The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1674 - Clay Newcomb

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:05.000 Train by day.

00:00:07.000 Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

00:00:08.000 All day.

00:00:14.000 What's happening, brother?

00:00:15.000 How are you?

00:00:15.000 I'm doing very well.

00:00:17.000 It's always interesting to meet someone in person when you've heard them on a podcast.

00:00:20.000 I've heard you, I don't know, a hundred times on the Meat Eater podcast, so to see you in person.

00:00:26.000 And then to start listening to your podcast, which is Bear Grease, which is...

00:00:33.000 A hilarious name for a podcast, and if people don't know, bear grease rendered bear fat is actually a very valuable thing, and it's great to cook with.

00:00:45.000 I'll never forget when I found out about bear hunting, about bears being good to eat, was actually from Steve Rinella.

00:00:53.000 Right.

00:00:53.000 When he was explaining to me about blueberry bears.

00:00:56.000 Yeah.

00:00:57.000 And then I watched that video that he put out of him hunting this bear in Alaska that had been eating nothing but blueberries.

00:01:04.000 Right.

00:01:04.000 And so when he's breaking down the bear and taking the fat off, the fat is actually purple because this bear has been eating so many blueberries that it's in its flesh.

00:01:14.000 Yeah.

00:01:14.000 And he said, it is the most delicious meat you'll ever eat.

00:01:18.000 Yeah.

00:01:18.000 Well, I mean, bear grease, bear fat...

00:01:22.000 It's essentially whatever that bear's been eating.

00:01:26.000 It's flavored, whether it be by acorns or berries or whatever.

00:01:31.000 I've got some bear grease for you, Joe.

00:01:33.000 Oh, exciting.

00:01:34.000 I come bearing many gifts if you would like to see what I've got here.

00:01:38.000 Tell me what you've got there.

00:01:40.000 Talking about bear grease and trying to connect it to a podcast, at some point I'll have to explain the metaphor of bear grease.

00:01:49.000 Let's explain it now.

00:01:50.000 Well, so bear grease at one time was this highly valued commodity.

00:01:55.000 I mean, used as a unit of currency on the American frontier.

00:02:00.000 And bear grease, bear oil would be the rendered fat of a bear that would turn into liquid.

00:02:07.000 Like this right here.

00:02:08.000 This is for you.

00:02:09.000 Thank you.

00:02:11.000 I mean, I know you've bear hunted, but have you had bear grease before?

00:02:13.000 No, I've eaten bear.

00:02:15.000 I've never rendered bear fat or cooked anything in bear fat.

00:02:18.000 I've only just taken the meat and cooked it.

00:02:22.000 Usually slow cooking.

00:02:23.000 So what you would do with that is you would cook with it.

00:02:25.000 You would fry with it.

00:02:27.000 You can make pastries with it.

00:02:28.000 You can use it to condition leather.

00:02:31.000 It's supposed to be amazing for pastries, right?

00:02:33.000 It is.

00:02:34.000 Pie crust.

00:02:35.000 Yep.

00:02:35.000 And so there was a time when bear grease, bear lard was super valuable on the frontier before refrigeration because bear fat stayed, didn't go rancid as quickly as pork lard.

00:02:48.000 So like on it, you would have pork and bear would be essentially the places where you would get it.

00:02:54.000 This lasted longer.

00:02:55.000 That'll last on the shelf at your house, unrefrigerated, for over a year.

00:03:00.000 Yeah.

00:03:00.000 Why does it last so much longer?

00:03:02.000 Just whatever the constituency of bear lard is, it just stays good for that long.

00:03:09.000 So, going back to this metaphor of the name of bear grease, in our podcast, we're exploring things, and even in the tagline of the podcast, we say that we're exploring things that are forgotten but relevant.

00:03:27.000 And we're searching for insight in unlikely places.

00:03:30.000 And so like this bear grease, I brought you some stuff that you can do with bear grease.

00:03:35.000 This is some bear fat lye soap.

00:03:38.000 Have you ever used animal tallow soap?

00:03:41.000 No.

00:03:42.000 Like just for like bathing, washing your hands.

00:03:44.000 No, never have.

00:03:44.000 Man, that's incredible stuff.

00:03:47.000 Yeah?

00:03:47.000 It really is.

00:03:48.000 100% all natural.

00:03:49.000 I mean, it's an ancient process of using lye and animal tallow.

00:03:54.000 What is lye exactly?

00:03:56.000 Lye is, doggone if you hadn't asked me, it's a chemical.

00:04:03.000 It's a caustic chemical that you can buy just about anywhere.

00:04:08.000 But shoot, it's like H2 something something.

00:04:12.000 They used to use ash.

00:04:14.000 They got the lye from ash.

00:04:21.000 It's a metal hydroxide traditionally obtained by leaching wood ashes or a strong alkali, which is highly soluble in water-producing caustic and basic solutions.

00:04:33.000 NaOH.

00:04:33.000 Sodium hydroxide.

00:04:34.000 That's what it is.

00:04:35.000 So they would get it from, like, burning wood?

00:04:38.000 Yeah.

00:04:38.000 So the real primitive method for making soap from animal tallow...

00:04:44.000 And you could make animal tallow soap out of...

00:04:47.000 Beef tallow.

00:04:48.000 ...anything.

00:04:48.000 But bare fat lie soap is our specialty.

00:04:54.000 But it...

00:04:55.000 It's supposed to be real good for your skin.

00:04:58.000 Do you sell this?

00:04:59.000 No!

00:04:59.000 No, no, no, no.

00:05:03.000 This is not for sale.

00:05:06.000 Did you make this?

00:05:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:05:09.000 And so what's the ingredients?

00:05:11.000 So just lye and...

00:05:13.000 Four ingredients.

00:05:14.000 Bare fat, sodium hydroxide, lye, water, and then just essential oils.

00:05:19.000 For the smell?

00:05:20.000 Yeah, so it smells real good.

00:05:22.000 What are the essential oils?

00:05:24.000 We had a bunch of different kind of oils that we added in, like peppermint, whatever.

00:05:29.000 I don't know.

00:05:29.000 Sometimes I'm amazed at how, you know, kind of like hygiene conscious us bear hunters are, like making soap and stuff.

00:05:36.000 Because the other thing I brought you, Joe, and I know you don't You don't run a beard, but this is some bear grease beard oil that I made.

00:05:44.000 And so that is a combination of three things.

00:05:47.000 So it's cheating just a little bit, but it's one part bear oil, one part almond oil, one part jojoba oil, and then essential oils.

00:05:58.000 And I mean, you can drip it out, put it on your hands.

00:06:02.000 Ooh, that smells good.

00:06:03.000 Yeah.

00:06:04.000 It's interesting.

00:06:06.000 And then the last one here, and then I'll start talking about my metaphor again if you want, but this is a bear grease hand salve.

00:06:14.000 And so bear oil has all kind of folklore around it.

00:06:19.000 And I'm in the process of like an anecdotal research, very serious project of exploring all these folk tales of bear grease and bear oil.

00:06:32.000 So it's healing properties?

00:06:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:06:34.000 They say, I mean, back in the day, bear oil would have been used to relieve arthritis pain.

00:06:41.000 They say, and you can find this all over the internet, that bear oil cures baldness, which obviously is like a big piece of folklore.

00:06:51.000 Right.

00:06:52.000 But it's still just fun.

00:06:53.000 But going back to the idea that bear grease has all these uses, is that this is a thing that at one time was a currency.

00:07:00.000 And if you polled the United States, 330 million Americans, and you said, what is bear grease?

00:07:07.000 I mean, like, what percentage of people would even know what it was?

00:07:11.000 Probably like 1% of 1%.

00:07:14.000 Yeah.

00:07:15.000 So it's been forgotten.

00:07:17.000 And so...

00:07:19.000 There was a time when, so there's an archaic unit of measure of a bear oil.

00:07:24.000 They used to take the tanned neck hide of a deer, which would have been a part of the buckskin that wasn't usable, the neck hide, and they would have sewed it together, and they would have used it to have stored bear oil, and they called it an eel.

00:07:41.000 So they would make a container out of it, like a wine flask almost.

00:07:44.000 An eel of bear oil.

00:07:46.000 Huh.

00:07:46.000 And it's just a wonder.

00:07:48.000 Spell it like eel?

00:07:49.000 Well, you know, it's been probably 10 years since I've actually seen it written.

00:07:53.000 I think it's E-L-L-E, like an eel of bear oil.

00:08:00.000 Would have been a unit of measurement.

00:08:01.000 So like you could have gone to the store and you're like, well, I got two eels of bear oil.

00:08:05.000 You know, I'd like some flour.

00:08:07.000 I'd like some whatever.

00:08:07.000 Yeah.

00:08:08.000 It's a wonder that we don't call the U.S. dollar an eel.

00:08:13.000 Because the buck is essentially connected to the value of a white-tailed deerskin that was tanned out and ready for tanning.

00:08:22.000 And that became equivalent to a buck.

00:08:25.000 For one dollar?

00:08:26.000 For one dollar.

00:08:27.000 Wow.

00:08:27.000 And so, again, this idea that there's some pretty amazing stuff that's forgotten.

00:08:32.000 And then, as hunters, we're very interested in...

00:08:36.000 In using as much as we can from these animals that we're taking.

00:08:40.000 Very interested in that.

00:08:42.000 And so a bear offers a whole other market of commodity that really no other big game offers.

00:08:50.000 In that, you know, of the big game that we hunt, like, let's say an elk.

00:08:55.000 I mean, you know, you're going to keep the meat, obviously.

00:08:58.000 That's the number one thing.

00:08:59.000 You're going to keep his horns.

00:09:01.000 But very few people would even keep the hide of that animal.

00:09:05.000 And certainly they're not rendering down elk tallow.

00:09:09.000 White-tailed deer would have the same sequence of usable commodities. 0.55

00:09:13.000 Man, a black bear.

00:09:16.000 We have incredible meat.

00:09:20.000 I would venture to say that 90%, maybe 80% of black bears that are killed in North America, their hides are tanned.

00:09:30.000 They have, usually, especially in the fall, have an incredible amount of fat, which can be rendered down into all these incredible, healthy, usable products.

00:09:41.000 And so, I mean, like, we have...

00:09:45.000 My point is we use more of a bear than we do almost any other big game animal that we hunt.

00:09:51.000 I'm getting off track here.

00:09:53.000 No, you're not.

00:09:53.000 My friends John and Jen, they run a bear hunting camp.

00:09:57.000 Yeah, in Alberta.

00:09:58.000 I know that.

00:09:59.000 And they take the bear fat and they give it to the First Nation elders and they use it for some sort of medicinal properties.

00:10:08.000 They have some way of utilizing it themselves.

00:10:10.000 Yeah.

00:10:11.000 And they found that pretty fascinating.

00:10:13.000 They personally use bear fat for cooking and things like that, and they cook a lot of bear, and they're interested in a lot of bear recipes, but they say that they make trades with the elders, and they deliver them bear fat.

00:10:24.000 They're really into bear fat.

00:10:25.000 Yeah.

00:10:25.000 But they don't kill bear themselves.

00:10:27.000 Right, right.

00:10:28.000 Which is interesting.

00:10:29.000 The natives.

00:10:30.000 Yeah, the natives.

00:10:30.000 Well, you know, they call them First Nations up there, I guess.

00:10:33.000 They have a different perspective on bears, like...

00:10:38.000 It's weird up there because they have different laws for First Nation folks.

00:10:44.000 So if you're on public land or what do they call it?

00:10:47.000 Crown land?

00:10:48.000 Crown land in Canada.

00:10:49.000 When you're up there, First Nation people, they can hunt at night with spotlights. 1.00

00:10:55.000 They can shoot a moose 365 days a year.

00:10:58.000 They don't follow seasons.

00:10:59.000 They can catch as many walleyes as they want.

00:11:01.000 They have a lot of weird rules.

00:11:02.000 But they don't hunt bear.

00:11:04.000 Right.

00:11:04.000 But there's a lot of them.

00:11:07.000 You're right.

00:11:08.000 There are First Nation tribes that do have inside of their history quite a bit of use for black bear in different places.

00:11:16.000 But I've seen that too.

00:11:17.000 A lot of the Canadian First Nation peoples aren't that interested in bear hunting.

00:11:24.000 Historically, I mean, bears and, you know, First Nation people, especially in the South and everywhere in Alaska.

00:11:33.000 I was just doing a reading a book on the Koyukon people up in in Alaska, which is an indigenous tribe and in Alaska.

00:11:42.000 And I mean, they have an incredible amount of Bear hunting history and bear hunting methods.

00:11:49.000 And like they have what they call taboos.

00:11:52.000 I've got a list on my phone of like 14 of their rules for bear hunting, which are like super interesting.

00:12:00.000 Let me hear them.

00:12:01.000 All like very...

00:12:03.000 Specific.

00:12:04.000 Yeah.

00:12:06.000 It might take me just a minute, Joe.

00:12:07.000 That's okay.

00:12:08.000 We should probably tell people, because all this stuff sounds odd, because when you're talking about hunting in North America, to most people that don't hunt, they think of deer hunting.

00:12:18.000 That's common.

00:12:19.000 But during the days where people were traveling across the country, settling, and the pioneers, they mostly ate bear, and they were using deer for the skins.

00:12:33.000 Which is kind of crazy when you think about it today.

00:12:35.000 Like that bear was...

00:12:37.000 Steve Rinella has that great animated thing.

00:12:41.000 Have you ever seen it online where someone's animated this piece about...

00:12:44.000 The story about Boone.

00:12:45.000 Yeah, Daniel Boone and all of his bear hunting and canning bears and smoking bears.

00:12:51.000 And that bear meat was highly prized.

00:12:55.000 Yeah.

00:12:55.000 Yeah, it was...

00:12:56.000 I mean, there's no reason...

00:12:59.000 Why that really should have changed, other than it just kind of went out of popularity? 0.99

00:13:04.000 Fucking Disney. 0.99

00:13:04.000 Disney did it. 0.99

00:13:05.000 That's what happened.

00:13:07.000 People started looking at animals in this really weird, anthropomorphic way.

00:13:10.000 I mean, it's Yogi Bear, it's a teddy bear, it's your buddy. 0.99

00:13:15.000 Which is the weirdest thing, to have an animal that will fucking kill you. 0.99

00:13:19.000 And that's the one that you've decided that you won't kill back, and you won't eat them. 0.98

00:13:25.000 Well, I mean, bear meat, that's probably the number one question that I get asked by people is, do you eat the bear?

00:13:31.000 And I mean, like, absolutely.

00:13:32.000 I mean, bear is, I mean, it's incredible meat when handled correctly, just like any other kind of meat. 0.99

00:13:37.000 The way I describe it, I'd say it tastes like a deer fucked a pig. 0.99

00:13:43.000 It's like red pork. 0.99

00:13:45.000 Yeah, it's like this really interesting meat, but it's very good.

00:13:50.000 It's very good.

00:13:50.000 Yeah, I mean, it really is.

00:13:51.000 You don't have to convince yourself.

00:13:53.000 Yeah.

00:13:54.000 Bear meat is good meat.

00:13:56.000 Yeah, and there was a time when it was, like, highly valued, and that just seems to be forgotten.

00:14:01.000 Yeah.

00:14:02.000 Just forgotten.

00:14:03.000 And what's wild, and I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but black bears on the North American continent are thriving.

00:14:13.000 Yeah.

00:14:14.000 Thriving.

00:14:14.000 Especially in New Jersey.

00:14:16.000 Anywhere.

00:14:17.000 Yeah.

00:14:18.000 Florida, Arkansas, Oklahoma, out west, Michigan...

00:14:22.000 Wisconsin.

00:14:24.000 Like, whatever's happening ecologically right now in North America.

00:14:28.000 And I mean, you could make a list that would just be bizarre about urban sprawl and fragmentation of wilderness and all this stuff.

00:14:37.000 Whatever is happening, you know, increase in temperature across the place.

00:14:42.000 Like, bears are thriving.

00:14:46.000 Why that makes sense that right now that people would begin to be re-interested in hunting bears is that we've got more people on this continent than we've ever had, obviously.

00:15:00.000 We've got more overlap of bear country and humans.

00:15:05.000 We literally are up against the wall in terms of managing these animals.

00:15:11.000 I mean, they will be managed.

00:15:14.000 Bears will be taken out of populations one way or another because bears...

00:15:23.000 For instance, let's take Arkansas.

00:15:25.000 Arkansas has 2.2 million acres of national forests and that's essentially the core bear habitat in the state of Arkansas.

00:15:32.000 That is great bear habitat.

00:15:34.000 A natural bear density in the Ozarks or Ouachita Mountains would be, let's just say, one bear per square mile.

00:15:40.000 And that would be a fairly high population of bears at a landscape level.

00:15:45.000 Well, if you have two bears per square mile, that might not seem much to you or me, because we're not bears.

00:15:51.000 But long term, that is not sustainable.

00:15:54.000 And bears replicate, basically, a healthy population of bears is going to increase by over 10% per year.

00:16:02.000 So if you have 100 bears, and the next year you're going to have 110, and then you can do the math.

00:16:09.000 One time I did the math, and I want to say within 12 years of population, even including mortality, Natural mortality could double in like 15 years if it was just released.

00:16:26.000 You know, when you start doing the math, 10% per year.

00:16:28.000 Anyway, point being...

00:16:29.000 And then you have to do the math with fawns and elk calves and all the different animals they're going to eat and what kind of impact that's going to have.

00:16:38.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:16:40.000 Point being, it's a great time.

00:16:43.000 It seems kind of counterintuitive with the social structure of the planet.

00:16:49.000 But I mean, man, this country was founded on...

00:16:55.000 It really was.

00:16:55.000 Bear hunting.

00:16:56.000 I mean, the American frontier was fueled by bear meat and bear fat.

00:16:59.000 It sounds so crazy to say, but it really is true. 0.98

00:17:01.000 And it took me a while to understand that.

00:17:03.000 It took me a while of reading historical accounts of these travelers and these people that were making their way, these pioneers, making their way across the country, and what they ate.

00:17:14.000 A lot of what they ate was bear.

00:17:16.000 This blows people's mind, and it blew mine when I first learned it years ago.

00:17:22.000 But, and we could do trivia, but I'm setting you up to know what the answer is.

00:17:26.000 Black bear.

00:17:28.000 What is the most widely distributed big game mammal in North America?

00:17:34.000 This is a little bit of a trick, because it's not quite as straightforward.

00:17:38.000 Most widely distributed, white-tailed deer, elk, naturally pre-European civilization.

00:17:42.000 What has to be black bear?

00:17:44.000 Well...

00:17:44.000 Right?

00:17:45.000 Black bear's number two.

00:17:47.000 Really?

00:17:47.000 What's number one?

00:17:48.000 Mountain lion.

00:17:49.000 Really?

00:17:50.000 Mountain lions went from—they basically covered the entire North American continent, except in the real far North Arctic.

00:17:59.000 But, you know, since that time, habitat fragmentation and mountain lion populations are now—they're thriving in the places where they are in the West, and they're moving back into the East, which we did a podcast on.

00:18:13.000 But black bears would be number two.

00:18:14.000 The most widely distributed big game animals.

00:18:17.000 So they were everywhere.

00:18:18.000 I mean, when people got off the...

00:18:20.000 I mean, when they...

00:18:21.000 In the eastern United States, full of bear.

00:18:24.000 I mean, the eastern deciduous forest, which would essentially be from...

00:18:29.000 Western Arkansas, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Maine, all the way to Florida, all the way down to East Texas, like one-third of the United States would be the eastern deciduous forest.

00:18:39.000 And how did they, like, was bear hunting a thing in Europe when the early settlers came here?

00:18:46.000 I don't think there was a lot of, like, I don't see a lot of connection between our bear hunting culture and European bear hunting culture.

00:18:55.000 Do you think we or the pioneers learned it from Native Americans?

00:18:59.000 Absolutely.

00:19:00.000 Daniel Boone learned how to hunt bears from Cherokee Indians.

00:19:03.000 Mmm.

00:19:04.000 Yeah.

00:19:04.000 And they learned all the different properties like the bear fat.

00:19:07.000 Yes.

00:19:08.000 Did they speak at all about trichinosis or about diseases that they would get from not cooking the bear meat enough?

00:19:18.000 It's really just a non-issue when you handle it right.

00:19:23.000 I mean, trichinosis dies instantaneously.

00:19:28.000 And because it's such a big platform, we can fact check this.

00:19:32.000 Trichinosis dies instantaneously at like 144 degrees.

00:19:37.000 Okay.

00:19:38.000 Which is like medium.

00:19:39.000 Yeah.

00:19:40.000 It's not even well done.

00:19:41.000 You know, the USDA is telling us to cook our meat to 160. Right.

00:19:45.000 So, I mean, we are programmed to cook our meat to 160, to cook it done in most things.

00:19:51.000 Trichinosis dies instantaneously at like 144 degrees.

00:19:54.000 And fact check that before you eat a piece of bear meat.

00:19:58.000 But it's an incremental scale going down.

00:20:02.000 Like, it dies at 143 if it's at 143 for 5 seconds.

00:20:07.000 It dies at 142 if it's at 142 degrees for a minute.

00:20:13.000 So you could sous vide bear at like 135 and do it all day long and you'd be good with a medium rare piece of beef.

00:20:20.000 Absolutely.

00:20:21.000 Like a medium rare piece of beef.

00:20:22.000 Yes.

00:20:22.000 Really?

00:20:23.000 Have you ever done that?

00:20:23.000 No.

00:20:25.000 I'm not quite on the sous-vide.

00:20:27.000 I mean, I should be.

00:20:27.000 I work for Steve Rinella, but I'm not on the sous-vide train yet.

00:20:31.000 Sous-vide's awesome.

00:20:32.000 I know it.

00:20:33.000 I'm behind the times.

00:20:34.000 I prefer smoking.

00:20:35.000 I prefer a pellet grill, like a Traeger.

00:20:37.000 That's my favorite way to cook.

00:20:38.000 But sous-vide, the thing about it is you could go to work and just leave it, sit out there on the counter, and it'll cook for eight hours for you.

00:20:45.000 Yeah.

00:20:46.000 And then you come back and everything is just sort of all the tendons and all the rough stuff is dissolved.

00:20:50.000 Yeah.

00:20:51.000 Yeah.

00:20:51.000 It's nice.

00:20:52.000 Yeah, it's good.

00:20:54.000 I know Ryan Callahan's big on it.

00:20:57.000 The sous vide.

00:20:57.000 Yeah.

00:20:58.000 Yeah.

00:20:59.000 It's good stuff.

00:21:00.000 But I've never done it with bear.

00:21:02.000 All I've ever done with bear is either slow cook it like a ham and make sure it's thoroughly cooked, put a meat thermometer in it, or I've made Ranella's bear candy recipe.

00:21:14.000 Have you ever had that recipe?

00:21:15.000 No, I haven't.

00:21:16.000 Oh my God, it's so good.

00:21:17.000 It's like a...

00:21:18.000 What's that?

00:21:20.000 There's like a...

00:21:22.000 Like a General Sao's chicken. 0.66

00:21:24.000 You know, it's kind of like a sweet sort of chicken.

00:21:26.000 You eat it over rice like an Asian dish.

00:21:28.000 You make that with bear.

00:21:30.000 So it has sugar in it. 0.99

00:21:31.000 My kids went fucking crazy for it. 0.99

00:21:34.000 They loved it. 0.99

00:21:34.000 Like bear candy was one of the favorite dishes that I've ever cooked for them. 0.99

00:21:38.000 Because it's very sweet.

00:21:39.000 It's a lot of sugar in it.

00:21:40.000 It's really probably not very good for you.

00:21:42.000 But man, is it delicious.

00:21:43.000 And you know, you cook it like an Asian dish with like...

00:21:46.000 Some peppers and scallions and it's got kind of a brown sauce to it and you pour it over rice and it's really, really good.

00:21:55.000 Nice.

00:21:56.000 Yeah.

00:21:57.000 Nice.

00:21:57.000 And other than that, I've eaten bear sausage and standard things.

00:22:01.000 Yeah.

00:22:01.000 Bear back strap.

00:22:03.000 Well, that's good.

00:22:04.000 So these are...

00:22:05.000 Read us off these rules again.

00:22:07.000 Okay, so...

00:22:09.000 These are not quotes from this book.

00:22:12.000 These are my interpretations that I wrote on the inside cover of the book.

00:22:15.000 Okay.

00:22:16.000 And you took a photo of it?

00:22:17.000 This book was called Make Prayers to Ravens.

00:22:21.000 That's the name of the book.

00:22:23.000 When was this book written?

00:22:25.000 In the 1970s.

00:22:26.000 It was basically an anthropologist that went and lived with the Koyukon people in Alaska for an extended period of time.

00:22:34.000 And he...

00:22:36.000 Nelson was his last name.

00:22:37.000 I can't remember his first.

00:22:38.000 Richard K. Nelson, I think.

00:22:40.000 Incredible.

00:22:41.000 Yeah, Make Prayers to the Raven, Richard Nelson.

00:22:44.000 Oh, incredible.

00:22:45.000 Okay, so when I got to the section on Black Bear, they had a full chapter on Black Bear.

00:22:52.000 And they started, they called them taboos.

00:22:54.000 But okay, so when a bear is found, and these are like...

00:23:00.000 Kind of spiritual rules that they use in bear hunting.

00:23:04.000 But if you find a bear, you must speak very cryptically about your plans to go back.

00:23:11.000 Because the spirit of the bear is aware and he'll hear you.

00:23:15.000 So if I went out hunting and I found a bear sign, but I didn't kill the bear, and I came back to camp, came back to my house that night, and I wanted you to come with me, I would be like, Tomorrow, I would like for you to come with me around the mountain just to see what we can see.

00:23:34.000 And you would know exactly what that meant.

00:23:37.000 You would be like, winkity wink.

00:23:40.000 So the idea is that your thoughts project and that the bears are so aware.

00:23:45.000 They assign bears a very high level of spiritual ranking and power and only second to the wolverine.

00:23:57.000 They have like this hierarchy of animal powers.

00:24:01.000 And so basically You know, you can't talk about your plans.

00:24:07.000 You've got to be cryptic.

00:24:08.000 Because those plans will get out there.

00:24:10.000 Because the bear will hear you and he will route you.

00:24:13.000 He'll do something different.

00:24:14.000 So that's rule number one.

00:24:15.000 You should never point at a bear because he will feel you.

00:24:19.000 So if you're hunting, you know, your first instinct is to, oh, there's a bear.

00:24:24.000 Point at it.

00:24:25.000 No pointing because he will see you.

00:24:28.000 You know, I would be... 0.99

00:24:31.000 I'm one of those people that loves calling bullshit. 0.99

00:24:33.000 I'd love to call bullshit on this, but I don't know if I do. 0.99

00:24:37.000 You know what I'm saying? 0.97

00:24:38.000 There's a thing about animals, when you are staring at them, I feel like they get some sort of a little frequency, like a little beep-beep-beep, a little message from the distance where they get uncomfortable.

00:24:52.000 I read these to Jan Spatelis, and he kind of functionalized every one of these.

00:24:58.000 He was like, well, of course you don't want to point.

00:25:01.000 He's like, think about the movement that you're making when you're pointing.

00:25:05.000 You're drawing attention to yourself.

00:25:06.000 Because he was trying to find the functional value.

00:25:10.000 And I'm not saying that I believe these, Joe.

00:25:13.000 I'm saying I believe them.

00:25:15.000 Bears are psychic.

00:25:16.000 I'm going with that.

00:25:17.000 So the third rule was that you talk to the bear as you shoot it.

00:25:21.000 You tell him what to do.

00:25:22.000 So you like sweet talk the bear.

00:25:24.000 And this whole chapter has examples.

00:25:29.000 Like they did interviews with these people.

00:25:31.000 They had examples of them doing this.

00:25:33.000 But basically when a bear is in your sights and you need him to do something particularly.

00:25:37.000 Because if you're hunting, a bear might be behind a tree.

00:25:40.000 He might be facing you.

00:25:41.000 You don't have a good shot.

00:25:42.000 You're supposed to sweet talk him.

00:25:44.000 And they gave examples of it.

00:25:45.000 It'd be like, dear friend.

00:25:47.000 I really would like for you to turn slightly to the right.

00:25:51.000 And the bear will do it.

00:25:55.000 I watched that episode of Meat Eater where you and Rinella were hunting bear.

00:25:59.000 Were you in Montana?

00:26:00.000 Montana.

00:26:01.000 And there was a bear that was how many hundreds of yards away?

00:26:05.000 800. 800 yards away and he winded you.

00:26:08.000 Yeah.

00:26:08.000 I mean, winded us like that.

00:26:11.000 What I mean by winded, for people who don't know what we're talking about, the wind came from behind you and reached the bear, so you're sent, reached the bear from eight football fields away, which is fucking bananas. 0.87

00:26:23.000 That's so far. 0.81

00:26:24.000 And that bear started running.

00:26:26.000 Yeah.

00:26:26.000 And that's the only thing that you could attribute to his behavior.

00:26:30.000 Oh, there was no question that the bear smelled us.

00:26:34.000 I mean, that's not, in my mind or Steve's mind, really debatable.

00:26:37.000 But there is more to the story that would help make sense, Joe.

00:26:41.000 Because we were basically at the foot of a mountain, and to our right was basically a very steep, straight-up mountain.

00:26:51.000 So we're sitting here.

00:26:53.000 The wind is hitting us directly in the back of the neck, and it's basically creating a wind channel that directed our scent right to that bear, where if it had been open country, I feel like by the time our scent got there, it would have dissipated.

00:27:09.000 And there were six of us.

00:27:11.000 You just see me and Steve on the screen, but behind us was at least four other people.

00:27:18.000 It may have been seven of us. 1.00

00:27:19.000 A lot of smelly motherfuckers. 1.00

00:27:20.000 It's true. 1.00

00:27:21.000 The other thing is, the way it's been described to me, that kind of makes sense, is skunks.

00:27:29.000 We can smell a skunk a mile away, and it's weird.

00:27:33.000 Like, a skunk smells weird.

00:27:34.000 Like, you know, you're driving down the road in your car, and you're like, I smell skunk.

00:27:39.000 Like, somehow or another, out there, that minuscule amount of sunk scent can get into your car and hit your nose.

00:27:47.000 Someone explained to me, now imagine that times 100, and that's how a bear can smell things.

00:27:52.000 Right.

00:27:52.000 And I'm like, what?

00:27:54.000 You know, it boils down to when you look at the physical structure.

00:27:59.000 I mean, you know, we have these olfactory receptors in our nose that help us smell, like just little receptors.

00:28:05.000 A bear would have... 0.74

00:28:07.000 And I've forgotten the stats.

00:28:09.000 Thousands more times surface area of those receptors.

00:28:14.000 So, I mean, they just have more mechanisms for receiving olfactory information.

00:28:19.000 More than a bloodhound, even.

00:28:21.000 Oh, yeah.

00:28:21.000 Yeah.

00:28:22.000 A bear, as I understand it, has the most powerful nose in the world of any animal.

00:28:26.000 That's what I understand.

00:28:29.000 But this is the way I've heard it described to me that made a lot of sense.

00:28:33.000 Like, if you were to walk into your house and there was a dish of lasagna cooking in the oven, and you walked in and you're like, I smell lasagna.

00:28:44.000 It's just what would register, lasagna.

00:28:46.000 A bear would walk in and he would say...

00:28:49.000 I smell cooking cheese.

00:28:52.000 I smell warm tomato paste.

00:28:56.000 I smell the noodles.

00:29:01.000 I smell sausage.

00:29:03.000 He could smell the layers.

00:29:05.000 I mean, essentially, it's such...

00:29:08.000 It's a scent.

00:29:09.000 That's one of our weakest things as humans is our scent.

00:29:12.000 We don't use it in a defensive way at all, really.

00:29:16.000 And so it's hard for us to understand.

00:29:18.000 But man, the animal kingdom runs off their noses.

00:29:23.000 It's almost like a superpower.

00:29:25.000 To try to comprehend how a bear could smell you that far is hard. 0.90

00:29:30.000 Yeah, our senses suck in comparison, right? 0.89

00:29:32.000 Yeah.

00:29:33.000 It's a wonder we ever survived.

00:29:34.000 So what were the other taboos?

00:29:36.000 Okay, yeah, there's a few more that are pretty interesting.

00:29:40.000 Always wear new boots when you're spring bear hunting.

00:29:43.000 So don't wear a pair of boots that you've worn before.

00:29:46.000 Always skin a bear where it is killed.

00:29:49.000 Never haul or drag a bear.

00:29:52.000 Why would you not wear old boots?

00:29:55.000 Because of the scent?

00:29:56.000 Man, when you read this book, you would get a sense for the worldview of these people and the way that they think.

00:30:02.000 And your question would be answered if you read the rest of the book.

00:30:07.000 Stuff happens and it becomes law.

00:30:11.000 Why don't you drag a bear? 0.99

00:30:14.000 Who knows?

00:30:15.000 A lot of these were just stated.

00:30:17.000 It was just like, this is what you do.

00:30:19.000 I think it has to do with respect, though.

00:30:21.000 This one was interesting.

00:30:22.000 When you kill a bear, you slit his eyes before you skin him so that he does not see you and him become offended after his death.

00:30:32.000 Wow.

00:30:33.000 So you walk up to the bear, the first thing you do, you slit his eyes.

00:30:36.000 Because they perceive these as like spiritual animals that have power.

00:30:41.000 Um...

00:30:42.000 They don't, they very rarely keep the skins of bears.

00:30:46.000 They don't want a bear skin in their house because they think it holds like authority or power. 0.58

00:30:52.000 So the bear hide is not used as, which you'd think in the Arctic that this would be like an essential for their clothing and whatnot, but they're killing caribou and other things.

00:31:03.000 I think I stumbled across the eye slitting on a video of Make the Prayers to the Raven.

00:31:09.000 Oh, wow.

00:31:09.000 I haven't even seen this.

00:31:11.000 Well, they're not even slitting the eye.

00:31:12.000 They're actually removing his eyes.

00:31:16.000 Wow.

00:31:17.000 And as I get down to these last two, I'll tell you kind of my conclusion of why this is intriguing to me and how I think it relates to me as someone who I don't...

00:31:28.000 Well, I'll tell you how it connects.

00:31:31.000 But...

00:31:33.000 The last thing, well, close to the last thing.

00:31:36.000 Bear death ceremonies are second only to human funerals.

00:31:42.000 So when you kill a bear, like, they have an absolute, like, ceremony.

00:31:47.000 People all over the village would cook food.

00:31:50.000 And this would be old, more ancient stuff.

00:31:53.000 I don't know that—I couldn't say how these people live today, but— Basically, like, extreme respect for that animal.

00:32:04.000 Only second to a human funeral would be the death of a bear.

00:32:08.000 And they would have these, like, ceremonies and cook and get together.

00:32:13.000 And it was, you know, I... I feel that way when I kill a bear.

00:32:19.000 I mean, like, I don't take it for granted, man.

00:32:21.000 And I've killed a fair number of bears.

00:32:23.000 And, like, each one is, like, significant to me.

00:32:27.000 Do you feel differently when you kill a bear than when, say, you kill a duck or something like that?

00:32:32.000 No.

00:32:33.000 I'm not one of those guys, if I could say those guys.

00:32:36.000 And I don't...

00:32:37.000 I'm not pointing any fingers.

00:32:39.000 Right.

00:32:40.000 A bear is an animal.

00:32:41.000 I mean, I do not attribute him...

00:32:46.000 I don't want to anthropomorphize him too much, but they are special animals.

00:32:50.000 And they are an incredible animal, especially when you understand where they fit inside of the ecosystem.

00:32:57.000 They're an indicator species, like basically wherever you have bears.

00:33:01.000 You can be guaranteed that a whole bunch of stuff underneath that bear is in order in terms of the ecology of the land.

00:33:08.000 There's probably salamanders there.

00:33:10.000 There's, you know, the squirrels are probably in good shape.

00:33:15.000 I mean, they're an indicator species.

00:33:17.000 And so, to me, they just represent something really special.

00:33:23.000 So all animals that you kill have a deep significance to you.

00:33:29.000 Bears are just another one of those animals.

00:33:32.000 They are.

00:33:32.000 But they are of particular interest to me.

00:33:35.000 And I feel like we have the right, for no reason other than that we just want to, to make something special.

00:33:43.000 I have chosen in my life That the Newcomb family, when we kill a bear, it's a big deal.

00:33:50.000 For no good reason.

00:33:52.000 Why do you do that, Clay?

00:33:52.000 Why not when you kill a squirrel?

00:33:53.000 Well, we just like bears, man.

00:33:56.000 Well, they are special.

00:33:58.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:33:59.000 Just by their abilities, just by how difficult they are to come upon.

00:34:06.000 I mean, there's a reason why they bait bears in a lot of parts of the country.

00:34:10.000 It's because It's hard to get on one.

00:34:12.000 Yeah.

00:34:32.000 They have to be managed in a certain way.

00:34:35.000 And if you choose to look at it this way, like all animals, they're a valuable resource.

00:34:41.000 Like deer are a valuable resource.

00:34:43.000 You eat one or you shoot one, your family can eat it for months.

00:34:47.000 That's a lot of food.

00:34:48.000 And the same with a bear.

00:34:50.000 And if you shoot a bear, you're also stopping that bear from killing a whole lot of fawns, a whole lot of elk calves, a whole lot of...

00:35:00.000 Livestock.

00:35:01.000 There's a lot of things.

00:35:01.000 I mean, that thing has to eat a lot.

00:35:03.000 Yes, it does.

00:35:04.000 And a good part of its diet is animals.

00:35:07.000 Yeah.

00:35:07.000 We just published an article that recounted a...

00:35:14.000 The study was probably done 10 years ago in Alaska.

00:35:16.000 And this was a brown bear study.

00:35:19.000 And they collared 17 brown bears in Alaska.

00:35:26.000 And they had a video, it was a video collar that took 5 second videos every, no, 15 second videos every 10 minutes.

00:35:37.000 And the batteries on those at the time, the technology, they would last for like 60 days.

00:35:42.000 And then the collar would release and they would go gather the collar up.

00:35:46.000 They were able to, they put them on 17 bears.

00:35:49.000 7 bears lost the collar so they had data from 10 bears.

00:35:53.000 And I want to say with seven bears.

00:35:59.000 This is going to sound bizarre because even as I read it, like I wanted to just be like, man, this is crazy.

00:36:05.000 But I mean, this came from the biologist in Alaska.

00:36:09.000 They killed, those seven bears killed over 200 moose and caribou calves in a time of 45 days.

00:36:16.000 I mean, they were just stomping around.

00:36:22.000 Yeah.

00:36:47.000 I want to say only 6% of his day he actually fed.

00:36:52.000 But in 45 days, less than 10 bears killed over 200 moose and caribou calves.

00:36:57.000 Have you seen the photographs from Yellowstone of the recent...

00:37:02.000 There's a wildlife photographer that captured a famous grizzly bear.

00:37:06.000 I want to say...

00:37:07.000 It had a number, like 399 or something like that.

00:37:10.000 And they caught this bear in the act of killing an elk calf.

00:37:16.000 And feeding it to the cubs.

00:37:17.000 I don't think I'm saying that.

00:37:17.000 It's pretty wild.

00:37:18.000 It's pretty wild because you see the elk calf still has spots.

00:37:22.000 It's real young.

00:37:23.000 And the bear catches up to it and it's like a big dust up.

00:37:27.000 And even the cubs are duking it out over who gets to eat.

00:37:31.000 It's pretty wild.

00:37:32.000 Wow.

00:37:33.000 It's pretty wild because they caught it with a really good wildlife photographer.

00:37:37.000 There's a whole series of photos.

00:37:38.000 See if you can find it.

00:37:40.000 It's very recent.

00:37:43.000 That's a lot, though, the impact on the species.

00:37:47.000 But it's also, for the health of the species, you need a certain amount of them.

00:37:51.000 As you were saying, it's a great indicator species, right?

00:37:53.000 Yeah.

00:37:54.000 And if a bear needs...

00:37:57.000 There it is.

00:37:58.000 Oh, wow.

00:37:59.000 What number bear is that?

00:38:00.000 Bear is a number.

00:38:01.000 Yeah, it's 399. Famous grizzly 399 kills elk calf on camera.

00:38:05.000 But it's wild, man.

00:38:07.000 Look at that seven-foot sow. 0.97

00:38:09.000 And look at her chasing down that poor little guy. 1.00

00:38:12.000 No chance.

00:38:14.000 Incredible beast, man.

00:38:15.000 Yeah.

00:38:15.000 And then the babies were behind her.

00:38:18.000 And they were like, what's going on, Mom?

00:38:20.000 What's happening?

00:38:21.000 Hmm.

00:38:23.000 And they got the whole deal of it chasing it down and eventually getting it.

00:38:28.000 Pretty wild, man.

00:38:30.000 Yeah, it is.

00:38:34.000 We just did a video on bear defense.

00:38:39.000 Through Meat Eater we put out a video on bear defense of whether you should use a pistol or bear spray.

00:38:46.000 What was the conclusion?

00:38:47.000 Both.

00:38:48.000 I mean, just to cut to the chase.

00:38:49.000 Yeah.

00:38:50.000 We interviewed a guy named Todd Orr.

00:38:52.000 Have you heard of Todd Orr?

00:38:53.000 He's the guy that got his head cut open in Montana?

00:38:55.000 Yeah.

00:38:55.000 He had the viral video of him walking out.

00:38:58.000 So I interviewed Todd, and then I went and was trained by a professional pistol shooter that talked to me about the sequence of drawing a pistol and shooting.

00:39:10.000 Mm-hmm.

00:39:10.000 And then we went to the Montana Fish and Wildlife, and I did a bear simulation, bear charge simulation with a remote-controlled bear that will only go 23 miles per hour.

00:39:22.000 Is there a video of that?

00:39:24.000 Oh, it's on Meat Eater YouTube.

00:39:26.000 Okay, I need to see that remote-controlled bear.

00:39:28.000 Yeah, well, Joe, what was wild about it was...

00:39:34.000 I mean, to be responsible in grizz country, and to be clear with people, like black bears, I'm not going to say black bears are not dangerous, because black bears do kill people and do attack people.

00:39:48.000 It is much less likely that a black bear is going to attack you as a brown or grizzly bear, which in the United States, brown grizzly bears are only pretty much in one general area, which would be in We're good to go.

00:40:30.000 Bear spray is highly effective, but there are times when you don't want to shoot a bear with bear spray.

00:40:37.000 There are times when it is life-threatening, and a bear is trying to kill you, and you need to take lethal action upon that bear.

00:40:45.000 And so, best case scenario...

00:40:46.000 There it is.

00:40:47.000 Oh my god.

00:40:48.000 Yeah.

00:40:49.000 It's crazy how fast it comes on you.

00:40:51.000 Well, okay...

00:40:52.000 And that's slow.

00:40:53.000 I sprayed the bear.

00:40:58.000 But what happened to Todd Orr was he sprayed that bear right in the face.

00:41:03.000 But that bear was running 35 miles an hour when it was 8 feet away from him.

00:41:08.000 And he hit it and the bear still hit him and mauled the heck out of him.

00:41:13.000 And, you know, within five, six seconds, the bear took in the full potion, you know, and left.

00:41:20.000 But Todd had already been banged up incredibly bad in a very short amount of time.

00:41:25.000 So, basically, my conclusion, even though I did spray this bear, was that I still would have got mauled.

00:41:31.000 And I knew it was coming.

00:41:33.000 I knew it happened.

00:41:33.000 So, basically, if you get surprised by a grizzly, you're in trouble, man.

00:41:38.000 Yeah.

00:41:39.000 And as far as caliber, is there a consensus?

00:41:43.000 We discussed that in the video.

00:41:45.000 And there's been a lot.

00:41:47.000 I mean, for sure, a bigger caliber is going to be more effective at stopping a bear.

00:41:52.000 But that is usually not the limiting factor in a bear attack scenario.

00:41:57.000 Because that big, bigger caliber gun, you may only be able to get one shot off accurately, where with a smaller caliber gun, like say a 9mm, you might be able to get off four accurate shots.

00:42:10.000 And so the idea, you know, what we say is that choose the handgun that you shoot the best.

00:42:17.000 Worry less about caliber.

00:42:19.000 Because for a while, guys were carrying.454 Casals, and I'm not saying that's a bad weapon. 0.95

00:42:24.000 You just need to be able to shoot that thing. 0.98

00:42:26.000 Right, the kick. 0.99

00:42:28.000 Yeah, they're tough.

00:42:29.000 I shot a.44 mag on this, a.44 mag revolver.

00:42:35.000 And, I mean, that's a great bear gun to carry.

00:42:37.000 It has tremendous kick.

00:42:39.000 To get six shots off quickly with that, accurately, for Clay Newcomb would be very difficult.

00:42:46.000 But with a 9mm.

00:42:47.000 9mm, pop, [...

00:42:49.000 Right.

00:42:50.000 So, and most likely, if you shoot a bear...

00:42:55.000 You're not necessarily going to kill the bear right that moment.

00:42:59.000 You're just hoping to hit him, stun him enough that you turn him.

00:43:03.000 And you're going for center mass. 0.73

00:43:05.000 Center mass.

00:43:06.000 You're not trying to headshot a bear.

00:43:08.000 Even if you did with a 9mm, it's a good chance it would bounce off the skull, right?

00:43:13.000 If it hit him in the right place, I would say yes.

00:43:16.000 But you could punch one in the right place, depending on the size of the bear.

00:43:21.000 What about a.45?

00:43:22.000 Is that a good middle ground caliber?

00:43:25.000 My firearms expert, Jake, on this video, and I haven't seen the ballistics, and there's so many variables with ballistics and different things, but he said a 9mm actually penetrates better in some situations than a.40 caliber.

00:43:44.000 Why?

00:43:45.000 Let me think about that.

00:43:45.000 Because smaller load?

00:43:46.000 Smaller diameter bullet.

00:43:48.000 So, you know, there's this physics involved between a smaller diameter bullet that has less mass, but, you know, I mean, it's just physics.

00:43:59.000 Moving faster because it weighs less.

00:44:01.000 Yeah, so there are some loopholes there because you think a bigger caliber is always going to be better.

00:44:06.000 And I'm not a caliber expert.

00:44:08.000 No, nor am I. But my conclusion was, if you're going to be in legit brown bear, black, grizzly country, you need to be carrying both. 0.80

00:44:17.000 Because in my mind, there are scenarios where a non-lethal option is very safe and doable.

00:44:25.000 And for people who wouldn't know as well, grizzly bears in the lower 48 are very protected.

00:44:31.000 And if you shoot a grizzly bear, you better have a very good convincing story or you're in big trouble.

00:44:38.000 What is this, Jamie?

00:44:40.000 Oh, is this the guy in Colorado?

00:44:42.000 Yellowstone.

00:44:43.000 They used a non-lethal shotgun round, I believe, on this bear, right?

00:44:49.000 Is this the one where it charges the warden?

00:44:51.000 Correct, yeah.

00:44:51.000 Was it injured before?

00:44:52.000 Is that what he used, Clay?

00:44:53.000 I don't know.

00:44:53.000 I've only seen a clip of it, which is this right here.

00:44:57.000 Oh, because his one leg is up?

00:44:58.000 Yeah.

00:44:58.000 I don't know, maybe.

00:45:00.000 He shoots it with a non-lethal round.

00:45:03.000 Oh, I hadn't even seen that part.

00:45:04.000 Yeah.

00:45:06.000 Yeah, it charges him.

00:45:08.000 This is real recent, like two weeks ago.

00:45:13.000 Look, he's got a pistol on his side, bear spray.

00:45:19.000 Oh, you hear the little kid crying?

00:45:21.000 They're right in the car right there.

00:45:23.000 Kid should cry. 1.00

00:45:24.000 Fucking 2,000 pound monster. 1.00

00:45:27.000 Gigantic monster. 1.00

00:45:28.000 That's a big bear, too. 1.00

00:45:30.000 Roll that back again so we can see how big that fucker is. 1.00

00:45:33.000 I mean, look at that. 0.99

00:45:34.000 Imagine that thing running towards him.

00:45:36.000 It does seem like something's wrong with his left paw.

00:45:38.000 Yeah, he's got it up off the ground, and he's still extremely fast.

00:45:45.000 Yeah, that's got to be a big male.

00:45:47.000 Seems like it.

00:45:48.000 Yeah, that's a big bear.

00:45:49.000 Yeah, he's got a hurt front foot.

00:45:52.000 Well, that's the legend of Bigfoot right there.

00:45:56.000 Bears walking on back feet.

00:45:58.000 I've shown that to people that are big-time Bigfoot believers.

00:46:02.000 I'm like, listen, man.

00:46:03.000 Imagine you're in a densely huge forest like Pacific Northwest, like Mount Rainier or something like that.

00:46:10.000 Incredibly dense forest.

00:46:12.000 You're only glimpsing things We're good to go.

00:46:32.000 Almost bipedal.

00:46:33.000 Yeah, there's a lot of them.

00:46:35.000 They call them pedals.

00:46:36.000 He was missing a front paw and he would walk around everywhere he went on his back feet.

00:46:43.000 For people who haven't seen it, you should Google black bears walking on two feet because it's crazy how often they do it.

00:46:49.000 It is.

00:46:50.000 It looks fake unless you...

00:46:52.000 When I first watched that, I was like, that isn't real.

00:46:56.000 I mean, years ago.

00:46:57.000 And then quickly, you see that it is.

00:46:59.000 That's one of the beautiful things about things like YouTube, is that there's so many videos now.

00:47:03.000 Whereas before, maybe it would be a legend.

00:47:05.000 You'd hear about it.

00:47:06.000 I saw a bear walking on two legs.

00:47:08.000 Like, what?

00:47:09.000 For how long?

00:47:10.000 Oh, across the whole field.

00:47:11.000 Like...

00:47:12.000 I don't know.

00:47:13.000 You wanted to believe people? 1.00

00:47:15.000 Be like, this guy sounds like he's full of shit. 1.00

00:47:17.000 Look at these guys just hanging out, man. 1.00

00:47:21.000 I mean, these two standing up there?

00:47:23.000 That is bananas.

00:47:24.000 Click on the video.

00:47:26.000 Click on any video and we're going to watch them do it because the way they do it is so strange.

00:47:30.000 It literally seems fake.

00:47:34.000 I mean, if you were walking around in the woods and you saw that, you would for sure think that was a Sasquatch.

00:47:41.000 Especially if you were scared and it was dusk, you know, and you hear weird noises.

00:47:46.000 Yeah.

00:47:46.000 And they, you know, they make weird noises.

00:47:50.000 That was an impressive bear call.

00:47:52.000 Pretty good, right?

00:47:53.000 I'm not kidding.

00:47:53.000 Not bad, right?

00:47:54.000 It made me turn my head.

00:47:56.000 That's how they sound, too.

00:47:57.000 They get that weird...

00:47:58.000 Oh, dude, you got a better bear wolf than me.

00:48:03.000 Want to hear my roar?

00:48:04.000 You're right.

00:48:10.000 Impressive.

00:48:11.000 I'm impressed.

00:48:12.000 I've got a lot of free time. 1.00

00:48:13.000 Not really, but I'm an idiot. 0.99

00:48:14.000 So what are the other taboos? 1.00

00:48:17.000 There was one more.

00:48:18.000 There was one more.

00:48:21.000 That a man should stay awake after killing a bear so that the spirit of the bear doesn't catch him sleeping.

00:48:28.000 Whoa.

00:48:29.000 How long are you going to stay awake for?

00:48:30.000 Well, it's like this kind of...

00:48:33.000 They just say, like, basically 24 hours.

00:48:35.000 They attributed a lot of, like...

00:48:38.000 Do you think that the attribution was due to the fact that they had these complete superhuman abilities in terms of, like, their senses, their sense of smell, and...

00:48:47.000 You know, again, the full context of the book, you see that they do this kind of stuff with a lot of animals.

00:48:54.000 Like, they have moose hunting taboos.

00:48:57.000 They have, like, everything has a way that it's done.

00:49:02.000 And that's really what I kind of appreciated about it, is that they pay attention, and that they had just a scripted way that they did things, which I... That ultimately turned to respect towards that animal,

00:49:18.000 you know?

00:49:19.000 But it is a fascinating book, for sure.

00:49:23.000 Yeah.

00:49:23.000 Koyukon people.

00:49:24.000 Well, it's always interesting when you see people that have lived with animals for generation after generation after generation.

00:49:32.000 So they're passing down...

00:49:37.000 Oh, yeah.

00:49:55.000 Yeah, that's a great one.

00:49:57.000 And I really love how your podcast is produced, too.

00:50:00.000 Whoever's editing it and putting music in it, they're doing a great job because it takes you to a different place with the music and the way everything is, the sound is edited into it.

00:50:14.000 It's really clever.

00:50:14.000 Thank you.

00:50:15.000 And it's something I would tell people, like if you're going to start off with one, start off with that one.

00:50:20.000 It's a good one.

00:50:21.000 Because it's representative of, it gives you an understanding of what this is all about without you having an interest in hunting.

00:50:29.000 Like that transcends.

00:50:31.000 Like you don't have to be a bear hunter or any kind of hunter in that regard.

00:50:35.000 Listen to that podcast.

00:50:36.000 It's really interesting and it transports you to think about what it was like for those people that relied on these animals for their food and how Incredibly risky it was.

00:50:46.000 Yeah So that episode was called death of a bear hunter.

00:50:50.000 Yeah, I think it's episode 4 and We learned a lot on that episode.

00:50:56.000 A lot of this has just kind of been an experiment to see how these stories come together.

00:51:01.000 And it's been an incredible journey for me.

00:51:04.000 I've had the time of my life making these podcasts.

00:51:10.000 I read a section of this book.

00:51:14.000 That was published in 1854, written by Frederick Gerstacher.

00:51:18.000 The Germans will say that I'm pronouncing it wrong, and I'm sure I am. 1.00

00:51:23.000 Gerstacher is what they say.

00:51:25.000 And I read like a 10-minute section out of the book.

00:51:29.000 And I remember when I first told...

00:51:32.000 The guy that was working with me on it, he was like, he was kind of like, okay, like, you know, you sure this is going to keep people's attention?

00:51:40.000 And I was like, man, I think it's going to be really good.

00:51:43.000 And man, when I listened to it, you know, I... Record all this stuff and do all the interviews.

00:51:52.000 But, you know, the guys, Phil Taylor at Meat Eater is the one that puts it together.

00:51:56.000 Like, I do basically, you know, 99% of the content editing.

00:52:01.000 So, you know, I'm picking out what's in there.

00:52:03.000 But Phil turns it into what you heard.

00:52:06.000 And man, that episode was the first one where we stitched together like a pretty robust story together.

00:52:13.000 Because it was centered around this guy getting killed by a bear out in the Ozark Mountains, you know, 20 miles from where I live.

00:52:21.000 But the story involved my family.

00:52:23.000 The story involved an old man named Ori Province that I met that helped us locate potentially where the grave was.

00:52:34.000 A quest into human nature of why do stories impact us?

00:52:39.000 And the beauty of that particular podcast, too, and really what I'm trying to do with Bear Grease is...

00:52:46.000 Answer some real essential, genuine questions inside of me.

00:52:50.000 Because I remember where I was standing when I read that story in about 2008. I'm just reading this book.

00:52:57.000 Somebody told me about the book.

00:52:58.000 A college professor had said, hey, there's some old bear hunting, Arkansas bear hunting stories in this book.

00:53:03.000 You ought to read it.

00:53:03.000 I was like, okay.

00:53:06.000 Bought the book.

00:53:07.000 Five years later, I start reading the book.

00:53:09.000 I'm going through the pages.

00:53:11.000 The book is called Wild Sports in the Far West, just to get that out there.

00:53:16.000 The first one-third of the book, he's just traveling through the United States, which is fascinating.

00:53:21.000 But because the center of my world is Arkansas...

00:53:26.000 And this takes place in 1840?

00:53:27.000 Is that what it was?

00:53:28.000 He arrived in the United States in 1837 and left in 1843, Frederick Gerstacher did.

00:53:34.000 And so the first third of the book, he's traveling through the eastern United States and goes up into Canada and finally gets to Arkansas.

00:53:42.000 And I start reading the story, and I read the story of Erskine's death.

00:53:47.000 And I mean, I was offended that no one had ever told me this story before.

00:53:54.000 It was like something incredible happening in your backyard, which I want to hear about your Black Panther. 1.00

00:54:00.000 I don't think it was a Black Panther.

00:54:02.000 I gotta see that.

00:54:03.000 I gotta see it.

00:54:04.000 Okay.

00:54:07.000 This incredible story.

00:54:10.000 And I don't know why I was so impacted by it, but I was.

00:54:14.000 And I went home and I told my family, and I would use that story, and I would tell my little boys when I would put them to bed, I would tell them that story.

00:54:22.000 My daughter, to this day, wears a bear claw necklace around her neck.

00:54:27.000 Like, that story really shaped our family, and for no really good reason.

00:54:31.000 Like, there's not some big moral of the story.

00:54:34.000 So part of the quest inside of...

00:54:38.000 We're good to go.

00:54:51.000 It wasn't that profound except that human nature.

00:54:56.000 We are drawn to stories.

00:54:58.000 Netflix is stories.

00:54:59.000 The Joe Rogan podcast is stories.

00:55:01.000 Humans are magnetized and drawn to and find significance, find identity.

00:55:07.000 They understand culture.

00:55:09.000 They understand value systems.

00:55:11.000 Like, our way to understand the world is through stories.

00:55:17.000 Well, without giving away too much of that story, that story has so many dots connected.

00:55:22.000 Like, first of all, there's a life or death struggle in that one man is seriously injured, the other man is killed.

00:55:27.000 It's also a camaraderie between animals because they're hunting with their hounds and what initiates him to literally go hand to hand with a bowie knife with his bear was that the bear is killing his dogs.

00:55:40.000 So he rushes on the bear and tries to stab it to death and gets mauled and killed.

00:55:45.000 And his friend jumps in and stabs the bear as well and gets his arm ripped out of socket. 0.99

00:55:51.000 It's wild shit because it's got so many things connected together. 0.99

00:55:55.000 And then you've got the dogs that are still remaining alive staying with him. 1.00

00:55:59.000 The dead bear is there.

00:56:00.000 His dead friend is there.

00:56:02.000 And he's trying to start a fire with one arm.

00:56:04.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:56:05.000 And then he uses up all of his powder, shooting shots off into the sky to try to alert the rest of the hunting party as to where he is in the dark while wolves are howling around him.

00:56:15.000 Yeah.

00:56:16.000 I mean, it's an amazing story.

00:56:18.000 I'll never forget even the first time I read that story when he...

00:56:22.000 So he's got a fire going and Erskine's corpse is, you know, 10 feet from him.

00:56:28.000 And he had to lay stones on his eyes so that his eyelids would stay shut.

00:56:34.000 And he said, with much effort, I made his arms lay down flat.

00:56:39.000 Wow.

00:56:40.000 I mean, he called it...

00:56:41.000 He made reference to it was the knight in the tomb.

00:56:46.000 Wow.

00:56:46.000 Because within...

00:56:47.000 I mean, you just described it, but within 10 feet of him was a dead bear, five dead dogs, a dead human...

00:56:55.000 Wow.

00:56:56.000 And him who was knocked unconscious, shoulder knocked out of place, and he stayed the whole night there, the night in the tomb.

00:57:05.000 Wow.

00:57:06.000 Just imagine the courage it takes to rush up on a bear with a bowie knife.

00:57:11.000 You know, that was very common during that time.

00:57:13.000 And I'm not taking anything away from this particular instance, but just for reference.

00:57:17.000 And it makes perfect sense why it was common.

00:57:19.000 Because the way to hunt a bear was with a pack of hounds.

00:57:23.000 And they were carrying one-shot muskets.

00:57:27.000 They didn't have repeating rifles.

00:57:29.000 So what would happen is the dogs would bathe the bear.

00:57:32.000 And some percentage of time inside of bear hunting with hounds, the bear does not run up a tree.

00:57:37.000 Most of the time it runs up a tree.

00:57:39.000 And you're able to take the bear out of a tree.

00:57:42.000 Some percentage of time, the bear stays on the ground.

00:57:45.000 The larger bears tend to stay on the ground?

00:57:46.000 Yep, usually.

00:57:48.000 Because they have a harder time climbing trees, too.

00:57:50.000 I mean, a really big bear is harder to make climb, but you might have a young bear that won't climb either.

00:57:56.000 So the correlation is, yeah, bigger bears typically won't climb, but sometimes younger bears are bad about it, too.

00:58:04.000 So you run up on this scene of bears, you know, dogs being a bear.

00:58:09.000 You shoot one time.

00:58:13.000 The bear's now been shot, but still might have life in him.

00:58:16.000 And so the situation escalates dramatically.

00:58:19.000 You don't have time to reload.

00:58:22.000 So what you do, you pull your bowie knife, which is standard issue for a bear hunter during that time period.

00:58:28.000 And you go in and you finish him.

00:58:30.000 How big is the blade on a bowie knife?

00:58:33.000 12 inches?

00:58:34.000 At least 12 inches.

00:58:36.000 Yeah.

00:58:37.000 Standard issue, man.

00:58:37.000 Like every bear hunter would have had one.

00:58:41.000 Jesus.

00:58:42.000 Yeah.

00:58:43.000 Just a wild way to go at it.

00:58:45.000 Yeah.

00:58:45.000 There's a lot of American art that revolves around that idea.

00:58:49.000 We have a painting in our home.

00:58:51.000 I believe it's William Fitzpatrick.

00:58:55.000 It's called The Life of a Hunter.

00:58:57.000 Could you look that up for us?

00:58:59.000 Life of a Hunter.

00:59:00.000 And there are multiple iterations of incredible art from the 1800s of men on the ground with bowie knives taking bears.

00:59:13.000 Why was the bear thought of as...

00:59:15.000 Oh, there's the image.

00:59:16.000 Okay, there's one of them.

00:59:17.000 Now, that's not the one I have on my wall.

00:59:18.000 I don't like that one as much.

00:59:20.000 Keep looking.

00:59:24.000 That one.

00:59:26.000 Go left.

00:59:27.000 This image right here.

00:59:29.000 That actual image, the real original painting...

00:59:33.000 Is in Bentonville, Arkansas at the Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum.

00:59:39.000 The original of that.

00:59:42.000 There's no dogs in this painting, but this scene is just so common during that time.

00:59:54.000 Okay, that's an illustration that was in the book, Wild Sports in the Far West.

00:59:59.000 So this was just an illustration.

01:00:00.000 Man, I did an illustration.

01:00:02.000 I like to draw, and I've got a pencil drawing that hangs in my office framed of the scene that I drew years ago.

01:00:11.000 Of that scene?

01:00:12.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:13.000 Do you have it online?

01:00:14.000 Is it online?

01:00:15.000 Yeah.

01:00:16.000 Type in, yeah, type in Clay Newcomb Erskine's death.

01:00:21.000 I think you'll find it.

01:00:23.000 How do you spell Erskine?

01:00:24.000 E-R... Oh, basketball coach's name.

01:00:26.000 Oh, really?

01:00:27.000 Really.

01:00:30.000 Yeah, it's...

01:00:33.000 I used it...

01:00:35.000 Well, it's on my Instagram, too.

01:00:37.000 It's up on my Instagram.

01:00:38.000 Yeah, it's for sure on my Instagram, if you can pull that up.

01:00:41.000 I don't know.

01:00:43.000 No, there's a lot of incredible history inside of bear hunting.

01:00:47.000 And what's so interesting is that just the trend of the age is that this would be something that seems to be...

01:00:57.000 This it?

01:00:57.000 You drew that?

01:00:57.000 Nope, nope, nope, nope.

01:00:59.000 Okay, go one back, keep going.

01:01:02.000 That one.

01:01:03.000 Yes, sir.

01:01:05.000 Wow, that's great.

01:01:07.000 Yeah.

01:01:09.000 So, you know, that's Erskine.

01:01:10.000 There's a dog that's been...

01:01:13.000 Yeah.

01:01:16.000 Why do you think they preferred to eat bear over deer?

01:01:21.000 Because deer had to be plentiful back then, right?

01:01:23.000 Right.

01:01:26.000 It was just super lean.

01:01:28.000 Yeah.

01:01:29.000 It was tougher.

01:01:31.000 Bear meat would be much more like beef.

01:01:35.000 Yeah, it was just better.

01:01:36.000 More of it.

01:01:38.000 So there were more of it because it's a larger animal?

01:01:41.000 Larger animal.

01:01:41.000 Yeah.

01:01:42.000 Yeah.

01:01:43.000 It just seems that with the danger involved that they would probably prefer eating deer.

01:01:50.000 I mean, we're showing and talking about these extreme scenarios.

01:01:55.000 You know, Daniel Boone and Early 1800s, maybe late 1700s, you know, was reported he and Rebecca and his son, one of his sons on the Big Sandy River in Kentucky, killed 155 bears in one winter.

01:02:10.000 What?

01:02:10.000 And I don't even think they were using dogs.

01:02:13.000 Like, they were just still hunting these bears.

01:02:15.000 There was that many bears?

01:02:16.000 Oh, yeah.

01:02:17.000 So it wasn't, like, it's not necessary, it's not always, you know, that's actually the trouble with some of hunting's PR, is that If me and you go hunting, we're going to come back and talk about the most exciting thing that happened, the most dangerous thing that happened.

01:02:33.000 Right.

01:02:33.000 And that brands the whole thing, which 98% of the time that doesn't happen, or 99%, or 99.99%.

01:02:43.000 But that's what we talk about.

01:02:45.000 Right.

01:02:45.000 We don't talk about all the times that the bear just ran up a tree and we killed the bear, or we just saw a bear feeding and were able to take it.

01:02:52.000 It never knew we were there.

01:02:53.000 It was a good, clean kill.

01:02:56.000 I think we're seeing the extremes inside of stuff like this, which is not something we necessarily focus on.

01:03:04.000 That's a big issue with perceptions of people who don't hunt, right?

01:03:09.000 Non-hunters' perceptions are a lot of times based on grip and grins.

01:03:12.000 They're a lot of times based on maybe you're flipping through the channels and you get on the outdoor channel and some guy shoots a big buck and they're hooting and hollering and high-fiving each other.

01:03:20.000 And people find it distasteful.

01:03:23.000 They see it, and they don't understand why everyone's so excited and so happy.

01:03:28.000 It's because they don't see how difficult it is to get to that position, how much anxiety is involved in shot placement and squeezing the trigger, making sure you don't flinch.

01:03:39.000 It's hard.

01:03:41.000 Any kind of hunting and taking an animal's life is very difficult.

01:03:44.000 So when you see that That success celebration.

01:03:48.000 People think it's like a celebration of death, of killing.

01:03:52.000 But it's a celebration of success and of overcoming anxiety and nervousness and the fear of failure and the moment itself, which is so enormous.

01:04:03.000 The moment when you're squeezing a trigger or drawing back a bow on an animal.

01:04:08.000 It's a heavy moment.

01:04:09.000 Yeah.

01:04:09.000 And there's so much going on in the mind, so much anxiety that you have to battle.

01:04:16.000 Well, and I think, too, that it's a snippet of time that's taken completely out of context.

01:04:22.000 Yeah.

01:04:26.000 Potentially.

01:04:27.000 And there's all gradients and scale inside of hunters.

01:04:31.000 Some people, it truly is a lifestyle.

01:04:33.000 They've dedicated their life to it.

01:04:34.000 Others do it less time, whatever.

01:04:37.000 But when I see a grip and grin photo, I see a lifestyle.

01:04:42.000 I see somebody that's probably dedicated a big part of their life that's not even connected directly to hunting that has informed their ability to be efficient hunters.

01:04:55.000 That's kind of what the stories that I'm telling, and even in the future, some of the stuff I'm planning in the future, what I'm trying to tell the story of is people who live their lives close to the land and the other things that happen.

01:05:10.000 So you always hear some flavor of hunting in most of my podcasts.

01:05:16.000 Many of them are not about hunting at all.

01:05:19.000 But you'll see a small window, but you'll see this life.

01:05:23.000 For instance, there's a podcast that's coming out soon.

01:05:27.000 And I interview this old guy that really is a legendary hunter.

01:05:31.000 I'm not going to tell you where he's from.

01:05:32.000 I don't want to forecast what the podcast is about.

01:05:34.000 But the whole podcast is about his life.

01:05:39.000 Very little of it's about hunting.

01:05:41.000 But it puts it in context.

01:05:43.000 And it goes, no, that's not just a...

01:05:46.000 Oh, hillbilly out shooting stuff.

01:05:48.000 This guy has dedicated his life to this.

01:05:51.000 This is a very thoughtful process.

01:05:54.000 This guy, not just his life, his dad's life, and his dad's life before him, was dedicated.

01:06:00.000 I mean, these guys made a decision.

01:06:01.000 This is going to be a big part of our life, boys.

01:06:03.000 We're going to be hunters.

01:06:06.000 And it affected their careers.

01:06:08.000 It affected their families.

01:06:10.000 It affected how many kids they had.

01:06:11.000 I mean, you know, just like the implications of choosing a lifestyle is so big.

01:06:16.000 And that's what I think is so profound about hunting.

01:06:18.000 And that's what I'm interested in.

01:06:20.000 Because I love to hunt.

01:06:22.000 Like, I cannot erase that for me.

01:06:24.000 Like, I do love to hunt.

01:06:26.000 But I am very interested in how hunting has actually affected my life, how it impacts the character of my children, how it impacts the sanctity of my marriage.

01:06:41.000 I mean, I'm kind of going out there, but I'm being serious.

01:06:45.000 I think that what we choose to dedicate our life to has the opportunity to make us better and impact our character and It's just a big story, man.

01:06:54.000 It's a big story, and a grip and grin doesn't tell that story.

01:06:57.000 But it's so hard, because it's hard to tell me, Clay, don't post a picture of yourself with a dead deer and you smiling.

01:07:05.000 And it's like, bro, you want me to accommodate my entire life for you?

01:07:11.000 I will do that.

01:07:13.000 I spend much of my life doing that, trying to interpret for people hunting.

01:07:19.000 But we're kind of asking for some empathy, too, from the other side.

01:07:25.000 And we've got to do a better job of telling our story.

01:07:28.000 Yeah, I think there's that.

01:07:29.000 And there's also that we're connected to what you would call, what the general population would call trophy hunters.

01:07:36.000 And therein lies the rub with bears.

01:07:39.000 Is that many people don't understand that bears are food and that it's not just food, it's actually a delicious food and from a conservation standpoint it's actually important to control the population.

01:07:51.000 But when you see someone posing with an animal, unfortunately it will go to like elephants or giraffes or some unpleasant animal, a lion, where you see someone posing with a lion and then you think about some Canned hunt in Africa where some obese man is standing there with a with a rifle over this majestic animal and it's very distasteful and it infuriates people and rightly so because the image they're getting out of that is some

01:08:21.000 cruel Sociopath who's just trying to check off boxes.

01:08:25.000 Have you ever seen Louis Theroux's piece that he did on hunting camps in Africa?

01:08:32.000 I have not.

01:08:33.000 It's really good.

01:08:35.000 It's really good. 0.98

01:08:36.000 And he goes to South Africa, and one of the best parts about it is he bothers the shit out of the people that run this camp. 0.90

01:08:42.000 He's there forever. 0.98

01:08:44.000 Until they just start talking frankly in front of him.

01:08:47.000 And he gets all these people who come over there, and they're talking about how much money they're paying.

01:08:52.000 I want to pay this much to get a hippo, and then I want to pay that much.

01:08:56.000 And you see these folks, and you see this sort of casual attitude they have about going over there, It's almost like going to Disneyland saying, okay, I'm at Disneyland, I want to ride the Incredibles ride, and then I want to go over here, and I want to do this thing.

01:09:13.000 It's the same sort of way of describing it, and missing is all of the stuff that I get out of your podcast.

01:09:22.000 All the stuff of the long, deep history of this and the traditions.

01:09:27.000 And then, you know, one of the best things about Meat Eater is not just that it's like, like Steve is an incredible narrator and the way he writes those pieces is amazing because it gives you this insight into his mind that is this deeply intelligent,

01:09:43.000 very well-read man who also loves hunting, but also the cooking.

01:09:48.000 He's always cooking wild game on the show, and you get it.

01:09:51.000 You get it when you see them cooking over a campfire and eating this food, and it's fantastic.

01:09:56.000 They're on the mountain, camped out.

01:09:58.000 It's very attractive.

01:10:00.000 It's so much better than a grip and grin.

01:10:03.000 If a grip and grin is the worst way to get people introduced into hunting, Meat Eater, the television show, is the best way.

01:10:12.000 Have you ever heard the...

01:10:16.000 Has anybody ever walked you through like the philosophy of the term trophy hunting and how it kind of came into?

01:10:23.000 No, no.

01:10:23.000 So here's the short version, Joe, is that I'll start out with a controversial statement and I'll qualify it.

01:10:31.000 Okay.

01:10:32.000 Trophy hunting is what saved North American wildlife.

01:10:35.000 Trophy hunting.

01:10:37.000 Imagine a market hunting culture where there was no ethic of, like it was literally the Wild West.

01:10:46.000 Let's explain that to people, how that all took place too, because most people don't understand.

01:10:50.000 So market hunting, like essentially when...

01:10:53.000 Europeans arrived here.

01:10:55.000 They arrived into a wildlife bonanza like the earth has not seen since of all the big game animals that we have now.

01:11:06.000 And they began to hunt these animals for market, for profit.

01:11:11.000 Okay.

01:11:12.000 So, you know, the hides of animals were valued.

01:11:15.000 The meat of animals were valued.

01:11:17.000 A bear fat was a commodity that could be traded as money.

01:11:21.000 And so there was much incentive, like Daniel Boone, a lot of these guys, I mean, they made a good living as market hunters.

01:11:28.000 And when I say good living, I mean, they weren't getting rich, but fur traders could get rich.

01:11:33.000 And so market hunting was a career.

01:11:36.000 I'm a market hunter.

01:11:38.000 That happened from in 150 years, essentially, from 1750 to the turn of the century, 1900. Basically, it was one of the greatest scale demolitions of wildlife that planet Earth has ever seen.

01:11:57.000 And...

01:11:57.000 And how long did this go on for?

01:11:59.000 How many years?

01:11:59.000 Well, you know, I mean, Boone was born in 1734, and he died in 1820, and that was kind of the...

01:12:06.000 So let's just say from the late 1700s till the late 1800s, so roughly 150 years.

01:12:14.000 And during that time, there was also no refrigeration, so if you did shoot an animal, it was really only good for a certain amount of time.

01:12:22.000 That's right.

01:12:23.000 And they had to sell it quickly.

01:12:24.000 Yeah, but it was common.

01:12:26.000 If you ate meat in St. Louis, Missouri in 1820, you were probably eating some kind of wild game.

01:12:34.000 That was marketed.

01:12:38.000 That was the mentality.

01:12:40.000 If it's brown, it's down. 1.00

01:12:42.000 Kill anything. 0.98

01:12:43.000 There was no ethic involved in it in terms of conservation.

01:12:47.000 That wasn't on people's minds.

01:12:48.000 It wasn't invented yet.

01:12:51.000 And in the late 1800s, Teddy Roosevelt and a group of guys that would later form the Boone and Crockett Club, they foresaw the end of North American big game.

01:13:01.000 They said, the big game of North America will be extinct in the next decade, like gone forever, such that they went out to collect specimens to put in a museum in New York so that future Americans would know what a buffalo looked like.

01:13:20.000 Because it was going to be gone.

01:13:21.000 So Americans would know what a mule deer looked like.

01:13:25.000 And so they...

01:13:27.000 Basically, these great thinkers of which Teddy Roosevelt and a bunch of them, there were many other men, but Roosevelt was the big one.

01:13:34.000 They were like, we got to change things or this thing's going to die.

01:13:38.000 And they created the Boone and Crockett Club, which essentially gave credit, gave cultural value through a numerical number.

01:13:49.000 A score of an animal.

01:13:51.000 And so for people that don't hunt, today you might hear a hunter say, man, I killed a 150-inch buck.

01:13:57.000 And that means nothing to you.

01:13:58.000 That's just a number.

01:13:59.000 But to us, that means a lot.

01:14:01.000 Because, oh, wow, 150-inch buck.

01:14:03.000 Like, we know the way that they're measured.

01:14:05.000 And we know that, man, that's a big buck.

01:14:08.000 And you're measuring the antlers.

01:14:09.000 Measuring the antlers of a bear.

01:14:10.000 You measure his skull.

01:14:13.000 Or the length of the body.

01:14:14.000 Well, for Boone and Crockett, it's just the skull, just for measurement.

01:14:19.000 The Boone and Crockett guys essentially came up with an ingenious plan that we are going to give cultural value to older age males so that people will be incentivized to take older age males and let the juveniles and females go.

01:14:37.000 And basically, over the course of about 50 years, they changed the entire hunting culture of North America.

01:14:44.000 They picked us up from a market hunting.

01:14:47.000 It's brown, it's down.

01:14:48.000 There was not much value put on big animals.

01:14:52.000 You can go back to some of the Native American cultures and see that they put some value on bighorns, but very little.

01:15:02.000 And I'm not an expert on that.

01:15:04.000 But essentially, this idea that we're now obsessed with big antlers comes from...

01:15:10.000 The idea that we want to save North American wildlife, and in a conservation perspective, the best animal to take out of a herd is an older, mature male, because he has contributed to the gene pool, and it is not a loss to remove him.

01:15:26.000 And so, basically, they had this incredible idea that worked, and so that's what hurts me a little bit.

01:15:32.000 Like, when you say trophy hunting, I'm like, no!

01:15:34.000 I mean, what you are describing, I am against.

01:15:39.000 The semantics of it, though, actually, if you deep dive, and that's where you cannot understand these things if you just gloss over the surface, and that's the problem with so many parts of our world, is people look at a clip off YouTube and go, okay, I understand the whole thing.

01:15:55.000 Man, you don't.

01:15:56.000 That's a part of Louis Theroux's documentary as well, where it explains that a lot of these animals in Africa were on the verge of extinction, and now they're in abundance, but they live in these high-fence hunting ranches.

01:16:08.000 And it's sort of a weird, bittersweet victory, because the numbers are huge.

01:16:15.000 They're higher than they've ever been before, because there's value associated with them, because people are willing to pay to kill them.

01:16:21.000 I realize that's a tough pill for some people to swallow.

01:16:26.000 To me, many, many, many animals have not been shot by me and my family because of the influence.

01:16:36.000 Of us wanting to take a bigger male.

01:16:39.000 And there's no shame in that.

01:16:41.000 It's honorable.

01:16:42.000 And it's not honorable because, wow, look at the animal you killed.

01:16:46.000 You must be a big stud man.

01:16:50.000 That's not it.

01:16:51.000 We're players in this big game that we understand.

01:16:56.000 You could take any one of my kids and put them in this chair and they could tell you the exact same thing that I just told you.

01:17:01.000 I mean, they understand what we're doing.

01:17:03.000 They understand that, yeah, when we pass up a young buck to shoot an old one, we will celebrate the heck out of those horns.

01:17:11.000 But we also know that we are celebrating the heck out of that we took an animal out that's the right one to take out, the hardest one to take out.

01:17:19.000 And so to throw...

01:17:23.000 And trophy, that word, came from that time period.

01:17:27.000 So anyway, to me that's fascinating.

01:17:29.000 It is fascinating.

01:17:30.000 Trophy hunting is what saved North American wildlife.

01:17:32.000 And now we have this incredible ethic inside of everywhere.

01:17:36.000 Like when you go elk hunting, you want to kill a big one. 0.98

01:17:38.000 When I go bear hunting, I want to kill an older age male. 0.99

01:17:41.000 And that's a good thing. 0.99

01:17:43.000 It's a very good thing.

01:17:44.000 It's hard to understand.

01:17:45.000 It's not understood in a headline.

01:17:48.000 Right.

01:17:49.000 It's a complex issue.

01:17:50.000 And it's an issue if you do go back to the whole market hunting thing and people get an understanding of what was happening in North America in the 19th century, they'll get a better appreciation of what was done.

01:18:04.000 Because with market hunting, having animals on the verge of extinction and then reintroducing them in places like Kentucky where they now have seasons again, Or places like Pennsylvania.

01:18:17.000 There's a lot of parts of this country where some, like elk, they're gone still from most of their range, right?

01:18:24.000 Where an animal has cultural value, it will be protected and preserved.

01:18:28.000 Where that animal has no cultural value, no incentive for the common man to preserve that animal, he will not be protected.

01:18:36.000 I think it's hard for people to swallow the fact that it takes a lot of money to protect these animals as well.

01:18:43.000 And one of the best ways to get that money is through the taxes that are taken from hunting tags and ammunition and gear.

01:18:53.000 And the Pittman-Robertson Act that has been set up to set aside, was it 10%?

01:18:59.000 It varies, yeah, 10 to 11 percent, something like that.

01:19:02.000 So through that, they've generated literally billions of dollars in conservation.

01:19:08.000 And as far as I know, I don't think there's anything even close in terms of the amount of resources that have been gathered for conservation.

01:19:15.000 Hunting has gathered up more money for conservation than anything else.

01:19:20.000 Absolutely.

01:19:21.000 I mean, when you see a big bear, when you see a hunter with a bear, with a deer, I mean, really, what you should see through that lens is see protected habitat.

01:19:32.000 I mean, because essentially, to have healthy populations of animals, we've got to have habitat.

01:19:37.000 And that is the biggest threat to North American wildlife right now, is just fragment...

01:19:42.000 Fragmentation of wilderness, urban sprawl, decimation of habitat.

01:19:47.000 I mean, you know, the stats are easily accessible of, you know, how much of the planet is becoming concrete every single second.

01:19:55.000 And, man, when you lock in these hunting grounds, I think it's awesome that we still, like, wars for the last...

01:20:06.000 10,000 years have been fought over hunting grounds.

01:20:10.000 And today we still kind of do the same thing.

01:20:13.000 I mean, not wars, but like we set aside areas that this is a place to hunt.

01:20:18.000 And those areas, public land anyway, are accessible to other people other than hunters.

01:20:24.000 But hunters are the ones that are primarily funding most of the public land.

01:20:34.000 It's ingenious.

01:20:35.000 Ingenious to the point it's almost hard to believe.

01:20:37.000 Yeah.

01:20:38.000 It's got to be a giant shocker too when you run those numbers by non-hunters or people that are opposed to hunting and that people who are believers in wildlife conservation but they don't really understand the amount of resources that are involved in maintaining that stuff,

01:20:54.000 protecting wetlands, Protecting, you know, making sure that public lands don't get bought up.

01:21:00.000 That's an issue too, right?

01:21:02.000 Some states, they're trying to sell off public lands and people have to act and it gets heated.

01:21:08.000 It gets really crazy because it's a slippery slope.

01:21:11.000 We have a really unique situation here too, right?

01:21:14.000 Yeah, I mean, North America has a hunting culture that's different than anywhere in the world.

01:21:22.000 And what's so cool about it, too, and Joe, you may know this kind of stuff, but, you know, the European model of hunting essentially boiled down to that people with money, wealthy people, elites, kings, aristocrats were the ones that hunted and controlled land and controlled wildlife.

01:21:40.000 Yeah.

01:21:42.000 The reason Gerstacher left Germany in 1837 was to come to this wild, wild place and hunt.

01:21:49.000 And those guys got here and they were like, you mean we can just go hunt?

01:21:54.000 I've got a friend that, I tell the story sometimes, I've got a friend that lives in Wales.

01:21:59.000 And she watches our bear hunting stuff sometimes.

01:22:03.000 And she says every time...

01:22:05.000 And she likes it, presumably.

01:22:08.000 She says every time she has seen me shoot a bear, she gasps because she says, he just shot the king's bear.

01:22:17.000 Wow.

01:22:17.000 That's the question.

01:22:19.000 Like, it's not...

01:22:21.000 It's just the impulse of her is like, oh my gosh, Clay's going to be in big trouble.

01:22:26.000 So it's like a cultural thing.

01:22:27.000 It's embedded.

01:22:28.000 Yeah, the wildlife is not for the people.

01:22:31.000 Roosevelt, man, this is so ingenious.

01:22:34.000 Roosevelt came over here and said, tell you what...

01:22:36.000 We're going to make wildlife accessible to all the people.

01:22:41.000 We're going to make public land accessible to everyone.

01:22:44.000 And everybody would have been like, wait a minute, you sure this is going to work very good?

01:22:48.000 Like, if we want to have more wildlife, don't we need to protect wildlife?

01:22:52.000 And they were like, no, we need to incentivize the average guy that he has a right and a place and an ability to go out on land and kill game for his family.

01:23:03.000 And then you give incentive to everybody to protect, to value, to conserve, to contribute, and it's worked better than anything on the planet.

01:23:13.000 Ever.

01:23:15.000 What people don't know, perhaps, is that most in European countries, Most of the land where people are hunting is privately owned.

01:23:25.000 And it used to be owned by the royals, which is why she's thinking, oh my god, he shot the king's bear.

01:23:32.000 And that's what Robin Hood was all about.

01:23:35.000 The original Robin Hood, the reason why Robin Hood was an archer, Robin Hood was a hunter.

01:23:40.000 And he was hunting for animals on the royal land and giving the meat to the villagers who were starving to death.

01:23:48.000 And he was taking from the rich and giving to the poor.

01:23:52.000 Later on, it became money.

01:23:54.000 Oh, I didn't know that.

01:23:56.000 So originally it was meat.

01:23:57.000 Yeah.

01:23:58.000 Originally Robin Hood was about hunting.

01:24:00.000 Hollywood stole another bow hunting story from us.

01:24:04.000 Well, it's like what they've done with hunting is really kind of crazy. 0.99

01:24:09.000 What Hollywood has done with Bambi and with movies where there's always these drunken assholes that are out there killing animals. 0.99

01:24:18.000 And so like a horror movie, when they get there, it's always great. 0.85

01:24:21.000 You ever see the movie Wolverine?

01:24:24.000 Probably.

01:24:25.000 One of the movies, one of the Wolverine movies, I think it's Wolverine, is Hugh Jackman stumbles upon some bear hunters.

01:24:32.000 Oh, this is one of the new superheroes.

01:24:32.000 No, I have not seen that.

01:24:34.000 Well, they're asshole bear hunters and he has to fuck these guys up because he's mad that they shot a bear. 1.00

01:24:39.000 Like, he defends the bear. 1.00

01:24:41.000 I haven't heard about that.

01:24:41.000 Yeah, but it's that thing where the bear hunters...

01:24:45.000 The hunters in films are rarely represented as noble people with a deep appreciation for wildlife and sustainability and the fact that this is going to feed and provide nourishment to their family and to friends.

01:25:02.000 It's never thought about that way.

01:25:03.000 It's thought about like Bambi. 0.96

01:25:04.000 You killed Bambi. 1.00

01:25:05.000 It's an easy story. 0.87

01:25:08.000 It's a one-step story to tell someone that does not know or has any context into the rural world that these hillbillies killing stuff are bad.

01:25:19.000 It's a multi-step story to understand it.

01:25:24.000 If you want to go from zero to an understanding, you've got to walk through all the things we've just described, and you can't put that on a billboard.

01:25:36.000 You can put on a billboard, This is bad.

01:25:40.000 Don't kill Bambi. 0.99

01:25:41.000 Right.

01:25:42.000 It's so classic, clickbait human nature to be like, yeah, that is bad.

01:25:48.000 In modern culture, everyone has this agenda of something with a bandwagon they want to get on.

01:25:55.000 It hurts me, man.

01:25:56.000 For real.

01:25:57.000 Joe, I stay up at night Thinking about this stuff.

01:26:01.000 I mean, and to me it's an issue of representation of my people.

01:26:04.000 I mean, I take it really personally.

01:26:06.000 I really do.

01:26:07.000 I mean, just like, we are not the bad guys.

01:26:11.000 We are the good guys.

01:26:13.000 Why can't we tell that story?

01:26:15.000 And part of the problem is the people who think of hunters as the bad guys Are involved in factory farming in the extent that they buy factory farmed meat.

01:26:27.000 So they're involved in this weird imprisonment thing where everything is done in the shadows behind closed doors and through the protection of ag-gag law. 0.70

01:26:35.000 So these agricultural gag laws won't allow people that work in these factory farm situations to take photographs and videos because it would unfavorably hurt the business.

01:26:46.000 So they've made it so that it's illegal to film atrocities.

01:26:50.000 Where people would be disgusted.

01:26:51.000 They're like, this is what it takes to get my bacon?

01:26:53.000 Well, I don't want bacon anymore, man.

01:26:55.000 So they're worried that that would hurt the business, so they've made it illegal.

01:26:58.000 So people have been locked up and gone to jail for taking video of things that most of us would think are crimes against nature.

01:27:07.000 Those people who buy that stuff will hate hunters, which is really kind of crazy.

01:27:14.000 We have the card stacked against us, too, for two things.

01:27:17.000 Number one...

01:27:19.000 A smaller number of people are hunters.

01:27:22.000 Number two, finances.

01:27:27.000 What we do as hunters is done in private, and it is not a massive financial contribution to society.

01:27:34.000 I'm not discounting the $100 that we talked about, but just think about the agricultural industry, the meat industry.

01:27:41.000 Massive amount of money coming into that.

01:27:44.000 I mean, they control the levers on the marketing of that thing.

01:27:48.000 We're just these guys that are doing what humans were designed to do from the beginning of time.

01:27:55.000 And we are easily marketed against because, I mean, we don't have the...

01:28:01.000 I mean, you know, there's not some organization that manages all of hunting's PR. It has a bank...

01:28:07.000 I mean, the point is that we, by the very nature of what we do, are a smaller group of people...

01:28:15.000 That are not a super financially empowered group of people.

01:28:18.000 There's no incentive for some big meat company to make hunters look good.

01:28:23.000 Also, it has the opposite effect that virtue signaling does.

01:28:27.000 You have to defend yourself.

01:28:30.000 There's a lot of people that love to talk about how they're vegan.

01:28:33.000 And one of the things about saying that you're vegan, you're letting people know that you're a very moral and ethical person who cares about life and you don't want anything to be harmed.

01:28:46.000 So you do no harm and you just eat vegetables.

01:28:49.000 And so by saying that, you get a free ride with a lot of people.

01:28:53.000 There's very few people that are going to question, okay, do you understand monocrop agriculture?

01:28:57.000 Do you understand what's involved?

01:28:59.000 If you're going to plant corn, how many gophers you have to kill?

01:29:03.000 Do you have any idea how much pesticide you have to use to kill off the bugs?

01:29:07.000 Do you have any idea what a damaging effect monocrop agriculture... 0.94

01:29:10.000 When you see hundreds of acres of soybeans, you know how fucking bad that is? 0.96

01:29:14.000 Yeah. 0.95

01:29:14.000 It's so bad for the environment. 0.95

01:29:16.000 There's no question whatsoever, you've displaced a shitload of wildlife.

01:29:21.000 If you're using combines to gather up that stuff, you're going to grind up a lot of rodents and rabbits and maybe deer fawns.

01:29:29.000 And all the wildlife habitat, pretty much anywhere in the eastern deciduous forest that is row crop agriculture was at one time a climax forest of some type.

01:29:41.000 Yeah, life eats life.

01:29:42.000 And as weird as that sounds, there's not really a lot of moral high ground to eating vegetables as opposed to eating a large game animal.

01:29:50.000 Shane Mahoney is a very well-known conservationist and author and speaker.

01:29:58.000 He's up in Newfoundland, and I heard him say a statistic one time, and I don't have the actual numbers, but essentially if everyone in the United States decided that they were going to be vegan...

01:30:10.000 We would have to turn the entire United States and Canada into, we'd have to clear the land and have it be row crop agriculture and able to fuel a 350 million person vegan operation.

01:30:28.000 His point in the numbers there, it's been so long, but his point was there's a massive imprint on this place, even from something that sounds so non-massive about being vegan.

01:30:46.000 Yeah, and what are you going to do with all the cows?

01:30:49.000 What are you going to do with all the chickens?

01:30:51.000 Are you going to give them birth control?

01:30:52.000 Are you going to sterilize them?

01:30:53.000 How are you going to keep healthy populations alive?

01:30:56.000 Do you have that worked out?

01:30:57.000 Are you going to decide some bulls can breed with cows and then some can't?

01:31:02.000 Are you going to play God?

01:31:05.000 Are you going to hunt them if there's too many of them?

01:31:07.000 And if you do, what are you going to do?

01:31:08.000 Are you going to feed them to mountain lions?

01:31:10.000 What are you going to do with all the food?

01:31:13.000 You're in a weird situation.

01:31:15.000 Have you ever read Dan Flores' book, Bison Diplomacy, Bison Ecology, Bison Diplomacy?

01:31:23.000 American Serengeti?

01:31:23.000 Didn't he write that?

01:31:25.000 He also wrote Coyote America, which is amazing.

01:31:30.000 He's written quite a few great things, but one of the things that he pointed to, and it's really an interesting theory, that when you go back to the original North American settlers, they did not talk about massive herds of buffalo.

01:31:49.000 And he thinks that the Native Americans, with their hunting strategies that they had already had in play, Once they got ahold of the horse, and once they were riding horses, which really didn't happen until the European settlement, it's a crazy sort of convoluted thing,

01:32:05.000 because horses originated in North America, but then they went extinct, but they had already traveled to other parts of the world.

01:32:13.000 So, like, Asian horses and all the horses the Mongols used originated In North America.

01:32:20.000 Right.

01:32:21.000 So they're in our fossil record.

01:32:50.000 But the diseases killed most.

01:32:54.000 So in killing 90% of these Native American tribes, what it did was completely alleviate all the hunting pressure. 0.82

01:33:03.000 So all these buffalo, the populations went crazy.

01:33:07.000 So when you see these millions of buffalo on these fields, that was wholly unnatural.

01:33:12.000 And his position was that was a direct indication that the hunters had died off.

01:33:19.000 It's hard for us to imagine a disease that wiped out 90% of all the people here.

01:33:27.000 But that is what happened.

01:33:30.000 And so when a lot of what Lewis and Clark would have seen in the early exploration of the West...

01:33:36.000 Was not natural for the last 10,000 years.

01:33:39.000 That's what you're saying.

01:33:40.000 Have you heard of Cavesa de Vaca?

01:33:43.000 Yeah, I just read...

01:33:44.000 Did you read it?

01:33:45.000 What is it?

01:33:46.000 A Place So Strange?

01:33:47.000 Is that it?

01:33:47.000 A Land So Strange?

01:33:48.000 A Land So Strange.

01:33:49.000 My friend Hank turned me on to it.

01:33:51.000 Okay.

01:33:52.000 Amazing.

01:33:53.000 Bizarre book.

01:33:54.000 It's been a while since I've read it, but I think that was the first documented European...

01:34:01.000 Traveled into the interior of the United States.

01:34:03.000 The guy landed in Florida, I want to say, and traveled up to the southern U.S. into parts of Texas.

01:34:09.000 Yeah.

01:34:10.000 400 guys, they got down to two.

01:34:13.000 Bizarre.

01:34:13.000 Wild.

01:34:15.000 Bizarre.

01:34:15.000 You know?

01:34:16.000 I mean, I think maybe two or four.

01:34:17.000 How many people survived at the end?

01:34:19.000 Maybe it's four.

01:34:20.000 But either way, from 400 guys...

01:34:23.000 Yeah.

01:34:26.000 Yeah, it's a bizarre history that we have.

01:34:29.000 Yeah, super bizarre.

01:34:30.000 When you think about how long people have been around, and one of the ways that I always describe it, and you have a similar way of talking about it in that bear hunting episode, is that, or was it the deer episode?

01:34:43.000 I listened to a couple of them.

01:34:44.000 But anyway, the point is that if the United States was founded in 1776 and people lived to be 100, that's three people ago.

01:34:51.000 That's not that long.

01:34:53.000 If you go back three people, you're looking at a completely different place, which is nowhere on earth like that.

01:35:00.000 Other than, obviously, the introduction of machines and engines and the industrial age, which changed the whole world.

01:35:12.000 Just the sheer fact that this was populated by nomadic tribes who are subsistence hunting, and then all of a sudden, within three generations, it's completely unrecognizable.

01:35:24.000 The population of the animals is completely changed.

01:35:27.000 Some of them have been extirpated out of their land forever, and then there's just this new group of humans from another continent that overwhelm the place. 1.00

01:35:36.000 Yeah.

01:35:37.000 It's nuts.

01:35:39.000 It is interesting, the human perspective of time.

01:35:45.000 And what you're referring to is when I was talking to my buddy, my hero, James Lawrence.

01:35:52.000 He's 72 or something, and he was heavily influenced by his grandmother, who...

01:35:58.000 I want to say we calculated that she would have been born in the 1800s, and she would have had grandparents just like James that would have been primitive humans.

01:36:14.000 And we feel like that was so long ago, but, you know, and I'm using James as an example from that one, but I mean, it's in all of us, but like, James is like, he, much of the way that he views the world would be from the direct influence of these people.

01:36:32.000 It's just an interesting thought.

01:36:34.000 Especially people who live close to the land, who live in the same places that they always have.

01:36:40.000 They're like an artifact.

01:36:41.000 And I'm fascinated by them.

01:36:45.000 Yeah, they carry with them the echoes of people who literally came on boats without a photograph to look at.

01:36:51.000 Yeah.

01:36:51.000 They had no idea what they were getting into.

01:36:53.000 Someone could have drawn...

01:36:55.000 This is what I saw in America.

01:36:57.000 You draw it down.

01:36:58.000 Like, okay, let me take the baby.

01:36:59.000 We're going to get in a boat and take a couple months and get across the country or get across the ocean.

01:37:05.000 I mean, how long did it take to get across the ocean back then? 0.97

01:37:09.000 It had to be a long fucking time. 0.97

01:37:11.000 At least a month, maybe three. 0.99

01:37:14.000 And they just took these chances.

01:37:16.000 I mean, what kind of wild ass people were the kind of people that were willing to take their family and jump on a boat and hope to live?

01:37:24.000 Because you knew not everybody on that boat was going to make it.

01:37:27.000 Yeah.

01:37:28.000 I mean, that was the reality of the age.

01:37:32.000 It's just, it's incredible.

01:37:34.000 It's incredible how far we've come in terms of, air quotes, progress.

01:37:40.000 Because it is progress.

01:37:41.000 But it's really what it is, is like technological innovation and the invasiveness of this technology and how it's permeated all aspects of life and all aspects of civilization.

01:38:07.000 I've heard you talk about this kind of stuff.

01:38:09.000 It's a common thought process for people to have in this time.

01:38:14.000 The way that we have lived, even just for the last 50 years, is a bizarre human experience that has never, ever, ever, ever, ever been seen before.

01:38:26.000 Information and technology.

01:38:29.000 Just, I mean, us sitting here, us knowing each other.

01:38:32.000 I mean, like...

01:38:34.000 In the 1800s, we would have known each other, because you would have lived in Austin, and I would have lived in Northwest Arkansas, and that would have been an 18-day wagon ride, or longer than that.

01:38:43.000 I mean, this is a bizarre human experience that we're having right now, and that's why, like, if we talk about people changing the rules, and we have this bizarre understanding of time, like, we just show up on this planet, and then we feel like we...

01:39:01.000 We have answers.

01:39:02.000 And that's why I'm so concerned with people, specifically with hunting, hunting bears.

01:39:07.000 It's like we have this one little sliver of time and we decide that we want to change the rules that have governed us for the last 10,000 years.

01:39:16.000 And it's like, wait a minute.

01:39:18.000 You just came on the scene like 50 years ago.

01:39:22.000 How old are you?

01:39:23.000 And it's not really fair.

01:39:26.000 I mean, it's like...

01:39:28.000 And the disconnection of humans from natural places and just a general understanding of the biology of a human and what we have to eat and how we have to live and the natural landscape...

01:39:42.000 It's so disconnected.

01:39:43.000 We're kind of in like a dangerous place for people that want to see wild places continue.

01:39:48.000 And I was talking to Keith Urbane, the guy that's with me here.

01:39:55.000 He said something last night that put a bunch of pieces together for me, just in probably a three-minute conversation.

01:40:02.000 But he talked about, he had been reading a book about how the American identity for 200 years essentially was...

01:40:10.000 Interface with wilderness.

01:40:12.000 And clearly there's a lot of very negative things.

01:40:15.000 Genocide, conquest of the West.

01:40:18.000 We're looking back on that now and trying to understand it and the impacts of it.

01:40:22.000 But the American identity for so long was our engagement with wild places.

01:40:30.000 And then all of a sudden...

01:40:33.000 We're done.

01:40:35.000 And how that like, we're now we seem to be in this time of trying to understand what is our identity.

01:40:42.000 And for so long, we had this identity that was deeply connected.

01:40:45.000 I mean, you know, you look across the nations of the earth and The American identity is pretty tied into, or has been, has tied into wild places and hunting and frontiersmen.

01:41:00.000 Some of our most famous people were Daniel Boone and some of these guys.

01:41:05.000 And anyway, we're in a weird place.

01:41:07.000 And then what we're trying to say is, hey, just because we don't...

01:41:11.000 There's a revitalization of American identity that should be modernized to fit...

01:41:19.000 Our world now.

01:41:20.000 And not to say that everybody should be hunters because they shouldn't.

01:41:23.000 And not to say that being a hunter is some magical thing that's going to make you a better person.

01:41:27.000 That's not what I'm saying.

01:41:28.000 But there should be a space for us.

01:41:30.000 I agree and I think it's a lack of understanding and that lack of understanding is there's a lot of factors.

01:41:37.000 This is what we talked about before with the media perceptions or depictions of hunters have been very distorted.

01:41:44.000 It's very very rare that you see a noble hunter who really truly respects the animal that they shot and killed and Takes time with the preparation and really values each piece of that meat.

01:41:56.000 You don't see that in films and in television shows.

01:42:00.000 You see the negative, because they're just trying, they have 90 minutes to get a story out there, right?

01:42:05.000 And the stories, you know, they're trying to have good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys wear black, and it's real simple.

01:42:10.000 It's easy to...

01:42:11.000 Hunters are a great, rude person. 1.00

01:42:14.000 If you've got a guy who's really in tune with animals, what do you do? 1.00

01:42:17.000 You have a drunk asshole hunter and you insert him into your story. 0.99

01:42:23.000 It's a tired trope, right? 1.00

01:42:25.000 But there hasn't been a lot of defense of that on the side of hunters.

01:42:33.000 Hunters defending themselves or depicting themselves in a positive light. 0.99

01:42:37.000 Because I think up until now...

01:42:39.000 There really haven't been the resources available.

01:42:42.000 The wildlife shows, or the outdoor shows, the hunting shows that are on television, are really just preaching the converted.

01:42:49.000 A lot of them have kill shots over and over and over again, and people hooting and hollering, and it's for the converted. 0.94

01:42:59.000 And oftentimes, and there's some of them, we don't have to name names, some of them are hugely distasteful, even to actual hunters.

01:43:07.000 You bring up some people that are professional hunters on television, amongst actual conservationists and actual hunters, they get angry.

01:43:16.000 They get angry about that person. 1.00

01:43:17.000 Like, that motherfucker's setting us back so hard, with all the hooting and hollering, and all the stupid way of talking about these animals. 0.99

01:43:26.000 But with podcasts and with shows like Meat Eater, I think things are changing in a lot of people's perceptions. 0.99

01:43:36.000 I've had multiple conversations with people where they said, I have never even thought about hunting until I listened to A hunter on your podcast describe what it means to them.

01:43:47.000 And then I started watching some videos, then I watched Meat Eater, or then I read a book.

01:43:51.000 And then I go, okay.

01:43:53.000 It's like one of those things where when you're looking at it from the outside, you have a view of it that is not really accurate.

01:44:01.000 And the only way to really understand what it is I think we have to lay layers upon layers upon layers of these kind of conversations and Discussions and stories and put them out there very carefully So and and be honest about the good and the bad the disturbing the part of the weird feeling of loss like you shoot an animal There's a there's a feeling man when I when I shoot an animal like an elk and I walk on that up to that animal There's a real feeling of loss.

01:44:29.000 There's a feeling of I'm very appreciative that that animal is going to feed me and my family and a lot of my friends for like a year.

01:44:39.000 I'm going to be giving out meat.

01:44:41.000 I'm going to give people sausage.

01:44:43.000 They're going to send me pictures of it.

01:44:44.000 Like, look what I got.

01:44:45.000 Look at what he cooked tonight for dinner.

01:44:47.000 It's exciting.

01:44:48.000 It's all great.

01:44:48.000 But there's a real feeling of loss, and you've got to be honest about that.

01:44:51.000 All the aspects of it.

01:44:54.000 And then people need to be educated about where their meat is actually coming from.

01:44:58.000 There's really good regenerative farming options.

01:45:02.000 You can buy, particularly, there's a lot of good places in Texas where you can know your rancher.

01:45:07.000 You can go and see the cows that that guy's raising.

01:45:10.000 You see the bison they have that they're raising.

01:45:13.000 And you can buy meat from these ethical people who humanely curate this meat.

01:45:18.000 And you can have a relationship with them and buy all your food from them.

01:45:21.000 And it's great.

01:45:22.000 It's a great option.

01:45:23.000 But if you're a person who eats meat, and you don't know where your meat comes from, and you're casting aspersions at hunters, You're doing it wrong.

01:45:34.000 And it might not even be your fault.

01:45:36.000 I'm not even blaming you for your perceptions, because your perceptions, again, a lot of them are shaped by popular culture.

01:45:43.000 And popular culture over the last, you know, whatever it is, 100 years, has not done a good job of accurately portraying what's the best aspects of it.

01:45:52.000 It only concentrates on the worst.

01:45:53.000 Yeah.

01:45:54.000 You know, Steve, Steve Rinella, man, he...

01:46:00.000 I've just got to know Steve the last year, really.

01:46:04.000 Before that, I would have just been a consumer of his content.

01:46:08.000 He really changed the game.

01:46:10.000 He did.

01:46:11.000 He changed the game with a thoughtful, intelligent way.

01:46:19.000 I mean, I don't know any way to say it.

01:46:21.000 I'm not trying to blow smoke up anywhere.

01:46:24.000 No, you're just telling the truth.

01:46:25.000 It's just the truth.

01:46:26.000 Articulate, well-read, thoughtful approach, and with a deep respect for those animals.

01:46:32.000 Yeah.

01:46:33.000 And there's other people doing it too, but... 0.99

01:46:36.000 But he's got a great way of describing things, and that motherfucker loves to talk. 0.99

01:46:43.000 So it's like... 0.99

01:46:45.000 You know, when he had done my podcast the first time, he didn't even know what a podcast was.

01:46:50.000 Yeah.

01:46:51.000 And then he got me to go hunting with him.

01:46:53.000 That was back in 2012. So that was nine years ago.

01:46:57.000 It was the first time I ever hunted.

01:46:58.000 So really, you had it with Steve nine years ago.

01:47:01.000 It was that long ago.

01:47:02.000 Yeah.

01:47:03.000 I mean, I still watched one of those episodes.

01:47:06.000 2012. Yeah, there's an episode of me and Brian Cowan hunting mule deer in the Missouri Brakes.

01:47:11.000 Did he get you started in hunting?

01:47:12.000 Yes.

01:47:13.000 Okay.

01:47:13.000 On that show.

01:47:14.000 Now, how did you know Ronella to begin with?

01:47:16.000 I watched his show, The Wild Within.

01:47:18.000 He had a show before Meat Eater called The Wild Within.

01:47:23.000 And The Wild Within was...

01:47:24.000 It was one of those sort of life below zero type reality shows where it was... 1.00

01:47:30.000 He told me they were trying to do shit. 1.00

01:47:32.000 They were trying to release a moose and then he shoots it to ensure that they had an animal for him to shoot. 1.00

01:47:38.000 And he's like, get the fuck out of here. 0.99

01:47:39.000 We're not doing that. 0.91

01:47:40.000 But there was a lot of...

01:47:42.000 What that show was that was interesting to me was his explanation of what these people back then...

01:47:51.000 Like, he had made a raft out of hide and used it to float down the river.

01:47:55.000 And, you know, he'd shot this moose and took care of it and did all the field dressing.

01:48:00.000 And living like that, to me, has always been fascinating.

01:48:04.000 And I had in my head...

01:48:07.000 I had this understanding that there was a disconnect between me and food.

01:48:13.000 That I would go to a store and I'd buy a steak, I'd come home and cook it, or I'd order a steak at a restaurant.

01:48:19.000 There's so many steps that were missing that my feelings of what a piece of meat were, were wholly inaccurate.

01:48:26.000 And I knew that.

01:48:27.000 And then I'd seen a bunch of PETA videos.

01:48:30.000 So I was like, oh, Jesus.

01:48:31.000 So I was thinking before Steve took me that I'm going to have one of two options.

01:48:36.000 Either I'm going to become a vegetarian or I'm going to become a hunter because I don't want to participate in this world where these animals are stockpiled into a warehouse and they're shitting into holes in the ground.

01:48:47.000 It runs into this giant toxic pond. 0.99

01:48:50.000 Have you seen the drone footage of pig It's fucking crazy. 0.80

01:48:54.000 And so I went with Steve, and my very first hunting experience ever was on video, and you can watch it online. 0.98

01:49:03.000 I shot a mule deer.

01:49:04.000 Okay, I remember.

01:49:05.000 I have seen that.

01:49:07.000 Yeah, that was the first animal I shot.

01:49:08.000 I'd forgotten that that was your first hunt ever.

01:49:11.000 Not only was it the first animal I shot, I'd only shot a rifle against paper like two days before that, like four or five times.

01:49:18.000 We set up targets out there and he was basically just telling me, just don't flinch, just squeeze the trigger slowly and let it go off by surprise.

01:49:27.000 And I just sort of, he was good at explaining it.

01:49:29.000 I got it in my head, but I mean, I wasn't even sure of how, where to look at the scope.

01:49:34.000 That's it right there.

01:49:35.000 That's it.

01:49:38.000 That was the first animal I had ever shot, ever.

01:49:42.000 And then we ate the liver that night over fire.

01:49:48.000 We cooked it on a campfire and I was hooked.

01:49:52.000 Steve looks pretty pumped, man.

01:49:54.000 Oh, he was so excited.

01:49:55.000 He gave you the arm slap.

01:49:58.000 Yeah, well, he was just excited that it dropped with one shot, but then we came up on it and it was still alive.

01:50:03.000 I had to put another round into it.

01:50:04.000 So not knowing Steve real well until the last year and a half or so.

01:50:10.000 You know, you have questions of like, what's this guy going to be like?

01:50:14.000 When you're with him or when the cameras aren't on.

01:50:17.000 Because, you know, there's a perception of someone that's in media as much as him.

01:50:20.000 Yeah.

01:50:20.000 And man, I mean, I would hope that people would describe me as a hunter.

01:50:30.000 I mean, like, the core motivation of me...

01:50:36.000 I've been exposed to it long enough that I can see through the fluff.

01:50:44.000 It didn't surprise me.

01:50:46.000 I knew Steve was the real deal, but I've hunted a lot with him now.

01:50:50.000 The guy just loves to hunt.

01:50:53.000 He's the real deal.

01:50:53.000 He's tough as nails.

01:50:56.000 What surprised me is...

01:50:59.000 He came and hunted with us in Arkansas.

01:51:03.000 Before we even hunted, he wanted to go out coyote hunting.

01:51:08.000 It kind of surprised me, just his drive to hunt.

01:51:11.000 He's legit.

01:51:15.000 Oh yeah.

01:51:16.000 No, there's no question about that.

01:51:18.000 There's no way he could describe it the way he describes things without having a deep love for it.

01:51:22.000 Yeah.

01:51:23.000 He's very valuable.

01:51:24.000 Very valuable.

01:51:25.000 He's a rare human that comes along that bridges a gap.

01:51:28.000 And he does it with his deep knowledge of literature and education.

01:51:33.000 He's a different kind of person.

01:51:35.000 That's what he did, is he tied in anthropology and human history into hunting.

01:51:40.000 And yeah, it's cool.

01:51:44.000 Yeah, it's cool what the company's doing, too, what MeatEater's doing, and now how MeatEater is connected to all these other really legit companies, too, like First Light, where First Light is now part of MeatEater, and they make this amazing hunting clothing and amazing hunting gear.

01:52:01.000 It's just nice.

01:52:02.000 It's nice to see that everyone in that community shares this ethic and shares this deep understanding.

01:52:11.000 They're all very intelligent people, whether it's Remy Warren, who does his podcast through it, or Ryan Callahan, or all you guys.

01:52:18.000 It's really nice.

01:52:19.000 I'm more impressed from the inside than I am the outside from a meat eater as a company.

01:52:23.000 That's pretty cool.

01:52:24.000 And I say that in all honesty.

01:52:28.000 Are you living in Montana?

01:52:29.000 Nope.

01:52:29.000 I live in Northwest Arkansas.

01:52:31.000 That's the first thing Steve told me when he called me is he said, I mean like within like 10 seconds of saying, hey, what do you think about coming to work for me here?

01:52:39.000 He said, you don't have to move.

01:52:41.000 I mean, man, my shtick is in Arkansas.

01:52:44.000 Why Arkansas?

01:52:46.000 I'm a seventh generation Arkansan.

01:52:48.000 We've been there since the late 1820s.

01:52:51.000 I never heard that term.

01:52:51.000 Did you know that was a term?

01:52:53.000 Arkansan?

01:52:53.000 Arkansan, yeah.

01:52:54.000 We've been there...

01:52:56.000 And that's your spot.

01:52:57.000 Yeah, man.

01:52:58.000 Clay, Gary, Lewin, Oscar, Robert, Thomas, Thomas.

01:53:02.000 Are you guys embarrassed at all about Bill Clinton?

01:53:04.000 My father and aunt went to high school with Bill Clinton at Hot Springs High School. 1.00

01:53:11.000 No shit. 0.99

01:53:11.000 I mean, yeah. 0.99

01:53:12.000 I mean, I'm not going to talk bad about Bill Clinton.

01:53:15.000 But, I mean, sure we are.

01:53:17.000 I'm just guessing.

01:53:18.000 I'm just throwing a probe out there.

01:53:21.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:53:22.000 No, it's a great place to live.

01:53:24.000 And no one should come there, ever.

01:53:26.000 Really?

01:53:27.000 Yeah.

01:53:28.000 You don't want anybody going there?

01:53:29.000 Well, I mean, the same thing's happening there that's happening all across the country.

01:53:33.000 People are moving out of urban areas.

01:53:34.000 You can sell your house somewhere.

01:53:36.000 Well, I better be quiet.

01:53:38.000 Yeah.

01:53:38.000 Well, that's happening right here, for sure.

01:53:40.000 Oh, it's happening everywhere.

01:53:41.000 Yeah.

01:53:42.000 Yeah, I was born in Arkansas, and I love it.

01:53:49.000 I have a deep sense of...

01:53:50.000 I've decided this about myself.

01:53:54.000 Yeah, I think I came to this conclusion on my own.

01:53:57.000 I have an unusually deep sense of place.

01:54:00.000 Interesting.

01:54:01.000 I really do.

01:54:02.000 And it's connected to Arkansas.

01:54:04.000 Yeah.

01:54:05.000 Do you know the story of Barry Seal?

01:54:07.000 Yes.

01:54:09.000 You mean Arkansas, the drug drops?

01:54:10.000 Man, you just made my day.

01:54:12.000 Yeah?

01:54:13.000 You know where I'm from?

01:54:15.000 You're from Mena?

01:54:15.000 Mena, Arkansas.

01:54:16.000 No shit. 1.00

01:54:18.000 Wow. 1.00

01:54:19.000 That's crazy.

01:54:21.000 You just made about 5,000 people very happy.

01:54:24.000 Wow.

01:54:24.000 By saying that name.

01:54:25.000 Now, what it's connected to Maybe not so much.

01:54:28.000 I grew up in Maine, Arkansas.

01:54:30.000 The Tom Cruise movie doesn't really do it justice.

01:54:33.000 What is it, American Made?

01:54:34.000 Is that what it is?

01:54:35.000 It's a good movie, but it's fictitious.

01:54:40.000 Tom Cruise is quite a bit more handsome than Barry Seals.

01:54:43.000 But the story behind it is that this guy was running drugs for rogue members of government agencies, whether it's the CIA or whoever, and he was flying into these countries,

01:54:58.000 buying cocaine, and then dropping it off in Mena, Arkansas.

01:55:02.000 And there's a long story that goes with it where there's two children were murdered two kids that saw the drop and then There was a lie that was told that they were high and that they fell asleep on train tracks and then the family wound up paying for autopsies and the autopsies concluded that they were murdered and stabbed and then you know and then yeah,

01:55:24.000 so so We moved to Meena in 1984 when I was five years old.

01:55:31.000 We just hopped a little town.

01:55:33.000 So it was right before it all went down.

01:55:34.000 Well, yeah.

01:55:35.000 And so my dad was...

01:55:38.000 I guess there's no harm in telling these details.

01:55:41.000 My dad was in banking.

01:55:43.000 So he became a banker in Meena, Arkansas.

01:55:46.000 And so he knew a lot of people in the community.

01:55:50.000 And he, so it was right after all that stuff, because all that stuff was happening in the late 70s.

01:55:55.000 Is that right?

01:55:56.000 I'm not sure, exactly.

01:55:57.000 Late 70s, early 80s.

01:55:59.000 But it was over by the time we got there.

01:56:01.000 But Dad has lots of stories, just over the years, of people that worked at the airport, which I know, I mean, I could list names of people that I know today that worked at that airport.

01:56:11.000 And there were stories of big jets coming in with no lights on in the middle of the night.

01:56:17.000 Yeah.

01:56:18.000 And how much of it is true, it's hard to say.

01:56:22.000 What is this, Jamie?

01:56:24.000 Scroll all the way up so we can read the whole title.

01:56:26.000 This is it.

01:56:27.000 Activities at airport in MENA detailed.

01:56:29.000 FBI document recently released. 0.96

01:56:31.000 Oh shit, this is last year. 0.95

01:56:33.000 Oh, that's pretty recently, isn't it? 0.99

01:56:34.000 Interesting.

01:56:35.000 So there's a cargo plane.

01:56:37.000 So this is one of the ways, I mean there was more than one way, but one of the ways where they got cocaine into the United States.

01:56:45.000 They smuggled narcotics into Mena, Arkansas.

01:56:48.000 There it is, Barry Seal.

01:56:51.000 Extensive joint investigation by the FBI, Arkansas State Police and IRS revealed that Barry Seal used the Mena airport for smuggling activity from the late 1980 until March of 1984. I was there, man!

01:57:04.000 Right when you were there.

01:57:05.000 Crazy, the heart of it.

01:57:06.000 I was thinking it was the late.

01:57:07.000 For some reason I had it, it was right before we got there.

01:57:11.000 Wild timing.

01:57:12.000 According to an internal FBI document released last week, SEAL, a pilot, moved much of his smuggling operation from Baton Rouge to Rich Mountain Aviation at the Mina Intermountain Airport, according to the May 1986 FBI memo.

01:57:27.000 It's a wild movie.

01:57:28.000 And it's not totally accurate.

01:57:30.000 There's better accounts of exactly what went down that you could find.

01:57:36.000 But that's that spot.

01:57:38.000 Yep.

01:57:39.000 Yep.

01:57:41.000 A lot of people made a lot of money out of that area.

01:57:42.000 I guess so.

01:57:43.000 Who knows?

01:57:44.000 It wasn't anybody local there.

01:57:46.000 No.

01:57:47.000 No, I'm sure.

01:57:48.000 It was somebody else.

01:57:48.000 Yeah, somebody else in control.

01:57:50.000 Now, as far as the area of Arkansas, we're looking at...

01:57:55.000 I've never been.

01:57:57.000 What is it like topographically?

01:57:59.000 If Arkansas were...

01:58:01.000 Let's just say it was this square right here.

01:58:03.000 There would be a line drawn across from the northwest corner, northeast corner to the southwest corner.

01:58:11.000 The southeastern triangle of Arkansas would be Mississippi River Delta country, like swamp country, producing some of the most – an incredible amount of rice, soybeans, and wheat, like farm country.

01:58:27.000 From – you go to the northwestern corner of Arkansas – And it is mountains.

01:58:35.000 It's southern highlands.

01:58:37.000 And those two places are like two different countries.

01:58:42.000 And it's that abrupt at different places.

01:58:45.000 So I was raised in the Ouachita Mountains.

01:58:47.000 I now live in the Ozark Mountains.

01:58:50.000 And essentially it would be very equivalent to Appalachia.

01:58:54.000 Beautiful, man.

01:58:55.000 Ozarks are beautiful.

01:58:57.000 Well, we all get a sense of it from the TV show, Ozark.

01:59:01.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:59:02.000 Which is a wild fucking TV show. 0.99

01:59:04.000 Never watched it. 1.00

01:59:05.000 Never?

01:59:05.000 Nah.

01:59:06.000 It's good.

01:59:07.000 Is it?

01:59:08.000 Oh yeah.

01:59:08.000 Does it make Ozarkians look bad?

01:59:11.000 No.

01:59:12.000 You don't think so?

01:59:12.000 No.

01:59:13.000 But it's not talking about real Ozark culture.

01:59:15.000 No, not really.

01:59:16.000 It's just a place.

01:59:18.000 It's just a place that's used for drama and drug dealing.

01:59:24.000 It's more about a guy who...

01:59:28.000 It's a brilliantly written show and brilliantly acted.

01:59:31.000 Jason Bateman is a wizard.

01:59:32.000 He put together an incredible show.

01:59:34.000 It's so addictive.

01:59:35.000 And it's more about drug dealing and how these people...

01:59:40.000 It doesn't sound too good, Joe, for Ozarkers, man. 0.94

01:59:44.000 It's not about the Ozarks.

01:59:45.000 It's really about Mexican cartels and this guy from Chicago that wind up in the Ozarks.

01:59:50.000 And he's just trying to run this...

01:59:53.000 I don't want to give away too much of it, but it's a brilliant show.

01:59:58.000 I know you're looking at it from a state pride perspective or a local pride perspective.

02:00:04.000 I mean, maybe you won't like it because of that, but it doesn't make people look bad.

02:00:09.000 I understand.

02:00:10.000 It basically is about human nature more than anything, and about people trying to deal with situations that have no pleasant answers.

02:00:19.000 There's no pleasant solutions that are real clear.

02:00:24.000 It's a wild show.

02:00:25.000 No, I hadn't seen it.

02:00:26.000 It's good.

02:00:27.000 I hadn't seen it.

02:00:28.000 But it's beautiful, like, you know, when they're in the Ozarks.

02:00:31.000 And see, I don't know where they filmed that, but I think it was in Missouri, in the Missouri Ozarks.

02:00:38.000 The topographic core, in terms of ruggedness of terrain, would definitely be in northern Arkansas.

02:00:46.000 So the Ozark Mountains would cover...

02:00:49.000 Northern Arkansas and a big part of southern Missouri.

02:00:52.000 So geographically, it would appear that much of the Ozarks is actually in Missouri, which it is.

02:00:58.000 And it's beautiful.

02:00:59.000 I'm not taking anything away from Missouri.

02:01:00.000 But the most rugged part of the Ozarks is in central Arkansas.

02:01:05.000 And by rugged, I just mean big mountains, lots of relief, big beautiful rivers, bluffy limestone country.

02:01:12.000 A lot of caves.

02:01:14.000 It's karst topography.

02:01:17.000 Beautiful.

02:01:18.000 And, you know, anywhere that you plop yourself down on this planet, like, there's incredible history there.

02:01:26.000 And there's incredible beauty there in its own way.

02:01:29.000 And so I recognize that where I live is like...

02:01:33.000 I mean, it's special because...

02:01:38.000 I've added value to it by being there, you know?

02:01:41.000 And I've heard it said by kind of an Arkansas philosopher who was describing the Ozark Mountains, okay?

02:01:48.000 And he said, the Rocky Mountains are grand and majestic.

02:01:53.000 But the Ozark Mountains are intimate, and if you see a knob, there's probably a pretty good chance that you could walk to the top of it within a half a day.

02:02:04.000 And that was kind of his—he was like—so, you know, there are much bigger, more majestic views, but— There's beauty to be found everywhere.

02:02:13.000 Ozarks are cool.

02:02:14.000 It's a cool place.

02:02:15.000 Yeah, something doesn't have to be enormous just to be beautiful in terms of, like, natural topography.

02:02:20.000 There's definitely beautiful mountains that are less daunting than, say, like, you know, the Continental Divide or something.

02:02:28.000 Yeah. 0.96

02:02:28.000 But all of it's fucking amazing. 0.96

02:02:31.000 But the thing about Arkansas is it's relatively lightly populated, right? 0.98

02:02:38.000 Less than 3 million people.

02:02:40.000 For the whole state.

02:02:41.000 State of, you know, 50,000 square miles.

02:02:44.000 So it's just a million people more than the greater Austin area. 0.98

02:02:48.000 So, like, Austin's a million, and then outside of Austin, apparently, is another million, you know, that are, like, closely connected, which is, compared to where I'm from, California, this ain't shit. 0.96

02:02:57.000 It's, like, hilarious. 0.95

02:02:58.000 But that, you're talking about the whole state.

02:03:01.000 Yeah.

02:03:02.000 So the whole state is basically the population of Austin plus a third.

02:03:06.000 Yeah.

02:03:07.000 Which is nuts.

02:03:08.000 Yeah.

02:03:08.000 And see, I don't really have a context for that, Joe.

02:03:11.000 Like, I really don't.

02:03:12.000 Like, I understand what you're saying.

02:03:15.000 To me, like, the population density of the planet is gauged against just what I know.

02:03:23.000 Like, it just seems real normal that, you know, there's three million people in our state.

02:03:28.000 And I mean, I think it's overcrowded.

02:03:30.000 I mean...

02:03:31.000 And where you live, how many people are in your town?

02:03:34.000 So I live in a suburb of Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is a town of about 2,000.

02:03:42.000 So Fayetteville is 2,000 or your suburb is?

02:03:46.000 My little town.

02:03:47.000 I'm trying not to say the name.

02:03:48.000 Right, I understand.

02:03:50.000 So Northwest Arkansas is kind of the hub, the population hub of Arkansas.

02:03:56.000 The state capital is Little Rock, which has 250,000, something like that.

02:04:01.000 Northwest Arkansas has Fayetteville, multiple cities strung together, and it's about an area of about 300,000 people.

02:04:08.000 And that's where the Walmart home office is, the Tyson home office, some big, big international companies.

02:04:16.000 And the University of Arkansas is there.

02:04:18.000 And it's a neat town.

02:04:20.000 And outside of that, how much of that is public land?

02:04:25.000 How rural does it get?

02:04:26.000 How quickly?

02:04:27.000 Quickly you get into rural areas.

02:04:30.000 I mean, like...

02:04:32.000 Like I said, I think there's 2.2 million acres of national forest in Arkansas and a lot more just standard, like, state public land.

02:04:40.000 And, I mean, like, from Fayetteville, you could pretty quickly be in national forest.

02:04:45.000 I mean, like, within 30 minutes drive, be in national forest.

02:04:48.000 But to be in really rural Arkansas, within 30 minutes, you could be there.

02:04:56.000 So 30 minutes, and when you're looking at wild game in that area, is it mostly deer and bear, like turkey?

02:05:06.000 Deer, bear, turkey would be kind of the big three in the highlands of Arkansas.

02:05:12.000 And whitetail hunting would be the primary thing that people are hunting.

02:05:16.000 Turkey numbers are way down.

02:05:18.000 Now, I like small games, so I've got squirrel dogs, I've got coon dogs, and I've got mules.

02:05:23.000 Do you eat coons? 0.99

02:05:25.000 We do, but that is not the primary reason that we harvest them.

02:05:29.000 What do they taste like?

02:05:30.000 They taste like a bear.

02:05:31.000 Really?

02:05:32.000 I mean, they're red meat, fatty red meat.

02:05:35.000 Wow.

02:05:36.000 So raccoon's good.

02:05:37.000 Yeah, it's not bad.

02:05:38.000 And it's...

02:05:39.000 Man, I... Depending on how you prepare it?

02:05:42.000 Yeah.

02:05:44.000 But we're...

02:05:45.000 You know, there's one of the pillars of the North American model of...

02:05:48.000 I've got to say this now that I've said that I don't need raccoons because we kill a lot of raccoons.

02:05:52.000 One of the pillars of the North American model of wildlife conservation is non-frivolous use of wildlife.

02:05:57.000 That's one of the seven pillars.

02:05:59.000 So it means we don't just kill stuff for no reason.

02:06:02.000 Most of that pillar is fulfilled in that we kill animals, we eat them.

02:06:08.000 But there are other reasons that we would kill animals.

02:06:12.000 That would fulfill the non-frivolous use, but wouldn't mean that we would necessarily kill them to eat.

02:06:19.000 Okay?

02:06:20.000 And this is nuanced water.

02:06:21.000 I'm nervous sharing it.

02:06:23.000 But like, so raccoons have an unnatural population.

02:06:27.000 I mean, there are more raccoons on the landscape than there has ever been in the history of the world.

02:06:33.000 Really?

02:06:33.000 Oh, yeah.

02:06:34.000 Absolutely. 0.99

02:06:35.000 Is that because of garbage? 0.98

02:06:36.000 Just ecological, not garbage, just... 0.99

02:06:40.000 Fragmentation.

02:06:41.000 All the things that are happening are fantastic for raccoons.

02:06:45.000 And so, essentially, we hunt raccoons for their hides.

02:06:50.000 So they're a fur-bearing animal.

02:06:51.000 So that part of the non-frivolous use with fur-bearing animals, you harvest the hides.

02:06:56.000 And occasionally you eat them?

02:06:58.000 Occasionally.

02:07:00.000 Like one out of ten?

02:07:01.000 Every now and then you just decide?

02:07:03.000 Yeah.

02:07:04.000 But mostly you're doing it because you need to control the populations and for the hides.

02:07:09.000 Two reasons.

02:07:10.000 For the hides and because, yeah, population control.

02:07:17.000 And I mean that's a justification for me.

02:07:19.000 I love to hunt raccoons with my dogs.

02:07:21.000 What is this here?

02:07:23.000 Farmland as a human population in the United States has grown from under 3 million to over 300 million, providing millions of raccoons with garden vegetables, fruits, nuts, grain, household garbage on which to feed.

02:07:36.000 In the 1800s, many areas of the United States supported approximately one raccoon per square kilometer, about three raccoons per square mile.

02:07:45.000 In 2002, a study of raccoons in Indiana found 222 raccoons per square kilometer. 0.99

02:07:52.000 Holy shit. 0.99

02:07:53.000 About 700 raccoons per square mile. 1.00

02:07:56.000 That's a lot of fucking raccoons. 1.00

02:07:58.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:07:58.000 The largest raccoon was 58 pounds. 1.00

02:08:01.000 Oh my god.

02:08:02.000 Found in Texas.

02:08:04.000 Wow. 1.00

02:08:04.000 By the way, those motherfuckers might be in my backyard. 1.00

02:08:07.000 They open up lids. 1.00

02:08:08.000 Pull garbage bags out, these fucks. 1.00

02:08:12.000 They're an incredible beast too. 1.00

02:08:13.000 So let me tell you about what I saw.

02:08:15.000 What we think we saw.

02:08:17.000 I have video footage of it, but it's night vision, and it's a cat that seems like it's about in the neighborhood of knee-high, maybe slightly below knee-high.

02:08:31.000 I'm estimating its weight.

02:08:33.000 It could be 40 to 60 pounds, something like that.

02:08:35.000 Who knows?

02:08:36.000 But it's a dark cat.

02:08:37.000 And I think it's probably a Jaguarundi.

02:08:41.000 Because Jaguarundis did exist in Texas, and people have seen them.

02:08:46.000 That's what it looks like.

02:08:47.000 Now, okay, did you...

02:08:49.000 We have video footage of it.

02:08:51.000 Can you show it to me?

02:08:52.000 Yes, yeah.

02:08:52.000 I'll have, if my security guys are listening, I hope they've...

02:08:57.000 Someone must have recorded it.

02:08:58.000 But you can see my neighbor, who's got a headlamp on, who's walking his dog.

02:09:04.000 The cat hears him and runs towards him, runs towards him, sees him, and then darts off into the woods.

02:09:10.000 So, the first episode of the Bear Grease podcast is the myth of the southern mountain lion.

02:09:16.000 I don't know if we talk about Black Panthers extensively.

02:09:20.000 Oh.

02:09:22.000 This was little in terms of like...

02:09:24.000 I've seen mountain lions before.

02:09:26.000 I've seen two mountain lions.

02:09:28.000 One, pretty clearly, that looked like it was dog-sized, you know, like a 70-pound-ish thing.

02:09:34.000 Yeah.

02:09:35.000 And I didn't realize...

02:09:36.000 It looked like a coyote almost.

02:09:37.000 Yeah.

02:09:37.000 And I realized it was a mountain lion when I saw its tail.

02:09:40.000 It was running across the road and had like one of these tails.

02:09:42.000 I was like, oh, that's a mountain lion.

02:09:43.000 If I was a betting man, and this is not against you...

02:09:46.000 But this was in Santa Barbara.

02:09:48.000 Okay, right, right, right.

02:09:49.000 This was in a place that has mountain lions.

02:09:52.000 Where I'm talking about was here in Austin, and it had a long tail, and it was a dark cat.

02:09:58.000 Well, in my interviewing biologists, what they said is that the number one culprit for misidentified mountain lions is house cats.

02:10:11.000 Yeah, this was big.

02:10:13.000 It was big.

02:10:14.000 It was big enough where my security guards had to tell me, make sure the dog's inside the house.

02:10:19.000 Wow.

02:10:19.000 They said, we've got this large predator on video in front of the house.

02:10:23.000 I'm anxious to see it, man.

02:10:25.000 Yeah.

02:10:26.000 Whatever it is, it's bigger than a cat.

02:10:29.000 It's bigger than a serval.

02:10:31.000 You know those little pet cats?

02:10:33.000 It's bigger. 1.00

02:10:34.000 It's a fucking real thing. 0.99

02:10:38.000 Oh, is this it? 0.99

02:10:39.000 There it is.

02:10:40.000 That's it.

02:10:41.000 So this is the video footage.

02:10:47.000 I mean, it's hard when you see the guy walk by, I don't necessarily think we should put my neighbor on video, but when you see the guy walk by, you get a sense Okay, I just saw his tail.

02:10:59.000 I want to watch it walk again.

02:11:01.000 Joe, has anybody, has a professional seen this?

02:11:07.000 No.

02:11:08.000 Okay.

02:11:08.000 So show this again.

02:11:09.000 Well, some wildlife person should...

02:11:11.000 What are you doing there, buddy?

02:11:13.000 Man, hey, you don't know the firestorm that I started about Black Panthers and mountain lions. 0.81

02:11:20.000 Well, there are definitely mountain lions here.

02:11:22.000 Right, right.

02:11:22.000 In Texas.

02:11:23.000 But this scenario...

02:11:26.000 But look at this thing.

02:11:26.000 Look at this thing.

02:11:27.000 That's a cat.

02:11:28.000 And look how big it is.

02:11:29.000 Right?

02:11:31.000 Is there any magnification of this where it's less grainy?

02:11:35.000 No.

02:11:35.000 This is it.

02:11:36.000 This is night vision.

02:11:37.000 So you can see up close on the ground, right?

02:11:39.000 Right in front where it's more illuminated.

02:11:41.000 You kind of get a sense of what it looks like at high resolution.

02:11:44.000 But this thing is like knee high. 1.00

02:11:48.000 This is a fucking cat, and it's a dark cat. 1.00

02:11:50.000 You see it run off? 1.00

02:11:51.000 That is not a house cat.

02:11:53.000 It's way bigger.

02:11:54.000 I don't want to show my neighbor, but I'll show it to you.

02:11:59.000 But when my neighbor walks by afterwards, it's up to his knee. 0.99

02:12:04.000 Whatever the fuck that thing is, it's not small. 0.99

02:12:07.000 Think of that as a cat. 1.00

02:12:09.000 That's a cat that's that high.

02:12:10.000 Yeah.

02:12:11.000 That's a big cat.

02:12:12.000 Yeah.

02:12:13.000 So whatever that thing is, I think it's a Jaguar undie because they were native to Texas and the last time they photographed one here was in the 1980s.

02:12:21.000 But you know how dense Texas is. 0.99

02:12:24.000 You go outside, fucking woods everywhere. 1.00

02:12:27.000 If it's nighttime, you don't know what the fuck's out there. 1.00

02:12:30.000 The idea that some wildlife biologist has combed every inch of this insanely massive state, and they existed here in the hill country. 0.97

02:12:39.000 They're native to this area.

02:12:41.000 But there's been people reporting pictures of them or reporting meetings of them and citing them, but there's no real photographic or video evidence.

02:12:53.000 Yeah.

02:12:53.000 Whatever that is, that's not a house cat.

02:12:56.000 That's a big fucking cat. 0.99

02:12:58.000 I'd like to see the scale of it. 0.99

02:13:01.000 Yeah.

02:13:01.000 I'll show you, well, I'll get those guys to get the further video, I hope they saved that as well, of my neighbor walking by.

02:13:10.000 Or, I could stand in that spot, and you can get a sense of what it looked like.

02:13:16.000 But I'm telling you, the thing is probably...

02:13:18.000 What I would be interested in would be...

02:13:22.000 And it's not a high-quality video, so it's hard, but, like, the gait of that animal, like, and I'm, this is why it's so wonderful about these kind of things.

02:13:33.000 And I don't know you well enough to, like, I don't know if you really want my opinion or if you don't.

02:13:40.000 I always definitely want your opinion.

02:13:43.000 Because this is the beauty of these animals out in wild places where there's, like, controversy over what it is.

02:13:50.000 Mm-hmm.

02:13:51.000 I am, by nature, a skeptic of anything that's abnormal, because usually people make errors in judgment.

02:14:01.000 I mean, like, 97% of the time.

02:14:06.000 I would have to...

02:14:10.000 I would like to see the scale of it.

02:14:12.000 That would give all the details.

02:14:13.000 That's what changed it for me.

02:14:14.000 We'll show you that afterwards.

02:14:16.000 What changed it for me is when I see my neighbor walk by.

02:14:19.000 And then I realize, this thing's about that big.

02:14:21.000 It's not a house cat.

02:14:23.000 It's wider than me. 0.99

02:14:25.000 Whatever the fuck it is, it's big. 0.99

02:14:27.000 It's not big like a mountain lion, though. 0.99

02:14:29.000 Hadn't seen it again?

02:14:30.000 No, I haven't seen it since then.

02:14:32.000 But I know that people have seen similar things like this.

02:14:37.000 And these are all anecdotal stories, but...

02:14:40.000 You've got to think that if that Jaguarundi was here in the 80s...

02:14:44.000 It could still be here. 1.00

02:14:45.000 Fuck yeah! 1.00

02:14:47.000 How many different times have they thought that an animal was extinct and then they find viable breeding populations of them? 1.00

02:14:55.000 Right.

02:14:55.000 It does happen.

02:14:56.000 What's wild about the myth of the Black Panther and much of the South is that there are black... 1.00

02:15:01.000 I mean, it is amazing...

02:15:03.000 How many stories there are of black panthers?

02:15:06.000 Any community, anywhere, I mean really in the eastern United States, you go in and say, are there black panthers here?

02:15:12.000 And some percentage of people will say yes.

02:15:14.000 And basically, science has never documented a melanistic mountain lion.

02:15:23.000 But they have with jaguars.

02:15:24.000 Yes.

02:15:25.000 So for down here, that could count.

02:15:28.000 You could be like, well, yeah, we're deep enough into Texas.

02:15:33.000 Jaguars are coming up from Mexico.

02:15:34.000 There are some jaguars that their home ranges span into the United States.

02:15:40.000 Arizona, for sure.

02:15:41.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:15:41.000 And there are documented melanistic jaguars and leopards.

02:15:46.000 But science has never documented a melanistic mountain lion.

02:15:51.000 And so the whole idea of a black mountain lion in Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, anywhere, is just straight up, it's not true.

02:16:04.000 Well, isn't it also that people see things in the dark and they can't get a good view of what it looks like?

02:16:10.000 Oh, man.

02:16:11.000 We interviewed a psychologist on our podcast about cognitive bias and naive realism.

02:16:16.000 And it's so funny because my dad, he's hilarious, but he talked about that.

02:16:25.000 It was like news to me.

02:16:27.000 I'd never heard him say it before, but he was like, yeah, I believe in Black Panthers.

02:16:30.000 And I caught this on audio kind of almost by accident.

02:16:34.000 Yeah.

02:16:34.000 Anyway, it goes so deep.

02:16:36.000 People are just...

02:16:38.000 And it's touchy.

02:16:40.000 I mean, it divides families.

02:16:42.000 Oh, for sure.

02:16:42.000 Like if they're Black Panthers or not.

02:16:44.000 And I love it, man.

02:16:45.000 I love it.

02:16:46.000 And I'm pro Black Panther. 0.74

02:16:49.000 I mean, I want the myth to continue.

02:16:51.000 I love a good myth, man.

02:16:53.000 Yeah, I do too.

02:16:55.000 But this thing, whatever that thing is, I mean, you get a chance to see. 0.99

02:16:59.000 If that's a house cat, that's a fucking whopper of a house cat. 0.98

02:17:03.000 And I don't think it is. 0.99

02:17:04.000 I think it's one of those Jaguar undies. 0.67

02:17:06.000 Pull that photo of that Jaguar undie up again.

02:17:08.000 Because it looks like that.

02:17:10.000 And that thing used to live here. 0.97

02:17:13.000 And when they say that the last sightings were in the 1980s, man, that, to me, like that thing, that's exactly what it fucking looked like. 0.98

02:17:20.000 Yeah, big cat. 0.87

02:17:21.000 And, you know, those things still exist.

02:17:24.000 They're not extinct.

02:17:25.000 Like, look at that thing. 0.99

02:17:27.000 That motherfucker right there, that's exactly what it looked like. 0.99

02:17:31.000 Hey, okay, what's wild? 0.99

02:17:33.000 Right now, On the Joe Rogan podcast, there is a social science experiment happening.

02:17:40.000 Because, like, I want to believe you so bad.

02:17:44.000 We don't have to believe me.

02:17:46.000 Look at that video.

02:17:47.000 What do you think about that video?

02:17:48.000 You're playing into my...

02:17:50.000 What we discovered and even the conclusion that we came to on our podcast.

02:17:55.000 Because part of the question...

02:17:56.000 Remember, we're answering these bigger questions about human nature.

02:18:00.000 And it's like, how could the myth of a...

02:18:03.000 And I'm not talking about Texas, okay?

02:18:06.000 Because there could legitimately be a black jaguar down here. 0.71

02:18:09.000 But how could...

02:18:11.000 The myth of a black panther exists in Kentucky when that animal has never existed.

02:18:18.000 And I deeply want to just tell you that I believe you.

02:18:24.000 It's hard for me not to just go, Joe, I'm with you, bro.

02:18:28.000 And fist bump you and go, man, that is a stinking jaguarundi in your backyard.

02:18:32.000 I feel the social pressure to do that.

02:18:34.000 Well, don't.

02:18:35.000 Don't give in to that pressure.

02:18:36.000 And that is the beauty of...

02:18:39.000 Of human nature and community.

02:18:41.000 And that's essentially what has propagated in some ways false things, but it's also what propagates a bunch of good stuff.

02:18:51.000 Like, I want to believe you.

02:18:53.000 And you are dead set on what...

02:18:56.000 Your perception of this is.

02:18:57.000 No, I'm definitely not.

02:18:59.000 Here's why I'm not.

02:18:59.000 I don't have enough data.

02:19:01.000 Okay.

02:19:01.000 I don't have much data either other than that video.

02:19:03.000 Yeah.

02:19:03.000 But I do know that there's a lot of exotic animals that people keep here as pets.

02:19:08.000 Yep.

02:19:08.000 And it easily can mean something along those lines.

02:19:10.000 Did you know that every part of the country has that story?

02:19:12.000 What story?

02:19:13.000 The story of the circus train wreck in the 1940s.

02:19:19.000 Oh, when an animal gets out?

02:19:19.000 No, for real.

02:19:20.000 It's all over, man.

02:19:21.000 Oh, for sure.

02:19:22.000 And everybody has the same story.

02:19:24.000 It's so funny.

02:19:25.000 Yeah, but you know Texas has more tigers in captivity than all the wild of the world.

02:19:30.000 Yeah.

02:19:30.000 If that could happen anywhere, it would be Texas.

02:19:33.000 It's a wild place.

02:19:34.000 So whatever that thing is, I mean, obviously we have grainy footage, but we do have, we'll show you off air, my neighbor, and you'll get a chance to see. 0.99

02:19:44.000 Because when you see that, that's when I went, oh, huh, that's a big fucking cat. 0.91

02:19:49.000 And they're like, yeah, this is not a small animal. 0.99

02:19:51.000 This is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 pounds, maybe bigger.

02:19:55.000 Yeah.

02:19:56.000 I mean, the upside.

02:19:58.000 Here's what you could do.

02:19:59.000 If you really wanted to test out your theory, this is what you would do.

02:20:02.000 And the biologist told me they'd do this with mountain lion sightings, is take a cutout, like a piece of poster board, and draw a big cat on it, like a big-sized house cat.

02:20:12.000 And put it in that spot.

02:20:13.000 Put it in that spot.

02:20:14.000 Oh, that's smart.

02:20:14.000 And then, you know...

02:20:16.000 Film it.

02:20:17.000 Yeah.

02:20:18.000 Oh, okay.

02:20:18.000 Just stake it out there and then walk back in your house.

02:20:21.000 Yeah, or just cut a square or a rectangle so you get a sense, well, this is the body size of it.

02:20:28.000 If I put that rectangle there, or maybe this is too big or this one's too small, yeah, that's smart.

02:20:34.000 Because if I put it in the exact same area, then I can get a real perfect readout of exactly how high it is.

02:20:42.000 Like a cat.

02:20:43.000 Like the silhouette of...

02:20:45.000 And make it like a big house cat. 0.77

02:20:47.000 I'll have a little...

02:20:47.000 We'll have a project with my kids.

02:20:49.000 Yeah.

02:20:50.000 My youngest daughter's very artistic.

02:20:53.000 I'll explain to her what's going on.

02:20:54.000 I want to hear the results of that.

02:20:56.000 We have a lot of cool animals in the area, though. 0.99

02:20:58.000 My God, there's a lot of fucking owls. 0.98

02:21:00.000 A lot of owls and a lot of deer. 0.99

02:21:02.000 Deer everywhere. 0.99

02:21:03.000 And we have one fat fucking coyote that we got on security camera... 0.99

02:21:08.000 That looks like a dog. 1.00

02:21:10.000 I mean, he's big.

02:21:11.000 Big. 1.00

02:21:11.000 Big ass coyote. 1.00

02:21:12.000 And you never hear him. 0.99

02:21:14.000 I don't hear any coyote howling here.

02:21:17.000 You don't hear him yipping?

02:21:17.000 No.

02:21:18.000 You hear weird fox noises.

02:21:20.000 Like foxes make those crazy noises at night.

02:21:22.000 Have you ever heard fox screams?

02:21:24.000 Yeah, they kind of growl.

02:21:26.000 Yeah, weird.

02:21:27.000 But no coyote howls.

02:21:30.000 But they're definitely there.

02:21:31.000 We have photos of them and video of them.

02:21:33.000 But that thing was weird.

02:21:36.000 It was.

02:21:37.000 Maybe wildlife biologists are going to contact me now.

02:21:39.000 Imagine.

02:21:40.000 Imagine we find out.

02:21:41.000 It'll be solved to me.

02:21:43.000 The next step of data I would need would be a two-scale model of a house cat right there in that spot.

02:21:51.000 Yeah.

02:21:52.000 Yeah, okay.

02:21:53.000 Well, one thing I do have that's a good scale is I have one of those foam pigs, those wild boar targets, a 3D target.

02:22:03.000 Okay. 0.96

02:22:03.000 I can go and plant that sucker out there. 0.96

02:22:05.000 And we'll get a real good idea. 0.99

02:22:07.000 Because the wild pig target's about this big.

02:22:09.000 Yeah.

02:22:11.000 Well, let me know how that goes.

02:22:12.000 Those Reinhardt targets? 0.82

02:22:14.000 Yeah.

02:22:15.000 What did you think by looking at it, though?

02:22:17.000 It's obviously a cat, right?

02:22:20.000 Man, I just need more data.

02:22:23.000 Right.

02:22:24.000 But you think it's a cat, right?

02:22:26.000 I'm not convinced.

02:22:27.000 Really?

02:22:28.000 What did you think it might be?

02:22:28.000 It just didn't have the gait and the grainy photo.

02:22:32.000 Let's see it again.

02:22:33.000 It didn't...

02:22:35.000 A cat has a very distinct gait and walk, and I didn't initially just...

02:22:40.000 It's kind of bouncy.

02:22:42.000 That's kind of bouncy.

02:22:43.000 That's kind of...

02:22:44.000 Yeah.

02:22:47.000 Like a dog?

02:22:49.000 That was my...

02:22:50.000 And I'm not saying that I believe that's a canine, but the gait of that animal...

02:22:58.000 That is not my conclusion that it is a canine.

02:23:01.000 That's not what I'm saying.

02:23:04.000 You just feel like it moves weird.

02:23:06.000 Yeah, the tail though, when it runs off, it does appear like a cat.

02:23:09.000 But that looks like a cat.

02:23:10.000 When it runs off, that looks like a cat.

02:23:12.000 That part where it runs off, because it hears my neighbor, let it go right there. 1.00

02:23:18.000 Yeah, that looks like a fucking cat. 1.00

02:23:20.000 It does. 1.00

02:23:21.000 More data.

02:23:22.000 Creepy cat.

02:23:23.000 Need more data.

02:23:24.000 Yeah.

02:23:25.000 My wife saw a zebra.

02:23:27.000 Oh, from your house?

02:23:29.000 Driving on the way to Houston.

02:23:31.000 Saw a zebra.

02:23:33.000 There was a guy that... 1.00

02:23:34.000 But there's a lot of fucking zebras out here. 1.00

02:23:38.000 Super common, believe it or not, in ranches in Texas for someone that was zebra. 0.99

02:23:43.000 There's a guy in Arkansas, this farm that we drove past every day to get to our house.

02:23:50.000 This guy in Arkansas had two zebras out in his pasture.

02:23:54.000 And it was when my kids were young, and we had wildlife games that we played when we drove down the road.

02:24:00.000 Every time we got in the car, it was a wildlife game.

02:24:02.000 And we assigned points to different types of wildlife, from crows to geese to deer.

02:24:08.000 And the highest level was a bear, if you ever saw a bear.

02:24:13.000 We were going to have some massive celebration and take everybody out to eat, and the winner got to choose where they went.

02:24:19.000 So we had this elaborate mechanism of this game we played.

02:24:24.000 When my kids were like four to eight, you know, whatever.

02:24:28.000 And this guy, man, this guy had zebras.

02:24:32.000 And I used to rant every time we drove past his place because I had to lecture my kids about how...

02:24:39.000 Yes, we did just see a zebra, but those don't live here.

02:24:43.000 Those are African animals. 1.00

02:24:45.000 And it was super confusing.

02:24:46.000 So to this day, now my kids are grown much older.

02:24:50.000 Every time we drive past that place, my son goes, dad, gum, zebra farmer. 0.88

02:24:57.000 It's like, don't have zebras in Arkansas, man.

02:24:59.000 They're cool when they're in Africa.

02:25:01.000 Yeah.

02:25:02.000 Well, it's weird how many animals are like that here, like oryx, which are really very uncommon in the wild.

02:25:09.000 They're endangered.

02:25:10.000 In Texas, you can go hunt them.

02:25:12.000 Yeah.

02:25:13.000 They're all over the place.

02:25:14.000 Yeah, Texas is a different planet when it comes to a different country.

02:25:18.000 Neil Guy?

02:25:18.000 Neil Guy.

02:25:19.000 Yeah.

02:25:20.000 What is this?

02:25:21.000 Yeah, wow.

02:25:22.000 Arkansas judge mauled by family's pet zebra.

02:25:25.000 Wow!

02:25:27.000 Wow. 1.00

02:25:27.000 They're a cool fucking animal, aren't they? 1.00

02:25:30.000 I've heard that they're... 1.00

02:25:31.000 My cousin actually has a half zebra, half donkey.

02:25:40.000 I don't remember what he did with it, but they're wild critters, man.

02:25:44.000 Oh, they can make a hybrid that's non-viable?

02:25:47.000 I think you're getting off on it.

02:25:49.000 So it's like a mule?

02:25:51.000 Well, this is in your wheelhouse because you're really into mules, right?

02:25:54.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:25:55.000 I don't know much about zebra breeding.

02:25:57.000 But they can be bred with a horse?

02:25:58.000 I think so.

02:26:00.000 Wow.

02:26:00.000 Man, you caught me on something I really don't know.

02:26:03.000 Look at that.

02:26:03.000 There it is.

02:26:04.000 A zonkey.

02:26:05.000 That's what it is.

02:26:06.000 A zonkey.

02:26:06.000 Zebra-donkey hybrid.

02:26:07.000 Yeah, my cousin had one of these.

02:26:10.000 I think he still does.

02:26:11.000 They have a big racehorse stable.

02:26:15.000 Wow.

02:26:15.000 A zonkey.

02:26:17.000 No, man.

02:26:17.000 Mules are fascinating critters.

02:26:19.000 They really are.

02:26:20.000 Well, that's another common misconception about the best animal to ride across the country during the pioneer days was not a horse.

02:26:28.000 It was a mule.

02:26:29.000 Yeah.

02:26:30.000 Well, man, if you want a spiel, like if you want a little spiel, and I could talk for hours about it, but what's the difference between a mule and a horse, and why would you pick a mule over a horse?

02:26:42.000 Because that's the biggest question.

02:26:44.000 Just to inform people, a mule, It's a hybrid cross between a female horse and a male donkey.

02:26:52.000 And it produces non-viable offspring.

02:26:55.000 And there's a term in animal breeding called hybrid vigor, which means you cross two distinctly different animals.

02:27:04.000 Hybrid vigor could be used in a lot of different ways.

02:27:06.000 But essentially, hybrid vigor means that the offspring of these animals is greater than the sum of the individual animal.

02:27:15.000 Like a liger.

02:27:16.000 Yeah, like, and so a mule has all these incredible properties that made it super valuable.

02:27:22.000 And that's part of the reason in the Ozarks, like, the Ozarks and the Southern Highlands of the United States are known as, in many ways, it could be argued, but as like the mule epicenter of the world.

02:27:36.000 Like, a lot of mule trainers, a lot of mule work, and it came from Many, many things, but mules handled the heat better than a horse.

02:27:47.000 Mules have more stamina than a horse when worked, and so that's why you hear people talking about plowing with mules.

02:27:53.000 I mean, you can plow with a horse, too, but a mule would have more stamina.

02:27:57.000 A mule's feet don't have to be worked on because a donkey is essentially not that much different than a wild animal.

02:28:05.000 Donkeys would have come from somewhere in the Mediterranean.

02:28:11.000 There would have been wild burrows and different things.

02:28:14.000 A donkey is pretty close to what it was.

02:28:16.000 A horse has been highly, highly influenced by human selection over thousands of years.

02:28:24.000 And so you get this animal that has been very much so built for our purposes.

02:28:30.000 In general, if a horse is not shooed, it will go lame and not be able to work much.

02:28:37.000 So that's why there's this whole farrier industry, which is where people put shoes on horses.

02:28:42.000 What about wild horses?

02:28:43.000 What happens with them?

02:28:44.000 Well, that's a good question.

02:28:47.000 Because if they're acclimated in a certain way, they can become—they don't have to have shoes in the wild, obviously, but they're not doing work either.

02:28:59.000 They're not having a bunch of people on them.

02:29:02.000 They're not working.

02:29:04.000 And it's kind of one of these deals.

02:29:06.000 Once you start, you can't stop.

02:29:08.000 So if you start shooing an animal, just like us wearing shoes, if we walked around from the time we were born barefoot, the biggest point and the main thing I'm talking about is that a mule has extremely sturdy, hard feet, and so you don't have to shoo a mule.

02:29:23.000 Some people do, but typically you don't have to.

02:29:26.000 So less maintenance.

02:29:27.000 And that's a major thing.

02:29:28.000 If you have a horse, man, you've got to shoe that thing every six weeks.

02:29:31.000 A lot of investment.

02:29:33.000 A mule won't founder.

02:29:35.000 And that may not seem like that big of a deal, but if you're an equine owner, if your mule gets in your barn and has access to 50 pounds of grain...

02:29:42.000 What does founder mean?

02:29:45.000 It means that if your animal has access to grain and it eats, eats, eats, eats, eats, It's an intestinal condition where basically the animal eats too much of the super rich food and just dies.

02:29:58.000 Oh, wow.

02:29:58.000 It's an intestinal thing.

02:30:00.000 So horses founder all the time.

02:30:01.000 A mule won't founder.

02:30:03.000 So with a horse you have to be very strict in what food you leave around.

02:30:06.000 Yes.

02:30:07.000 Yeah, your horse will founder like that.

02:30:09.000 Wow.

02:30:10.000 But the main reason that a mule would be the chosen animal for mountain riding is they're known to be safer than a horse.

02:30:19.000 What makes a horse a wonderful thing is that they're very trainable, easy to train, such that They say that you could train a horse to run off a cliff, okay?

02:30:33.000 You could make, because when you're on that animal, you're in charge of it, and you could give it the cues to make it do something that would endanger its life.

02:30:42.000 And in most circumstances, that's a great thing, because, I mean, like, you're in charge, and this animal's doing what you want it to do.

02:30:47.000 You could lead the horse into war.

02:30:48.000 Yeah.

02:30:49.000 A mule has a very strong self-protective mechanism in it that most people would perceive as stubbornness.

02:30:55.000 So you hear people talk about stubborn as a mule.

02:30:58.000 Well, what that is is a self-protective mechanism on that animal.

02:31:01.000 That animal, you ride a mule up to a raging river out in Montana.

02:31:08.000 Buddy, you want to be on a mule because he ain't going to cross that creek if he's going to die.

02:31:14.000 So if you're on his back, you're going to be safe.

02:31:21.000 If you cue him to go up the side of this bluffy mountain, if he'll go, just trust him.

02:31:28.000 A horse might get up there and roll off.

02:31:30.000 And I'm not talking bad about horses.

02:31:32.000 I mean, horses are dominant, the most, for sure, most popular equine animal.

02:31:37.000 Mules are about 10% of the equine world.

02:31:40.000 But what I love about mules, what I love about them, is that they're very difficult to train.

02:31:49.000 And that's why people...

02:31:53.000 We're good to go.

02:32:08.000 The thing that works against the mule, I should be like the mule marketing guy for the planet because we need some better PR. Because what happens is people get a mule, don't understand how a mule works because he thinks way different than a horse.

02:32:25.000 Much more difficult to train.

02:32:27.000 And a mule never forgets.

02:32:30.000 I had a—yeah, well, I'll tell you something somebody else said.

02:32:32.000 A mule never forgets, and you can mess up a mule very quickly.

02:32:37.000 And so what happens is I get a mule and start to train it, start having some problems with him, and problems could be— I mean, just a variety of different ways.

02:32:47.000 And then I sell that mule because I can't do anything with it.

02:32:52.000 And the next guy gets it and he starts adding problems because he's getting a mule with a problem.

02:32:57.000 And then basically a mule has five different owners and every one of them has put their own problem on that mule.

02:33:02.000 And that mule basically becomes like a wild beast.

02:33:05.000 And so people know like stubborn as a mule, man, you don't.

02:33:08.000 I mean, you'll hear a lot of legit cowboys and guys say, man, you don't want anything to do with a mule.

02:33:13.000 What I learned that I had to do was get mules from the time they were young.

02:33:19.000 I didn't want a mule that had been messed with by anybody else.

02:33:24.000 I want to know every interaction that that animal has had with a human.

02:33:29.000 I've had a lot of luck with that in training these mules.

02:33:33.000 I love it.

02:33:35.000 They're safe in the mountains.

02:33:37.000 The reason I want to ride mules is to get deeper into wild places and stay longer.

02:33:44.000 And there's some romance involved in it, which I have zero shame over.

02:33:48.000 Sometimes when I ride mules with Rinella, he's like, we could just walk.

02:33:53.000 He accused me of liking the romance of it.

02:33:58.000 And I'm like, yeah, of course I do.

02:34:00.000 Of course I want to ride a mule.

02:34:01.000 But there is some real function.

02:34:03.000 And he likes riding mules too.

02:34:05.000 He's pretty good.

02:34:07.000 And that was the thing that across the country, the early settlers, they rode mules very often, right?

02:34:14.000 Yeah.

02:34:15.000 Yeah.

02:34:15.000 Because they knew about this a long time ago.

02:34:17.000 Yeah.

02:34:18.000 So Wild West movies.

02:34:20.000 There would have been a lot of mules involved. 1.00

02:34:21.000 And articulation of the feet.

02:34:23.000 This will close my spiel.

02:34:25.000 Okay.

02:34:27.000 Mules have the ability.

02:34:29.000 They say that a horse is able to understand where his front feet go, but his back feet just kind of go wherever.

02:34:36.000 This is anecdotal.

02:34:38.000 A mule has, like, great articulation in his feet, both front and back.

02:34:43.000 So he's able to very much so pick where he puts his feet.

02:34:46.000 I mean, I see that.

02:34:47.000 That's the reason.

02:34:48.000 They're like a four-wheel drive horse.

02:34:49.000 And when you raise mules, you raise mules specifically for use in hunting adventures?

02:34:54.000 Yeah How many mules do you keep?

02:34:58.000 I've got four right now.

02:35:00.000 I'm not in the commercial mule business.

02:35:03.000 I'm not selling mules for anything.

02:35:07.000 Is that a big business?

02:35:08.000 A commercial mule business?

02:35:10.000 Man, COVID, just like everything, has sent the price of mules through the roof.

02:35:15.000 Really?

02:35:15.000 I don't know if it's COVID, but my mules are probably triple the value of what they were a year ago.

02:35:20.000 Because people want mules now? 1.00

02:35:21.000 Yeah.

02:35:22.000 Maybe it's just because they're cool now.

02:35:23.000 They kind of go in and out of vogue.

02:35:26.000 There's cycles in the mule world.

02:35:28.000 But hunting accelerated during COVID. Yeah, but that's not...

02:35:31.000 The primary use of mules is not hunting, I would say.

02:35:34.000 It's farm work?

02:35:35.000 Recreational riding.

02:35:36.000 Recreational riding.

02:35:37.000 Just in general.

02:35:38.000 Interesting.

02:35:38.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:35:38.000 Mostly equine world is recreational riding.

02:35:41.000 But then outfitters out west sometimes have big herds, big stocks of animals.

02:35:46.000 So the mule trade world is...

02:35:48.000 There's a lot of...

02:35:50.000 There's trainers all over the country, and there's great Western mule trainers, but there are a lot of trainers in the East that train mules year-round, and then they take them to these big mule sales in the Western United States and sell them for big money.

02:36:03.000 So this is a secret I will let you in on.

02:36:05.000 You could come to Arkansas and buy a mule for $1,000 that you'd pay probably $4,000 to $5,000 just for hauling them and selling them somewhere in Idaho.

02:36:16.000 Really?

02:36:17.000 Yeah, don't tell anybody.

02:36:18.000 Too late.

02:36:20.000 I couldn't end this podcast without complimenting you on your mustache. 0.99

02:36:24.000 That's a fucking strong move. 0.99

02:36:25.000 Thank you. 0.99

02:36:25.000 I like how you got the beard integrated, the mustache. 0.99

02:36:29.000 It's sort of a part of the beard, but it's not.

02:36:31.000 It's a great look.

02:36:32.000 Much appreciated.

02:36:33.000 It's very old westy.

02:36:35.000 For a guy who's so into bear hunting and the outdoors and hunting, you got a perfect mustache.

02:36:42.000 That's all I have to say.

02:36:43.000 Thank you.

02:36:43.000 And I appreciate talking to you, man.

02:36:44.000 It was really, really enjoyable.

02:36:46.000 I really do.

02:36:46.000 Thank you so much.

02:36:47.000 And I'm enjoying your podcast very much.

02:36:48.000 It's called Bear Grease.

02:36:50.000 It's available on everything, right?

02:36:52.000 Spotify, iTunes, all that.

02:36:55.000 Thank you, Joe.

02:36:55.000 Thanks, Clay.

02:36:56.000 I really, really enjoyed it.

02:36:57.000 Yeah, thank you.

02:36:58.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 26, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1674 - Clay Newcomb

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Transcript