The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1122 - Donnie Vincent

00:00:02.000 Five, four, three, two, one.

00:00:06.000 Donnie Vincent.

00:00:07.000 What's going on?

00:00:08.000 How are you, buddy?

00:00:09.000 Good.

00:00:09.000 Really good.

00:00:10.000 I'm very excited that you didn't know about floating at all.

00:00:12.000 You didn't know about float tanks even remotely until you came here.

00:00:15.000 Yeah.

00:00:16.000 And it's wicked looking.

00:00:17.000 It's fun, man.

00:00:18.000 If you've got time after the show, you can float.

00:00:21.000 If you want to do it, I might have to do it just to say that I've done it.

00:00:24.000 But yeah, I didn't know the science behind it.

00:00:28.000 Other than, obviously, floating would be, you know...

00:00:33.000 Just feels good.

00:00:34.000 Just to meditate and just to sit there in a quiet...

00:00:36.000 You know when you're a little kid and you go in a swimming pool or something and you put your ears just under the water and you get that kind of...

00:00:42.000 Yeah.

00:00:42.000 When everything's just peaceful and you can just sit there and you can't hear your mother or you can't hear your girlfriend or whatever and it's just quiet.

00:00:47.000 I assume it's a lot like that.

00:00:49.000 It's very telling that you said two women.

00:00:51.000 You didn't say your dad.

00:00:52.000 You didn't say your grandpa.

00:00:54.000 My dad never talked to me.

00:00:55.000 Maybe that's a whole other subject matter.

00:00:57.000 That's another part of the problem probably.

00:00:58.000 But yeah, I am trying to get floating spread across the world.

00:01:02.000 I think it's the best way for people to relax.

00:01:04.000 There's nothing like it.

00:01:05.000 First of all, physically you relax because the water has so much Epsom salts in it.

00:01:10.000 It's just really good for your muscles.

00:01:11.000 It's good for sore muscles, overworked.

00:01:17.000 It's great for that, but it's also great in the environment where you're in that tank with total darkness, total silence.

00:01:24.000 Oh, total darkness.

00:01:26.000 Oh yeah, it's pitch black in there.

00:01:27.000 You close the door, you don't see a ray of light.

00:01:31.000 And then your ears are underwater.

00:01:33.000 And I have to get some earplugs for guests.

00:01:35.000 I don't mind having the salt in my ears, but some people get a little weirded out by the salt.

00:01:41.000 Do we have them in there?

00:01:43.000 I bought a big thing of it.

00:01:44.000 I did. 0.96

00:01:45.000 My memory's fucked up, dude. 0.93

00:01:47.000 What's wrong with me? 0.99

00:01:49.000 I bought a whole giant jug of it, right?

00:01:52.000 But the other thing is that it just gives you alone time in a way that you don't ever get.

00:01:57.000 When you're floating in there, you're not thinking about your body.

00:01:59.000 You're not thinking about anything.

00:02:01.000 You're just floating.

00:02:02.000 And it's just very peaceful.

00:02:04.000 It makes you have a real moment to consider things.

00:02:09.000 I've made some of my best decisions in that thing.

00:02:11.000 And I don't think...

00:02:12.000 I mean, obviously, we all know the rat race right now. 0.91

00:02:15.000 None of us...

00:02:15.000 I mean, it's why I go to the mountains.

00:02:17.000 It's the same thing.

00:02:18.000 Sitting there in peace.

00:02:20.000 And my mind has been doing this for years where early on when I would go in the Arctic or early on when I'd go into the mountains or something like that, everything was frantic.

00:02:30.000 Like, I had to do things really quickly.

00:02:31.000 I wanted to cover a lot of ground.

00:02:34.000 Everything, packing, moving, everything was so frantic.

00:02:37.000 And then when I started realizing that if I would just stop and slow down and look at the very tiniest details around me, no matter where I was or who I was with, then I started having a great appreciation of my presence.

00:02:50.000 And so I'm sure something like that is just because of the darkness and because of the floating, it's just hyper-extended into that presence of You can trick yourself into thinking that nothing else is going on in your life.

00:03:03.000 Right.

00:03:04.000 Yeah, no, I agree with you.

00:03:05.000 I think that we take this attitude that we have in the city when you're dealing with traffic and massive amounts of people, and you sort of have that same momentum when you go into the mountains.

00:03:15.000 And if you do do that, you're not going to appreciate it the same way.

00:03:18.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:03:19.000 You've got to look around.

00:03:20.000 Yeah.

00:03:20.000 I did that for a few years.

00:03:22.000 I would go, I thought I had to accomplish something.

00:03:26.000 So I'd go to site A and hunt there.

00:03:28.000 And I'd try to, as horrible as this sentence is to say, I'd try to kill as fast as I could so I could get out of there and go to site B and site C. And then I started realizing, I actually had a friend of mine, he's like, man, I think you're...

00:03:40.000 I think you're hunting too much.

00:03:42.000 I think this is going to catch up with you and the experience is going to start to degrade for you.

00:03:46.000 But it was almost like I was trying to accomplish really fast goals.

00:03:50.000 And when I started slowing that down and saying, hey, I don't want to go to the Arctic for seven days and try to knock all these things off my list in seven days.

00:03:58.000 I want to go to the Arctic for 30 days.

00:04:01.000 And now let the Arctic come to me.

00:04:05.000 Now I just want to sit still and be quiet and not chase the Arctic down, but I want it to come to me.

00:04:12.000 Well, I think people who don't have any experience in the outdoors and certainly people who don't hunt, Don't understand it.

00:04:20.000 And their version of it, they're getting either from movies, where hunters are always portrayed as villains, or they're getting it from these outdoor TV shows, which I don't think do a good job of representing what it actually is.

00:04:32.000 Even the really good ones, like Ranella's show, which I think is the best show out there.

00:04:36.000 Sure.

00:04:36.000 It's still 22 minutes with commercials.

00:04:39.000 And I just don't think that you get a real sense of what it's like.

00:04:43.000 What I think you did that's really interesting, and one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on, is you're doing films.

00:04:50.000 Like, you're doing an hour-long film about a hunt.

00:04:54.000 And in that, you really get an understanding of the environment.

00:04:58.000 You take great shots, or whoever your cameraman is, great shots of the environment.

00:05:02.000 Super talented.

00:05:04.000 Close-ups on leaves floating down a river, and you get a real sense of it, which is missing.

00:05:11.000 You're still getting a blink of multiple weeks in the wilderness, but at least you get a feel like, oh, this is something very different than what's being portrayed.

00:05:23.000 This is like this intense...

00:05:26.000 Almost spiritual experience in this very bizarre environment that surrounds civilization.

00:05:32.000 And we think of it, you know, in these weird terms, but when you're out there in it, it's very difficult to capture what that's like.

00:05:40.000 And I think you've done an amazing job in doing that.

00:05:43.000 Jamie's put some of your stuff up online here where you get a chance to see it, but...

00:05:47.000 And I appreciate that.

00:05:48.000 It's hunting.

00:05:50.000 It drives me nuts.

00:05:51.000 Go ahead.

00:05:51.000 No, I'm just going to say, whoever's doing your editing, he's fantastic.

00:05:57.000 Yeah, he's really talented.

00:05:58.000 He does a really, really good job of just picking good shots and just the overall experience is relayed very well.

00:06:07.000 You get a chance to see, oh, this is an adventure.

00:06:10.000 This isn't just as simple as someone's going out there trying to fill a freezer with wild game meat.

00:06:16.000 No, you're on an adventure and then the wild game meet is a part of it. 0.99

00:06:20.000 It's all a lot of shit going on. 0.98

00:06:22.000 And this piece right here was specifically done for Nat Geo because they have the National Geographic Society, which is the magazine, and then they have National Geographic, which is the TV show. 0.99

00:06:35.000 And so they wanted to do...

00:06:37.000 They hit me up for a bunch of TV shows.

00:06:39.000 They wanted me to, you know, come and find Bigfoot.

00:06:41.000 They wanted me to... 1.00

00:06:43.000 Those motherfuckers! 1.00

00:06:45.000 They called me for everything. 1.00

00:06:46.000 They would call me and say, where are you right now?

00:06:51.000 Where's your cabin?

00:06:52.000 And I'd say, I don't have a cabin.

00:06:54.000 And they'd say, well, surely you're skinning a beaver out right now.

00:06:57.000 And I'd say, no, no, no.

00:06:58.000 I live in Wisconsin, just out of Minneapolis, and I'm walking my Labrador down the street in shorts.

00:07:05.000 And so they said, well, they really want to do a TV show.

00:07:09.000 And they wanted it to encapsulate hunting to some degree.

00:07:13.000 But the society, the magazine was against hunting.

00:07:16.000 The TV show would allow it. 0.55

00:07:19.000 So they wanted me to do a no bullshit sermon, if you will, download, looking down the barrel of the camera and just said, this isn't going to go public. 0.55

00:07:28.000 This doesn't have to be pretty. 0.86

00:07:30.000 It's not going to be edited well.

00:07:31.000 But just please tell us why you hunt.

00:07:34.000 We try to explain it so that we can bring it to our producers and say, this is why he hunts.

00:07:39.000 And so I did this, had my little temper tantrum there, and in doing it, realized it made me really question, you know, I'd say, okay, so you want to know why I hunt?

00:07:51.000 And then it made me take a step back and say...

00:07:55.000 Man, for the love of God, I really don't even know.

00:07:57.000 I don't know why I hunt, but I can explain some of the areas.

00:08:01.000 It doesn't explain why I'm a hunter.

00:08:03.000 It doesn't explain exactly why I hunt, but I can tell you I love the adventure.

00:08:07.000 I can tell you I love the really clean protein that I get for me and my family.

00:08:11.000 I can tell you that our ancestry unequivocally comes from 100% groups of hunters and gatherers that's around the world.

00:08:20.000 I can tell you all of these points.

00:08:22.000 I can tell you that I love seeing antlers of all sizes and the hides, and I can tell you I love watching grizzly bears eat blueberries and watching salmon come up a river to spawn.

00:08:31.000 I can tell you all of these things, but I don't know if all of those things make me a hunter or if I'm just experiencing all those things because I am a hunter.

00:08:39.000 It's just very difficult to articulate.

00:08:42.000 It's very difficult to articulate how much you love something, yet you're willing to engage it in such A heavy way, such a violent way that you're willing to step in, kill it, cut it up, get your hands bloody, because really that's what it is.

00:08:58.000 We love it so much that we're willing to expose ourselves to the elements, put ourselves in these places, let the arrow or the bullet go.

00:09:08.000 Watch an animal die, which is never an interesting thing to watch.

00:09:12.000 I say interesting, but it's just not a pleasurable thing to watch.

00:09:15.000 But this is how we engage as hunters into these environments.

00:09:18.000 And so I was trying to convey that to Nat Geo in a seven-minute piece.

00:09:24.000 And Kyle, after he put it together, he's like, I think we should release this.

00:09:27.000 And I said, hell no.

00:09:28.000 Hell no.

00:09:29.000 I talk about PETA in it.

00:09:31.000 I talk about Being a vegetarian in it, which I'm not against vegetarianism.

00:09:36.000 PETA is a joke, but he insisted, so he finally won the argument.

00:09:42.000 Well, PETA, you know, the idea behind ethical treatment of animals is amazing.

00:09:48.000 Of course.

00:09:49.000 I mean, like you were saying, you have a Labrador.

00:09:51.000 The idea that hunters hate animals, too, is also a very confusing thing.

00:09:55.000 Hunters love animals.

00:09:56.000 There's a lot of hunters that have dogs and cats.

00:09:59.000 Yeah.

00:09:59.000 But ethical treatment of animals is imperative.

00:10:03.000 It's very important.

00:10:04.000 I mean, if we are really the stewards of nature, if we're really the top of the food chain, and we most certainly are, and we're conscious, and we have a conscience, we absolutely should be ethical in our treatment of animals and take care of them and be kind to them.

00:10:19.000 The problem with PETA is that's not really what they're about.

00:10:23.000 They're the animal liberation organization.

00:10:25.000 That's what they really are.

00:10:26.000 What they're about, they don't want any animals to be pets.

00:10:30.000 They don't want people to have pets.

00:10:32.000 This sounds radical, but it's absolutely true.

00:10:35.000 In fact, PETA euthanizes thousands of pets a year.

00:10:39.000 They kill pets, and they kill them quickly.

00:10:41.000 They don't keep them alive very long, and the idea being is that For the critics, the idea that's been bandied about is they don't want these animals to live and breed and stay pets.

00:10:52.000 They want animals to only be wild.

00:10:54.000 And that's fine.

00:10:56.000 But there's thousands and thousands of years of domesticated animals.

00:11:00.000 And if you want to let those animals loose...

00:11:03.000 And have them wild, you have a whole, another series of problems.

00:11:07.000 Unless you want to kill all the golden retrievers and all the chihuahuas, they're not going to survive in the wild.

00:11:12.000 Yeah, we've perpetuated past that a long time ago.

00:11:16.000 Yeah, they're not wild animals.

00:11:17.000 They're just not.

00:11:18.000 No.

00:11:18.000 Yeah, like a little fat kid's not a wild animal either.

00:11:21.000 You leave him in the woods, he's going to die just as quickly as your fucking chihuahua. 1.00

00:11:24.000 He's going to be food. 1.00

00:11:25.000 Yeah, they're not going to make it.

00:11:27.000 This is not, you know, so...

00:11:30.000 There's a weird ideology that they're attached to.

00:11:35.000 It's not tenable.

00:11:37.000 You can't argue it.

00:11:40.000 You know, the idea of ethical treatment of animals, I'm 100% with that.

00:11:44.000 Of course. 0.98

00:11:45.000 I fucking hate the whole idea of captive orcas. 0.99

00:11:48.000 That, to me, is one of the big ones. 1.00

00:11:49.000 Gross. 0.98

00:11:50.000 That freaks me the fuck out, that we can take these alien creatures that are essentially as smart as us, probably, and put them in swimming pools and justify it. 0.99

00:12:00.000 And that the only time they've ever killed people in recorded history has been in those swimming pools. 0.79

00:12:05.000 Yeah.

00:12:06.000 They don't kill people in the wild.

00:12:07.000 They kill everything else.

00:12:08.000 They kill whales.

00:12:09.000 They kill dolphins.

00:12:10.000 They kill sharks. 1.00

00:12:11.000 They don't fuck with people. 0.97

00:12:12.000 In fact, there's been instances where they've saved people. 0.97

00:12:15.000 Mm-hmm.

00:12:16.000 And yet, we've decided to put those.

00:12:17.000 So me and PETA are on 100% the same page as that. 0.92

00:12:20.000 And PETA's retweeted a bunch of shit that I've put up before, which is really weird. 0.98

00:12:24.000 They've retweeted a bunch of shit that I've put up about orcas. 0.99

00:12:29.000 And when I've done that, people are like, you know he hunts, right? 1.00

00:12:33.000 And then it gets radio silence on PETA's butt. 0.95

00:12:36.000 You know, they don't want to comment on that. 0.98

00:12:38.000 They just want to support my hate for, you know, orca captivity.

00:12:42.000 You know, I had one of the most...

00:12:44.000 I've had some...

00:12:45.000 I've been fortunate to have remarkable engagements with wildlife in my life.

00:12:50.000 But two years ago in BC, I had one with a killer whale.

00:12:53.000 And it was wicked.

00:12:56.000 And to this day, I regret not making the decision I'm about to tell you about.

00:13:00.000 But we had been...

00:13:01.000 I'd been bear hunting on the coast, and we were in a boat cruising back to the harbor...

00:13:06.000 And we found two pods of killer whales, three big bulls, and a bunch of cows that were hunting.

00:13:11.000 And we kept, as they would come up, they were chasing salmon, and as they would come up, we would just get closer just to film them, or even just to see them.

00:13:19.000 And then they'd go down and...

00:13:21.000 So I don't know if it was just happenstance of where we were, but we came up and we were just kind of waiting for the whole pod to come up.

00:13:29.000 And all of a sudden, just 50 feet from the boat, here comes the huge dorsal fin of this bull, comes right at our boat, Bumps into our boat.

00:13:38.000 I'm standing in the crow's nest, essentially.

00:13:41.000 I'm on the roof of the boat looking at this thing.

00:13:43.000 He comes up, bumps into our boat, and he just glides his left side all along the boat.

00:13:49.000 So his left pectoral fin is probably under...

00:13:53.000 Our gunwale, if you will, or under our hull.

00:13:55.000 And so he's just dragging his fin and he rotates on his side, dragging his dorsal fin along our side, exhales, covering our director of photography, William's face in his spray.

00:14:08.000 And as he's doing this, he goes, he hugs the bow of our boat and he never, ever breaks eye contact with me.

00:14:15.000 He's staring at me out of his left eye, literally rolling his eye over and he just cruises all the way around the boat.

00:14:23.000 And I wanted to dive in.

00:14:25.000 And I just wasn't sure.

00:14:26.000 I didn't want to be one of these...

00:14:28.000 The first guy to die?

00:14:30.000 I didn't want to be the first guy to die.

00:14:32.000 And I also didn't want to have some sort of shallow water blackout because the water was so cold.

00:14:37.000 So I didn't want to dive in and have all of a sudden...

00:14:39.000 I didn't know how my body would react because I hadn't been in the water yet.

00:14:43.000 And then also I was like, I'd watched Blackfish or whatever that film is where they killed a bunch of folks in SeaWorld and in BC. And so I was just like, well, what if there's got to be a first?

00:14:56.000 Wolves never killed anyone either. 0.99

00:14:58.000 And then some young lady went jogging in BC and son of a bitch, we have number one. 1.00

00:15:03.000 Well, there's a long history of wolves killing people, though, in the past. 0.99

00:15:06.000 Yeah, I'm just saying, you know, in recorded time.

00:15:09.000 But still, he maintained eye contact, turned, and then just continued on with the hunt. 1.00

00:15:14.000 Fuck. 1.00

00:15:15.000 Did you film all this? 1.00

00:15:17.000 Well, you filmed as much as we could, because it happened really fast.

00:15:19.000 But yeah, it was wicked.

00:15:21.000 Absolutely wicked.

00:15:22.000 I mean, literally, his dorsal fin is probably 10 feet tall.

00:15:25.000 And it is just...

00:15:27.000 You know, when you drag something against another object with force, you know, his fin is just...

00:15:33.000 You know, he was just very engaged with the boat.

00:15:36.000 Is your dorsal fin really that tall?

00:15:39.000 Yeah.

00:15:40.000 Yeah, it's like, it's got to be 8, 9, 10 feet. 0.99

00:15:43.000 That's fucking crazy! 0.97

00:15:44.000 Yeah, it's huge. 1.00

00:15:45.000 I guess it makes sense.

00:15:46.000 They're so big. 1.00

00:15:48.000 Fuck, man. 1.00

00:15:48.000 I've never seen one in the wild. 1.00

00:15:49.000 I've seen dolphins in the wild and I've seen whales in the wild.

00:15:52.000 I've never seen an orca.

00:15:53.000 Yeah, they're wicked animals.

00:15:55.000 We can't even comprehend what that animal is. 0.99

00:15:57.000 I've always said that if orcas weren't real and Bigfoot was real, we wouldn't give a shit about Bigfoot. 0.99

00:16:03.000 Bigfoot would be in the zoo right next to the fucking orangutans. 1.00

00:16:06.000 You know, we'd be like, look at the big monkey, you big stupid monkey, you know? 1.00

00:16:10.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:16:10.000 But orcas, I mean, they speak in a language that we can't decipher. 1.00

00:16:15.000 We don't know what they're saying, but we know that they have dialects.

00:16:17.000 We know that they stay in these pods for life.

00:16:20.000 They have this family organization, and they all stay in their clan. 0.99

00:16:26.000 They're fucking incredible. 0.99

00:16:27.000 And you've seen Blackfish, obviously. 0.99

00:16:29.000 Yeah.

00:16:30.000 So much as I could watch, I couldn't watch the whole thing.

00:16:32.000 I get angry.

00:16:34.000 Oh, yeah.

00:16:34.000 I get furious that this is a giant business, that they take these things and they buy them from other organizations.

00:16:42.000 And I've had real problems with it for a long time.

00:16:47.000 And my friend Phil Demers, he was a trainer at Marine Land.

00:16:52.000 And he's been on the podcast many, many times.

00:16:54.000 And he's involved in these constant lawsuits with Marine Land.

00:16:58.000 He was a walrus trainer and he also trained killer whales and, you know, he's given us some real insight into the horrors of what it's like in marine land and even in SeaWorld and what they're doing and how they get these orcas and how they're treated and how bad it is for them to be trapped in these environments and how their dorsal fins go limp because they never have to deal with current,

00:17:20.000 so they atrophy.

00:17:21.000 The whole thing is sick.

00:17:23.000 Do they still have them now?

00:17:25.000 Killer whales in SeaWorld now?

00:17:26.000 Yes.

00:17:27.000 Yeah.

00:17:27.000 They still have them.

00:17:28.000 Yeah.

00:17:29.000 They can't buy new ones, apparently, or something like that.

00:17:33.000 They're some weird- Oh, fantastic.

00:17:34.000 Yeah.

00:17:34.000 The whole thing, they can't...

00:17:35.000 I think they could still breed them, though. 1.00

00:17:37.000 I mean, the whole thing is fucked up, man. 1.00

00:17:40.000 It's just like slavery. 1.00

00:17:41.000 If, like, we had aliens as slaves, we just couldn't...

00:17:44.000 We're like, what are you saying?

00:17:46.000 Oh, yeah, I don't know what you're saying, dude.

00:17:47.000 Get in the pool if you want to fish. 1.00

00:17:49.000 Get in the fucking pool. 1.00

00:17:50.000 I mean, that's basically what's going on. 1.00

00:17:52.000 It's gross.

00:17:52.000 Yeah, it's sick.

00:17:54.000 It's twisted.

00:17:55.000 You know, and I just...

00:17:57.000 So that's where me and Pete, we're on the same page.

00:18:00.000 Yeah, I think anyone, honestly, treating anything with ethics, right?

00:18:05.000 Particularly animals.

00:18:06.000 Of course, hunters are animal lovers.

00:18:08.000 You know, we rescue dogs, we rescue cats, we...

00:18:11.000 It absolutely goes without saying, which is where the contention comes from.

00:18:16.000 That's where the questions come from.

00:18:18.000 I get as many letters from non-hunters and from people that think that they're against hunting or have maybe damning questions than I do from hunters themselves.

00:18:32.000 I get letters from hunters, I'd say.

00:18:34.000 You know, you're a badass or you really inspire me or, you know, I'm really happy that I can have my kids watch your films.

00:18:42.000 Like, I don't let them watch hunting TV, but when we sit down and they want to see something, they want to ingest something that has hunting in it, you know, we'll watch your films.

00:18:50.000 And so I think that's really cool.

00:18:51.000 But I get a lot of questions from non-hunters and then people that have some contention with it.

00:18:56.000 Well, I think there's a lot of people out there that are curious.

00:18:59.000 I mean, 90, depending on who you ask, 95 or 97% of the population eats meat.

00:19:05.000 And the percentage that actually kill that meat themselves is incredibly small.

00:19:10.000 It's probably like 1%.

00:19:11.000 Sure.

00:19:12.000 You know, I mean, I don't know what it is.

00:19:13.000 It might be a little bit higher than that, but it's no more than 5%.

00:19:16.000 And there's a lot of people that are just on the fence, and they're just sitting there going, well, I eat it, but I don't kill it myself, but I somehow know they're angry that someone's doing it themselves.

00:19:28.000 Before I ever thought about hunting, my thoughts about hunters were that they were cruel people that liked to kill animals.

00:19:36.000 Why would you kill animals?

00:19:38.000 It's not necessary.

00:19:39.000 You can buy meat from a store.

00:19:40.000 This is the very shallow thinking that I had, you know, decades ago.

00:19:45.000 Then, you know, as I started getting older and really considering what I do with my body and what kind of food I put in, and then the internet was a big one.

00:19:55.000 Because the internet came along and I started watching those videos, a lot of them that PETA puts up, of factory farming.

00:20:00.000 Oh.

00:20:02.000 Terrible.

00:20:03.000 It's not just terrible.

00:20:04.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:20:06.000 This is like human beings at their very worst.

00:20:11.000 That we've treated these things as the most...

00:20:18.000 I mean, not just as a commodity, but we've ignored their feelings and their thoughts and the fact that they have instincts and needs, and that we've stuffed them into these tiny little cages.

00:20:30.000 It's a sickness.

00:20:31.000 Then you see the cruel, inhumane treatment that some of the people that work there...

00:20:35.000 You know, and people that work in farms will tell you, look, this is very rare, and these are isolated instances, and this is terrible.

00:20:41.000 That's well and good, but there's also ag-gag laws that prevent people from filming.

00:20:47.000 Agricultural gag laws that prevent people from filming on these factory farms because they don't want people to know how horrific those conditions are.

00:20:54.000 So there's some truth to it.

00:20:56.000 I mean, maybe they're isolated instances.

00:20:58.000 Maybe it's a small percentage of the farms that do treat their animals like that.

00:21:01.000 But it's significant enough that they're worried about the impact on the economy to the point where they're passing laws that keep people from filming and showing people what it's like in these places.

00:21:11.000 You can even just show people without any abuse.

00:21:13.000 Just show what's going on.

00:21:15.000 Just even a still photo of how they're living.

00:21:18.000 Yeah.

00:21:18.000 And you're not going to want to consume the food.

00:21:20.000 And the people that, they think that these animals were raised this way, right?

00:21:25.000 They're cows. 0.72

00:21:26.000 They're bovines. 1.00

00:21:27.000 They're big, dumb animals. 1.00

00:21:28.000 They were bred for this. 1.00

00:21:30.000 Who cares? 0.98

00:21:31.000 They have no idea what's going on until that spike hits them or they get electrocuted or they get their throats slit. 0.97

00:21:37.000 Yeah.

00:21:37.000 But if you have any wherewithal at all, if you have any being, any soul at all, and maybe this is the wrong Idealization or the wrong picture I'm building in my head.

00:21:51.000 But if you make yourself the cow just for a second, if you remove yourself just for a freaking second and just say, like, is this how I would want to be treated?

00:22:01.000 Is this how I would want to live? 0.74

00:22:02.000 Is this how I would want to die?

00:22:04.000 Then you start to ask yourself some pretty big questions that are relatively easy to answer.

00:22:09.000 And we have a lot of people on the earth right now.

00:22:11.000 And it's going to continue until...

00:22:14.000 Something big happens.

00:22:16.000 But if you can remove yourself from your own ego and from your own comfort and try to visualize at all what these other animals are going through, even animals you're hunting, it's going to make you better and more cognizant of being ethical and treating everything with absolute care,

00:22:34.000 even in killing it.

00:22:35.000 Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of contradictions there, though, right, with hunting, because, like, if you really care about the animal, why would you kill it, right?

00:22:43.000 That's the big question.

00:22:44.000 Yeah, it's the hardest thing to wrap your head around, yeah, if you're not into it.

00:22:48.000 And our wilderness is...

00:22:50.000 It's absolutely wild.

00:22:52.000 I mean public lands in particular, it's absolutely wild.

00:22:56.000 But it's also very weird because a lot of the funding for that wildlife comes from people that buy hunting tags and hunting equipment in order to kill those animals.

00:23:07.000 So the way those animals are sustained and the way the wildlife are protected and the way that the wardens and game rangers are paid A lot of it is through the hunters who want to go out and kill the animals that live on it.

00:23:21.000 So a lot of people are like, okay, this is wild, sort of.

00:23:25.000 Sort of.

00:23:27.000 It's protected by people that want to go in that water.

00:23:30.000 And engage it.

00:23:31.000 Yeah.

00:23:32.000 I mean, we're reducing it to a single variable.

00:23:34.000 So you want to protect these elks. 0.85

00:23:36.000 You can go in there and kill an elk. 0.97

00:23:36.000 No. 0.97

00:23:37.000 I want to protect these...

00:23:38.000 First of all, I want to protect the habitat.

00:23:40.000 Right.

00:23:41.000 So these elk can thrive.

00:23:42.000 And then in certain instances, go in and remove a few animals.

00:23:46.000 Or in certain instances, like if you're in Alaska or something like that and hunting a stable caribou herd, you can go in and remove...

00:23:52.000 You know, not everything is based off of sole management, right?

00:23:55.000 As animals encroach where people are, we need to cut their numbers down because humans have taken up so much land.

00:24:01.000 But...

00:24:01.000 There are other populations that are trending in relative harmony.

00:24:07.000 If they have big, huge scales of land and we're not drilling for oil or whatever, where you can go and remove a few animals in a predator and prey scenario and it works just fine for the herd.

00:24:16.000 It works just fine for the population and actually, in a very small way, helps the population by removing certain animals for an age class or a sex class, things like that.

00:24:25.000 But that's the difficulty.

00:24:28.000 We're preserving the habitat So that we can go in and engage in the wild, right?

00:24:33.000 I mean, I think also a lot of people, they think you buy your gun, you buy your bow, you buy your tag, you go to Utah, you leave with an elk.

00:24:41.000 Well, that is how it works for like 15% of the people.

00:24:45.000 If that.

00:24:46.000 If that.

00:24:47.000 But there's a whole contingent of 80% or 90% of people that buy their bow, buy their gun, buy their pickup truck, get their hotel room, get their tent, hike 20 miles into the wilderness, Strike out.

00:24:59.000 Listen to a lot of quiet, look around, hike out, get back in their truck, drive home, send me an email saying, where is it that you find elk around September 15th in Utah?

00:25:11.000 And so there's, and still those people are engaging and still, you know, and there's all different wise, there's, you know, there's fly fishermen and elk hunters and, and there's people that just want to take photos.

00:25:20.000 And so everyone has their different engagement, but that's really what it's about.

00:25:23.000 And we have, what, we're trending towards 8 billion people on the face of the earth now?

00:25:28.000 So, well, large-scale agriculture and farming and animal agriculture as well has created this environment where people can thrive in these cities where they're not growing any food.

00:25:41.000 I mean, California, where we're at right now, is one of the weirdest places on the planet Earth.

00:25:44.000 There's 20 million people.

00:25:46.000 No one's growing anything but weed.

00:25:47.000 I mean, look around here.

00:25:49.000 There's no farms out here, man.

00:25:51.000 There's no farms.

00:25:53.000 It's completely weird. 0.98

00:25:54.000 And the people that are, a lot of these people that are writing, a lot of these people that are against this, they're So hypocritical. 0.92

00:26:00.000 Well, they're eating cheeseburgers while they're typing. 0.99

00:26:02.000 So hypocritical. 0.98

00:26:03.000 It's very strange. 0.98

00:26:04.000 Yeah.

00:26:04.000 It's very strange.

00:26:05.000 But I've been that person.

00:26:07.000 I've been that meat-eating person who thought that hunters were cruel.

00:26:11.000 I've been that person.

00:26:11.000 I get it.

00:26:12.000 I know where they're coming from.

00:26:13.000 And I've considered vegetarianism.

00:26:16.000 And when I was fighting, I was a vegan or a vegetarian, rather.

00:26:19.000 I guess I was probably considered vegan.

00:26:21.000 I don't think I was eating any cheese and I wasn't drinking any milk.

00:26:24.000 But I did that for like six months.

00:26:26.000 It just didn't agree with me.

00:26:29.000 I mean, maybe I didn't do it right and I never did it again, but I was doing it to try to lose weight.

00:26:34.000 I was also not eating enough.

00:26:37.000 There was a lot going on there because I was trying to fight at a low weight class.

00:26:42.000 But a lot of people do it and they do it well and it works for them.

00:26:47.000 But they have to understand even that's not clean, man. 1.00

00:26:49.000 Large-scale agriculture in terms of farming, that shit kills a lot of animals. 1.00

00:26:54.000 It displaces a lot of wildlife. 1.00

00:26:56.000 You're never supposed to have a thousand acres of soybeans or a thousand acres of corn or a thousand acres of fucking wheat or anything. 0.97

00:27:04.000 Anything. 1.00

00:27:05.000 All that shit is fake. 1.00

00:27:07.000 All that shit is something someone's put there, and when they're using pesticides, they're killing things, and when they're using those combines, they are grinding up bunnies and fucking rats and mice and killing countless bugs. 1.00

00:27:18.000 So the idea that you're getting away without killing any sentient life, it's bullshit. 0.99

00:27:22.000 And even look at, so the corridor of the Mississippi River, right, used to be solid wetlands, and our wetlands is how we recycle water. 0.98

00:27:29.000 It's how we, that stinky biomass that you smell, that's clean water being made.

00:27:35.000 That's detritus material being processed.

00:27:38.000 Mississippi River used to be completely lined with these wetlands.

00:27:43.000 Farmers have one in, and obviously it's not the farmer's fault.

00:27:47.000 This is just as soon as we started agriculture, 13, 14, 15,000 years ago.

00:27:53.000 The stopwatch was hit.

00:27:54.000 We went one direction.

00:27:56.000 You cannot go away.

00:27:57.000 We were hunters and gatherers.

00:27:58.000 We could only raise so many children.

00:28:00.000 We had to move with the food. 0.87

00:28:01.000 We had to move away from our excrement.

00:28:04.000 We had to keep a small population.

00:28:06.000 But the second we figured out how to grow corn and rice and stay in one place and raise more than one child, and now we're close to our excrement, literally the stopwatch to something that is going to be a fantastic event.

00:28:21.000 I don't know if I'm going to see it.

00:28:23.000 I don't know if you're going to see it, but something wicked is coming.

00:28:27.000 And there's no other way to look around.

00:28:31.000 There's...

00:28:31.000 Anyway, something big is...

00:28:33.000 You mean by overpopulation?

00:28:35.000 Overpopulation.

00:28:36.000 Something will happen.

00:28:37.000 Human beings are animals.

00:28:38.000 We have awesome thumbs.

00:28:40.000 We have great brains.

00:28:41.000 But we are nothing...

00:28:43.000 There's nothing amazing about us.

00:28:45.000 We can fly to the moon.

00:28:46.000 We can do all this great stuff.

00:28:48.000 By the way, I loved your discussion with your flat earther guy.

00:28:52.000 That was freaking amazing.

00:28:53.000 And the other guy that thinks if you eat the perfect amount of food, you won't poop or pee.

00:28:56.000 Oh, that guy. 1.00

00:28:57.000 That silly fuck. 1.00

00:28:59.000 California remains the leading U.S. state for cash farm receipts. 1.00

00:29:02.000 Biggest state with...

00:29:03.000 Oh yeah, that's outside of LA. California has a lot of farms. 0.75

00:29:10.000 In fact, if you drive from LA and you go to Fresno, like when we were working in Fresno, there's fucking nothing but farms. 0.96

00:29:17.000 Like all the way up to San Francisco, nothing but farms. 0.59

00:29:20.000 It's a lot of almond farming, a lot of tomatoes, avocados.

00:29:23.000 But you look at, so we've gotten rid of our wetlands, and now our soils are sawdust.

00:29:29.000 There's nothing in them anymore.

00:29:30.000 Right.

00:29:31.000 So we pump in the nitrogen, we pump in the phosphorus, the rains come.

00:29:34.000 Well, explain that too, because a lot of people don't understand that when you use, when you grow vegetables on a plot of land over and over and over again, you deplete the soil of all the minerals.

00:29:43.000 Yeah.

00:29:43.000 Yeah, because you're not letting anything die there, right?

00:29:46.000 You are pulling from the earth.

00:29:48.000 You're harvesting the plant.

00:29:49.000 Nothing is dying.

00:29:50.000 Nothing is returning back to the earth.

00:29:52.000 So then the next year, you don't have that detritus material creating all the goodies in the soils, the bugs, the microbes.

00:30:01.000 You don't have these funguses.

00:30:02.000 You don't have these symbiotic relationships that are working with all these insects and microbes.

00:30:07.000 So that create your soil to be a living system.

00:30:12.000 We've As we push all that into the plant and we harvest it and we just keep doing that repeatedly, well, there's less and less of this biomass in the soil.

00:30:19.000 So we have to then go in and fertilize with nitrogen and phosphorus to give our plants nitrogen fixation, things like this, to grow these plants.

00:30:27.000 Then we harvest them.

00:30:29.000 Then rains come.

00:30:30.000 There's erosion.

00:30:31.000 All of these soils.

00:30:32.000 So we lose some of our top soils, which brings us down to even more other different levels of soils that need even more chemicals brought into them so they can actually grow something.

00:30:41.000 But all these soils that are heavily laden with nitrogen and phosphorus pour into the Mississippi River.

00:30:46.000 And people know about this.

00:30:47.000 I'm not saying anything that hasn't been extremely well documented.

00:30:51.000 And then pushes down to the Gulf of Mexico.

00:30:54.000 The sunlight hits it.

00:30:55.000 All of this algal blooms happen.

00:30:58.000 All this algae hits this nitrogen and phosphorus.

00:31:01.000 It grows it just like it grows a corn stalk.

00:31:03.000 The sunlight hits, it has these huge blooms that needs oxygen to function, so it creates these huge hypoxic zones, right?

00:31:12.000 You've heard these things called dead zones.

00:31:13.000 Fish can't live in them, and so anyone that hangs their hat on being a vegetarian, and I know there's reasons for being a vegetarian.

00:31:22.000 I know there's people that refuse to do it.

00:31:25.000 They don't want to kill the animal themselves, and they're not going to buy from a factory farm.

00:31:30.000 I probably have more in common With vegetarian people that don't want to kill their own animals and aren't willing to eat factory-grown food than I have with some of my hunters, with other hunters,

00:31:47.000 it seems.

00:31:49.000 I know what you're saying.

00:31:50.000 I'm so focused on conservation and habitat and being aware.

00:31:56.000 It's not ever-present, but I have this awareness of when I go and hunt someplace that You know, am I actually doing something good here?

00:32:06.000 You know, I went a few years ago to Newfoundland to hunt woodland caribou and the population was really down.

00:32:12.000 And so I got invited to go there and so I started looking into it because the population was down.

00:32:18.000 I was like, man, should I even really be doing this?

00:32:21.000 Through my research, I found out this population of caribou is really cyclic, and as they fall really low, they thrive.

00:32:28.000 It's one of the best times for the caribou, and actually when their populations are at a huge boom, they do the worst.

00:32:34.000 Is that because they eat too much of the lichen?

00:32:37.000 Yeah, so their habitat resource just starts to be overlaid, and then they have another bust.

00:32:42.000 So I went and did it.

00:32:45.000 There's a constant yin and yang.

00:32:48.000 And as a hunter, as a vegetarian, even if you want to claim veganism, all of these things, we should be asking ourselves big questions.

00:32:57.000 This whole thing, everything lives here in a gray area.

00:33:00.000 There is no black and white.

00:33:01.000 I'm not against vegetarians.

00:33:02.000 I'm not against vegans. 0.82

00:33:03.000 If a vegan comes up to me and says, how in the hell can you kill an animal and wear leather shoes? 0.99

00:33:08.000 I say, shh. 1.00

00:33:09.000 Shit, that's a really good point. 0.99

00:33:11.000 Let me ask myself, because I'm going to have to sit down in a quiet float tank and think about myself. 0.99

00:33:17.000 I should be asking myself some of these big questions, and as should they.

00:33:20.000 I just think there's a lot of information that we should keep asking ourselves.

00:33:26.000 Because if the population of human beings continues exponentially, which it will, until this major event that everyone thinks is coming, Hunters should almost be the first ones to give up hunting,

00:33:41.000 if it trends towards that someday.

00:33:43.000 If it gets to be there's not enough wildlife or wildlands or something fantastic happens, hunters should be the first ones.

00:33:51.000 They should be on the front line of being aware of the habitat and the resources and say, hey, you know what, we need to back off.

00:33:59.000 And I've seen it before.

00:34:00.000 It's actually really cool.

00:34:01.000 A few years ago, this is a micro instance, but a few years ago, actually a few years ago, I say it's a long time ago, 1991, a huge blizzard hit in Wisconsin on Halloween Day.

00:34:13.000 And the Wisconsin Deer Hunters Association Shut down whitetail hunting overnight.

00:34:20.000 He said there is no deer hunting this year.

00:34:22.000 It's canceled.

00:34:23.000 It's done.

00:34:24.000 There's no legal deer hunting this year.

00:34:25.000 And then all of these deer hunters were taking their tractors out on these public lands and on their private lands and plowing areas for the deer to walk around and the deer to move around.

00:34:36.000 And so there's all sorts of instances about it, but you get what I'm saying.

00:34:40.000 I think we have to keep asking ourselves these questions as we move through our time and space.

00:34:45.000 I think it's real important.

00:34:46.000 And what you said about, you know, what you're essentially saying is that people, and this has always been my problem with people that proselytize or people that are really into proclaiming that they have the moral high ground because they eat only vegetables.

00:35:02.000 That high ground is filled with holes.

00:35:04.000 You're going to step in one of those holes if you keep talking.

00:35:07.000 Because the more angry you get at people that hunt and the more angry you get at people that eat meat, you have to understand that if you're eating vegetables, just by fact that you're buying them from a factory farm, you're buying them from large-scale agriculture, you're absolutely responsible for death.

00:35:23.000 And the death of fish, I'm glad you brought that up, because those dead zones in the ocean, that's a gigantic problem.

00:35:29.000 It's a gigantic problem, and it's a problem that's caused in large part by large-scale agriculture, as you said.

00:35:36.000 I think that one of these problems is going to be solved by factory-created meat.

00:35:42.000 The problem is how many other problems are going to be created by that.

00:35:46.000 You mean like made meat?

00:35:48.000 Like out of soy?

00:35:50.000 No, no.

00:35:51.000 No, they're making meat in laboratories.

00:35:55.000 Laboratory-created meat.

00:35:58.000 I don't know exactly what the process is, but it's flesh.

00:36:01.000 What's the cellular base?

00:36:02.000 What's the first thing that they put in the Petri dish?

00:36:05.000 They're cloning beef and all these different things, and the idea is that they're going to be able to do this without anything dying.

00:36:13.000 So if you think our population, if you think our human growth is exponential now, now we can get rid of the land.

00:36:22.000 Now we don't need the land.

00:36:23.000 Now there's no value for wild places and there's no value even for farms.

00:36:28.000 Now we can get rid of all of that and billionaires, you know what billionaires love?

00:36:32.000 They love money.

00:36:33.000 And so billionaires will buy up all this land because they already have all the money to buy the land.

00:36:36.000 They'll buy the land, they'll get the farms, and they'll get all the wild places out, and they'll build even more houses because you can eat some beige-colored gruel or laboratory-designed meat, and we can get even more people.

00:36:50.000 Well, I don't think they're thinking about it that way.

00:36:52.000 So I just invented something?

00:36:54.000 I'm sure.

00:36:55.000 I mean, it's like the idea of they.

00:36:58.000 Like, they're going to do this.

00:36:59.000 Well, they're us.

00:37:00.000 And there's, you know, wildlife and wild lands are protected.

00:37:04.000 There's federal land.

00:37:06.000 And you can't really build factory farmed meat houses on those places.

00:37:11.000 But I see what you're saying.

00:37:12.000 But there's also the real problem of, like, what...

00:37:15.000 There's no...

00:37:17.000 There's no free ride.

00:37:18.000 What happens when you make that meat?

00:37:21.000 That's what I'm asking you.

00:37:22.000 What's the first thing in the Petri dish, right?

00:37:24.000 What's the cost of doing this?

00:37:25.000 Also, is there some sort of a side effect to eating that meat?

00:37:28.000 Does it have negative health effects?

00:37:31.000 Does it have a negative environmental effect?

00:37:33.000 Is there any sort of waste product that's created by creating this meat?

00:37:39.000 I don't know.

00:37:39.000 These are all questions that have to be answered.

00:37:41.000 Yeah.

00:37:42.000 None of it's clean, though.

00:37:44.000 This is what's really important.

00:37:45.000 When you run an arrow through a bull elk and that thing runs 20 yards and falls down and dies, there's this weird feeling that you have.

00:37:53.000 There's a weird feeling of loss that goes along with this weird feeling of happiness that you're successful.

00:38:02.000 There's no one or zero.

00:38:04.000 It's not a binary experience.

00:38:06.000 It's not clean.

00:38:07.000 It's like life itself.

00:38:09.000 Life eats life.

00:38:11.000 And if you want to claim the moral high ground because you're a vegetarian or if you want to claim the moral high ground because you're a hunter I think I think you're missing the big picture that there is all this weirdness to life and that there There is this thing that we do that we consume and that every other animal does as well That's the thing that What always strikes me as being strange is people have a real hard time with people eating predators or people hunting predators.

00:38:41.000 Like bear hunting is one of the number one most surefire ways to get people angry at you online.

00:38:49.000 Yes.

00:38:50.000 And there's a lot of ignorance attached to it, particularly with black bears, which are responsible for literally killing 50% of all the moose calves and all the deer fawns and elk calves.

00:39:01.000 50% of them get whacked by black bears.

00:39:03.000 They're very successful at calving season.

00:39:05.000 Yeah, they have a...

00:39:06.000 How strong is their nose?

00:39:07.000 It's some...

00:39:08.000 Like, a bloodhound is thousands of times stronger...

00:39:13.000 Than a deer.

00:39:14.000 Well, than a deer, or than us.

00:39:15.000 And then a black bear...

00:39:18.000 Measurably above them.

00:39:19.000 Measurably above them.

00:39:20.000 So they can smell, like, the way I try to explain it to people is like, you know how you smell a skunk?

00:39:25.000 Like, if you're driving in your car, like, ew, you smell that skunk? 0.99

00:39:27.000 You can smell that fucking skunk for blocks. 1.00

00:39:29.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:39:30.000 Now, a black bear can do that with your foot odor. 0.96

00:39:34.000 Yes.

00:39:34.000 Yeah, literally can smell you.

00:39:36.000 Can smell the mustard on a hamburger and pick it out from the beef and the pickles.

00:39:41.000 It's even better than that.

00:39:43.000 Because some biologists are surmising that they actually can tell time with their nose.

00:39:48.000 So when they walk in, you know, like you and I are driving on the road and we go, oh my god, do you smell that skunk? 0.96

00:39:53.000 Well, he's sitting there, as he strolls through the neighborhood, he's going, oh my god, a skunk was hit by a car this morning.

00:39:59.000 But yesterday...

00:40:00.000 A little fat kid threw a cheeseburger out of the window here, and two days ago, a woman with really strong perfume walked on the sidewalk with a poodle.

00:40:07.000 So there's so many layers to what they're taking in, and everything has its essentially different strengths because of how long it's been present in that area, that they can almost kind of read a book as they're strolling through their environment.

00:40:21.000 How do they know that?

00:40:22.000 How do they know that they can do that?

00:40:23.000 I think they're just making summations off of like how powerful their noses are and that they're picking up so much information that they're picking up old information, current information, brand new information.

00:40:34.000 And I mean, if you think about that, all of that information coming in their head in an instant, every instant, every time they breathe in.

00:40:42.000 So I think scientists are probably making a summation that these bears have to process this information as they're going through because otherwise they'd run scared all day, right?

00:40:51.000 It's incredible.

00:40:51.000 They're incredible animals.

00:40:53.000 But it's interesting how nature...

00:40:54.000 And they're delicious.

00:40:55.000 They are.

00:40:55.000 They do taste good.

00:40:56.000 Oh my word, are they delicious.

00:40:57.000 People don't want to hear that, though.

00:40:59.000 You eat bears?

00:41:00.000 Yep.

00:41:00.000 You eat a bear?

00:41:01.000 So, I have this thing where I've hunted with several hunting guides, several bear hunting guides, where I've convinced them.

00:41:08.000 They've never eaten bear meat.

00:41:09.000 Some of these guys that are guides, like, they send the meat home with their clients or they donate it.

00:41:14.000 But I say, have you guys ever eaten bear meat?

00:41:15.000 I mean, the bears here, they have worms and their fat is yellow. 1.00

00:41:20.000 And I say, you're full of crap. 0.99

00:41:22.000 And so I did a hunt two years ago with a very dear friend of mine. 0.99

00:41:25.000 I won't mention his name because he'd be mortified, as he should be.

00:41:29.000 But I said, hey, let's eat some bears when I get there and we kill a bear.

00:41:34.000 And he's like, what if you don't kill a bear?

00:41:36.000 I said, I'll tell you what.

00:41:36.000 He had a few bear hunts before me.

00:41:39.000 I said, please.

00:41:41.000 He kills very old bears.

00:41:43.000 And I said, please save the rattiest bear that you kill for us. 0.50

00:41:48.000 The oldest bear. 0.98

00:41:50.000 Nastiest looking boar.

00:41:51.000 Please save. 0.60

00:41:53.000 Ask the archer or the hunter if we can steal one of his hindquarters.

00:41:56.000 And he did.

00:41:57.000 And he let us.

00:41:58.000 And when we got there, he pulled it out of the trash bag.

00:42:00.000 He had a trash bag in their hang-in cooler.

00:42:03.000 He pulled it out of the trash bag, and the fat was yellow.

00:42:06.000 And it looked horrible.

00:42:07.000 And he told me that when he was skinning it, he actually saw some worms underneath the hide.

00:42:12.000 They have some...

00:42:12.000 They always have worms.

00:42:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:14.000 It's a constant.

00:42:15.000 And so we made it that night along with some bighorn sheep, which is fantastic eating.

00:42:23.000 And all of the bighorn, several pieces of the bighorn were left.

00:42:27.000 The bear was long gone.

00:42:30.000 It was absolutely amazing.

00:42:31.000 How did you guys cook it?

00:42:33.000 We did it two ways.

00:42:34.000 One way, we did it because we were kind of having a dinner party at a cabin.

00:42:39.000 And so we made just these little tiny medallions.

00:42:41.000 And it was really funny, too, his reaction.

00:42:44.000 So then we just pan-seared it with butter and garlic and onions and just ate it like little, whatever, chicken McNuggets, if you will.

00:42:52.000 And he ate that, and he's like, well, yeah, I mean, you combine anything with butter and onions and garlic, it's going to taste good.

00:42:58.000 And I'm like, do you hear yourself? 0.96

00:43:00.000 So, I mean, it's going up to a chef and be like, oh, yeah, you made me codfish, but you used dill and mayonnaise, and yeah, you're a liar, you know?

00:43:09.000 So then that night, we made this big roast, and we seared it on all sides, right, and seasoned it all up, made a nice rub, and put it in this broth with vegetables and everything, and He ate that.

00:43:18.000 And of course, he's like, well, I mean, you made a rub and you seared it.

00:43:20.000 And I'm like, well, if you suck at cooking, it's not the bear's fault.

00:43:23.000 Bear meat's delicious.

00:43:25.000 I'm not telling you to eat it raw off his skeleton the moment you're skinning him, but if you take the time to prepare the flesh when you're in the field and then cook it well, it's amazing.

00:43:36.000 It's right up there with anything.

00:43:37.000 You're dealing with his internal biases.

00:43:39.000 Yeah.

00:43:39.000 Yeah, he's got these biases and he's just had them and held on to them forever.

00:43:43.000 And especially if you're skinning something, you see worms and you get grossed out.

00:43:46.000 Yeah.

00:43:46.000 And you already think it's weird.

00:43:48.000 Yeah.

00:43:48.000 You know, Rinello told me a story once about a bear that he shot and killed and was cooking on a friend's smoker.

00:43:55.000 And he told the friend, he goes, man, he goes, you got to clean that fucking smoker out. 0.98

00:44:00.000 And the guy's like, what are you talking about? 0.99

00:44:00.000 He goes, man, that smoker smelled like fish. 0.99

00:44:03.000 And he goes...

00:44:04.000 I never cooked a fish on that smoker, ever.

00:44:06.000 Like, what are you talking about?

00:44:08.000 And he's realizing that the bear that he killed had just been eating nothing but fish.

00:44:12.000 And he said that when he was eating it, it was like eating smoked fish.

00:44:16.000 So it was really good, but it was this weird taste.

00:44:20.000 Because it was like you're eating this red meat that tastes like smoked fish.

00:44:25.000 It's wicked.

00:44:25.000 They're awesome.

00:44:26.000 They're awesome.

00:44:27.000 Have you had a blueberry bear before?

00:44:29.000 Yes.

00:44:29.000 I've never had that.

00:44:30.000 I've heard it's the most incredible meat on the planet Earth.

00:44:33.000 In fact, I got dropped off, I don't know, four or five, six years ago.

00:44:37.000 I was in the Arctic for 30 or so days, and the pilot dropped us off, and he goes, hey, do you have a bear tag?

00:44:43.000 And I said, yeah, I have a bear tag.

00:44:45.000 And he's like, if you kill a bear, he's like, there's tons of bears where I'm dropping you off.

00:44:48.000 He's like, tons of grizzlies, tons of black bears, which is uncommon, but...

00:44:52.000 He's like, if you kill a black bear, he's like, and you don't want the meat, I'll take it.

00:44:56.000 You know, he'd made it very clear before he even dropped us off, and I said, no, we'll keep it, but we'll share with you for sure.

00:45:02.000 We'll definitely share some with you, but it's phenomenal.

00:45:04.000 Yeah, Rinella was telling me that it's literally the greatest meat on earth.

00:45:09.000 Like, when you have a bear that's been eating nothing but blueberries, and he did an episode of Meat Eater once where he shot one, and as he's opening it up, you see purple fat.

00:45:18.000 Yeah.

00:45:18.000 Because the bears have been eating blueberries for so long their fat is purple.

00:45:22.000 Yeah.

00:45:22.000 And it made me think about my own diet, quite honestly.

00:45:24.000 Because if this thing tastes so good and smells so good because of what it's eating, like, if you're eating, like, fucking cheeseburgers and fries, like, that's gotta be in your fat. 1.00

00:45:34.000 That's got all that bullshit food. 1.00

00:45:35.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:45:36.000 You know, fucking donuts. 1.00

00:45:37.000 That's got to be in your cells. 1.00

00:45:39.000 You literally are what you eat.

00:45:42.000 We know it, but do you internalize it?

00:45:44.000 I think when you see a bear that has purple fat, maybe you internalize it even more.

00:45:49.000 I think so.

00:45:50.000 Yeah, I mean, anytime you're able to spend...

00:45:54.000 You know, you're dismantling an animal or something like that.

00:45:58.000 You actually get to see these things.

00:46:00.000 And yeah, if you have the same perspective or wherewithal that we were talking about a few minutes ago, that's when you sit there and go, wait a minute, you're not just mindlessly skinning this bear.

00:46:09.000 You're sitting there going, does my fat look like Skittles?

00:46:12.000 Because I pounded a bag of Skittles yesterday.

00:46:14.000 Right.

00:46:14.000 I heard they are gross, though, if they've been eating a rotten moose.

00:46:19.000 I've heard if you eat a bear that's been eating rotten meat, that it's pretty fucking gross. 0.96

00:46:23.000 I've heard that, too, but I've eaten them, and it was fine. 0.96

00:46:26.000 Really?

00:46:26.000 Yeah.

00:46:26.000 But you ate one that ate a rotten moose?

00:46:28.000 Well, I've eaten one that was eating a rotten whale.

00:46:31.000 Oh! 0.60

00:46:33.000 And the whale was like, the whale was like orange, orange and yellow.

00:46:38.000 They do that, right?

00:46:39.000 Like a whale gets beached, it dies.

00:46:41.000 They like living it.

00:46:42.000 They'll crawl right up inside of its ribcage and they come out looking like they found too much hair gel and just everything slicked back.

00:46:49.000 That's so foul.

00:46:50.000 It tasted good?

00:46:52.000 Yeah.

00:46:53.000 How'd you cook it?

00:46:55.000 Same.

00:46:55.000 Same way.

00:46:56.000 Actually, I did more medallions that way because I was backpacking, so I ate it right on the beach.

00:47:00.000 When you talk about bear hunting, you're going up against years of movies. 0.79

00:47:06.000 Years of fucking yogi and boo-boo and people have this weird perception of what a bear is. 0.96

00:47:15.000 And we are the only things that keep their population in check. 0.99

00:47:19.000 The only things.

00:47:20.000 If you care about deer and if you care about moose and if you care about other wildlife, predator control is a real problem.

00:47:28.000 They're one of the most ethical animals really to hunt.

00:47:31.000 There are a lot of them.

00:47:32.000 And you have to be careful, though, right?

00:47:35.000 I mean, they need to be controlled in certain areas.

00:47:38.000 Certain areas, there's probably a decent balance because there's not a lot of food, so they might not be focusing on moose calves, right?

00:47:46.000 Because there might not be a lot of moose or something like that.

00:47:47.000 But in areas where there's great overlap, it's definitely...

00:47:53.000 They don't get killed a lot, right?

00:47:54.000 And so people don't hunt them a lot in general.

00:47:57.000 And people just, you know, they instantly go to the ungulates, right?

00:48:05.000 They instantly go to the deer and the moose and caribou, things like that.

00:48:07.000 But yeah, they definitely need to be managed.

00:48:10.000 The place I hunted, I was bear hunting last week in BC, and the place I was hunting hasn't really been hunted in like 10 years.

00:48:17.000 And you just know that these bears are so terribly successful at stealing mule deer fawns and moose calves in this area.

00:48:25.000 And I've seen it before.

00:48:27.000 And you just see them like...

00:48:28.000 I killed a grizzly bear a few years ago.

00:48:31.000 That was...

00:48:31.000 I shouldn't say I killed it.

00:48:34.000 It charged us. 0.87

00:48:35.000 And so the guy that I was with, he had to shoot it. 0.99

00:48:37.000 And so he killed it.

00:48:39.000 But as soon as the bullet hit the bear...

00:48:41.000 He pooped out two cow moose calves.

00:48:44.000 And we had seen a cow with two calves, two twins, and then he was just cruising up and down the river, and so he definitely got them.

00:48:54.000 And then when we killed him, he'd...

00:48:56.000 And then I wasn't even really thinking much about it, just didn't have this wherewithal of what was going on, and it was kind of intense.

00:49:03.000 Um, situation when it went down.

00:49:06.000 But later on, we were talking to the biologist about it when we were having the bear skull and hide and meat sealed.

00:49:13.000 And, um, and we told him that he pooped out a calf.

00:49:15.000 And he's like, oh, fantastic, because there are grizzly bears and black bears that are really successful fawn and calf killers.

00:49:22.000 And then there are others that aren't, right?

00:49:24.000 They're kind of individualistic like we are.

00:49:26.000 And so he's like, it's really good that you remove this big old boar who was a successful calf killer because he would just fixate on that in the spring.

00:49:33.000 And really, It does not take, like a lot of people might think, oh, there's millions of moose.

00:49:37.000 No, there aren't.

00:49:38.000 And you go up in these areas, like people ask me all the time when we're up in Alaska, they're like, oh, when you get off the airplane, there's got to be just animals everywhere.

00:49:46.000 No, there are no animals.

00:49:47.000 You get off the airplane in the Arctic and you take a look around, there's nothing.

00:49:52.000 There's no trees.

00:49:53.000 There's no trees.

00:49:54.000 There's no moose.

00:49:55.000 There's no caribou.

00:49:56.000 You find them when you go looking for them.

00:49:58.000 You find them when you find this little micro niche of habitat.

00:50:02.000 But by and large, there's nothing there because there's not a ton of resources there.

00:50:08.000 I think people think it's the Serengeti, and it's not.

00:50:12.000 So if you have a successful grizzly, And he's preying on moose in a particular valley, he could really do some damage.

00:50:21.000 And where I was, and I just hunted mountain lion for the first time in BC this winter, and I was talking to the biologist there because I had great contention about doing it.

00:50:30.000 Why is that?

00:50:31.000 I didn't want to run them with dogs.

00:50:33.000 I didn't want to shoot out of a bait in a tree.

00:50:36.000 It just had never interested me.

00:50:38.000 And so a buddy of mine just got his first hunting concession in BC. He's been a guide his whole life, but he now has his own concession.

00:50:45.000 He has black bears and mule deer.

00:50:47.000 It's the guy that I was also just bear hunting with.

00:50:49.000 But he said, hey, will you come up and do a lion hunt?

00:50:51.000 And I said, no, man, it's not for me.

00:50:53.000 And he's like, well... 0.99

00:50:55.000 You know, you're kind of being a hypocrite right now. 0.98

00:50:57.000 And I said, well, what do you mean? 0.96

00:50:58.000 He's like, well, you're always preaching that people should ask themselves big questions and people should kind of dive into, you know, this tornado or this storm and experience things and ask themselves and like actually challenge their thought process.

00:51:10.000 So who better to come up and go on a lion hunt?

00:51:13.000 And if you have prejudice about it, why don't you come up and do it?

00:51:16.000 And so you can see if your prejudice are real or not.

00:51:19.000 And so I did it and it was very eye opening.

00:51:22.000 It was an incredible experience.

00:51:23.000 What was eye-opening about it?

00:51:25.000 Just the animals themselves.

00:51:27.000 It was the enthusiasm around the hounds.

00:51:31.000 I kind of pictured this.

00:51:33.000 I had this fox and a hound scenario built up in my head.

00:51:37.000 I felt for the same stereotypes that non-hunters and anti-hunters were falling forward.

00:51:42.000 I was like, oh, these houndsmen are kind of redneck. 0.57

00:51:45.000 You know, they treat their dogs like crap and they're sending their dogs into this lion fight and it's going to get rough and these dogs are going to get beat up and scarred up and then finally you treat this lion and the hunter comes waltzing in with no barrier of entry whatsoever, 0.97

00:52:01.000 no physical suffering whatsoever, no mental suffering whatsoever comes waltzing in and shoots this thing out of a tree and takes some photos and then skins it out, leaves the flesh and moves on with their life. 0.98

00:52:15.000 And so I go up there.

00:52:16.000 I meet the houndsman.

00:52:17.000 And first of all, my friend, his name's Ben Storek.

00:52:21.000 He's a very gracious hunter.

00:52:23.000 He's very aware.

00:52:23.000 He's very kind to animals.

00:52:25.000 He has tremendous wherewithal, which is why we continue to hunt together.

00:52:29.000 So I go up there.

00:52:30.000 I meet his houndsman.

00:52:31.000 Great guy.

00:52:32.000 His hounds are part of the family.

00:52:34.000 Sleep in the cabin with him.

00:52:36.000 Great dog food, great medical care every single night when we'd get home.

00:52:41.000 And the scenario in which I killed a lion was also very rewarding for me as a person.

00:52:47.000 We tracked him.

00:52:48.000 I'll use kilometers because that's what we were doing there.

00:52:50.000 But we tracked him for like 21, 22 kilometers just by his track.

00:52:56.000 And it was really cool because this lion had tore his back right track.

00:53:01.000 So it was kind of like a movie.

00:53:03.000 We'd see his tracks in the snow, and there's always a dime-sized spot of blood in his track.

00:53:09.000 And it was pretty cool because we went and spoke with some ranchers along this river, and they're like, yeah, he's a sport-killing deer, which I didn't believe, but I just wanted to hear the ranchers' kind of summation on it.

00:53:20.000 And they didn't want him...

00:53:21.000 The ranchers were, I was really surprised, but the ranchers were like, you know, we want you to kill this cat because he's sport killing these deer, but we want Ben to be very measured in how he takes cats because they really love cats in this area, and they just want Ben to be cognizant of the animals he removes,

00:53:37.000 which he is anyway.

00:53:38.000 They love cats just because they just love the idea of them being there, the wild.

00:53:42.000 Yeah, the symbolism of the wild.

00:53:44.000 And then all these ranchers, they raise cattle.

00:53:46.000 And they watch the wolves harass their cattle.

00:53:50.000 But they watch the cats will literally walk right through a calf pen.

00:53:54.000 And the calves won't spend any...

00:53:56.000 They don't even look at the lion.

00:53:58.000 The cows aren't looking at the lion.

00:54:00.000 But the lion will just stroll right through the pen and just carry on about his day.

00:54:04.000 Because he wants to kill deer and sheep.

00:54:06.000 That's what he wants to fixate on.

00:54:07.000 He doesn't want to deal probably with mama cow. 0.98

00:54:09.000 But...

00:54:09.000 Right.

00:54:10.000 So we tracked this thing for 22 kilometers.

00:54:12.000 We actually got down on it on top of a mule deer kill that it had made the night before.

00:54:17.000 Bumped it, and it ran way up into the mountains in these hills.

00:54:20.000 And we tracked it all the way up there.

00:54:21.000 We tracked another four or five kilometers.

00:54:24.000 And then that's when we released the hounds.

00:54:27.000 And it was wicked to see the enthusiasm in the hounds.

00:54:30.000 Like, I just pictured something that was going to be bloodthirsty and, like, you know...

00:54:36.000 They wanted to rip this cat apart.

00:54:38.000 But these hounds, the look on their faces, and I'm making judgments here, but the look on their faces was just pure enthusiasm.

00:54:46.000 Like, this is a game.

00:54:47.000 Like, our job is to chase this cat down.

00:54:51.000 Well, that's how they've been trained.

00:54:53.000 Yeah, and to get it in a tree.

00:54:54.000 Like, they're not sitting there going, we're going to catch and kill this cat.

00:54:57.000 They're like, our job is to kind of get it in the tree, you know?

00:55:00.000 Right.

00:55:01.000 It was just really cool to be around the dogs and watch their energy.

00:55:04.000 So they went and treated the lion.

00:55:06.000 We snuck in on the line, and he didn't like it.

00:55:09.000 See, he jumped off, and the dogs ensued, pursued again, and then we treated him again, and I killed him. 0.87

00:55:14.000 And killing him was neither here nor there. 0.87

00:55:19.000 It was just an act. 0.95

00:55:22.000 It was just a light switch for me.

00:55:27.000 Ben had spoke with the biologist.

00:55:29.000 They wanted a certain amount of cats removed from this area because they were really having predatory impact on the sheep and the deer.

00:55:37.000 And I kind of found out why afterwards when I spoke to the biologist.

00:55:40.000 But we got him in three and Ben's just like, hey, he's a big tom and he's an old tom. 0.99

00:55:45.000 And so we're going to kill him anyway. 1.00

00:55:48.000 So if you want to kill him, kill him. 1.00

00:55:49.000 If not, we're going to kill him. 1.00

00:55:50.000 You know, they had tags too. 0.99

00:55:51.000 Everything was legal. 0.99

00:55:52.000 And I said, no, I'll kill him. 0.99

00:55:54.000 I wanted to take the process all the way through. 1.00

00:55:56.000 So I killed him. 1.00

00:55:56.000 He died very quickly. 1.00

00:55:59.000 And I'd always heard that their meat was really good.

00:56:02.000 And I'd also heard people say it's unedible.

00:56:04.000 So, of course, I don't kill anything unless I'm going to eat it.

00:56:08.000 So we ate it.

00:56:09.000 And it was arguably the finest meat I'd ever had in my life.

00:56:13.000 That's another thing Ranella told me.

00:56:14.000 You said it tastes like the best pork you've ever had.

00:56:16.000 Well, I'm not even a big fan of pork.

00:56:18.000 I like pork, but pork is okay.

00:56:20.000 Mountain Lion is like succulent, flavorful, deep, rich pork.

00:56:24.000 It's just absolutely unbelievable.

00:56:27.000 Their fat is supposed to be really good as well.

00:56:29.000 Yeah.

00:56:29.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:56:31.000 And so it was just a really rewarding experience for me.

00:56:34.000 And then I got to hang out with the dogs afterwards.

00:56:35.000 And then when I went and spoke with a biologist, that was eye-opening as well because the houndsman we were with, he kind of guessed the cat to be like five or six years old, which would be very old.

00:56:45.000 He turned out to be three.

00:56:47.000 Which is amazing that they go from a kitten to this thing was like 175, 180 pounds.

00:56:53.000 That big?

00:56:54.000 That big in just three years.

00:56:56.000 And the biologist even told me he had one come in earlier that year that was over 200. It was like 202, 203, which is about as big as they get.

00:57:04.000 And it was radio-collared.

00:57:05.000 And he's like, oh, this is going to be wicked because we have the radio-collar.

00:57:09.000 I'm going to be able to call the biologist that radio-collared.

00:57:11.000 This thing, it's 200 pounds.

00:57:12.000 This thing, it's got to be like five or six, seven years old.

00:57:15.000 He called the guy and the thing was, just had barely, he was like just over two years old.

00:57:21.000 And he was already 200 pounds.

00:57:24.000 Two years old?

00:57:25.000 Yes.

00:57:28.000 Sometimes aging deer, aging bears is kind of a tricky prospect.

00:57:32.000 You're looking at the molar wear and you're looking at their lateral incisors and their medial incisors and you're looking at wear and everything.

00:57:40.000 With the lions, it's very easy to see.

00:57:44.000 The age classes have distinct dental changes that happen.

00:57:48.000 There's kind of no middle ground.

00:57:50.000 And of course, the radio caller, they knew, but they're just so terribly successful.

00:57:56.000 And just looking at the amount of biomass they put on their bodies, just their size and how they carry it. 0.99

00:58:02.000 Their fucking forearms freak me out. 1.00

00:58:03.000 Their forearms are like a human thigh. 1.00

00:58:06.000 That's what freaked me out, because I'm sitting there holding this thing's scun-out body.

00:58:11.000 Scun-out body?

00:58:14.000 It weighs the exact same as a deer.

00:58:16.000 It's the same thing as a deer, but the proportions are way off.

00:58:19.000 The thing is so much shorter.

00:58:21.000 The meat goes all the way down to their paws.

00:58:25.000 They can jump 30 feet out of a tree and land.

00:58:28.000 You and I would be rolling around on the ground going, oh my god, look at my femur.

00:58:32.000 These guys just kaboom!

00:58:33.000 They're off to their races.

00:58:35.000 They weigh the same as a deer.

00:58:37.000 You drop a deer out of a tree and it's going to have four broken legs.

00:58:40.000 These things just land and Yeah, they're freaky animals.

00:58:43.000 And so I was going to say, so the sport killing, so the biologist told me with the area where there's a lot of wolves, and so the wolves, the lions are so much more successful at killing than the wolves, that the wolves just become somewhat lazy, and they'll get in these little packs and they'll literally find a big tom and they'll just follow him.

00:59:02.000 And so what this cat is doing is scientists have observed him killing deer, and he'll literally kill and cache deer and sheep so that when the wolves find his caches, the wolves will eat, and so then he can go and eat in peace himself. 0.97

00:59:17.000 Whoa, so he doesn't get fucked with by the wolves. 0.99

00:59:19.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:59:19.000 So he's leaving them food. 1.00

00:59:20.000 He's leaving them food, which is why the ranchers thought, because they're like, he killed a deer and he didn't do anything with it.

00:59:25.000 He just killed a deer.

00:59:26.000 Wow.

00:59:26.000 And so they're like, no, no, no, he killed the deer.

00:59:28.000 And it was funny because when we tracked him that day, he brought us to nine kill sites that day.

00:59:34.000 Wow.

00:59:34.000 Yep.

00:59:35.000 So he's literally doing that while you're chasing him, saying, look, just eat this, leave me the fuck alone. 0.99

00:59:40.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:59:41.000 So as you're tracking him, he's tracking you past spots, hoping that you take his cash and leave him alone.

00:59:48.000 Yep.

00:59:49.000 Wow.

00:59:50.000 Yep.

00:59:51.000 It was a fantastic experience.

00:59:53.000 That's crazy.

00:59:53.000 And then the biologist also told me, and I was like...

00:59:56.000 Man, I had a lot of contention about coming here and hunting lions.

00:59:59.000 I don't know how successful they are at repopulating.

01:00:03.000 We almost hunted them to extinction at the turn of the century, and they're just starting to expand now back into some of their original territories.

01:00:12.000 He's like, hey, man.

01:00:13.000 Donnie's like, this is a great animal to take.

01:00:15.000 This is an area that receives very little lion hunting.

01:00:17.000 We have to take some of these lions out. 1.00

01:00:19.000 And he showed me data that they had on this one lion.

01:00:22.000 And I don't want to misquote the data, but basically this single lion had removed like 9 or 11% of this particular sheep herd in a year.

01:00:29.000 Boom! 0.99

01:00:31.000 Just like boom, boom, boom.

01:00:34.000 And this dude knew the game. 0.76

01:00:36.000 He knew where to kill. 0.99

01:00:37.000 He knew how to kill.

01:00:38.000 But they have no chance. 0.68

01:00:40.000 I mean, he's just a super presser.

01:00:41.000 They have no chance. 1.00

01:00:42.000 If he finds them, he's going to kill them. 0.99

01:00:44.000 He runs faster, he's stronger, and if he gets a hold of them, they never lose. 1.00

01:00:48.000 It's never like a deer gets away.

01:00:51.000 No, they win every time.

01:00:53.000 So it's right down the same path as all the predators.

01:00:58.000 It leads to really good discussions, but people get upset when you kill predators.

01:01:02.000 They get very upset.

01:01:03.000 It's really strange, because they don't have any problem with the predator killing deer, and they have less problem with people killing deer. 0.98

01:01:10.000 But they have a real problem with people killing predators, and I believe it's the same problem they have with Cecil the Lion and shit like that. 0.99

01:01:16.000 They think that you're just doing it to be an asshole, and you just want this thing on your wall. 1.00

01:01:21.000 You want a head on your wall. 1.00

01:01:23.000 I do have some contention, and you tell me.

01:01:25.000 For instance, the grizzly bear issue being shut down in BC. Grizzly bear hunting.

01:01:32.000 Maybe you can explain that for people who don't understand what's going on with that.

01:01:35.000 Yeah, so the British Columbia government shut down British Columbia grizzly bear hunting because they equated it, and I guess they're probably correct, with trophy hunting, right? 0.95

01:01:46.000 Where hunters were killing these animals.

01:01:49.000 And just taking the skulls and hides and leaving the flesh behind. 0.81

01:01:54.000 And I don't know.

01:01:56.000 I've never...

01:01:56.000 Have I... I grizzly bear hunted in BC once, but I was actually more on a sheep hunt.

01:02:02.000 But yeah, just this notion of like the gentleman that killed Cecil the lion.

01:02:08.000 Like if you're really going to kill an animal and just take its hide, then I have a pretty significant issue with that.

01:02:17.000 And so I just hope these hunters, the guys that were hunting the grizzly bears, I wonder if this was more of a hunter-instilled issue than people are even bringing light into it.

01:02:30.000 Because if people were killing grizzly bears in British Columbia, taking their hides, taking their skulls, and taking all the flesh, I feel like we'd still be grizzly bear hunting in British Columbia.

01:02:40.000 Yeah.

01:02:40.000 I don't know.

01:02:41.000 I mean, maybe, maybe, but grizzly bears are another notch up even above black bears in terms of what Rinella calls charismatic megafauna.

01:02:52.000 People love those things because they like to see them.

01:02:55.000 And if you don't have to deal with them, if you're not like that guy in Ennis, Colorado last year, they got his head cut open by one.

01:03:01.000 If you don't have to deal with them, they are amazing to look at.

01:03:05.000 And we all want them around.

01:03:06.000 Of course.

01:03:07.000 They're an incredible animal, but...

01:03:09.000 It's this thing of trophy hunting. 1.00

01:03:11.000 You think of some fat, lazy asshole with a rifle that stands on top of a lion. 0.99

01:03:17.000 There's this image that I found online, and I was looking and I was like, that's why people have a problem with trophy hunting, personified. 1.00

01:03:26.000 This fat fuck who should never, in a million years without that rifle, have ever... 1.00

01:03:33.000 Or the help. 1.00

01:03:33.000 Yeah, or the help. 1.00

01:03:35.000 Especially the help, right?

01:03:38.000 There's no way he would have got on it.

01:03:39.000 There's no way he would have got to that position.

01:03:41.000 He must have got there in a car.

01:03:43.000 And then they have this lion there, and he's perched up on the lion like he did some amazing thing.

01:03:48.000 And meanwhile, that's probably one of those caged lions anyway.

01:03:52.000 It is.

01:03:53.000 So many of those high fence hunts where they let these lions, they have them all caged up in a pen, they throw cows over the dead cows, over the pen, over the wall of the pen, the lions tear them apart, and then they pick one and take that one out into the wilderness area,

01:04:10.000 which is all fenced in anyway, and then they let it loose.

01:04:13.000 And the lion stays in the area because it has no idea what its boundary is, what its territory is, what other lions are in that area.

01:04:20.000 So a lot of times they sit still and they wait for a while before they figure out what their territory is.

01:04:25.000 The hunter comes in, shoots it, stands on it, takes a picture.

01:04:28.000 I mean, you just shot a pet.

01:04:30.000 If you told me, you said, hey man, I went into Tanzania, I went into the wildest part, and backpacked in, and set up camp, and I was there for 40 days, and I killed an eight planes game,

01:04:46.000 and I worked with the locals, and I shared meat with these different tribes, and And man, we found a pride of lions, and there was a giant maned male, and there was another sister pride over here, and we snuck in and we killed him, we hunted him, we killed him,

01:05:02.000 we skinned him out, we took his flesh, and we went on an honest hunt, and we engaged the wild here, and we removed an animal.

01:05:12.000 Wicked.

01:05:12.000 I would love to read that book.

01:05:14.000 I'd love to see that film.

01:05:15.000 I'd love to hear you tell me that story.

01:05:16.000 But does anybody eat lions?

01:05:18.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:05:20.000 Does anybody?

01:05:21.000 I don't know.

01:05:22.000 I've never even heard of it.

01:05:23.000 I've never been to Africa.

01:05:24.000 And if you're not...

01:05:29.000 Then what are we doing?

01:05:30.000 I understand killing.

01:05:31.000 So there's some weirdness there, too.

01:05:35.000 Because if you told me, if you called me and said, hey, man, I'm going to pay you a million dollars.

01:05:41.000 I want you to come down to my concession.

01:05:43.000 I get these offers daily.

01:05:44.000 Not a million dollars, but... 0.99

01:05:47.000 Will you come down on my concession and shoot a giraffe?

01:05:51.000 I'm just making this up, but I'm trying to pick a zoo animal. 1.00

01:05:54.000 Will you come down and shoot a giraffe?

01:05:56.000 I'd love to see you come down and film this, blah, blah, blah. 0.91

01:05:58.000 And the answer is no.

01:06:01.000 Explain a concession to people, too.

01:06:03.000 There's large areas that are most of the time fenced in.

01:06:06.000 Yep.

01:06:07.000 Thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of acres.

01:06:10.000 You're never going to see the fence.

01:06:12.000 We could drive you around in there for a week and you'd never see the fence.

01:06:15.000 So it's semi-wild.

01:06:17.000 Yeah.

01:06:18.000 The fence thing is very weird, right?

01:06:20.000 Because their habitat...

01:06:22.000 The fence essentially keeps people out.

01:06:24.000 Yeah, it protects them from poachers.

01:06:25.000 Yeah, it's not necessarily to trap the animals, although the animals can't leave.

01:06:30.000 It's to keep the poachers out.

01:06:31.000 It's to preserve these areas because people with greed will kill anything to get a few dollars in the marketplace for market meat and then certainly to sell a hide to maybe even an even more fat hunter that...

01:06:45.000 Or a person that calls themselves a hunter that wants a lion on their wall that doesn't even want to engage in the process, right?

01:06:51.000 They'll buy the skin or something.

01:06:52.000 That's why there's trade in tiger skins and things like this.

01:06:56.000 So in these concessions, if you called me and said, hey, will you come down and shoot a giraffe? 0.97

01:07:01.000 I'll pay a million bucks to come down and shoot a giraffe. 1.00

01:07:04.000 The answer is no. 1.00

01:07:06.000 I don't want to kill a giraffe.

01:07:07.000 But if you called me and said, hey, we have restored this habitat in this whole river delta, and lo and behold, the giraffes have absolutely taken off, and they're very, very successful, and they're decimating the vegetation here, and they're starting to fight each other with great severity,

01:07:23.000 and we're finding dead bulls and stuff.

01:07:25.000 We need to remove 10 animals from this herd. 0.96

01:07:28.000 Will you come down and shoot 10 giraffes with me? 0.99

01:07:30.000 100%. 0.99

01:07:30.000 Absolutely. 0.99

01:07:31.000 Like, if I can come down and contribute, We're good to go.

01:08:05.000 Maybe really poisonous for hunting.

01:08:07.000 I think it's very poisonous.

01:08:08.000 I think that Cecil the lion story was incredibly poisonous.

01:08:11.000 It was one of those stories where it was almost impossible to find any support for the guy who did that thing.

01:08:20.000 And it was legal.

01:08:23.000 It was.

01:08:23.000 I mean, you know, people say, what was a collared lion?

01:08:26.000 You can't really tell.

01:08:28.000 Like, they have giant manes.

01:08:29.000 Even if it was, it doesn't mean anything. 0.58

01:08:30.000 You can shoot collared animals.

01:08:32.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.97

01:08:32.000 I mean, they're not collared because they're protected. 0.97

01:08:34.000 It's not like the idea is, like, you can never shoot it because it's collared.

01:08:37.000 Yeah.

01:08:38.000 And, you know, it's...

01:08:41.000 It's just not what people...

01:08:43.000 It's real hard to justify if you're not eating it.

01:08:46.000 I mean, why would you want to do it?

01:08:48.000 Why would you want to go and hunt a lion?

01:08:50.000 It doesn't make any sense. 1.00

01:08:51.000 You'd have to be an asshole. 1.00

01:08:52.000 That guy's not asking himself any questions, I'll tell you that. 1.00

01:08:54.000 Right.

01:08:55.000 Yeah.

01:08:56.000 Right.

01:08:56.000 Why is he doing it?

01:08:57.000 He's doing it because that's what he likes to do.

01:08:59.000 And so that's why I wonder, like, I haven't grizzly bear hunted in British Columbia, but I wonder...

01:09:04.000 I have lots of friends there that are guides and outfitters, and I understand that the meat...

01:09:08.000 I've heard it's gross.

01:09:11.000 I've heard it's gross, too, but I've eaten it.

01:09:12.000 How is it?

01:09:13.000 Fantastic.

01:09:14.000 Really?

01:09:15.000 Grizzly.

01:09:16.000 Yes.

01:09:16.000 Now, again...

01:09:17.000 My friend John...

01:09:18.000 You know John Barclow from Sitka?

01:09:21.000 I think I've met him.

01:09:23.000 I think I've met him.

01:09:24.000 He's telling me that he served people brown bear meat at a party once.

01:09:31.000 He had cooked it and made it like little hors d'oeuvres and he didn't tell people what it was.

01:09:36.000 And they're like, this is really good.

01:09:36.000 What is it?

01:09:37.000 And they're like, oh, it's brown bear.

01:09:39.000 And they got real mad at him.

01:09:40.000 Make a meat bear?

01:09:41.000 Yeah.

01:09:42.000 But they liked it.

01:09:43.000 Yeah, they liked it.

01:09:43.000 So we—I was hunting brown bears on Kodiak Island a few years ago, and I didn't kill one.

01:09:50.000 But when we got done, there was a guy there, a classically trained chef that lived in town, and he had—him and his buddies had killed a bear.

01:09:58.000 And so he invited us over for dinner when we were in town, and he served us brown bear, and it was— Amazing.

01:10:03.000 It was absolutely amazing.

01:10:05.000 How did he cook it?

01:10:06.000 He did it several different ways, but one of the ways he did it that was really amazing, and again, this is all in preparation, right?

01:10:11.000 But he made kind of like Swedish meatballs.

01:10:14.000 And he told us that the preparation was intensive, so he made a bath.

01:10:19.000 A whole milk bath, put the bare meat in it, let it sit for 10 hours, dump the milk out, put more whole milk in it.

01:10:26.000 He did that like four or five times to just leach anything that was in the meat out, right?

01:10:31.000 Probably blood and any sort of, I don't know if you can leach.

01:10:34.000 Why milk?

01:10:35.000 I don't know.

01:10:36.000 I don't know.

01:10:37.000 I don't know if that's...

01:10:38.000 I've heard people doing that with bass.

01:10:40.000 Like taking bass fillets and catfish fillets and putting them in milk.

01:10:44.000 Yeah.

01:10:44.000 I mean, would it be something along the lines of osmosis?

01:10:47.000 Would it be that the milk has a greater density so the blood wants to leave the meat and go into the...

01:10:53.000 and create...

01:10:54.000 You're asking the wrong guy.

01:10:55.000 I really have no idea.

01:10:56.000 I'd just be guessing.

01:10:57.000 I don't either.

01:10:57.000 But anyway, and then he pan-seared a bunch of it, and it was like in a roast, if you will, but he did it all in a really hot cast-iron skillet, and it was phenomenal.

01:11:07.000 And then I just heard somebody the other day, what was I listening to?

01:11:11.000 I was reading something about polar bear hunting, and somebody was remarking that polar bear was really good to eat.

01:11:17.000 And so I think there's a lot of misinformation out there about what is edible and what is not edible and what is good and what isn't.

01:11:24.000 And probably because of the preparation, because people just have been ignorant about how to prepare and keep the meat.

01:11:30.000 Because I have people that think, I have lots of friends that think deer meat's disgusting.

01:11:34.000 Soak fish in milk for odor-free cooking.

01:11:37.000 Hmm, okay.

01:11:38.000 So it says when you're buying fish...

01:11:41.000 Okay, here's the science.

01:11:43.000 Try to say that word.

01:11:45.000 Trimethylene.

01:11:46.000 Trimethylene oxide.

01:11:47.000 Trimethylene oxide is a common chemical in living things.

01:11:50.000 It's colorless, odorless, and produced by normal metabolic processes.

01:11:54.000 When a fish or shellfish is killed, however, it breaks down into trimethylene, which is the chemical responsible for that fishy smell that we know so well.

01:12:02.000 If your cut of fish isn't too far gone, as the flesh is still firm and only a few days thawed at most, a quick soak about 10 to 20 minutes in a bowl of milk will help get rid of that odor.

01:12:13.000 The casein.

01:12:14.000 Okay.

01:12:14.000 How do you say it?

01:12:15.000 Is that casein or casein?

01:12:16.000 I've heard it both ways.

01:12:17.000 I've never heard it.

01:12:18.000 I only read it.

01:12:19.000 Yeah.

01:12:19.000 C-A-S-E-I-N in the milk bonds with the trimethylene.

01:12:23.000 And while it's not a full extraction, a quick soak can pull a good bit amount of the flesh and reduce the odor.

01:12:29.000 So that's probably what's going on.

01:12:30.000 You're reducing the odor in the meat.

01:12:32.000 And probably enhancing the flavor in doing so.

01:12:36.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:12:36.000 Especially if a stinky ass bear has been eating fish. 0.99

01:12:39.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:12:40.000 And this one definitely had, I think.

01:12:42.000 Yeah, well, the big ones especially.

01:12:44.000 I mean, that's one of the reasons why they grow so big on Kodiak, right?

01:12:46.000 It's because they have so much access to fish.

01:12:48.000 Yeah, and short torpor, short hibernation.

01:12:51.000 Yeah, that's crazy, man.

01:12:54.000 I've never eaten grizzly.

01:12:56.000 I've eaten brown bear, or black bear, rather.

01:12:59.000 My friend John and Jen, they have a camp up in Alberta, and we ate.

01:13:04.000 Do you know them, the rivets?

01:13:05.000 I don't.

01:13:07.000 They have a camp up in Alberta and great black bear hunting.

01:13:11.000 And Jen is a really good cook and she made this black bear stir fry. 1.00

01:13:14.000 And even people that were skeptical, they were like, okay, I've never eaten bear before. 0.98

01:13:18.000 They're like, holy shit, this is fantastic. 0.97

01:13:21.000 She cooked this stir fry and then served it over rice. 0.99

01:13:24.000 I mean, it's amazing.

01:13:26.000 It was so good.

01:13:27.000 And so good for you. 1.00

01:13:28.000 The way I explain it to people, it's like a deer fucked a pig. 1.00

01:13:31.000 That's what the meat tastes like. 0.99

01:13:34.000 And maybe its cousin was a cow.

01:13:37.000 It's not a meat that tastes like anything you could put your thumb on.

01:13:43.000 Like, oh, that's just like this.

01:13:46.000 That's just like that.

01:13:47.000 It's just really rich.

01:13:49.000 It's fantastic.

01:13:51.000 And bear hunting all the way around is just awesome.

01:13:53.000 Yeah, but again, it's so charged in the public eye in terms of how people perceive it.

01:14:01.000 It's one of those animals, and I think it's because of these movies that people grow up with, these movies where these animals are our friends, and they're looking out for us, and they're our buddies.

01:14:13.000 We've done ourselves no service by doing that, by creating these films that have poisoned little kids' minds as to what these animals are.

01:14:22.000 And what these animals are are opportunists and predators, and they are there to remove the weak and the limping and the babies and anything else he can get his hands on for population control.

01:14:33.000 I mean, this is the balance of nature.

01:14:35.000 If we still were hunters and gatherers, right, there would not be...

01:14:39.000 There was not a single anti-hunter in that group, right?

01:14:43.000 Right.

01:14:45.000 That guy didn't live.

01:14:46.000 There's no room for that guy.

01:14:47.000 So even what I talked about in our short film, Who We Are, the president of PETA comes from a strong group of hunters and gatherers.

01:14:57.000 Otherwise, the dude wouldn't be here.

01:14:58.000 But to play devil's advocate, their thought process and the thought process of vegans and vegetarians are that...

01:15:05.000 If I could speak for them, is that we're moving past that.

01:15:08.000 We're moving past animal cruelty.

01:15:10.000 We're moving past the need to eat and consume meat.

01:15:14.000 Right.

01:15:15.000 I disagree.

01:15:17.000 I think we have, through infrastructures of safety and laziness, we've set it up so that you can go down that road if you want.

01:15:25.000 We've set this up so you don't have to...

01:15:29.000 You never have to crack an egg.

01:15:30.000 If you have enough money, you never have to crack an egg in your entire life.

01:15:33.000 And you can eat eggs your entire life.

01:15:35.000 So you can back away from who we really are.

01:15:40.000 If you have the financial wherewithal or you live in New York City or you live in LA, you can back off of the real muddiness as far as you want.

01:15:48.000 But in true reality, this is really who we are.

01:15:51.000 It's just that we have infrastructures now that make up for it that make you...

01:15:56.000 That allow that disconnection.

01:15:58.000 They allow you to say, hey, we've moved past this now.

01:16:01.000 I can get my coffee at the corner.

01:16:04.000 I don't have to go to Ethiopia.

01:16:06.000 Yeah, it's hard to argue.

01:16:08.000 It's hard to argue.

01:16:09.000 And we did a piece, my production company, Sigmanta, we did a piece a few years ago or last year for Epic Meats.

01:16:15.000 Have you ever heard of those guys?

01:16:17.000 They do high-end jerky and they do animal fats and they do bone broths and things like that.

01:16:23.000 Yeah, they make bars, right?

01:16:25.000 Those are delicious.

01:16:26.000 Yeah, they're really amazing.

01:16:27.000 So the owners were vegans.

01:16:28.000 They were both vegans, a husband and wife couple, and they're both also triathletes.

01:16:35.000 And they were doing these races, and they were having a tough time recovering from their races.

01:16:40.000 And they actually owned one of the largest vegan food companies in the country.

01:16:45.000 And they went to go see a friend who was a medical doctor, a friend of theirs, and he said, hey, look, I think you guys need to get some really high-end animal fats in your systems to help your bodies recover from these races. 0.99

01:16:59.000 And they started doing that and their symptoms, like their soreness, whether it be back pain, hip, knees, I'm assuming that was all from the races. 1.00

01:17:13.000 I don't know.

01:17:32.000 And they went down that road.

01:17:34.000 They ended up actually selling the vegan food company off because people found out that they owned both.

01:17:39.000 And I think there was obviously some problems there.

01:17:44.000 But they just found really good sourced meat and they do all field harvest.

01:17:50.000 And so we did a commercial production for them, a branding piece for them to kind of highlight how they treat their animals and how they kill their animals because they kill them Rather than putting them on a truck and loading them into corrals and doing that whole thing, they literally drive out with the same tractor that they feed them with,

01:18:06.000 and they have them on huge pastures so that they're actually reclaiming the ground.

01:18:10.000 And it's really cool.

01:18:11.000 When they do ranches, they'll go in and test all the soils of these ranches and the grasses, and then they'll retest them after one year, three years, five years, and they're finding even better soils and better grasses as these animals have spent time there because they're doing More fertilizing and the grasses are being reclaimed and then they shoot the animal in the head with a high-powered rifle and so they do just lights out,

01:18:33.000 boom, done and then that's how they butcher them. 0.94

01:18:36.000 So they do it about as ethically and humanely as you can kill an animal.

01:18:40.000 As you can kill an animal that's being raised in a pen.

01:18:42.000 What was that place in LA? Was it called Harmony Cafe?

01:18:46.000 Is that what it was called?

01:18:46.000 What was the place where the people owned it?

01:18:50.000 Gratitude.

01:18:50.000 Cafe Gratitude.

01:18:51.000 Right, that's right.

01:18:52.000 There was a place in LA that was owned by these people.

01:18:56.000 It still is, but they were vegans for a long time and they were having health issues as well and they decided to butcher their own animals and start raising their own animals and butchering them. 0.99

01:19:06.000 And I think they wrote about it on a blog And they were just trying to explain themselves, and vegans went fucking crazy.

01:19:13.000 The people that owned the restaurant went crazy, and they got a bunch of death threats, and it became this giant issue with them. 0.92

01:19:20.000 I get where they're coming from.

01:19:22.000 They have this rigid idea of what's happening, and they don't want an animal to die so that they can live.

01:19:28.000 I get it.

01:19:29.000 But their perception of the ethical purity of their deciding to just eat vegetables...

01:19:37.000 And the actual health consequences in terms of how many people can get by and what your physical dietary needs are, how many people can get by on just eating a vegan diet, especially if you're not super careful and using algae and all these different things to get B12 and fat-soluble vitamins.

01:19:56.000 You can get by, but is it optimum?

01:19:59.000 For most people, according to most nutritionists and people that aren't ideologues, no.

01:20:04.000 Yep.

01:20:05.000 I agree.

01:20:06.000 The answer is no.

01:20:06.000 It's like we are herbivores.

01:20:08.000 I mean, rather, omnivores.

01:20:10.000 We're not herbivores.

01:20:11.000 And some people that are in the vegetarian world, they want us to think that we are basically herbivores and that we can get by and that our desire to consume meat is just because of the sickness that we have and this evil nature that, you know, human beings sometimes are possessed by.

01:20:28.000 But it's just not true.

01:20:30.000 Yeah.

01:20:30.000 The whole reason why we became a human being in the first place as opposed to one of the lower primates, a lot of that is attributed to our consumption of meat.

01:20:40.000 Hunting, meat, cooking, cooking with fire.

01:20:43.000 And it's such a fantastic...

01:20:44.000 I would love if I was a billionaire and you said, hey, do you want to continue along with the career that you're on right now?

01:20:53.000 I absolutely would, but the thing that I would love the most is to take people with me.

01:20:58.000 Yeah, it would be super hard for a vegan to get into that, though.

01:21:02.000 I mean, man, they would have to have some sort of desire on their part to see the cycle of life. 0.99

01:21:08.000 It's not something you could just take some flower child that's only eating sprouts and say, hey, I'm going to go shoot this mule deer through the lungs with a fucking... 1.00

01:21:18.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:21:18.000 You know, Muzzy Trokar, and you're going to sit there and watch them. 0.99

01:21:23.000 Yeah.

01:21:24.000 No, they would have to be—they have questions.

01:21:27.000 Yeah, I mean, they would have to be on that path themselves.

01:21:30.000 It's just—it's an interesting byproduct to me of society.

01:21:35.000 What we've done with this really incredible infrastructure that we've created where we can get food to these 20 million people that live in LA and No one be a part of that Preparation in terms of you know getting the animal killing it serving it, you know Butchering it cooking it serving it we cut all that shit out and go right to buying the meat that's already cooked Yeah,

01:21:55.000 and we've done it so much and it's so much more prevalent than any of the other steps you know most of the Most of the consumption that most people in this country, like when we're talking about eating meat, I would say maybe even,

01:22:12.000 what is the number?

01:22:14.000 I would like to know what the number is, if I had a guess, of how many people even cook their own meat.

01:22:20.000 I mean, how many people are getting most of their meals from a store or a restaurant or fast food?

01:22:27.000 Yeah, pre-prepped.

01:22:28.000 Oh, fast food.

01:22:29.000 I mean, I didn't even think about fast food.

01:22:31.000 That's got to be the majority.

01:22:32.000 Yeah, I mean, how many people are actually even cooking their own meat?

01:22:35.000 I mean, we've cut out so many steps.

01:22:38.000 I would bet it was probably more than half don't even cook their own meat.

01:22:44.000 Yeah, I mean, people, they just don't have an understanding of where it comes from, right?

01:22:49.000 And the engagement.

01:22:50.000 There's just no understanding whatsoever.

01:22:53.000 It's such a charged subject.

01:22:54.000 And I just saw, flying here to meet with you, I just saw, I think it was in the Minneapolis airport, there was a huge sign on the wall.

01:23:02.000 It was a picture of a massive, massive cornfield.

01:23:06.000 And it may have been doctored up, but it was corn as far as the eye can see.

01:23:10.000 And it was for Cargill, a big corporation out of Minneapolis.

01:23:13.000 I think they're out of Minneapolis.

01:23:14.000 But it said, preparing to feed 8 billion people.

01:23:22.000 And, uh, so I just see that sign and I'm just like, yeah, that, I mean, that's hell in a handbasket right there. 0.99

01:23:28.000 Corn's fucking terrible for you. 1.00

01:23:29.000 Terrible. 1.00

01:23:30.000 Absolutely terrible.

01:23:31.000 And literally, you can read that sign and all these people will be like, oh, that's so beautiful.

01:23:35.000 Like, all those corn stalks and there'll be food for us forever.

01:23:38.000 Why cook when you cannot?

01:23:40.000 The percentage of diners, or dinners rather, eaten at home that were actually made at home in the U.S. It is so weird having you here. 0.97

01:23:48.000 Jamie's the shit. 1.00

01:23:49.000 It's so weird. 1.00

01:23:50.000 This isn't just me, but this is just dinner, so.

01:23:51.000 Right.

01:23:51.000 It's So this is how many people are cooking.

01:23:53.000 But really, that's the only meal.

01:23:54.000 It's lower and lower.

01:23:56.000 So it's somewhere in the 60% range.

01:24:01.000 So the percentage of dinners eaten at home that were actually made at home in the U.S., somewhere around 60%. 0.99

01:24:08.000 So in that 60%, You gotta think there's the mom or the dad that's cooking and then the kids that are eating the food so they're not cooking shit. 0.99

01:24:19.000 No. 0.97

01:24:20.000 So it's probably way lower than that in terms of the actual human beings that are eating cooked food that they cook themselves.

01:24:26.000 Yeah.

01:24:27.000 So how can you stand on any sort of laurels at all without at least asking some questions?

01:24:35.000 Yeah, I mean, people, their answers are they feel better if they think that they're doing no harm.

01:24:42.000 And the way to do no harm is to eat vegan.

01:24:45.000 So this is the ideology behind it.

01:24:47.000 And I understand it.

01:24:49.000 I get it.

01:24:50.000 I appreciate it. 0.99

01:24:51.000 But the fucking anger at people who don't follow that path is where it gets real squirrely. 0.99

01:24:57.000 And it's a small number of people, and I've talked about this in my act, that the problem with vegans is the problem with people. 0.99

01:25:05.000 It's not veganism, it's people. 1.00

01:25:08.000 If you get a room that has 100 people in it, the odds of one of those people being a fucking idiot is 100%. 1.00

01:25:15.000 It's almost 100% that one of them is a fucking idiot. 1.00

01:25:18.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:25:18.000 So if you get 300 million people, you have 3 million fucking idiots. 1.00

01:25:23.000 And some of those folks are vegans. 1.00

01:25:25.000 And that's the problem with veganism.

01:25:27.000 It's not veganism itself.

01:25:30.000 There's a certain percentage of human beings that they don't have to do anything to become vegans, right?

01:25:36.000 They just join this group.

01:25:38.000 It's not like you have a...

01:25:39.000 We're thinking about allowing you in to the vegan culture, but we want to know what your philosophy is.

01:25:44.000 Are you a hateful person? 0.99

01:25:45.000 Are you a person that's looking to be a vegan so you can just talk shit about other people? 1.00

01:25:49.000 Are you looking to be in a group or a gang, a plant-based gang, and put the word vegan in front of your name and just start talking shit? 1.00

01:25:57.000 Because that's a lot of the people. 0.99

01:25:59.000 And so people read all these angry, hateful things that these people write, and they go, oh, well, this is vegans.

01:26:05.000 But it's not.

01:26:06.000 It's not.

01:26:06.000 Most vegans are not like that at all.

01:26:08.000 It's people.

01:26:09.000 Most people are not like that at all. 0.98

01:26:11.000 But there's a certain percentage of them, and they claim veganism, and they usually put that name, the word vegan, in their fucking screen name. 1.00

01:26:18.000 That's how you could spot those assholes. 1.00

01:26:20.000 Proud. 1.00

01:26:21.000 Yeah, they're into it.

01:26:22.000 They're in a plant-based gang, and that's really what happens.

01:26:26.000 What it is, is not necessarily even a problem of diet.

01:26:29.000 It's a problem of human nature, is that people love to stand on the moral high ground. 0.98

01:26:35.000 They love to point down to all the other people, whether it's a religious issue, like you're not eating halal, or you're not eating kosher, or you're eating meat on Good Friday, whatever the fuck it is. 1.00

01:26:45.000 They just decide that they have this moral high ground that you don't have, so fuck you. 1.00

01:26:51.000 I'm doing it right. 1.00

01:26:52.000 And it really comes from our own questions of our own existence and this messiness that we're all inherently aware of, that life eats life.

01:27:02.000 Big time.

01:27:03.000 Big time.

01:27:03.000 There was a guy that I did a podcast with out of Maine, and he was for sure a vegetarian.

01:27:11.000 He might have been a vegan.

01:27:12.000 But then he started, and he's a forager big time.

01:27:15.000 It's actually pretty remarkable what he does, but I think 99% of his food he finds in the forest year-round.

01:27:21.000 He's just into it big time, processes all of his food from wild apples to acorns.

01:27:26.000 Is that a tovar?

01:27:28.000 What's his name?

01:27:31.000 Daniel Vitalis.

01:27:32.000 What's that?

01:27:34.000 Oh, Daniel Vitalis.

01:27:35.000 Okay, yeah.

01:27:35.000 I've heard of him as well.

01:27:36.000 So I did a podcast with him, and he told me that he'd eat insects.

01:27:42.000 He was completely against hunting.

01:27:45.000 He didn't want to kill anything.

01:27:46.000 That's why he's eating insects.

01:27:47.000 And I would get a little bit of hate mail.

01:27:54.000 Yeah.

01:27:55.000 Yeah.

01:27:57.000 Yeah.

01:28:06.000 Like, there's a lot of meat on one of these frogs.

01:28:08.000 Like, it's like 20 dragonflies, you know?

01:28:11.000 And he got a little bit more flack for it.

01:28:15.000 And then a buddy of his wanted to take him fishing.

01:28:17.000 And they caught a trout.

01:28:18.000 And he's like, oh my god, this is like three frogs.

01:28:21.000 Like, this is three frogs!

01:28:22.000 And so what he's equating it to is how much work he has to go through to get this protein or to get this plant.

01:28:29.000 Like, you find one apple, that's 15 acorns, you know?

01:28:31.000 And so, like, he's equating this to work.

01:28:34.000 And so he just kept moving up the food chain.

01:28:37.000 And then one year he killed a turkey.

01:28:40.000 And he told me, he's like, I killed a snowshoe hare.

01:28:42.000 And he's like, I was blown away at how much meat was on a snowshoe hare.

01:28:47.000 He's like, that was three meals for him and his girlfriend.

01:28:50.000 Try a moose.

01:28:51.000 Yeah, and so he just kept moving up.

01:28:53.000 He killed a turkey.

01:28:53.000 Then this last year, he killed a black bear.

01:28:55.000 But he's like, every stage that he's moved up, his hate mail went up, you know, I don't know, exponentially, but significantly.

01:29:03.000 And so it's just, people equate all these things to, you know, we relate more to mammals, obviously.

01:29:07.000 We're mammals, you know, and then you bring in something like a bear that has...

01:29:12.000 Anthropomorphic, you know, mannerisms, right?

01:29:14.000 You watch a black bear for a half a day and you're like, you see your dad. 0.99

01:29:17.000 You're like, oh, he just sat on his ass for four hours. 0.99

01:29:20.000 They roll around sometimes in the back and play. 1.00

01:29:21.000 Yeah, chewed on his toenails.

01:29:23.000 Yeah, he's like itched his ear, farted. 0.70

01:29:25.000 He pooped over there next to the girl. 0.97

01:29:27.000 And then, you know, and you're like, oh my God, it's my dad.

01:29:29.000 I'm hunting my dad, you know?

01:29:30.000 And so, you know, there's things like that.

01:29:33.000 But that's where this, I think that's where this really cool engagement comes from with hunters.

01:29:38.000 And there's a lot of hunters.

01:29:40.000 Like, I talk to a lot of hunters, and I don't want to be negative.

01:29:42.000 I'm trying not to be negative, but I talk to a lot of hunters.

01:29:44.000 I have nothing in common with them.

01:29:45.000 Absolutely nothing.

01:29:46.000 Right.

01:29:47.000 You hunt, I hunt.

01:29:48.000 I don't even think we have that uncommon because I see how you hunt and it's had nothing to do with how I hunt.

01:29:52.000 But isn't that like what we were just saying about vegans that the problem is just being a human being?

01:29:56.000 Correct. 1.00

01:29:56.000 There's a certain amount of people that choose to hunt that are not well informed and they're fucking idiots. 1.00

01:30:01.000 Yep, and so that's the stuff. 1.00

01:30:02.000 It's like same with the vegans.

01:30:04.000 I'm sure there's vegans that sit at home and just grab their faces and go, I can't believe somebody just said that.

01:30:10.000 I can't believe they sent a death threat.

01:30:12.000 Yeah.

01:30:12.000 We're vegan for, you know, God's sakes.

01:30:14.000 One of my best friends is a vegan.

01:30:16.000 Yeah.

01:30:16.000 Ian Edwards, hilarious comedian.

01:30:18.000 He's a vegan.

01:30:18.000 I know some vegans too, and I actually know some vegetarians that, you know, it was an education for me, but I had some vegetarians hit me up for meat, you know, and I was like, uh...

01:30:28.000 Oh, you're a vegetarian.

01:30:29.000 And they're like, well, yeah, yeah, we're not going to eat this meat, but we'd love to have some fish or deer meat from you.

01:30:34.000 Like, oh, okay, now I'm starting to...

01:30:35.000 This was a while ago, but I'm like, oh, okay, now I'm starting to get it here.

01:30:38.000 Right, people have ethical concerns about where their meat comes from.

01:30:41.000 Yeah.

01:30:41.000 Yeah, my friend Jake Shields, he's a guy who fought in the UFC, and he's a world-class jiu-jitsu black belt.

01:30:47.000 He's been a vegetarian his whole life, but he said he would eat meat that was hunted.

01:30:50.000 Yeah.

01:30:50.000 He was like, because that's, you know, there's no ethical...

01:30:53.000 It adds up in his head for him, right?

01:30:54.000 Right, right.

01:30:54.000 Like, it answers his questions.

01:30:56.000 Exactly.

01:30:57.000 But that's exactly it.

01:30:59.000 I've had some awesome conversations with people that were not hunters that asked great questions.

01:31:05.000 Way better than conversations I've had with guys that call themselves hunters at times.

01:31:09.000 Again, it's the problem with human beings, right?

01:31:13.000 There's certain people that just aren't thinking that much.

01:31:15.000 And then there's certain parts of the hunting culture that are really abhorrent.

01:31:20.000 There's people that think it's...

01:31:23.000 Funny or fun to shoot as many animals as they can and they don't they don't have any consideration to you know that this life has been taken so that your life can be Nurtured or you get nutrition from this animal and they're not thinking of it in terms of this cycle of life They're just thinking of in terms of you know just like The worst aspects that you get like in a movie about hunting and for me like Doing it.

01:31:52.000 Going to the Arctic.

01:31:53.000 I bring that up often because it's my favorite place.

01:31:56.000 Why is the Arctic your favorite place?

01:31:59.000 It's just so wide open.

01:32:02.000 You have northern lights at night if you're lucky.

01:32:07.000 Massive moose and caribou.

01:32:09.000 Watching caribou migrate and grizzly bears eating blueberries.

01:32:13.000 I spent so much time with wolves up in these areas and really engaging with the wolves and stuff.

01:32:18.000 Just...

01:32:19.000 It's just always fed these experiences to me, and that's what really started to mean, that's what really mattered the most to me, was being in these areas, taking a deep breath, being super present, being super aware, and seeing all of these different things that were...

01:32:34.000 Filling my soul, right?

01:32:36.000 True soul food while I was hunting a moose or while I was hunting a caribou.

01:32:40.000 And then maybe being successful on a moose or a caribou and skinning it out and feeling the weight on my back because I'm getting it back to camp.

01:32:49.000 And the northern lights are overhead.

01:32:50.000 Or if they're not out, the stars are out.

01:32:52.000 And I'm hearing wolves howling.

01:32:54.000 And I lived with a pack of wolves one summer in Alaska when I was up there doing research.

01:33:01.000 You lived with a pack of wolves?

01:33:03.000 No.

01:33:03.000 So how'd you do that?

01:33:06.000 I was doing research for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and I ran a research camp, a genetics camp, from June through September, May through September, whatever.

01:33:19.000 I did it five years in a row, and one year, a pack of wolves moved into my research camp.

01:33:25.000 Whoa.

01:33:26.000 Oh, it was whoa.

01:33:28.000 I mean, whoa.

01:33:29.000 I went fly fishing one night, and I was standing on the bank of a river casting, and it was an eerie little river that I was on.

01:33:37.000 It was pretty quiet, but it had a good flow, and I was waiting for salmon to come up, and I was fly fishing for grayling.

01:33:42.000 And I just kind of had this eerie feeling.

01:33:44.000 I was by myself, and I just had this eerie feeling that I was being watched, and And I happened to look behind me and there's a big alder thicket, right?

01:33:51.000 These bushes that are probably 10 to 12 feet high, have green leaves on them and these twisted gnarly, almost like a, you know, Boo Radley type tree, like gnarly branches.

01:34:00.000 And I was just staring in the alders.

01:34:03.000 And there's grizzly bears where I was, so I was just trying to mine my...

01:34:06.000 And I'm, you know, I'm walking on wolf and grizzly bear tracks as I'm fishing.

01:34:10.000 So I was just staring back in the alders and it was like a movie.

01:34:15.000 So my eyes were starting to truncate down on the leaves and then all of a sudden it came to this little opening.

01:34:20.000 I could see a wolf's face staring at me through the alders and she was probably 10 yards away, something like that.

01:34:29.000 And so I saw her and when I looked at her she was just staring at me.

01:34:33.000 And I just looked back at her and I just said, hey, you know, I just said, hey.

01:34:37.000 I said, hey, mama, what's going on?

01:34:38.000 And I just kept fishing because I wanted her to know that I knew.

01:34:42.000 And I turned my back on her and I kept fishing.

01:34:43.000 Well, lo and behold, she comes out on the sandbar with me.

01:34:46.000 And she starts walking down behind me.

01:34:49.000 And it was funny because if I didn't make eye contact, she was totally chill.

01:34:52.000 But if I made eye contact, she would snarl at me. 1.00

01:34:54.000 She'd raise her lips up and give a little deep-seated growl. 1.00

01:34:58.000 And so she was standing.

01:34:59.000 Now she's probably three feet behind me.

01:35:02.000 What?

01:35:02.000 Yeah.

01:35:03.000 And so she's right there.

01:35:05.000 She's literally right there.

01:35:07.000 And so I'm just like, hey mom, what's going on?

01:35:09.000 I'm just casting my fly rod.

01:35:10.000 And when I'm not looking at her, she's kind of trying to check me out.

01:35:14.000 She's doing the whole nose extension, getting a whiff. 0.98

01:35:17.000 So she moves off.

01:35:18.000 She moves off down the...

01:35:19.000 Three feet?

01:35:20.000 Mm-hmm.

01:35:20.000 She moves off down the...

01:35:21.000 Do you have a gun on you?

01:35:23.000 I did have a 12-gauge at that time.

01:35:24.000 I had a 12-gauge slug gun.

01:35:26.000 But I rarely took that thing with me.

01:35:28.000 But I got in trouble actually from one of my bosses because one of the other biologists told my boss, he never carries the gun.

01:35:34.000 And we're supposed to carry a gun everywhere we go.

01:35:36.000 And so I'm just like, whatever.

01:35:38.000 So she left.

01:35:40.000 Were you worried that she was going to attack you?

01:35:42.000 No.

01:35:43.000 Why did she get so close?

01:35:44.000 That seems weird.

01:35:45.000 I don't know.

01:35:46.000 Yeah, she was just checking me out.

01:35:47.000 She's just checking me out.

01:35:48.000 That's how I was reading into it anyway. 0.99

01:35:51.000 So you think just by the way you were talking to her that she realized that you weren't even interested in being a threat and she was confident that she could get the fuck away from you? 0.99

01:35:58.000 That's a good question. 0.98

01:36:00.000 Yeah, that's a good question.

01:36:01.000 Three feet?

01:36:02.000 Yeah.

01:36:02.000 That's this.

01:36:03.000 That's one, two, three.

01:36:06.000 Yeah, maybe even two and a half feet. 1.00

01:36:08.000 Fuck, dude. 1.00

01:36:09.000 That's like you could touch her. 1.00

01:36:10.000 Oh, it gets much better.

01:36:12.000 It gets much better.

01:36:13.000 I ended up spending a whole summer with her and all the other animals in the pack.

01:36:17.000 So the next day, I hear her howl down the river.

01:36:21.000 So I'm just messing around, so I howl back to her.

01:36:23.000 She howls back to me instantly. 1.00

01:36:25.000 I howl back to her. 0.95

01:36:26.000 All of a sudden, I see her.

01:36:27.000 She's now standing exactly where I was standing the night before.

01:36:30.000 It's all a true story. 0.98

01:36:32.000 She's sitting on her butt, sitting upright like you would see a German shepherd sitting, staring at me. 0.97

01:36:38.000 So I give her just a little coy little... 0.96

01:36:43.000 She lays down.

01:36:45.000 She maintains eye contact with me.

01:36:47.000 And then she's just sitting there staring at me.

01:36:49.000 And then she sits up again.

01:36:51.000 And I howl again.

01:36:52.000 Just a little one.

01:36:53.000 She lays down again.

01:36:54.000 She's just maintaining eye contact.

01:36:56.000 Then she leaves.

01:36:57.000 That night.

01:36:58.000 So the area of the tundra that I was on is greatly impacted by even human foot traffic.

01:37:05.000 So you have to be really careful where you step because, you know, your footprint will be there for a long time.

01:37:10.000 So we'd walk on these little planks that we made out of 2x4s that would sit up on logs that we put in place.

01:37:16.000 And I had a tent where I slept, and I had a genetics tent where I did all my stuff, and then I had a cook tent, things like that.

01:37:23.000 But right in front of my tent, I had this little platform where I would get dressed in the morning, because I would literally live for five and a half months in a little two and a half person pup tent.

01:37:31.000 So I'd get out in the morning and get dressed on this little piece of wood, and then I'd walk to breakfast or whatever, or to the river.

01:37:37.000 In the middle of the night, the alpha male was sitting on my little platform and he howled right outside my tent.

01:37:43.000 Dude!

01:37:44.000 And I sat up and I grabbed my gun and I was just sitting there and he woke me up from a dead sleep.

01:37:48.000 I was just sitting there panting with my gun.

01:37:50.000 I was looking all around and I didn't know what it was.

01:37:53.000 Then I heard something and I kind of peeked out and I saw that it was this big male.

01:37:57.000 I was like, okay, it's just not just a wolf, but like, you know, he's not going to bother me at all.

01:38:02.000 So I hung my gun back up and I just set my gun back down and I just laid back down.

01:38:07.000 But Those two instances just started each day.

01:38:12.000 The next day I come out and I'm walking to the genetics tent and I see him.

01:38:16.000 He's 20 yards away and he's paralleling me on this plank.

01:38:20.000 And I go into the cook tent and then I'm kind of like peeking out the little corners.

01:38:24.000 I don't know what they're doing.

01:38:27.000 I don't want to walk out and...

01:38:29.000 And I don't think that's...

01:38:31.000 They have no body language of hunting whatsoever.

01:38:34.000 And so...

01:38:35.000 What is their body language of?

01:38:36.000 Curiosity?

01:38:37.000 Curiosity, yeah.

01:38:39.000 And I hate to...

01:38:41.000 Anthropomorphize?

01:38:43.000 Yeah, but it was just like that movie Never Cry Wolf.

01:38:47.000 That's exactly how the wolves were engaging with me.

01:38:49.000 What was that movie?

01:38:50.000 It was about a researcher, a book by Farley Mowat, of a researcher that went up to the Canadian government.

01:38:57.000 They were thinking that wolves were decimating these caribou herds.

01:39:01.000 And so they sent this biologist up there to research the wolves to see how many caribou they were killing and basically what the biologist found out was that the wolves weren't killing any caribou.

01:39:10.000 Zero caribou.

01:39:11.000 They were killing redback voles and they were fishing and they were doing other ways.

01:39:14.000 They were eating small animals which is basically a very large part of what wolves do.

01:39:19.000 They eat very small animals and occasionally kill caribou, occasionally kill moose, things like that.

01:39:23.000 In certain areas they can be really hardcore predators.

01:39:27.000 In other areas they eat a lot of mice.

01:39:30.000 But that's how these wolves are engaging with the actor in this movie.

01:39:34.000 They're kind of inquisitive.

01:39:36.000 They're coming around.

01:39:37.000 And so these wolves, they were just always present.

01:39:40.000 Even I would go hiking just to get some exercise, and literally three or four of them would go with me.

01:39:45.000 And they'd hang back like 50, 60 yards behind me.

01:39:48.000 But I'd hike for like 10 miles and they'd do the whole thing with me and return back to camp with me.

01:39:53.000 And then it started to really grow because we have this research gear that's in the river so that we can count, speciate, and sample the salmon as they swim through to go spawn.

01:40:04.000 But after the salmon spawn, they all die, right?

01:40:07.000 And so they would spawn, die, and they'd come back and they'd wash up on my gear.

01:40:11.000 And so I'd have all these, that's why the wolves were there.

01:40:13.000 They wanted to eat the dead fish that were coming back down.

01:40:16.000 And so as I started to toss fish off on the banks of the river, usually I would just toss them back into the river, but I'd toss them on the banks, the fresher fish.

01:40:24.000 And the wolves started eating them.

01:40:26.000 And then our relationship just kept growing and growing and growing and growing.

01:40:30.000 And I ended up spending like three and a half months with them.

01:40:33.000 Did you think while you were doing this that this is probably how human beings and wolves developed this relationship?

01:40:39.000 100% 100% 100% and actually I feel bad saying this and I hope I don't offend anybody but I was working with two Inuit guys two Eskimo guys and they wanted to shoot all these wolves I kind of lied to him and I just said, man, like, have you ever seen wolves behave like this?

01:40:56.000 And they said, no.

01:40:56.000 And I said, well, you know, some of your guys' beliefs, you know, fall that your ancestors move on into the animal kingdom, right?

01:41:04.000 And they're like, yeah.

01:41:04.000 And I said, well, is there a chance that some of these wolves could be some of your ancestors, you know?

01:41:09.000 And I know that's not true.

01:41:11.000 At least I think I know that's not true.

01:41:13.000 But they're like, yeah, yeah.

01:41:14.000 So I just was trying to convince these guys because they wanted to blast these things.

01:41:17.000 And so I just convinced them not to shoot the wolves. 1.00

01:41:19.000 And I feel like an asshole saying it. 1.00

01:41:20.000 Why do you feel like an asshole saying that? 1.00

01:41:22.000 I don't know. 1.00

01:41:23.000 I just didn't want them to shoot the wolves.

01:41:24.000 It's probably a good way to rationalize it.

01:41:27.000 I steered them down a path of where their minds may have gone anyway.

01:41:31.000 But I spent time with those wolves and I've had, you know, in the idea of management, like when we were in the short that Jamie was just playing Who We Are that we played, you can see some wolves in there.

01:41:44.000 And a few years ago I got surrounded by a pack of wolves in the Arctic with the crew.

01:41:48.000 And it filmed really beautifully.

01:41:50.000 And it was one of the most remarkable engagements I've ever had in the wilderness.

01:41:54.000 And they were definitely...

01:41:56.000 Their body language was definitely looking at us as though...

01:42:00.000 Are we food?

01:42:02.000 Right?

01:42:03.000 So that was one of them.

01:42:04.000 But we had like six or seven wolves come in behind us.

01:42:07.000 So this wolf would be in front of us.

01:42:09.000 Two or three others would be behind us.

01:42:11.000 But you can see they're not attacking us.

01:42:13.000 They're not even hunting us.

01:42:14.000 But you can just see like they're wondering...

01:42:16.000 You know, is there a play here?

01:42:19.000 Right?

01:42:20.000 Is there a play here?

01:42:21.000 And I mean this.

01:42:24.000 I'm not being a tough guy.

01:42:25.000 There wasn't an ounce.

01:42:27.000 I didn't have a...

01:42:28.000 Not a fiber of my body was afraid at any point.

01:42:31.000 And there's probably six, seven wolves around us within ten yards.

01:42:36.000 And they're communicating.

01:42:37.000 They're doing this little like...

01:42:38.000 So they're talking to each other.

01:42:41.000 And then they just moved off and it turns out that...

01:42:44.000 The moose that I was stalking, I think they were stalking too.

01:42:47.000 There was a big bull that was bedded.

01:42:49.000 And if they weren't stalking him, because I think they would have had their hands full with him, but if they weren't stalking him, then they were just moving in that general direction.

01:42:57.000 They were for sure hunting.

01:43:00.000 And I've always had a tremendous respect for them.

01:43:06.000 I've always had time with them.

01:43:08.000 I've always had time with them.

01:43:10.000 I've had wolf tags in my pocket before.

01:43:12.000 This kind of falls under the same idea of conservation, like these wolves right here.

01:43:18.000 I had a wolf tag in my pocket.

01:43:19.000 I had my bow.

01:43:20.000 I could have arrowed any of these wolves easily, multiples of them probably.

01:43:25.000 But I don't want to kill a wolf here because they know when another wolf is gone.

01:43:31.000 The pack knows.

01:43:32.000 And so that...

01:43:34.000 That weighs on me a little bit.

01:43:35.000 It's also why, right? 0.97

01:43:36.000 Like, why kill them? 0.95

01:43:38.000 Are there too many of them? 0.93

01:43:40.000 Unless there's a real issue.

01:43:42.000 See, that was the thing for me.

01:43:43.000 I didn't do my homework for this area, so I was just like, I don't know if there's a lot of wolves.

01:43:48.000 I don't know if there's little wolves.

01:43:49.000 I'm not going to kill a wolf.

01:43:50.000 I have no interest in killing a wolf.

01:43:51.000 I get a wolf tag with my stuff.

01:43:54.000 Ranella was telling me that there's one of the explorers that traveled the West during the Lewis and Clark days.

01:43:59.000 His favorite meal was wolf.

01:44:02.000 And that wolf was literally his favorite thing to eat.

01:44:07.000 I've never eaten it.

01:44:08.000 Yeah, I would have a real hard time.

01:44:10.000 I just couldn't...

01:44:11.000 They're too much like dogs.

01:44:14.000 I think there's some sort of a genetic memory that we have of our relationship with wolves.

01:44:19.000 I mean, they've become dogs and they've become our...

01:44:23.000 You know, our companions, and they've become a part of our community.

01:44:28.000 Yeah, it just wasn't, you know, it wasn't for me.

01:44:31.000 And when the pilot picked me up, he asked me if I'd seen any wolves, and I said, yeah, we saw a lot of wolves.

01:44:35.000 And he's like, oh, they're now, you know, he's not, I'm not telling you, he's running surveys here, but he's like, yeah, there's a lot of wolves here, there's a lot of predation on moose here, so we're trying to really cut the wolves down here.

01:44:47.000 And I saw a lot of wolves, but I also saw a ton of moose.

01:44:50.000 And I saw a ton of cows, and I saw lots of calves and lots of big bulls.

01:44:54.000 So everything seemed to be functioning in that area.

01:44:57.000 And I also saw a ton of redback voles, right? 1.00

01:45:01.000 They look like mice with little short tails.

01:45:02.000 And I know where there's a lot of redback voles, I know that wolves do extremely well eating them.

01:45:07.000 And so you see these little tunnels, right, in the tundra and stuff.

01:45:10.000 And I think wolves eat a lot smaller of prey than people think on average, right?

01:45:16.000 We see sensational things.

01:45:18.000 Of small dogs or wolves.

01:45:20.000 And we filmed...

01:45:21.000 I don't know if...

01:45:22.000 Did you see the dingo hunt that we filmed in Australia?

01:45:24.000 No.

01:45:25.000 Oh, my God.

01:45:26.000 You guys went on a dingo hunt?

01:45:28.000 No.

01:45:28.000 We were hunting buffalo.

01:45:29.000 And while we were hunting buffalo, dingoes just exploded from the bush.

01:45:34.000 And the dingoes were pack hunting the Asiatic water buffaloes.

01:45:38.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:45:39.000 Nobody's ever seen it before.

01:45:40.000 Nobody's ever filmed it before.

01:45:41.000 We had the Dingo Institute call us immediately from Australia.

01:45:45.000 We had...

01:45:46.000 How big's a dingo?

01:45:48.000 Small, tiny dude.

01:45:49.000 So we filmed all this in Australia.

01:45:51.000 It's literally never been filmed before to our knowledge.

01:45:53.000 Everyone that we talked to that is dingo researchers. 0.99

01:45:55.000 They want to know exactly where this was because they'd never seen this behavior.

01:45:58.000 And see this behavior right here?

01:46:00.000 That was them actually coming in to hunt us.

01:46:02.000 But you can see the whole crew sat down.

01:46:04.000 Everybody was totally committed.

01:46:06.000 They're trying to kill that calf right there. 0.83

01:46:08.000 And still that calf is monstrous, right?

01:46:11.000 So there's four or five, six of them there.

01:46:13.000 And then they chase, they stampede the whole herd out there.

01:46:35.000 This is weird.

01:46:41.000 They don't want to die.

01:46:42.000 You know what I mean?

01:46:43.000 So like, yeah, nobody had ever seen this before. 0.99

01:46:44.000 But if they don't want to die, why the fuck are they going after water buffalo? 0.98

01:46:47.000 I don't know, dude. 0.99

01:46:47.000 Those things are giant. 0.99

01:46:50.000 Terrible idea.

01:46:51.000 But obviously, I don't know if this group has done this before.

01:46:54.000 Well, they must have, right?

01:46:55.000 They must have been successful on the calf.

01:46:58.000 And the idea is that they're going to chase them and wear them out and that one of the calves is going to be separated and they're going to take it down.

01:47:04.000 Yeah.

01:47:05.000 But they're like 35 pounds.

01:47:07.000 That's so crazy.

01:47:08.000 They're such a small animal.

01:47:09.000 And these calves, even the calves are probably like 100 pounds, right?

01:47:12.000 You see how...

01:47:13.000 Bigger.

01:47:14.000 Bigger, yeah.

01:47:15.000 Maybe even 200. That guy looks Australian as fuck. 1.00

01:47:18.000 The other guy? 1.00

01:47:19.000 Yeah, he's barefoot and everything.

01:47:20.000 Hey, mate.

01:47:21.000 Yeah.

01:47:21.000 Hello.

01:47:22.000 Yeah.

01:47:22.000 Look at my hat.

01:47:24.000 So yeah, so just all these instances like this, literally, I hate to...

01:47:28.000 But this is why I hunt.

01:47:30.000 Like, that stuff...

01:47:33.000 I'm probably not going on a photo safari ever in my entire life.

01:47:36.000 I'm not climbing Mount Everest unless there's something at the top that I need.

01:47:41.000 It's just not in my DNA. It's not who I am.

01:47:43.000 But going out to kill a water buffalo in Australia because they're...

01:47:49.000 Not only are they overpopulated, they're absolutely decimating the country.

01:47:53.000 And they're not supposed to be there. 1.00

01:47:54.000 No, I mean, you could kill them all. 1.00

01:47:55.000 You could snap your fingers right now, kill every buffalo on the continent of Australia, and you'd be doing nothing but helping that place. 0.99

01:48:02.000 And so those are the kinds of engagements that I love, right?

01:48:06.000 Going there, seeing these things.

01:48:07.000 You're not going to see them unless you're there, and you're not going to see them unless you're there for a very long time.

01:48:11.000 Yeah, just being in the woods and seeing wildlife in its wild environment is a crazy experience.

01:48:18.000 I was telling my friend Colton, he's a guide in Utah, and I was saying, you guys should have a thing for people that have zero desire to hunt.

01:48:27.000 And let them, like, take them, put them in full camo, and have them creep through the woods during the rut.

01:48:33.000 And watch these elk scream at each other and communicate.

01:48:37.000 Just to be around them is amazing.

01:48:39.000 Absolutely.

01:48:39.000 It's an amazing, because to know that these things have done this for thousands, if not millions of years.

01:48:46.000 I mean, they've found white-tailed deer skulls in Florida that have been aged to over a million years.

01:48:53.000 Yeah.

01:48:54.000 So they know that they've been in that form. 0.99

01:48:57.000 And likely elk as well, in that form, for a fucking million, maybe even more years. 0.98

01:49:02.000 These things, this is what they've done. 0.99

01:49:03.000 They've done it forever, and to be around them when they don't know you're there.

01:49:07.000 We did this film for Under Armour, me and Cam Haynes, and we went elk hunting in Utah, and we were in this...

01:49:16.000 This wooded area watching these elk that were in this meadow by a stream, and we sat there waiting for a shot opportunity for like an hour or so, watching them.

01:49:27.000 They had no idea we were there, and some of them were 15, 20 yards away.

01:49:30.000 And I was like, this is the crazy, just to be around them when they don't know you're there is so amazing.

01:49:37.000 We did it last year with...

01:49:39.000 Men's Health did an article on us.

01:49:42.000 And so we took...

01:49:44.000 It was trippy.

01:49:45.000 Like, I'm talking to the art director at Men's Health.

01:49:47.000 She's in downtown Manhattan.

01:49:48.000 They have no idea what life is about.

01:49:52.000 So she's like...

01:49:53.000 Yeah, Donnie, so what we're going to do is we're going to have you and your crew, so there's three in my crew, and then we're going to have a photographer, photographer's assistant, and then we'll have the writer with you.

01:50:03.000 Well, good luck!

01:50:04.000 So I'm just like, alright, so I'm stalking bull elk, and I've never elk hunted before, so I have no idea what I'm doing other than what I've read about, and so I'm stalking these bulls with six people.

01:50:14.000 And they asked me, like, hey, do we have to wear camouflage?

01:50:16.000 I said, no, you don't have to wear camouflage.

01:50:17.000 And they said, well, what, is there anything we shouldn't wear?

01:50:20.000 And I said, just try not to wear anything with really bright, stark colors, and try not to wear any bright yellows, because that's the spectrum that elk see in.

01:50:27.000 And the photographer assistant shows up with just, I mean, like, canary yellow pants, skinny jeans.

01:50:33.000 And I'm like, hey, they're from Ojai.

01:50:35.000 Where's Ojai?

01:50:36.000 That's here, right?

01:50:37.000 Yeah.

01:50:37.000 In Southern California?

01:50:38.000 Yeah, so they're from Ojai.

01:50:40.000 But it was wicked because we got to 18 yards from the 6x6.

01:50:45.000 All of us.

01:50:46.000 Six of us.

01:50:47.000 18 yards from the 6x6.

01:50:48.000 That's crazy.

01:50:49.000 And what was crazy is they're staring at the 6x6. 0.95

01:50:53.000 All of their jaws are on the ground, but I'm staring at them.

01:50:58.000 Because I really don't care about the 6x6. 1.00

01:51:00.000 He's too young.

01:51:00.000 I'm not going to shoot him.

01:51:01.000 But I loved, I was addicted to their reactions.

01:51:04.000 Right.

01:51:04.000 And they're just like, and the elk walk.

01:51:06.000 Actually, so we're staring at them.

01:51:08.000 The elk's staring at these guys.

01:51:10.000 I'm staring at them.

01:51:11.000 I'm just like taking this on.

01:51:12.000 I'm like, this is pretty rad for me.

01:51:13.000 Where were you guys?

01:51:15.000 Nevada.

01:51:15.000 Shell Creek Range in Nevada.

01:51:18.000 And so we're sitting there, and all of a sudden the elk looks to its left really sharply.

01:51:23.000 And so I look over, and there's a coyote 10 yards from us staring at the elk.

01:51:28.000 And then all these guys are seeing the coyote, they're seeing the elk, and then everything runs away.

01:51:32.000 And I turn around and look at these guys, and they're just like, whoa!

01:51:37.000 Like, the one photographer, he's like, that was a literal monster.

01:51:43.000 And it was like a three-year-old six-by-six, you know, four-year-old six-by-six.

01:51:46.000 And he's like, that thing?

01:51:48.000 And, like, I just shut up and I'm just listening to these guys and they're just jacking.

01:51:52.000 And now two of the three of them want to hunt.

01:51:54.000 They'd never hunt in their lives.

01:51:56.000 Now, the writer, Michael Easter, he really wants to hunt, and he's actually going to go on another hunt with me, I think.

01:52:01.000 Next year, I'm going to spend like 40 days in the Yukon Territories, just walking from one end to this concession that a friend of mine has like four and a half million acres, and we're going to try to walk from one half kind of to the other half, if you will, and hunting our way through.

01:52:13.000 Just kind of do a journal hunt, film the whole thing beautifully, try to, and tell a story.

01:52:18.000 And he wants to go along and write a book about the experience.

01:52:21.000 Wow.

01:52:21.000 Yeah, and so it'd be wicked.

01:52:23.000 But that's the thing, all these guys, just to see their look, seeing this bull elk right there, and they're watching him, and he put on quite a show.

01:52:31.000 He didn't bugle.

01:52:31.000 I really wish he would have, although they heard bugles because we camped at 12,000 feet.

01:52:35.000 I made him hike all the way up to the top.

01:52:37.000 I'm like, man, if we're camping, we're camping at the tippity-top.

01:52:39.000 I want you guys to just experience.

01:52:41.000 And so bugles would echo out at night around the canyon.

01:52:44.000 But they watched him eat, and he made a rub and just messed this tree up with his antlers, and they just...

01:52:51.000 It was wicked.

01:52:51.000 Great experience.

01:52:52.000 But I agree with you.

01:52:53.000 I think people like, let's put some camouflage on here.

01:52:55.000 Or hell, wear yellow pants.

01:52:57.000 Wear yellow skinny jeans if you want in your flat bill hat from Ojai. 0.84

01:53:01.000 And let's go sneak up on hell. 1.00

01:53:02.000 Fuck flat bill hats. 1.00

01:53:03.000 I'm saying it. 1.00

01:53:04.000 I'm sorry, Jamie.

01:53:06.000 Just kidding.

01:53:07.000 His has a small curvature.

01:53:08.000 Just a small curvature.

01:53:11.000 He's been on a cavalier's tear over the last few days with all sorts of different hats on.

01:53:17.000 I think that what I was saying to these guys is without even having to have a tag, you guys could guide these people and it wouldn't be a dent in the resources.

01:53:27.000 It wouldn't diminish the population.

01:53:30.000 But it would be...

01:53:32.000 It's an educational experience.

01:53:34.000 There's ripples that come from that.

01:53:36.000 Those people are going to go back and tell other people about it.

01:53:38.000 It's one thing to go to the zoo, but you go to the zoo, it's the most unnatural environment in the world where animals are looking you right in the eye and they're not freaking out.

01:53:45.000 That has nothing to do with what you're talking about.

01:53:47.000 Yeah, it's nothing.

01:53:48.000 You can see an elk at the zoo, but you can't watch an elk at the zoo.

01:53:51.000 The elk is not an elk.

01:53:53.000 It's a farm animal.

01:53:55.000 Yeah.

01:53:55.000 It's just not the same.

01:53:56.000 When you see one in the wild, and their noses are flaring, and they're smelling the air, and their ears are twitching left and right, and they're scanning for noises, and you realize, like, wow, this thing is out there fucking earning, hustling, you know, eating grass, trying to stay alive,

01:54:11.000 and if it gets to, you know, like, that elk that I have out there was nine years old.

01:54:17.000 It's a nine-year-old animal that's out there surviving against mountain lions and bears and just figuring out a way to get through and keep surviving.

01:54:27.000 Get through those winters, make it to spring, keep going, keep going.

01:54:31.000 I mean, it's an amazing animal.

01:54:34.000 It has a story.

01:54:35.000 The thing has a story.

01:54:36.000 And if you sit down, you know, I'm sure you were sad when you killed him, but you sit down and I'm sure you were euphoric as hell that your plan finally worked.

01:54:47.000 Because you've watched it fail 2,000 times. 0.93

01:54:49.000 So you sit there with your kind of holy crap moment of this actually happened and he's actually dead now. 0.66

01:54:55.000 And, you know, you have the sorrow of taking an animal's life, but then you sit there and you have any perspective at all. 0.90

01:55:01.000 You think about those nine years, just like you just did.

01:55:03.000 You think about any minute of those nine years.

01:55:04.000 And the same was like sheep, you know, or like...

01:55:07.000 Your water buffalo back here, this is horned, right?

01:55:09.000 So they don't lose it every year.

01:55:11.000 The elk cast their antlers off every year and grow new ones, which is, I think it's fastest growing biological substance known to man, right?

01:55:18.000 Yeah, pretty crazy.

01:55:19.000 But these things have horns, so it's made out of fingernails, so you literally can sit there with your buffalo.

01:55:24.000 And drag your fingernail or a bighorn sheep or a doll sheep and drag your fingernail through these little crags and you see these splits and cracks and you're like, you know, what was a bad winter and what was a great spring and when did the wolves chase you and when did you almost lose your life in a fight and when,

01:55:42.000 like...

01:55:43.000 I wish, you know, I wish we could kind of hold on to these things and kind of go through a little montage of what this thing lived through, you know, but that's the only thing we can do is insert ourselves into the wilderness for a short amount of time, or as much time as we can afford and convince ourselves that that's where we still live.

01:56:00.000 Yeah.

01:56:01.000 I mean, just the relationship that we have with nature, I think, has taken such a bizarre turn because of cities.

01:56:08.000 I think that what we've done also in our relationship with animals by putting them in these little animal prisons that we call zoos and having people go and stare at them in some very unnatural way, we've really distorted nature.

01:56:24.000 The majesty of wildlife and nature.

01:56:27.000 And the only, in my opinion, the only real way to appreciate what an animal is, is to see an animal in the wild, to see it in its habitat.

01:56:37.000 And until that happens, until you do that, you really...

01:56:41.000 You could see a giraffe at the zoo, and they're pretty majestic.

01:56:46.000 They're really crazy, and they're one of the weirdest animals, too, because they let little kids feed them.

01:56:50.000 I mean, they're so confident in their behavior.

01:56:54.000 I had a bit about it in my act, in that, like, you say that animals don't belong in the zoo.

01:56:59.000 I'm like, I agree with you, except for giraffes. 1.00

01:57:03.000 Giraffes don't seem to have any fucking problem with the zoo. 0.98

01:57:06.000 They love it. 0.99

01:57:07.000 Yeah.

01:57:08.000 And my joke was that they're like, another day with no lions, and they're just wandering around having a great old time.

01:57:14.000 I mean, they're so confident that, like, when my daughter was two, we brought her to the zoo, and they'll let a two-year-old hold a piece of lettuce up for a giraffe. 0.99

01:57:22.000 They just fucking know. 0.99

01:57:23.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:57:23.000 But... 0.99

01:57:24.000 If you saw, the first time I ever saw him, I was with my friend Mike Hawkridge and my friend Ben O'Brien, the first time I ever saw a moose in the wild.

01:57:32.000 We pulled the car over and it was like that scene in Jurassic Park when Jeff Goldblum sticks his head out of the Jeep and he's like, wow.

01:57:39.000 Like you see one in the wild, you realize how big they really are.

01:57:43.000 And this thing was just walking through this open field in the woods. 0.98

01:57:47.000 And we were like, holy shit, look at the size of that thing. 0.98

01:57:52.000 Filmmaker killed by giraffe while working in South Africa. 0.99

01:57:54.000 Oh yeah, he got head-butted, right?

01:57:56.000 Yeah.

01:57:57.000 That's how they do it.

01:57:57.000 Oh yeah, they use their head like a whip.

01:58:00.000 Yeah.

01:58:00.000 We showed a film of these two battling, these two bulls slamming each other with their heads.

01:58:06.000 It's fucking crazy. 0.99

01:58:07.000 Brutal. 1.00

01:58:08.000 Yeah.

01:58:08.000 As is anything that lives out there.

01:58:10.000 That's a way to go, huh?

01:58:11.000 Get killed by a giraffe?

01:58:13.000 He didn't even see it.

01:58:14.000 He was looking through the camera.

01:58:15.000 Oh, no.

01:58:16.000 Filming something else, yeah.

01:58:17.000 Oh, yeah.

01:58:17.000 He still thinks he's looking through a camera right now.

01:58:19.000 He probably is.

01:58:20.000 Yeah.

01:58:20.000 Some other dimension.

01:58:21.000 Yeah.

01:58:22.000 He's like, what?

01:58:23.000 Oh, everyone's gone.

01:58:24.000 Boom.

01:58:24.000 Yeah.

01:58:25.000 Yeah, that had to be lights out.

01:58:26.000 And that's, you know, back to the grizzly bear hunting thing.

01:58:29.000 That's the unfortunate thing, right?

01:58:30.000 It's all those people that close down hunting.

01:58:32.000 Mm-hmm.

01:58:34.000 I would venture a guess.

01:58:38.000 That anyone that voted on that ballot has never seen a grizzly bear, or been a grizzly bear territory, or participated at all in understanding how that ecosystem works.

01:58:46.000 Well, isn't it a very small percentage of people?

01:58:49.000 It was a very small number of people, and they got the information from an email list, right?

01:58:54.000 I think it was less than 3,000 people.

01:58:58.000 Something really crazy.

01:58:59.000 A pile of misinformation and rumor.

01:59:03.000 Well, it's also, if you talk to the actual wildlife biologists, and maybe even more importantly, the people that are in the field on a daily basis, there's no problem with the grizzly bear population in British Columbia.

01:59:14.000 In fact, it's thriving.

01:59:16.000 It's a giant animal that eats a lot of meat, and it's out there taking out a lot of calves right now as we speak, and now that they can't hunt them, they're very likely to have a situation where they're going to have to hire people to shoot problem bears.

01:59:29.000 Absolutely.

01:59:30.000 The first eco-tour that goes down where a boat full or a bus full or a hiking group watches a boar kill and eat triplets. 0.87

01:59:41.000 Kill and eat three football or watermelon-sized cubs and rip them to shreds and eat them while they're bawling and trying to get to their mom and then have him kill their mom.

01:59:50.000 Once that goes down, they'll be like, okay, I think we might have a couple too many bears here. 0.96

01:59:54.000 But that happens every day, even in a great, not every day, but it happens often even in a good population.

02:00:00.000 But now that they've shut down any killing whatsoever, these things have no predators other from old boars that become giant bullies on the block.

02:00:08.000 Yeah, what are they gonna do about that?

02:00:09.000 Because apparently there is some sort of a movement to try to educate people and get them to understand what they've done by making this hunt illegal.

02:00:18.000 But What I would like to see is people also be educated on the fact, like what you said, that these animals are actually edible.

02:00:26.000 And that maybe part of the problem is the fact that these people are just taking the head and the hide and leaving behind the meat.

02:00:32.000 And if you were responsible for not just taking the meat but showing that you're consuming it and then teaching these people how to cook it and how to prepare it and make them realize, like, you should be using this thing In its entirety as a resource. 0.93

02:00:48.000 And don't just think about it as this fucking rug or this, you know, skull that you're going to have on your wall. 0.93

02:00:54.000 And that's the problem. 0.99

02:00:55.000 I think that's the problem.

02:00:56.000 I don't know, but I think that's the problem.

02:00:58.000 Because if people, and some people do think this, I get letters like this all the time where people say, let me get this straight.

02:01:06.000 Right.

02:01:28.000 Right.

02:01:47.000 So people will write and say, see, let me get this straight.

02:01:49.000 You kill the deer, you take its life, you take its hide, and you take its antlers, and you just take it home and mount it, and you leave everything else to rot. 0.99

02:01:56.000 If anybody says that, they're ignorant. 0.99

02:01:58.000 They're not paying any attention whatsoever. 0.99

02:02:01.000 That's willful ignorance, because you could find that out.

02:02:03.000 And first of all, everyone knows that deer is delicious.

02:02:07.000 Deer, venison, and elk in particular, it's delicious meat.

02:02:11.000 The fact that you would even consider leaving that behind is crazy.

02:02:15.000 Nobody does that.

02:02:15.000 I've never heard of anybody doing that.

02:02:17.000 I've heard of it.

02:02:18.000 I've heard of it, but I've heard of a lot of things.

02:02:20.000 With deer and elk?

02:02:20.000 Not in reality.

02:02:22.000 I've just heard of it, right?

02:02:23.000 I've heard people saying, oh yeah, it's what they used to do, it's what they did, and you know...

02:02:28.000 I couldn't even imagine that as a scenario.

02:02:31.000 In today's day, I mean, the meat is so good. 0.99

02:02:35.000 I've had people at my house before that have never eaten elk, and I've cooked it for them, and they're like, holy shit! 0.97

02:02:39.000 Because there's a feeling you get from eating it, too. 0.98

02:02:51.000 I mean, if anything, I've seen it go the other way.

02:02:57.000 I've seen hunters argue over...

02:03:06.000 I've seen guys argue over that more than anything.

02:03:08.000 I sent elk meat to the writer of Men's Health, who was writing the article, because I ended up killing the elk.

02:03:15.000 Two days after he left, he had to go on another story, and I ended up killing Alex.

02:03:18.000 So he's like, hey, will you send me a box of meat so I can try it?

02:03:20.000 Because I feel like I was really part of this hunt.

02:03:22.000 And I did so, and he's just like, yeah.

02:03:25.000 I mean, he wrote about it in the article, but it's in the last paragraph or whatever, but he sent me a text message, and he's just like, are you freaking kidding me?

02:03:32.000 This is the finest thing I've ever eaten in my life.

02:03:34.000 It's prepared correctly, but you have to learn how to do that, too.

02:03:38.000 Yeah.

02:03:38.000 And he seared everything.

02:03:40.000 He talked to us, and we told him, you want to keep it really medium rare and just...

02:03:44.000 And he just loved it.

02:03:45.000 He loved it.

02:03:45.000 And he talked about all those days that he hiked with us in the mountains.

02:03:51.000 He remarked that he could taste that in the flesh.

02:03:53.000 He felt that connection.

02:03:55.000 Now he's like big time wants to start hunting for his food.

02:03:59.000 Yeah, I always tell people if you really want to start hunting, you really want to do it, it's so difficult to get started.

02:04:07.000 It's so difficult to even find the resources to take the first steps.

02:04:14.000 And people that say, I want to bow hunt, I'm like, listen, man.

02:04:18.000 First of all, you need to learn how to shoot a bow.

02:04:21.000 And second of all, by saying that you want to bow hunt, what you're saying to me is, I want to practice 300 days a year with my bow.

02:04:28.000 I want to really learn archery.

02:04:30.000 I want to learn the proper form.

02:04:32.000 I want to learn mental control.

02:04:34.000 I want to learn...

02:04:37.000 Yeah.

02:04:55.000 This is not...

02:04:55.000 Don't say I want to go bow hunting like I want to go deep sea fishing on a chartered boat where they put the bait on the hook, drop it in, and I just reel in the fish.

02:05:07.000 That's possible.

02:05:08.000 But saying I want to go bow hunting, like, you know...

02:05:12.000 They see you do it and they go, oh, you bow hunt.

02:05:14.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:05:15.000 Okay, but I'm crazy and I've been obsessed with this shit for years and I practice every day and you go to my backyard, I've got fucking rubber elk sitting on a hillside and I shoot at them every day before I do anything. 0.99

02:05:26.000 So how much do you want to do it? 0.99

02:05:28.000 How much do you really want to do it?

02:05:29.000 Because you first have to become an archer.

02:05:31.000 Yes.

02:05:32.000 Then you have to learn something about hunting.

02:05:35.000 Now you have to actually get out of your truck and take a bunch of steps into the wilderness and hope you can even just get back to your truck, let alone finding an animal, a legal animal, sneaking into within archery range.

02:05:49.000 Killing him quickly, dismembering him, getting him on.

02:05:51.000 And you've got to be in shape. 0.99

02:05:53.000 That's the other thing that freaked me out when I first went hunting. 0.94

02:05:56.000 I was in shape as far as like jujitsu and martial arts shape, but fucking hiking with a backpack on in altitude and you're going up and down and up and down at seven hours a day. 0.94

02:06:07.000 You're like, oh, okay. 1.00

02:06:08.000 You've got to be conditioned for this shit. 1.00

02:06:12.000 I think the way to do it, if somebody really wants to, is really wild pigs. 1.00

02:06:18.000 Wild pigs with a gun is probably the first way you should do it. 0.85

02:06:22.000 Because I think, first of all, it has to be done.

02:06:24.000 This is something that's imperative.

02:06:26.000 It can't be done enough.

02:06:28.000 It can't be done enough.

02:06:29.000 Again, you could go, no wild pigs, starting now, and it would be a great service.

02:06:34.000 It would be a great service.

02:06:35.000 Except for people who enjoy wild pig meat.

02:06:37.000 And hunting, because it's awesome.

02:06:39.000 Yeah, I mean, it's an awesome way to get started, too.

02:06:42.000 You go wild pig hunting, you're doing good for the environment.

02:06:46.000 This is an invasive species that devastates ground-nesting birds, all sorts of plant species.

02:06:51.000 And if you're dealing with agriculture, like, wow, I mean, then it's really, you're talking about a massive financial burden on farmers, but with a rifle.

02:06:59.000 That's the way to do it because it's so much easier if you have a rifle rest and someone can take you to a range.

02:07:05.000 The learning curve is so much shorter than with a bow.

02:07:09.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:07:10.000 100%.

02:07:10.000 That's a great first animal.

02:07:12.000 The only other thing that I would maybe say if somebody could share with you...

02:07:16.000 Is to share a duck blind or something along those lines.

02:07:19.000 Because sometimes it's difficult to wrap your head around killing a large animal first.

02:07:23.000 It might help to kill, as odd as that sounds, we're more comfortable with killing pheasants or grouse or ducks or something like that.

02:07:29.000 But that's also a very tricky shot.

02:07:33.000 And there's safety elements there because a number of people have guns and not everyone's paying attention.

02:07:38.000 Right.

02:07:38.000 Yeah.

02:07:40.000 Have you been to Lanai?

02:07:41.000 No.

02:07:41.000 I haven't.

02:07:44.000 I've done it two years in a row now, where we hunt Axis deer in Lanai, and it's another one of those things that has to be done. 1.00

02:07:51.000 There's something around 3,000 people on the island And more than 20,000 axis deer.

02:07:59.000 And it's a very small island. 0.99

02:08:01.000 And it's fucking bananas. 0.99

02:08:03.000 I mean, we were coming home from... 0.99

02:08:06.000 We got super lucky on the first night.

02:08:09.000 The first night of hunting, we got out of the truck.

02:08:12.000 We set up a target to see if the bows were in tune.

02:08:16.000 Shot one arrow at a target. 1.00

02:08:18.000 And Alec, the guy that I was with, went, Fuck, there's a buck. 1.00

02:08:22.000 About 200 yards. 0.99

02:08:24.000 Look right there. 1.00

02:08:25.000 We're like, holy shit. 1.00

02:08:27.000 We kicked off our shoes, stalked in on them, and I killed them within 15 minutes, which is nuts. 0.99

02:08:31.000 Because the next four days without killing anything, and I finally got another one on the last day. 0.95

02:08:36.000 But you could shoot as many as 12 a day. 0.96

02:08:38.000 I mean, they want to get rid of them. 0.98

02:08:39.000 Oh, of course.

02:08:40.000 Yeah, they're eating themselves up out of house and home, right?

02:08:42.000 Yeah.

02:08:44.000 Crazy, the numbers.

02:08:45.000 The numbers are crazy, but it's also crazy how tuned in these things are and that they evolved to escape tigers.

02:08:51.000 Oh, yeah.

02:08:52.000 They're from India.

02:08:53.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:08:53.000 I mean, they are fucking switched on. 0.99

02:08:55.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:08:56.000 They're like a whitetail deer on steroids and meth.

02:08:59.000 Yeah.

02:08:59.000 I mean, they're like, what?

02:09:00.000 What's that?

02:09:01.000 And they're gone.

02:09:02.000 And they're so fast, man.

02:09:04.000 I've never seen an animal so fast.

02:09:06.000 So wicked.

02:09:06.000 Yeah, but it's a good argument for hunting.

02:09:09.000 It's like, well, here's a situation where the population is fucked up. 0.98

02:09:15.000 There's no balance of life here. 0.98

02:09:18.000 There's no balance here.

02:09:19.000 This is completely out of balance. 0.99

02:09:21.000 And because of that, they hire snipers to come and shoot them. 0.97

02:09:25.000 Yeah, I'm assuming they're hiring guns to come in at night and shoot them with night scopes or whatever. 0.96

02:09:28.000 Exactly.

02:09:29.000 That's exactly what they do.

02:09:30.000 Just to keep it somewhat in check.

02:09:33.000 But unless you want to let wolves loose on this island, I don't know how else you're going to fix that.

02:09:39.000 You want to put tigers there? 0.95

02:09:40.000 That's what's really supposed to be, catching them.

02:09:42.000 I actually studied tigers right out of college in Bangladesh and Nepal.

02:09:47.000 And I would see Axis deer there. 0.93

02:09:49.000 And they were...

02:09:50.000 I mean, the jungle there, though, is real.

02:09:52.000 So that's why they're looking at everything, right?

02:09:55.000 Because you look at a tiger in a zoo, and you're like, there's no way.

02:09:57.000 That thing can hide. 1.00

02:09:59.000 But then you go to their jungle and everything's green except for all the palms that die turn bright orange.

02:10:05.000 And they all have really long, sharp fronds that look like a tiger stripe.

02:10:11.000 So you see his little blotches of orange and black all...

02:10:16.000 disappearing into the green and so but we would see the deer and the deer would know like when we were going into an area to either we had a cat that was radio collared or we're going in to look at a particular piece of habitat the deer were just like on pins and needles like we'd get even remotely close and you could see him we are dealing a lot with islands and you'd see him leaving the island on the other side like they'd be ditched in the swim to the next island Wow very aware they're extremely aware How crazy is it that somehow or another the tiger evolved to develop those stripes that look

02:10:46.000 like the colors in nature?

02:10:48.000 Like, what is the mechanism?

02:10:50.000 Phenotypical representation.

02:10:52.000 Yeah, see, like this is from, I don't know where this picture was taken, but this reminds me of like in Nepal, in southern Nepal where I was, the Royal Chitwan National Forest.

02:10:59.000 They have this grass that grows like 20 feet tall and, I mean, just absolutely disappear.

02:11:03.000 But how bizarre is it that this animal somehow or another evolved this camouflage?

02:11:09.000 Yeah.

02:11:09.000 It's so strange.

02:11:11.000 So strange.

02:11:11.000 That's so amazing though.

02:11:13.000 Yeah.

02:11:14.000 The evolution of it.

02:11:15.000 You know, this idea of phenotypical, their physical representation of their genetics is just so fantastic.

02:11:22.000 What did you study in college?

02:11:23.000 Wildlife biology.

02:11:25.000 Yeah.

02:11:25.000 Because I wanted to, you know, when I got started doing, you know, hunting and things like that, I don't come from a hunting family.

02:11:31.000 So I just...

02:11:32.000 When did you start hunting?

02:11:35.000 As soon as I could.

02:11:36.000 When I was 10, 11, 12, I would force my dad.

02:11:41.000 He had a couple of guns because he just had guns when he was a kid.

02:11:45.000 He would go up and he'd go deer hunting once a year with a buddy of his in Maine.

02:11:51.000 I think they just drank beer.

02:11:53.000 He never killed a deer.

02:11:54.000 I don't think they ever even deer hunted.

02:11:55.000 They'd just literally drive up, get in a cabin with their buddies.

02:11:58.000 Just get hammered.

02:11:59.000 Get hammered.

02:12:00.000 I think that was probably the game.

02:12:01.000 Worst case scenario, right?

02:12:02.000 That's like when I was in high school, one of my friends from high school, he did that.

02:12:07.000 His family would go deer hunting, and his dad literally never killed a deer.

02:12:11.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:12:12.000 I was like, that is the dumbest shit I've ever heard in my life. 1.00

02:12:14.000 Your dad spends all this time hunting in the woods and has never killed a deer. 1.00

02:12:18.000 He's not hunting.

02:12:18.000 Yeah, David Abel.

02:12:19.000 Hey, David.

02:12:20.000 And so, but yeah, so my dad, the gift to me was my grandparents got him a subscription to Outdoor Life Books.

02:12:27.000 So he'd get all these books that were penned by these gifted authors.

02:12:33.000 One of them was named Jack O'Connor, who's inspired my entire career, but I'd read all these things.

02:12:37.000 And so I just thought, I want to spend time outside, so I might as well get a wildlife biology degree and then do research and live outside and things like that.

02:12:44.000 And as odd as it was when I was in college, I was still hunting a lot.

02:12:48.000 And I had family and friends sit me down and they're like, hey man, you got to like buckle down on your studies.

02:12:53.000 And I wasn't disagreeing with them, but they're like, you need to stop hunting.

02:12:57.000 Stop hunting so much because I'd literally, I'd go to the Arctic caribou hunting by myself and I'd come home and go to classes and then I'd leave to go to Alaska on a black bear hunt and I'd come home and go to classes and I'd just save as much money as I could, didn't party, didn't drink with any of my buddies, didn't, you know, didn't do anything lavish.

02:13:13.000 I just literally kept going on trips and, you know, it's kind of basically what's led to my career today.

02:13:18.000 But it was funny that I, you know, these kind of things traveled in parallel, if you will.

02:13:22.000 When did you start making films and when you did it did you make them with the intention of trying to relay like what I was explaining at the beginning of the podcast that what you do best is you you as much as possible in an hour you're relaying the whole experience yeah as opposed to what you're gonna get When you see a hunting television show,

02:13:43.000 or especially what you're going to get when you see hunting in a movie.

02:13:46.000 Yeah.

02:13:47.000 So we started in 2012, and I had some guys that approached me to host a hunting TV show.

02:13:53.000 And I said, well, what's that going to look like?

02:13:57.000 And they said, well, we'll pay for your trips.

02:13:59.000 We'll get all your sponsors and stuff lined up.

02:14:01.000 You'll be fully sponsored.

02:14:02.000 We'll split the sponsor dollars with you.

02:14:04.000 We'll buy your airtime, X, Y, and Z. These guys were pretty wealthy.

02:14:08.000 I was like, this sounds like an absolute dream to me.

02:14:12.000 But I said, I want to control how it's filmed, where we go, how we hunt, and the gear that I use.

02:14:17.000 And they said, 100%.

02:14:18.000 Well, very quickly, within like the first eight days, those things started to go out the window. 0.99

02:14:24.000 They said, we want you to go here and hunt with this guy because he's super popular and we want you to kill this animal.

02:14:28.000 We want you to wear this clothing.

02:14:29.000 And I was like, no, I never do any of this.

02:14:31.000 I'm not doing any of this.

02:14:33.000 So I said, you know what, you guys, I appreciate the opportunity, but I'm going to walk away from this gig.

02:14:36.000 And so I walked away from it.

02:14:39.000 And then I ended up meeting up with Kyle, of whom you met earlier, is in your green room right now.

02:14:43.000 And then another guy named William Oltman, who's our director of photography now at Sigmanta.

02:14:49.000 And I met up with these guys, and through a series of weird circumstances, we ended up filming together.

02:14:54.000 And we just started kind of going on trips.

02:14:56.000 But when we started going on trips, our intention was never to do a TV show.

02:15:01.000 Our intention was, how can we tell a story about what we're doing?

02:15:06.000 Because really what we're doing ends up with having a really fantastic tale.

02:15:10.000 It doesn't have to be a huge tale.

02:15:12.000 It doesn't have to be Moby Dick.

02:15:13.000 But there's a story whenever you're going on these hunts.

02:15:15.000 And so...

02:15:16.000 We just decided, like, how can we flesh this out?

02:15:19.000 So we just went on these trips.

02:15:20.000 We filmed them as beautifully as we could.

02:15:22.000 We filmed them as completely as we could, right?

02:15:24.000 A lot of guys, when they go on these trips, they'll film, okay, you arrived, and now you're hunting, and then you kill an animal, and they're just trying to, like, get a little piece of it.

02:15:32.000 Well, we would try and film everything.

02:15:35.000 And then when we got done, we started putting together our first film, and we thought, okay, we'll put together a film.

02:15:40.000 We'll see what the audience kind of thinks.

02:15:43.000 And then we'll just play from there.

02:15:45.000 We'll just go from there and see what happens.

02:15:46.000 And so I started writing the film, writing the script, all the dialogue that was going to live outside of what was already naturally occurring on camera.

02:15:56.000 And I brought it into Kyle's office and I was like, yeah, so read this.

02:16:00.000 And he picked up my notebook and he's like, dude, I've never, ever heard you talk like this.

02:16:04.000 I've never, it was, I think, probably a little bit macho and a little bit sensational, a little bit like being actual delivered, like delivering a line and trying to convey something on film that wasn't me.

02:16:18.000 And he's like, I've never, he's like, why don't you write like how you talk in the office?

02:16:21.000 Like when you're ranting and raving and talking about wildlife and talking about your experiences, write like that.

02:16:26.000 Like paint a picture for us, you know, and answer some questions maybe that you have of your own.

02:16:33.000 So I started writing in that manner, and then we released our first film in 2012, or 13, The Rivers Divide.

02:16:40.000 It was a story about a deer that I was hunting for two years in North Dakota, and it just took off.

02:16:45.000 Yeah, I watched that.

02:16:46.000 Steve.

02:16:47.000 Steve.

02:16:47.000 Steve the deer.

02:16:48.000 Why'd you name him Steve? 1.00

02:16:50.000 A friend of mine named him because a friend of his, who's named Steve, said, the fact that you name deer is idiotic and completely stupid. 1.00

02:16:59.000 And my friend Jeff said, great, that the next deer we find is going to name Steve. 0.99

02:17:04.000 It is a weird thing when you watch a lot of these shows and people have a piece of property and they have trail cameras and they have all these different names for these deer.

02:17:13.000 That's where it gets real squirrely too.

02:17:15.000 It's not good.

02:17:15.000 And I do it too.

02:17:16.000 It's not good.

02:17:18.000 It's not good.

02:17:19.000 And it's funny because we were actually talking about this in The Blind one day and it's like, we name things.

02:17:26.000 Right?

02:17:26.000 If you have two sons, you don't go, yep, so there's my skinny boy, the one that does okay in school, and here's a little fat one that we can't keep peas on the fork with.

02:17:35.000 But these are my two kids here.

02:17:37.000 You're like, no, this is Bob and Jeff.

02:17:39.000 And so when we're deer hunting with these animals, when you're on lanai, you don't have this opportunity.

02:17:45.000 But if you were there...

02:17:47.000 All year long, you might be like, hey, I saw the buck with the crooked.

02:17:51.000 You might be like, I saw Crookedhorn.

02:17:52.000 I saw him again tonight.

02:17:55.000 Rather than saying to your wife or your girlfriend or your buddy saying, hey, I saw that one buck that I'm hunting with the crooked.

02:18:01.000 Instead of going down that road, you start nicknaming all this stuff.

02:18:03.000 People name their cars.

02:18:04.000 We name motorcycles.

02:18:07.000 I don't know.

02:18:08.000 How is it that you got this far in this hunting journey and you just recently started elk hunting?

02:18:17.000 September is only so long.

02:18:19.000 And like I said, I like the Arctic.

02:18:20.000 So I would just always go moose hunting and caribou hunting.

02:18:22.000 Right.

02:18:23.000 Yeah.

02:18:23.000 But no excuse whatsoever.

02:18:26.000 I hunted a few years ago in Colorado, 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, I hunted cow elk.

02:18:39.000 Oh, wow.

02:18:48.000 Done.

02:18:49.000 And so I cut her up, cleaned her up, and I just had always went to Alaska during September and not in the Elk Mountains.

02:18:56.000 And finally I was just like, I need to do this.

02:18:58.000 And it was awesome.

02:18:59.000 I had a good and bad experience.

02:19:02.000 Great experience with like the morning that I killed was sensational.

02:19:06.000 It was misty, rainy.

02:19:07.000 The bulls were screaming.

02:19:09.000 Everything was very wild.

02:19:10.000 We were way back in there.

02:19:11.000 It was really sensational.

02:19:13.000 Really, really impactful.

02:19:15.000 But up to that point, the area that I was hunting, the Shell Creek Range in Nevada, they only have a few tags there.

02:19:22.000 But when you get a tag, everyone hires basically all of their family and friends to come and help because it's such a rare tag.

02:19:30.000 So there's 30 guys to every tag.

02:19:32.000 And so I saw four-wheelers and side-by-sides.

02:19:35.000 And there's complete...

02:19:37.000 An utter intrusion, negative intrusion, by hunters into this wilderness.

02:19:42.000 It's ridiculous, and it needs to be stopped, in my opinion.

02:19:45.000 Like, you should have to leave all your motorized vehicles on pavement and go into the mountains on foot.

02:19:51.000 That's my opinion.

02:19:52.000 But this area that I was in, they had something like 400 miles of improved...

02:20:06.000 We're good to go.

02:20:22.000 Yeah.

02:20:45.000 As far as I'm concerned, it should be closed down.

02:20:48.000 If you want to go and ride your ATV, go ride your ATV. If you're elk hunting, leave the ATV on the road.

02:20:54.000 Right, and by ATV, you're talking about those little rangers?

02:20:57.000 Yeah, mostly side-by-sides.

02:20:59.000 There are a couple of quads, but mostly side-by-sides, yeah.

02:21:01.000 Yeah, those are very, very controversial.

02:21:04.000 We were in Nevada a couple years back in the...

02:21:10.000 The desert area, like sagebrush area near a few hours outside of Reno.

02:21:18.000 And we experienced a few of those where people were using them illegally.

02:21:23.000 They're driving into these areas where you're off the road and you're just...

02:21:29.000 Just driving through these open plains areas with these ATVs that aren't supposed to be there and spooking deer and...

02:21:35.000 Yeah.

02:21:35.000 Impacting the substrate and the soils and the...

02:21:39.000 Yeah.

02:21:39.000 Bad.

02:21:40.000 Yeah.

02:21:41.000 It's...

02:21:41.000 On one hand, I say, well, you know, it's not the worst thing in the world in terms of, like, if you need to get an animal out of there.

02:21:48.000 I kind of agree with it.

02:21:50.000 But I kind of understand your point...

02:21:51.000 Maybe you shouldn't even be able to do it with that.

02:21:54.000 Because then you're going to...

02:21:56.000 Look, I mean, it's going to be really hard to regulate whether or not a person should or shouldn't be able to use it at any point in time.

02:22:03.000 Yeah, and I'm not talking about, like, if somebody that's handicapped or somebody that's truly debilitated wants to access this area, absolutely, by all means.

02:22:10.000 I'm talking about able-bodied people.

02:22:12.000 Middle-aged and young men that are not doing their...

02:22:16.000 not working hard.

02:22:17.000 Yeah, that's a weird thing, right?

02:22:19.000 Like, they want to be able to do that, and then there's also people that want to be able to go in there on horseback.

02:22:24.000 Yeah.

02:22:24.000 That's another argument.

02:22:25.000 I mean, I've heard people that have been hunting, and they, you know, in a quiet area, and then all of a sudden five people come by on horseback in front of them, you know, that they're with an outfitter, and the outfitters, I mean, they took the time to hike 19 miles deep into the backcountry, And,

02:22:41.000 you know, it's a hard haul. 0.94

02:22:44.000 And then the next thing you know, some people come in on horseback and, you know, they got pack mules and all sorts of other shit. 0.99

02:22:50.000 There's a fucking caravan of animals and people and they're spooking everything out. 0.99

02:22:55.000 Yep. 1.00

02:22:55.000 And it all comes down to that barrier of entry, right? 1.00

02:22:59.000 Yeah.

02:23:00.000 And I thrive the most.

02:23:01.000 Like, it's for me, and I'm sure for you too, it's the most rewarding to do the work.

02:23:06.000 Backpack in.

02:23:07.000 Suffer, right?

02:23:07.000 That's suffering.

02:23:08.000 Like, I feel like we should have to suffer for these.

02:23:10.000 Well, it's also rewarding to do it on foot because you're going deep into this area that's hard to get to.

02:23:18.000 And when you do get there, there's nothing there but you.

02:23:21.000 If you're the type of person that's willing to hike in 7, 8, 9, 10 miles, the deeper you get, the further you're going to distance yourself from everybody else because most people aren't going to do that.

02:23:32.000 No.

02:23:33.000 Most people aren't going to.

02:23:35.000 Especially, that's the weird thing about public land, right?

02:23:38.000 It's like kind of anybody can get in there, but who's going to get in there 22 miles?

02:23:42.000 Yeah.

02:23:42.000 Very few people.

02:23:44.000 Yeah, and I have people all the time, and I'm sure you go through this too, but I'll kill an animal and hunters right away. 0.98

02:23:50.000 They want to identify you.

02:23:51.000 Was that on public or private land?

02:23:53.000 Right.

02:23:53.000 Well, it was on public land.

02:23:54.000 You know, and people think that it's this, and I'm not, I mean, you know, in certain areas of the country, it's more difficult, but people think if you killed an animal on public land, like, you're a real hunter, because you had to deal with other hunters.

02:24:05.000 Right.

02:24:05.000 No, where I went, there was not another person.

02:24:07.000 So, you know, it's like, when you're accessing, when you're going deep, and there's not ATVs, there's not side-by-sides, and you can actually hike into an area, you can get away from these people, right?

02:24:16.000 You can get away from what people are willing to access, but...

02:24:19.000 People like to celebrate public land because you weren't on a guided hunt.

02:24:23.000 You weren't in this.

02:24:23.000 Well, it's also a wealth thing, too.

02:24:25.000 People want to disparage accomplishments for people that do things that the wealth is a barrier for entry.

02:24:33.000 Yeah.

02:24:34.000 The problem I have with that is, first of all, the wildest of the wild is the place where people can't go.

02:24:41.000 And the other thing is, if somebody said, hey, I'm going to give you a tag for Nevada for some private land area that is just an unbelievable elk hunt, but it's a private land, but I'm going to give it to you.

02:24:55.000 You're not going to go, well, I'm not going to do that because it's private land.

02:24:58.000 I don't do that.

02:24:59.000 No, I'd say, can I get it next year, too?

02:25:01.000 Yeah, most people are only saying that they wouldn't do it because they can't afford it, and so they want to disparage anybody who can because there's a barrier for entry, and that barrier is financial. 0.97

02:25:10.000 But those areas where you go, if you can get into these private places, those are the areas where they're really wild because there's no fucking people. 0.94

02:25:19.000 They can't go back there. 0.99

02:25:21.000 Yeah.

02:25:21.000 And you get to see these animals the way they would be when there is no access to the public, because there isn't.

02:25:29.000 Yeah, and that's the best.

02:25:30.000 But I get it.

02:25:31.000 I mean, I get the sentiment, and I get why people would be upset that some people can afford it and others can't.

02:25:37.000 Oh, for sure.

02:25:38.000 For sure.

02:25:39.000 It's definitely...

02:25:40.000 Yeah, I mean, everybody wants to participate.

02:25:43.000 Everyone wants to see and access all these different areas.

02:25:46.000 And if you can't, right, then it's a negative experience if somebody can.

02:25:52.000 And I feel the same way.

02:25:53.000 Like, you see...

02:25:54.000 You know, I see this every year when I go to some of these hunting shows around the country.

02:25:57.000 Like, I'll go to Wild Sheep Foundation and they bring up the Montana Bighorn tag for sale.

02:26:02.000 I would love to buy that thing.

02:26:03.000 Those things are so ridiculous when they have those auctions and the tags go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

02:26:09.000 Yeah, $350,000. 0.99

02:26:10.000 That is fucking crazy. 0.99

02:26:11.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:26:12.000 That really is fucking crazy. 0.98

02:26:14.000 I mean, the fact that people spend that money. 0.99

02:26:15.000 And then the other thing is, I mean, I know a guy who did that who hired these people to sit on this one fucking bighorn for months. 0.81

02:26:24.000 They hired these guys to basically be full-time employees to scout this one gigantic bighorn, track it around, follow it, keep an eye on it, and then finally the season opened and this guy trudged in there and killed it. 0.64

02:26:40.000 Here's what I would do if I was a billionaire or had the cash.

02:26:43.000 I'd buy the tag.

02:26:44.000 I'm telling you right now to your face.

02:26:45.000 I would buy that tag often if I had that kind of money. 0.86

02:26:49.000 But instead of hiring the crew to find me a big ram and waltzing in on opening day and killing it, I'd fire the crew because I have enough money.

02:26:57.000 I'd go in there and spend the entire season in there myself, immersing myself in that wilderness.

02:27:02.000 And using the fact that I have a pile of cash at home to live in the wilderness for 30 days and maybe kill a big ram, maybe not.

02:27:09.000 But these guys want They want the bragging rights.

02:27:12.000 They want that giant ram.

02:27:14.000 They want the bragging rights. 0.56

02:27:15.000 It's a resume.

02:27:17.000 It becomes a resume of animals.

02:27:19.000 And I kind of equate it to...

02:27:21.000 I've talked about this a little bit before, but when we were kids, like if you went fishing with your dad or hunting with your dad or whatever, like let's say you went down to a little local lake here in California or whatever, and you guys were going bass fishing.

02:27:33.000 You guys go bass fishing and you're catching bass or whatever, and then all of a sudden one magical Sunday morning...

02:27:39.000 You or your dad hooks a monster bass.

02:27:41.000 And you, you know, you guys, grab the net and you're, you know, have the energy in the boat, right?

02:27:46.000 Grab the net and reel, you know, keep your rod tip up, you know.

02:27:48.000 There's a lot of energy around this big fish that's going to be really hard to land.

02:27:51.000 It's such a special occurrence.

02:27:53.000 You finally get the net underneath him.

02:27:55.000 You get this big bass in the net and you're, you know, you're hugging, you're high-fiving, you're, oh my god, we've come to this lake 30 times.

02:28:01.000 It's the biggest fish we've ever caught.

02:28:03.000 That, that, And then you take the pictures and you go home and you tell your mom, you tell your friend, you're like, oh my god, and he came up and he ate the frog and we set the hook.

02:28:13.000 And you tell that whole tale and you have that energy that lives around that fantastic experience.

02:28:18.000 And these guys are trying to buy that.

02:28:20.000 That's a really remarkable experience.

02:28:22.000 When you go elk hunting and you stumble into a really big bull or you do your homework and you keep truncating down the information, you keep taking steps into the wilderness down until you find this really massive bull.

02:28:36.000 You slip in.

02:28:37.000 You have the wind right.

02:28:38.000 You're hidden in a bush or against a rock.

02:28:41.000 And here he comes and you can't believe it.

02:28:43.000 You've done your homework and you've truncated down this experience.

02:28:45.000 And here he comes and you come to full draw and he, for whatever reason, stops at 30 yards.

02:28:50.000 And you find your pin and you just...

02:28:51.000 And you watch your arrow zip right through him.

02:28:53.000 And you're looking around for somebody to tell.

02:28:55.000 It's just a huge experience.

02:28:57.000 They're trying to bottle that up, write a big fat check, and try to experience that in one afternoon.

02:29:04.000 Is it that they're trying to experience it?

02:29:07.000 Or is it that they want to show that they have the thing?

02:29:12.000 They want to show it.

02:29:13.000 Because that experience I just described to you, those emotions, everyone can relate to that.

02:29:18.000 Or people that have done this can relate to that.

02:29:20.000 So when they show you their picture of their 200-inch RAM... All their bodies go, oh man, how, oh my.

02:29:28.000 And really he has no interest in that whatsoever.

02:29:31.000 That is literally just to build a resume.

02:29:33.000 Same with the big maned lion, right?

02:29:35.000 If you went in and dilded, if it was a truly wilderness experience, you really did your homework.

02:29:40.000 And I know I'm splitting hairs here, but this is how my mind works.

02:29:44.000 Tell me the story.

02:29:45.000 I'd love to hear it.

02:29:45.000 But if it's anything other than that, then...

02:29:49.000 Well, that's the thing about you.

02:29:52.000 What you're saying mirrors what I hear from guys like Steve Rinella and people that are really accomplished hunters that are very ethical and have the right mindset is that this is supposed to be difficult.

02:30:05.000 Yeah, the experience is supposed to be, you're supposed to hike all those miles.

02:30:09.000 You're supposed to go up and down those mountains.

02:30:11.000 It's supposed to be exhausting.

02:30:12.000 It's supposed to be hard to get close to one of these creatures.

02:30:14.000 It's supposed to be difficult.

02:30:16.000 You're supposed to not know what's over the next ridge.

02:30:19.000 That's part of the reward.

02:30:21.000 And if that reward isn't there, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

02:30:25.000 Shooting fish in a barrel is weird.

02:30:27.000 It's not interesting at all.

02:30:28.000 It's great if you definitely need a fish.

02:30:31.000 Yeah.

02:30:32.000 Yeah.

02:30:32.000 And that's okay.

02:30:33.000 Like, there are little, you know, you can cut little corners in life, right?

02:30:37.000 Like, you know, I'm not saying everything has to be like, because then somebody might say, well, you're using a compound bow.

02:30:44.000 The other guy's using a recurve.

02:30:46.000 Right.

02:30:46.000 That's a good argument, and that argument gets weird, right?

02:30:49.000 But if you're doing it, we say if you're doing it well and good, it doesn't matter, you know, it shouldn't matter.

02:30:56.000 Like, if you're an ethical, if you're hunting for the right reasons, you're asking yourself these big questions, it shouldn't matter if you pick up a rifle and you shoot them at 100 yards, or you pick up a recurve and you shoot them at 10 yards.

02:31:07.000 Because I know recurve shooters that can only shoot like 15, 18 yards.

02:31:11.000 I know recurve shooters that can shoot 50, 60, 70 yards.

02:31:15.000 And, you know, so we're all different.

02:31:18.000 We all like to, you know, some people really enjoy shooting their rifles.

02:31:21.000 Some people really enjoy shooting their bow.

02:31:22.000 I don't think we should split hairs there.

02:31:24.000 Just realize that the bow hunter maybe had to go to the next level of immersion to get himself next to that animal.

02:31:32.000 And, you know, the rifle hunter, you know, there's a slightly less barrier of entry, but it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it.

02:31:40.000 Well, rifle, I've heard it argue, and I agree with them, that rifle hunting on public land is probably more difficult than bow hunting on private land.

02:31:48.000 Without question.

02:31:50.000 And certainly more difficult than bow hunting on public land, because bow hunters have, that's the reason I started bow hunting, was have access to public land prior to the rifle season.

02:32:01.000 Yeah.

02:32:01.000 To extend my season, to go in the woods when it's quiet and no one else is around and see animals acting naturally, rather than seeing this orange army and seeing everything running for its life.

02:32:12.000 Right, right.

02:32:12.000 Yeah.

02:32:13.000 Yeah, that's where it gets squirrely, right?

02:32:15.000 It does.

02:32:16.000 Public access is great, but man, it does get really weird, and I've experienced it when there's a lot of hunters around.

02:32:22.000 I was in Wisconsin for opening day a couple years ago, and it is like a war zone.

02:32:28.000 The moment light goes off, you hear boom, boom.

02:32:31.000 Thank you.

02:32:32.000 Boom! 0.99

02:32:33.000 And I was with Rinella, and we filmed it for Meat Eater, and I looked at him like, what the fuck is going on, man? 0.99

02:32:39.000 Are we at war? 0.96

02:32:40.000 He's like, this is opening day in Wisconsin.

02:32:42.000 I was like, that's crazy!

02:32:44.000 I mean, it is just everywhere, just gunshots ringing out in the distance.

02:32:51.000 Yep.

02:32:52.000 And again, like, you know, sometimes we like to talk about management.

02:32:55.000 Not every population needs to be managed, but literally, you probably can't kill enough deer that day.

02:33:01.000 Oh! 1.00

02:33:01.000 In Wisconsin, you better manage those fucking deer because people are hitting them with cars all day long. 1.00

02:33:06.000 Yeah, you literally couldn't kill enough. 1.00

02:33:07.000 And we were eating them.

02:33:09.000 They were eating a lot of corn because where my friend Doug Duren's farm is, where we're hunting, it's all corn.

02:33:14.000 Yeah.

02:33:15.000 And man, they could not have tasted better.

02:33:17.000 Yeah.

02:33:17.000 They were so good.

02:33:19.000 I mean, it was insane. 0.98

02:33:20.000 We sauteed them that night in a cast iron skillet with garlic salt and butter, and holy shit was it good. 0.98

02:33:28.000 People were just moaning in orgasmic ecstasy while they were eating this deer. 0.98

02:33:34.000 It's cuisine, man.

02:33:35.000 It's so good, man.

02:33:36.000 When you're sitting there with your bodies, it should be valued.

02:33:39.000 And it's freezing cold outside.

02:33:41.000 You're indoors, and it's warm, and everybody's happy.

02:33:46.000 Man, it was epic.

02:33:47.000 It was epic.

02:33:48.000 It's something to be told, for sure.

02:33:50.000 Yeah, it is something to be told.

02:33:52.000 I think, and we should probably wrap this up, we're about three hours in, but I think I would want people, if they're really curious about this, Endeavor I really would want people to start with your films because I appreciate that I think that what you're doing if they have the time to sit down and watch that whole thing what you're doing is you I think you represent the best Just the best slice It's so hard to get that slice in 22 minutes and I think Rinella does an amazing job in doing it in 22 minutes,

02:34:22.000 but I think what you've done by turning these into films and by really giving yourself the opportunity to relay your appreciation, the wonder and the awe of nature and your immersion into that world and to do so in such an incredibly creative way and Beautifully visually stunning way that I think you've done an amazing service and I think I think it's a great place for people to start

02:34:52.000 to get a look at them and for people that that do hunt I think they will really appreciate if they haven't seen your stuff before I appreciate that man like it's uh we definitely suffer for the work like writing the music the shooting it like We want to represent ourselves with absolute purity,

02:35:10.000 but we also realize that there are people that have questions, so we try to write and behave in a manner that, like you've done today several times in a podcast, you say, hey, explain what a concession is.

02:35:21.000 People don't know what a concession is.

02:35:22.000 Well, if you can write in this certain manner, give them some sort of an education while you're telling them the story and do it poetically, and that's...

02:35:31.000 I appreciate it.

02:35:32.000 Well, there's so few people doing it that way.

02:35:35.000 Sitka makes some really good films.

02:35:37.000 They're making some longer films.

02:35:39.000 They're in the 20 minutes and longer.

02:35:41.000 But I think very few people are doing what you're doing, but really making it into a movie.

02:35:46.000 I appreciate that, man.

02:35:47.000 This next one will be about 90 minutes in length, and I'm really excited about it.

02:35:51.000 I can't wait, man.

02:35:52.000 Let me know.

02:35:53.000 Donnie Vincent, ladies and gentlemen.

02:35:54.000 Thanks for being on here, man.

02:35:55.000 I really appreciate it.

02:35:56.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 29, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1122 - Donnie Vincent

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript