Ben O'Brien joins us to talk about his time on the island of Lanai, his love of the cat lady, and his new movie about Yeti. We also talk about some new moonshine and some other stuff, but mostly we talk about whiskey. We hope you enjoy this episode and stay tuned for the next one! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your stuff. Thanks for listening and Happy New Year! Cheers, EJ & JP! - The EJ Crew. - EJ and JP is a production of Native Creative Podcasts. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. We are in no way affiliated with Native Creative, LLC. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Native Creative and produced in partnership with Yeti Productions. Thank you for supporting this podcast and all the hard work put into this podcast. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe and subscribe to our other shows! and spread the word to your friends about this podcast on Anchor.fm/NativeCreative. and share it with your fellow podcasters! . and we'll be looking out for you in the next episode! in the mailbag! on Tuesday, November 6th, 2019. Thank you, yeti, Yeti, baby! xoxo. xo, Ej, -EJude and Yeti & Yeti - Yeti and yeti. ~Jude, yeti is a film about their family history in the NWT. Jeebus - Jodie, - yeti & yeti Jadynn, jadyns, jodie & much more! - Jodi, jeebus, etc, etc., etc. - jadie, etc. etc. . . - jedie, jd, etc.. - etc. , etc. & so much more. - etc. Jadie - so much love, jade, etc... jd. & so on. - Jody, j jd
00:01:03.000Hashtags are wrong, man, when people are hashtagging.
00:01:05.000Of course, I do it sometimes just to poke fun at everybody, but I've had probably a dozen people like, man, I tried the cat lady last night.
00:01:12.000Yeah, people are just drinking it just to say they drank it.
00:03:32.000So we'll fly into Norman Wells and go north from there up into the McKenzie Mountains, which are about as far north as you can get before you hit the Arctic Circle.
00:03:40.000So we'll be sniffing the Arctic Circle most days.
00:03:43.000But it's still, it's still Alaska, right?
00:05:29.000You have to, unless you're really, unless you can get in a tent and just kind of zonk out.
00:05:32.000But it's 12, I think it's 12 or 13 days up there.
00:05:35.000So by the time you get to day 5 or 6, you're, I mean, you're living out of your backpack, you're carrying probably 50, 60, 70 pounds in your pack, hunting, climbing every day.
00:05:44.000So, I mean, it's, by the time you get laid down, I don't think it matters what's going on.
00:05:47.000Now, when you do something like that, how much gear are you guys bringing?
00:05:51.000Are you living entirely out of your backpack?
00:05:53.000So, in the float plane, the plane takes you to base camp, which I think in this case is not a float plane, so it'll be a wheel plane.
00:06:06.000And then six days in, they will either come in a helicopter and pick us up and move us if we're not having any luck, or they'll just drop us more gear.
00:06:23.000It's like, for me, it'll be like Austin to Denver, Denver to Edmonton, Edmonton to Norman Wells, hop a charter to base camp, and then from there fly out into the hunting area.
00:08:37.000So there you've got the Beachwood Forest, which is probably, if I would just say hiking, straight up for about an hour and a half or two hours.
00:08:43.000And is that an invasive species for New Zealand?
00:08:52.000And they all were introduced by, and I wish I had really looked up some of the specifics, but they were all introduced by some other countries.
00:09:03.000And so the problem over there, to get on a whole different subject, is that The people on that island, the residents of New Zealand, don't value those animals as part of the landscape.
00:11:48.000Yeah, wolves way more than any animal.
00:11:50.000I was talking to, there was a gal at my work that I was talking to, and she lives in Austin, Texas, and is very, not a hunter, but works at Yeti, and so she's around hunting.
00:13:15.000They don't know that at the turn of the century, they were almost all gone.
00:13:18.000Because we market hunted them to hell.
00:13:20.000And so I think that's, there's just, it's just education, man.
00:13:24.000I just think people need to seek the other side, which I always try to do, and you do all the time.
00:13:30.000Just seek whatever the other side is, and hunting is not always the way to go.
00:13:33.000Yeah, but it's inconvenient because it's hard.
00:13:36.000Say if you're a vegetarian or a vegan, you're going to get your information from animal rights activists, and it's going to be biased in that direction.
00:13:45.000Or if you're a hunter, you're going to get your information from hunting and conservation groups, and it might be biased in the other way.
00:13:52.000I think wolves are a good thing because they're awesome.
00:14:57.000So how do they determine whether or not they should be gunning them down?
00:14:59.000It's, you know, and I don't know, like, the holistic method that they use, but I know our guide up there this year was just talking about he would go to the sheep stations or the ranch owners or some of the areas.
00:15:10.000Some of those big mountain areas are owned privately.
00:15:13.000And some of the areas where they were down a little bit lower, they would just say, go out today and kill 100. And that's what they would do.
00:17:00.000People get super obsessed, and they fetish...
00:17:04.000Numbers like you know the score and what a score is for people don't know they take a tape measure and they go over very Specific sections of the antlers and they calculate all the measurements together and when they do that they come up with some number and there's these Milestone benchmark numbers like a 200 inch whitetails a huge deer or a 400 inch elk is a huge elk it is they get stags that go to 500 and more what?
00:18:38.000It's a weird, like, New Zealand is definitely coming from where we come from and all the things we have, and we just find it normal that we can hunt.
00:18:45.000How many huntable species are there on this, you know, on this continent?
00:18:51.000Going down there is just such a weird...
00:18:53.000And they celebrate the outdoor culture.
00:18:56.000They celebrate hunting and fishing almost in the way that we do.
00:18:59.000And they have public land, much like we do.
00:19:02.000And their public land is more revered and more well-managed and better taken care of, I think, than our public lands.
00:19:40.000Yeah, they used to have an eagle called the Host Eagle, and apparently they killed them off in the 1400s, and they were so big, there's speculation they used to eat people.
00:21:58.000Every time I'm hanging around you, I hear about these like evil mystical animals and Well, I think the real concern was that the host eagle, they might have killed it off.
00:22:08.000The local New Zealand folks might have killed it off back then because they were eating people.
00:26:16.000I watched something on like Planet Earth about them and that they showed them in packs and they eat bone marrow.
00:26:25.000So they would get a bone off the ground, fly up into the air and strategically drop it onto the ground so it would crack open, fly down, eat the insides.
00:26:36.000The same thing, you could just see their brains churning.
00:26:39.000A lot of times you see an animal in the sky, a bird in the sky, and you still get soaring around, but you could see the predatory brain of this Langergar as it flew above us, just churning as it looked around for what to get after.
00:26:52.000Well, they say ravens are stupid smart, like as smart as chimps.
00:28:01.000I vividly remember looking up at some point and seeing this thing floating in the breeze and looking around and thinking, that thing is savage.
00:31:35.000But I think maybe a little bit we could address the fact that hunters are a little bit overcompensated for the fact that people are pushing back on them so much.
00:32:17.000I've always thought in my head like, mm, okay.
00:32:19.000It's like people like largemouth bass fishing, but if you go to a restaurant and they have largemouth bass right next to Chilean sea bass and you pick the largemouth bass, you're kind of an asshole.
00:33:50.000Right, but I would assume that if someone like John, who works for Sitka, this is probably the number one hunting gear clothing company in the world.
00:36:23.000And I think there's just chinks in that armor that if we don't recognize those points, especially the conservation one, I think that's a bigger deal.
00:36:31.000Like conservation, hunting is a tool for conservation.
00:36:34.000It's the same way as translocation is a tool for conservationists.
00:36:37.000You can move the animal to get him away from a certain situation, reintroduce the animal.
00:38:22.000I'm out there and I'm, ah, kill that one because I really like backstraps.
00:38:26.000I know those two things are happening, but they're almost like, you pull that away from what's actually going on and focus on why you're there.
00:39:40.000So, like, are you hunting or are you practicing?
00:39:43.000Well, you're definitely hunting, but that hunting is practice.
00:39:47.000For other hunts where you don't get nearly as many opportunities as you do in Lanai.
00:39:50.000Lanai is one of the best examples of a place that has no predators and a real problem with overpopulation.
00:39:57.000You weren't with me and Dudley that one time where me and him and his son were hanging out and we were there at last light and we were watching these axis deer come off the mountain and we saw I don't know how many hundreds.
00:40:11.000I mean, it might have been seven, eight hundred deer coming off this mountain.
00:40:54.000Hey, everybody, we're never gonna do that.
00:40:56.000But, so, it's one of, in terms of, like, since the animals are there, and there's no talk of eradicating them because they have a real value, the people that live there live off of them.
00:41:08.000Like, all those folks that we were hanging out with, like Roman, and a lot of the people that work at that place, they eat Axis all the time, and it is, without a doubt, not an, it is the opposite, it is the most delicious game meat in the world.
00:41:22.000If it's not I gotta say it's number one.
00:41:25.000If it's not number one, it's number two.
00:42:29.000Like, we were, that group of hunters we had in camp was probably, I mean, I've hunted with a lot of awesome, talented folks, was probably the most skilled group of hunters I've ever been around.
00:43:40.000Stripping away all the things that I know to be right right in my own mind Was that was those people getting them all together and then like meeting Roman and meeting Brandon and meet Alec all our guides and all the locals that were there like Those are things I and I learned more about The quick twitch muscle on a guy to hear oh my god than I've ever learned so I feel like I've learned something I spent time with these people that that made me better at not just hunting but everything and Well,
00:44:06.000for people who've never been around an access deer before, they evolved with tigers.
00:45:05.000Look, if you're a person who values animal protein, if you like ethically sourced animal protein, there's no better way to get it than a place like Lanai.
00:47:21.000And like, for us to separate out one part of our consumption and then like, beat the crap out of it, even though we've been doing it for two million years, is in and of itself kind of weird.
00:47:43.000But I think part of the issue is that people over the last hundred years or so have been so removed from where the meat comes from that when they can find a direct connection like, oh, you went and you shot a moose and then you ate that moose?
00:48:38.000I think having vegans and having animal rights activists and having to be able to have dialogue with them, it also makes sure that you keep people honest, like people that are hunters.
00:49:55.000But I think Locovore was probably pushed out there as like, the way to reverse that second point, the way to reverse the suburban and urban rise, was to take that suburban male or female and say, you can hunt and get your food.
00:51:01.000How many non-hunters who don't either have the wherewithal to get educated or want to, or just don't fall into the anti-hunter side, like the agnostic crowd?
00:51:12.000How many of those are there out there?
00:51:28.000And if you wanted to go out and procure your own meat, first of all, if you wanted to do it with a rifle, that's going to take a tremendous amount of time.
00:51:48.000Even if you get with John Dudley and you learn how to be a great archer, and you understand that in your suburban area there are some places where there's deer that you may kill, you've got to get access to those places.
00:51:59.000And then when you're done with that, you've got to figure out a way to get that thing from dead deer to meat and all the other things.
00:52:42.000There is just this big gap, and my father got me into it, but my brother doesn't hunt, but he has respect for it and understands what's going on.
00:52:51.000I think at the time that I was introduced to hunting, my brother was more interested in going out with his friends than Saturday mornings were not for getting up early.
00:52:59.000And so we're essentially the same person, but I just went this way, and he didn't go that way.
00:54:16.000So that's another whole nother can of worms, but it could it could go away Yeah, I think the the issue is that so many people are opposed to it because they're so removed from the realities of the wild and They just feel some sort of moral superiority by either not eating meat entirely or by not killing their own meat They're not killing their own meat is really ridiculous.
00:54:38.000Like my wife was having a conversation with someone They were out to dinner with a bunch of people while I was on an elk hunt and The guy was eating a steak.
00:55:05.000I was saying something the other day, like...
00:55:07.000And I got a lot of, like, people were looking at me like I was weird at work.
00:55:11.000One of my buddies at work was eating a chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A. And I look on the bag and there's a cartoon chicken on the bag.
00:55:18.000And in my mind, I'm like, that's like building a swimming pool by the lake.
00:55:21.000It's fucking weird and irony that we're like...
00:55:25.000Saying, hey, I'm eating a chicken, but here's a cartoon version of it so we can celebrate the fact that we just murdered this chicken and we fried it up.
00:56:30.000Because my kid, my son's nine months old, and from before he was born until now, there's cartoon bears everywhere, and there's like this, you know, personification of these cute little creatures that come along with being a little baby.
00:57:07.000I mean, if Yogi killed a hiker, if a hiker fucked up on one of the episodes of Yellowstone and just took a wrong turn and Yogi's eating his ribcage,
00:57:22.000a bunch of people show up and- Like Pooh Bear and Yogi are just fucking going at it.
00:57:45.000I have no idea why bears get this thing, because bears are around.
00:57:49.000It's not like there aren't bears around.
00:57:51.000They're in almost all states, aren't they?
00:57:53.000Yeah, but what it is is people that don't experience them firsthand, and when they do experience them firsthand, usually they're in their car like, look, a bear, and they drive by.
00:58:12.000There was, um, my friend Tommy, who lives in Connecticut, sent me a picture of these bears that were in the middle of the street duking it out, uh, in Connecticut.
00:58:22.000Like, they're invading Connecticut now, and they don't have any pressure.
00:58:26.000So here's the thing about bear hunting as opposed to anything else.
00:58:30.000Like, California's weird in that they don't hunt mountain lions, but what's good about that is California has very little deer.
00:58:40.000Now, it's not good if you like to hunt deer, but it is good if you like to drive down the street and not slam in a fucking deer.
00:58:46.000Like, Iowa doesn't have mountain lions.
00:59:02.000People, like, everywhere you look, in, like, Iowa and Montana, these people have pickup trucks with these battering ram front grill things that they put.
00:59:10.000Well, how many deer did we kill in Lanai?
01:00:01.000People think stupid shit like that, right?
01:00:03.000In the moment, I would have been driving my car and I would have seen this deer flying through there and I'd be like, well, it was a good run.
01:00:32.000But that's, I mean, you know, you start to, like, break down those things.
01:00:36.000Like, more animals, less animals, the value of them, and all these things.
01:00:39.000What a complex freaking thing to have to figure out.
01:00:42.000I always just get, the more you read, the more you jump in, the more you go, you know, going to New Zealand.
01:00:50.000Going to, you know, Northwest Territories, going to Nepal, you go to these places and you just realize that everybody has the same essential problem.
01:01:43.000And I'm sure in those 100,000 generations, there was plenty of people that didn't, you know, exist on the hunter-gatherer diet alone, but the majority of humans...
01:01:51.000I wonder how many there were, honestly, because I feel like people were just really super opportunistic back then.
01:01:56.000I mean, if you were just trying to survive and struggle, I don't think you could say, like, hey, I don't want to eat that rabbit because I feel bad.
01:02:05.000And then you have to wear its pelt, and that's a different deal.
01:02:09.000I was writing a piece one time, and I got into reading about these basket weaver people that were in Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, which is really close to Vegas.
01:02:20.000And you should go if you've never been up there.
01:02:54.000There's a ranch in Texas that a buddy of mine went to, and he's like, you could just go over there and touch these things, and they might be 5,000 years old.
01:03:02.000I did that when my wife and I went up there.
01:03:04.000You could have had a can of spray paint.
01:05:02.000And everything, you know, you can do to do it, whether it's with deer, or whether it's with corn, or whether it's with tomatoes, or whatever you can grow.
01:05:18.000So that's where it gets really complicated.
01:05:20.000And that's where I think that hunters have done a really good job over the last...
01:05:25.000X amount of years, describing to people, like, if you're going to eat meat, this is the most ethical, the most cruelty-free, and the most natural way to do it.
01:05:36.000And you're talking about an animal that literally, like, okay, here's a perfect example.
01:05:41.000That deer, that mule deer that you're looking at right here, that deer had no idea I was alive until it died.
01:06:20.000To where you are now, I mean, you've evolved in this, like, what you see as hunting and in our community and in our world and doing different things.
01:06:27.000And in some ways, you evolve from, when I was a kid, we just shot deer.
01:06:50.000You're not a trophy hunter, but you do appreciate The difference between a small antlered animal and a large one, in terms of its maturity and how awesome it is to see a 380-inch elk or a 200-inch deer, your pursuit is different than it was when we shot that moose.
01:07:07.000It is also, but also part of the pursuit that's different is that I understand that the benefit of going after mature animals is if you're getting a mature deer, you're talking about a deer that's five years old, that deer has had five breeding seasons,
01:08:07.000And so you're out there like, I really love access to your meat, but when we're over there, they're like, we have certain call bucks and there's certain things you want to shoot.
01:08:14.000It's like, I really love access to your deer, and if I was out there just for meat, I would have shot the youngest deer.
01:08:18.000Probably not the youngest, but I would have picked a certain age group.
01:08:21.000Yeah, but I'll tell you, here's the argument against that with axis deer.
01:11:19.000But the thing about this, an argument for hunting bears is different than the argument for hunting any other animal because you do eat them and you need to kill them because they don't have a natural predator.
01:11:28.000The problem with bears is, especially if we went in Alberta, Jesus Christ, they are everywhere.
01:11:34.000People that think there's a shortage of bears need to go to Alberta.
01:11:39.000People that want to have one of those experiences where you walk away from that and be like, Did I just do that?
01:11:44.000Yeah, are there 20 fucking bears hanging out over here?
01:13:31.000And so, after a while, he started running, you know, got running shoes and started to get into the actual sport of running.
01:13:39.000And then it seems to me, like, three or four years later, he was like, I think I'm going to run this 50-mile race in the mountains of Maryland.
01:14:46.000I could take this thing and then he ran 50 and then I think one time he ran 100 and then he ran the entire C&O Canal one time 183 miles and I was like I think it was in maybe a senior in high school and I had like had to drive to the checkpoints and like give him food and stuff.
01:15:02.000So he never started until he was in his 40s?
01:15:04.000God maybe 50s it was 40s probably I would say yeah late 40s.
01:15:09.000So what did he keep does he still do it how old is he now?
01:15:12.000He would still do it if his knees would allow him to.
01:15:13.000He's mid-60s now, 65. His knees are fucked up.
01:15:16.000But he'll still bike and he hikes all the time now.
01:15:24.000And when he gets around one of his buddies in particular that they ran together, they're like old army buddies and talking about this experience that they shared together.
01:15:33.000Like, remember that one time on Mile 94 when you trip and fail and And it's just like they're telling old war stories.
01:15:40.000It's like this visceral thing that they share.
01:17:41.000And it's one of those things where we went to hunt them and I didn't really have much of an idea of what blue sheep was until we started getting into the thing.
01:18:36.000So there's several bins of baby chicks, and this goat is just standing there, and it just reaches in, chews one down, and the goats aren't carnivorous, so they don't have the teeth for this.
01:18:49.000And this baby chick's trying to fucking claw its way out.
01:23:31.000So you go up there, you're looking for this blue sheep.
01:23:34.000Yeah, so we're looking for the blue sheep.
01:23:36.000So I'll start off by saying that we were hunting in a very rural, when I say rural, it's like six days walk from the nearest road where we were at.
01:23:54.000And so we're in this remote region of Nepal, in this district called the Rokum District.
01:23:59.000And to say that the Rokum District is full of this, like, primal, these primal people and animals, I mean, it is really just out their place.
01:24:18.000And the people there were part of a civil war, the Nepali Civil War, from 1996 to 2006. This district was maybe the epicenter of the rebellion.
01:24:30.000There was a Communist Party rebellion against the government, against the monarchy.
01:24:40.000Amazing, because they've lived in this abject poverty for their entire lives.
01:24:44.000And not only that, they've lived through this Civil War in recent times.
01:24:50.000I think we think about Civil War as this, like, thing we go to see at a national park.
01:24:55.000So anyway, we're with these people, we're hunting, we go into, we get helicoptered into 10,000 feet, which is this just knob in the middle of nowhere.
01:25:05.000We hike about a full day to our base camp, which is this little village called Dule Yarsa in the middle of, of course, nowhere.
01:25:56.000And she starts telling this story about how right where we were sitting during the rebellion, the police, the government police came in and shot six men right where we were sitting and buried them out back.
01:26:08.000And this is like, this lady must be in her mid-50s and she looked like she was 80. I mean, she's just like, it was this transformative thing for me sitting there listening to this being translated like, holy crap, where are we?
01:26:23.000And in the midst of that story they were passing around, they had made this moonshine, which they called Roxy.
01:26:28.000It's just like made in a ceramic thing outside of where we were at.
01:29:26.000And at some point, I just, like, it snapped in the room.
01:29:30.000It was just, like, spinning like crazy.
01:29:33.000And I was thinking, and I knew about altitude sickness, and I knew that I live in a place that's basically sea level, and I was at a place that was 13,000 feet, and I've never done that before.
01:34:13.000So I didn't say anything to Ben about the baby, like, right off, and we're getting going, and eventually I just kind of collapsed, and I'm like, look, man, you know, I was talking positively, and I wasn't hallucinating any more than the baby and the wolf, which is enough.
01:34:27.000And we get down, we get going down this ravine, and the camp, you can start to see camp, guys putting camp together.
01:34:33.000And, um, essentially he was like, just give me your pack, give me your trucking poles, give me everything.
01:34:38.000And he held my shoulders and just kind of one step, one step, one step.
01:35:40.000I remember coming down this switchback trail to go into camp, and I remember not...
01:35:47.000Much like when I fell, I was like, I'm aware that my feet are hitting the ground, and these trekking poles are hitting the ground, and I'm aware that I'm doing this, but I feel like I can't control it.
01:35:56.000I feel like I could be floating through the air just as well as walking.
01:35:58.000It was a weird, like, head-detached-from-body feeling.
01:36:05.000At the end of the day, I think what they thought was like it was the sickness that everybody else got coming on at the same time as altitude and it was just my body was fighting this battle against itself.
01:37:32.000And I think, you know, eventually I had some water and I went to sleep.
01:37:35.000And I woke up in the middle of the night and Ben, the medic, was in the tent clutching his little medical bag and was sleeping in there with me.
01:38:22.000Somebody smarter than me could tell you what actually was going on, whether I was just a pussy or there was some actual scientific stuff going down.
01:38:32.000I gotta fork a joint since it's illegal.
01:39:54.000And we get to a spot where our main guide, Mon, had spotted some sheep and so we get to where he had spotted some sheep and I'm feeling tired I'm like that we're going up as we go so we may be there 14,000 feet or 13.5 at that point and We sit down,
01:40:14.000and he's glassing his sheep, and I remember glassing them, and like, oh, okay.
01:40:17.000They're like, so far up, you can't imagine going that far to get them.
01:40:21.000And then my stomach just like, oh, no.
01:40:54.000Yeah, and it was like, our camera guy, one of our main camera guys, Renan, who's an amazing person, a whole other podcast about that guy, he shit his pants, I think, during, like, day one.
01:41:07.000And I don't know how many pairs of pants he had, but I remember watching him scrubbing the shit out of his pants, thinking, oh shit, that's going to get interesting.
01:41:15.000But by the time we got into sheep country, we were all okay with the occasional shart or whatever's going on.
01:41:21.000Because your body's just like, you're realizing that your mind has a directive, but your body is dealing with some pretty extreme conditions.
01:41:28.000And I wonder, I always wonder now looking back on it, like how well I would have done if there wasn't sickness.
01:41:33.000And like I had some stuff like go to Kathmandu and it's just dust and dirt and all this craziness.
01:41:38.000And I had going into it like respiratory issues and then sickness and then visions of things.
01:41:43.000And so by the time you get in there, you're like, shit.
01:41:47.000You know, it really makes you respect the fuck out of Jim Shockey.
01:41:52.000For people who don't know who Jim Shockey is, Jim Shockey is extremely respected in the hunting world, but let's just step aside with that.
01:42:02.000He's an amazingly accomplished hunter.
01:42:04.000But maybe even more important than that, he's got a show called Uncharted.
01:45:54.000I mean, he goes to these incredibly remote places and communicates with these tribespeople that live in the jungle or in the mountains or wherever it is.
01:46:03.000And you could tell that this is a guy, Jim is like, what is he, probably 60 or so?
01:46:09.000And he realizes that he's lived a long life, he's experienced a lot of wild and amazing things, and now at this point in life, what he really desires are extreme experiences.
01:46:20.000Of a human kind and also of a wild kind, like in nature.
01:46:25.000And there's like a different level to him.
01:46:28.000The outdoor TV thing is funny just because I do appreciate and have friends that fall into that...
01:47:14.000And it's like there's such a juxtaposition between what Steve and Jim and some of these other, like Heartland Bowhunter, these guys are able to even cinematically produce.
01:47:22.000Yeah, Heartland Bowhunter, they do a really good job with their editing and their footage.
01:48:32.000There's a few Into the Backcountry's really good, too.
01:48:34.000But Meat Eater's probably the one I would send them to.
01:48:37.000I'd be like, the narration that you're going to get and the intellectual understanding of how to present these subjects and how to...
01:48:48.000Yeah, you know I mean that's what's important to me like as I get along in my life and career and like I have a son now and I'm trying to figure out what I want him to know and It's important to me that there's people like Steve Rinella out there representing my thoughts and feelings in a way that I probably couldn't.
01:49:06.000So I don't want to struggle with that.
01:49:09.000If he says, hey dad, let's watch an outdoor channel, I don't want to be like, oh, I don't know, man.
01:49:14.000So I do appreciate Steve for what he does, and there's a bunch of them that are really good.
01:49:21.000I guess I would say, at the end of the day, I've always struggled with Being in a room full of hunters and watching the Outdoor Channel because we're hypercritical of every little thing.
01:49:34.000Well, there's that, but that's different to me.
01:49:37.000You don't think that flows into the actual, like, the quality of the content and how you enjoy it?
01:49:42.000No, because I feel like if I'm watching Nate Simmons or Steve Ranallo or Remy Warren or any of those guys, I don't think anybody should be second-guessing what those guys do in the field.
01:49:49.000Because you have a level of proficiency.
01:51:55.000The majority of shows are people who are paying for airtime, and then companies come in and sponsor their show and pay that for their...
01:52:01.000Isn't that weird, though, that a network on actual regular DirecTV, like you can get to a channel 605, 606, 604. You know what's interesting?
01:52:11.000The hunting channels, which are, like, I would say...
01:52:17.000Overwhelmingly Christian, like in terms of viewership and in terms of the people that are on the show, are literally two or three channels away from black dicks and white chicks on DirecTV.
01:52:29.000The porn channels are like 596, 597, and then you go 604. It's like, hey, y'all, we're out here representing God's great earth and the beauty and the bounty of Jesus Christ out here in the forest.
01:52:45.000Well, you're always two clicks away from something terrible.
01:54:11.000Like, Joe Scarborough and his fiancee, do you know that whole story where the president tweeted that the woman came to Mar-a-Lago, but she had facelift surgery, and she was bleeding very badly, and he did not hang out with them.
01:54:59.000Yeah, we're gonna be there for a total coincidence, my wife doesn't believe it, but the total archery challenge is actually there at the same time.
01:55:32.000I do every once in a while flick on CNN or something, but I'm not one of those people.
01:55:39.000I've seen people in my life that get so wrapped up in that stuff that it becomes their reality.
01:55:44.000I've never been affected by anything Donald Trump has done in my daily life.
01:55:48.000The healthcare thing is a different deal, but...
01:55:51.000But I think in my daily life, there's few things that directly affect me other than something that seems existential, other than the environment and freaking healthcare.
01:56:00.000Right, but that doesn't even affect you where you feel it.
01:56:34.000If I see a Russian on the street, I'll punch him right in his face.
01:56:36.000Well, you saw that news report where the reporter, he admitted that this whole Russian thing is kind of bullshit and it's just for ratings?
02:00:22.000I created the premium, cooler category, and when you create a category like that, and become a business like Yeti is, you're going to have people that follow along.
02:00:33.000And they kind of need us, and we kind of need them, and it's whatever, but as long as they're not infringing on the things that are intellectual property and things of that nature.
02:02:32.000But isn't it smart, though, that people are that cynical?
02:02:35.000I mean, look, but here's a perfect example.
02:02:37.000I rant and rave about the glory of a 1965 Corvette.
02:02:41.000I don't work for 1965 Corvettes, okay?
02:02:44.000It's just like there's a reality about certain things that are awesome that people have created that I celebrate.
02:02:50.000And I don't say, I'm not going to talk about Zevia because they're not a sponsor, or I'm not going to talk about Yeti because they're not a sponsor.
02:04:36.000So they shoot this arrow, and then with your phone, you can track the knock through a Bluetooth device that has some sort of a GPS locator on it.
02:04:48.000Oh, you shoot it in the grass, which I do often.
02:05:20.000But these knocks, it's going to be a good way to find arrows for sure, but what's interesting is it'll be a good way to track animals if you shoot an animal.
02:05:32.000Like a lot of times, People shoot an animal, and the animal runs, and it's in thick cover, and you can't find it.
02:06:57.000What's crazy was, Ben and I were there, I shot at this one deer, and other deer that were like 30 feet away from us jumped out of the bushes.
02:07:18.000And they ran off, and we knew they didn't cross into the next little paddock, like, the next across this road, so I circled around and got up on this, like, mound so I could see into the grass, and I could see them in there.
02:07:28.000They're just, like, talking to me, like, shit, what do we do?
02:07:50.000Animals evolved to experience whatever the...
02:07:53.000Dangers of their environment are and their dangers are 100% people.
02:07:57.000Yeah, that animal is probably four or five years old been around people for four or five years It's like oh I get it when people around they're trying to eat you man people have never got me in this grass Yeah.
02:11:20.000And we got into these mountain passes in these valleys where there was like, you know, two, three feet of snow and it was frozen on the top and you were just like, every step you would crunch two feet down.
02:11:34.000And there was a time during that where we, we summited this, probably the highest peak we were at, which was mid-15s, close to 16. And I was just like, I can't, this is, I hope the sheep are right there because this is it.
02:13:22.000Oh, yeah, they're burning through that thing.
02:13:24.000And not only did they eat eyeballs, so Cole had shot a sheep and he was caping out the head, taking the hide off the head.
02:13:31.000Pop the eyeballs out and I think jokingly handed to one of the porters like ha ha eat this and I watched that dude put it on the end of a stick and put it over fire and eat it.
02:13:44.000So they I didn't see this personally, but they were picky.
02:13:47.000Yeah, they took the punch that the gut sack and and cut it open flapped out the insides and And took it back and cooked that too, you know?
02:13:56.000It's kind of like a haggis, tripe kind of thing.
02:14:00.000And so, I mean, they just like, they just devoured the thing.
02:16:44.000These guys would take, like, a 90-pound suitcase, put it on top of their head, and just go walking up these trails I was describing like it was nothing.
02:17:07.000I mean, like, and they're wearing, like, these guys are wearing, like, sandals, and some of them will be wearing, like, old sneakers, and they're just wearing, like, whatever clothes that they would be able to gather.
02:17:19.000And they're doing these amazing things, and when they take a break from something that you or I could never conceive of doing, they're like, happy as could be.
02:17:27.000Their perspective on life is only hardship and poverty.
02:17:33.000That's the only thing they'll ever know.
02:17:35.000But yet, they're happier than I think maybe I could ever be.
02:17:39.000That's a big part of Sebastian Junger's book, Tribe.
02:17:45.000A big part of it is how living easy and not sustaining massive amounts of difficulty, like most people do in these impoverished communities, is one of the reasons why people aren't happy.
02:17:57.000Is that people actually need struggle, which is very counterintuitive for a lot of people.
02:18:02.000And I remember coming back, there was a bunch of moments, and I could describe all these moments where I'd be at my wits end just thinking, I'm just a regular dude.
02:18:14.000And I'd get to a point where I'd be just completely exhausted.
02:18:17.000And I would look over and here would come this porter, this, you know, 25-year-old kid with a basket strapped on his head with, you know, 100 pounds of stuff, wearing sneakers, and I got $400 Italian boots on and sick gear, and I'm like...
02:18:32.000And it would always come at these opportune moments where I'd look over and I'd see that and be like, oh, crap.
02:19:48.000It gave, like, there's a lot of things.
02:19:50.000Our main guide, Mon Bahador, didn't have shoes until he was, like, 13. And they used to go hunting, and they would build their own guns.
02:19:58.000And he described to us a couple times where, like, he remember hiking and hunting sheep, and, like, the gun would blow up on his back and blow his shirt off.
02:21:16.000I don't know what the number is, but it's thousands.
02:21:19.000I think we were probably within a couple of dozen Westerners that had been to that area post-war and had brought 24, 25 jobs, plus the people that prepped that, plus all that stuff.
02:21:30.000So, like, seeing that is pretty powerful to me.
02:21:34.000And shooting that sheep and not even giving a shit whether the horns made it back or not.
02:21:40.000I mean, somebody could question my motive all they want.
02:21:44.000But within the system and the structure that's set up there now, hunting is one of the more valuable things that they...
02:21:50.000one of the more valuable tools they have to get better at everything.
02:22:01.000Yeah, and we can look down upon that, but it is a natural resource along the same veins as if you live in an area that has fracking, that's a natural resource.
02:22:12.000If you live in an area that they dig minerals out of the ground, that's a natural resource.
02:22:19.000It's just the reality of their environment.
02:22:21.000And so there's so many, I think that there is arguments against what we did.
02:22:25.000If somebody like broke it down, like I always try to break it down from the other side, I think people say like, why don't you just take pictures of it?
02:22:38.000People don't understand how difficult it is to do what you did.
02:22:41.000To do what you did and then have this final accomplishment, which is to get close enough to an animal where either it doesn't know you're there or you get in a good place where it can't wind you, it doesn't smell you, and you can take it out and kill it.
02:23:15.000Okay, but here's the problem with that.
02:23:16.000Their response to that could easily be, you know, what about if you decided to hunt people?
02:23:22.000If you paid a million dollars to go hunt a person, and that money fed all these tribespeople in Mozambique, is it okay to go out and hunt people?
02:23:30.000No, you surely still have an ethical and moral obligation to do it.
02:23:34.000But to them, to animal rights activists, you have an ethical and moral obligation to let that sheep live.
02:23:46.000Because we only ate it there because we didn't have a freezer full of back straps and because That thing didn't occur the way it normally occurs for me.
02:23:54.000There was like some complexity in that of that Yeah, my mind right crap man, you know Am I really over here just to collect this sheep and bring it home and show people but you're also filming yeah, we may oh we made what will be hopefully an awesome film and so At the end of the day,
02:24:09.000I check myself, and I said, did you do it for the right reasons?
02:24:13.000And after I look back at the trip, I'm like, man, there are a hundred reasons why I did it, and they're all good.
02:24:18.000And what we did was a good impact on the place we went, on the animals that we hunted.
02:24:24.000To me, it's all good, and I would love to have arguing with somebody that feels differently about that.
02:24:30.000Plus, you go to trip balls and see a fake baby and a fake wolf.
02:24:34.000People pay a lot of money for that shit.
02:25:30.000We'll be back next week with a one podcast with my friend Ari Shafir on July 18th, which is the release date of his new Netflix special, which is going to be fucking amazing.
02:25:41.000It's a two-part special, Childhood and Adulthood.