of.
02:10:59.000Or are we under this weird censorship of...
02:11:04.000These people that really don't have any expertise in the subject at hand.
02:11:07.000You can have expertise in every subject.
02:11:10.000So as soon as you have people that are ideologically opposed to certain discussions, you've got a real problem with free speech.
02:11:18.000And I think that an argument could be made with all these social media platforms that they're so fucking big now that they can influence so much of the world's discussions that That we have to figure out where we stand in terms of free expression.
02:11:34.000Because if you say to a person, you can't talk on Twitter because you don't believe that a man can be a woman.
02:12:20.000I can call you a stupid piece of shit, and that's fine.
02:12:23.000But if I call you by your old name, I'm dead-naming you.
02:12:25.000Well, now we're in a weird ideological thing, right?
02:12:28.000Because we've decided this is a protected class of people, and that you can't even have this offensive discussion about this protected class of people.
02:12:35.000So you've set up almost like this religious barricade to free expression about this one very, in your ideas, sensitive subject.
02:12:44.000That's a crazy way to dictate how people can and can't talk.
02:12:49.000And you develop this, you know, you're going to have these people that are going to say things behind closed doors and be terrified that other people are listening.
02:12:57.000And that shouldn't be that way on the internet.
02:13:00.000Especially when you're dealing with, you know, I mean, fuck most of the people on Twitter, they're not even using their name.
02:13:06.000They have some fake name in their profile.
02:13:08.000Yeah, to challenge orthodoxy, You either have to get really good.
02:13:20.000If you're going to challenge orthodoxy, you have to be so good that you can do it in a way that you don't set off the alarms.
02:14:33.000A lot of discourse in today's society because people are being dishonest in doing that.
02:14:40.000They're being dishonest and if you can't reply to that, if somehow you're banned from Twitter or you're banned from YouTube or you're banned from Facebook or something like this comes up and you have no recourse, there's no way you can defend yourself.
02:15:09.000When I've got ivermectin prescribed by a doctor that's meant for humans and a medication that actually won the Nobel Prize for its use in humans.
02:15:33.000Do we have just sanctioned bodies that are allowed to manipulate reality for their own financial benefit or to promote whatever narrative that they think is either beneficial or sanctioned?
02:15:48.000So if you can't defend yourself on Twitter, if you can't defend yourself on Facebook or YouTube, if you don't have a podcast, those are your options.
02:15:56.000And if they remove you from one of those options or all those options, like that was one of the crazy things that the White House press secretary said, is that if you get removed from any social media platform for misinformation, you should be removed from all of them.
02:17:19.000We need free expression to sort it all out.
02:17:21.000And it's very convenient for people to just want to silence people who say things that they don't like or say things they think are inappropriate.
02:17:30.000The only way we figure out what's right is you let everybody talk and it's messy and it's complicated and a lot of times people say things you don't like.
02:17:39.000But that's how you sort out What's how you feel about things takes a long time takes a long time to gather up a true opinion on a subject and one of the only real ways is to get a view of it from all sides and in history we Typically after a period of 50 years or so look back and condemn Any occasion where we have suppressed dissenting views.
02:18:08.000Yeah, I think we're going to do that here, too.
02:18:10.000Blacklisting people from the Red Scare, issues that came around, civil liberties for certain minority groups during World War II. There just winds up being a theme, and later we'll look and be like, ah, you know.
02:18:27.000People after the terror, it hasn't been 50 years by any stretch, it's been 20 years, people after the terror attacks at 9-11 who question certain orthodoxy about what we should do militarily, right?
02:18:39.000We're put in a certain place, and now it's like we're dusting off and re-looking at these early whistleblowers.
02:18:47.000It'll be interesting to see how the history of this stuff gets written, particularly around questions about when you dare question COVID orthodoxy.
02:19:10.000Oh, just I'm making a joke about the different people's concerns about the vaccine, and I got the vaccine, and I felt like nothing happened to me.
02:19:17.000Oh, some people thought it had mind control agents in it?
02:19:21.000Yeah, I've heard all manner of things.
02:19:25.000I've seen people, there's hours and hours on YouTube, or at least there were, of people putting magnets on their injection site, and they think that somehow or another there's a chip in there.
02:19:42.000I mean, I don't know if it's bullshit.
02:19:43.000I don't know if they're making things up.
02:19:45.000Yeah, I guess my primary point around that is that I have...
02:19:52.000Through this, I have been on many sides of issues and have largely tried to just roll through it and not have people tell me what to do.
02:20:02.000And looking at travel restrictions, I'm like, oh, I want to avoid travel restrictions, even though I already had COVID. I'm like, I'm going to go get the vaccine because I don't want to have any kind of travel restrictions.
02:21:15.000I've sat on every possible side of this thing.
02:21:18.000And at this point now, you get to a point where you throw my hands up in the air, and as I've thrown my hands up in the air about not understanding it, losing faith that anybody really understands it right now, it's been now difficult for me to see people getting punished for challenging the orthodoxy when everything has changed so much.
02:22:28.000And how it has been used in that way to sort of like punish dissenting voices or exclude dissenting voices.
02:22:34.000I think that I have a perhaps an unusual perspective on it because for my entire career I've dealt with a set of ideas that are inherently controversial.
02:23:02.000Like this set of ideas and set of interests that I had existed pre-social media.
02:23:07.000So as social media came to be a thing, I've always lived within the context of how do I take things that the people that hold distribution channels are probably going to have a semi-adversarial view of?
02:23:24.000And how do I find a way to keep dealing with the ideas I want to deal with and distribute the ideas and distribute the imagery and distribute the content that I want to make in a way that conforms to their views so that I can keep doing it?
02:23:38.000So I feel like I've always, like a little bit of been like a...
02:23:44.000You know, like a spy kind of like living in this other world in some way.
02:23:50.000Like I'm used to feeling like someone's going to come and take my shit away from me.
02:24:13.000Because back during the star days, people were attacking your show because it was the first show that Netflix had that showed actual hunting.
02:24:26.000Because that's a brave move for them to decide to take something that's traditionally been on the Sportsman's Channel or the Outdoor Network and then to put it on Netflix.
02:24:37.000We worked with a company that handled distribution, and this is years ago now.
02:24:44.000We worked with a company that handled international distribution, and the company that handled international distribution had some connections to Netflix, and Netflix purchased what was called a second window.
02:25:59.000So we have certain people who are very, very intimate with our material.
02:26:04.000Being okay with it and distributing it and allowing us to monetize it and at the same time feeling like someone at any minute is just going to drop it out because we use firearms.
02:26:17.000The funniest thing is through all this, it's like you'd imagine we get attacked from the right more than the left.
02:26:35.000You know, I think it's kind of like, I think that a lot of what we do makes people uneasy, that there's sort of a new, like there's this kind of like new emerging thing that has maybe disrupted some traditional, that has disrupted some traditional Monopoly.
02:26:57.000It would be that somehow, even though virtually everything we make has firearms in it, every show we put out has firearms in it, is that you don't love firearms enough, which is just like, it's always confusing to me.
02:29:28.000And it's such a crowded, confused world, and when you kind of, like, survey the enemies, when you sort of find that, you know, you find that...
02:29:43.000It'd be like if during World War II we had decided to go and bomb England because they weren't totally on board with our plan rather than staying focused on the freaking Germans.
02:29:56.000And so I think that a lot of that heat is coming from people who they're looking and like, you're a lot like us, but maybe you're a little bit different.
02:30:56.000Like, if there's a show and you don't think they glorify guns enough and you're angry at them, like, don't you have enough shit in your own life to focus on?
02:31:07.000It's usually because, you know, you're probably at least a little jealous.
02:31:12.000Unless you've done something egregious, like you've actually campaigned against Second Amendment rights, which, of course, I know you would never do, but if you did...
02:31:20.000Then they'd be like, well, this is crazy.
02:31:22.000This fucking show, they use guns, and then they campaign against guns.
02:31:41.000You get, like, you experience this all the time.
02:31:43.000You get in trouble for having, and talk about getting in trouble from the right and the left, you get in trouble for having conversations with certain people.
02:31:50.000You know, we had a Native American historian and activist named Taylor Keene in our podcast, so he said some things that people view as controversial around Like, you know, around things like picking up an arrowhead.
02:35:34.000It's like the thing that blows my mind though is when I go about my daily existence, if I didn't know it wasn't all going on from the news and social media and stuff, when I go about my daily existence and just the interactions I have with people,
02:35:52.000fuck, I would never know what was happening.
02:36:58.000Something about human interaction when you're together with the way we're supposed to look each other in the eye have a conversation Be close to each other like physically in the room with each other That's how humans are meant to communicate when we're communicating anonymously through text messages or arguing about things on Facebook and these fucking long verbose Passages like it's not normal.
02:37:21.000It's not a normal way where you get to just Fucking expand upon something for paragraph after paragraph where no one says well that's fucking wrong and that's not true That's not what I said and this is not what I meant and you're changing this and taking this out of context people people get more Angry with each other when you don't get to respond when someone says something and you're like you're like well,
02:37:44.000that's not me fuck you and then they it's designed in a way That is not compatible with human emotions, with normal human interactions, with social cues, and reading each other's...
02:38:01.000Like, Louis C.K. had a bit about this once, about kids and kids doing things online, that kids like to be mean online, because it's like fun and they don't feel anything.
02:38:12.000Like, if some kid is in front of you and they say something mean, and then the other kid feels bad and starts crying, they go, oh, well that doesn't feel good.
02:38:19.000But they say it online, they're like, oh, fuck him.
02:38:32.000And this is the way that a lot of ideas get discussed.
02:38:36.000A lot of people are communicating that way.
02:38:39.000And as detailed by these documentaries like The Social Dilemma and, you know, these different books that have been written about this problem and that woman who just testified, which is kind of crazy, right?
02:38:51.000The day the woman's testifying about the problems with Facebook is the day Facebook goes down.
02:38:55.000And there's a lot of conspiracies about that, right?
02:39:00.000It's an issue that they're aware of inside the company and that they chose profit over rectifying this issue.
02:39:06.000They're like, well, this is what we do, though.
02:39:07.000They're like, we're making a lot of money doing this.
02:39:10.000And I think that in the wild, when people are just running into each other, we're still just people.
02:39:23.000Maybe I'm wrong about this, but isn't the inception of that app, like what they were fixing to make, was they were fixing to make a way you vote people up and down?
02:39:42.000There were other apps around the same time like that where you would find someone hot and you'd click, yeah, they're hot, and they'd get, like, ranked higher.
02:39:49.000So it's like, maybe it hasn't drifted too far.
02:39:54.000Well, the thing about Facebook is I think when they do their prognosis on the future, it skews so old that Like, it's young people are dropping off of the use of Facebook pretty radically.
02:41:34.000And advertisers, including the amount of content produced on its platform, failed to disclose internal data showing a contraction of the user base in important demographics,
02:41:54.000including American teenagers and young adults.
02:41:57.000The company is also hidden to the extent of which content production per user Has been in long-term decline, the complaint said, but obviously these are allegations from a whistleblower.
02:42:24.000Upset that if you are a young woman, this is a very good complaint, a valid complaint, that if you're a young woman, if you have issues with anorexia, Facebook will send you anorexia content your way, which may exacerbate someone's predilection towards anorexia.
02:42:49.000Social media, they get the impact of social media worse than anybody.
02:42:54.000According to Jonathan Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, he talked about that, that higher suicide rates, self-harm, all that stuff, the bullying, online bullying, young girls are the victims of that more than that.
02:43:07.000Yeah, I read a statistic that of teenage girls, I can't remember, like a pretty staggering majority of teenage girls go to sleep at night with some level of anxiety about social media.
02:43:56.000In some way, you have to sit and acknowledge that they made a thing.
02:44:02.000They made a thing that's useful, and...
02:44:06.000For me, as a content producer, me as a media personality, I'm able to use the tools they made and reach people that I otherwise wouldn't make.
02:45:39.000When the Bluetooth syncs up and just randomly plays a song, yeah, you're like, that's not on my fucking playlist!
02:45:45.000Yeah, that was a, well, boy, what a fucking bad PR move that was.
02:45:49.000Yeah, I mean, look, these conversations are interesting, and you're right, there's no definitive yes or no, good or bad, because they're new.
02:46:00.000There hasn't been a hundred years of social media influence where we get to have an understanding of what kind of impact this has on our society.
02:46:08.000Yeah, and I still feel like I'm like a mouse in someone's kitchen, man.
02:46:15.000That I'm able to be in there doing my shit and haven't been found out yet and thrown out.
02:46:23.000I get it, too, especially with your line of business.
02:46:26.000And then when you see these new regulations that YouTube's putting out and you realize, like, oh, well, this might be a real fucking problem.
02:47:25.000Because I knew that there were certain episodes, like when Alex Jones came on my podcast once, The ratings went down.
02:47:34.000There was no update in the ratings for like a week.
02:47:37.000When I tell you it was my biggest podcast at that point in time, I think eventually Elon Musk became bigger and a few other ones became bigger, but at that time when Alex came on for episode 9-11, it was not just the biggest, but it was the biggest by far.
02:47:57.000And then when it came back, That episode was ranked like, you know, number five or six or something like that, where other episodes where I knew what the downloads were, were number two or one.
02:48:27.000It was because it was a wild, chaotic, you know, alcohol and marijuana-fueled conspiracy ride with a maniac.
02:48:34.000Yeah, well, at a certain level of influence, you know that people do, at a certain level of influence, there are people that are able to pay detailed attention to very specific things.
02:48:46.000I'm sure, like, I wouldn't be shocked to hear that your show drew some special level of attention, the same way that there were people at Twitter assigned to Trump's tweets.
02:51:21.000Censored, and there's advertising that's inserted, and this is a wild west of content where anyone can have something, and a lot of them are good.
02:51:32.000So if you have a million shows, which is really what there is right now, for someone to come along and say, I want you to pay, good fucking luck.
02:52:01.000Unless I was the victim of some sort of censorship and I was a martyr.
02:52:07.000And then I put it on my website and I had everybody download it from there and make some sort of a contribution and that's the only way we can keep it alive.
02:52:17.000Then you could get people to realize like, Fuck the man, man.
02:52:38.000This is pretty startling growth considering there was just over 500,000 active podcasts from just three years ago in 2018. That's what's nuts.
02:52:47.000These podcast statistics are completely in line with the fact that podcasts are slowly going mainstream.
02:53:47.000I don't know why not, because I do enjoy it.
02:53:50.000When I stop enjoying it, you know, I mean, I don't want to mention any names, but there's certain people that do shows where people feel like they're phoning it in.
02:53:58.000If anybody ever really feels like I'm phoning it in, I'll stop.
02:54:03.000If I feel like I'm phoning it in, I'll definitely stop.
02:54:16.000If we get a camera on us and other people can get in on it and they enjoy it, like there's someone out there on a treadmill right now enjoying the shit out of this.
02:54:25.000You're providing something that people actually enjoy.
02:54:27.000As long as it's enjoyable to me, I think it'll still be enjoyable to other people because enthusiasm, like genuine enthusiasm is contagious, you know?
02:54:37.000And I find that if I watch someone that's cooking on TV or someone that's making things or someone that's talking about something they're passionate about, even have zero interest in it, if it's a genuine enthusiasm.
02:54:49.000Which is why when I do this show, I don't do it based on famous people.
02:54:54.000I don't try to get people that I know will get big ratings.
02:55:39.000And as long as I think they're interesting, I want to talk to them.
02:55:41.000Whether it's a fucking author that no one's ever heard of, that has some book that's interesting, or a photographer that covers wars, or whatever.
02:57:18.000Show and interesting kind of subjects and and before you'd ever taken me hunting I'd always had this fascination with hunting I'd always watched like Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild and watch a bunch of these hunting shows because I would be like but that's probably the best way to eat like to get the meat yourself that way you really understand where it's coming from versus this weird sort of separation between you and the act of the animal dying where you don't really understand what you're doing just eating meat you know and One of the two times I thought my career was over was
02:57:48.000when that Wild Within show on Travel Channel didn't take off.
02:58:27.000And I felt for a minute that my book hadn't done good enough to get to make another one, but then someone took a bet on me again, and I was able to make a successful book.
02:58:36.000But, yeah, doing that Wild Within on Travel Channel, dude, we were...
02:59:26.000And I was just, didn't realize, like emerging into a thing where, like you said, like the Wild West or you're in the open ocean or whatever the hell, like I was just emerging into a place where like the time lined up that you didn't need to be,
03:00:27.000It was fun, but it was kind of a mess.
03:00:28.000And then when that was over and we started making Meat Eater, I was like, I had learned enough from that wild NBS to understand very well what I wanted to make.
03:00:38.000And it was going to be extremely stripped down.
03:00:42.000And it was going to be like, and I was going to have a very high, like, a Very high level of influence over everything that happened.
03:01:59.000I think that's one of the things that's hardest to convey when you're just seeing a success, and then the success is always towards the end.
03:02:06.000It's all like you expect it, like a movie.
03:04:19.000And Sitting there in front of these guys talking to them, and these are people that had come out of high school.
03:04:27.000They came out of high school post 9-11 and went into the military, did all their training, became Green Berets, and had spent their entire adult life either training for or in Afghanistan and Iraq.
03:06:12.000I'm not going to lean on him too hard about it, but I feel like he would be setting things back right again.
03:06:18.000Do you feel like you're worried that you might want him to do something that maybe he wouldn't do otherwise because you didn't do it and you feel guilty?
03:07:20.000If you go to, you know, wherever you could buy books, go to Apple Books or whatever.
03:07:27.000And get the American Buffalo audio version because you finally do the voiceover for it.
03:07:33.000Yeah, do that, but mainly right now go get Meat Eaters Campfire Stories close calls.
03:07:38.000And then also we're doing a fundraiser right now.
03:07:43.000At TheMeatEater.com where we're doing a fundraiser for our land access initiative where we raise money to improve and enhance places where you're hunting fish.
03:07:52.000And we've got a big auction going on right now.
03:07:54.000We've got a signed guitar from Luke Combs.
03:07:56.000We've got all the kinds of Like a raccoon hide, antelope skull and stuff, all used on the episodes.