On this week's episode, we're joined by former Washington Post political reporter and current Los Angeles Times writer, Joe Pesci. We talk about how he got into journalism, why he left the job, and what it's like being a reporter in Congress. Plus, we talk about what it was like to be a member of Congress in the late 90s and early 2000s, and why we should all be thankful we don't have to pay tolls on the Turnpike. And, as always, thank you for tuning into HYPEBEAST Radio and Business of HYPE. Please don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to our other shows MIC/LINE, The Anthropology, The HYPE Report, and HYPETALKS. Please remember to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, too! if you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review! If you don't like the show, please tell a friend about it and tell us what you think about it! And if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how we should make it better, we'll consider it in the comments section below. Thanks again for listening! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's your favorite part of the show? 2: How do you feel about the episode? 3: What's the worst thing you've ever heard of a politician? 4: How did you think of a piece of legislation? 5: What do you think it was? 6: What would you do with it? 7:30 - What does it feel like? 8:40 - How did someone else do it better? 9:20 - What kind of thing you'd like to do more? 11:00 12:00 | What's it's better than it's a better than someone else? 13:30 | How did I feel like it's my favorite thing? 14:40 15:30 16:40 | What s your biggest takeaway from it s better than that? 17:30 // 15:10 | How do I think it's the most important thing to you can I would like to see me do it more than that you could do it in a little bit more? / 16:00 // 17:10 18:20 19:20 | What do I got a better job than this?
00:00:39.000Watching this thing go down now, this atrocity of justice and voting and chaos and everything that's going around, the Russians are attacking, all this stuff that's going on right now, what does this feel like to you?
00:00:52.000It feels so good to not be doing this job anymore.
00:00:57.000I feel like anybody that has any sort of intelligence that is a political blogger that's involved in it for any length of time, or not necessarily a political blogger, or a columnist, an author, after a while you've got to realize that you're fucking writing about pro wrestling.
00:01:23.000I got into it because when I got into it, the essence of politics was people of different kinds of backgrounds and persuasions of different regions would all meet in a room, i.e.
00:01:32.000the Capitol, either it's a state Capitol or Congress.
00:01:37.000So it was all about compromise and debate and wheeling and dealing and that kind of stuff, which is inherently fascinating when you're a reporter.
00:02:41.000We'd shut the door, and anybody in the Transportation Committee was one of Bud's boys.
00:02:45.000You were a Republican, you were a Democrat, you were one of Bud's boys.
00:02:48.000And so they all played a game like this.
00:02:50.000And so, except for my guy, my guy would come out and hold press releases saying, oh, you know, this is terrible, you know, this is corruption, blah, blah, blah.
00:03:21.000And in there was a line item that gave the residents of Bud Schuster's congressional district a free pass to drive the Pennsylvania Turnpike for X number of years.
00:03:34.000So basically anybody who lived in Bud's district didn't have to pay tolls for, I think it was two years.
00:04:02.000I mean, that's what's so bizarre, that even in this age of transparency, they're still, like, stacking stuff in, sliding things into bills.
00:04:09.000And there's very few people to watch them now.
00:04:18.000Even if something does get in, there's going to be some new scandal tomorrow, Kanye West going to be visiting Trump at the Trump Tower, and you're not going to think about the bill anymore.
00:04:26.000There's too much to pay attention to, Hank Shaw.
00:04:28.000Which is why I find it fascinating that you went from that world to much more of an artistic pursuit of being a chef.
00:04:37.000That's something that I've really come to appreciate over the last, say, ten years or so, and I credit the initial push To watching No Reservations when Anthony Bourdain's show was on the Travel Channel.
00:05:32.000And then when I watched Anthony Bourdain's show, when he would have this great reverence for these people that he would visit, who were these real artists, and they would put together these amazing dishes, and the enthusiasm and the passion that he had for describing it made me super excited about it.
00:05:48.000And then I started realizing, oh wow, I never thought about it like this.
00:06:05.000It lasts for as long as you're in the restaurant or as long as you're in that comedy hall.
00:06:10.000Yeah, if, like, you couldn't record comedy where, like, you could record a meal and film it, like, on Anthony Bourdain's show, and I can't appreciate it at home, but I could watch you, if you did stand-up and I laughed at home, I don't have to be there.
00:06:50.000Well, okay, so there are some people who will say that my cooking leaves you with a deep feeling of whatever, you know, ennui or happiness or joy or farts or whatever.
00:07:01.000And, like, no, we're cooking good food.
00:07:42.000You're making people laugh, ultimately.
00:07:44.000Well, comics are freed from that today in this very unique form because of the internet and because of podcasts.
00:07:53.000So because of podcasts, comics, if you have actually something that you want to say that is not necessarily funny, you can do that now.
00:08:01.000Because podcasts are so open-ended, there's no real structure to it.
00:08:04.000Whereas, like, if you go on stage, and people did for the longest time, they would go on stage and rant about the government or about abortion or about crime or whatever, and it would be not funny.
00:08:13.000And they would feel like it was something that was important.
00:08:17.000So it had to be discussed, even though it was discussed in this weird forum where people go to pay to see comedy, and you're not giving them comedy, you're ranting.
00:08:25.000And it was almost, like, respected under, like, some snobbish...
00:08:29.000Sort of sect of stand-up comedy fans and practitioners.
00:08:38.000Bill Hicks did it perfectly, but the way he did it, fuck, a lot of people imitated it to the point where there's a famous comedy club in Georgia called The Punch Line that went under, and it had a back room, the green room where the comics would hang out,
00:09:35.000You're like, one of the things that I've really enjoyed about seeing some of your dishes, that you like to cook things, like say if you're cooking like a wild pork loin, you want to use a lot of the ingredients that are in the area where that animal lives.
00:09:52.000Yeah, I'm not the first person to do that, but it's one of the things that I do a lot.
00:09:58.000What goes together in the field or in the water or in the seashore or whatever, almost always will go together on the plate.
00:10:06.000So, I mean, I've done such weird stuff as, you know, when I go grouse hunting, what were the grouse eating?
00:14:46.000There's one today, a video they put up of this guy in his home looks out on his front porch and there's a fucking mountain lion killing a deer on his front porch.
00:19:00.000But what I was going to say is that there's this new sort of liberal knee-jerk reaction to sharks that now you're not supposed to kill sharks.
00:19:09.000So there was a, I think it was the mayor of New York City, or was it the governor, that caught a thresher shark.
00:19:22.000And he caught it and cooked it, and people just jumped on the outrage train and started getting angry that he was killing endangered sharks.
00:20:03.000They're a species of least concern, if you look at all the fish monitoring things and whatever, and we're keeping like four for the whole season.
00:20:13.000Because they can get reasonably big, and it's the common shark that lives up there, and everybody...
00:20:19.000I think that when you get down to it is Americans are not really good at nuance.
00:21:53.000So if you're going to fish for these fish, you need to have ice on board.
00:21:57.000And you need to basically catch the fish, you kill the fish, and then you gut the fish right there, and then you get them on ice.
00:22:04.000Because sharks, skates, and rays effectively pee through their skin.
00:22:11.000So if you don't gut the fish right after you kill it, you get this buildup of ureic acid in the meat, and basically your fish fillet is going to smell like ammonia, which nobody likes.
00:22:24.000Skates and rays are the same as well, huh?
00:22:26.000So all three, I think, if I have to remember, they're elasmomorphs.
00:22:33.000I forget what the scientific name is, but it's the cartilaginous fish.
00:22:36.000Now, the variations in sharks, that's a very extreme variation, the difference between like a grouper and a swordfish, which is like a real thick, meaty.
00:22:49.000Leopard sharks like crabs, crustaceans, shellfish, that sort of thing.
00:22:55.000Although they actually really, really dig this nasty little fish called the midshipman, which looks like the ugliest catfish you've ever seen.
00:24:54.000Now, when you cook something like a shark or anything that's controversial, anything along those lines, do you feel like you have to preface it with some sort of an explanation that this is not an endangered species and it is a giant misconception and this is no different than eating a tuna or...
00:25:14.000I usually put a paragraph or something in there to say...
00:25:18.000When you're writing something about it.
00:25:19.000You'd be like, you know, hold on, people.
00:25:22.000This is not, you know, it's not a white shark.
00:25:25.000It's not, you know, it's not an endangered species at all.
00:25:28.000I mean, it's just, you know, and I'll usually put a link to the, where it says, it's IUCAN, is the International Union of Concerned Whatever.
00:25:36.000And it's basically, it's the marker that shows what's endangered, what's threatened, what's the species of least concern.
00:25:43.000Even then, if you think about it, our bag limit for leopard sharks in the San Francisco Bay is three a day, and we typically do a self-imposed limit of only two a day, and we almost never keep females.
00:25:56.000When you say we, meaning you and your friends and the people you fish with?
00:25:58.000No, meaning most of the commercial fishing fleet.
00:26:01.000So if you could take a charter in the bay- You mean commercial, like recreational?
00:26:16.000Just take the two, and we're going to throw these big giant females back, because a lot of times, especially this time of year, they can have pups, because they give birth to live young.
00:31:00.000The biomass of ground squirrels is more than any other animal on the ranch.
00:31:05.000It's 270,000 acres with mountain lions, deer, elk, pigs, and there's more weight of ground squirrels than anything else.
00:31:17.000I would love to be able to tell you that, yeah, they're delicious, but they tend to carry bubonic plague, which does not make them good eats.
00:37:20.000That whole public land, private land thing is something that I had literally no knowledge of, no interest in, never discussed until I met Rinella.
00:37:31.000And when Rinella started, Steve Rinella started explaining to me The difference between public land and private land and how it was all put in place by Teddy Roosevelt and all the conservation that was done in the 1800s and how much resistance was behind it.
00:37:43.000And he actually talked about it pretty in depth in a podcast we did here a couple of weeks ago.
00:37:47.000And I just, I can't believe it took me until I was like 45 until I heard about that.
00:37:53.000It's, you know, actually, Steve's got a really good example of why you might not necessarily have to.
00:38:00.000It's because he was talking at the backcountry hunters and anglers.
00:38:15.000And so he's like, yeah, well, everybody in New York City knows, can cite you chapter and verse, the subway lines.
00:38:23.000No one who doesn't have reason to has any reason to know about the subway lines.
00:38:29.000So when somebody who lives in rural Montana or whatever says, why haven't you ever, you know, this issue with public land, blah, blah, blah.
00:38:35.000Well, if I live in New York City, I don't have to know.
00:38:38.000It's just like we were saying at the beginning of this, it's like there's too many things to look at.
00:38:43.000There's too many distractions in our world right now.
00:38:46.000And it's just, it makes it hard to do anything anymore.
00:38:49.000There's no quiet at all in our lives anymore.
00:38:55.000Yeah, Steve's got a real good way of breaking things down like that.
00:38:59.000He's got a good way of providing you with examples that you go, oh, yeah, that's a good one.
00:39:06.000Because, yeah, if you lived in Montana, you wouldn't give a shit about the subway lines in Brooklyn.
00:39:11.000And if you lived in Brooklyn, the infringing on public lands or Paul Ryan's plans to sell them off to corporations so that they could pay off the debt, it just doesn't even register.
00:40:09.000Everybody's land, public or private, belongs to either the people of the United States or, if it's migratory, the people of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
00:40:17.000Or if you're in Texas and it's a high fence and it's owned by- Well, yeah, that's legally livestock.
00:41:34.000You know, and you talk to people that have had it, and one of the really fascinating things about Steve, he's really smart, Steven Kotler.
00:41:40.000And when he was discussing it, he was talking about the neurological aspects of Lyme disease, that it really wrecks havoc on your cognitive function.
00:41:48.000To the point where one time when he had it, before he was diagnosed, he didn't know what was wrong with him.
00:41:52.000He was at a green light and he couldn't figure out what green meant.
00:42:37.000Yeah, in the East Coast, they think something like, I think they were talking about Long Island, where they were saying some absurd number, like 50% of the ticks have Lyme disease?
00:42:49.000I went mushroom hunting two summers ago with a fellow chef friend of mine named Anita Lowe, and so we were out mushrooming by her place in the eastern end of Long Island, and we cooked some mushrooms, had a good time, blah, blah, blah.
00:43:02.000So I get back like 48 hours later and I find two tick nymphs right in the band of my boxers.
00:43:26.000I did this show for SyFy called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and one of the things that we investigated was this weird disease called Morgellons.
00:43:59.000But one of the guys that I interviewed was a doctor who also had Morgellons.
00:44:04.000And he had a really unique insight to it because he said that as a doctor, one of the things he found is a direct correlation between people who have this disease and Lyme disease.
00:44:25.000He was saying that people who have Lyme disease, that there's some sort of a neuro...
00:44:29.000Toxic effect of Lyme disease, which distorts reality to the point where these people think these fibers are growing out of them.
00:44:35.000And he was talking about himself, like he saw something moving around in his eye, like saw something wiggling around on the surface of his eye, and then it wasn't there anymore.
00:44:44.000And he realized, like, okay, this is not real.
00:44:46.000Like, I'm seeing something that's not real.
00:44:48.000And then as he got deeper into it, he found that all these people that had this bizarre Morgellons thing also had Lyme disease.
00:46:00.000And then it gets into people, makes people more aggressive, makes people more prone to get into accidents, disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims, motorcycle crash victims have toxoplasma.
00:48:03.000I think there's also some sort of a connection between sexual promiscuity and females.
00:48:10.000Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff they're working on to try to figure out what exactly these fucking parasites are doing to people's brains.
00:48:16.000Well, you've heard of the cordyceps, right?
00:48:28.000What you're trying to talk about is there's a mushroom that infects the spores, infect an ant, convince the ant to go somewhere high so that these cordyceps mushrooms grow inside the ant's body, and then it explodes and sprays spores through the air,
00:50:26.000And this is one that's infected a praying mantis.
00:50:30.000And this one's going to burst out of the praying mantis.
00:50:32.000But when this aquatic worm gets inside...
00:50:35.000Oh, because you get it wet, that's when it'll come out.
00:50:38.000But the aquatic worm that gets inside grasshoppers When it reaches gestation, when it's time to be born, it rewires the grasshopper's brain and talks the grasshopper into committing suicide.
00:50:55.000So the grasshopper jumps into a lake and drowns, and the aquatic worm comes out of its body and swims away.
00:51:59.000If you find the grasshopper, there's one where it talks the grasshopper and the grasshopper just jumps in the water and just starts drowning and then it pops out of its body.
00:52:09.000Nature's such a creepy, creepy thing in a lot of ways.
00:52:13.000Like, the parasite world in particular.
00:52:15.000Like, somehow or another, predators to me are less disturbing than parasites.
00:52:41.000I knew that people eat sturgeon eggs, but I really wasn't aware that sturgeon was that delicious in fish.
00:52:46.000I also wasn't aware that it was legal to catch them.
00:52:49.000I, for some reason, thought that they were endangered.
00:52:51.000It's weird, which is one of the reasons why poaching is such a big issue, is because we're one of the last recreational fisheries in the country for sturgeon.
00:53:02.000Yeah, because the East Coast sturgeon was fished out around 100 years ago, and they're only now coming back in the East Coast, and there's still no fishery for them.
00:53:13.000So all of the sturgeon you see in restaurants in Sacramento is farmed.
00:53:50.000They were talking about what's going on in the Ohio River, that they're putting these catfish in lakes And they're taking them out of rivers.
00:54:00.000They're putting large catfish in lakes, but they can't survive.
00:54:02.000They can only live in these lakes for so long.
00:54:04.000But everybody wants to catch a big catfish.
00:54:06.000So they have these commercial catfishing businesses, recreational catfishing, where they'll take these people and they'll have them fishing in these lakes.
00:54:15.000And they use some sort of chemical in the lake that forces the catfish to bite.
00:54:34.000And they have these red sores all over their body because some chemical's been introduced into the water, which I guess the irritant causes them to...
00:54:44.000Like they're biting out of frustration, I guess, maybe?
00:54:47.000The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.
00:56:57.000For this enormous buck that they had used for breeding on this commercial deer property.
00:57:03.000See, if you own a piece of land in Texas or in any place where they allow this, you can buy deer and then have these deer released onto your land and then you can Air quotes again.
00:57:18.000So they raise these things to maturity and they give them this massive protein-rich diet and then they also have great genetics on top of that.
00:57:27.000So these deer have these insane antlers.
01:01:32.000And it's just strange to me also that some animals figured out how to stay alive, like alligators and crocodiles for, you know, X amount of million years.
01:01:40.000Well, all these other things like largemouth bass are so much more recent.
01:01:55.000Because that one, they thought until they caught one, it was like the early 1900s, they thought it had been extinct for millions of years, right?
01:05:54.000So I was sort of sad because I went up there because I wanted to catch a giant and then I was reading about it before and I realized that every halibut over about 125 pounds is big breeding female.
01:06:06.000So it's a bad idea to land it because actually the halibut stocks in Alaska are not doing that well.
01:06:12.000So get it to the surface, get a picture of it.
01:06:16.000So your ideal halibut apparently is like an 80 pounder or an 85 pounder.
01:10:01.000I'm glad you just said that, because the most recent trip that I had, I was in Hawaii just a month ago, and- That's the only state I've never been to.
01:11:42.000See, we've talked about taking her hunting, but I think still that fucking one marlin messes with her.
01:11:50.000But they were telling me that you had to smoke it.
01:11:52.000But on the last trip that I was on, which was about a month ago, these guys were telling me that, no, no, no, you can cut it and eat it like swordfish.
01:15:57.000Yeah, he does a lot of stuff for a group called Huntfish Feed, so it gets hunters together to donate tons and tons of game meat for homeless shelters, and they do a big cookout thing so that everybody gets a meal.
01:17:32.000There's a really fucking scary video of this polar bear.
01:17:37.000There's a seal on an ice shelf, and the polar bear slips up behind the seal, and the seal doesn't know, and the seal's like, oh, Jesus, and then just tries to get away.
01:17:47.000And he's got that really sad look on his face.
01:17:52.000He gets into the water, and then the polar bear's in the water right behind him seconds later, and then the polar bear comes out with it, and it's in his jaws.
01:19:05.000There's a stand-up comedian, Kevin Fitzgerald.
01:19:08.000He's also a veterinarian, and I worked with him once in Denver.
01:19:11.000And he told me that polar bears are one of the few animals that, when they come out of the womb, they're like the little alien from the movie Alien that bursts out of the chest.
01:19:30.000So another friend of mine, a woman named Rebecca, who's really good with animals, she's worked with all kinds of animals, but she mostly focuses on raptors now.
01:20:08.000Yeah, it was interesting because it's, you know, back to our talk about jaguars coming back into the United States.
01:20:15.000Well, any animal that's forced to kill things with its face in order to stay alive is a sketchy thing to have in your neighborhood in San Francisco.
01:23:09.000But if someone cooked it in front of you and it smelled good and it was in the bowl and you were with these people and they were all eating it, you wouldn't take a bite?
01:23:25.000Like, I know they're cooking it really well, but I know that prions, like the prions that cause mad cow disease that come from brain matter.
01:23:38.000Chronic wasting disease, for folks who don't know what we're talking about, is a disease that affects deer.
01:23:42.000And it's really common in the Midwest.
01:23:44.000And they think that it may have originated, at least this is the rumor, from these weird commercial deer farms where they grow all these deer and they all live together.
01:23:53.000Because apparently one of the things that happens is if deer eat out of the same spot, that's where it develops.
01:24:02.000Like if there's a feed tray and they're all eaten out of the feed tray, that's unnatural for the wild.
01:24:17.000If I want to make chops or if I want to make stock out of the bones of the deer I shot, what do I do with CWD? I've done an exhaustive look at all the science that's out there, and it's never jumped the species barrier.
01:24:41.000So if it was me and there was testing available for my deer, I would absolutely do it.
01:24:47.000And if you're in the clear, you're in the clear.
01:24:49.000And if not, and it was too hard, I would probably keep the limb bones but not anything off the spinal column because I've just, you know...
01:24:58.000And you would keep the limb bones for marrow?
01:25:00.000Yeah, either marrow or making stocks and broths.
01:25:04.000And then, you know, cooking shanks on the bone.
01:25:06.000And when you do shanks, you braise them and slow cook them.
01:25:10.000That's a neglected part of a lot of undulates, right?
01:25:14.000I think it's probably the single easiest way of You know, to use the stupid catchphrase, opening your game.
01:25:21.000Because grinding shank meat sucks because there's so much connective tissue and they're easy to saw off with a sawzall or a hacksaw.
01:25:28.000They usually will fit in your pot and they're amazing braids like that.
01:25:33.000And even if that's all you do different, besides your butcher will like you because all he's got to do is just saw them off and put them in a butcher paper and bring them back to you.
01:25:43.000Now, you started your hunting and cooking career off.
01:25:47.000You started as a chef, and then you wanted to get closer and maybe understand what you were cooking better.
01:25:59.000I mean, I started hunting in Minnesota, and my best friend was the outdoor writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
01:26:06.000And we had been fishing at the time, and then hunting season came around, and he invited me out.
01:26:13.000Well, let me preface this, but he'd been sort of plying me with mallards and with rabbits and with some venison prior to me ever going out.
01:26:20.000So the stuff that he had killed, he wanted you to try.
01:26:43.000And you can't buy it, so you've got to learn to get it.
01:26:46.000And the other thing that was really life-changing about it was...
01:26:51.000So, I'm a pretty good fisherman, and when I'm in a place for a while, you learn to read a body of water.
01:26:59.000You know, in my case, back in Long Island, you learn tides, you learn weather patterns, you learn all of the little intricacies of what it takes to actually get on fish.
01:27:10.000So, most anglers are just hooks and lines.
01:27:15.000The real fisherman knows where to put the boat to find the fish, knows how fast to troll, knows what angle to the waves you want to be, and all these little detailed things.
01:29:16.000It tastes like something that actually lived a life.
01:29:18.000Tell me that about mule deer, that they don't like mule deer, because mule deer tastes like the sage that it eats, and that they like whitetails because they eat corn.
01:31:03.000Any bird that eats seeds as a matter of habit, human beings are going to like to eat it more.
01:31:08.000Because it just creates a set of flavors that we're more familiar with.
01:31:11.000Now, the exceptions to that are kind of fascinating.
01:31:13.000If you talk to Newfoundlanders or Icelanders, Or Inuit, the people who are grown up eating seabirds, they love that fishy, low-tidy flavor thing that's going on.
01:31:26.000I see you're getting the hairy eyebrow.
01:31:30.000I want to try, even though I know I'll hate it, I want to try that fermented shark that they love in Iceland.
01:35:17.000And then the iron rule of head cheese making is, if it looks like meat, keep it fairly big.
01:35:24.000If you have no idea what it is, chop it very small.
01:35:30.000And then you pack it into a loaf pan or a sausage casing, and then you boil down the cooking liquid by half, and then that really concentrates the gelatin.
01:35:40.000And then you pour that hot broth over the mixture that you packed into the loaf pan or the sausage casing or whatever, and then you put it in the refrigerator and it sets.
01:36:30.000I mean, I've always been fascinated by chartreutery, just the idea that people figured out a long time ago how to dry things and preserve things.
01:37:04.000That's such a weird thing, because you find out how smart they are, and commercial pig farming becomes very disturbing when you find out how- That's another reason why I got into hunting.
01:37:13.000I have not bought meat or fish for the house since 2004. That's awesome.
01:37:53.000It's the connection with the food, it becomes a completely different experience.
01:37:59.000And it's so hard to explain that without sounding pretentious or without just repeating myself over and over again, which I've done many, many, many times on this podcast.
01:38:08.000But when you, if I'll pull like an elk backstrap out of the freezer tonight and I'll thaw it out.
01:38:15.000And I'll, you know, marinate that, put some kosher salt on it, some pepper, and grill it.
01:38:44.000Having entered this whole game as a cook or, you know, this pursuit of hunting, it really challenges me to make great food out of every bit because, you know, you broke it, you bought it.
01:38:55.000And tacos de lengua made from elk tongue, phenomenal.
01:39:00.000Head cheese made from a doe's head, braised shanks.
01:39:54.000I watched a show once where he saw this giant bull elk on the first day of his hunt within the first couple hours, and he didn't shoot it because he didn't want to be done hunting.
01:40:09.000He explained it to me afterwards where it made more sense, and it was because he had just come from Kentucky, where he had did another show, and he had shot an elk in Kentucky, like, literally the week before.
01:40:41.000The inability to be disingenuous is so powerful that he won't do that.
01:40:47.000Well, the hunt I did with him was like, yeah, I'm older than he is.
01:40:50.000I'm like, I'd like to climb to the top of this mountain and look for things and then sit here for until I find something and then walk to that thing and shoot it.
01:40:56.000He's like, let's climb all over these mountains.
01:43:17.000That's one of the animals that really...
01:43:20.000When you talk to people that are anti-hunting and they just want to let nature run its course, there's some animals where you literally can't do that.
01:43:28.000Pigs are one of them, especially invasive pigs.
01:43:31.000I have hunted pigs in California for years and years and years.
01:43:34.000I've heard all these stories about Texas.
01:43:36.000A few years ago, I finally went down to southeast Texas to do hunting and cooking schools.
01:43:42.000The guy I was working with is in Bay City.
01:44:36.000Yeah, car accidents and wild game and population control is one of the most surprising statistics when you tell people 2 million car accidents with deer every year, or 1.5 million, at least, in the United States with deer.
01:45:03.000Years ago, I was working at the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, and I did a data analysis, one of the first ones that was ever done on deer vehicle collisions.
01:45:12.000And apparently, if you're in Anoka County, north of the Twin Cities, on November 8th at dusk, watch your ass.
01:47:17.000There's nothing that tastes like a grouse.
01:47:19.000It's sort of like a chicken, but you'll know you're eating grouse.
01:47:23.000Now, well, I didn't know this either until fairly recently, as you were explaining before, that there's different kinds of ducks, and the ducks that eat seeds are preferable, but diver ducks you can eat.
01:48:26.000For the most part, I'll always pluck them, because they have a different diet.
01:48:30.000But on the other hand, goldeneyes, buffleheads, most bluebills but not all, ringnecks, a lot of those birds, you know, they still taste good, but I'll tend to skin them.
01:48:42.000It is really fascinating to me that the taste of when you eat an animal depends so much on what the animal's diet is, and then it makes me think about my own diet.
01:48:52.000And like, what is going on with the cells of my own body?
01:48:55.000And you think about people that are on poor diets that have terrible food that they consume and they choose to drink soda all the time.
01:49:01.000And their tissue itself is affected so drastically.
01:49:24.000And was it similar, like the blueberry bear concept?
01:49:28.000Well, it didn't turn anything blue, but it was amazing.
01:49:32.000I mean, it was super sweet, super fatty, just very mild.
01:49:35.000Yeah, that's what I hear, that blueberry bear is like the ultimate game.
01:49:40.000I think you get a bear in the fall that's been eating blueberries, and like Rinella did a whole episode about it on his show where he cut one open and it had purple fat.
01:50:43.000See, the thing about the blueberry bear, though, is that it's got that engaging sort of sweetness to it that I think would be really interesting.
01:50:51.000I don't think you'd get that from the avocado.
01:51:27.000The other cool thing is that if you were to get one of these guacamole bears, you can freeze it and be free of trichinopsis.
01:51:33.000Because south of about Oregon, draw a line all the way across the country, the bears there, if they have it, will tend to have a variety called Trichinella spiralis, which you can kill by freezing.
01:54:33.000You know, I have a friend from the Yucatan who hunts deer in the Yucatan.
01:54:37.000And, you know, I have another friend from Hokkaido in the northern island of Japan who hunts the same sick of black-tailed In Alaska now, they used to hunt in Hokkaido as a kid.
01:54:47.000And, you know, South Africans and New Zealanders, and I mean, even if you can, you know, if you're smart and thinking out there, you're going to say, well, what about Australia?
01:54:55.000In Australia, I mean, I don't know if you've ever eaten kangaroo, but kangaroo looks exactly like venison.
01:55:54.000But you've got some great fucking recipes and ideas in here, man.
01:55:58.000How long did it take you to put this together?
01:56:01.000I've started, I don't know, maybe some of it 10 years, but actually sitting there writing it, two years.
01:56:09.000You know, because all the recipes I had to test and I had to send the recipes out to, you know, lots of readers because one of the things that is important for me is that my recipes are as watertight as possible.
01:57:31.000Like, if somebody's really curious about it, how would you know how to substitute them?
01:57:35.000I would say bison or grass-fed beef will get you pretty close in flavor, and lamb or goat will get you pretty close in size.
01:57:43.000Lamb doesn't taste like medicine, but in terms of size, like a shank recipe, for example, or a shoulder recipe, or a neck recipe, lamb would be a perfect substitute.
01:57:52.000But if you want to get close to what a good deer or an elk tastes like, grass-fed beef or bison.
01:57:58.000And when people do buy commercially available venison and elk, doesn't it all come from other countries?
01:58:04.000Does it come from New Zealand, most of it at least?
01:58:06.000Most of whatever it is that you will see called venison will be red stag from New Zealand.
01:58:11.000But there are elk farms in the United States that have seen elk commercially for sale.
02:00:28.000And I cleaned them because I was wondering about this mysterious scent gland that you're not supposed to break up, which is on the smaller back.
02:00:34.000It's kind of like a javelina tramp stamp.
02:00:37.000And so if you skin the animal like you would skin a pig, you never see it.
02:02:54.000And so they're super nervous, and they die really easy.
02:02:56.000Usually it's like, ow, I'm dead, and they fall over.
02:03:00.000And so what you do is you go up, you take your little shot, yay, kill the leno.
02:03:06.000And then got him right there, throw the wobbly bits in a bag and throw it in a cooler, and then get him out of the skin as fast as possible.
02:03:13.000If you do those two things, it's some of the best venison you'll ever eat.
02:03:17.000Why do you have to get it out of the skin as fast as possible?
02:04:40.000If you were trying to coax someone into trying wild game or being interested in wild game, what do you think would be one that you would start them off with?