In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe talks about his new book, "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield. He also talks about how to get a discount on any and all MeatEater episodes, and why you should get on it. Also, if you want to get fit and strong, and want what they call functional strength, there's no better way to do so than kettlebells. I work out with them every week and I'm a huge fan and supporter of them. Onnit is a human optimization website that we sell the best shit that we can find as far as strength and conditioning equipment, as well as nutrients and supplements. And, uh... what is the new website that you guys have while we're on this? People can download MeatEaters episodes. They can finally sell volumes of the show online. And if you use the code "ROGAN" you can get a $5 discount on Season 4 of the volumes. And the one that we were talking about is "The One with Brian Callen and the one with Brian" which is the bundle that is Season 4. That's Season 4 Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4. I'm sure you'll agree that that's a deal you can't get on any of the other volumes. Unless you're going to finally get them on any other platform. You can get them for $5! I can't wait to finally sell them online. I'm so glad you can finally get the volumes of The One With Brian and the One with the One With The One with The One that we're talking about. That's it's finally being sold online. I can finally do that. I hope you guys can finally finally get a deal on Volume 4. Thanks for listening to the show and I hope that you enjoy it. I'll be back on the show soon! -Joe Rogan Podcast. -Jon Sorrentino and I'll see you next week! -Jon Rogan Show - Jon Rogan's new book "The war of art" - Joe Rogans' new book: "The Game of Thrones: Game Changers" - Season 2 is out soon. Jon Rogans Podcast - Season 4 is out now! Jon gives us a discount code: ROGAN'S BECAUSE HE'S GONE! and it's going to be $5, $10, $15, $20, $25, $50, and $50!
00:00:40.000If you are in your car, like a lot of people listen to podcasts that way.
00:00:45.000If you're in your car, if you're commuting, it makes being on a plane or a train, whatever, makes it more interesting than just fucking sitting in traffic and being retarded.
00:00:57.000This will make it so that you're actually enjoying that time.
00:02:25.000Is the best shit that we can find as far as strength and conditioning equipment, as far as nutrients, as far as protein powder and supplements.
00:02:35.000Of course, we have the Primal Kettlebells, the Ape Kettlebells, and the Zombie Kettlebells, which are new ones that we have made.
00:02:56.000If you want strength and conditioning equipment, if you want to get fit and strong, and you want what they call functional strength, there's no better way than kettlebells.
00:05:52.000As much as there's difference, they recognize them all as one species.
00:05:55.000There's some old world, like in Africa there's some other members of the pig family, and javelina or not, javelina are a peccary, so like when you hear javelina or people talk about pigs in Arizona, they're often talking about a peccary.
00:07:02.000That you take a wolf and turn it into an English bulldog?
00:07:05.000Like how the fuck did that take place?
00:07:07.000But I don't know, those boys in Russia that were taking silver foxes and just like selecting for behavior and stuff, they could move those things so fast.
00:10:36.000Capable of surviving on this continent, and mule deer are like this new thing.
00:10:40.000It's a bummer, like my favorite animal, I like the sun, you know, and the sun's only going to last four billion more years, it's going to burn out.
00:10:49.000I like mule deer a lot too, and it seems like, I mean, despite a lot of people's best efforts to prevent it from happening, it seems like mule deer are vulnerable.
00:10:57.000It seems like they're slowly starting to die off, too.
00:10:59.000There was an article about the numbers dropping and their habitat dropping and being diminished and they're being pushed out.
00:11:05.000Yeah, and some things are hard to explain, you know.
00:11:08.000But whitetails, they've always lived in the southeast.
00:11:12.000And whitetails seem to periodically expand out and then for climatic reasons retract.
00:11:18.000But they kind of keep that ancestral homeland.
00:11:20.000I'm talking in very long term, that ancestral homeland in the southeast.
00:11:23.000But at one time, whitetails made it all the way across the country.
00:11:27.000And some climatic conditions or something happened and the population retracted, but it left this remnant population in California on the Pacific Coast.
00:11:35.000And then there was a massive genetic barrier, you know, like if you took a bunch of dogs and separated them and put, you know, some dogs in South America and some dogs in North America and came back and checked on them in a long time, they're going to have gone in a little different direction.
00:11:53.000And then at a time, the blacktail seems to have extended its range eastward.
00:11:57.000The white-tailed deer extended its range back westward, and there was a hybridization event where male blacktails were breeding with female whitetails and producing this hybrid mule deer.
00:12:10.000There was a habitat retraction again, and blacktails retracted back to the coast, and whitetails retracted back the other way, and you had to spawn this thing we call mule deer.
00:12:21.000Like, how do they know that this- There was all this guy, Valerius Geist, who's like the most interesting biologist- He's a guy out of Calgary.
00:12:27.000And Valerius Geist has kind of like done so much work on Big Game.
00:12:36.000And he came up with a lot of interesting theories.
00:12:38.000Like some stuff we talked about in the past where Valerius Geist came up with this idea that what happens to species when they colonize land that had been vacated by glaciers?
00:12:46.000You know, and there's like certain things that go on.
00:12:48.000And he was into founder effect, you know, where...
00:12:53.000Imagine, like, one way we got different as people is imagine that just, like, four people struck off, you know, across the oceans in a homemade craft and landed there, and you had a male and a female, and they spawn a new,
00:13:10.000you know, they successfully breed and create a new population, but let's say they both just happen to be 6'7", you know, and 300 pounds, you have, like, this thing like the founder effect where...
00:13:23.000A small little population can carry traits and characteristics that are maybe not totally, not a complete example of where they came from.
00:13:33.000And so you have like a radical deviation when they spread out.
00:14:33.000I was watching this thing that was talking about deer on television.
00:14:38.000They were talking about the difference in the size of the bodies of deer from the far north, like Alberta in Canada, to the far south, like in Mexico.
00:14:45.000And the further you go south, the animals tend to be smaller.
00:15:01.000And it would be that, if you look, like take the extreme like whitetails, like the biggest, like guys dream of going to Alberta to hunt whitetails because whitetails are huge.
00:15:26.000My brother, he told me what the name of it is.
00:15:29.000But some species seem to be a little bit exempt.
00:15:31.000They say that mule deer don't do that quite as much.
00:15:34.000You know, you get some really big mule deer in other areas.
00:15:37.000They're not as tied to it, but just like a general principle.
00:15:39.000And what they speculate it has to do with is heat retention.
00:15:43.000So you have more, like, you weigh more than me.
00:15:51.000I have more surface area per unit of mass than you have.
00:16:00.000So if you're a really big deer, and if you're in the north, the thing you're trying to do is retain body heat.
00:16:05.000And the animals, like people, shed body heat by just exposing parts.
00:16:09.000Like when deer lay down, they lay down with their legs tucked in them.
00:16:11.000Because you look on the inside of a deer's leg, very thin hair, very thin hair under the tail, right?
00:16:17.000And when they're laying down, if it's cold, they're protecting those areas that have thin hair.
00:16:21.000So a big animal has less surface area, so he's less capable of shedding heat and more capable of retaining heat.
00:16:30.000A small, wiry animal has greater surface there and he's able to shed heat.
00:16:35.000So one of the things you look at mule deer, like mule deer further south will have, tend to have bigger ears because a great way to shed heat is through your ears.
00:16:47.000So they'll have thinner hair on their ears, bigger ears.
00:16:50.000If you think about a radical version of it, just imagine...
00:17:15.000You look at African elephants have those giant freaking ears because they can funnel a lot of blood through those ears and shed a lot of heat.
00:17:23.000It's like you shed a lot of heat through your fingers and your ears, how they get so cold so fast because you push a lot of blood into those areas and it's cooling off in the air.
00:17:33.000So that's one reason, that's like a theory of, if it is, I think it might be the Bergman principle.
00:17:50.000So the stuff that's on the northern extreme of its range, where it's butting up against, like the thing that puts the throttle on its existence, is cold.
00:18:59.000So in California, you have Columbia black-tailed.
00:19:01.000Washington, Oregon, you have Columbia black-tailed.
00:19:03.000Eventually, you get up to the north of just north.
00:19:05.000On the coast, you get to the B.C., Alaska border, and then you start calling them sick of black-tailed.
00:19:09.000Sick of black-tails, man, you look at them, it's like they almost look like a white-tailed, but they're a black-tailed deer.
00:19:15.000The Columbia black-tailed resembles much more a mule deer.
00:19:18.000For record-keeping purposes, the divider between the range of the Columbia mule deer and I'm sorry, the divider between the range of the Colombian blacktail and the mule deer is I-5.
00:19:31.000So if that sumbitch jumps the road, he is, for record-keeping purposes...
00:19:37.000He goes from being a Columbia blacktail to a mule deer.
00:19:40.000So you look like all the record book Columbia blacktails are shot along the left side of I-5 on a northward direction because they're much bigger than anywhere else.
00:19:52.000But they've got to divide it somewhere, so they divide it like that.
00:19:54.000So in one thing's life, he could jump back and forth.
00:19:56.000They're not even recognized as distinct.
00:19:58.000If you look at the Latin name for them, the scientific name for them, they're Taxonomists don't recognize the difference, but we all do.
00:20:06.000You look at me like, that's not a freaking mule deer, man.
00:20:09.000I can tell by looking, but it's just these morphological differences.
00:20:13.000These things you see, but they're not really betrayed in the genetics.
00:20:38.000Like, well, they were saying the best understanding and now this is the...
00:20:42.000You know, it's not static, subject to change, but it's frustrating for people.
00:20:48.000I'm glad you're on this week because this is a week that's pretty controversial in the news, this story about this black rhino that they auctioned off a hunt for.
00:20:57.000This is some fascinating shit to me because...
00:21:37.000And what they're saying is that this rhino had to go anyway because this rhino was an old non-breeder and he was very aggressive and he was trying to kill the younger males.
00:21:47.000And because it's an extinct or because it's an endangered species, this was an animal that they were going to have to do something about anyway.
00:22:32.000Since being introduced to hunting by you, I've become pretty obsessed.
00:22:37.000And I read about it all the time, and I'm trying to sort out all the different philosophies and try to figure out why people think what they think.
00:22:55.000I saw some online that were like fucking 70 acres, and they have a high fence, and people are pretending that they're hunting in these things.
00:23:03.000Yeah, they'll sometimes set the animal out on the day.
00:23:18.000There are versions of that here, and we can talk about...
00:23:21.000I can talk in a much more educated way or in a much more knowledgeable fashion about versions of that that occur here in the U.S. But, like, I've never been to Africa.
00:23:31.000I have ill-informed opinions about what goes on in Africa, but I recognize when it comes to stuff like this, it's...
00:23:39.000There are so many contradictions that are hard to deal with, and it's really difficult for people to get their heads wrapped around why a guy...
00:23:48.000Not knowing the person, I can't say that the person is saying who's like, oh, I would just as happily give you the money to help save rhinos.
00:23:58.000But if this one has to go anyways, I suppose I'll come and get it.
00:24:02.000I don't really know what his motivations are.
00:25:45.000In a rough sense, we have this idea that we maintain here that wildlife is held in the public trust.
00:25:50.000An individual can control Access to his lands for hunting, but the animal belongs to the state.
00:25:57.000You don't get to make decisions necessarily about the things that are on your property.
00:26:02.000And that's been something that Americans, and particularly American hunters, have always been proud of.
00:26:08.000We have this North American model of wildlife conservation we always talk about, which is this idea of public trust wildlife, and that we manage it in long-term things because people have a vested interest in having more and more animals around for whatever purpose, viewing, hunting, etc., One of the things they do,
00:26:24.000though, and so you take an animal like the bighorn sheep, and the bighorn sheep at a time was pretty nearly wiped out.
00:26:32.000They were never hurting as bad as black rhinos are, but they were hurting really bad.
00:26:35.000And as we got them restored, we started having limited numbers of tags.
00:26:38.000So you might have a mountain range, and every year they determine that we can kill one sheep out of that range.
00:26:44.000And people will, and I do this every year, people will apply for a lottery that's conducted by the state.
00:26:50.000And you put your name in the hat, you pay a fee, They, you know, put all the names in there, draw one out, and be like, Dave draws a tag.
00:26:58.000And this generates a whole bunch of money, and they use it for tranquilizing sheep that you can helicopter them to new areas and restore the species.
00:27:05.000And all the funding comes from this kind of stuff.
00:27:06.000One thing they realized a great way to make money is if you can get that up, let's say you can kill five out of that mountain range, they might wind up going, we're going to do, you know, we'll do four through the lottery, which is for everyone, like the common man's pool, but we're going to take one and auction it off.
00:27:22.000Every year the one, the Bighorn sheep tag they auctioned in Montana, it goes for $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 every year.
00:27:31.000I think recently it went for $380,000 or $400,000.
00:27:35.000I don't think it's broken a half million, but it goes up because if you go out in Montana and you go hunt six, if you go hunt the Missouri Breaks, All the record book bighorns come out of there.
00:27:46.000The biggest bighorns, the biggest Rocky Mountain bighorns come out of the break.
00:27:50.000So guys will pay a ton for what they call the governor's tag in Montana.
00:29:07.000Other people are like, dude, this is not the country we live in because we're still kind of hurting from the idea of where we came from in Europe, which is like the Robin Hood model.
00:30:02.000But other people who are on the other side of this say, yeah, but the money is so helpful.
00:30:05.000And if it wasn't for big chunks of money like that, we wouldn't have recovered the bighorn sheep as effectively as we've recovered the bighorn sheep.
00:30:32.000You know, all that stuff we've loaded through.
00:30:33.000Yeah, we saw a lot of- When a guy will buy the governor's tag, he'll usually hire some guys, or he'll hire some guys to go spend a couple months.
00:32:42.000There's no other way to explain the success of the richness of animals and the richness of wilderness habitats we have in this country when you look at how many people live here, how wealthy we are, all the technology.
00:32:55.000Some of the other countries that would be sitting where we're at have destroyed their wildlife.
00:33:06.000And I think that one of the ways to explain the fantastic job we've done is that we've really held true to this idea that wildlife belongs to us.
00:33:13.000And when you do damage to it, you're doing damage to this idea of, you know, an American treasure.
00:33:21.000You're damaging other people's interests, you know.
00:34:05.000No, it's valuable because they're idiots, because people think that it makes your dick hard.
00:34:09.000Like, I guess they haven't heard about Viagra, wherever the fuck they're trying out rhino horn.
00:34:14.000I went the other day, I mean, just like three days ago, I saw the act I went to see the current head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service speak about some issues that we'll be facing this year.
00:34:24.000And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is getting really involved in the rhino trade.
00:34:29.000When they talk about all the money they're spending, they're spending money on enforcement, they're spending money on trying to battle the source, that you might somehow convince people that they don't want it.
00:35:09.000No matter what, that business, the guys that are actually out there with firearms, you can imagine, the guy that's out on the ground, Hunting rhinos, being chased by people who have pretty much a license to, in some cases, kill them.
00:35:24.000Like, I don't think that guy is a rich man.
00:35:27.000He's making someone wealthy, but there's no way that guy is rich.
00:35:31.000Not only that, it's just such a bizarre thing.
00:35:34.000The idea of shooting this giant, majestic, endangered animal just for its horn.
00:36:50.000When you look at a rhino, to me, I mean, it's one of the closest things when you look like a Triceratops or a Stegosaurus or something like that, and you look at a rhino, it's like one of the closest things to that ancient time.
00:37:03.000You look at this big, fucking, giant, armored animal.
00:37:38.000Isn't it amazing in that way that there's stuff now that I'd be like, no, dude, this really does work to the point where it could cause trouble for you.
00:38:20.000That the aphrodisiac market for men would, you know...
00:38:25.000The dick-hardening market for men would evaporate now that there are pharmaceuticals that are specifically tailored for that and are clinically proven to work.
00:38:33.000Well, that's how the American troops get information about the Taliban from the Afghani warlords, is Viagra's, the number one method of payment.
00:38:44.000Yeah, because these guys, a lot of these warlords, they're living the same way they lived back when Alexander the Great was run in Afghanistan.
00:38:51.000Afghanistan has Kabul and then mountains, and mountains filled with villages and extremely primitive locations, and they're living old school.
00:39:02.000And sometimes there's a guy who's a warlord who's got 20 wives, and his dick doesn't work anymore.
00:39:07.000And they come along and they go, look, we got guns.
00:40:07.000But so much of that kind of thing is, and it's hard for people that don't hunt to understand, so much of that kind of stuff comes from context.
00:40:14.000You develop over time a deep context with an animal, and for me that familiarity and the hours you spend, the hours you log watching it, understanding it, reading about it, studying it, for me develops into something that produces a great desire to hunt the animal once I get to know it.
00:40:32.000An animal that I don't know well I don't have that much desire to hunt for it.
00:40:39.000But when I watch them and watch them and watch them, like bighorn sheep, when I moved to Montana, when I was born in Michigan, I didn't go out there being like, man, I cannot wait to hunt bighorn sheep.
00:40:49.000But after spending years and years and years out glassing for deer, glassing for elk, glassing for bears, I'm like, bighorn, bighorn, bighorn.
00:40:57.000And I really got to where I loved to watch bighorns.
00:41:47.000And he's got a private security detail following around all the time now.
00:41:53.000He's giving this interview with CNN. He's talking about the people who have threatened his kids because he has people threatening to kill him right now that I have to talk to the FBI and have my private security details.
00:42:05.000Keep my children from being skinned alive and shot at.
00:42:59.000Friends of mine that have hunted in Africa kind of marvel at the rapidity with which, like how quickly the animals get hauled off and consumed.
00:43:43.000For me to go hunt something, I also have to know that it's sound, that it's in a safe position.
00:43:50.000And one nice thing about living in the U.S., I mean, there's some exceptions to this, but generally in the U.S., if you want to be ethical about your hunting practices in the U.S., you can generally look to the guidance of your state fish and game agency.
00:44:04.000I mean, a state fish and game agency can't get away with, I mean, theoretically can't get away with and Practically can't get away with running a species into the ground.
00:44:17.000So generally, if you're looking and you realize that there's a population of bighorns and there's a hunting season for them right now, it's...
00:44:30.000If they're finding a decline in that thing, they're going to curb it or cut it out all together and wait until it's growing again.
00:44:35.000And then you can also look at their long-term goal of where they want animals, how many animals they think the area can support.
00:44:41.000So it's easy in the U.S. because this stuff is watched so much.
00:44:44.000Obviously, again, coming from a guy who doesn't spend any time in Africa, I know that in Africa, money talks in a way that it doesn't necessarily hear when it comes to small issues like wildlife.
00:44:55.000You can buy your way into things that maybe you don't have any real ethical business.
00:45:00.000In the U.S., it's just easier to kind of, there's a lot more information at our fingertips.
00:45:04.000So for me, when I go hunting, I can really kind of read up and understand a lot about what I'm going after, where it's at, what the management goals are, what risks the animal has.
00:45:14.000Is hunting it, you know, productive and helpful right now?
00:45:17.000Is it potentially detrimental to the species?
00:45:22.000It is amazing how good a job the Department of Fish and Game, or what is the actual group, what are they called?
00:45:28.000Well, there's a state, so you have U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is a federal thing, and so they have a hand in managing migratory waterfowl, but most things are managed by, so every state has a, you know, you kind of like, just in general terms,
00:45:44.000you'd call them fishing game, but it's like, in Michigan, it's the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
00:45:49.000In Montana, it's Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.
00:45:53.000But just as a euphemism versus fishing game.
00:45:55.000So, you know, every state, the Department of Environmental Conservation in New York, so every state has a different name, but it's a state department that sets hunting and fishing regulations.
00:46:07.000And on these state departments would be big boards, and the people that set it will be biologists, various figures, different stakeholders.
00:46:16.000So you'd have, like, representatives from the hunting community, representatives who are outside of the hunting community, We'll all come together and come to some level of cohesion and some level of, you know, they'll find a happy middle ground when they set their quotas.
00:46:30.000And they often, I mean, they meet every year to determine what can be done and not done.
00:46:34.000And they can control harvest a number of ways by issuing tags, shortening seasons, lengthening seasons.
00:46:40.000You can, if you want to slow down a harvest, you might move the season away from the rut.
00:46:46.000You know, if you want to pick up a harvest, kill females.
00:46:50.000You know, if you want to bring a population down because of various factors like agricultural interests, auto insurers, you know, generally want deer numbers lower.
00:47:00.000Agricultural interests generally want deer numbers lower.
00:47:05.000Landscape people often want deer numbers lower.
00:47:07.000So to kind of factor like their concerns and you got the concerns of people who want, hunters want more deer.
00:47:20.000If you have a population that's really hurting, you go in there and do predator control in that area, and sometimes you can bring some animals back from the brink.
00:47:29.000It's possible to lose isolated populations.
00:47:32.000It's possible to have a mountain range, and you spend a few hundred thousand dollars, a million dollars, whatever, moving some bighorns in there, and you find that you're just getting hammered by lions, and you're going to lose all the sheep and lose your whole investment.
00:47:45.000You might go in there and hit those lions a little bit, save them, so...
00:47:50.000There's so many tools at their disposal.
00:48:19.000That's why there's a lot of conservation money out there right now because the gun businesses have been blowing up.
00:48:24.000As people feel that their gun rights are under attack, they've been buying so many firearms, it puts money in the Pittman Robertson, I think it's called.
00:49:01.000I know that you get annoyed by PETA as much as I do.
00:49:04.000It's like, they're not spending the money on doing the stuff that hunters are.
00:49:10.000Like, hunters are bankrolling so much of wildlife research and wildlife conservation.
00:49:14.000And it's not just stuff that benefits the animals we're after, you know?
00:49:17.000My problem with groups like PETA or the Animal Liberation Organization, the people that want to fucking save lobsters and rescue them from restaurants and throw them back into the ocean...
00:49:27.000There's a lot of knee-jerk reactionary nonsense that's not based on the actual science of understanding the population of these animals.
00:49:36.000When people start getting angry at people hunting wolves, like this is a perfect example.
00:49:41.000They've opened up wolf season now in a bunch of different places.
00:49:44.000And the reason being is that people's livestock are getting decimated.
00:49:47.000Elk populations are getting destroyed.
00:49:49.000I mean, they have to move in to control it, but to a lot of animal rights people, all they see is bloodthirsty maniacs that want to kill beautiful wolves.
00:49:58.000And they don't understand that, first of all, A, these wolves have been reintroduced to a lot of these areas, and then B, like, we're supposed to be the stewards of the land.
00:50:06.000We're supposed to be the intelligent people that understand the numbers, and something has to be done about it.
00:50:10.000This isn't something that people have decided, I'd like to kill a wolf, yeah, let's make it legal.
00:50:14.000They're going, hey, we've got an issue.
00:50:49.000They're like, we need to get rid of some wolves.
00:50:51.000We could bring back the days where we have government agents going out and gunning for them, or we could open it up and have people actually pay money.
00:52:14.000It's just bringing them into control because we are puppeteers.
00:52:21.000There's a lot of people living here and you're really balancing a lot of interests.
00:52:28.000Again, it's like Like, so much in life, you really have to take, before jumping into the stuff, the emotional stuff, you really have to take the time to look at the stuff.
00:55:14.000Well, it's all to prevent the harrowing experience that might happen to someone should they wake up in the morning and realize and see a deer run into their yard and tip over because it had a arrow in it.
00:55:24.000And as upsetting as that would be, it's so much better to go out and just at night, quietly, snipe them off, you know, clean it all up.
00:55:33.000There's a video of this happening in some other country of...
00:55:37.000They showed these, um, that was a joke.
00:55:40.000That video, lions released to deal with the deer population.
00:57:34.000Well, it's also, if you want to, you know, if you have like some sort of a bowel issue and you want to clean out the old pipes, a little bit of, take some Epsom salts and some water, just a couple of tablespoons, gargle it and shove it down the pipe and it'll be like a broken fire.
00:59:06.000By three days in, I was there for two weeks.
00:59:09.000By three days in, I realized, like, this is fucking dangerous.
00:59:13.000You have to keep your eyes open in the middle of the night because it was dark as shit.
00:59:16.000And kids were getting up in the middle of the night and tying kids to their beds and then leaving them in the woods, like dragging them out while they were sleeping.
00:59:23.000They would wake up screaming alone in the dark, like in the woods.
00:59:28.000There's no predators or anything in New Hampshire, but it was fucking...
00:59:59.000I'm on the mass edit outside of the magazine and they're telling me that the most letter-generating article they ever ran was an article that was deemed to be critical of the Boy Scouts because there had been a number of catastrophes that had happened to Boy Scouts at scout camp.
01:00:49.000Statistically, you're probably going to be fine.
01:00:51.000But when you've got a bunch of inner city kids and they have fucking bows and arrows and pocket knives and they're wandering through the woods...
01:00:57.000And there's only like three counselors.
01:00:59.000There was like 30 fucking kids and three people watching us.
01:01:02.000There was a lot of shit going on, man.
01:02:38.000He was born an inner city kid and wanted to somehow be out in the woods.
01:02:41.000And for him, it was a perfect avenue into it.
01:02:43.000But then for me, it was like a, you know...
01:02:46.000You couldn't do as cool stuff doing that as I could hang out with my dad and his friends and his kids, so I never got really involved in it.
01:02:53.000When I was in high school, I don't remember the kid's name, but someone wrote a really cool article, one of the kids in my school, about Boy Scouts, about the problem with the code of the Boy Scouts, because one of them was keeping your thoughts clean.
01:06:13.000I try not to be that, you know, I try not to, but yeah, you do, you get used to a certain momentum, you know, and you get home for a while.
01:06:20.000My wife will sometimes point out, she's like, you haven't even been home a week and I can tell you, you know.
01:06:25.000Well, I don't get, the one way I don't get that way is with my kids.
01:06:30.000And whenever I go, like, anywhere, like on vacation, the thing that, or on a trip to work, the thing that always gets me is I hate leaving my kids.
01:07:05.000And I think when you're around someone all the time, you don't appreciate them as much as when you go away, you miss them, and then you come back.
01:12:26.000The first episode I ever watched, you were going to take the same route that Lewis and Clark took, and you shot a moose and turned it into a boat.
01:12:38.000You shot it with a musket, too, right?
01:12:40.000I mean, do you want, like, the show business story about how I did...
01:12:42.000What made you decide to be on TV? I would periodically, as a writer, I would periodically get called by producers and developers about stuff I had written.
01:12:56.000You might get a phone call or you get an email, not a phone call, an email through a magazine or whatever and realize that some guy at History Channel wants you to come down and what they do is they're desk-bound individuals and they're obligated to Going to these meetings,
01:13:16.000And so when they're putting together their portfolio of ideas, they would like to go contact writers or people who are out doing interesting stuff in the hinterlands, you know, and come in and kind of report about what's exciting at the time.
01:13:27.000And I'd gone to a number of these meetings over the years about stories I had written, and every time you get the email, you're like, oh, my God, I'm going to be on TV, and it would never work out.
01:13:35.000But eventually I signed a development agreement after I wrote my first book.
01:13:43.000Scavenger's Guide to Oat Cuisine, which I just got the rights back to.
01:13:47.000There's so few of those books out there, they sell on Amazon for like $130.
01:15:51.000But it's so complex, and there's so many layers to it, and the timeline switched around.
01:15:56.000I mean, it's, it's a genius work of film.
01:15:59.000And then this fucking dummy came along and decided to make this shoot-em-up, and there's gonna be, why, fuck you, fucking, fucking, fuck, fuck, fucking, bang, bang, bang.
01:16:08.000And it's just an assault on your intelligence.
01:20:37.000Yeah, he would walk into a bathroom and bang the wall, and we would run out of the bathroom, and he would talk to Pinky Tuscadero in there.
01:21:42.000You make it, there's all this excitement and stuff, and later it doesn't do well.
01:21:45.000You're up there going, this is not going well.
01:21:47.000I've never done it, but I can just imagine how humiliating it must be.
01:21:50.000The way I describe it is like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother.
01:21:54.000It's actually probably worse than that because there's somewhere out there, there's someone that would like to suck a thousand dicks in front of his mother.
01:22:20.000And the best way to do comedy is almost to be non-existent.
01:22:23.000When you write and when you perform, there's almost no you in there.
01:22:29.000Unless it's a self-deprecating aspect of it, like you're pointing out things that are silly about you, or pointing out ridiculous ideas that you might have had in your head at one point in time.
01:22:38.000But other than that, when you're performing, you're never thinking, man, I'm up here and I'm killing.
01:22:49.000And all you know is that you kind of know how to do it, and all you know is that you kind of have to keep at it in order to continue doing it, and that it's really fun to do.
01:22:57.000But the moment you start taking it serious or attributing all of the success of it to you being super special and amazing and unique, you fucking suck.
01:23:37.000So the checking aspect, the being, the ego check, and the creative process, the tuning in, it's non-existent.
01:23:45.000You're treated probably around you, you're treated with a certain amount of deference, too, that you're not going to get as doing stand-up.
01:23:51.000They're treated like, we're treated like shit.
01:23:53.000The comedians are like, well, you know, people like you if you're good, and they appreciate the, but no one, like, takes it seriously as an art form.
01:24:56.000After I saw you last time, When I went to see you in New Jersey, we were driving home and my wife was saying to me, she's like, my face hurts from laughing at heart.
01:25:33.000It's like self-hatred and I'm so pathetic.
01:25:36.000It's funny that you build a whole act.
01:25:38.000You can build a whole act and you're at a position of strength.
01:25:42.000I don't know if you ever think of it that way.
01:25:44.000But, like, you're up there, like, you seem, like, when you're up there, you seem somehow, like, in control and, you know, like a word you like, in control and powerful, but still funny.
01:25:53.000And it's a weird contradiction, because we get from stand-up, we get to thinking, like, it's just like, yo, my wife don't like me, no one likes me, I'm awful, I can't do anything, you know?
01:26:03.000Well, people have always said that you have to be nebbishy or fat or weird to be a comedian.
01:26:10.000I was told that so much that I was insecure about my body when I first started doing comedy.
01:26:26.000I mean, there's sort of laws to it, but there's no rules.
01:26:30.000You know, there's laws, some of the laws are that it has to be funny to you, and that you have to learn it, and that everybody's different.
01:26:38.000Like, there's Mitch Hedberg, who is like, you familiar with Mitch Hedberg?
01:26:42.000Oh yeah, man, I got a good Mitch Hedberg story.
01:28:07.000You can't handle getting beat up like that.
01:28:09.000The punishment that your self-esteem takes when you bomb on stage is almost overwhelming.
01:28:16.000For some people, I've seen guys bomb and never recover.
01:28:20.000I've seen them, like, their act diminishes, like they had some potential, there was something there, and then I've seen, like, one night where the fucking wheels come off, and then they never recover.
01:29:54.000If you go on stage and say if you're a Republican and you're on stage and you start going off about gay marriage or this or that and you just give a speech.
01:30:05.000If I'm in the audience and I have an opposing point of view...
01:30:11.000I think that's wrong and I think people should be able to do this.
01:30:14.000But if you go on stage and say something that makes me laugh, even if I don't agree with you, even if I don't agree with you, if you make me laugh, I have to at least consider your idea.
01:30:28.000I had a guy who came up to me who was a Christian, and I used to do this bit about Noah's Ark, that if you told Noah and the Ark to an eight-year-old retarded boy, he's going to have some questions.
01:30:38.000So I had this whole bit about someone sitting down with this young retarded boy telling him the story of Noah's Ark.
01:32:27.000Well, why would anybody assume that that boat would make any connection in history to a crazy story about a dude who got all the animals to come on his boat because God talked to him, told him it was going to rain, and he was going to drown everybody because everybody wasn't paying attention.
01:34:08.000I think Gilgamesh is the original one.
01:34:10.000Yeah, it's one of the oldest ones that we know of, but it's a coincidence.
01:34:14.000Yeah, well, I think, seriously, I think what the story of Noah's Ark is, what it really is all about, is that at one point in time, I think there was a huge disaster, and I think it's probably happened more than once, where, like, meteors hit, or, you know, a shifting in the core, ice caps, or something huge, where it's just, like, it kills,
01:36:41.000The second thing I struggle with is, like, you talk to really liberal people and you're like, yeah, Rush, you know, Rush Limbaugh is funny sometimes.
01:36:56.000But I remember, like, when you were doing part of your act, you were talking about when people get really mad at comedians for saying something controversial.
01:37:03.000And you kind of, you mentioned, like, How come no one's mad at Johnny Cash for shooting a man just to watch him die?
01:37:16.000The thing about comedy is it's an easy target.
01:37:19.000For people that are looking to be offended, which is a lot of bloggers and people looking to find something to be outraged about, They'll point to comedy because comedy is a soft target.
01:37:30.000A lot of comedians will say, fuck that.
01:37:49.000Yeah, it's like the soft target of comedy is the idea that there's like this real subtlety to language and there's a subtlety to sarcasm and being facetious.
01:38:38.000Like, you can say something fucked up, and I know that you're not serious, so I'll start laughing, and then we'll go, that's so wrong.
01:38:44.000But we know it's funny because it's not a statement.
01:38:48.000Yeah, no, I know exactly what you mean.
01:38:49.000But there's like this PC police thing going on now where a bunch of people who...
01:38:55.000And most of the time, when you pay attention to those people, because I find it fascinating, and I'm...
01:39:00.000I try to consider myself to be a student of human nature.
01:39:03.000And one of the things that I find about these people that complain so much about all these different things, and they find this moral outrage or find one thing to harp on over and over again, is they're usually extremely troubled personally.
01:39:16.000They usually have overwhelming issues, like they're morbidly obese, or they're socially inept.
01:39:24.000There's something wrong with them that's causing them to find this soft target and then lash out constantly at this soft target.
01:39:32.000And then also if you look at what they do, a lot of people, what they're trying to do is stop someone from hurting someone's feelings.
01:39:42.000And they're trying to say that what you're doing is mean and you're hurting someone's feelings.
01:39:46.000So what I'm going to do is hurt your feelings.
01:39:50.000In the most vicious and cruel way possible, you know, with these blogs and the writing, and I'm going to do to you what you're somehow or another doing.
01:40:01.000So I'm going to be a complete, total hypocrite.
01:40:26.000What they're doing is just being an asshole because they feel like they have a license to be an asshole because they can take what you said and put it on paper and say, look, in quotes, Tracy Morgan said if his son was gay, he'd stab him.
01:42:17.000Having friends that have good senses of humor, people that joke around about things, or say mean things.
01:42:22.000Some of my favorite people, like Jim Norton is one of my favorite comedians, and he's my favorite guy on the radio, because he says ridiculous, evil, mean shit all the time, but he doesn't mean it.
01:42:34.000But he's really smart about how he does it.
01:42:37.000And he takes a tremendous amount of grief because of it.
01:42:40.000Because people will try to point out some of the things that he says and then, you know, and accuse him of being, you know, homophobic or this.
01:42:47.000One of the least homophobic guys you'll ever meet.
01:42:49.000In fact, he will talk openly about how many experiences he's had with trannies.
01:42:54.000He's had like all these transsexual experiences.
01:42:56.000He's a pervert, complete total pervert.
01:45:27.000Let's say someone makes a crack about gays and it flops.
01:45:33.000A way that it can flop is if they're so transparent that you see in them for a minute and you're like, wow, that really comes from a place of deep hatred.
01:46:55.000It's not only not supported by history, but the point is, like, when I talk about that on stage, I make a big point out of the fact that I want to make sure that, like, I don't want anybody to think that I have any problem with gay people.
01:47:09.000But I also don't want any gay people to just take random jabs at the giant mass of straight people and say, we're responsible for all the wars.
01:48:33.000The idea that gay guys are immune from sexual harassment, they're not going to sexually harass you because they're from this marginalized group.
01:48:59.000Gay guys would roofie you just like a straight guy would roofie you.
01:49:02.000The idea that someone is really super cool just because they're gay is ridiculous.
01:49:06.000It's just like the idea of someone being super cool because they're black.
01:49:09.000Marginalized groups have a little bit of leeway with a lot of knee-jerk, reactionary, bleeding-heart liberals, which is why a guy like Al Sharpton is allowed to be on television.
01:49:21.000Al Sharpton is a con man and an idiot, but yet he represents black people on television.
01:49:27.000Because no one wants to say anything about him because he's black.
01:49:30.000Because if you pick on Al Sharpton, you're picking on marginalized people and you are therefore a racist because he represents brown people.
01:49:40.000But meanwhile, if you follow his career, I mean, the guy made his living off of, like, the Tawana Brawley thing where there was a fake rape where he, you know, he came out and had this gigantic protest and it turns out that this woman, Tawana Brawley, was never really raped in the first place.
01:52:29.000At my house the other day, my wife was playing a Martin Luther King speech because Martin Luther King Day is Monday, and my daughter was like, who's Martin Luther King?
01:52:38.000So my wife is playing this speech for our five-year-old.
01:53:13.000Where's this guy that represents the black community?
01:53:15.000A guy who is making these incredible points and is saying something that's so moving.
01:53:21.000And then you look in the audience and it's so mixed.
01:53:24.000There's white people next to black people.
01:53:26.000And such an incredible time in our culture where people realized that there was these inequalities and there was this groundswell of movement to try to make the world equal and behind it or the figurehead of it is this incredibly powerful,
01:56:09.000We have a serious lack of these powerful, inspirational characters, these people that go on TV or give speeches that really have vision to them.
01:56:21.000I mean, Obama had some of that as a candidate, but as a president, it's almost like he looks so tired.
01:56:28.000When I see him on TV, he looks so goddamn tired.
01:56:31.000And I remember when he was running, we had Bush and Cheney, and we were in war, and we were in a war that most people didn't support, and it was very confusing, and it was...
01:56:38.000Coming out that the pretense of this war was incorrect and there wasn't really any weapons of mass destruction and all these lives and devastation and people were looking into Halliburton and the connection to Cheney.
01:57:33.000But I always think, like, when I look at things that...
01:57:37.000There's things that happen to candidates.
01:57:40.000I think it has so much to do with money.
01:57:43.000We get these figures going into the primaries.
01:57:45.000You get these figures that buck the trends and Mavericks.
01:57:51.000When I say Mavericks, I'm not referring strictly to McCain, but you get these people that come in and they're going to upset the status quo.
01:57:58.000But then you have to play the politics game and you owe so much stuff for money.
01:58:02.000And then you pay those debts and it's like corrupting.
01:58:05.000And I think a similar thing happens to people often in office.
01:59:32.000Jimmy Carter is one of the few guys that was president that I would really love to sit down with and have a private conversation.
01:59:38.000Because he seems to be like a true humanitarian.
01:59:41.000And he seems to be, out of all the people that were ever president, the guy who caused probably the least amount of loss of lives and the least amount of War and heartbreak seems to be Jimmy Carter.
01:59:51.000He seemed truly like a kind man who wound up in this weird situation where he was the President of the United States.
01:59:59.000He wound up in a weird situation out in the desert.
02:01:59.000We get a really serious communist, then we go from that to a real serious anarchist, then we realize that doesn't work, so we go to some wild-ass dictator.
02:02:13.000I feel that kind of like these mild undulations, when you view it from a historic perspective, I think these mild undulations that we go through in politics are to our benefit.
02:03:48.000I'm going to give you this check, but I don't want them damn horses in that park.
02:03:51.000Because there's no other way to explain it.
02:03:53.000And it shows kind of this weird ignorance and arrogance where if you talk to anyone who's involved in livestock theft and livestock issues, we don't have a horse theft.
02:04:02.000We don't have a not enough horse problem.
02:04:54.000The idea that you couldn't get a Big Gulp or a giant drink at a movie theater.
02:04:56.000I remember one of those comedians, some comedian was doing something, he was doing like a thing where he was like, you're supposed to complete the sentence, like, it's so hot, you know?
02:05:04.000And one of them was, it's so hot, Bloomberg had to go over to Jersey to get a Big Gulp or something like that.
02:05:38.000But then I'd say, like, you gotta be, like, a big enough person in some weird way to be like, okay, you go ahead and push on, and I'm gonna try to not want to, like, control your life.
02:05:48.000Well, there's gonna be people who look at you and go, dude, you can't talk about cigarettes or motorcycles.
02:06:00.000You describing it was harrowing, but watching it was way crazier.
02:06:04.000When that fucking thing got up and started running towards you, even though I knew you were okay, I met you after the fact, I was like, oh, he's dead.
02:06:17.000You know, if you do enough TV, like, that was...
02:06:20.000What I did was so stupid that you'd want on one hand...
02:06:23.000It was so dumb what I did, and I'll tell what I did in a minute, but what I did was so stupid That you'd want to then hide how stupid you were and not have it be on TV. Right.
02:06:34.000But on the other hand, like, but it's compelling TV. Like, a guy getting run over by a moose is interesting, you know?
02:06:38.000So it's your thing of, like, your ego where...
02:06:59.000That's a cow saying, I am coming into estrus.
02:07:04.000And moose calling is effective right before the rut, right before the breeding season, because bulls know what's going to happen.
02:07:15.000Like, the cows are going to want to be bred, and I'm going to breed them.
02:07:18.000But the cows haven't really got rolling yet, so it's just all anticipation.
02:07:23.000If they were actually all doing it, and the cows are really in estrus, and the bull's with a cow that's in estrus, he's going to be less likely to come to one calling.
02:08:01.000But it's very hard to determine where it was...
02:08:04.000Not where, it's hard to determine how far away.
02:08:07.000And we heard that and then we debated for a long time whether we'd heard it or not.
02:08:11.000We're like, no, I know I heard a bull, I heard a bull.
02:08:14.000Then it actually started to thunder a little bit off in the distance, which made it even more confusing because it was like, was it thunder or was it that, you know, noise?
02:08:21.000So Ryan starts trying to lure the bull to us.
02:08:34.000And I stay put, hoping that the bull...
02:08:37.000We'll come and he's going to want to see her before he gets too close.
02:08:41.000So by Ryan staying about 75 yards further away, the bull might hang up in the vicinity where I'm at, you know, while he's trying to get a visual lock on the cow to make sure everything looks safe.
02:09:08.000And now we're in his zone enough where he's coming to investigate and he's coming in and he kind of comes at me and I do like a really stupid thing where I take what you call a brisket shot.
02:09:18.000And a brisket shot on a deer or a wild pig is devastating.
02:09:21.000You know, you're coming in like the sternum and it is devastating to the animal, a small animal.
02:10:33.000So I'm trying to feel where he put a hole in me, and I'm thinking he'd punch the hole through my waders and into my ass tissue.
02:10:41.000But then I realized that I got blood all over, because I'd hit him in the brisket, so when he ran me over, he smeared a lot of that blood on the back of my clothes.
02:11:22.000Serious issues have been giardia, so drinking bad water, and Lyme disease by getting bit by little teeny bugs that are infected with bacteria.
02:11:34.000But when I'm laying in bed and I'm not thinking about microbes, I'm thinking about big giant animals coming to get me, you know, and that one came and knocked me.
02:11:42.000In the minute, like, it's mixed emotions.
02:11:45.000As soon as it happens, I'm like, that was the stupidest thing I ever did.
02:14:01.000Yeah, so I don't think Chris Stringer floats this idea, but he talks about a guy who floats this idea that they had a confrontational hunting style that Neanderthals did.
02:14:10.000That they were in there, you know, tearing it up.
02:14:13.000And Cro-Magnons had a little bit more of a, let's stay back, you know, we'll stay back and get them at a better time.
02:14:20.000Well, Neanderthals are way closer to the rest of the animals than we are.
02:14:25.000I mean, they were five feet tall, 200 plus pounds, big thick fucking bones.
02:14:41.000Yeah, they weren't, like, just structurally the females were similar.
02:14:45.000And so having that little run in with that moose was kind of, I felt like a little bit, in a positive way, I felt a little bit like, maybe like, it was like a Neanderthal experience.
02:14:55.000But the Neanderthal thing is weird, man, because they find out all these things that we used to think they didn't do.
02:15:01.000There's evidence that once they came into contact with Cro-Magnon, it was like they started picking up some of the things that they were into.
02:15:09.000There's evidence that suggests that they had been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and all of a sudden dudes show up, like we show up, and all of a sudden they kind of got interested in decoration a little bit, got interested in art a little bit.
02:15:21.000I mean, it's a theory that they were somehow interacting with us and were kind of like stealing our...
02:16:57.000On one hand, they're coming into Congress because they despise them, but like dudes, conquering dudes will often find themselves, you know, like history's full of those examples, like a conquering army that's coming out to get like the worst people on the planet and all they want to do is annihilate them, but they also kind of want to have sex with them.
02:17:14.000Did you ever see, there's one, I think he was an Australian anthropologist, very fringe guy, but he had this really funny take on Neanderthals that they were these super predators and that we hunted them into extinction.
02:17:36.000No, but I don't know if I've seen that guy's ideas, but I've seen the idea that that's the case, and what people point to is that they always find butcher marks, not always, but it's very common to find butcher marks on those bones, and also find where they crack the heads open, presumably to get the brain out.
02:17:52.000Yeah, I wish I could remember killing Neanderthals.
02:18:18.000And his proposal was the eye sockets were much larger, the features were more simian, the bone structure was much closer to lower primates than ours, and we're just assuming, we anthropomorphize these Yeah.
02:18:50.000Oh, that's what he thinks they look like?
02:19:16.000I mean, because they get such sophisticated ways of looking at stuff.
02:19:18.000Well, there was that one misinterpreted idea that I think a Harvard geneticist was saying that one day it could be possible and there may be an ethical consideration that we would have to ask a woman if she'd be willing to give birth to a Neanderthal baby.
02:19:35.000And then it became, you know, distributed.
02:19:37.000Harvard geneticist wants women to give birth to a Neanderthal.
02:20:18.000Why am I thinking about neonatal dicks?
02:20:20.000Tell me about your Mitch Hedberg story.
02:20:24.000You know, the more I think about it, I'm going to try to tell it real quick because it's not that great of a story, but I had this girlfriend who had this fellowship she got in San Jose, California.
02:20:32.000And so I was back and forth between Montana and San Jose all the time.
02:20:36.000And there's always this marquee above this comedy house.
02:23:01.000Yeah, the guys I know the best at hunting, you go out and it has to be that you know you're going to Because if things get hard and things get bad and things aren't going your way, if you've already been going into it like you didn't know it was going to happen, it allows you to more quickly jump into that it didn't happen.
02:23:19.000If you go into it like it has to happen, it will happen, it has to happen, then when things are sucky, you've You're still pursuing that narrative, you know?
02:24:58.000If they're, I mean, they're really, they're really something, I mean, they've gotten, they've through our, you know, through, I'm trying to put together an idea that's not actually that complicated.
02:25:12.000Thanks to us, and in spite of us, at the same time, they've managed to get everywhere.
02:25:41.000And they just don't seem to really cause the level of damage and hysteria that they do in some other areas, like in certain areas in the southeast and the Gulf Coast area.
02:25:54.000I mean, there's pigs to the point where it's just really hard on agricultural interests, and it's kind of inexplicable.
02:26:01.000How they seem to be there for so long and then explode into some level.
02:26:05.000But in California, there's some pigs around and people generally appreciate them.
02:26:10.000I used to hunt pigs at, not used to, I still do, but I have a friend who's got some, her family has some cattle ranches up around Sacramento.
02:26:19.000And he's kind of got this little bit like, yeah, you know, sometimes I get too many and I need to get rid of some, but then we'll get a dry year and they'll all go away anyway.
02:26:27.000And I'd like it if you went out and shot some.
02:27:11.000And these guys are wishing there was more of them.
02:27:14.000And in other parts of the country, you got government agencies paying real money to try to wipe them out.
02:27:20.000Because they cause such a problem with native species and agricultural interests.
02:27:25.000But here it's a different vibe in California.
02:27:27.000Have you seen the Pigman Ted Nugent footage?
02:27:31.000I've seen clips of it, I haven't seen it.
02:27:32.000I mean, I know everything, I know so much about it.
02:27:35.000I mean, I have a show on that network, you know?
02:27:36.000Yeah, they shoot, for folks who are just listening and don't know what we're talking about, they have, Pigman has a couple of episodes called Aporkalypse, where they shoot pigs at a helicopter's.
02:29:01.000They'd fatten themselves on acorns and masts and grubs and various things.
02:29:05.000And when you wanted one, you could take your rifle out and find a couple and shoot them.
02:29:09.000And it was a way to produce meat where you weren't needing to provide it with all of its feed.
02:29:15.000It was just a very sturdy animal that could fatten itself on land.
02:29:18.000And inevitably, these pigs would get away.
02:29:21.000So we've had wild pigs here about as long as we have had Europeans here.
02:29:28.000Another version happened later where people brought them in as a game species.
02:29:32.000When they would bring them in as a game species, they would bring them in from Siberia and other areas where you still had the original stock.
02:29:42.000The original Sioux Scraffa was what we call the Eurasian wild boar.
02:29:46.000They had been bringing in domestic versions that had been bred off the Eurasian wild boar.
02:29:52.000And then people brought directly in the wild boar.
02:29:54.000Now, if you look for a parallel with cattle, like the ancestral cattle is an animal we now call the oryx, but the oryx went extinct.
02:30:00.000So we lost the wild version, but retained the domestic version.
02:30:04.000With pigs, we had the domestic version that we humans created over long, long tens of thousands of years, coexisting with the wild version.
02:31:08.000You can't use spotlights to go out and shoot deer at night.
02:31:10.000We've built up these rules because we have ideas about what's sporting, what's the elements of fair chase, also what leads to too much harvest.
02:31:19.000So If you make it too easy to go get animals, then you're going to have shorter seasons.
02:31:26.000You're going to have fewer available tags.
02:31:28.000And so they kind of balance technology to sort of make it that you're going to have whatever success rate.
02:31:35.000Like a lot of elk hunts, only 10% of the hunters that participate in the elk hunt are successful.
02:31:40.00090% are unsuccessful because we have rules in place that make it difficult to do, to hunt.
02:31:47.000There's so many pigs now in some places that we're like discarding a lot of the...
02:31:53.000In dealing with that species, we're discarding a lot of the notions that we've held dear.
02:31:58.000Like you would never go out in a helicopter and shoot deer.
02:33:26.000Running with dogs and killing them in knives and digging them out of holes and chasing them into little fenced enclosures and killing them in there.
02:34:59.000But they have a guy who's a full-time pig hunter in there.
02:35:02.000He goes around and kills pigs as a way to try to protect these rare bird species and give them nesting opportunities.
02:35:09.000The rancher who likes to hunt wild hogs He goes and he usually kind of hunts along his border with the preserve because the pigs will come out of the swamps in the preserve and come up and hunt and root around on his land in the cover of night and then retreat back into the preserve where they're relatively safe and hide out.
02:35:27.000So what he realized is he went through and put this fence in and put trap doors, one-way doors in his fence so that pigs could leave the preserve and enter his fence and But then they couldn't get back out.
02:35:43.000So now and then if he gets itching to go pig hunting, he'll go out at four in the morning and make sure all the doors are shut, like closes the doors up so the pigs can't get back through the other way.
02:35:53.000And then he knows they're probably somewhere on his ranch, and when he starts chasing one of his hounds, they won't be able to make it back into their safety in the preserve.
02:36:01.000And when he goes out, if he gets a boar, like an old boar, It's got his nuts intact.
02:36:08.000He knows it's not going to be a great eating boar.
02:36:11.000Because they just, they run themselves, you know, they're not like, they don't have a lot of fat.
02:36:44.000So like a steer is a castrated male, cow, castrated bull, and a barred hog is castrated.
02:36:52.000So we went out one night and caught a big boar with his nuts intact.
02:36:57.000We castrated him and turned him out so that he could, as this guy put it, it would take his mind off ass and put it on the grass.
02:37:05.000And then we stayed out, caught another pig, and this one had at some point in time, they didn't even know if they had it or another guy had done it, this one had been castrated.
02:37:17.000But he had been castrated and those guys were like, that'll be a good one to eat.
02:37:20.000So we killed that hog and kept it for food.
02:37:24.000And we ate that thing, from honest to God, we ate its skin as pork rinds, took its intestines out and flushed the intestines and stripped them, made our own sausage casings, liver, heart, ate his nose and head cheese,
02:37:40.000ate his feet, like, ate every part of that hog.
02:38:34.000I made head cheese with the first wild pig I ever killed was in California.
02:38:39.000I went out to hunt wild pigs, and I had never laid eyes on a wild pig, and I didn't want to shoot the first wild pig I saw.
02:38:44.000So I went out one day without my rifle just to see some wild pigs, and the next day I went out and got one, and I wound up making head cheese with it, where it doesn't make a cheese, but it's like gelatinous.
02:38:55.000So a lot of the cuts, like when you butcher an animal, a lot of the cuts that are chewier, that don't really make great steak, they're not that way because they have a lot of connective tissue and Fatty deposits, whatever.
02:39:09.000They have stuff that like turns into collagen when you cook it.
02:39:11.000Like turns into like a gelatin when you cook it.
02:40:32.000One of the things I really love about your show is that you occasionally do show recipes and how to cook, but also that you butcher the animals.
02:40:39.000You cut quarter the animals, gut them.
02:41:17.000Because they think that it would make people turned off by hunting.
02:41:20.000It's like, how you think people get turned off by hunting by seeing people eat what they hunt is beyond me.
02:41:25.000But Sportsman Channel is really cool because they let us do stuff that, I mean, and it works to the advantage because people are like, you know what?
02:42:08.000Like, that meat was so tender and good.
02:42:11.000And, you know, you get into the thing where you guys, when you're on TV, you know, you watch, like, morning shows, and they have a cooking segment.
02:42:19.000The host, I was like, oh, it's so good.
02:42:37.000Elk's widely regarded as, like, if you went and surveyed people who've tasted a wide variety of meats, elk is the one that people would be like, it's the best one.
02:42:45.000Where we're going, Teehan, has elk on it, tule elk.
02:43:00.000It's back now because you have big chunks of property like that where they can find some refuge and people are working to maintain them and provide habitat for them.
02:43:52.000He likes to hunt moose and doll sheep, because moose is good.
02:43:55.000But he puts a moose in his freezer, just because he doesn't have a...
02:44:00.000He doesn't have a locker where he can dry-age his meat.
02:44:03.000He'll kill a moose because of weather and bugs and other issues.
02:44:06.000He comes home and right away processes his moose and puts it in his freezer.
02:44:11.000And he don't usually touch that thing for six months.
02:44:13.000Because it will slowly age, like meat will tenderize in your freezer over time.
02:44:18.000So when he calculates his year out, he knows he's going to kill a moose in September.
02:44:22.000He doesn't plan on having the one he killed before be gone in September.
02:44:27.000He plans on having the one he killed before be gone, you know, staggered.
02:44:31.000So the one that he kills, he lets it slowly age in his freezer and it will tenderize in your freezer over time and then he starts in on the new one.
02:44:38.000So when he kills a moose, he's still eating the moose from the year before.
02:44:41.000That seems so weird because the way you ate that moose, it didn't seem like it needed anything at all.
02:44:49.000Yeah, those animals, like most animals, especially males and bulls, like most animals, not most, animals benefit, like ungulates, Benefit from aging.
02:46:27.000I think chef sounds a little more formal, but I'm a wild game cook.
02:46:30.000One thing about being a wild game cook that's more challenging...
02:46:33.000than being a regular cook is you're dealing with so much variability.
02:46:37.000Like you get some great chef and he can do some amazing thing because he's got a purveyor, you know, and when he buys a pig, it's like the pig ate this for 72 days and then we ate this for 14 days and then we killed it on this day and chilled it at this temperature for these many days and,
02:46:52.000you know, and every time he buys a pig, the pig comes in his kitchen or his restaurant and he knows, he just knows what it's going to be like, you know.
02:47:01.000Animals, you don't know what kind of There's age issues and what kind of trip they've been on.
02:47:07.000So you learn how to kind of control that and sort of bring the ingredients into line because some animals are good and some animals aren't.
02:47:13.000I shot a mule deer one time that was just disgusting to eat things.
02:47:19.000And then you get another mule deer and it's like, that is so good.
02:51:09.000One of my goals, not a goal, but a thing I'd like to see happen is...
02:51:14.000Rather than, I mean, we could definitely have more hunters.
02:51:17.000I think we need more just to have political clout to defend our lifestyle.
02:51:19.000But I also would like to see the people who have no interest in hunting come to, like, through understanding kind of the mechanics of wildlife, start to recognize it as that hunting is legitimate.
02:51:33.000Useful practice and not the opposite, you know?
02:51:36.000I think people that pay attention do see that.
02:51:38.000I think for the most part, the real issue is that most people have this sort of periphery view of it.
02:52:28.000No, I think anyone who looks at wildlife politics in a way that's, like, immersive and you have to come to understand it, you go ask someone who runs a wildlife agency, like a state wildlife agency or federal wildlife agency, and ask them what their job would be like without having hunting as a tool,
02:52:46.000and, you know, it would make them shudder.
02:52:49.000Because you just, you know, it's going to be very difficult to maintain...
02:52:57.000The portfolio of different species we have at the levels we have.
02:53:01.000You'd have to be open to having really wild fluctuations, having cycles of disease, and things that aren't as pretty.
02:54:58.000I was saying it to my wife the other day while I was watching.
02:55:00.000I was like, this show, it's almost like I want more people to see it.
02:55:04.000I wish more people would see it because it would open their eyes as to...
02:55:08.000Your approach, it's a more intelligent philosophy behind it.
02:55:13.000You see all these hunting shows like, well I'll tell you what, there's a big buck came out, I'll tell you what, we shot him with that gun, I'll tell you what.
02:55:21.000You don't have any of that stupid shit in it.
02:55:24.000It's interesting, it's fascinating, you're a well-read, introspective guy, and I love the narration on it too.