Steve Rinella is the host of the first hunting show on Netflix, "The Hunt." He's also the producer of the hit show, "Hunting with Joe" on the History Channel. In this episode, we talk about what it's like being on the set of The Hunt, how he makes music for the show, and what he's been up to in the last few years. We also talk about how he got to where he is now, and some of the things he's working on in the future, like a new show with no music at all, and why he thinks there should be no more hunting shows with no sound at all. It's a great episode, and we hope you enjoy it! If you like the show and want to support it, you can do so by becoming a patron patron, or become a patron supporter of the show or any other media outlet supporting the show. The Hunt is available on all major podcasting platforms, including Audible, Podcoin, and Podcoin. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends, family, and fellow hunters everywhere! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's your favorite hunting show? 2:30 - What kind of music you like? 3:20 - How to score a hunting episode? 4:15 - What is the best hunting show you've ever scored? 5:40 - How much money you've been paid for a hunting series? 6:00 7: What are you looking for? 8:00- What is your favorite type of music? 9: What do you like about the show you're listening to? 10: What is it? 11:20- What's a hunting show that you'd like to see me score? 13:30- What would you like to hear from me? 14:00 -- How do you want to hear me score your next hunting show or movie? 15:30 -- What are your favorite deer hunting song? 16:40 -- What's the worst hunting show I've ever shot? 17:10 - How do I feel about a hunting hunting episode with no words? 18:00: What does it sound like in the field? 19:20 -- How much music you're looking forward to do in the next one? 21:00 | What do I want to do next? 22:40 | How does that sound?
00:00:18.000See, I tell everybody that if you want to watch a hunting show, like people watch hunting shows and they go, oh, what the fuck are these guys doing?
00:01:35.000Instead of starting with season one, you know, they put up season five and six on Netflix, which is nice because it makes people real curious about the other ones.
00:01:43.000There's one episode that's probably one of my favorite episodes you ever did where you never shot anything.
00:01:48.000It's that one episode with you alone deer hunting.
00:01:56.000A lot of ambient sound, a little loud wind.
00:01:59.000Who makes those choices, like those editorial choices?
00:02:02.000That was, you know, the editor, one of our editors, kind of one of our core editors that's been doing it for a long time, a guy by the name of Guy.
00:03:46.000That we use, but it's a searchable database of music, like a catalog of music.
00:03:53.000The documentary we're doing, we're beginning now to work on, we're in the initial stages of having it scored, which is fun, because it's not something I've ever messed with.
00:04:03.000Like, I think very rarely in a television show do you have a television show scored.
00:04:07.000You know, you're usually using library music or licensed music, you know?
00:04:20.000I hate when I'm being manipulated by music during a scene.
00:04:24.000Like, if the music's telling you to, where you're like...
00:04:27.000Where they come up to it and they're like, man, you're not going to feel like this isn't making you feel how we wish it made you feel.
00:04:34.000Perhaps if we played this, you'll feel this way more.
00:04:36.000Yeah, it's weird that we just accept that.
00:04:38.000This is the part where you're supposed to feel, you know, kind of like feelings of nostalgia and, you know, and like these remorseful feelings.
00:04:47.000And we have no idea how to invoke that in audiences.
00:04:50.000But this musician did a wonderful job.
00:05:17.000You know, there's a musician I like quite a bit named Micah P. Hinson, and he's out of Abilene, Texas.
00:05:25.000And he has a song called The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea.
00:05:29.000And a friend of mine who's a screenwriter, we always have joked about someday writing a movie so sad that you could play that song at the end and it would not feel manipulative.
00:05:39.000Like, a movie so sad it could earn to have the day Texas sank to the bottom of the sea he played in the end of it.
00:06:04.000Yeah, there's something about music in movies that we just totally accept it.
00:06:10.000In television shows and music, when there's a scene and they want to manipulate you and they want to establish some sort of a feeling that you're supposed to invoke, they just shove it in there.
00:06:19.000The Radiohead album OK Computer has a song called Exit Music for a Film because I think they just felt like they were trying to send a message to the licensors.
00:11:00.000It's about a really curious, open-minded guy who loves to go to different cultures, and he goes there, you know, and the premise is he goes there to hunt.
00:11:08.000But he's traveled to some really, really incredible places and filmed some amazing stuff.
00:11:14.000Did you see the one where he went to, I forget what river it was in Africa, where these people have a significant problem with crocodiles eating people?
00:11:22.000Oh, no, I didn't, but I've talked to some people about that one.
00:19:22.000And the amount of mass shootings, in relative, obviously they're all horrific and terrible, but relatively, to the amount of people that we have, it's relatively small.
00:19:35.000And I think the kind of person that can engage in something like that, there's so many factors, and you can't blame it on guns.
00:19:43.000It's like blaming forks on people getting fat.
00:20:02.000So people look at it like a really complex thing.
00:20:05.000We saw so much of this during the run-up to the presidential election, where to make a point really fast, you look at something that's terrifically complex.
00:20:14.000And then it's not just that you want the magic solution, but people kind of go like, well, what possibly could be done?
00:20:21.000And I think people move in the direction of the Second Amendment.
00:20:26.000And there's also sort of an agreement that people have when discussing it.
00:21:23.000Yeah, I had friends that were so convinced that, like most people in the country, whether you liked it or not, were convinced that Clinton was going to win.
00:21:37.000I got one friend in particular that went out and bought a bunch of stocks for firearm companies, and he said they took a little hit after the election.
00:22:59.000And then all of a sudden you got in the need where you wanted to buy all you could get because it was in your head that you couldn't get it.
00:23:05.000So then you'd see a thousand of them and I'd be like, well, I'm going to buy it because everyone's buying it.
00:23:23.000And it, I don't know where it came from.
00:23:25.000And I think that now, all through the last eight years, there's been just this, there's been this, like, great arming of America, because I feel like so many people were worried about having their rights infringed.
00:23:36.000There's, like, at least now, in that community, of which I'm a part, I suppose, there's a sigh of relief, you know?
00:23:45.000Yeah, there's a great relaxation among sports when they think that Trump is going to come in and, you know, protect the Second Amendment rights, but a lot of people have to be worried about private land or public land.
00:23:59.000Yeah, that's the thing that I'm really watching, and I'm curious about it.
00:24:04.000You know, at this point, you know, the talk's over, right?
00:24:15.000Whether someone was for it or against it, for or against Trump's victory, I think now the responsible thing to do in my mind, or the realistic responsible thing to do in my mind, because there's so many unknowns, just to approach the administration with an open mind.
00:24:31.000I mean, now I'm like, okay, talk's over.
00:24:35.000What sorts of things are we going to see come out of it?
00:24:36.000And I don't know if anyone really knows the answers to that.
00:24:39.000And in my outward, public-facing way, I don't generally talk about politics outside of issues that relate to wildlife, issues that relate to hunters and fishermen.
00:24:54.000I kind of focus in because politically I'm a mess.
00:25:08.000Like, I don't get, I don't draw my viewpoints from going and looking and finding out how I'm supposed to feel about it in order to be, like, a consistent partisan individual.
00:25:18.000Last January, though, for people who aren't even, I'm sure there's probably a lot of people that aren't familiar with this.
00:25:24.000Can I give a quick rundown on public lands?
00:25:27.000The federal government owns millions and millions of acres of land in the U.S., primarily in the western U.S., and there's a handful of different land-holding agencies.
00:25:40.000The Bureau of Land Management manages lands.
00:25:43.000The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages lands through the refuge system.
00:25:46.000So when those boys in Oregon took over the wildlife refuge there, that was...
00:25:53.000That was actually U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service land.
00:26:05.000And then, of course, you have states own public land, but the federal land management agencies, of which there are several, hold deed to millions of acres of land.
00:26:14.000And it's owned by the American people.
00:26:18.000And it's represented through, you might think of it as represented through a trust, and the trust is administered by the federal government on your behalf.
00:26:26.000That's our public lands, where people recreate.
00:26:29.000Another large holder of public lands is the National Park Service.
00:27:02.000People get frustrated with dealing with the federal bureaucracy, and the reason that is, is generally the feds are pretty, I mean this is a gross generalization, but generally the feds are much slower on exploitation.
00:27:18.000Of natural resources, less responsive to demand for exploitation of natural resources than state agencies are.
00:27:25.000So federal lands, you know, they're...
00:27:29.000In exercising the will of the American people, federal land agencies are...
00:27:38.000It's not as easy to deal with when it comes to mining and development and other issues as state agencies are.
00:27:52.000For developers, miners, loggers, others, they want to see people able to more readily make a buck off the land.
00:27:59.000They'd like to see these lands, our federal lands, they'd like to see them go into private hands or like to see them go into state hands.
00:28:06.000Because they know that either way it goes, if they go into private hands or state lands, they're going to have a much easier time doing extractive industries and development on those lands.
00:28:16.000So that's like under the surface what's going on.
00:28:20.000And then, for instance, one of the reasons the guys that took over the refuge, the Malomir Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, one of their gripes was they run cattle on public property, right?
00:28:32.000So they pay a fee that one of those families is heavily involved in running cattle on federal land, and they pay a fee far below the going rate.
00:28:45.000So what you'd go pay a rancher if you wanted to run cattle on his land, they'd pay about 10% of that by some estimations to run it on public land.
00:28:52.000And then when federal land managers don't want to renew those contracts because, again, because people are thinking about other uses for the land or whatever they want to do with it, it causes an intense amount of, like a serious amount of frustration with people.
00:29:07.000So there's people that want to dump lands.
00:29:09.000Now, I heard Donald Trump speak last January, so almost a year ago, in Las Vegas.
00:29:19.000And he was standing 40 yards away from me and was talking about that he has no desire to see our public lands privatized.
00:31:30.000Yeah, that you hold deed, like, as an American citizen, in most ways, as a global citizen, because our national, our public lands are open to anyone, American or not, right?
00:31:41.000But as an American citizen, you hold deed to hundreds of millions of acres of land.
00:31:45.000Now, there are conditions to your use, just things you can and cannot do, but you're free to roam, camp, hunt, fish, look at the stars, whatever.
00:31:59.000And these things that came about, they came about in various ways, probably the most influential person in creating the public land system we have now is Theodore Roosevelt.
00:32:34.000He's like one of those dudes who you can just be like, like Teddy Roosevelt, and people are like, yeah, positive feelings, positive feelings.
00:32:54.000I mean, there was so much going on during the Iran-Contra hearings, where it's like, oh my God, who is this asshole that we let run president?
00:33:02.000Yeah, I think around the time, like, by the time he died, he had sort of ascended to political heaven.
00:33:37.000It was like this outlandish idea, like, you mean to tell me you're just going to take huge chunks of land that could earn some individuals an extraordinary amount of money right now and just set it aside for just Joe Blow future person to enjoy?
00:34:05.000Because at the time people were arguing like, okay, if public land...
00:34:09.000Because here's the other thing that kind of pertains to this, is wildlife in America is publicly owned.
00:34:15.000It's not like most countries, it's not like that.
00:34:17.000Wildlife in the U.S. is publicly owned.
00:34:18.000So if you've got a deer standing on your neighbor's place...
00:34:24.000You, as not a federal citizen, but you as a citizen of your state, own that deer.
00:34:30.000That person can control access to it, but it's not his deer.
00:34:34.000He can prevent you from going up to it because you can't go on his land, but he has no more right to that deer than you do, generally speaking.
00:34:40.000So when people said to Roosevelt, like, how are you blocking industry?
00:34:45.000Out of all these lands and how are you blocking industry from getting at the wildlife so we can sell the wildlife back when we had commercial hunting?
00:34:52.000He goes, if it's for the people, give it to us.
00:36:33.000We've accomplished a lot, but then now and then people just get pissed because they want to be able to do stuff.
00:36:38.000There's like interests that want to make money.
00:36:40.000And when they want to make money and then someone tells them no, they get a little bit pissy.
00:36:45.000And then the smart ones of them, and I would never detract from their intelligence, the smart ones of them, rather than walking away, they go like, well, how is this law?
00:37:01.000And right now, those folks have an idea that the solution to their problem is that we would begin undoing the great work of people like Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and Aldo Leopold and all these seminal American figures,
00:37:19.000that we would undo their work and go back to a system where these landscapes are privatized.
00:37:29.000People who've never been to Yellowstone, and even if you're not a hunter, you should go once in your life.
00:37:35.000Yeah, you can't hunt Yellowstone anyway.
00:38:14.000You go by the visitor center, there's a Coca-Cola machine, there's a vending machine, and right next to the vending machine, there's a fucking elk, just chilling, just laying down there.
00:38:24.000I mean, they have zero fear of people.
00:38:26.000And it's amazing how they become sort of acclimated.
00:38:34.000It's funny, when you look at, there's a problem I've identified As much as I love Yellowstone, in my perspective as a fellow that does what I do for food and enjoyment, which is to hunt, I look at it from a grand wildlife thing,
00:38:52.000and I look at it as it serves the purpose of being this fantastic wildlife sanctuary.
00:38:58.000And everyone, like our mutual friend Doug Dern, even on his farm, he has established Like a sanctuary area, like on his farm, a place where you don't go.
00:39:10.000That it's always a spot where deer go and they don't get harassed in that area.
00:39:14.000And it's like a self-imposed sanctuary.
00:39:15.000And so you have, Yellowstone provides that.
00:39:17.000But I've identified this sort of thing, an idea I've been working on called Yellowstone Syndrome, though.
00:39:24.000It's where people, Americans, some of them, their only idea about wildlife and wildlife politics and wildlife management comes from the Yellowstone story.
00:39:35.000That they wind up having a difficult time understanding wildlife and wildlife management in situations that are outside of a national park setting.
00:39:44.000Which is to say, they don't have a very good grasp on the inevitable conflicts that are going to arise between wildlife and society.
00:39:54.000And that's a large chunk of ground where you just do not have those sorts of conflicts.
00:39:58.000Like what kind of conflicts are we talking about?
00:40:02.000A thing that's been very difficult and very vexing for wildlife managers is what happens to Buffalo when they leave Yellowstone National Park.
00:40:13.000To back up on the Yellowstone issue, just to get a sense for how revolutionary that idea was, the Indian Wars weren't even over when they made Yellowstone Yellowstone.
00:40:27.000We were still battling American Indians on the Great Plains when Yellowstone went into effect.
00:40:32.000Matter of fact, Yellowstone was a park when the Nez Perce were chased through by the U.S. Army.
00:40:39.000And they actually killed a couple tourists in Yellowstone right at some of the buildings that are still there.
00:41:21.000But with the buffalo situation, for instance, how it's colored the broader conversation would be Yellowstone is one of the few places where the animal buffalo or a bison,
00:42:52.000And at various times, there's a few thousand of them in the park, and the snows pile up.
00:42:57.000And one of the things they like to do when the snow piles up is they like to leave the park.
00:43:02.000And they go out at West Yellowstone, which is one of the primary entrance points into the park, and they'll go out at the Gardner entrance in the late winter.
00:43:58.000When a state is getting brucellosis cases, they have to pay for testing.
00:44:02.000So it's expensive to get all your cows tested, but if you have brucellosis in your state, then the producers got to pay the testing to get them tested to make sure they're not brucellosis positive.
00:44:13.000Well, cattle long ago passed brucellosis to the bison.
00:44:17.000When the bison leave the park, they carry brucellosis with them and could reintroduce it into cattle herds, though there's no known case of that happening yet, I don't think.
00:45:57.000So conceivably, a buffalo could leave Yellowstone, give birth, the afterbirth could be there, a cow could eat that after birth and get brucellosis.
00:46:05.000Yeah, and like everything we're talking about, there's so many caveats and complications to this thing, such as elk have brucellosis, but elk come and go as they please.
00:46:15.000So, the minute a buffalo, or a bison, when he leaves Yellowstone National Park, if he walks into Montana, Now, it's not even fenced, right?
00:46:26.000But when he crosses the line, he goes from being a wild animal from being native wildlife to being livestock.
00:46:36.000So he goes from being the property under the administration of the National Park Service to the administration of Montana's Department of Livestock.
00:47:16.000Therefore, every year, there's a perennial story every year where a bunch of buffalo leave the park and get rounded up by the Department of Livestock and sent to quarantine or usually sent off to slaughter.
00:47:28.000Yeah, they just killed a bunch of them.
00:47:33.000But, you know, that place cranks out a lot of animals, too.
00:47:35.000So it's like they're always throwing out these humongous numbers of animals they've gotten, and then every year you wind up having quite a few animals in the park.
00:48:05.000And one thing might be to say that we got, and this is generally true of wildlife in America, I think There was a brief period around 1900 when we had, you know, maybe about 75 of them left in the U.S. People got very used to there sort of like not being buffalo,
00:48:26.000And now it's becoming like a player again.
00:48:29.000The animals are becoming a player again.
00:48:30.000We were down to 75. We've got 500,000 in the U.S. now.
00:48:35.00094% of them are privately owned, but we have a population of a half million buffalo in this country.
00:48:43.000So, but we got really used to them not being around, and so it was this thing that was like this additive thing.
00:48:48.000Like, I think if there had been a long period when there were no elk, and then all of a sudden someone said, hey, guess what?
00:48:53.000We're bringing these big-ass ungulates back that eat tons of stuff.
00:48:58.000And they're huge, and they might have a disease, and we're just going to let tens of thousands of them cut loose across the landscape.
00:49:06.000People have been up in arms, but they were used to elk, because elk were always on the ground.
00:49:09.000So that's why buffalo recovery has been so hard, because it's kind of like you're trying to sell people on this new thing.
00:49:14.000Even though historically it's hardly new, they've been around, but there was a period of...
00:49:20.000You know, a century, not quite a century, when it wasn't an issue.
00:49:23.000So it's really hard to get livestock interests and private landowners around these areas to unanimously get on board with the idea that we're going to have animals roaming out of the park that has been proven to happen that will get into your corral and kill your horse.
00:49:42.000Or, you know, take out a school bus if it hits them.
00:50:07.000Yeah, they rut in the summer and the bulls get very, they get real fired up.
00:50:12.000And then, you know, the funny thing there too with the Yellowstone ones is you're dealing with animals that are habituated.
00:50:17.000So it's only been like, you know, it's been a hundred years that you can't, you haven't been able to hunt in the park, but animals have gotten habituated to humans.
00:50:23.000We like to look at Yellowstone and think you're seeing something kind of natural, but you're actually seeing something pretty unnatural because that landscape was hunted for 12,000 years.
00:50:31.000The last hundred years notwithstanding.
00:50:35.000The unnatural thing is these animals being super comfortable.
00:50:38.000Being habituated to humans is unusual.
00:50:40.000But we go there and be like, this is what animals were like.
00:50:42.000I'm like, not if you draw a line back to when humans arrived in the new world.
00:50:46.000Well, that was one of the more fascinating things about Dan Flores on your podcast, where he was talking about buffalo and that at one point in time...
00:50:55.000The Indians, or the Native Americans, when they had guns and they had horses, they were on their way to extirpating the buffalo on their own before the market hunters came into place.
00:51:06.000That's an incredibly controversial idea.
00:51:08.000Yeah, that was a controversial idea, and that was put, again, in my book that I wrote, and I have a book, American Buffalo, about the history of the animal.
00:51:19.000And my own personal experience is hunting for the animal and finding a skull of one that I found and sort of a journey that led me down.
00:51:25.000But in working on that book, I spent quite a time reading the work of Dan Flores, and he was a mentor of mine in graduate school.
00:51:32.000And he wrote this very interesting piece called Bison Ecology, Bison Diplomacy.
00:51:38.000And what he looked at was, he was trying to find, was there a period when...
00:52:23.000Okay, so enormous herds of wild horses.
00:52:26.000And the horse was distributed, so you trace, and Flores explains all this as well, you can trace horses to Native American tribes on the Great Plains and elsewhere.
00:54:11.000You had tribes migrating out onto the Great Plains and fighting over those resources.
00:54:19.000And I believe it was one of his graduate students that later looked at this piece, where when Lewis and Clark did their big westward journey in the early 1800s, the places where they talked about seeing the greatest amounts, where they were just blown away by how many buffalo they were seeing, generally fell upon sort of a no-man's-lands areas between warring tribes.
00:54:42.000So the buffers of traditional hunting zones, like where the Blackfeet and the Sioux met up The edge habitat there was where you had a lot of animals that weren't getting exploited by people.
00:54:54.000So you started to see these regional extirpations of the animal.
00:54:58.000And then firearms was another big blow.
00:55:02.000Where even outside of white hide hunters just showing up, but just those European technologies of horse...
00:55:18.000What was interesting about his paper was that he was saying that the early settlers, or the early explorers of the United States in the 1500s and 1600s, they didn't talk about Buffalo.
00:55:52.000The English go in there 200 years later and they're talking about buffalo.
00:55:55.000So there's sightings in what's now New Orleans.
00:55:58.000Cabeza de Vaca ran into Buffalo around what's now Houston.
00:56:03.000There's sightings of Buffalo in what is now Washington, D.C. Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone, figures like that, were hunting them around the site of Nashville and Memphis.
00:56:14.000They were all the way to the East Coast.
00:56:16.000It seems there were only a handful of states that at some point in time didn't have any.
00:56:20.000My home state of Michigan doesn't seem like there were any.
00:56:23.000For a long time, people thought that there had been buffalo in New York.
00:56:28.000But it turns out the evidence for them in the paleontological and archaeological record is two skulls.
00:56:35.000Both the skulls have cultural markings on them.
00:56:38.000And it seems that they were the same way that me and Joe here will hunt an animal and bring the head home, that they might have been just things someone had, trophies that were traded or whatever, because there's no other faunal remains from the animals in New York.
00:56:59.000They made these giant effigy mounds that people didn't even realize they were there until we had airplanes to get above and see the snakes and, like, serpents and deer and all these creatures they were building out of earth mounds that were so big that guys would, like, live around the mound and never recognize it for what it was until they could look at it from above.
00:57:18.000You can see these things with satellite imagery.
00:58:29.000The English, a while later, they'll go down, some guy will go down the Mississippi River, he don't see shit for people, but there's Buffalo crawling everywhere.
00:58:39.000So, and another issue, another thing people talk about is changing agricultural practices that slash-and-burn agriculture was becoming used.
00:58:47.000And slash-and-burn agriculture was conducive to spreading, it was conducive to buffalo because it created open spaces for them.
00:58:56.000That's another thing people look at as slash-and-burn agriculture.
00:58:58.000But either way, it's proposed that the apex of that species...
00:59:19.000It got its name from a guy named Colonel Dodge.
00:59:22.000Colonel Dodge, if you're interested, I could explain how he came up with it, but Colonel Dodge is the one that floated the idea that there were 60 million buffalo.
00:59:30.000Now, the fashionable number is, you know, 32, you hear 32 million, you hear 40 million, and people say that that was an extraordinary amount of those animals, and we witnessed it at its apex.
00:59:45.000And that other times in the history of the continent and other times of the natural history of our continent, there weren't nearly that many of the animals.
00:59:53.000That's such a fascinating concept, and I never had heard it before.
00:59:57.000I'd only heard that there was giant numbers of them and that the Europeans came over and Americans wiped them out because we wanted the skulls and the fur.
01:00:07.000So if you get to the end of the Civil War, At that point, there's maybe $15 million, and that's when it was in 1871 and 1872 that what you might call the commercial-scale harvest of the animals happened.
01:00:30.000And it happened in the south, what was called the southern herd, around 1871, 1872, in the areas surrounding Dodge City, where there was a large population of them.
01:00:45.000So the last big slaughter happened around Miles City, Montana.
01:00:50.000And it happened when the railroad made it to Miles City.
01:00:54.000The Northern Pacific made it to Miles City and provided a way to get hides to market.
01:00:59.000And they did the last big kill there and killed about a million of them up there.
01:01:03.000And then a year later, Roosevelt came out.
01:01:07.000To Medora, North Dakota, thereabouts, hired a guide and scoured the countryside, hunting through the carcasses of rotting animals, trying to find one last one.
01:01:40.000So, but then, whatever kind of effect it had on him, he then went and became the most influential conservationist we've ever had in this country.
01:02:10.000What's cool about that, the time that worked out, is photography was just coming out.
01:02:14.000People were starting to have portable cameras.
01:02:15.000And there was a photographer named L.A. Huffman who'd been sent out to Miles City, and he actually took a lot of images.
01:02:22.000Of those hide hunters working the last big hurt, the last big shoot.
01:02:28.000And then shortly after that, there was some number of animals left, and they allowed a bunch of Plains Indians to leave one of the reservations, and they went and did a little bit of a mop-up.
01:02:38.000But yeah, then shortly thereafter, there was a guy named Hornaday who was kind of writing letters around, trying to find out who had one of these things laying around, because it had all fallen into private hands.
01:02:48.000You know, those guys like buffalo hunters would kill them and they'd be like, holy shit.
01:07:09.000It just is like, you know, we have all these conversations in bioethics and other things about playing God.
01:07:14.000I think that extinction, like, human-caused extinction is terrifying.
01:07:18.000Do you support if there is evidence of human-caused extinction, if there is the opportunity to bring something back through scientific methods, through, like, some sort of cloning?
01:07:27.000Do you support that, or do you think it's gone?
01:07:30.000Man, I'm on the fence about it, and my understanding of the technology is probably too limited for me to really speak to it with any authority, but the most interesting aspect of that is when you get into the Pleistocene extinctions, where,
01:07:46.000you'll notice, just to kind of bring people up to speed on what that means, if you just look globally at Where and when we lost pachyderms, so elephants, including the woolly mammoth mastodon on our own continent.
01:08:06.000If you look around where we lost pachyderms, we always lose pachyderms right around the time humans show up.
01:08:43.000There's all kinds of stuff, and they vanished right around then.
01:08:47.000Yet, we didn't reach an island out in the Bering Sea until 4,000 years ago, and there was a woolly mammoth on that island until 4,000 years ago.
01:08:58.000So some people look, there's a thing called the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis, which holds that all these large mammals, nine genera of large mammals that went extinct when humans arrived in the New World, that they were somehow human-caused extinctions.
01:09:11.000Now, other people argue that it was...
01:10:00.000I went with a guy, there's a famous Paleo-Indian site north of Denver called the Lindenmeyer site.
01:10:09.000And the Lindenmeyer site was one of the few, not one of the few, the only place that we now know were large gatherings of the Folsom culture.
01:10:31.000And it's presumed that it was just a place that you could describe and people could meet up.
01:10:36.000But the Lindenmeyer site has been studied extensively, and tons of radiocarbon dating has happened at the Lindenmeyer site.
01:10:42.000And I was with a guy there who was working on that theory, the theory with the asteroid impact and the nanodiamonds, because he was able to go draw samples from strata that had been tested and studied so much Which is an expensive,
01:11:01.000laborious process to get datelines, you know, and he was there drawing those things out.
01:11:04.000And then I had other people who work professionally in this space talking about how, sort of ridiculing the idea and saying it's just like one of these ideas that never dies and never quite lives but never quite dies.
01:11:21.000But, you know, when you look at it, it's just so hard to believe they hunted them to extinction so quickly.
01:12:56.000Like, you know, there were interglacial periods, like if you look at the Ice Ages or the Pleistocene, right, there were interglacial periods where the water was much higher than it is now.
01:13:09.000There were interglacial periods when the water would have been up over the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
01:13:35.000And that's one of the things that emboldens people who contradict...
01:13:42.000One of the things that emboldens people who contradict human-caused climate change is that we've been through so many cycles, they'll often point out and say, well, how do we know this isn't just another warming trend between Ice Age periods?
01:13:56.000And then a lot of people point out and go, because there's no evidence that they ever happened this quickly.
01:14:02.000These are things that played out over 10,000 years.
01:14:04.000These aren't things that played out over human lifetimes.
01:14:07.000You know, an interglacial period being a 10,000 year thing.
01:14:11.000Interestingly, interglacial periods Are really important to understanding all these issues because interglacial periods and glacial periods mark moments when wildlife could have come into the New World, when wildlife such as,
01:14:27.000you know, buffalo and then later elk and other things, when they would have had the opportunity to come from Asia and cross the Bering Land Bridge and come down onto our continent, and when they could have not done that.
01:14:41.000So when you look at, like, when did humans show up?
01:16:19.000The paleontologist found it and literally found it in five minutes.
01:16:23.000He said he started walking around the property.
01:16:25.000He found a tooth or some sort of chip, a piece of bone.
01:16:28.000He recognized it immediately as being a dinosaur, made some phone calls, called some people, and next thing you know, like within weeks, they had started excavations.
01:18:24.000I think there's a dumbass reason, and there's a taxonomical reason.
01:18:31.000And I know dear friends of mine on both sides of that spectrum, where if I put it to my brother, who on occasion calls them goats, he'll talk about how taxonomically they're distinct, like they're the only thing in their...
01:18:44.000They're the only thing in their family, right?
01:20:48.000Like Hawaiians, indigenous Hawaiians people carry native rights, they regard themselves as native Hawaiians, yet people are always telling them that the wildlife is non-native.
01:20:59.000So you've got people that showed up with pigs, and now the Nature Conservancy will get chunks of land in Hawaii and eradicate the non-natives.
01:21:10.000And the native Hawaiians will be like, but we're contemporaneous with these animals.
01:21:24.000I don't mean to say they like it's a unanimously held viewpoint, but people who hold the viewpoint that they hunt pigs, their father hunt pigs, their grandfather hunt pigs, their great-great-great-great-great-grandfather hunted pigs.
01:21:37.000Now, what's the pressure coming from to eradicate them?
01:21:41.000No, it's from people who are worried about losing yet more.
01:21:45.000And we've already lost a dozen, you know, speaking of regional extinctions or extirpations, and in some cases, extinction extinctions, we've lost dozens of species of Hawaiian flora and fauna to, considering a wide range of ground-nesting birds,
01:22:05.000So now it's not so much focused on the animals, but flora.
01:22:10.000So there are people who would like to, and I get where they're coming from, who would like to restore large areas of native plant communities in the Hawaiian Islands.
01:22:26.000Because when you go there, all the fruit you see, the coconuts are not native.
01:22:30.000Papayas, mangoes, breadfruit, none of that stuff's native.
01:23:00.000And there's people who, you know, they're able to glean all of their food...
01:23:07.000Sources from the island, from things that their ancestors have established on the island, and it's offensive to them.
01:23:14.000Do you know about Darwin visiting the Galapagos Islands, and that's one of the ways that he sort of formulated his theories about evolution and all the various variety of wildlife through visiting the Galapagos Islands?
01:23:30.000And unintentionally, people have had seeds that they brought with them on the bottom of their shoes.
01:23:56.000Yeah, some people brought goats over there, like some sailors brought goats over there as a food source, left them on the island, figuring, hey, we'll stop back when we need food, and now they've got goat problems.
01:24:05.000So they're trying to figure out how to eradicate the goats, and there's a great radio.
01:24:13.000Well, they take one goat and they sterilize that goat, and so that goat can't breed, but that goat will find all the other goats and hang out with that goat, and they put a radio collar on the little fucker, and then he lets them know where the other goats are, and then they gun down those goats and let this one goat live.
01:24:28.000And he goes, well, I gotta go find some other goats.
01:24:31.000And he goes and finds the other one, and they're like, oh, we found them.
01:24:33.000And the thing is, the poor guy don't even know.
01:25:34.000Like, my friend Adam Greentree lives in Australia, and, you know, it's a crazy place, because it's similar, in a lot of ways, to Hawaii, is that a lot of the animals they hunt are non-native, but their hunting magazines are filled with fucking dogs and cats and shit.
01:27:38.000If you're buying corn, you're eating corn on a cob, thinking you're all healthy.
01:27:41.000That shit is coming from a really unnatural place.
01:27:44.000It's coming from this ground that has been filled up with all this nitrogen that's been sucked out of the air through the Haber method.
01:27:51.000They've dumped it into the earth because the earth's been depleted with minerals to the point where it no longer supports growth of plants unless you add stuff to it.
01:27:59.000And then you have these large-scale machines that you need to tend to this stuff.
01:28:04.000And there's nothing natural about large-scale agriculture.
01:28:07.000We just don't consider it because we consider...
01:28:10.000Factory farming when it comes to living animals as being horrific, whether it's pigs or cows or chickens, that disturbs almost anybody with a conscience.
01:28:20.000But we don't think twice about the consequences of large-scale agriculture on actual wildlife and the wild ground.
01:28:27.000When you picture that we have, I mean much vaster than this, but that we have entire counties that support a single species, Of plant.
01:29:37.000Wow, so was this Native Americans that did this?
01:29:40.000Were they figured out how to splice these plants together and tie them together?
01:29:43.000Yeah, there's a book, I can't remember the name of the book that gets into it, but just trying to like track down sort of the history of corn and how it came to be.
01:29:51.000You know, they oftentimes point to a domestication of animals and plants.
01:29:55.000Sometimes it was sort of an accidental domestication.
01:29:57.000You know, like you go out and gather something, right?
01:29:59.000And you bring it home, you process it near your home, you're scattering seed, right?
01:30:04.000And eventually you're creating these things.
01:30:57.000He's educated enough about agriculture and educated enough about the inherent struggle, the inherent life and death through all food production, that he doesn't think, oh, I have all the answers.
01:31:15.000He knows you're violently churning the land with equipment.
01:31:19.000Things are dying when you grow vegetables.
01:31:23.000We're enmeshed in a cycle of life and death that is inescapable.
01:31:29.000His point, and I don't want to totally steal the guy's point, he'd do a better job of explaining himself, but his point is that if we agree that we should minimize suffering, There are steps we can take to minimize suffering.
01:31:43.000Not saying that I've got it answered and I've got it figured out, but if we want to minimize the suffering of sentient beings, then that's a conversation we should have.
01:31:54.000The best thing that he said in explaining the animal rights movement, which I've always been a little bit baffled by, is he gets into this idea of...
01:32:10.000You know, we've dealt with and deal with racism.
01:32:14.000We've dealt with and deal with sexism.
01:32:17.000And we are, he would argue, I think he would say we're on the cusp of tackling our problem of speciesism.
01:32:24.000And he would say, like, if you went to someone, like, you know, if you went to the Mississippi Delta, you know, in the late 1700s and said to someone, like, hey, you know, have you ever thought about the fact that,
01:32:41.000You know, you kind of like own and abuse these people.
01:32:44.000Have you ever thought about how they're like people too?
01:33:10.000He's like, when I say it to you, you're like, well, clearly we're so...
01:33:14.000Does he aim to stop animal on animal crime?
01:33:17.000You know, I asked him about that, and that was one of the things.
01:33:22.000At the end of our conversation, I even said to him, I'm like, you got a couple things you need to work on.
01:33:26.000Because he didn't have a great one for that.
01:33:29.000Another one that he didn't have a great one for is he had...
01:33:34.000Not that he had a great one, not that I was trying to stump him, because he's a very intelligent, well-thought person, very respectful to people he's talking to, even people that disagree with him.
01:33:43.000I have nothing but admiration for the guy.
01:33:45.000But we had a conversation that I was not totally satisfied with, where he has a deal of reverence, it seems, and again, at the risk of putting words in his mouth, he has a reverence for indigenous hunting cultures,
01:35:01.000And they would write letters back to the king complaining about how these people refused to stop go hunting.
01:35:11.000Like, you give them a chance and these sons of bitches take off to go hunt.
01:35:14.000And here we are giving them everything they need to be sedentary.
01:35:17.000And they just won't get with the program.
01:35:19.000So there is this struggle where people are like, you're supposed to be like, I think some people expect you, like, if you're a human, they think that the end result of humanness...
01:36:02.000They suffer the same, regardless of your motivations.
01:36:06.000Which leads me to want to point out, okay, but the indigenous cultures that you say it's okay for them to hunt, their animals are suffering too.
01:36:14.000The animals they kill don't know that they're being killed by indigenous peoples, and therefore it makes the suffering more palatable for them.
01:37:40.000You're taking this cat and you're putting this cat above the animals that it eats.
01:37:44.000You're deciding that these chickens and the fish and all the different things that you need to grind up to make cat food, that's okay, because you love this cat.
01:37:51.000You have a hierarchy of animal life, and we all have a hierarchy of life.
01:38:27.000Like, you're a vegetarian who's committed to a Buddhist life of do no harm, but yet there's no way around this.
01:38:34.000You have to poison these fucking ants with death from the sky that comes out of these containers, these metal containers, these aerosol containers of death.
01:38:46.000But as long as I am taking the liberty of putting myself in Robert Jones' position, I think that he would have some interesting stuff to say about this conversation we're having where we're like,
01:39:04.000because some harm happens, Then, let's just say fuck it and we'll open up the gates.
01:40:31.000Vision of you know the consequences of their actions on themselves if someone's talking about like if this guy's a vegan and he's a vegetarian He's talking about how many animals you've killed how many animals are you responsible for for your fucking your Whole-wheat pasta.
01:40:44.000He wasn't even he wasn't even he was so he was a meat-eater.
01:40:48.000No, no, that's Ricky Gervais It's Ricky Gervais constantly talks about hunters and hunting the guy eats meat.
01:40:56.000Yeah Like, there's so many weird laws, and I get it that he doesn't think people should hunt animals just for trophies, and I agree, but it's very rarely do these animals get hunted just for trophies.
01:41:08.000Like, if you shoot a fucking elephant, the village eats the elephant.
01:41:35.000I should point out that your article that you wrote was one of my favorite on that subject and it was right around the time that the Cease of the Lion thing was going down.
01:41:44.000And it also referenced that Kendall Jones girl who got a lot of hate online because she was a Texas cheerleader and she was really cute.
01:41:53.000Yeah, people hate a good-looking woman hunting in Africa.
01:41:57.000With a big smile on her face and lipstick.
01:42:00.000Some dude did real good in heating and cooling and winds up going to Africa a lot.
01:42:06.000People are like, yeah, that's fucking cool.
01:42:08.000As long as hot girls, hot American girls don't go there.
01:42:11.000Well, and it's also like, what are you shooting?
01:42:12.000If you're over there and you're shooting a kudu and you're going to eat it and you feed the villagers, everybody goes, well, it is an antelope.
01:42:22.000I was going to talk about the hierarchy because we spend a lot of time at work.
01:42:26.000When we're out filming Meat Eater, we spend a lot of time talking about the hierarchy.
01:42:29.000Because, for instance, we have a camera guy we work with, Rick Smith, has a long professional history in working with wildlife and filming wildlife and didn't grow up hunting.
01:43:48.000I'll tell the end first and say we didn't shoot the Wolverine, but we were just talking about, you know, we legally could have gone and take a crack at it.
01:44:15.000Because we took the four big marrow bones, and he wound up getting over on another night at dark and stole some of our marrow bones out of our cache.
01:46:49.000And probably, you know, it could be a lot of the things we have about hominids, you know, like large, mysterious hominids could come from, you know, obviously bears walking around on their back feet.
01:47:28.000Turns out some guy comes into a check station and he had shot this bear that walks around on his back feet and they'd given him the name Pedals because he'd taken two scavenging bird feeders and stuff around the neighborhood.
01:47:38.000And so I can't remember the magazine, one of those dipshitty New York online magazines that just basically steals shit out of the New York Times and writes its own interpretations of New York Times articles.
01:47:52.000It wasn't Gawk or something like that.
01:47:53.000It said that Pedals had been assassinated.
01:48:29.000Oh, the people, yeah, the charismatic megafauna thing.
01:48:32.000Because another thing we talked about on our podcast recently, we had a biologist on who works for the Kalispell tribe, an Indian tribe that historically were in Idaho, portions of Washington,
01:48:48.000portions of Montana, and they're very involved in mountain caribou recovery in the U.S. So most people do not know that Traditionally, we had a caribou population that drifted from Canada down into northern Washington,
01:49:28.000What happened to them was just disturbances to habitat.
01:49:32.000There was always a small, like, not a large number of them, and we had a lot of things that messed with their travel corridors, development, road construction, logging activities, and now they rarely ever drift down into the U.S. But it was an active recovery area there,
01:49:49.000so we got about a dozen No one gives a shit about mountain caribou.
01:50:06.000The amount of, like, energy, the amount of mental energy that goes into people's favorite animals.
01:50:18.000At the expense of other good wildlife projects we could be working on, it kind of boggles my mind.
01:50:25.000Black bears, we have enough black bears that we have black bear hunting seasons in I think 36 states.
01:51:06.000We've done these anthropomorphizations with these cartoons and television shows, and it's ingrained in the consciousness of a lot of people.
01:51:14.000No matter what you do, you can't get it out of there.
01:51:16.000There's some legitimate differences between animals.
01:52:25.000I do create a hierarchy, but I also try to question where the hierarchy comes from and to suss out contradiction.
01:52:34.000But the only problem to me, where it gets problematic for me, is the way in which it seems that you can get some Americans so excited about...
01:52:48.000Preventing any kind of exploitation of a handful of species, yet they remain completely uninvolved with the issues in politics and recovery efforts of other things that need it right now.
01:53:05.000The fact that with wolves and certain populations of grizzly bears, certain populations of wolves have reached recovery objective, yet we still cover them under the Endangered Species Act.
01:53:16.000Because people want to use the Endangered Species Act to save things from any threat of exploitation at all.
01:53:22.000Like, nothing to do with what the legislation was meant for.
01:55:35.000And what was funny about this dude is how frustrated he would get with trying to show them his shit, which he thought they'd be blown away by.
01:56:12.000And this dude's like, yeah, that's cool.
01:56:14.000But I know a guy that can shoot his bow and his arrow will travel to the far side of the mountain and kill a caribou that he can't even see.
01:56:25.000Or he was saying, we can do surgery on people and do an appendectomy.
01:56:53.000No, dude, it's like, it's the greatest book, man, how frustrated it gets.
01:56:56.000But one of the cool things he describes is, he describes how they would kill, you know, when they killed a polar bear, they would bring the head back and put it in their lodge.
01:57:10.000I don't want to push this too far, but much in the same way you might bring a head home and hang it on your wall.
01:57:16.000They'll bring it home and put it in their lodge.
01:57:18.000And the thinking, as explained to Stephenson, was that I'm bringing him home so that he can observe me and my family and see that we're good people.
01:57:31.000And when he goes to the afterlife, he will tell other bears...
01:57:35.000If you gotta get killed by somebody, not a bad guy to have it happen.
01:57:42.000And I often point out about the animal skulls and hides in my own home that I feel like, you know, I don't want to make myself seem too spiritual in some ways.
02:02:19.000Basically, there's a system there where you have very poor farmers who don't own the land, but it's state-owned land, government-owned land, but they have subsistence farms.
02:03:22.000So, it wound up being like, of many interesting things about this whole thing, it wound up being like, comparing this guy's pet To this guy's livestock.
02:03:31.000You sort of got into this thing, which is the more enviable position?
02:04:55.000I've hunted and eaten hundreds and hundreds of pounds of black bear meat.
02:05:00.000When people come in, they're like, dude, I just...
02:05:01.000I don't want to act like they're coming...
02:05:04.000When people come to me and express disapproval, I don't want to act like I can't understand where they're coming from, because I had the same thing I felt there.
02:05:13.000I remember making the argument, and I never fact-checked it, but I feel like there are more people in this world who live in a country where it's socially acceptable to eat dog meat than not.
02:05:27.000I haven't formally fact-checked that, but I remember looking at some basic figures and thinking that that was true.
02:05:34.000Well, it's interesting that we choose to not eat pigs, but pigs are probably as intelligent, if not more so.
02:05:51.000When pigs are feral, they generally avoid people.
02:05:53.000When dogs are feral, they don't always.
02:05:56.000I mean, there was an instance a couple years ago outside of Atlanta where an elderly couple was attacked and someone was killed by wild dogs.
02:06:04.000The Australian dingo traces back to being a dog who owes its ancestry to human activities.
02:08:02.000But it still doesn't seem the same to me as a deer.
02:08:06.000Like, if you gave me a choice, hey, would you rather go hunt axis deer, which I've never hunted, seems so much more natural to me than go hunt black bear.
02:08:34.000That a lot of big game hunters will do some amount of bear hunting, get a couple bears, and then drift away from bear hunting.
02:08:49.000They still respect how difficult it is and how much you can learn about bears, but I find that a lot of people who've gotten some bears are always excited to go on a bear hunt if it's someone's first bear hunt.
02:09:03.000They're like, you know, I have no desire.
02:09:05.000If you want to go, I would love to go along.
02:11:31.000Well, no, because what I was doing for a long time was saving up my bear hides, and I wanted to cut them into like 9 or 10 inch squares and have a very large comforter made out of many different bears cut into squares.
02:11:55.000So, you get one, and you get it tanned, and then you got a bear hide.
02:11:59.000And once you got a bear hide, and it's like on the floor, and then you got a bear hide over the back of the couch, and you got a bear hide hanging on the wall, you get to a point where you don't need any more bear hides.
02:12:10.000You eat the meat and you have the hides, but you don't need more bear hides.
02:12:14.000And when you get a bear, there's an expense to getting the hide prepared, but you feel wasteful not using the hide.
02:12:20.000So it's very hard to shoot a bear just for meat.
02:12:34.000So now, like one day Danny was like, the last bear he got...
02:12:39.000He got up to the bear and found himself just kind of, he goes, I just don't, I don't need, you know, like I look at it and I'm like, I have like a set of obligations to this animal now and I'm not excited about it anymore.
02:13:43.000It's just like something happens and you just quit wanting to hunt bears.
02:13:46.000One of my favorite episodes of yours was on the Prince of Wales Island where you had a bear in your sight and you just decided, I don't want to shoot this bear.
02:14:39.000When I say I'm out-glass-up, I mean if I'm sitting on a big glass and tit or a glass and knob up some high where I have a commanding view of the landscape.
02:14:46.000Glassing meaning use your binoculars to look at the landscape.
02:14:49.000The way I generally hunt, I hunt a lot of open country in the American West and in Alaska and things where you have good visibility.
02:14:58.000The bulk of the time I spend hunting, I spend on a good lookout point.
02:15:05.000A high point where you can see a good 180 degree view or maybe not always 180, sometimes 360, whatever, a commanding view of the surrounding landscape.
02:15:14.000And we generally hunt by sitting there and observing with binoculars and just watching, watching, watching to the point where sometimes we'll spend days doing nothing but watching.
02:15:31.000And when you get good at this, you find animals that people would never in a million years find, that other people would never in a million years locate.
02:15:38.000When I'm doing that, and I find a bear, and I'm observing a bear, I would never leave that bear to go do some other thing.
02:15:53.000When you find a bear, like when I find a bear, I watch him until he's gone.
02:15:58.000You can't turn away from him because I always feel like at any point he's gonna do some amazing thing that would blow your mind.
02:16:18.000My friend John Dudley was watching a bear through his binoculars, and he saw a bear run up on a moose and smash it on the back and crush it.
02:16:26.000He saw a grizzly smash a moose on the back and break its back, literally hit it so hard that it snapped the moose's back, and then he tackled it once it was down and started eating it.
02:16:37.000I haven't seen that, but that's what I'm looking for.
02:16:39.000So you watch them, and there's a sort of anticipation with seeing them.
02:16:46.000Deer, they're very interesting, and the more you watch them, the more you learn about them.
02:16:51.000And the thing that I've always been fascinated by and was talking about with some friends of mine recently was how interested I've become in interpersonal relationships among mule deer, like the body language they use.
02:17:04.000And how you can locate deer that you can't see just based on body language of deer that you can see.
02:17:13.000That you watch them and you become aware of things they're aware of and you learn where other things are that are out of your view just by how, just by what it's doing.
02:17:36.000And then does that are encountering another band of does have a body language they use.
02:17:41.000And you just get used to this and you sort of have it in your database.
02:17:44.000Yeah, and then once you see it, you go like, oh, he knows about it.
02:17:47.000There's a deer somewhere that's not in that group and that deer is aware of the fact that the deer is not in the group and it's like wondering about it.
02:18:36.000I even said right then and there, I said, I'm not going to shoot the first one of something I saw.
02:18:40.000That's why I feel like, when I was talking earlier about the black hole of Africa, I always imagine guys going to Africa and being like, no shit, that's what one of those shoot looked like.
02:18:56.000So if you see another one, yeah, I'd reconsider.
02:18:59.000But no, I didn't want to shoot the first Wolverine I ever laid eyes on.
02:19:02.000That's why I was trying to get, you know, Giannis has seen, You know, he's been out caribou hunting and watched wolverines scavenging caribou carcasses.
02:19:11.000And so I was like, you know, he's not the first one you saw.
02:20:47.000I carry a cultural awareness, so I at least knew about what I was looking at, but he was in this point of just processing.
02:20:59.000Unlike the whitetail that you encountered, who damn sure knew what that thing carries with it.
02:21:05.000Yeah, we talked about it before the podcast started, but I was hunting with my friend John Dudley, and we were in the tree stand, and we were supposed to get down at 1.30, and at 1.25, I'm like, what do you want?
02:21:17.000So I climbed down first, and at 1.25, like five fucking minutes before we said it, and this big, mature whitetail walks through, and John signals to me, does the bowwinkle thing, putting his thumbs on his head, and he starts pointing, and then I realize there's a deer coming down the path,
02:21:34.000and so I kind of hide behind the tree, but there was all these branches in front of me.
02:21:38.000Anyway, you've already heard the story, but for the people listening, the deer locked eyes with me.
02:21:42.000And there was this intensity, like immediate intensity in his eyes that I'd never experienced an animal looking at me like.
02:22:05.000I have very vivid memories of when I was 12 and had just hit legal hunting age in Michigan, and I was sitting on the ground hunting squirrels on a farm owned by a man named Alan Zerlot.
02:22:22.000And leaning against a tree and having a four-corn whitetail coming through the woods...
02:22:31.000And, you know, a buck like that, this isn't always true, but generally a four-crumbed whitetail is a year and a half old.
02:22:38.000Even at that time, you start hunting squirrels September 15 in Michigan.
02:22:41.000So, I mean, that deer was, you know, he could have been as little as 15, 16 months old.
02:23:12.000I remember grabbing sticks and trying to snap them.
02:23:16.000To make a noise to make that deer spook off, you know?
02:23:19.000But being, like, conflicted between just being scared shitless and doing the thing you don't do, like, as a hunter, you just learn, like, don't make loud noises in the woods.
02:23:28.000When people make loud noises in the woods, it makes me cringe, man.
02:23:31.000What's interesting about this mature deer that saw me and freaked out when he saw me is that literally a minute before that, because when I was down, that deer came through with two other deer, and one of them looked to be like maybe a two-year-old deer, and one of them was a baby.
02:23:46.000One of them was like one-year-old, and the one-year-old got within 15 feet of me.
02:23:50.000I just pinned up against the tree, and the one-year-old walked right by me, had no idea I was alive.
02:23:54.000The other one that was a younger deer...
02:23:57.000Walked by me, didn't look my direction at all.
02:24:24.000He might have saw a bow and said, I've seen that fucking thing before.
02:24:27.000Somebody shot me in the ass with one of those a year ago.
02:24:29.000That's one of the things I like about big bucks.
02:24:31.000You know, I think that culturally in this country, we're kind of getting where it's almost like this accepted idea that you're supposed to hate trophy hunters, right?
02:25:54.000You can have big bucks in areas that have very low predation and low hunter pressure, and he could get big and still make some mistakes, because he doesn't have as many mistakes that could be made.
02:26:07.000But a really big buck in an area that has a lot of lions, a lot of coyotes, wolves, human hunters, he's big because he hasn't messed up.
02:26:22.000We had an occasion to watch, we were hunting in Colorado hunting mule deer this year, and we watched, I glassed up a pretty nice buck and they went up and do an aspen grove.
02:26:34.000He was traveling with a bunch of does, and they all go into an Aspen Grove.
02:26:38.000Later, Giannis was looking above there, and he said there's some coyotes rolling down into that Aspen Grove where all the deer went.
02:26:46.000It's now the middle of the day, and it's rifle season.
02:26:49.000It's been rifle season on and off through a couple of weeks of hunting season.
02:26:55.000All those deer come pouring out of that aspen grove.
02:26:58.000I, at the time, commented how it seemed like someone was squeezing a tube of toothpaste the way the deer came shooting out of that aspen grove and ran out across a large sage flat, exposing themselves.
02:27:10.000The one deer out of the group that didn't walk out of that sage, that didn't walk out of that aspen grove, was the big buck.
02:29:07.000Well, it's a very difficult quarry, and when you're eating that animal, I mean, there's a completely different sense of not just accomplishment, but connection to that animal than...
02:29:17.000Buying some steak in a store or shooting some button buck.
02:29:47.000For the same reason why you're challenged to chase after big bucks.
02:29:50.000You're telling me that somehow, if you eat meat, that somehow the system by which you go about getting meat through farms and stores and shit like that is somehow morally or aesthetically or ethically or somehow superior To me eating an animal that I've hunted myself from a sustainable population that's well-managed and that I've decorated my home with its parts
02:30:20.000that will be there until I die and then will decorate the homes of my children.
02:30:26.000If you're telling me somehow that I'm like depraved For that, I have a hard time engaging in the conversation.
02:30:52.000How much time do you have to actually immerse yourself in wildlife and understand the politics of it, understand what's really going on out there in the world?
02:31:01.000I've seen an overhead view of the Pacific Northwest and looked down at all the forest and just done the calculations in their head about these animals and how many of them there are and how much of the Wild West is filled with animals.
02:31:16.000But that doesn't stop people from having opinions on ships.
02:31:55.000It didn't occur to me until I was coming down here today, but I've been railing a lot on the echo chamber that we all live in.
02:32:06.000And I think if anyone goes and you look at your Facebook feed or any number of things, we surround ourselves with people who tell us what we think.
02:32:28.000And people on each side of it feeling so absolutely certain that not only were they right, but that everyone felt the way they felt.
02:32:37.000And it's just been a big part of the national conversation, like the echo chamber thing.
02:32:43.000What I have found with people that listen to your show, who come up to me and be like, oh, I heard you on Joe's show the times I've been on there, is that you've somehow managed to defy that Where you have the right-wing nutjobs and the left-wing nutjobs all listening to you at the same time.
02:33:22.000Just the fact that you listen to it, I don't know.
02:33:24.000That doesn't tell me anything about you, other than that you'd like to wrestle with ideas.
02:33:29.000Because this is one of the few places where people are talking about shit, and you talk about stuff and bring it up, where it's like, people are willing, because of you and the way you handle it, they're willing to subject themselves to disparate views for a minute.
02:33:44.000And I don't know what it is, the formula, if you've even thought about it.
02:33:50.000It's just how I look at things, I think.
02:33:53.000I have my rigid lines that I won't cross, where I think something is evil or something is ethically wrong, but I'm willing to entertain ideas, and I'm not rigid.
02:34:05.000If someone comes to me and they tell me that I'm wrong about something, I'll go, really?
02:34:30.000Especially as you start getting into more things or exploring new subjects and new topics, you realize it is impossible to know everything.
02:34:39.000So for you to define yourself by the knowledge that you know or the knowledge you don't know, it seems kind of crazy.
02:34:46.000I think you're far better off defining yourself, not even defining yourself, but far better off approaching the world By searching for the truth, you know, and not being connected or married to any ideas, it's far too often people get into these discussions with people and it becomes a game of trying to win,
02:35:07.000you know, trying to one-up the person with information or data and then coming off of that with a victory.
02:35:13.000Yeah, I mean, that's what you're seeing on all these news shows, man.
02:35:16.000One of the things that I did during the election was while the debates were going on and post-debate, I would bounce back and forth and spend an hour on Fox News and an hour on CNN. And I was like, what is the world?
02:35:27.000This is so baffling because these are just enforced narratives from one side and the other.
02:35:32.000And I think the country suffers because of that.
02:35:56.000I mean, you can't be right all the time and you can have preconceived notions that turn out to be incorrect and you have to be able to recognize those.
02:36:13.000We should definitely do this more often.
02:36:15.000But I think, yeah, I mean, I appreciate that perspective that you have, too, that you are willing to say, like, I don't have an opinion on Obamacare because I really don't know enough about it.
02:36:26.000That's really healthy and really important and, for some reason, really rare, especially with a well-read person like yourself.
02:36:33.000And it makes you sound a little bit like a dumbass.
02:37:21.000Now, as a student of American history and someone whose favorite era is the Mountain Man era, which ran...
02:37:31.000A way to define the Mountain Man era would be it began...
02:37:35.000Kind of like the moment Lewis and Clark made it back to St. Louis after their expedition, and a man named John Coulter turned around and went back out west to trap Beaver.
02:37:47.000The Mountain Man era began, one could argue, that day.
02:37:52.000And it ended when the last rendezvous was held for the Free Trappers, which was in the 1840s.
02:38:54.000It'd be like if you were making a movie about the people who came when Washington and Franklin and everyone came together to draw up the American Constitution, and you said it like in the jungles of Thailand.
02:39:17.000He did not have a son who he was avenging.
02:39:20.000Hugh Glass got mauled by a bear, and they left him in the protection of Jim Bridger, a very young Jim Bridger who was a teenager, and another guy.
02:39:28.000And Hugh Glass, through much struggle, crawled his way back to a fort, and he later confronted Bridger and said, just so you know, buddy, next time someone leaves you to watch a guy die in the woods, don't leave him laying around by himself.
02:40:31.000A story that demonstrates sort of the American landscape and American grit and turn it into a British Columbian, you know, a Canadian farce.
02:41:29.000I've been around in business enough where I can see that there are forces at play where they probably went and they were saying, you know what?
02:41:39.000I get all that shit, but you better put a love interest in this thing.
02:41:42.000Well, isn't that in a lot of ways similar to your experiences in Hollywood when you were doing your first show?
02:41:52.000When I saw your first show, and then I spoke with you about it, and you were telling me they were trying to let a moose loose, and then you would shoot it.
02:42:06.000Like, a lot of times stuff doesn't show up, and a guy who I later became friends with and have a lot of respect for, but he was new to hunting and was not new to television, was new to hunting, and he was saying, well, that's why they have animal wranglers.
02:42:16.000And that was just one of the early conversations we had.
02:42:19.000I wound up liking him quite a bit, but yeah, it was...
02:42:23.000I think that one of the things that gets reality television in trouble...
02:42:26.000There's a fake anecdote I often tell about two kinds of producers, right?
02:42:33.000There's a producer who would say to you, how would you do that, whatever you're doing?
02:42:38.000And you'd say, well, I'd take this really small little knife and I'd very carefully make a really delicate little incision right here.
02:42:50.000And they would say, great, I'm going to film that.
02:42:54.000And then there are ones that would go, but could you use a machete?
02:42:57.000And I think that, you know, and those are two types of And luckily in my career, now I'm able to surround myself with people who like that little small knife.
02:43:13.000Well, you got very fortunate in that you went to the Sportsman's Channel, which gives you essentially free reign.
02:44:02.000Even though it's legal to use walkie-talkies and certain things in some places, you don't want to use them.
02:44:10.000I had this thought the other day because I was listening to this podcast And these guys were discussing different lenses for optics, they were comparing spotting scopes, and they started talking about walkie-talkies, and it became this combination of things that guys love.
02:45:20.000The states where it matters because of having, like, open country, it is or is becoming, and it's not, you're not going to be, it's just not going to happen.
02:45:30.000I mean, so many states are out in front.
02:45:31.000I think 13 or 14 states have banned drones now.
02:45:33.000It's great that they got out in front of it, because it sort of came out of nowhere, right?
02:45:37.000Two-way communications is something where a lot of, you know, some states, and I'm not talking, like, liberal softy states, man, Montana, Alaska, you can't use two-way communications to hunt.
02:45:48.000Because they've decided that that's where you draw the line.
02:45:51.000Yeah, because they might not even discuss an ethics thing, but it's something that goes back to the great conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold, where he had said, we spent a lot of energy improving the pump, but not the well.
02:46:10.000And if you just work on improving ways to pump them out, Without also working on ways of Improving the well and having there be a stable population of them, you're going to drain the damn well.
02:46:23.000So when we're looking at as emerging technologies come out, you have to constantly ask yourself, with increased efficacy, like if we get it where technology means that every hunter is always successful, what will that wind up meaning for wildlife populations?
02:46:41.000It's not going to mean a diminishment of wildlife populations.
02:46:44.000It'll mean a tremendous diminishment of hunter opportunity.
02:46:48.000You have a lot of over-the-counter public land elk hunts in the American West are about 10 or 20% success rates.
02:46:56.000So you give out 100 licenses, you're going to kill about 15 elk.
02:47:02.000This is a generalization, but it's generally true.
02:47:04.000You're giving 100 guys an opportunity.
02:47:07.000If you have success rates at 100%, how many tags are you giving out?
02:47:42.000And you know that nine of them were up on glass and tits with radios, radioing the guy in, but they sure as shit aren't wearing the headsets and the pictures.
02:47:51.000So they kind of get, too, that they're not proud of it.