The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1716 - Steven Rinella

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 You ate meat tobacco?

00:00:13.000 We're up and going.

00:00:14.000 Tell me about this.

00:00:14.000 Oh.

00:00:15.000 Well, I was just telling this story the other day.

00:00:19.000 Are you swallowing?

00:00:20.000 I was just telling this story.

00:00:22.000 Because we had a bunch of the guys I work with, and this other dude, Jared Outlaw, who were all...

00:00:30.000 Big Dip guys.

00:00:31.000 We were having a conversation about Dip.

00:00:32.000 Is Jared the flip-flop flesher?

00:00:35.000 No, no, no.

00:00:35.000 No, that's Seth.

00:00:36.000 That's a guy named Seth. 0.88

00:00:37.000 A lot of the guys I used to work with, or not, a lot of the guys I work with did and do, you know, they're horrible tobacco addicts. 0.93

00:00:46.000 Dip.

00:00:47.000 Because they're all workers, so they don't smoke because it keeps their hands free.

00:00:47.000 Yeah.

00:00:52.000 Um...

00:00:53.000 But I was explaining to them my version, and I feel like it traces to when I was in fifth grade, we had to make agricultural maps of the United States of America, and you had to glue the product, so you get to South Dakota and you glue a little corn kernel.

00:01:08.000 Right, I remember those.

00:01:09.000 Yeah, and put some wheat, you know?

00:01:10.000 Yeah.

00:01:12.000 And for whatever reason, for Virginia, we had tobacco, and someone had brought in, I can't even remember what it was, it must have been loose leaf or plug, and Me and my buddy, I don't even know if this dude remembers,

00:01:28.000 me and my buddy Stanley Johnson ate.

00:01:31.000 We took it out the playground and ate something.

00:01:35.000 Dude, I was, I was, I hallucinated twice as a child.

00:01:41.000 Once on, once when I had to get a root canal.

00:01:45.000 And once when we ate that tobacco.

00:01:47.000 I mean, I was, I was, I was hallucinating.

00:01:50.000 What were you saying?

00:01:52.000 I can't remember.

00:01:52.000 My mom had to come get me.

00:01:57.000 She had to come fetch me from school. 0.82

00:01:58.000 How old were you?

00:01:59.000 Fifth grade.

00:02:00.000 Oh wow. 0.86

00:02:01.000 Unbelievably sick.

00:02:02.000 When I was in, I guess it was 7th grade, 6th or 7th grade, I really got into Tom Sawyer.

00:02:10.000 Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

00:02:11.000 I read all his books.

00:02:12.000 And they were always chewing tobacco, so I bought some.

00:02:17.000 And I tried it and I got very sick.

00:02:19.000 Just like drool pouring out of my mouth.

00:02:22.000 You know, like you get that drooling.

00:02:26.000 That set me off from chewing tobacco.

00:02:29.000 So you were a Mark Twain fan?

00:02:30.000 Oh yeah.

00:02:31.000 Have you had your kids read Mark Twain?

00:02:33.000 No, I haven't.

00:02:35.000 No, I would, though.

00:02:37.000 It's a conversation starter.

00:02:38.000 It certainly is.

00:02:39.000 When you find out about...

00:02:42.000 I don't know how into history they are, but when you just get into the history of people and the history of people in the United States, those books are fascinating books in that regard.

00:02:56.000 Mark Twain is widely regarded as the first stand-up comedian.

00:03:00.000 Oh, I'd buy that.

00:03:01.000 Yeah, because he used to read his books that were humorous in front of people.

00:03:05.000 Oh.

00:03:06.000 And people think that that kind of started out the idea of stand-up comedy.

00:03:10.000 Yeah, he was quick-witted, too.

00:03:12.000 That's good.

00:03:12.000 Yeah.

00:03:14.000 And then there's the name, Mark Twain, which I learned from you.

00:03:17.000 What it meant.

00:03:18.000 Yeah, we covered this all the time.

00:03:19.000 Yeah.

00:03:20.000 Should I share?

00:03:21.000 Yeah, sure, share.

00:03:22.000 So, well, recently there's been some controversy introduced into this, but Mark Twain had worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, so he had a very informed perspective for all of his characters.

00:03:36.000 A riverboat required 12 feet of water.

00:03:41.000 You know the big paddle wheel riverboats?

00:03:43.000 Required 12 feet of water for safe passage.

00:03:47.000 So, there would be a guy up on the front of the boat who'd have a rope with a weight on the end and every fathom, a fathom is a nautical term for six feet, he'd have a knot tied in the rope every fathom.

00:03:59.000 And he'd throw the weight out, the weight hits the bottom, and you see how deep the water is.

00:04:04.000 So, Mark Twain is second Mark.

00:04:08.000 Which is 12 feet.

00:04:09.000 12 feet.

00:04:09.000 So, he describes like you're going through the fog or in the dark and there's some guy up front going, Mark Twain...

00:04:16.000 Some other guy, we recently, someone sent in to us, because we were discussing this on our podcast, and a guy sent us in this book.

00:04:25.000 I can't remember who the hell wrote the book, but he was saying the real thing is, Mark Twain, when he was out, I think when he was out visiting one of the silver mines in Nevada, maybe, he took to go into a bar, and the bar would log how many drinks you had on a chalkboard.

00:04:42.000 So it's like your tab.

00:04:42.000 Okay?

00:04:45.000 In this book, this guy was saying what happened was Twain, whose birth name was Samuel Clemens, Twain would come in and order two drinks by saying...

00:05:00.000 Mark Twain.

00:05:02.000 Meaning, put me down for two marks.

00:05:06.000 So Twain means two?

00:05:08.000 Two.

00:05:09.000 I'm going to start throwing that around.

00:05:11.000 Yeah, I've never heard that used as two.

00:05:13.000 Have you ever heard anybody use it as two?

00:05:15.000 Is that like a forgotten terminology?

00:05:18.000 I don't know, but I bet Jamie's looking it up right now.

00:05:22.000 Here it goes.

00:05:23.000 I've been on the show before.

00:05:23.000 That second one came out.

00:05:25.000 That rumor came out.

00:05:26.000 I guess he was still alive, so I guess he responded to it according to this article.

00:05:30.000 What did he say?

00:05:33.000 It's the nom de plume of Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news for the New Orleans McCain, and he died in 1963, and he no longer needed that signature.

00:05:44.000 1863. So Twain sold it from Twain, from Captain Isaiah Sellers.

00:05:48.000 He said, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor's remains.

00:05:53.000 That is the history of the nom de plure I bear.

00:05:55.000 So he stole it.

00:05:57.000 Interesting.

00:05:59.000 He no longer needed it, because the guy was dead.

00:06:03.000 So he took it from a dead guy. 0.91

00:06:05.000 If you die, I'm going to be like, my name is Joe Rogan.

00:06:08.000 Interesting. 0.96

00:06:09.000 Interesting.

00:06:10.000 So I wanted to tell you, I had a legitimate real-life mountain lion encounter.

00:06:15.000 A big one.

00:06:16.000 A huge one.

00:06:17.000 I saw a real huge mountain lion up close.

00:06:20.000 It was about 30 yards away.

00:06:21.000 We were in a truck, and we were driving. 0.99

00:06:23.000 It was right by a creek, and on the other side of the creek, there was a tree, and underneath that tree was a fucking giant car. 0.93

00:06:31.000 Yeah, the guy I was with, my friend Colton, he saw it first. 1.00

00:06:34.000 He goes, holy shit! 0.99

00:06:36.000 Look at that cat! 1.00

00:06:36.000 Shit! 1.00

00:06:37.000 Look at the size of that mountain lion! 1.00

00:06:38.000 We stop the truck and I see the eyes glowing because it's about 7 p.m.

00:06:44.000 It's just starting to get dark and I get the binos out and I got them like close up, big ol' pumpkin head, giant paws, terrifying, staring at us.

00:06:55.000 Well, just staring at the truck.

00:06:56.000 He knew that there was things inside the truck, I'm sure, moving.

00:07:00.000 Enormous.

00:07:01.000 That's cool.

00:07:01.000 Because I told you I'd seen one before, but it was small.

00:07:01.000 Enormous.

00:07:04.000 The one I'd seen before was like 60, 70 pounds, like a dog size. 1.00

00:07:07.000 This thing was fucking giant. 0.99

00:07:09.000 It was terrifying. 1.00

00:07:09.000 That's great. 1.00

00:07:11.000 See, if you've had two sightings, that's a lot.

00:07:14.000 That's a lot.

00:07:15.000 They're few and far between, man.

00:07:16.000 Yeah.

00:07:17.000 This was the first time I saw one.

00:07:21.000 Clearly.

00:07:22.000 Like, not moving, stationary, looking right at us.

00:07:27.000 The whole encounter lasted 30 seconds.

00:07:29.000 It was like a real view of one. 0.99

00:07:31.000 Like, holy shit. 0.99

00:07:33.000 It was so big, man. 1.00

00:07:35.000 That's good.

00:07:37.000 Enormous forearms.

00:07:39.000 That was the crazy...

00:07:40.000 I was looking at its arms. 1.00

00:07:41.000 It's standing there, like, big-ass paws and this giant fucking head. 0.99

00:07:46.000 Ooh, all I was thinking is, like, if I wasn't in this truck, if I was out on the road, if I was out walking, and I saw that thing from that close... 0.99

00:07:54.000 It scared the shit out of you a little bit. 0.87

00:07:56.000 Oh, my God. 0.65

00:07:57.000 Oh, my God.

00:07:59.000 In Utah, you can get a tag for them, over-the-counter, spot-and-stock, for 50 bucks.

00:08:03.000 Yeah?

00:08:04.000 Yeah, it's hard to get a tag with hounds.

00:08:06.000 Oh, it is?

00:08:07.000 Oh, okay.

00:08:07.000 Yeah.

00:08:08.000 Yeah, it's a draw.

00:08:09.000 Yeah, I think they...

00:08:09.000 It takes a while.

00:08:10.000 Even the states that...

00:08:13.000 The states that, like Washington, used to have a hound season, and they lost it to the animal rights activists, but they still maintain their regular hunting season.

00:08:25.000 Texas treats them like coyotes.

00:08:27.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:08:27.000 You just whack them. 0.99

00:08:29.000 There's a happy middle ground. 0.68

00:08:30.000 Yeah.

00:08:31.000 I think that I think the states that manage them as a big game animal are on the right track.

00:08:41.000 Yeah, the states that don't do anything about them, like California, then you get a case like a couple weeks ago, a five-year-old kid got bitten by a mountain lion in Calabasas.

00:08:50.000 His mom had to punch the thing in the face. 1.00

00:08:52.000 And, you know, the kids in the hospital, the thing bit his fucking head. 0.99

00:08:56.000 Yeah, it was weird. 0.99

00:08:57.000 90-pound cat.

00:08:59.000 Two summers ago, you and I might have talked about this, two summers ago, Oregon, Washington had its first mountain lion fatality in state history in the same summer.

00:09:09.000 Oregon had its first mountain lion fatality in like 98 years in the same summer.

00:09:14.000 And how were they managed up there?

00:09:16.000 Like I said, Washington used to have, they had a hound season, but you can still just get a tag.

00:09:22.000 I was communicating with a guy who was developing a mountain lion hunting strategy that's pretty ingenious.

00:09:30.000 He goes out the same way a hound hunter will go out.

00:09:35.000 When there's fresh snow, he'll go out and drive roads, drive logging roads, whatever, and cut a track.

00:09:42.000 But instead of setting his dogs out on the track, he'll just start tracking the lion.

00:09:48.000 Just walking.

00:09:49.000 Yep.

00:09:50.000 And every time he gets to a good piece of bedding cover, like a grown-up clear-cut or a canyon, he gets to a good piece of bedding cover, he stops and turns his predator collar on.

00:10:02.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:10:03.000 And calls.

00:10:04.000 And he was writing us in saying how he's been trying.

00:10:08.000 I'm like, that's a pretty genius idea, right?

00:10:10.000 Explain to people what a predator collar is.

00:10:11.000 Oh, so you can...

00:10:12.000 A predator collar is a pretty broad term.

00:10:15.000 It just...

00:10:17.000 You can do a mouth-blown predator call, which mimics the sound, typically, of a dying animal.

00:10:24.000 So, if you just went into a sporting goods store and walked up to a shelf and bought a mouth-blown predator call, it would probably mimic the sound of a dying rabbit.

00:10:34.000 You can get, like, jackrabbit, cottontail rabbit, and it's just a horrific sound.

00:10:39.000 It's like, whee!

00:10:40.000 Whee! 1.00

00:10:43.000 Then they have electronic callers that have these massive libraries.

00:10:46.000 So I have an electronic caller.

00:10:49.000 I have a Lucky Duck electronic caller.

00:10:52.000 And it's got a library of dozens and dozens of sounds.

00:10:55.000 So it's like you can have it play woodpeckers in distress.

00:11:00.000 I mean, anything.

00:11:01.000 It's like house cat noises, which is attractive to urban coyotes.

00:11:01.000 Oh, yeah.

00:11:06.000 Oh, wow.

00:11:07.000 Yeah, a vast library of sounds.

00:11:09.000 So he would go and turn a predator call around.

00:11:11.000 And a lot of times, like fawn distress calls, it's just like loud, excitable noises that are attractive to predators.

00:11:20.000 Yeah.

00:11:22.000 And eventually he wrote in that he said he sat down.

00:11:26.000 Turned his collar on.

00:11:28.000 And, you know, I actually say he turned his collar on.

00:11:30.000 I don't know if he was using an electronic, like a battery-powered collar, or a mouth-blown collar, but either way, he said, you know, within a minute, there's the lion.

00:11:39.000 And he got him.

00:11:40.000 Did you see the guy who was trying to scare a mountain lion off? 1.00

00:11:44.000 He's telling him, get the fuck out of here, fuck you. 1.00

00:11:46.000 He's got a Glock pointed at it, and then he shoots it? 1.00

00:11:49.000 You didn't see that?

00:11:49.000 Uh-uh.

00:11:50.000 No.

00:11:51.000 Nor did I see something that's floating around of a dude... 0.69

00:11:55.000 With a machete killing one off his dog.

00:11:57.000 Oh my god. 0.99

00:11:58.000 I haven't seen that one.

00:11:59.000 Well, we were gonna publish it.

00:12:01.000 We were gonna publish it on our website because it hadn't been widely distributed.

00:12:05.000 Is it brutal?

00:12:06.000 I guess it's just too much.

00:12:07.000 I never saw it.

00:12:08.000 I was away.

00:12:09.000 I just came back and heard that we had decided not to do it because it's...

00:12:12.000 And you didn't immediately watch it?

00:12:15.000 I still haven't gotten around to watching it.

00:12:17.000 Your willpower is better than mine.

00:12:17.000 Wow.

00:12:19.000 Yeah, so...

00:12:20.000 Well, I just...

00:12:22.000 So, one of my colleagues, Spencer, he's got a...

00:12:26.000 He and I share an appreciation for those kind of sordid videos, and...

00:12:31.000 Yeah, I gotta ask him for it.

00:12:33.000 Watch this, because this is pretty crazy.

00:12:35.000 Oh.

00:12:36.000 Look at it.

00:12:37.000 I mean...

00:12:40.000 You get back.

00:12:42.000 Back.

00:12:45.000 He's practicing a lot of restraint.

00:12:47.000 Yeah.

00:12:48.000 No.

00:12:49.000 Oh.

00:12:52.000 Mother. 0.99

00:12:53.000 I just had to shoot this mountain lion. 0.99

00:12:57.000 They pounced at me and I popped it in the face. 0.99

00:13:01.000 Holy.

00:13:02.000 That's wild.

00:13:04.000 Holy.

00:13:05.000 I mean, that is close.

00:13:06.000 What do you think that is?

00:13:07.000 10 yards?

00:13:08.000 If that?

00:13:08.000 It was close.

00:13:09.000 Oh, my God.

00:13:10.000 Yeah.

00:13:11.000 See, he'll report himself probably and he'll do like an investigation. 0.98

00:13:15.000 Holy s***. 0.91

00:13:16.000 And he'll definitely... 0.99

00:13:17.000 Oh, he'll get off for sure.

00:13:19.000 Look how close...

00:13:20.000 Go back to that.

00:13:21.000 Look how close that is.

00:13:22.000 That's amazing, man.

00:13:22.000 That's not even ten yards.

00:13:24.000 I mean, that might be fucking five yards. 0.97

00:13:26.000 No, it's feet. 0.98

00:13:27.000 You know Yanni had a... 1.00

00:13:28.000 That's a big one, too.

00:13:29.000 Look how big that thing is. 0.95

00:13:30.000 See, I disagree.

00:13:32.000 You don't think that's 90 pounds?

00:13:33.000 100 pounds?

00:13:34.000 It's not big.

00:13:34.000 Oh, yeah.

00:13:34.000 Okay, yeah.

00:13:35.000 The one I saw was like $1.60.

00:13:37.000 Giannis had several of them come into his turkey call this year.

00:13:40.000 Yeah, had a three-pack come in.

00:13:40.000 Ooh.

00:13:42.000 Jesus.

00:13:43.000 A female, two of her kits came into the turkey call. 0.95

00:13:46.000 What did he do?

00:13:47.000 I don't know what he did.

00:13:49.000 He didn't freak out.

00:13:52.000 I think he shooed him off or started talking to him.

00:13:55.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:13:56.000 Yeah.

00:13:56.000 Because he was calling to a turkey...

00:13:59.000 And the Lions were kind of coming from behind off to his right side, and he's not certain whether they were going to pass by his right shoulder on the way to the real turkey, or if they were going to him.

00:14:14.000 What else is funny that just happened this spring, he has this on video.

00:14:20.000 He shoots a turkey.

00:14:22.000 Well, he has the Lions on video, too.

00:14:25.000 He's got them on his Instagram, but he shoots a turkey, and And all of a sudden, I mean, no soon does that turkey get hit that a coyote has it and is running away.

00:14:38.000 Trying to grab it.

00:14:40.000 Wow.

00:14:40.000 Or since they run away, trying to like wrassle the turkey.

00:14:44.000 So did he shoot the coyote?

00:14:45.000 No.

00:14:46.000 But he's just standing there.

00:14:47.000 And the coyote was, because, you know, they'll come into the turkey sounds.

00:14:50.000 So, shoots the turkey, the coyote comes out, and then the coyote doesn't run off until he kind of goes at it to spook it.

00:14:59.000 But it stayed right there while he shot the turkey. 0.99

00:15:01.000 They are so fucking bold, those things. 0.98

00:15:04.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:15:04.000 They're so clever, too. 0.98

00:15:06.000 They come in...

00:15:07.000 One of my buddies, Seth, I think they called in three coyotes turkey hunting in one day this spring.

00:15:12.000 I've had black bears, bobcats...

00:15:18.000 Sorry, a black bear, a bobcat, many coyotes come in to turkey calls, but I have never had the lion thing, but I got a few friends that have done lions, and I feel that that is the greatest.

00:15:29.000 That's a good achievement.

00:15:30.000 Were you the one who told me the story about turkey hunting where you heard something behind you and it was a bear?

00:15:36.000 Was that you?

00:15:37.000 Yeah, I heard an exhale.

00:15:38.000 I didn't know it was there until it exhaled in my ear.

00:15:42.000 How far away?

00:15:43.000 Inches.

00:15:44.000 Inches.

00:15:45.000 Me to you.

00:15:45.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:15:46.000 No, I'm not joking, man.

00:15:47.000 Like, exhaled in my ear.

00:15:49.000 It was like he got there and couldn't figure out what was going on.

00:15:51.000 I all of a sudden heard him go.

00:15:53.000 And I turned and just, yeah.

00:15:56.000 How big was he?

00:15:57.000 I don't know.

00:15:58.000 I don't know.

00:15:59.000 I honestly didn't.

00:16:00.000 It was so, like, disconcerting and he was gone so fast.

00:16:04.000 But, yeah, I wouldn't be able to say.

00:16:07.000 I think that all these people that vote against mountain lion hunting and have this perception of mountain lions need to be around one.

00:16:13.000 They need to experience that just to understand that those things need to be managed or they will kill your kids.

00:16:18.000 Like you really need to see it.

00:16:20.000 I don't know that they...

00:16:21.000 I mean, it's so seldom that they do...

00:16:25.000 No, it's not going to happen.

00:16:26.000 No.

00:16:26.000 It's not a realistic adventure.

00:16:28.000 I just think, in my view, if they're well-managed, in my view, they need to be managed as a renewable resource.

00:16:38.000 Right, but see that term?

00:16:40.000 What's with the shooting star?

00:16:42.000 This guy, it just came with the setup.

00:16:45.000 Well, we bought these star panels.

00:16:47.000 They have the option for a shooting star.

00:16:49.000 We thought it'd be cool.

00:16:50.000 One shot over the deck.

00:16:50.000 Oh, yeah.

00:16:52.000 But the look that people get when they're not sure what's going on.

00:16:55.000 You know, Twain was born in the year of Halley's Comet and died when Halley's Comet came back, and he predicted that he would die?

00:17:01.000 Whoa.

00:17:02.000 He came with the comet and left with the comet.

00:17:04.000 Wow.

00:17:05.000 That's pretty intense.

00:17:05.000 Yeah.

00:17:06.000 Back to Mount...

00:17:07.000 That term, renewable resources, like, that's a good term.

00:17:10.000 Like, you use that term as a hunter and as a conservationist, but...

00:17:15.000 Most people...

00:17:16.000 The problem is like the people that vote, right?

00:17:19.000 Like a good example is British Columbia, right?

00:17:21.000 Because British Columbia bans grizzly hunting because they think grizzly hunting is trophy hunting.

00:17:27.000 Meanwhile, they're like overrun with grizzlies.

00:17:29.000 They have a lot of grizzlies and they would manage them by controlling their population and would...

00:17:33.000 You know, it would keep people from getting attacked, it would keep livestock from getting attacked, and the encounters were frequent.

00:17:40.000 Like, my friend Mike lives up there, and he's like, there is no shortage of grizzly bears.

00:17:44.000 Like, they're all over the place up here.

00:17:46.000 He goes, and now what they've done is they've stopped people from managing them because the people in the cities, who never have any encounters with them whatsoever, think that it's unsightly to hunt them.

00:17:57.000 But they allow black bear hunting.

00:17:59.000 Because black bear seems to be something that people actually do eat.

00:18:04.000 But then you can't gut them.

00:18:08.000 Because if you gut them, they're worried that people are shooting them just for their gallbladders.

00:18:12.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:18:14.000 So it's wild.

00:18:15.000 Yeah, for a long time you couldn't have a gallbladder in your possession.

00:18:17.000 Isn't that crazy?

00:18:18.000 You couldn't even use your own bear's gallbladder.

00:18:21.000 But here's the problem that I see.

00:18:28.000 Okay, ducks don't kill people, generally.

00:18:34.000 Oh, you know what I was reading the other day?

00:18:36.000 This state has more animal deaths, by far and away, Texas has more people killed by animals than any other state.

00:18:47.000 Well, there's more tigers in captivity in Texas than in all the wild of the world.

00:18:52.000 You know, it winds up being dogs.

00:18:53.000 Dogs kill people here?

00:18:54.000 Are the number one. 0.69

00:18:55.000 Really?

00:18:56.000 What kind of dogs?

00:18:57.000 Feral dogs, domestic dogs.

00:18:59.000 Feral dogs?

00:19:00.000 Yeah, dogs kill...

00:19:00.000 So, Texas...

00:19:03.000 North Dakota and Rhode Island had zero animal deaths.

00:19:09.000 Very low populations.

00:19:10.000 One's small and one has a very low population density of humans.

00:19:15.000 And one's just small enough to not have that many citizens.

00:19:18.000 But yeah, Texas is number one.

00:19:19.000 California is a distant second.

00:19:21.000 Wild pigs, dogs, rattlesnakes.

00:19:25.000 But here's the thing.

00:19:26.000 Ducks don't kill people. 0.98

00:19:29.000 Generally.

00:19:30.000 Generally.

00:19:32.000 If you're going to go around and determine what we should be allowed to hunt based on what might kill you if we don't hunt it, I would be worried about the future of duck hunting.

00:19:42.000 Well, no, I wouldn't say that.

00:19:45.000 I'm more inclined to be like, in my desire to sort of bracket things...

00:19:53.000 I would say if you have sustainable, harvestable populations of wildlife, and you have a public interest in exploiting that wildlife, and it can be exploited without long-term detriment to the species,

00:20:10.000 that should be allowed.

00:20:12.000 That's very reasonable.

00:20:13.000 But ducks are on menus in restaurants.

00:20:15.000 Grizzly bears are not.

00:20:17.000 The difference is people don't think of grizzly bears as something that you would eat.

00:20:21.000 That's correct.

00:20:24.000 Peking duck.

00:20:25.000 It's a common dish.

00:20:26.000 Ducks are in a lot of restaurants.

00:20:28.000 No, I was very sad.

00:20:29.000 I was very sad to see what happened in BC, and I think it's emotionally charged.

00:20:33.000 I think you're seeing the same thing.

00:20:35.000 You see routinely the same thing around wolves.

00:20:39.000 Just this morning, someone shared an article.

00:20:44.000 Montana just rewrote some of their wolf hunting rules and expanded some areas.

00:20:48.000 And they used to have, outside of Yellowstone National Park, they had hunting districts that had these very strict quotas.

00:20:54.000 They liberalized wolf hunting in Montana because we have a lot of wolves.

00:20:59.000 And there's a pack in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley, there's a pack of 24 wolves.

00:21:07.000 And three of those wolves this year have been killed outside the park.

00:21:12.000 So now you can expect renewed calls for the park's jurisdiction to extend further away from the edges of the park in order to protect that because people will routinely call them Yellowstone's wolves rather than Montana's wolves.

00:21:31.000 Yeah, that is an interesting situation, right?

00:21:33.000 Because you have this park that everyone visits.

00:21:36.000 And, you know, I went there and I took a selfie with the elk.

00:21:39.000 They're hanging out in front of a Pepsi machine because it's so bizarre.

00:21:42.000 Did you get a bunch of social media backlash?

00:21:44.000 No, I didn't put it up.

00:21:45.000 No, I just took the picture because I just thought it was so strange that we're all just standing there and there's elk just lying down on the ground.

00:21:53.000 Yeah, completely habituated humans.

00:21:54.000 Yeah.

00:21:55.000 They've done a great job of restoring...

00:21:59.000 Natural predators to the landscape, but they overlooked one, which is the human predator.

00:22:06.000 So, you had 9,000 years at a minimum.

00:22:11.000 This is just based on direct...

00:22:14.000 Archaeological evidence.

00:22:15.000 We have 9,000 years of human hunters on the landscape in Yellowstone National Park, the last hundred years notwithstanding.

00:22:23.000 We've gone through great effort to restore natural predators in that ecosystem.

00:22:28.000 Not humans.

00:22:29.000 Not that we don't have a very heavy hand in Yellowstone.

00:22:32.000 Humans have an enormously heavy hand in Yellowstone.

00:22:35.000 What I wanted to do when I retired...

00:22:38.000 I used to want to campaign.

00:22:40.000 This is not going to make a hell of a lot of sense to people, but I wanted to campaign to make Hunter's Orange laws standardized around the country.

00:22:49.000 Not with a federal law, but just get all states on board.

00:22:55.000 Yeah, because...

00:22:57.000 Like, in some states you have to have 400 inches of blaze orange when you're hunting with a firearm.

00:23:01.000 Some states it's like 500 inches of blaze orange.

00:23:03.000 Some states it's no blaze orange.

00:23:04.000 Wyoming, you gotta have an orange hat.

00:23:06.000 I was gonna be like, I was gonna dedicate my life to making it be that all states adopted the Wyoming rule.

00:23:12.000 Only hat.

00:23:13.000 Orange hat.

00:23:13.000 You think that's enough?

00:23:14.000 Yeah, I do.

00:23:15.000 If you want to wear more, wear more.

00:23:17.000 Is all orange, does that work if you have colorblindness?

00:23:20.000 I have no idea.

00:23:21.000 It's interesting, right?

00:23:22.000 I wonder what that means.

00:23:23.000 I don't even know what they see.

00:23:25.000 But let me tell you what I'm going to do now when I retire.

00:23:26.000 Oh, okay.

00:23:26.000 Go ahead.

00:23:27.000 No, I'll get back.

00:23:27.000 Are you going to retire?

00:23:28.000 You're not going to retire.

00:23:29.000 No, but when I do retire, I'm going to campaign, I'm going to make it my life's work to have Yellowstone National Park turned into a wilderness area.

00:23:37.000 Really?

00:23:38.000 Yeah.

00:23:38.000 All the infrastructure.

00:23:40.000 I'm going to fight hard.

00:23:41.000 I need a slogan for it that's as catchy as Make America Great Again.

00:23:45.000 But isn't the problem that those animals are so habituated?

00:23:49.000 They're so used to humans that it's almost like it would take a long time.

00:23:53.000 You remember when- It'd take about a year.

00:23:55.000 About one year?

00:23:55.000 Yeah?

00:23:56.000 And then they'd figure it out?

00:23:56.000 Yeah.

00:23:57.000 Yeah.

00:23:58.000 I don't want to mess up travel.

00:24:01.000 So the highways that cut through there would stay open, but most of the infrastructure would go.

00:24:06.000 Wildlife management would go to the states of Wyoming and Montana, and it would become a wilderness area.

00:24:12.000 That's a great designation, because in a wilderness area, it would enjoy greater protections.

00:24:19.000 Than it has as a national park.

00:24:21.000 How so?

00:24:23.000 Federally designated wilderness is non-motorized.

00:24:26.000 Oh, I see.

00:24:27.000 But wouldn't that cut down on tourist dollars?

00:24:29.000 Oh, yeah.

00:24:30.000 We'd have to figure something else out.

00:24:33.000 Listen, weed's going legal in Montana.

00:24:35.000 Is it?

00:24:36.000 Yeah.

00:24:36.000 So that's where all the money is?

00:24:40.000 I'll figure that out.

00:24:41.000 When I retire, I'll get all the details sorted out, but I just think it's time to restore the human predator. 1.00

00:24:47.000 It's time to do what's right on that landscape and protect it.

00:24:50.000 That's an interesting way of looking at it.

00:24:52.000 So protect it from vehicles, too, because that is an issue in that area, right?

00:24:57.000 Yeah, just quiet, just mellow things out, quiet things down, and restore the human predator. 0.97

00:25:03.000 I just gotta think of a sweet slogan.

00:25:05.000 It's such a massive place for tourist dollars.

00:25:09.000 I mean, so many people visit Yellowstone every year just to look at the animals and occasionally get knocked through the air by a buffalo. 0.89

00:25:16.000 Those bison videos where people get too close, those are fucking hilarious because they happen every year. 1.00

00:25:21.000 People go flying through the air and flip and land on their head. 0.93

00:25:26.000 To return to Hunter's Orange.

00:25:28.000 Yeah.

00:25:29.000 You had a question about Hunter's Orange, about being colorblind?

00:25:31.000 Yeah.

00:25:32.000 I don't know, but the whitetail hunter...

00:25:37.000 Oh, here it is.

00:25:38.000 Can deer see an orange...

00:25:39.000 Well, that's deer.

00:25:41.000 Yeah, listen, here's the thing.

00:25:43.000 God bless you, Jamie.

00:25:49.000 Lots been written about what deer see.

00:25:52.000 It's just speculation.

00:25:54.000 Because their eyeballs function very differently.

00:25:57.000 Yeah, it's just different.

00:25:57.000 So what they see and how they respond to it.

00:25:59.000 But interestingly, Mark Canyon, who's a very avid whitetail hunter, he can't blood trail.

00:26:10.000 Because he can't see blood?

00:26:11.000 Yeah, because of colorblind issues.

00:26:13.000 Oh, wow.

00:26:15.000 That's crazy.

00:26:18.000 What if he uses a black light?

00:26:20.000 Maybe it's his dad.

00:26:20.000 No, I think it is him that can't.

00:26:22.000 No, he's got to use various tricks or bring someone in, but he can't clearly pick up blood.

00:26:28.000 And blood trailing, for me, now that my eyeballs are going bad, short range.

00:26:34.000 Do you use glasses?

00:26:35.000 Reading glasses.

00:26:36.000 But when you blood trail?

00:26:38.000 I hadn't thought of it.

00:26:39.000 Why not?

00:26:41.000 My eyes get worse every day now.

00:26:44.000 Not every day, but it's noticeable.

00:26:47.000 With this year, blood trailing, I had a younger person with me, the flip-flop flasher, Seth.

00:26:55.000 And he was spotting 10 drops to my one, and I realized it's like I'm used to looking for blood up close too much. 0.92

00:27:02.000 And I gotta back up or get my damn glasses on because it's getting harder to blood trail.

00:27:07.000 Have you taken any supplements for your eyes? 0.97

00:27:10.000 No, because it's only right now.

00:27:12.000 No, I'm ready to do anything, man.

00:27:13.000 It's only right now becoming a thing for me where it's starting to...

00:27:16.000 But we've been talking about it for a couple years.

00:27:18.000 I know, but now...

00:27:19.000 Now it's a real issue.

00:27:20.000 Listen, you see this?

00:27:21.000 Yeah.

00:27:22.000 What's that? 1.00

00:27:23.000 Oh, you got glasses in the back of your fucking case for your phone. 1.00

00:27:28.000 It's not bad. 1.00

00:27:29.000 Let me see them glasses.

00:27:30.000 I hit a point where I couldn't order in a dark restaurant.

00:27:34.000 And my friend lent me those so I could order.

00:27:39.000 These are hilarious.

00:27:40.000 Dude, those are great.

00:27:40.000 You look cool in those, too.

00:27:41.000 Do it?

00:27:43.000 And I had to use his to order, and then I used his to order a set of those.

00:27:49.000 These look like you've had Vaseline on your fingers and you've just been, like, trying to polish them.

00:27:54.000 I haven't cleaned them yet.

00:27:56.000 Oh, yeah, but anyways, blood trailing's getting hard.

00:27:59.000 Hunter's, yeah, Hunter's Orange, I think, is...

00:28:02.000 You know, I think it's a good idea.

00:28:04.000 Some states don't require it at all.

00:28:05.000 The state we're sitting in right now doesn't have a hunter's orange law.

00:28:08.000 Right.

00:28:08.000 Did you hear about that?

00:28:09.000 The guy who got shot, Archie Hunter, got shot by a muzzleloader hunter in Colorado this year?

00:28:16.000 This year?

00:28:17.000 I haven't heard that.

00:28:17.000 Yeah.

00:28:18.000 I know it happens every year.

00:28:19.000 I hadn't heard that.

00:28:20.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:28:21.000 I mean, you just got to wonder, how the fuck does a person think a person is an animal? 0.96

00:28:26.000 I mean, how does that ever happen? 0.99

00:28:28.000 Not only that, He thought he was an animal, and he thought he was aiming at its lungs.

00:28:36.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

00:28:37.000 Yeah, I mean, I think the archery hunter was in full camo, and this guy, you know.

00:28:44.000 My friend Robert Abernathy got shot turkey hunting, and Really?

00:28:50.000 I know a handful of people have all been shot turkey hunting.

00:28:50.000 Yeah.

00:28:53.000 I know one guy's been shot turkey hunting twice.

00:28:56.000 Jesus Christ.

00:28:58.000 In the same spot.

00:28:59.000 Did he have, like, was he using some fan in front of him or something like that?

00:29:04.000 He was doing something that's pretty taboo, which is he was mimicking the sound of a gobbler. 0.96

00:29:13.000 So, when you're hunting turkeys in the spring, you have to kill males. 0.93

00:29:13.000 He was mimicking... 0.93

00:29:16.000 Right.

00:29:17.000 And you usually make a sound of a female to draw a male in. 0.99

00:29:20.000 Well, he...

00:29:21.000 You can really...

00:29:23.000 It can be effective to mimic the sound of a male.

00:29:27.000 It's like a challenge.

00:29:28.000 A challenge, right?

00:29:31.000 So...

00:29:31.000 You'll appreciate, like, cow calling at an elk, but a little bugling at an elk can get his blood boiling.

00:29:39.000 He was...

00:29:42.000 Had pulled all of the stops and started mimicking the sound of a male and got shot.

00:29:48.000 Then he's hunting the same spot years later, mimics the sound of a male, gets shot by a different guy.

00:29:54.000 And very different attitudes to these two different people.

00:29:54.000 Jesus Christ.

00:29:57.000 The one guy that shot him wanted to fight with him and blame it on him.

00:30:02.000 The other guy that shot him felt so bad that he quit hunting and he had to befriend him And make him comfortable to go hunting again.

00:30:15.000 So one person took an adversarial approach to the man he shot and one person was deeply repentant to the point where he gave up the discipline.

00:30:23.000 I was watching a video yesterday of a woman who rear-ended this guy in a Lamborghini and then got out and started screaming and yelling at him that he hit her car and the guy was laughing.

00:30:33.000 Did you see that video?

00:30:34.000 They show the video from the gas station. 1.00

00:30:36.000 The guy's like, what the fuck are you talking? 1.00

00:30:37.000 And then she gets mad at him for being white. 1.00

00:30:39.000 But she's white. 0.99

00:30:40.000 Isn't she white? 1.00

00:30:41.000 Kind of white?

00:30:42.000 I don't know. 0.99

00:30:43.000 But I mean, it's like a literal crazy person. 0.93

00:30:43.000 She looked white. 0.93

00:30:46.000 Like maybe just trying to make up an excuse for why she was in a car accident. 0.91

00:30:49.000 But she clearly takes a turn, slams into this guy's car.

00:30:53.000 The guy pulls over to the gas station.

00:30:55.000 She gets out and knocks on his door. 1.00

00:30:56.000 You hit my fucking car! 1.00

00:30:57.000 And screaming and yelling at him. 1.00

00:30:59.000 Like, you shoot a person? 1.00

00:30:59.000 People are nuts. 1.00

00:31:01.000 You should definitely fucking apologize. 1.00

00:31:02.000 Because you didn't even... 0.99

00:31:04.000 You didn't even look.

00:31:05.000 I mean, did you think that guy was a turkey?

00:31:08.000 The guy that got shot twice, his name is Preston Pittman.

00:31:11.000 What was the story with the first one?

00:31:13.000 So that was a good friend of mine, Robert.

00:31:15.000 Who shot him?

00:31:16.000 No, no, no, no.

00:31:17.000 Oh, the guy that got shot twice?

00:31:20.000 Who shot him the first time they wanted to fight him?

00:31:20.000 Yeah.

00:31:23.000 I don't know a lot of details about the guy that wanted to fight him.

00:31:25.000 But that's a crazy person, right?

00:31:26.000 Yeah, the guy shot him and then got mad at him for making a gobble. 0.94

00:31:30.000 But he didn't even look.

00:31:32.000 That's what's so crazy.

00:31:33.000 It's all movement.

00:31:34.000 Listen, man.

00:31:36.000 You know...

00:31:37.000 How bad did he get shot?

00:31:40.000 20 gauge?

00:31:42.000 I can't remember.

00:31:42.000 But yeah, he got bad.

00:31:43.000 Penetrated his skin.

00:31:45.000 He got bad.

00:31:46.000 Like, in his skin.

00:31:48.000 My friend Robert got shot.

00:31:52.000 We're talking about what size shotgun pellets you use to hunt turkeys.

00:31:57.000 Robert Abernathy was saying to me how he's like, man, I can't remember what size it was.

00:32:03.000 There's like a large pellet.

00:32:05.000 Maybe twos or something.

00:32:07.000 And he said, you shouldn't be able to use those.

00:32:09.000 Those things hurt.

00:32:11.000 I'm like, what do you mean those things hurt?

00:32:13.000 He goes, that's what I got shot with.

00:32:15.000 He was hunting, and he was sitting there listening for a gobbler, and there was a stump in front of him.

00:32:24.000 And he said that he lifted his foot up and put his foot on the stump.

00:32:29.000 And all of a sudden, BAM! Someone shoot him in the foot? 0.88

00:32:31.000 Yeah, and in conversation with the man that shot his leg, the man said to him, when you lifted your foot up on that stump, it looked like a gobbler going into full strut. 0.96

00:32:44.000 Oh my god, that guy's blinder than you.

00:32:46.000 No, listen man, I'm only blind up close.

00:32:50.000 It's just, yeah, so...

00:32:52.000 God, it's just so crazy that people just pull the trigger on a movement.

00:32:55.000 Yeah.

00:32:56.000 You know, I can't...

00:32:58.000 Listen, I definitely can't condone it, but you kind of get it.

00:33:04.000 I don't condone it.

00:33:07.000 I don't condone it.

00:33:09.000 When I hear something like that, though, to be honest with you, one of my first—I have twin feelings— One of condemnation of the individual and one of like some level of, you know, like a level of sympathy.

00:33:26.000 Didn't one of your friends get shot through the backpack by a rifle hunter?

00:33:30.000 Yeah.

00:33:31.000 What happened there?

00:33:32.000 He was deer hunting in Washington.

00:33:37.000 Got shot through his backpack.

00:33:39.000 That guy got in trouble.

00:33:40.000 The guy that shot him through his backpack got in trouble. 0.99

00:33:42.000 He fucking should. 0.99

00:33:44.000 Um... 0.99

00:33:45.000 Jesus Christ.

00:33:46.000 Yeah, I probably told him.

00:33:46.000 My dad got shot in the foot.

00:33:49.000 He just got shot in the foot rabbit hunting.

00:33:52.000 But that was an accident, right?

00:33:53.000 That wasn't a mistaken identity. 0.69

00:33:55.000 That was just a guy thumbing with a hammer on his shotgun and shot him in the foot.

00:34:01.000 You know what you and I were talking about?

00:34:03.000 But you said you wanted to talk about it now.

00:34:06.000 Yeah.

00:34:07.000 Is the COVID in deer.

00:34:09.000 Yeah, the deer are testing positive for COVID. And they don't really understand why, right?

00:34:15.000 Isn't that correct?

00:34:16.000 No.

00:34:18.000 I mean, they've done...

00:34:20.000 Hundreds of deer in multiple states.

00:34:22.000 I think it was Michigan had the highest.

00:34:25.000 Like 68% of the deer they checked.

00:34:26.000 And they checked over 100 of them.

00:34:28.000 Isn't that incredible?

00:34:29.000 Because that's more than any population of humans.

00:34:32.000 At any point in time, what's the population of humans that test positive for COVID? I mean, it can't be more than a few percent.

00:34:39.000 They're positive for the antibodies.

00:34:41.000 No, I mean, oh, positive for the antibodies.

00:34:43.000 Oh, but not positive for COVID. Not positive.

00:34:45.000 And they don't know that it has any...

00:34:47.000 They don't know that it has...

00:34:51.000 Any effect on them.

00:34:53.000 So when I first heard that, a wildlife biologist in Arizona named James Heffelfinger sent me some information about that.

00:35:03.000 When I first heard it, I was like, yeah man, but maybe it's something that was always there, but you weren't looking for it, or there's a false marker.

00:35:14.000 And he wrote back with a bunch of information on it, and they had all these serums That they've banked from over the years.

00:35:23.000 Serums meaning like blood samples?

00:35:24.000 Yeah.

00:35:25.000 They have banked blood samples from deer.

00:35:29.000 Probably just for this sort of thing, right?

00:35:30.000 Right.

00:35:31.000 And when they go back pre-COVID and look at all these deer samples, it's not there.

00:35:37.000 Wow.

00:35:38.000 That's so fascinating.

00:35:38.000 And now it's there.

00:35:40.000 We're laughing that it all comes...

00:35:41.000 I was joking that it's either like a really good hunter who gets very close to deer...

00:35:49.000 That's one theory.

00:35:50.000 Probably not right.

00:35:51.000 I had a theory that it comes from Doug Dern's urine.

00:35:56.000 Did he have COVID? Buckman juice.

00:35:58.000 I don't think he's had it, but I know that his urine is very attractive to deer.

00:36:04.000 But he hasn't had COVID, so that doesn't work.

00:36:07.000 Yeah, and I thought maybe it came from Doug.

00:36:09.000 My whole family got COVID. He's like a deer man.

00:36:13.000 He's around deer all the time.

00:36:16.000 But I don't really get it.

00:36:18.000 Another thing I could picture...

00:36:24.000 I don't know that this is true.

00:36:26.000 If I was in charge of examining this, a thing that I would be curious to look at would be captive cervids, which are in very close proximity to people.

00:36:36.000 Which is also how they spread CWD. Yeah, CWD can be spread that way.

00:36:39.000 They just had another deer farm that had shipped 100 and some CWD positive deer around the country.

00:36:45.000 You could see that that would be a case where you had...

00:36:55.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:37:03.000 Yeah.

00:37:14.000 Yeah, but that's highly unlikely.

00:37:16.000 It sure seems like it.

00:37:17.000 Because outside contamination of people, people getting COVID outside is almost unheard of.

00:37:23.000 Yeah.

00:37:24.000 And it shows up in, like, zoo animals, close proximity to humans.

00:37:28.000 It shows up in, like, fur farms, like all the mink they had to destroy in Norway, close proximity to humans. 0.95

00:37:28.000 Does it? 0.95

00:37:33.000 I heard tigers, like, in the zoo.

00:37:35.000 They've caught tigers in the zoo.

00:37:36.000 My whole family got COVID, and I was curious to see how my dog would react.

00:37:42.000 Like, whether he would get it.

00:37:44.000 Because, you know, I didn't, like, shy away from him.

00:37:46.000 Like, a lot of times I watch TV, and he, like, on the couch, he likes to hop up on the couch and cuddle.

00:37:51.000 So, like, while I was home all day sick with COVID, he just hopped up with me and hung out with me. 0.97

00:37:57.000 So I'm like, should I be fucking petting him like this? 0.97

00:37:59.000 Oh, yeah. 0.98

00:38:00.000 I'm like, he seems all right.

00:38:01.000 We had that argument where, when I had COVID, I was out in our guest house quarantining.

00:38:08.000 I was gone when I got it and got home.

00:38:11.000 And before I went in to see my family, we have a little guest house.

00:38:14.000 I went out there and eventually got my test back and had COVID. And I let the dog in.

00:38:20.000 Oh, and then into the house, too.

00:38:22.000 And then we had to do all the...

00:38:24.000 My wife's like, I don't know, what happens now? 0.99

00:38:26.000 Is the dog supposed to quarantine?

00:38:28.000 I think the dog should quarantine, probably.

00:38:30.000 We didn't quarantine the dog.

00:38:31.000 I was the last one in my family to get it, so I wasn't worried about them getting it, because they already had antibodies.

00:38:37.000 But I'm like, what about the dog?

00:38:39.000 But I'm like, I think he's probably already had it. 0.99

00:38:41.000 I don't want to test him, because I don't want to put him through a fucking blood test. 0.99

00:38:45.000 No, it's funny about dogs. 0.99

00:38:47.000 The weirdest thing about quarantining with it...

00:38:50.000 At first, man, my kids are upset.

00:38:52.000 They're crying, you know, like, very confused.

00:38:56.000 Oh, because you can't come in the house?

00:38:57.000 Oh, yeah, I'm out in the garage, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, you know?

00:39:00.000 Oh, wow.

00:39:00.000 Because then, you know, if you come up to me, then you're not supposed to go to school, and, like, I'm going to go out there, and they're, like, upset, and they're making artwork for me and bringing me food.

00:39:09.000 And after a few days, they're just like, the fuck's that guy? 0.99

00:39:14.000 They got used to it? 0.99

00:39:15.000 It was like I ceased to exist after a few days.

00:39:19.000 Kids adapt.

00:39:19.000 Wow.

00:39:21.000 That's funny.

00:39:22.000 Oh, yeah, man.

00:39:22.000 That's funny.

00:39:23.000 It was like they forgot all about me.

00:39:24.000 I was out there, you know...

00:39:28.000 Taking naps and stuff like that.

00:39:30.000 It is interesting about the zoo animals, because the zoo animals may be close proximity, but all of it outside, and then also no real physical contact with zoo animals.

00:39:40.000 What are you talking about no physical contact with zoo animals?

00:39:43.000 Like tigers?

00:39:45.000 I've read that tigers had gotten it.

00:39:48.000 Like, big cat.

00:39:49.000 See if you can find that.

00:39:51.000 I'm pretty sure that's what I read, that these tigers have gotten to the zoo, unless maybe they had to handle the tiger.

00:39:56.000 If you're talking about 15, if the new...

00:39:59.000 Not the new.

00:40:00.000 There's this sort of, like, weird rule of thumb that, you know...

00:40:04.000 You know the rule of thumb, like, 15 minutes, 6 feet?

00:40:07.000 Yeah, it's nonsense.

00:40:08.000 Nine lions and tigers at the National Zoo are being treated for COVID. So through the fence or cage or whatever.

00:40:14.000 Wow, that's a couple weeks ago.

00:40:15.000 Of course they're spending that amount of time.

00:40:16.000 You know what, at my kids' school, you know what they do that's really interesting?

00:40:19.000 You know the whole, like, 15 minutes, 6 feet thing?

00:40:22.000 Mm-hmm.

00:40:23.000 They limit their, my boy, my older boy, they limit his lunchtime to 15 minutes.

00:40:28.000 Oh, well that doesn't make any sense.

00:40:30.000 Because then they're like, yeah, no one's gonna, how can they?

00:40:34.000 But that's, with the Delta variant, which is the predominant variant now, that's not real.

00:40:39.000 Because now it's like 30 seconds.

00:40:40.000 Yeah, he likes to shoot the breeze with his bodies too, so it's hard for him to get his lunch eaten. 0.96

00:40:44.000 That's silly. 0.71

00:40:46.000 Remember when we were kids who had chicken pox? 0.93

00:40:49.000 You'd go over your friend's house so you could get chicken pox.

00:40:51.000 If you had chicken pox, everybody would go and get chicken pox.

00:40:54.000 Let's get it over with.

00:40:55.000 Now we're scared of something that doesn't even harm kids.

00:40:59.000 Zookeepers first noticed last week that the animals were displaying symptoms including decreased energy and appetite and coughing and sneezing.

00:41:06.000 The animals are now being treated with anti-inflammatories, anti-nausea medication, antibiotics, the latter of which is intended to address a likely secondary bacterial pneumonia.

00:41:15.000 God, I didn't even do any of that stuff.

00:41:17.000 No, that's pretty crazy, though, that it's...

00:41:19.000 Presumptive positive?

00:41:21.000 Oh, interesting.

00:41:23.000 A tested presumptive?

00:41:24.000 Interesting.

00:41:25.000 Maybe they don't have an actual animal COVID test or something?

00:41:27.000 I don't know what that means.

00:41:28.000 That's a good point.

00:41:29.000 Good catch, Jamie. 0.98

00:41:30.000 You know, when the pandemic started, When shit really hit the fan, I was in Baja with my family.

00:41:37.000 And I got back and I called my friend, Chester Floyd. 0.93

00:41:41.000 And I said, this is the most prophetic thing anybody said about COVID to me.

00:41:46.000 I said, Chester, man, what do you think about all this that's going on?

00:41:50.000 And Chester said, man, I think a lot of people got a lot of opinions. 0.99

00:41:58.000 And holy shit. 0.99

00:41:59.000 Holy shit, was he right? 1.00

00:42:01.000 Dude, he was on to something. 0.99

00:42:03.000 Oh my god.

00:42:04.000 You know, I wonder how much, like, if you could get a gauge of the overall anxiety of the world, how much it decreased yesterday when Facebook was down.

00:42:14.000 Mmm! 0.89

00:42:16.000 You know how you go by those trails and it has like, here's your fire warning for the day.

00:42:21.000 Yeah.

00:42:22.000 You see the green?

00:42:22.000 It has all these different colors.

00:42:24.000 If there was like an anxiety meter and you could go by and see like, what was it like with no Facebook?

00:42:30.000 And Instagram, both. 0.99

00:42:32.000 I bet that shit would be pretty light. 0.99

00:42:34.000 Twitter's still up, which is probably like 50% of the anxiety is Twitter, but 50% of it might be Facebook. 0.99

00:42:41.000 It might, yeah.

00:42:42.000 It's probably good, and it's funny that...

00:42:43.000 All social media anxiety?

00:42:45.000 You know, I use social media as a...

00:42:48.000 I use it for work and have fun with it, but...

00:42:55.000 Yeah, it blows my mind that for a long time, it would be that you were supposed to regard those individuals responsible for social media platforms, we were supposed to regard them as these heroes.

00:43:08.000 It's like, oh, the Arab Spring! 1.00

00:43:11.000 You know what I mean?

00:43:11.000 Oh, right.

00:43:13.000 Bringing the world together. 1.00

00:43:16.000 It's like, holy shit, dude. 0.99

00:43:18.000 Well, the algorithms. 0.99

00:43:19.000 What changed is algorithms.

00:43:21.000 If you watch the Social Dilemma, the documentary, The Social Dilemma.

00:43:27.000 That guy, Tristan Harris, has been on the podcast and sort of explained a lot of it to us.

00:43:32.000 He's going to come back on again and we're going to talk to him some more about it because it's...

00:43:35.000 It's very disturbing because what they've done with these algorithms and they knew what was happening while they were doing it is they've accentuated arguments.

00:43:44.000 They've accentuated all the division between people and that it's kind of like an unstoppable domino effect.

00:43:50.000 It seems like at this point in time there's a clear division in our country that didn't exist in 2007. If you go back to the invention of the first iPhone and when social media started coming about, if you go from there to now, the change is palpable.

00:44:07.000 It's very, very real.

00:44:09.000 And then when you add in the anxiety of a pandemic and real adversity, which is what people have encountered over the last 18 months, now it's through the roof. 0.98

00:44:19.000 Now people are literally fucking insane. 0.98

00:44:21.000 They're unrecognizable. 0.98

00:44:23.000 I hear that, but I know YouTube's not a social media platform, but I had a rare moment of just nothing going on this morning because I woke up in a hotel and I wasn't at work or messing with my kids.

00:44:34.000 And so I was just dicking around on YouTube.

00:44:38.000 And I was kind of pleasantly surprised to be like that YouTube understands that I like to watch Norm MacDonald videos and I like to watch stuff about catching bobcats.

00:44:51.000 Yeah, that's true.

00:44:53.000 They weren't trying to serve me something that's going to make me mad.

00:44:58.000 But see, that's because you're healthy.

00:45:00.000 See, this is the thing about it.

00:45:01.000 People think that they do it because they want to make you mad.

00:45:05.000 They do whatever you're interested in.

00:45:05.000 It's not.

00:45:08.000 Like my friend Ari, he did this experiment where he went on YouTube and only looked at puppy videos.

00:45:13.000 And all it would show him was videos of puppies.

00:45:15.000 Like every time he went on YouTube, it's puppies.

00:45:18.000 But when you get into the comments...

00:45:20.000 That's when you find out that YouTube is a social media platform.

00:45:24.000 Not just that, but creeps have used comments.

00:45:29.000 They've gone to certain websites, and this is how they've caught people for sex trafficking. 0.99

00:45:36.000 And there was a bunch of these weird fucking kid videos. 0.98

00:45:40.000 I don't know if you're aware of these. 0.99

00:45:42.000 They don't understand what was going on.

00:45:44.000 They don't know how these things were made or why they were made, but there was a bunch of kid-friendly looking videos.

00:45:52.000 So it'd be like Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse, but then they would get drunk.

00:45:59.000 And, like, fall down and bust their head open.

00:46:02.000 It was really weird.

00:46:03.000 But these videos would show up in, like, if a kid was looking at cartoons, and if you're one of those parents that just, like, gives your kid an iPad, just go ahead.

00:46:13.000 Your kid would watch normal cartoon videos, and then all of a sudden, in the feed, because of the algorithm, these, uh, it was, like, Spider-Man was a bunch of them.

00:46:22.000 Here's a, for instance, screenshot.

00:46:24.000 Oh, jeez!

00:46:25.000 This was, like, Elsa-gate stuff.

00:46:27.000 I'm not showing this online.

00:46:29.000 It's just for you guys to see.

00:46:30.000 Yeah, Elsagate was one where Elsa from Frozen, there was a ton of these videos where kids were looking up Elsa videos.

00:46:40.000 So because they were looking up Elsa videos, all these other videos that were also Elsa videos showed up in them.

00:46:46.000 And apparently what was going on was like inside the comments.

00:46:49.000 Am I wrong about this?

00:46:51.000 Inside the comments, there was like people who got arrested for doing...

00:46:55.000 Yeah, that's where I don't know.

00:46:58.000 I'm not going to say that didn't happen.

00:47:00.000 Yeah, there are FBI investigation.

00:47:00.000 I don't know.

00:47:05.000 Yeah, it got crossed over into like the pedophile genre.

00:47:08.000 They were using code words and stuff.

00:47:11.000 Yeah, they were using these comments like they would meet up on certain videos and they would communicate inside the comments of those videos with code.

00:47:21.000 And that's how they got away with communicating publicly about certain things.

00:47:26.000 And I don't know if they were child porn or what they were involved with, but I remember there was a lot of people that got in trouble for that.

00:47:33.000 And then YouTube's trying to figure out, like, what are these videos? 0.97

00:47:36.000 And who the fuck is making these? 0.90

00:47:38.000 What was the motivation? 0.99

00:47:38.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:47:40.000 They don't know.

00:47:40.000 The theme was weird.

00:47:42.000 We watched a bunch of them one day.

00:47:43.000 The theme was weird.

00:47:44.000 It was always the same thing. 0.99

00:47:46.000 They seemed kind of normal, and then the cartoon characters would get drunk, and they would always wind up getting busted in the head with a bottle and blood everywhere, and you're like, what the fuck? 0.99

00:47:56.000 So it goes from being like, yeah, weird shit. 0.99

00:47:58.000 You don't let your kids just cut loose on YouTube, do you? 0.99

00:48:00.000 No, no, [...

00:48:02.000 Luckily, one of my kids, all she likes to watch on YouTube is a girl named Sniperwolf, who's very funny, and she does these reaction videos to stuff, but it's very G-rated, and she loves watching her.

00:48:16.000 But I keep an eye on what they're doing, and I don't allow them to just start going crazy.

00:48:23.000 Yeah.

00:48:24.000 Because it's just...

00:48:27.000 You know, you never know.

00:48:28.000 I mean, one day, you just stumble upon an ISIS beheading video. 0.99

00:48:31.000 And now you have your kids fucking waking you up in the middle of the night crying and screaming because they can't get this image out of their head. 0.99

00:48:37.000 It's terrifying. 0.99

00:48:38.000 It is.

00:48:39.000 To be on the other side of it, too, because when you're young, all you want to do is...

00:48:44.000 Throw off the chains.

00:48:45.000 Oh, yeah.

00:48:46.000 And then all of a sudden you're in the position of putting the chains on.

00:48:50.000 Yeah, you gotta.

00:48:50.000 It's like, how much freedom do you give them?

00:48:52.000 How much do you talk to them about stuff?

00:48:54.000 How much do you let them figure this stuff out on their own?

00:48:58.000 It's tricky.

00:49:00.000 And it's a weird world because it didn't exist previously.

00:49:03.000 It's not like we're dealing with something that we went through when we were children.

00:49:06.000 There was no Google when we were children.

00:49:08.000 There was no LiveLeak.

00:49:10.000 You ever go on LiveLeak?

00:49:11.000 No.

00:49:11.000 I know about it, but yeah.

00:49:13.000 Horrible videos. 1.00

00:49:14.000 You can watch a lot of car accidents and animal attacks and just wild shit. 1.00

00:49:18.000 That's not... 0.99

00:49:19.000 Oh, no, I have been on that.

00:49:20.000 Yeah, I have stumbled into that.

00:49:23.000 But that didn't exist. 0.77

00:49:25.000 When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch something fucked up, you had a plan for it. 0.55

00:49:29.000 Like, when we wanted to watch Faces of Death, somebody had to get the video. 0.90

00:49:33.000 One of our friends had to watch the door, you know?

00:49:36.000 So, like, we were in the basement.

00:49:37.000 One of the friends had to watch the door, make sure the parents didn't come down.

00:49:40.000 And then we put it on the VCR, and we were ready. 0.99

00:49:44.000 Like, if someone came down, you'd pop that fucking tape out and hide it. 0.99

00:49:48.000 These kids today, all they have to do is just have a phone. 0.99

00:49:51.000 And a lot of times kids are 11 and 12, they have phones. 0.99

00:49:55.000 And 12-year-olds with a phone, they're going to start Googling people fucking, people getting killed. 1.00

00:50:01.000 They're going to see the most crazy shit. 1.00

00:50:02.000 Have you seen this? 1.00

00:50:03.000 Your friends are going to say, have you seen that?

00:50:04.000 And then you're going to look on your phone.

00:50:06.000 There's no way to stop it.

00:50:08.000 There's no way to stop it. 0.99

00:50:09.000 Kids have wild fucking workarounds for little restrictions. 1.00

00:50:15.000 My sneaky little fucking kid, you know what she did? 1.00

00:50:17.000 She screen recorded my wife when my wife went and put in a password for her screen time. 1.00

00:50:27.000 Nice move. 0.65

00:50:28.000 Very nice move.

00:50:30.000 She handed her phone over to my wife. 1.00

00:50:32.000 My wife goes in and puts a password in for her screen time so she can only get an hour's worth of screen time a day. 1.00

00:50:39.000 And then my wife checks and she's like, how the fuck do you have four hours of screen time? 0.97

00:50:42.000 What's going on here? 0.99

00:50:44.000 And then she figured out that the little monster... 1.00

00:50:48.000 Did you guys have public access when you were growing up?

00:50:51.000 My public access TV. I used to see some of that shit. 0.99

00:50:54.000 My first exposure to Faces of Death was after 10 o'clock. 1.00

00:50:57.000 They could show whatever the fuck they wanted for whatever reason. 0.99

00:51:00.000 Really? 1.00

00:51:01.000 Not blatant porn, but porn.

00:51:04.000 Really? 0.99

00:51:05.000 That's the Bud Dwyer video of him shooting himself in the face.

00:51:09.000 You saw that on TV? To the 21 Guns salute when I was going to bed when I was like 10 years old.

00:51:14.000 What?

00:51:14.000 Yeah.

00:51:15.000 No way!

00:51:15.000 Huh.

00:51:16.000 And then this guy ended up, I was talking with some of my friends when I was back at home in my reunion.

00:51:20.000 This guy was, we all knew about him when we were like 12, 13 years old.

00:51:25.000 Had a show.

00:51:26.000 Painted up like an insane clown posse type character. 1.00

00:51:29.000 And would have like blood, girls, vaginas, lips, all sorts of wild shit. 1.00

00:51:35.000 Really? 1.00

00:51:36.000 Wild.

00:51:36.000 And it was just like, the government was putting it on technically because of public access.

00:51:40.000 So in public access, there's no restrictions like there are with the FCC? That's what I was asking.

00:51:44.000 You guys didn't have?

00:51:45.000 That's like what Wayne's World was. 0.89

00:51:47.000 That's my only thing I knew growing up was like Wayne's World on the SNL was a public access show, but then we actually had public access, and that's where wild shit was happening after 10 o'clock.

00:51:55.000 I had a friend of mine who had a public access show. 0.83

00:51:58.000 My friend Larry Rapucci.

00:52:00.000 He was a stand-up comic in...

00:52:02.000 I think it was Larry's show.

00:52:03.000 But he was a stand-up comic in Boston.

00:52:05.000 We all did a public access show when we were struggling comedians.

00:52:09.000 You did it too?

00:52:10.000 Yeah, I wore a dress.

00:52:11.000 I wore a dress and a wig and we had a dating show.

00:52:16.000 This is the wild guy that I would...

00:52:18.000 This is from the 90s, I think.

00:52:20.000 I found it on YouTube.

00:52:21.000 It's like very David Lynchian, man.

00:52:21.000 It still exists.

00:52:23.000 It's just so weird to watch now.

00:52:25.000 Damon Zex.

00:52:26.000 Oh, so he would...

00:52:27.000 That's him on the right and him on TV? Oh, so he really planned this out.

00:52:31.000 This was some weird shit. 0.99

00:52:33.000 This is 96? 1.00

00:52:33.000 Wow. 1.00

00:52:34.000 He's doing coke.

00:52:35.000 The tampons.

00:52:36.000 It's all...

00:52:36.000 Again, I was a kid when I was seeing this stuff.

00:52:39.000 Wow.

00:52:40.000 To me, it's not that strange.

00:52:41.000 Looks like Robert Smith from The Cure, man.

00:52:43.000 Someone found him.

00:52:44.000 I don't know.

00:52:45.000 I'm sure he's on Facebook or probably doing this stuff still.

00:52:47.000 Let's find him.

00:52:48.000 Well, he's going to find out now.

00:52:50.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

00:52:51.000 Wow, yeah.

00:52:52.000 So he got away with this?

00:52:53.000 This was all on...

00:52:55.000 Yeah, but he wasn't even the only one.

00:52:56.000 There was a clown called Angsto the Clown.

00:52:58.000 I'm sure Red Band knows about this stuff because he was a little bit older than me in the same area.

00:53:02.000 That's probably why he was probably watching the same show.

00:53:05.000 Where were you brought up?

00:53:06.000 This is why it might make sense now.

00:53:07.000 Where were you brought up?

00:53:08.000 In Columbus, Ohio.

00:53:09.000 Huh.

00:53:10.000 Wow.

00:53:11.000 And then looking back into some of the stuff that was happening there, it kind of makes a little bit of sense.

00:53:15.000 But if this wasn't going on everywhere, that's sort of strange to me.

00:53:18.000 I never saw it in Boston, but I might have been out of the loop.

00:53:21.000 It might have existed.

00:53:22.000 I just wasn't aware of it.

00:53:23.000 But I thought the regulations were across the board if you were broadcasting.

00:53:27.000 I didn't think that public access was different.

00:53:30.000 Is it because it's local?

00:53:32.000 Maybe, and then there's like...

00:53:34.000 Free speech laws that we're getting into.

00:53:37.000 Again, I was a kid, so I have no idea.

00:53:39.000 I was excited to see it.

00:53:42.000 It won't be available until spring, but for the last couple of years, I've been working on a book.

00:53:52.000 This is the thing I thought I'd never do.

00:53:54.000 I used to be annoyed by people who thought about their kids before I had kids, but...

00:53:57.000 I have a book that I just finished called Outdoor Kids Inside World.

00:54:02.000 It's about, you know, kids in nature, raising kids.

00:54:07.000 And yeah, man, if you'd asked me, dude, like 10 years ago, I'd have been like, no way I would do something like that.

00:54:12.000 But it's harrowing, man.

00:54:14.000 It's like scary.

00:54:15.000 What is scary?

00:54:16.000 Having kids!

00:54:17.000 Oh.

00:54:18.000 Okay, yeah.

00:54:20.000 Worried about them and the danger.

00:54:22.000 Yeah, and trying to guide their experience.

00:54:26.000 For me, I've found that exposure to nature, experiences in nature, understanding nature winds up being an avenue of approach that I have with them.

00:54:43.000 It's like a common language, you know?

00:54:45.000 Yeah.

00:55:02.000 Freedom to consume what media you wanted.

00:55:04.000 Freedom to talk to who you wanted to talk to.

00:55:06.000 Freedom to go where you wanted to go.

00:55:08.000 That later you're in a position where you're denying...

00:55:17.000 Denying someone something that you really wanted in an honest way when you were young.

00:55:22.000 Yeah.

00:55:23.000 I had a conversation with Jonathan.

00:55:25.000 It's a push and pull, man.

00:55:26.000 Jonathan Haidt about that.

00:55:28.000 He talks about the concept of free-range kids.

00:55:32.000 He lets his children wander.

00:55:35.000 It was Jonathan Haidt, right?

00:55:36.000 It was, right?

00:55:37.000 The coddling of the American mind.

00:55:39.000 He lets his kids wander around New York City.

00:55:42.000 Like, he lets his kids walk home from New York City.

00:55:45.000 And, you know, he was talking about one time his kid got a little lost and they were really, really scared.

00:55:51.000 You know, it was like they were trying to find him and it's like a terrifying feeling.

00:55:55.000 But that ultimately the development that the child receives from Being able to navigate the world on their own is very valuable, but there's a risk.

00:56:06.000 And so you have to weigh this risk versus reward.

00:56:10.000 And the opposite of that is people who helicopter parent, and we know how that turns out, right?

00:56:15.000 That's not good when you overly coddle your kid and your kid is not exposed to any sort of adversity.

00:56:22.000 Or any sort of danger or any sort of adventure or any sort of independence that it could be stifling.

00:56:28.000 And then it takes a long time for the child to develop outside of that parental environment once they become free.

00:56:35.000 There's different kinds of kids, right?

00:56:37.000 There's kids that grow up in bad neighborhoods with very little parental guidance and they're 18. And then there's kids who grow up completely coddled and completely protected and insulated and they're 18. And then they run into each other.

00:56:50.000 Totally different life experiences.

00:56:52.000 Yeah.

00:56:53.000 And I was the former.

00:56:55.000 I was the kid that didn't have a lot of guidance when I was a kid, and I was kind of a latchkey kid.

00:57:01.000 I'm glad you just used that word.

00:57:02.000 Yeah, it's a common word, right?

00:57:03.000 Common phrase.

00:57:04.000 Apparently it's not.

00:57:05.000 No?

00:57:06.000 I grew up with that word.

00:57:07.000 I was commenting on how my wife in her early years was a latchkey kid, and she's like, I haven't heard that word in a long time.

00:57:07.000 Yeah, latchkey.

00:57:13.000 I'm like, that used to be a word, dude, like latchkey kid.

00:57:16.000 Yeah, you got a key.

00:57:17.000 You got a key, and you came home and no one was home, you know, when I was 12 years old.

00:57:22.000 I mean, it wasn't like five days ago someone was pointing out to me that that word doesn't get used anymore.

00:57:26.000 Well, kids don't...

00:57:26.000 Yeah.

00:57:28.000 I mean, it's kind of a different thing.

00:57:30.000 You don't really see 12-year-old kids walking home with a key and opening up their front door anymore.

00:57:36.000 I mean, I think about my children and how young they are, and I can't imagine them doing that.

00:57:41.000 But I did that.

00:57:42.000 And I think that the independence that comes from...

00:57:45.000 Being a kid who walks home from school by yourself and opens your door by yourself.

00:57:51.000 My parents didn't come home until whatever it was.

00:57:55.000 They worked until 5 and then they were home.

00:57:57.000 I was out.

00:57:58.000 I would go places. 0.99

00:57:59.000 No one knew where the fuck I was. 0.99

00:58:00.000 There was no phones. 0.99

00:58:01.000 There was no cell phones.

00:58:02.000 I could leave a little post-it note or something like that.

00:58:06.000 It's been interesting to watch as a parent the way that different parents find what dangerous things they're comfortable with.

00:58:16.000 Friends of mine, like my friend Kelly lives in New York, and she'll talk about And we have similar mindsets about exposing kids to risk.

00:58:27.000 And her kids will take the subway, right, or whatever, home.

00:58:32.000 And to me, where I live and have not had kids that age in the city, like, I can't picture what she's getting at.

00:58:40.000 You know what I mean?

00:58:41.000 I go like, wow, that seems just kind of like crazy.

00:58:44.000 Yeah.

00:58:45.000 How old are the kids?

00:58:46.000 Irresponsible.

00:58:47.000 I'm trying to think, how, 14 and 9 or 10, somewhere in there.

00:58:52.000 And I don't know if they've been at it for a while.

00:58:53.000 But either way, things that some people would regard, things that people from the outside would regard as hard to picture.

00:59:00.000 But at the same time, I expose my kids to danger that I have decided is an okay danger to court.

00:59:09.000 I'll expose them to being...

00:59:11.000 They can be around grizzly bears.

00:59:13.000 They can be unescorted in areas that have a lot of mountain lions and bears.

00:59:18.000 We take small boats out in the very big water.

00:59:21.000 We do all kinds of things, but it's things that I've decided are...

00:59:27.000 Good risk.

00:59:28.000 Healthy risk.

00:59:29.000 Have you been around a grizzly with your kid?

00:59:31.000 Yeah.

00:59:32.000 My boy I have.

00:59:34.000 Yeah?

00:59:34.000 Where at?

00:59:35.000 In Alaska.

00:59:36.000 Yeah?

00:59:37.000 Yeah.

00:59:38.000 And then a lot of very up close exposure to black bears.

00:59:44.000 Very up close.

00:59:46.000 Yeah, and living in Montana.

00:59:48.000 And I see that, like at our fish shack in Alaska, it's like a daily occurrence.

00:59:51.000 But I see that and I'm thinking, man, I love being able to expose my kids to this and to have them be not jumpy people.

01:00:02.000 But then I hear that they were at their friends on YouTube.

01:00:08.000 Like, unfettered YouTube access, and I'm like, oh my god!

01:00:11.000 Oh my god!

01:00:12.000 Right, they're gonna believe in Kuanan.

01:00:14.000 You know, yeah, it's just like, we all find our ways to be, you know, we all find our ways to, like, try to find some way to be comfortable and try to find some way to not be overdoing something or underdoing something.

01:00:27.000 Yeah.

01:00:28.000 Well, I think kids for sure need some form of adversity to work through.

01:00:32.000 And I think sports are really great for that for kids.

01:00:34.000 You need to learn how to lose.

01:00:36.000 But man, I know some stunted people that played a lot of sports.

01:00:38.000 Yeah, it's not a 100% guarantee. 1.00

01:00:42.000 But it is a guarantee that if you've never encountered any loss at all, you're fucked. 0.98

01:00:47.000 Yeah, no challenge at all, no adversity at all. 0.99

01:00:47.000 Any challenge. 0.99

01:00:50.000 And then dependent upon the kind of parenting that you received.

01:00:53.000 It's not that it is a deal breaker, like you have to have sports in your life or you'll never be good at things.

01:01:00.000 I think you have to have difficult things that you're attempting to do.

01:01:05.000 You know, I think that's really beneficial for kids and for adults.

01:01:09.000 I mean, I think that's a key part of my life is lessons learned through adversity and trying new things is a very important part of that because it forces you to really be a beginner.

01:01:21.000 One of the things I found in martial arts, like when you would get guys who are world champion kickboxers and they start entering into MMA, they're really good at one aspect of fighting, which is kickboxing.

01:01:33.000 And then they would have to learn wrestling and jiu-jitsu. 0.94

01:01:35.000 They didn't like it because the wrestling and jiu-jitsu, the problem was they were getting fucked up a lot. 0.96

01:01:40.000 Oh, yeah, I could see that. 0.96

01:01:41.000 They were losing.

01:01:42.000 So they're used to being dominant, and then all of a sudden they're losing.

01:01:46.000 Right.

01:01:46.000 Before they've been for years good at something.

01:01:48.000 Now they suck at some part of it.

01:01:50.000 So they would avoid that aspect of it. 0.63

01:01:50.000 Exactly. 0.63

01:01:52.000 So their development as a mixed martial artist was always limited.

01:01:56.000 They always get to a certain level and they could never pass that because they never really developed the skills required to excel in the overall thing.

01:02:05.000 There was always like this hole in their game.

01:02:07.000 They'd never go live in that.

01:02:08.000 They'd never allow themselves to go live in that. 0.99

01:02:12.000 Loser space, right? 0.97

01:02:13.000 Yeah, but that's where all the lessons are.

01:02:16.000 The bad feelings, where all the lessons are.

01:02:19.000 It's like someone who's never experienced heartache, right?

01:02:21.000 And then they experience, and like, oh!

01:02:23.000 It's like death.

01:02:25.000 It's like you lose a part of your life.

01:02:27.000 And, you know, I remember the first time I got my heart broken when I was like, I guess I was like 17 or 18. I couldn't believe how bad I felt.

01:02:35.000 I was like, God, this is the worst feeling ever.

01:02:37.000 Did you ever go look her up on Facebook or anything?

01:02:39.000 But if I did, I don't know.

01:02:39.000 Oh.

01:02:39.000 No.

01:02:42.000 But, you know, I'm sure I'd be over it.

01:02:44.000 But the point is, like, you have to experience that to know.

01:02:49.000 And then I think, like, how am I going to live without this girl in my life?

01:02:53.000 And then, you know, years later, I'm like, how would I have lived if I kept that girl in my life?

01:02:58.000 Oh, my God, it would have been horrendous.

01:03:00.000 I have such a hard time picturing you being heartbroken.

01:03:02.000 I was heartbroken.

01:03:03.000 Yeah, when I was 18. Yeah.

01:03:05.000 I know this isn't a parenting show, but a friend of mine- It's a show.

01:03:09.000 A friend of mine who's an attorney, and he deals a lot with, what do you call it, custody, child custody stuff.

01:03:18.000 We were talking about all these theories about- What kids need and how to do it.

01:03:25.000 And he said, man, I only know one thing that really fucks up kids. 0.99

01:03:28.000 He says, it's when they know that no one gives a shit about them. 0.99

01:03:32.000 He's like, that's the thing that, that's in my view, that's what does it. 0.97

01:03:37.000 Yeah, that's the hardest.

01:03:39.000 When you see foster kids that don't have love, they don't have a family, they don't have real parents, or maybe even worse, they know their parents are out there, but their parents don't give a fuck about them and someone else is raising them.

01:03:55.000 Oh, it's damaging.

01:03:56.000 Oh, it's so devastating.

01:03:58.000 And it's like, how do you fix that ever?

01:04:00.000 I think once a child has gone through a really bad emotional development and childhood development, it's like so difficult.

01:04:11.000 To somehow or another get out of that space and become like a normal person, become a person who's balanced and who just gets their shit together. 0.99

01:04:22.000 It's so fucking hard. 0.95

01:04:24.000 I mean, you can't imagine the emotional pain that some of these children go through. 0.99

01:04:28.000 It's so fucking devastating. 0.95

01:04:30.000 And we do this thing. 0.99

01:04:32.000 We...

01:04:33.000 We get Christmas gifts for these foster kids.

01:04:36.000 And the thing about it is, though, you get this sheet of paper where you get a rundown of these kids and their life. 0.99

01:04:44.000 And you're like, oh, fucking Christ. 0.99

01:04:47.000 Oh, then you make a selection of gifts? 1.00

01:04:47.000 It's so hard. 1.00

01:04:49.000 Yeah.

01:04:49.000 That's nice to see you do that.

01:04:50.000 It's nice, but it's so hard because you want to just adopt them all.

01:04:53.000 You want to just go...

01:04:54.000 And, you know, my wife's not having that.

01:04:56.000 But, I mean, I'm that way with dogs.

01:04:58.000 I can't go to the pound.

01:04:59.000 If I go to the pound, I'll have 100 dogs.

01:05:01.000 Yeah.

01:05:02.000 I can't do it.

01:05:03.000 I'm that guy. 0.99

01:05:04.000 I fucking love dogs. 0.98

01:05:06.000 I wouldn't be able to go home. 1.00

01:05:09.000 I like that you call it the pound.

01:05:12.000 I still call it the pound.

01:05:13.000 Isn't it still the pound?

01:05:14.000 No one knows.

01:05:15.000 Like latchkey kids, there's a whole generation of people that don't use that word.

01:05:20.000 No, no, it's the dog pound, man.

01:05:23.000 That's what Snoop Dogg calls it.

01:05:25.000 I hate it.

01:05:27.000 I don't know, man.

01:05:29.000 It's not fair.

01:05:30.000 Life's not fair.

01:05:32.000 That's an important lesson, too.

01:05:34.000 People want fair in this world.

01:05:36.000 That's not a real thing.

01:05:38.000 There's not fair in looks.

01:05:40.000 There's not fair in intelligence.

01:05:42.000 There's not fair in the way you were raised.

01:05:45.000 And sometimes not fair is beneficial.

01:05:48.000 Because sometimes when you get a shitty hand of cards, you develop adversity and determination that a person who's been coddled doesn't have and that allows you to excel wildly beyond anything that you're capable of. 0.99

01:06:02.000 Which is a hard thing for me as a parent because all of my favorite friends are fucked up. 1.00

01:06:08.000 Like they all had fucked up childhoods and it made for the most interesting people. 1.00

01:06:13.000 But, you know, they're horrific. 0.92

01:06:15.000 Like my friend Joey Diaz, one of my favorite people that's ever lived, found his mom dead on the floor of the kitchen when he was 13 high on acid.

01:06:23.000 Hmm.

01:06:24.000 Yeah.

01:06:25.000 I don't want that to happen to my kid.

01:06:27.000 You know, no one wants that to happen to their kid.

01:06:29.000 But that was his existence.

01:06:31.000 That's who you gravitate toward.

01:06:33.000 Always.

01:06:33.000 Always gravitate toward people.

01:06:34.000 Yeah, I gravitate toward people who had, like, pretty scrappy upbringing.

01:06:38.000 Yeah, they're more fun.

01:06:41.000 Reliable.

01:06:41.000 Yes.

01:06:42.000 Reliable.

01:06:43.000 Also, they have a thing that you like to use, a term.

01:06:45.000 They have a lot of gurr.

01:06:47.000 Yeah.

01:06:47.000 But I bet you'd look and you'd find that they were deeply loved, but scrappy.

01:06:55.000 Yes.

01:06:55.000 And, well, Joey's a perfect example of that because he's a deeply loving person.

01:07:00.000 He's like, if you're in his inner circle, you know you're loved.

01:07:05.000 Like, he calls you.

01:07:06.000 He tells you he loves you.

01:07:07.000 He's very affectionate, very loving.

01:07:11.000 Because it's valuable to him.

01:07:12.000 He knows what it means to not be there, to not have someone there for you.

01:07:18.000 Yeah.

01:07:19.000 It's a tricky thing, man.

01:07:20.000 It's like with all things in life, there's a balance that can be achieved.

01:07:25.000 But sometimes through imbalance, you develop spectacular abilities.

01:07:31.000 You know, like some of the greatest fighters, like Mike Tyson is a great example, right?

01:07:36.000 Literally didn't experience any love in his life until he was like 13 years old and he was adopted by this guy, Cus D'Amato, who just happened to be one of the great boxing trainers in history.

01:07:46.000 And through this guy's mentoring and also through hypnosis, the guy hypnotized him to be this assassin inside the ring, he got his love through destroying people.

01:07:58.000 And obviously that worked out really well.

01:08:00.000 I mean, you don't have a Mike Tyson.

01:08:03.000 You don't make a Mike Tyson if birthdays are all on time and everyone's buying you a nice Christmas gift and you never run into bullies at school.

01:08:13.000 You don't get a Mike Tyson.

01:08:16.000 Everybody worshipped Mike Tyson.

01:08:18.000 When we were kids and Mike Tyson fought, Jesus, that was a big deal. 0.98

01:08:23.000 I guess I was in my early 20s when Mike Tyson was in his prime, holy shit, was that a big deal. 0.94

01:08:30.000 When you watch a Tyson fight, I mean, everybody knew when Tyson was fighting. 0.96

01:08:34.000 It was like you were going to see a public execution.

01:08:37.000 You don't create a person like that unless things go badly.

01:08:42.000 My kids have to pack their own lunches and their own snacks, you know, so they be self-sufficient.

01:08:47.000 But then every morning, my wife basically makes them dissemble it in her presence so she can check.

01:08:53.000 Oh, that's funny.

01:08:56.000 What do they try to smuggle in?

01:08:57.000 No, it's just like, you're talking about, you know, being like, I don't know, just, you know, that's how you make a Mike Tyson.

01:09:04.000 Like, I don't know.

01:09:07.000 I don't know if we're going to wind up with any Mike Tysons. 0.91

01:09:10.000 You don't really want to raise a Mike Tyson, really.

01:09:14.000 Not that Mike's a bad guy.

01:09:16.000 He's a great guy. 0.99

01:09:17.000 But he's a great guy because he figured his way through all that shit and became this guy. 0.97

01:09:23.000 Yeah, there are definitely celebrated individuals who adversity now and then creates these spectacular Yeah. 0.97

01:09:36.000 People.

01:09:37.000 You can also break them, though.

01:09:39.000 Yeah, and I think that to go into it planning on, if you went into it thinking you were going to manipulate that system to produce a spectacular child, it would be, like, ripe for backfiring.

01:09:49.000 It's Johnny Cash, A Boy Named Sue.

01:09:52.000 Oh, yeah. 0.99

01:09:53.000 Yeah, there's a whole damn song about it. 0.97

01:09:54.000 Yeah, I mean, it's like, I knew I wasn't going to be around, so I named you Sue. 0.97

01:09:59.000 That's right.

01:10:00.000 I'm trying to get all like, yeah, Johnny Cash already thought all that.

01:10:04.000 Yeah, he figured it out. 0.96

01:10:05.000 I mean, it's a fucking hilarious song. 0.95

01:10:07.000 But it's very tricky. 0.93

01:10:10.000 It's very difficult.

01:10:10.000 But I think your friend that pointed out that the worst thing that can happen is a kid that doesn't feel loved.

01:10:16.000 That's true.

01:10:16.000 I think that's probably where, you know, a lot of psychopaths come from, unfortunately.

01:10:21.000 You know, that's old expression, hurt people hurt people.

01:10:25.000 Hmm.

01:10:25.000 You know?

01:10:26.000 I hadn't heard that.

01:10:27.000 You never heard that one?

01:10:28.000 No.

01:10:28.000 Really?

01:10:29.000 Hurt people hurt people?

01:10:30.000 No.

01:10:30.000 That's pretty common.

01:10:31.000 That's more common than latchkey kid, I thought.

01:10:35.000 What is it like raising kids in Montana?

01:10:38.000 I mean, it's really cool because you're in this super rural environment a lot.

01:10:44.000 You're in this area where you're in a nice town, but you're also surrounded by this gorgeous landscape of mountains and wildlife. 0.92

01:10:56.000 It's a pretty fucking cool place.

01:10:58.000 I think it works well. 0.88

01:11:05.000 Having that level of immediacy to be able to take them out to experience things that we care about.

01:11:12.000 We did a family walk on Sunday and we went and caught grasshoppers so we could throw them in the creek.

01:11:20.000 Watch fish get them?

01:11:22.000 Watch fish get them.

01:11:23.000 Stuff like that.

01:11:24.000 And fish a lot and hunt mushrooms and we camp a lot in the summer.

01:11:28.000 I like it, man.

01:11:29.000 I'm gone a lot for work.

01:11:31.000 So...

01:11:33.000 I try to have it I travel a lot, so I try to have like very, when I'm home, I try to keep it impactful.

01:11:43.000 That's cool.

01:11:43.000 And try not to be lazy.

01:11:45.000 Yeah.

01:11:45.000 And I'm not lazy, but I make sure to not be lazy and I make sure to like really, that we're just out doing stuff, doing stuff, doing stuff.

01:11:52.000 Right, right.

01:11:52.000 And make that a thing for them so they get accustomed to it.

01:11:56.000 Yeah, like there's always a plan.

01:11:59.000 Always going, doing something, always a plan.

01:12:01.000 I mean, it can be relentless for people around and I've had, and I've Had people lobby complaints about that system of living.

01:12:09.000 But that's how I like to run the program.

01:12:13.000 Well, for what you do and, you know, for the company Meat Eater and for First Light, like, there's no better place for you to live.

01:12:20.000 I mean, Montana's just an amazing place to live and run a company like your company, you know, that makes Netflix shows and videos and writes books and, you know, it's like, it couldn't be better.

01:12:36.000 Yeah, it's a good—and then we have a very good network of folks there.

01:12:42.000 Yeah, it's great, man.

01:12:45.000 And then Bozeman, you know, where I live, it's— It's big.

01:12:54.000 You know, it's bigger than where I grew up, right?

01:12:57.000 How many people is Bozeman?

01:12:58.000 Like 300,000?

01:12:59.000 400,000?

01:13:00.000 No, it's not.

01:13:01.000 I mean, because there's like the town and there's the sort of like greater valley area.

01:13:06.000 I don't know where it's at.

01:13:07.000 Jamie, find out on the lickety-split.

01:13:09.000 For like in the town, 70 or something like that in the town?

01:13:13.000 70,000 in the town?

01:13:14.000 Yeah, maybe I'm way off.

01:13:14.000 But then the greater area.

01:13:16.000 I'd have to look up.

01:13:17.000 I could be totally wrong.

01:13:18.000 What's the greater area?

01:13:19.000 Like two?

01:13:20.000 All told?

01:13:21.000 200,000?

01:13:22.000 Yeah.

01:13:22.000 Well, I don't know.

01:13:24.000 Let's find out.

01:13:25.000 Yeah, find out for me, will you?

01:13:26.000 Either way, it's...

01:13:29.000 Yeah.

01:13:30.000 Yeah.

01:13:31.000 114,000.

01:13:32.000 Hmm.

01:13:34.000 It's a beautiful area.

01:13:35.000 Much bigger than where I grew up.

01:13:36.000 Yeah.

01:13:36.000 But still very small, you know?

01:13:40.000 Like, people kind of know you.

01:13:43.000 There's a story I haven't had a couple times where...

01:13:49.000 Well, it's so small.

01:13:53.000 You feel observed.

01:13:55.000 Yeah.

01:13:56.000 You're observed.

01:13:57.000 Well, I feel like that in Austin.

01:13:59.000 You feel observed here? 0.98

01:14:00.000 I fucking bet you do. 0.97

01:14:01.000 Much different than Los Angeles. 0.98

01:14:04.000 There's also...

01:14:05.000 They're much more accustomed to famous people in Los Angeles.

01:14:11.000 It's not a big deal.

01:14:12.000 Here it's more of like, hey! 1.00

01:14:15.000 There's that fucking guy. 1.00

01:14:17.000 They make a thing about it. 1.00

01:14:19.000 Where it's like in LA, it's just normal to see Ben Affleck or whatever the fuck. 0.98

01:14:24.000 Yeah, you feel observed. 0.97

01:14:27.000 Years ago, I got this...

01:14:29.000 I did some ads for Subaru and got this car for free.

01:14:34.000 The way it worked, for some reason, it was these branded history things, okay?

01:14:40.000 So I got to pick 13 things around the country that I thought were interesting.

01:14:45.000 And one was like, I did this thing about this guy that there's this mountain range and a town and a path and a national forest all named after this dude.

01:14:54.000 And all that's really known about him is he got killed by a grizzly bear.

01:14:57.000 Is that Bridger?

01:14:58.000 No, his name is Lulu or Lolo.

01:15:01.000 Oh.

01:15:02.000 So there's the town of Lolo, there's Lolo Creek, there's Lolo Pass, there's Lolo National Forest, and all they know is there's like a dude that lived on a tributary to that creek, and he got killed by a grizzly.

01:15:12.000 That's like really all I know about the guy.

01:15:14.000 Anyways, they did a thing about where they think he might have been buried.

01:15:17.000 I did all these other things.

01:15:18.000 It was like this thing, it appeared on, it was like these ads that were on History Channel.

01:15:25.000 And I would go and check out whatever, something that was interesting, but there'd be like these driving shots, right?

01:15:31.000 Where you like drive there in a Subaru.

01:15:35.000 So the way that stuff works is you have to buy the car just for insurance purposes.

01:15:42.000 Like you buy the car from them and like invoice them for the car purchase.

01:15:47.000 Oh, okay.

01:15:49.000 I don't know how common this is.

01:15:51.000 But anyways, when it was all said and done, I got the car.

01:15:54.000 So we were going to sell it, but my wife started to drive it, and now we've had this car since 2009. They're bulletproof.

01:16:01.000 Yeah, my wife drives it. 1.00

01:16:02.000 Those fucking things. 1.00

01:16:03.000 And my wife's very, when it comes to vehicles and stuff, she's very pragmatic. 1.00

01:16:10.000 Joey Diaz drives nothing but Subarus.

01:16:12.000 Yeah.

01:16:12.000 She'd be like, why would you buy a car if you got a car for free?

01:16:15.000 Is this your little ads?

01:16:18.000 Oh, yeah.

01:16:18.000 Young, fresh-faced Steve Rinella.

01:16:20.000 Dude, I was about like four years old.

01:16:21.000 Look at you.

01:16:22.000 It was like four.

01:16:23.000 Who's the guy with the hat?

01:16:25.000 He was the guy I wrote a magazine profile on that he hunts for old denim.

01:16:30.000 So this is 2007?

01:16:32.000 Look how young you are.

01:16:33.000 No, no, no.

01:16:34.000 2009, maybe.

01:16:35.000 Fine.

01:16:36.000 I saw some old homestead cabins down here.

01:16:38.000 I can't leave any stone unturned.

01:16:40.000 I have to check it out.

01:16:41.000 So, yeah, that dude would...

01:16:43.000 I did that one because I wrote a piece about that guy.

01:16:46.000 He would go...

01:16:49.000 I want to get back to this thing about this car, but this is interesting.

01:16:52.000 So, you know the earthquake in San Francisco and the big fire?

01:16:56.000 Whatever the hell year that happened.

01:16:57.000 Late 1800s.

01:16:58.000 What was that earthquake that destroyed San Francisco?

01:17:01.000 Levi's?

01:17:02.000 Levi's lost their own catalog.

01:17:04.000 They lost their own library of their clothes they made.

01:17:07.000 So, like, Levi's denim...

01:17:11.000 1906?

01:17:12.000 They made...

01:17:14.000 In that fire, Levi's lost their sort of history.

01:17:17.000 Wow.

01:17:18.000 So Levi's knows they made clothing that they know from advertisements that they have no physical representation of.

01:17:25.000 Wow. 0.54

01:17:25.000 So I wrote a piece about these dudes that would start, they would go hunting around in mine shafts and stuff and find old ass denim. 0.54

01:17:35.000 And the coolest thing to find was you would find a very old pre-1906 pair of Levi's.

01:17:43.000 And these things that sell for like $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 to collectors.

01:17:46.000 They're all these like buckle back jeans.

01:17:49.000 They had buckles in the back, a couple buckles in the back, and that's how you cinch them up.

01:17:53.000 In the back?

01:17:54.000 Yeah.

01:17:55.000 So collectors would call them buckle backs.

01:17:57.000 Yeah, there you go.

01:18:00.000 So this dude- So was this before they figured out belts?

01:18:04.000 Yeah, just how they used to tie them, man, like buckle backs.

01:18:07.000 Huh.

01:18:08.000 So- This dude, he got into that vintage denim stuff, but he also would find old, old clothes and sell them to collectors, sell them to people making films,

01:18:25.000 looking for period clothing.

01:18:27.000 And I drove around with him in Nevada and wrote a profile on him.

01:18:35.000 I think it was called the Brotherhood of the Very Expensive Pants.

01:18:38.000 It was when I was a writer for Outside.

01:18:42.000 Wow, look at that.

01:18:44.000 Yeah.

01:18:44.000 You know, the coolest thing I found in the week I spent with him was a pair plugging up a...

01:18:49.000 There was an old cabin on a ranch, and it had two chimneys.

01:18:54.000 And at some point in time, someone had moved his wood stove from one end of the cabin to the other and plugged...

01:19:02.000 The old chimney hole with a pair of jeans.

01:19:05.000 Wow.

01:19:06.000 And we go in there.

01:19:08.000 So he'll go in and he'd strike a deal with ranchers.

01:19:10.000 He'd be like, listen, man, I'm going to...

01:19:11.000 And a lot of times he'd be like, I'm going to look around in your old buildings and stuff and I find something, I'll buy it for me. 0.98

01:19:17.000 They'd be like, bullshit, get out of here. 0.97

01:19:19.000 And just to turn them on, he would all of a sudden look and whatever he could see, he would look and give them an insane price for nonsense. 1.00

01:19:30.000 Just to butter him up.

01:19:32.000 Really?

01:19:33.000 Oh yeah.

01:19:33.000 It's like we went to this guy and this guy had just junk everywhere and it was like he had a lot of junk and also be like there's the old cabin where grandpa lived.

01:19:42.000 There's the old rundown house where my mom and dad lived and here's my house and everything was exactly they just would move across the property and build a new structure and leave the old ones in place so he's dying to get in here and look around.

01:19:55.000 And this guy had a t-shirt.

01:19:57.000 This guy had an outdoor spigot that was dripping.

01:20:00.000 For whatever reason, he tied a t-shirt around it to deflect the drip or whatever to prevent erosion underneath there.

01:20:07.000 I have no idea.

01:20:08.000 But a t-shirt tied around a drippy thing.

01:20:10.000 And he goes, like that t-shirt, for instance.

01:20:13.000 And gave him like $25 for the t-shirt.

01:20:16.000 No desire to have the t-shirt.

01:20:17.000 But he just had to point to something.

01:20:20.000 To let the guy know that he's got a real possible windfall here. 0.99

01:20:23.000 Yeah, and then the guy's like, well, damn, son. 0.99

01:20:25.000 Let's have a look. 0.99

01:20:27.000 And he'd be in there buying saddle blankets and boots, hats, anything.

01:20:32.000 The jeans that plugged up the hole.

01:20:34.000 So we're on this place, and I was with him, man.

01:20:38.000 He went through all the channels and talked to the ranch manager, got a hold of the ranch, or the rancher's like, have a look, let me know what you find.

01:20:44.000 Goes in there and pulls out.

01:20:46.000 This had to be a very old, I can't remember what kind.

01:20:48.000 It was like some other kind of jean.

01:20:50.000 It wasn't old Levi.

01:20:52.000 Pulled out a set of pants that had been plugging that chimney up.

01:20:57.000 Since the early 1900s.

01:20:59.000 Whoa.

01:21:00.000 And you know the sun?

01:21:01.000 Like, how often does the sun shine down a chimney?

01:21:05.000 Straight.

01:21:06.000 Yeah.

01:21:06.000 Like, not very often.

01:21:07.000 Yeah.

01:21:08.000 Okay?

01:21:08.000 So, I don't know, there's like three feet of pipe above these pans.

01:21:13.000 And it looked like tie-dye because that part that was up, just being exposed to the rain and whatever limited amount of sunshine ever shined straight down that chimney.

01:21:20.000 He'd like bleach those pants white.

01:21:22.000 But he pulled those pants out and there they were. 0.68

01:21:24.000 And they find stuff like, people used to make log homes and chink, you know, chinking between the logs. 1.00

01:21:30.000 Shirts and pants and shit. 0.99

01:21:32.000 Really? 1.00

01:21:32.000 Oh yeah, he's got a whole damn place full of that stuff. 1.00

01:21:35.000 Had, I haven't talked to him in a long time. 0.92

01:21:37.000 And all that stuff is very valuable?

01:21:41.000 Because his place was called Carpe Denim.

01:21:46.000 And people knew to go to him. 0.96

01:21:50.000 So he would have designers, like clothing designers, would want to go to his warehouse full of all this crazy old shit he found to get inspiration. 0.97

01:22:01.000 Wow, look at all that stuff.

01:22:02.000 To get inspiration for, you know, like whatever, like Dickies, Carhartt, whatever, like different designers would go and look around his stuff to get inspiration for it.

01:22:11.000 Jamie, send me this guy's Instagram page.

01:22:14.000 It's OriginalIndianJeans. 1.00

01:22:16.000 Yeah, that's him.

01:22:18.000 OriginalIndianaJeans, sorry.

01:22:21.000 BrittEaton.

01:22:23.000 I think all those old jeans were made out of hemp.

01:22:28.000 I think before the 1930s, before hemp became a problem when they made marijuana illegal, then you have like a stamp to grow hemp, and then it become phased out with the cotton gin.

01:22:43.000 You know, well, the decorticator actually was what brought it back.

01:22:46.000 I think that was in the 1930s.

01:22:49.000 But all before that, canvas itself Came from cannabis.

01:22:54.000 Like canvas was actually made with hemp.

01:22:56.000 Like even like the Mona Lisa was painted on hemp.

01:22:59.000 It's a far more durable fabric.

01:23:02.000 And if we had hemp jeans, they'd be so much more durable.

01:23:08.000 It's a weird cloth. 0.94

01:23:09.000 Have you ever fucked around with hemp as a cloth? 0.99

01:23:11.000 No, I haven't. 0.99

01:23:11.000 I bet he'd be able to tell you a lot about it. 0.99

01:23:13.000 I bet he would.

01:23:14.000 The fibers are really insane.

01:23:17.000 I had a friend of mine, my friend Todd McCormick, used to grow marijuana.

01:23:21.000 He was one of the first guys ever to be arrested for it when they had medical marijuana, but they were still charging people federally because it was medical in California.

01:23:31.000 But when you would go to jail, you would realize once you went to court that you couldn't bring up medical marijuana because you were in a federal trial.

01:23:38.000 And the federal trials, they wouldn't even recognize it.

01:23:40.000 You were just a drug dealer to them.

01:23:42.000 And he was like, oh my god, this is a crazy racket. 0.76

01:23:45.000 I'm getting railroaded here.

01:23:46.000 Because you couldn't even say, no, I was growing it for medical purposes in the state where it's legal medically.

01:23:53.000 So he had a stalk of this stuff.

01:23:56.000 And you would pick it up, and it would be hard like oak, but light like balsa wood. 1.00

01:24:02.000 It was the wildest shit. 0.99

01:24:04.000 You'd realize there's nothing like that fiber on earth. 0.99

01:24:08.000 And when you take that fiber and break it down, the paper, they would make hemp paper, and it's crazy.

01:24:13.000 You can't tear it, but it feels like paper.

01:24:16.000 It's so superior.

01:24:18.000 Hemp clothing is insanely durable.

01:24:21.000 It's so much more durable than cotton.

01:24:22.000 Yeah, and all the hemp rope.

01:24:24.000 I'm familiar with, in the Pioneer and Frontier days, they used to use the hemp for rope and other fabrics.

01:24:30.000 Parachutes.

01:24:30.000 Yeah, like the parachute that George Herbert Walker Bush parachuted to safety with in World War II. That was made out of hemp.

01:24:36.000 They used to make all the parachutes made out of hemp.

01:24:39.000 This is far more durable than cotton.

01:24:44.000 Let's look at this car.

01:24:47.000 Subaru.

01:24:48.000 Yeah, and all of a sudden one day...

01:24:51.000 Where our office is, like, my wife drives a car, and all of a sudden where our office is, there's all these bumper stickers that say, like, Ronella drives a Subaru on people's cars, but not my car.

01:25:05.000 And so it's like someone, like, observing, you know, someone in this area, like, observing what my wife drives and, like, printing a bumper sticker.

01:25:18.000 Just, like, weird.

01:25:20.000 That's weird.

01:25:21.000 Yeah, like, small town stuff, you know?

01:25:22.000 And I had a choir around.

01:25:24.000 It was some dude that worked at, it was some event, like, it was, like, these dudes that worked at Sitka, and then I eventually found out which one of them did it, and he, like, tried to get a job with us, and that was, like, his, like, vengeance thing, which is, like, bizarre, man.

01:25:36.000 You feel just observed.

01:25:37.000 He tried to get a job with you, and he couldn't get a job, so then he made a bumper sticker that said the kind of car you drive?

01:25:44.000 Yeah, and pasted it on people's cars in our parking lot, but not my car.

01:25:50.000 Whoa.

01:25:51.000 Thank God you didn't hire that guy.

01:25:53.000 Well, it just winds up, it's just weird, man.

01:25:55.000 Well, that is a problem with hiring people, right?

01:25:57.000 Like, you never know.

01:25:59.000 No, just like, so there is like an observed quality, but I, you know, I mean, I hate to be negative about it.

01:26:06.000 I mean, I have so many wonderful, wonderful friends, and it's a great, beautiful, great place to live, but there's, yeah, there's like a...

01:26:15.000 The good with the bad.

01:26:17.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:26:17.000 Yeah, you're gonna get both.

01:26:18.000 Yeah.

01:26:20.000 Yeah.

01:26:20.000 It's just, yeah.

01:26:22.000 And when people get rejected, I mean, imagine being a woman, you know, experiencing, like, some guy tries to hit on you, and you reject him, and then this guy's stalking you.

01:26:32.000 Oh, yeah.

01:26:32.000 Social media, sending you evil letters, and that's a very common thing.

01:26:37.000 I'm sure for guys, too.

01:26:39.000 Yeah.

01:26:40.000 It's horrible. 1.00

01:26:41.000 People are fucking crazy. 1.00

01:26:43.000 A good percentage of them. 1.00

01:26:44.000 One out of a hundred. 1.00

01:26:46.000 Out of their fucking mind. 1.00

01:26:47.000 You run into them. 1.00

01:26:48.000 You zig when you should have zagged.

01:26:50.000 Boom.

01:26:51.000 You got a problem.

01:26:53.000 And you got to be real careful.

01:26:54.000 Got to have a good filtering system to keep those people out of your life.

01:26:57.000 And I would imagine when you have an organization like yours where you have a lot of employees.

01:27:02.000 There's a lot of people there.

01:27:03.000 Yeah, Meat Eater, man.

01:27:04.000 We have a hundred people that work for us.

01:27:08.000 Because we have an apparel company.

01:27:11.000 So First Light is underneath Meat Eater.

01:27:14.000 It's in Meat Eater.

01:27:16.000 So you keep it in Ketchum.

01:27:18.000 They stay there in Ketchum.

01:27:19.000 We have a ton of overlap, but no, they have a person in Ketchum that...

01:27:26.000 That runs that program, and they have a bunch of people.

01:27:32.000 Phelps Game Calls.

01:27:33.000 They're in Washington.

01:27:34.000 Oh, that's right.

01:27:34.000 You guys are a part of that, too.

01:27:36.000 Yeah.

01:27:36.000 So Jason, he's been on our podcast a bunch.

01:27:39.000 We just were filming with him.

01:27:41.000 He sent me one of his new Bugle Tubes that has the built-in...

01:27:44.000 The built-in thing, yeah.

01:27:45.000 Yeah, pretty nice.

01:27:46.000 Dude, I'm telling you what, man.

01:27:48.000 I have never...

01:27:50.000 I think? 0.99

01:28:19.000 I'm like, I felt like an idiot, like a child. 0.99

01:28:22.000 Well, he is a real wizard. 0.98

01:28:23.000 I mean, I've heard videos of him online.

01:28:25.000 Oh my God, that guy's amazing.

01:28:26.000 He'd be like, no, that bull's going to come and look over right here.

01:28:30.000 That thing that he made is so good that I had my daughter, my 11-year-old, make a bugle call. 0.98

01:28:39.000 It was pretty fucking good. 0.96

01:28:40.000 Let me see if I can find it. 0.97

01:28:42.000 Because I filmed it because I just thought it'd be hilarious.

01:28:44.000 Oh, her ripping on it?

01:28:44.000 See her first ever attempt.

01:28:46.000 Yeah, Phelps is great.

01:28:48.000 He's a good dude.

01:28:49.000 He lives there, and then we have another company that's with us called FHF. They make the vinyl harnesses and all kinds of...

01:28:57.000 Oh, you guys are with them, too?

01:28:57.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:28:58.000 Jesus.

01:28:59.000 What are they?

01:29:00.000 They're in Belgrade, Montana.

01:29:02.000 You guys are like the Facebook of the outdoor.

01:29:04.000 You just keep gobbling up all the competitors.

01:29:06.000 Well...

01:29:07.000 No.

01:29:08.000 Yeah, the government needs to step in and break you guys up.

01:29:10.000 FHF Gear was built by a police officer, Paul Lewis.

01:29:18.000 Still runs FHF Gear.

01:29:20.000 They do this all-American-made.

01:29:21.000 He's still in there.

01:29:22.000 I have one of those.

01:29:23.000 They're very good.

01:29:24.000 His wife, Jen Lewis, they work together.

01:29:27.000 Phelps is still at Phelps Game Calls.

01:29:32.000 Me and him are doing a project where we've been filming this.

01:29:36.000 We went to Kansas and we cut down a black walnut tree.

01:29:40.000 And there's probably a thousand turkey calls hiding in that black walnut.

01:29:43.000 And we're doing a thing about turning that black walnut tree into a thousand turkey calls.

01:29:48.000 Oh, that's pretty cool.

01:29:49.000 That'll be cool.

01:29:50.000 I'm trying to find this video and I'm not going to.

01:29:53.000 Oh, your daughter ripping on the metal bugle tube? 0.99

01:29:56.000 Yeah, because it's funny.

01:29:57.000 Because it's not bad for like a first ever attempt at blowing a bugle tube for a child.

01:30:03.000 Yeah.

01:30:04.000 Phelps, he holds the patent on aluminum bugle tubes.

01:30:10.000 Yeah, it sounds great.

01:30:13.000 It's interesting that everybody else was making them out of plastic, and then he figured out there's a different sound.

01:30:18.000 Oh, it's different.

01:30:20.000 So yeah, he's there, and then we have our...

01:30:25.000 Media, you know, kind of like the media end of our business is based out of Bozeman.

01:30:29.000 We have content contributors like, you know, you've had Clay Newcomb on.

01:30:32.000 Yeah.

01:30:32.000 He's in Arkansas.

01:30:33.000 He's a fucking interesting guy. 0.99

01:30:35.000 Oh, yeah. 0.99

01:30:36.000 Danielle Pruitt is here and she's in Texas. 0.90

01:30:39.000 Mark Kenyon is one of our- What is that?

01:30:41.000 What does she do? 1.00

01:30:42.000 She's just a content contributor with us.

01:30:44.000 She has a brand that she built up called Wild and Whole.

01:30:48.000 Is that a podcast as well?

01:30:50.000 No, she doesn't do a podcast, but she does a lot of hunting and fishing stuff, a lot of culinary stuff.

01:30:56.000 That's her particular area of interest.

01:30:58.000 So she's there, and she works with us.

01:31:01.000 We work very closely.

01:31:02.000 She's in Houston.

01:31:04.000 Mark Kenyon's out in Michigan.

01:31:05.000 So we have people all over, content contributors, but we're based there in Montana.

01:31:09.000 Do you ever feel like you get spread thin with all that stuff?

01:31:13.000 I know you have a lot of podcasts under the media umbrella, and there's just a lot of stuff.

01:31:19.000 Do I feel spread thin?

01:31:21.000 Does it feel the company?

01:31:23.000 Do you ever feel like it's difficult to keep track of everything and make sure that the quality is up to standard?

01:31:30.000 I haven't felt that because I feel that primarily it's been able to sort of like Let me speak to it in the way of what I'm involved with.

01:31:45.000 I'm involved in everything and I have awareness of what goes on, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I have a team of people that I work with on producing things that are my primary day-to-day responsibility, being that we just launched just a week ago,

01:32:02.000 I think.

01:32:03.000 We launched five new episodes on Netflix, right?

01:32:06.000 Season nine?

01:32:08.000 Season ten, part A. Just went live on Netflix.

01:32:12.000 So I'm heavily involved in making that.

01:32:14.000 We do a lot of books.

01:32:16.000 I'm heavily involved in our book projects.

01:32:19.000 I'm heavily involved in certain stuff.

01:32:21.000 By having a team of people around that I work really closely with, you're able to greatly amplify what you put out.

01:32:27.000 I'm able to do more.

01:32:29.000 And that means a lot to me because I had spent my life Up until we started a company, I'd spent my life, a lot of it just as one writer.

01:32:38.000 And it takes a couple years to write a book.

01:32:41.000 And so my output was constrained by just what was one person capable of doing.

01:32:49.000 When I wrote my Buffalo book, I researched it for two years and then spent nine months writing the book.

01:32:53.000 And I wasn't doing much else then.

01:32:55.000 Now I'm able to We're good to go.

01:33:08.000 In terms of getting into working with brands that we love, so far it's been people that...

01:33:17.000 The companies we work with are people that...

01:33:19.000 First Light, for instance, was one of the first sponsors we ever had for our show.

01:33:23.000 Vortex Optics and First Light were the first two people that ever got behind our show.

01:33:30.000 I knew Phelps for a long time.

01:33:31.000 I've been wearing an FHF vinyl harness.

01:33:36.000 I remember my late friend Eric Kern turned me on to FHF stuff a bazillion years ago when Paul was just stitching away in his basement or whatever.

01:33:45.000 So to have it be that those relationships matured and we kind of came together under one company, it all seems very natural to me.

01:33:53.000 It all seems like just things growing and getting better.

01:33:56.000 So I have never felt too spread thin.

01:34:01.000 And then, like I said, we have a lot of people that kind of know what they're doing.

01:34:06.000 I have to be pretty careful.

01:34:07.000 I've had to learn to know what I don't know.

01:34:12.000 You know?

01:34:13.000 Yeah.

01:34:14.000 To learn what I don't know, you know?

01:34:15.000 I had to learn what I don't know.

01:34:17.000 And to give people, like, faith to do the things they do.

01:34:23.000 Right, so your roles shifted and become like a manager.

01:34:27.000 Yeah, man, I'm such a bad manager, man.

01:34:30.000 That became clear through the pandemic and stuff.

01:34:32.000 But no, I can't manage.

01:34:34.000 I can't really manage people.

01:34:36.000 I mean, I can...

01:34:37.000 Why is that?

01:34:38.000 Why can't I manage people?

01:34:41.000 Because...

01:34:42.000 That's kind of hard to explain.

01:34:48.000 I only have one way of...

01:34:50.000 That's a good question.

01:34:53.000 I don't...

01:34:55.000 I don't think I have developed multiple ways to interact with people.

01:35:03.000 Huh.

01:35:05.000 I sort of have one way in which I can interact with people.

01:35:10.000 In what way?

01:35:11.000 What do you mean by that?

01:35:13.000 Obviously you have a different way you interact with your kids than you do with your wife.

01:35:16.000 Okay, that's fair.

01:35:18.000 When dealing with people in my age bracket, I can't step into a role—I can't step into a position of being able to not have it be very close and very personal.

01:35:40.000 Mm-hmm.

01:35:41.000 I think a large thing is that you've met some of the people I work with.

01:35:46.000 We spend an enormous amount of time together.

01:35:50.000 We travel together.

01:35:51.000 We sleep in tents together.

01:35:52.000 We're together all the time.

01:35:56.000 It's that I can only interact in the way that I've learned to interact with my peers since I was a kid.

01:36:06.000 And in that proximity, I can't be that I'm going down to work and I need to put my work way on.

01:36:15.000 I think that I probably share too much information.

01:36:24.000 I probably don't conceal my annoyance.

01:36:32.000 I probably have high expectations.

01:36:38.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:36:39.000 And when I see people who are actual people managers, they have a more calculated approach.

01:36:47.000 And my approach, I guess, is very emotional.

01:36:52.000 Or more authentic.

01:36:54.000 The problem with those calculated people managers is they probably cut loose somewhere. 0.99

01:37:00.000 They probably put on a dress and get a bunch of hookers or do something nutty. 1.00

01:37:06.000 That's the thing about CEOs, right? 1.00

01:37:09.000 They're the ones who always like to go to dominatrix and get kicked in the balls. 0.99

01:37:13.000 Because they're being so calculated all the time. 0.98

01:37:15.000 Yeah, it's like they're so wrapped up in this thing that they're doing.

01:37:20.000 If you're a person and you're running a company, you're essentially performing all day long, right?

01:37:27.000 Because you can only be a certain amount of yourself.

01:37:30.000 Most people like to tell jokes that are maybe inappropriate or use language that's maybe inappropriate or say things that everybody's thinking but you really shouldn't say.

01:37:40.000 They like to do that occasionally.

01:37:43.000 Well, if you're a CEO of some major company, that would come with enormous financial consequences.

01:37:49.000 As some of them have found on this very show.

01:37:52.000 Yes.

01:37:53.000 Well, that was nothing.

01:37:54.000 He just smoked a little weed.

01:37:56.000 He made the money back the next day.

01:37:58.000 The company went down like 6% and went up 9% the next day.

01:38:01.000 But everybody wants to talk about the 6% and went down the first day.

01:38:04.000 Everyone wants to talk about the 9%. 1.00

01:38:06.000 Yeah, 9%. 0.99

01:38:06.000 Everybody's like, look, it's a fucking giant company. 0.99

01:38:08.000 It's going to go great. 0.98

01:38:09.000 But, like, I was reading about someone from Bezos' Blue Origin company, right, just got fired for something.

01:38:16.000 It's like the way you're allowed to behave if you're a bigwig in some sort of a large corporation is very narrow.

01:38:26.000 There's a very narrow, acceptable way that you're allowed to behave and you're scrutinized, like, extremely closely.

01:38:34.000 I think?

01:38:55.000 You have to be very conscious of how people are going to perceive or even distort what you're saying.

01:39:03.000 Look at it and take it out of context.

01:39:05.000 I mean, it's got to be an incredibly pressure-filled thing to do when you're doing that every day, eight plus.

01:39:13.000 I mean, no CEO really works eight hours a day, right? 0.97

01:39:15.000 You're working nine, ten, twelve, whatever the fuck it is. 0.97

01:39:19.000 They gotta do that every day. 0.97

01:39:20.000 I mean, that's...

01:39:21.000 How many of them die of heart attacks?

01:39:24.000 How many of them die of cancer?

01:39:25.000 How many of them, like, the pressure gets to be too much and they can't take it?

01:39:32.000 Probably better the way you behave.

01:39:34.000 Maybe some of my terminology's not wrong.

01:39:37.000 I'm interested in...

01:39:38.000 I'm interested in...

01:39:41.000 To me, the word leadership feels a lot different than the word management.

01:39:47.000 Yeah.

01:39:48.000 Yeah.

01:39:49.000 Well, leadership through example is always an interesting thing because it's like there's certain people that you admire and the way they live their life, like Jocko Willink is a great example, right?

01:40:03.000 He shows leadership through example, the way he lives his life.

01:40:08.000 Very disciplined, very fair, very smart, very open-minded and objective.

01:40:13.000 Doesn't have any weaknesses in his social game, but also just a real prime example of discipline.

01:40:25.000 And through that, you go, well, that's a leader.

01:40:28.000 Yeah, I got you.

01:40:29.000 I wind up... 0.98

01:40:36.000 In working with people, I wind up having a lot of love for people that will shovel shit, that grew up and know what that's all about.

01:40:51.000 That probably more than any other thing means a lot to me. 0.99

01:40:55.000 Like someone who will jump in and shovel shit when it needs to happen. 0.99

01:41:01.000 I like people who will take a bullet for what they're working on. 0.99

01:41:08.000 Who can articulate their perspective on something, but know when to give in.

01:41:18.000 But can fight just to the right moment, right?

01:41:22.000 And they're not doing it for the fun of it.

01:41:24.000 But then in the end, it's like, okay, now we gotta move.

01:41:27.000 We gotta go.

01:41:28.000 Well, having been on your show a few times, I've always admired the amount of work that's involved, like, for the cameraman and the folks that are running the show behind the scenes,

01:41:45.000 sound, all that stuff, because those guys are there 24 hours a day.

01:41:49.000 Like, if you're on a trip, and that trip is a seven-day trip in the backcountry, Yeah.

01:41:58.000 Yeah.

01:42:13.000 And you don't end hunting until it's...

01:42:16.000 Unless you're successful.

01:42:18.000 Until it's dusk.

01:42:19.000 You're filming the entire time.

01:42:21.000 So these folks are working long hours.

01:42:24.000 And then there's no hotel to go to. 0.98

01:42:27.000 The hotel is a fucking thin foam thing that's over rocks. 0.94

01:42:33.000 And then you lay your sleeping bag over that. 0.99

01:42:35.000 And you're sleeping. 0.99

01:42:36.000 And oftentimes you're freezing your dick off. 0.99

01:42:38.000 Like when we were in Montana the first time... 0.99

01:42:40.000 First time I ever went with you, I was like, wow, this is a job.

01:42:44.000 Imagine this job where your job is all day.

01:42:47.000 There's no like, I'm punching in, I'm punching out.

01:42:50.000 There's none of that.

01:42:51.000 The job is constant.

01:42:53.000 It's all day.

01:42:54.000 It's a very unusual job.

01:42:56.000 Because if you looked at the hours that those guys work, it's hard to quantify. 0.98

01:43:00.000 Because you're kind of working when you're fucking sleeping on a rock. 0.98

01:43:03.000 That's not normal. 0.99

01:43:04.000 It's all the time.

01:43:05.000 And I... In that management thing, I guess, I have to remind myself to think, like, they're at work.

01:43:14.000 Because I'm more like, we're just in it. 0.98

01:43:17.000 We're in it, and you have to be in it, but then I'm like, holy shit, these dudes are at work. 0.99

01:43:21.000 Why in the world would they do that? 0.98

01:43:22.000 It's not like any other jobs.

01:43:24.000 Say if you're filming a television show, an adventure show, and you're filming an adventure show, and you're looking at mushroom specimens in the woods, You know, you're going to have a shooting schedule.

01:43:38.000 Like at 8 a.m., we're going to have breakfast at 9.30.

01:43:42.000 You know, Paul's going to go out and examine all these different mushrooms and show everybody.

01:43:46.000 And then we're going to have dinner at 6 p.m., you know, and then, you know, we're going to wrap it up for the day.

01:43:52.000 And then we're going to start up.

01:43:53.000 There's none of that with you guys.

01:43:54.000 You guys are out there.

01:43:55.000 Plus, you might be seven, eight miles from camp. 1.00

01:43:58.000 And then you gotta huff all the way back with fucking headlights on in the middle of the night, and then you're looking at your watch like, Jesus Christ, we gotta be awake in seven hours, you know, and you haven't even eaten yet, and then you eat, and then you crash, and then it's like, alright, everybody up, it's five, like, fuck! 0.99

01:44:13.000 Yeah, we have a lot of what we would call death marches. 0.99

01:44:19.000 And one day we were trying to define what a death march is, and Yanni feels that it's not a death march until there's a fight that breaks out.

01:44:27.000 People are arguing?

01:44:29.000 About what way to go.

01:44:30.000 Oh, that's funny.

01:44:31.000 Yeah, no, I love it, man.

01:44:34.000 You develop...

01:44:37.000 Very, you know, intimate relationships with people, man.

01:44:41.000 Yeah.

01:44:41.000 You develop intimate relationships with people.

01:44:43.000 And it's hard.

01:44:44.000 And for that professionalism and all that, it's doing that, you know, months for months, being together all the time in whatever, like in tents or in a rental house and in cars and just like,

01:45:02.000 ugh! 0.97

01:45:02.000 Right? 0.97

01:45:03.000 You...

01:45:06.000 You can't stay buttoned up quite like maybe how you're supposed to.

01:45:15.000 Right, like if you were a CEO. Yeah, it's a different kind of experience.

01:45:20.000 And it's also an experience that I think is really lost in translation in all of hunting media.

01:45:28.000 I think you do the very best at...

01:45:33.000 First of all, your show is fantastic because of your narration and because you have a very clear love of the wilderness and of animals and of the experience of hunting.

01:45:49.000 It's hard to encapsulate a seven-day, really rigorous experience into an hour-long show.

01:45:59.000 And it's lost.

01:46:01.000 To people that don't experience, like to me who's done it with you, I can watch one of your shows and I can go, man, I wish I was there the whole time.

01:46:09.000 Where I would really get a sense of how hard it was to find the bulls, and then you hear them in the distance, and then you've got to walk three miles through this valley and try to get to this other ridge, and then you glass them up, and then they're already gone because they caught your wind.

01:46:22.000 There's so much the seesaw ride of the experience of trying to navigate your way through the woods and hunt, and then the wild thrill of it being successful or the failure.

01:46:35.000 All those things are...

01:46:38.000 The worst thing that's ever happened to hunting, I think, is hunting shows. 0.90

01:46:43.000 And that, not yours, but a lot of them, there's shitty music and bad writing, and it's all about the kill. 0.73

01:46:52.000 And to people that... 0.71

01:46:54.000 I don't have any experience doing that.

01:46:57.000 They're watching and it's sort of encapsulated into this very brief moment of people laughing and hooting and hollering because they shot a deer.

01:47:05.000 Why are you happy?

01:47:07.000 People don't understand it.

01:47:08.000 What is happening here?

01:47:10.000 Why are you happy?

01:47:12.000 Yeah, you feel the experience hasn't teed that up.

01:47:16.000 Yeah, you're missing everything.

01:47:18.000 It's like if all of romance was boiled down to an orgasm.

01:47:23.000 It's like, Jesus, there's so much more to human experiences and relationships.

01:47:27.000 There's so much more to hunting.

01:47:29.000 It's like everything else.

01:47:30.000 There's so much more to...

01:47:32.000 If you see a fight...

01:47:36.000 And you know that this guy punches that guy and that guy falls down.

01:47:41.000 If that's all you see, if you're just like a highlight of a knockout, you're missing And the struggle and the people that are in the camp with them, they're the only ones that really know.

01:47:51.000 If someone is in a camp with Roy Jones Jr. in his prime, they see all the training leading up to the fight and then the fight.

01:48:00.000 Those are the people that get the real experience.

01:48:02.000 And I feel like no one gets the real experience of hunting.

01:48:07.000 Until you do it.

01:48:08.000 And it's one of the reasons why it's so misrepresented and misunderstood in the general public.

01:48:17.000 In the people that don't hunt, in our culture, hunting has gotten this very bizarre bad rap And even amongst people who eat meat.

01:48:27.000 And I think a lot of it is because of that.

01:48:29.000 I think your organization and what you've done with Meat Eater, with your writing, particularly with your show, is the best thing that's ever happened to hunting in the modern era because it explains it and displays it.

01:48:42.000 In a well-thought-out, intelligent way that's filled with emotion and it's filled with introspective thought and articulate discussion and in a way that people get a chance to see,

01:48:58.000 oh, maybe I had the wrong impression of what this is.

01:49:02.000 We made many of our episodes that were 22 minutes long.

01:49:07.000 And we still, on Sportsman Channel, Outdoor Channel, 22 minutes.

01:49:14.000 When you watch a half-hour show, you're watching 22 minutes of stuff.

01:49:17.000 And traditionally, we would produce it in a four-act structure.

01:49:21.000 So you have an enormous amount of constraint on how you put this thing together.

01:49:26.000 Premiering episodes on Netflix, you're not held to that.

01:49:28.000 You're not held to the act structure.

01:49:30.000 You can kind of make them their own natural length.

01:49:32.000 But we had a lot of training early on in making...

01:49:41.000 That's where the skill of the editors is, how do you take...

01:49:48.000 How do you take maybe, I don't know, 100 hours of stuff and compress it down in 22 minutes in some way that was true to the experience?

01:49:56.000 There's stuff you don't show, there's stuff you do show, but yeah, it's tight.

01:50:01.000 It's 22 minutes.

01:50:03.000 It's hard to capture it.

01:50:05.000 I think the key in doing it is that I'd made the show with A lot of people who are very key, and you know Moe, right?

01:50:17.000 You know Moe, you know Nick Brigden.

01:50:19.000 People early on that were very involved in making the show that I was making.

01:50:22.000 These people, these weren't hunters.

01:50:25.000 They were people who were very interested in story.

01:50:29.000 They were very interested in sort of like the rhythm of the story, how a story got captured, how a story got laid out.

01:50:35.000 And so they weren't coming from a lifetime of watching hunting media.

01:50:41.000 They were coming from a lifetime of how do you do this thing, which is take people on an emotional, like create an emotional journey for someone doing something.

01:50:49.000 And they applied that skill set.

01:50:52.000 With me, who had a level of subject matter expertise and had my own understanding of narrative that I developed as a writer, but come in and apply that universal storytelling principles to this thing that other people might have felt was beneath them.

01:51:11.000 But they had the generosity of spirit in those early days.

01:51:15.000 They had the generosity of a spirit to take this thing and see some kind of beauty in it.

01:51:22.000 And help develop it into a thing where they were like applying their expertise to it.

01:51:26.000 Then kind of the only time has ever been done before.

01:51:31.000 I don't think before you, anybody had ever done it that way.

01:51:34.000 I mean, for context, like Mo Fallon went on to direct Parts Unknown with Bourdain.

01:51:41.000 He was an assistant to the film director, Michael Mann.

01:51:44.000 Yeah.

01:51:44.000 I mean, the dude went, you know, he was like...

01:51:46.000 And he's a brilliant, brilliant guy.

01:51:48.000 Like making, you know, he went to Africa and worked on Ali. 0.94

01:51:50.000 Yeah.

01:51:51.000 Right?

01:51:51.000 Like, he...

01:51:52.000 Yeah, incredibly interesting person in his own right.

01:51:58.000 And for him to...

01:52:01.000 And then eventually became a hunter, which is interesting too, right?

01:52:04.000 Through doing your show.

01:52:06.000 What's funny about some of the guys that come on to work on the show is they wind up having...

01:52:11.000 They might not have hunted, but they wind up having quite an education.

01:52:17.000 And they get where they have well-earned opinions.

01:52:24.000 And they're good at spotting stuff.

01:52:29.000 Mo's modest, right?

01:52:31.000 So he'd be the last guy that would ever be like, he wouldn't call himself a thing, but Mo's been exposed to during those years that he worked with us.

01:52:40.000 Moe was exposed to more action than most people that hunt are ever going to be exposed to.

01:52:46.000 He just exposed an enormous amount and processed it in an interesting way.

01:52:50.000 When you see the landscape of hunting media, have you seen the level of it come up since Meat Eater?

01:53:01.000 It was like 2012 you came around?

01:53:04.000 It's been about nine years?

01:53:06.000 Yeah, this is our 10th year, our 10th season.

01:53:11.000 I've seen enormous changes, and it's hard to untangle the impacts of digital media.

01:53:25.000 Right?

01:53:26.000 Because during that time, we were undergoing all this stuff with distribution channels changed so much.

01:53:32.000 And you had sort of the gatekeepers melted away.

01:53:39.000 You have people producing a lot of stuff.

01:53:41.000 Like our company, we do a lot of direct-to-YouTube series.

01:53:44.000 So you're able to put material out.

01:53:47.000 So people that wanted to make good material might before, they hadn't fallen into...

01:53:55.000 They didn't line up with what people felt should be broadcast.

01:53:59.000 And now they're able to put out what they want to make.

01:54:01.000 So it's hard to untangle what might have happened in outdoor media from what is just happening in media.

01:54:13.000 With the ability of creative individuals to come out, make a thing, and then have the thing be seen by other people without it needing to be something that someone decided on.

01:54:23.000 And you're seeing that in all aspects of everything.

01:54:28.000 So have I seen big changes in hunting media?

01:54:32.000 Absolutely, because even in our own ability to put out material, I've seen enormous changes.

01:54:38.000 We do tons more, and we're able to do stuff without having someone say that it's okay to do it.

01:54:43.000 Yeah, that's such an important point, because without that point, I mean, without that ability, podcasts would have never existed.

01:54:50.000 No one would have ever let you do something like this.

01:54:54.000 Yeah, you wouldn't have gone and pitched it and had someone say yeah.

01:54:59.000 But a lot's changed.

01:55:01.000 I think that the celebration of the culinary aspects of hunting and fishing, absolutely, they're far more represented now than they were 10 years ago.

01:55:11.000 Far more represented.

01:55:12.000 You never saw it.

01:55:13.000 You just saw the kill.

01:55:14.000 The first time I ever saw anybody cooking was on your show.

01:55:18.000 And the first time I ever cooked any kind of wild game myself was on your show.

01:55:23.000 When we shot that mule deer in Montana.

01:55:27.000 I never would...

01:55:30.000 So much has been done.

01:55:32.000 You can't come in and ever claim to have...

01:55:37.000 You can't claim to have invented anything because there's so much stuff out there.

01:55:42.000 But yeah, there's a mix.

01:55:46.000 There's a mix of things covered that...

01:55:53.000 We cover a sort of recipe or a formula of things that hadn't been covered quite the way we cover them.

01:56:01.000 Is there an issue now with YouTube where I know they have new guidelines for hunting where you're not allowed to show The kill you're not allowed to show like the impact of a bullet or of an arrow and I don't think you're allowed to show any kind of suffering And you may not be able to show butchering.

01:56:22.000 I'm not sure about that.

01:56:24.000 That has not been a thing that we've encountered.

01:56:26.000 This is a new thing about demonetization.

01:56:28.000 Have you seen these new rules?

01:56:30.000 See if you can Google this.

01:56:31.000 You might not even be aware of it, because I think it's very recent.

01:56:34.000 As a matter of fact, I think it came out last week.

01:56:36.000 Oh, well then that might be something that will come...

01:56:39.000 If that's a demonetization issue, I haven't been...

01:56:43.000 Yeah, well, you know, YouTube has been very heavy-handed with this concept of demonetization.

01:56:52.000 It's sort of a way of encouraging self-censorship.

01:56:55.000 Sure.

01:56:56.000 And we found that out in a weird way when we stopped doing, when we were moving from YouTube to Spotify.

01:57:04.000 All of a sudden, All of our shows that used to be demonetized were no longer demonetized.

01:57:09.000 Maybe 25% of our shows would be demonetized on YouTube.

01:57:13.000 25% of them would not be eligible for any sort of income.

01:57:17.000 That all changed as soon as we went over to Spotify.

01:57:19.000 Then 100% of the shows got monetized.

01:57:22.000 Upon closer inspection, the YouTube ad-friendly content guidelines was found that in July of 2021, the policy was updated to make it clear that footage of animals in distress induced by human intervention may not run ads.

01:57:38.000 Naturally, the hunting and killing of animals fall within the new guideline, meaning that hunting content as we know it can no longer be used to make money on YouTube.

01:57:46.000 The exact policy reads as follows.

01:57:48.000 You can turn on ads for this content.

01:57:50.000 Hunting content where there is no depiction of graphic animal injuries or prolonged suffering.

01:57:56.000 Hunting videos where the moment of kill or injury is indiscernible and no focal footage of how this dead animal is processed.

01:58:06.000 For trophy or food purposes, which is crazy.

01:58:10.000 Well, it says, while they don't go into much detail, it seems clear that any impact shots or footage of an animal after it's been shot is no longer acceptable to make ad revenue.

01:58:19.000 The thing is, like, how far...

01:58:22.000 This is from bowhunting.com.

01:58:23.000 Yeah, I don't know, because I was watching...

01:58:25.000 I really don't.

01:58:26.000 I can't comment on it.

01:58:27.000 I don't know how...

01:58:28.000 I can't comment on it.

01:58:29.000 I don't know how it's being interpreted.

01:58:30.000 I was watching things this morning, not our own material, but I was watching things this morning that were monetized, that would...

01:58:38.000 Not conform.

01:58:39.000 Here's where, they might not have put that into effect, but here's where it gets squirrely.

01:58:42.000 We've seen things that were not monetized, meaning the people who created them did not get money, but there's still ads on them.

01:58:53.000 Oh, yeah.

01:58:54.000 So that's real, right?

01:58:55.000 Yeah.

01:58:56.000 Correct?

01:58:57.000 Where things were not monetized.

01:58:59.000 Like they're serving ads on their platform, but they're not sharing.

01:59:01.000 Exactly.

01:59:02.000 Whereas the creators don't get money, but there was an ad on it.

01:59:06.000 Hasn't that been a complaint that people have levied before?

01:59:09.000 I don't necessarily think that's happened to us, but I do believe that has been a complaint, that people have said, hey, my video's demonetized, but it still has an ad on it.

01:59:18.000 Oh, I see what you're saying.

01:59:19.000 That's real, right?

01:59:20.000 I'm sure it is.

01:59:22.000 Let's Google that just to be sure.

01:59:23.000 And in fairness to YouTube, I mean, I always say this and it's an important point.

01:59:29.000 YouTube is managing at scale in an impossible volume. 0.79

01:59:33.000 The amount of people that are uploading videos to YouTube on a daily basis and to even hire people that are supposed to watch all that shit as it's being made is impossible. 0.97

01:59:44.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:59:45.000 There's no way you could do it.

01:59:46.000 You have hundreds of hours, hundreds and hundreds of hours of content uploaded every minute.

01:59:51.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:59:52.000 I mean, just imagine assigning someone to listen to this fucking show, to watch every episode, three fucking hours every day. 1.00

01:59:59.000 This motherfucker, he takes up half my day. 0.99

02:00:01.000 Yeah, but part of the thing of having a media company, you know, is where we put a lot of focus is, I'm very interested in a broad... 0.99

02:00:16.000 Distribution.

02:00:17.000 Yeah, here it is right here.

02:00:18.000 YouTube will put ads on non-partner videos but won't pay the creators.

02:00:23.000 Yeah, YouTube said an update to its terms of services this week that it has the right to monetize all content on its platform.

02:00:31.000 As such, it said it will start putting ads on videos from channels not in the YouTube Partner Program, which shares ad revenue with creators.

02:00:39.000 So yeah, that's it.

02:00:40.000 That's what Facebook does, though.

02:00:41.000 I mean, it did for 15 years or whatever it was for a long time.

02:00:44.000 Well, that was the crazy thing about YouTube, right?

02:00:47.000 Was that YouTube, in a remarkable, fair move, decided to share revenue with the people that are creating content, encouraging people to create content.

02:00:55.000 Because I feel like if they didn't do that, people would still have created content.

02:00:59.000 Like, they really didn't have to do that.

02:01:01.000 And I remember when they first started doing it, when we first started making money, we were like, you can make money?

02:01:06.000 Yeah, we had a podcast episode the other day with an early YouTuber, a dude named Jared Outlaw, an early YouTuber, and he talked a lot about that being a major transition point.

02:01:15.000 As an early YouTuber, it was when monetization became possible that it just really transformed the YouTube community.

02:01:23.000 He identified as a YouTuber.

02:01:25.000 But with media, a thing that I remain very interested in is this diversification of distribution.

02:01:36.000 Because you are so vulnerable.

02:01:37.000 Yes.

02:01:38.000 All the time.

02:01:39.000 Yeah.

02:01:39.000 We publish with Random House.

02:01:45.000 We produce podcasts.

02:01:47.000 We distribute as free material podcasts.

02:01:49.000 But then we just recently released a very high-grade audio original thing through Random House.

02:01:57.000 And we released a book that never had a book version.

02:02:01.000 So it's our project, Campfire Stories.

02:02:03.000 Release it with them.

02:02:05.000 Do stuff on social.

02:02:07.000 Release material through traditional, we still work with Sportsman Channel, right?

02:02:12.000 Everywhere all the time, so that you don't feel like someone's gonna, like, unplug you all of a sudden.

02:02:16.000 Yeah.

02:02:17.000 Yeah, we were in this situation before the Spotify deal where I was very nervous because we would have controversial discussions.

02:02:27.000 You know, discussions on controversial subjects.

02:02:30.000 And subjects that where you would get removed even if what you're saying was correct.

02:02:34.000 Like a perfect example is the lab leak theory.

02:02:37.000 Like the lab leak theory for COVID-19.

02:02:39.000 Oh yeah, you used to be a nut job for thinking that that was plausible.

02:02:43.000 Exactly.

02:02:44.000 But I had people on the podcast in April of 2020 saying that and I was labeled a dangerous conspiracy theorist by like these different left-wing media platforms that had decided that there was only one narrative despite the fact that I had evolutionary biologists that were explaining in detail why when you study these viruses it appears they've been manipulated.

02:03:06.000 I remember it being very naughty.

02:03:07.000 Very naughty.

02:03:08.000 Very naughty to think that a place that studies coronaviruses Would have it be that someone would catch a coronavirus.

02:03:18.000 It's hilarious, right?

02:03:19.000 At that place. 0.98

02:03:20.000 And the fact that it broke out in the very exact town, in the exact neighborhood where this fucking level 4 lab is. 0.99

02:03:30.000 But that was part of the problem with having a president like Trump, who is so fucking polarizing. 0.98

02:03:35.000 That anything that he agreed with, people immediately disagreed with it. 0.97

02:03:39.000 I mean, he could have agreed with some of the most amazing inventions in the history of the world, you'd be a racist if you agreed with them, because of the fact that Trump was a proponent of them, that he was promoting them.

02:03:50.000 So, I recognized...

02:03:52.000 I always fantasized about a quiet version...

02:03:56.000 Of Trump?

02:03:57.000 Yeah.

02:03:57.000 Oh, like someone who wasn't bombastic...

02:04:00.000 Many policies...

02:04:02.000 He could have pursued many policies.

02:04:05.000 Or let me put it this way.

02:04:07.000 Obama could have sold many of his policies.

02:04:11.000 And people have been like, oh yeah, that makes sense.

02:04:12.000 Oh yeah, for sure.

02:04:13.000 Well, in fact, he did.

02:04:14.000 Particularly the stuff about the border.

02:04:16.000 When people talk about how Trump was so horrific in his border.

02:04:19.000 There's speeches where Obama is talking about how we can't have porous borders.

02:04:24.000 We have to protect our borders.

02:04:25.000 And people are like, oh yeah, it makes total sense.

02:04:27.000 This is outrageous today.

02:04:29.000 It would have been interesting to pursue many of his policy positions in a way where he would come.

02:04:35.000 You know, I see both sides, but you have to careful consideration.

02:04:38.000 It's hard, right?

02:04:40.000 Because the guy's entire career, he had this one persona. 1.00

02:04:45.000 This, fuck you, pay me, I'm the man, you're fired. 1.00

02:04:51.000 He was always like, Rosie's gross. 1.00

02:04:53.000 He always had Rosie O'Donnell's disgusting person. 1.00

02:04:56.000 He would insult people openly. 0.96

02:04:58.000 And that was part of his thing.

02:04:59.000 And he did it while he was president, which was wild.

02:05:02.000 It was wild to see.

02:05:03.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:05:04.000 A president, a sitting president, talking about a woman he had sex with and calling her a horse face. 0.97

02:05:09.000 I remember seeing that on Twitter going, this is crazy. 0.95

02:05:12.000 He's not changing at all.

02:05:14.000 But that's what got him to the dance.

02:05:16.000 But that's what got people excited about him.

02:05:19.000 Oh, he's real.

02:05:20.000 He's PC. But it also really fucking... 0.99

02:05:24.000 Polarized the people that were in opposition to him. 0.97

02:05:27.000 And so because of that, everybody kind of lost their mind.

02:05:31.000 And it became where you couldn't even discuss things with actual experts that were experts in the field that you were discussing.

02:05:38.000 People that had no education in it whatsoever were deciding that these subjects were off limits and now would be demonetized.

02:05:45.000 And I saw that coming.

02:05:46.000 I was like, that's a real problem for me because I'm not going to change how I do this show.

02:05:51.000 I can't.

02:05:52.000 There's no reason.

02:05:53.000 I wouldn't do it.

02:05:54.000 I wouldn't enjoy it.

02:05:55.000 I'd hate myself. 0.99

02:05:55.000 If there was subjects that were taboo that I found profoundly interesting and I didn't discuss them because I thought I would be demonetized, I would be fucked. 0.99

02:06:05.000 I would be like, why am I doing this then? 0.98

02:06:06.000 Why don't I quit? 0.53

02:06:07.000 Because I want it to be just like if you and I were having a conversation, if we were sitting across a fucking dinner table or we're hanging out at your house and we just start talking about stuff and it's interesting, I want to just talk about it. 0.78

02:06:19.000 I just want the cameras to be on it so other people can be in on the conversation. 0.65

02:06:22.000 But I'm not going to change how I do this.

02:06:25.000 I'm never going to change how I do this.

02:06:26.000 So we were in this situation where I was like, okay, well, should we start putting stuff on?

02:06:29.000 We put stuff on Vimeo for quite a while.

02:06:32.000 I'm like, should I start expanding and looking for other online video platforms?

02:06:37.000 Would that water us down?

02:06:38.000 Would that help us?

02:06:39.000 And then I started thinking about all these other social media platforms.

02:06:42.000 Maybe I should join them and start posting them.

02:06:44.000 But a lot of them are like you get labeled a right-wing kook if you're on these.

02:06:47.000 Yeah.

02:06:48.000 All these QAnon folks on there.

02:06:51.000 It's one of those things where we're in such a strange time when it comes to media because everybody is sort of making the rules up as they go along and the amount of censorship that these companies are allowed to employ With no real regulations in terms of like,

02:07:15.000 you know, the First Amendment or- Yeah, they're privately held companies.

02:07:19.000 I know they are, but they're so big that they're not really- it's not simple anymore.

02:07:25.000 Like, Twitter is responsible for an enormous portion of the world's discourse.

02:07:30.000 Yeah.

02:07:31.000 And to say that that's just a private company, then these people that run this private company, who are they?

02:07:36.000 They're the arbiters of information.

02:07:38.000 They're the people that are allowed to decide based on their own policies, which is based on their own ideologies, what is and is not acceptable.

02:07:47.000 But you're one of the country's biggest media personalities.

02:07:50.000 How odd.

02:07:52.000 Well, I'm just telling you, I don't know if you don't know this, you are.

02:07:55.000 That's what I heard.

02:07:55.000 Okay.

02:07:58.000 Are you willing to have someone come to you and say that you need to be more fair to everyone because you have outsized influence?

02:08:06.000 It's the opposite.

02:08:07.000 I want other people to be able to talk freely the way I'm able to talk freely.

02:08:14.000 I wouldn't want to restrict their ability to do a podcast just because I'm doing a podcast.

02:08:19.000 Yeah, that's a good point.

02:08:21.000 If I have an opinion on things, I always think that the answer, and I've been wrong before, and if I'm wrong, I always try to correct myself if I find out that I'm wrong.

02:08:30.000 I'm not one that tries to bury an incorrect statement.

02:08:33.000 I will try to expose it and try to explain how I was incorrect.

02:08:37.000 Yeah.

02:08:38.000 I don't think anybody would trust you if you don't do that, especially when you're doing something like this where, you know, we don't talk before this.

02:08:44.000 This is one subject that we did talk about before this.

02:08:46.000 What was it?

02:08:47.000 The deer.

02:08:48.000 The deer thing.

02:08:48.000 No, you told me not to talk about it.

02:08:49.000 The deer having COVID. I was like, let's not hold that.

02:08:51.000 Let's talk about it on the podcast because I knew it was interesting.

02:08:53.000 Deer having COVID. But we don't have like a set agenda.

02:08:57.000 So when you don't have a set agenda, there's oftentimes you're going to come across things, and thank God Jamie's the best one-handed Googler in the business. 0.97

02:09:03.000 I don't know what the fuck we're gonna talk about while we're talking. 0.92

02:09:06.000 That's part of the fun of the show is that it is just a conversation. 0.98

02:09:10.000 As soon as I micromanage that and change, it's like it's gonna lose whatever appeal it has to me.

02:09:16.000 Because the appeal it has to me is like to be able to have conversations.

02:09:20.000 I want everybody to be able to do that.

02:09:22.000 The problem with People that have rigid ideologies that also have the power to decide what people can and can't do is that you get situations like the lab leak hypothesis where they're wrong and they're banning people and they're censoring people and it goes on for months and months and months and it destroys people's faith in free expression.

02:09:41.000 It destroys the ability to have conversations about the subject that are important because you have to say, well, why do you believe that this leak hypothesis is probable?

02:09:51.000 When then you have an evolutionary biologist or a virologist or an epidemiologist, and they start explaining things or debating it in a way that it seems like it's not possible.

02:10:01.000 And you can't have those conversations if someone has an ideological opposition to an idea based on a person who's a proponent of that idea, like Donald Trump, saying it's the Chinese virus, and then all of a sudden everybody says, well, if you discuss it, having leaked from a lab that you're a racist.

02:10:18.000 And then, you know...

02:10:20.000 You've got to be able to figure out what's right and what's wrong.

02:10:23.000 The only way is through discussion.

02:10:25.000 The only way.

02:10:26.000 It's the only way.

02:10:27.000 You can't have a person who decides, you can no longer talk about this subject because this subject has detrimental effects on X, Y, or Z. Well, it says who?

02:10:38.000 Because some people would say it doesn't.

02:10:40.000 And some people would say, well, X, Y, and Z are problematic because you can't have that discussion.

02:10:45.000 So they're these sacred topics that you can never really get an understanding of.

02:10:49.000 And then they're like a religion.

02:10:50.000 Like, what are they now?

02:10:52.000 You're not allowed to take the Lord's name in vain.

02:10:54.000 You're not allowed to talk about the Wuhan Clinic.

02:10:56.000 Like, what are we doing?

02:10:58.000 Like, are we talking?

02:10:59.000 Or are we under this weird censorship of...

02:11:04.000 These people that really don't have any expertise in the subject at hand.

02:11:07.000 You can have expertise in every subject.

02:11:10.000 So as soon as you have people that are ideologically opposed to certain discussions, you've got a real problem with free speech.

02:11:18.000 And I think that an argument could be made with all these social media platforms that they're so fucking big now that they can influence so much of the world's discussions that That we have to figure out where we stand in terms of free expression.

02:11:34.000 Because if you say to a person, you can't talk on Twitter because you don't believe that a man can be a woman.

02:11:42.000 That's a good example, right?

02:11:43.000 Because that's one of the things that gets you banned from Twitter.

02:11:46.000 If you don't believe a man can be a woman, you know, like a trans woman. 1.00

02:11:50.000 Or if you use some...

02:11:52.000 This is the one that you get banned from...

02:11:53.000 If you decide to become Steveina Ranella, and I keep calling you Steve.

02:12:00.000 Little old Steve Rinella.

02:12:01.000 Like, I'm deadnaming you.

02:12:03.000 It's called deadnaming.

02:12:04.000 And that's a ban for life.

02:12:06.000 I hadn't heard that word.

02:12:06.000 You get banned for life.

02:12:08.000 Really?

02:12:08.000 This is crazy.

02:12:09.000 Because, like, that's your name.

02:12:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:12:12.000 Right?

02:12:12.000 It's been your name for 40-plus years.

02:12:14.000 Why can't I call you that anymore?

02:12:16.000 That's so offensive. 1.00

02:12:17.000 But I can call you a cunt. 1.00

02:12:18.000 I can call you a dope. 1.00

02:12:20.000 I can call you a stupid piece of shit, and that's fine. 1.00

02:12:23.000 But if I call you by your old name, I'm dead-naming you. 1.00

02:12:25.000 Well, now we're in a weird ideological thing, right?

02:12:28.000 Because we've decided this is a protected class of people, and that you can't even have this offensive discussion about this protected class of people.

02:12:35.000 So you've set up almost like this religious barricade to free expression about this one very, in your ideas, sensitive subject.

02:12:43.000 That's nonsense.

02:12:44.000 That's a crazy way to dictate how people can and can't talk.

02:12:49.000 And you develop this, you know, you're going to have these people that are going to say things behind closed doors and be terrified that other people are listening.

02:12:57.000 And that shouldn't be that way on the internet. 0.96

02:13:00.000 Especially when you're dealing with, you know, I mean, fuck most of the people on Twitter, they're not even using their name. 0.98

02:13:06.000 They have some fake name in their profile. 0.99

02:13:08.000 Yeah, to challenge orthodoxy, You either have to get really good.

02:13:20.000 If you're going to challenge orthodoxy, you have to be so good that you can do it in a way that you don't set off the alarms.

02:13:27.000 Certain comedians are able to do it.

02:13:28.000 Yeah.

02:13:30.000 Comedians are probably the best trained to do it. 0.96

02:13:32.000 Yeah.

02:13:32.000 You can wiggle your way, but it has to have an impact.

02:13:36.000 Oftentimes, people will take what you're doing out of context.

02:13:39.000 Oh, yeah.

02:13:40.000 For sure.

02:13:41.000 I see that happen to comedians.

02:13:44.000 I think a lot of comedians, I've brought this up, I think that you do this.

02:13:50.000 Whether you mean to or not, you build a sort of balance in it.

02:13:54.000 And what makes it okay to laugh about stuff is you're willing to laugh about yourself and you're willing to laugh about your own opinions.

02:14:00.000 Oh, I mean it.

02:14:00.000 You're willing to laugh about your own history.

02:14:02.000 Yeah.

02:14:04.000 That gives people some room to play.

02:14:07.000 But when you strip out certain portions, you can make someone look terrible.

02:14:12.000 Sure.

02:14:12.000 Out of context, in quotes, in an article.

02:14:15.000 I have a whole bit about it.

02:14:16.000 About some of the stuff that happened to me during the election with Bernie Sanders.

02:14:20.000 Because it was so hilarious to read these articles where they're taking jokes and they're just taking a small snippet of a bit.

02:14:27.000 I saw some of that material.

02:14:28.000 Hilarious.

02:14:29.000 This is a problem with...

02:14:33.000 A lot of discourse in today's society because people are being dishonest in doing that.

02:14:40.000 They're being dishonest and if you can't reply to that, if somehow you're banned from Twitter or you're banned from YouTube or you're banned from Facebook or something like this comes up and you have no recourse, there's no way you can defend yourself.

02:14:53.000 Like, that to me is a real issue.

02:14:55.000 Because I've seen so many people mischaracterized, misquoted, taken out of contest, or even lied about. 0.97

02:15:04.000 Like, I've had fucking CNN say I'm taking horse dewormer. 0.98

02:15:08.000 I've seen that. 0.98

02:15:09.000 When I've got ivermectin prescribed by a doctor that's meant for humans and a medication that actually won the Nobel Prize for its use in humans.

02:15:18.000 And CNN. Lies about it.

02:15:21.000 And they do it on purpose and they know what they're doing.

02:15:23.000 So it's like, if you can't defend yourself or there's nowhere you can say the truth, like, what are we doing?

02:15:32.000 Like, what are we doing?

02:15:33.000 Do we have just sanctioned bodies that are allowed to manipulate reality for their own financial benefit or to promote whatever narrative that they think is either beneficial or sanctioned?

02:15:45.000 Like, is that free speech?

02:15:47.000 That's not free speech.

02:15:48.000 So if you can't defend yourself on Twitter, if you can't defend yourself on Facebook or YouTube, if you don't have a podcast, those are your options.

02:15:56.000 And if they remove you from one of those options or all those options, like that was one of the crazy things that the White House press secretary said, is that if you get removed from any social media platform for misinformation, you should be removed from all of them.

02:16:08.000 Well, what about if you're right?

02:16:09.000 That's what she said, which is so crazy.

02:16:11.000 That's not your position.

02:16:12.000 Your position is to be saying what the president will do or won't do, what is the policy, answer the reporter's questions.

02:16:21.000 Your job is not to dictate what social media companies do or don't do in terms of misinformation. 0.99

02:16:28.000 To even think that this is your place to manipulate or suggest It's fucking chaos. 1.00

02:16:33.000 It's crazy. 0.99

02:16:34.000 It's crazy that we're in a position where a person would say something like that.

02:16:37.000 We should ban more people for misinformation.

02:16:41.000 Well define misinformation because you give a lot of it yourself. 0.99

02:16:44.000 Like the fucking White House press secretary is responsible for the occasional misinformation. 0.99

02:16:49.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:16:50.000 Like, what happens there?

02:16:51.000 Should you be banned?

02:16:52.000 Because that seems like, you know, if we're going to hold everybody to the same standard, we should be really clear about this.

02:16:57.000 Like, what does that mean when you say misinformation?

02:16:59.000 If someone fact checks you and they find you to be in error and you do not correct it publicly, what are we supposed to do about that?

02:17:06.000 Should you be banned from being a White House press secretary?

02:17:09.000 Should you be banned from being able to speak on social media because you've been proven to be incorrect, possibly willfully?

02:17:17.000 I think we need free expression.

02:17:19.000 We need free expression to sort it all out.

02:17:21.000 And it's very convenient for people to just want to silence people who say things that they don't like or say things they think are inappropriate.

02:17:28.000 It's not healthy.

02:17:30.000 The only way we figure out what's right is you let everybody talk and it's messy and it's complicated and a lot of times people say things you don't like.

02:17:39.000 But that's how you sort out What's how you feel about things takes a long time takes a long time to gather up a true opinion on a subject and one of the only real ways is to get a view of it from all sides and in history we Typically after a period of 50 years or so look back and condemn Any occasion where we have suppressed dissenting views.

02:18:08.000 Yeah, I think we're going to do that here, too.

02:18:10.000 Blacklisting people from the Red Scare, issues that came around, civil liberties for certain minority groups during World War II. There just winds up being a theme, and later we'll look and be like, ah, you know.

02:18:24.000 We got a little carried away there.

02:18:27.000 People after the terror, it hasn't been 50 years by any stretch, it's been 20 years, people after the terror attacks at 9-11 who question certain orthodoxy about what we should do militarily, right?

02:18:39.000 We're put in a certain place, and now it's like we're dusting off and re-looking at these early whistleblowers.

02:18:47.000 It'll be interesting to see how the history of this stuff gets written, particularly around questions about when you dare question COVID orthodoxy.

02:18:57.000 I've had it.

02:18:59.000 I got the vaccine.

02:19:00.000 I was kind of misled because I thought the government was going to try to take my brain over.

02:19:04.000 But I wanted to get in the ring with him and fight it out, but nothing happened, you know?

02:19:09.000 What do you mean?

02:19:10.000 Oh, just I'm making a joke about the different people's concerns about the vaccine, and I got the vaccine, and I felt like nothing happened to me.

02:19:17.000 Oh, some people thought it had mind control agents in it?

02:19:21.000 Yeah, I've heard all manner of things.

02:19:23.000 I've heard magnets.

02:19:25.000 I've seen people, there's hours and hours on YouTube, or at least there were, of people putting magnets on their injection site, and they think that somehow or another there's a chip in there.

02:19:35.000 Oh, to draw it back out?

02:19:36.000 No, no, they think there's a chip in there, like the magnet sticks.

02:19:39.000 Oh, no, I didn't even try that.

02:19:41.000 I mean, I don't know why it sticks. 0.99

02:19:42.000 I mean, I don't know if it's bullshit. 0.98

02:19:43.000 I don't know if they're making things up. 0.96

02:19:45.000 Yeah, I guess my primary point around that is that I have...

02:19:52.000 Through this, I have been on many sides of issues and have largely tried to just roll through it and not have people tell me what to do.

02:20:02.000 And looking at travel restrictions, I'm like, oh, I want to avoid travel restrictions, even though I already had COVID. I'm like, I'm going to go get the vaccine because I don't want to have any kind of travel restrictions.

02:20:12.000 Which one did you get?

02:20:13.000 Moderna.

02:20:13.000 Did you have any side effects?

02:20:15.000 Because that's the strongest one.

02:20:17.000 No.

02:20:18.000 Yeah, for a couple hours I felt a little weird.

02:20:19.000 How many months was it between your infection with COVID and then getting the shot?

02:20:25.000 I think I got it as soon as I could.

02:20:29.000 So like three months or something?

02:20:30.000 Yeah, whatever the hell they told you.

02:20:31.000 I was concerned about, like I said, I was concerned about travel restrictions.

02:20:36.000 And I just was kind of like going along with the program.

02:20:39.000 And did you get two shots or did you get one?

02:20:40.000 Two shots.

02:20:41.000 Whatever distance apart.

02:20:42.000 Yeah.

02:20:43.000 And nothing really happened.

02:20:44.000 I didn't really get that.

02:20:44.000 I got sleepy when I had COVID. I got achy when I had the vaccine.

02:20:49.000 But, you know, I've held all these different opinions, like deep frustration.

02:20:54.000 I went from being in it right away.

02:20:56.000 I was like, oh, it's just a thing we're going to have to live with.

02:20:58.000 I think?

02:21:15.000 I've sat on every possible side of this thing.

02:21:18.000 And at this point now, you get to a point where you throw my hands up in the air, and as I've thrown my hands up in the air about not understanding it, losing faith that anybody really understands it right now, it's been now difficult for me to see people getting punished for challenging the orthodoxy when everything has changed so much.

02:21:42.000 It's like, how could any person...

02:21:44.000 Sit right now and act like you have the authoritative view on what's going to happen.

02:21:52.000 And this is coming from someone who's played along with the program every step of the way.

02:21:57.000 And when I come out the other side of it, I have a deep skepticism.

02:22:02.000 And not that I feel that there's some grandmaster plan.

02:22:06.000 I just have a deep skepticism of anyone...

02:22:13.000 We're good to go.

02:22:28.000 And how it has been used in that way to sort of like punish dissenting voices or exclude dissenting voices.

02:22:34.000 I think that I have a perhaps an unusual perspective on it because for my entire career I've dealt with a set of ideas that are inherently controversial.

02:22:46.000 I'm a firearm owner.

02:22:49.000 I support Second Amendment rights.

02:22:51.000 All my material involves guns. 0.97

02:22:54.000 We kill animals and eat them, right?

02:22:59.000 But these things all existed.

02:23:02.000 Like this set of ideas and set of interests that I had existed pre-social media.

02:23:07.000 So as social media came to be a thing, I've always lived within the context of how do I take things that the people that hold distribution channels are probably going to have a semi-adversarial view of?

02:23:24.000 And how do I find a way to keep dealing with the ideas I want to deal with and distribute the ideas and distribute the imagery and distribute the content that I want to make in a way that conforms to their views so that I can keep doing it?

02:23:38.000 So I feel like I've always, like a little bit of been like a...

02:23:44.000 You know, like a spy kind of like living in this other world in some way. 0.98

02:23:50.000 Like I'm used to feeling like someone's going to come and take my shit away from me. 0.98

02:23:56.000 You know? 0.99

02:23:57.000 Yeah, I see what you're saying.

02:23:59.000 When we first started to run shows on Netflix, I couldn't even get excited about it. 0.98

02:24:04.000 I was like, that shit won't be there a day. 0.98

02:24:07.000 It won't be there a day. 0.99

02:24:08.000 I remember having this conversation with you because it was like one star.

02:24:11.000 You guys had like one star.

02:24:13.000 Because back during the star days, people were attacking your show because it was the first show that Netflix had that showed actual hunting.

02:24:21.000 I wanted to talk to you about that.

02:24:23.000 How did that come about?

02:24:24.000 What was the conversation?

02:24:26.000 Because that's a brave move for them to decide to take something that's traditionally been on the Sportsman's Channel or the Outdoor Network and then to put it on Netflix.

02:24:37.000 We worked with a company that handled distribution, and this is years ago now.

02:24:44.000 We worked with a company that handled international distribution, and the company that handled international distribution had some connections to Netflix, and Netflix purchased what was called a second window.

02:24:54.000 Were they hesitant at all?

02:24:56.000 Did you have conversations about content or anything?

02:24:59.000 They may have been hesitant, but they didn't tell us anything about the hesitancy.

02:25:05.000 In fact, I have never, and this is after years, I have never had a discussion over there that even alludes to it.

02:25:18.000 Interesting.

02:25:19.000 Yeah.

02:25:19.000 And you saw their response when people were getting up in arms about that cuties thing.

02:25:25.000 That was crazy.

02:25:26.000 Right?

02:25:28.000 There's a thing like the degree to which you stand by producers and the degree to which you stand by your ideas.

02:25:34.000 It just hasn't been a thing.

02:25:35.000 But I assumed.

02:25:36.000 I used to wake up every day thinking that...

02:25:39.000 Oh, there's no way we're going to be able to stay on Instagram.

02:25:41.000 There's no way we're going to be able to be on YouTube.

02:25:43.000 There's no way we're going to be able to be on Twitter.

02:25:45.000 And then at the same time that I'm worrying about that, our material gets outward validation from a large streaming service.

02:25:57.000 We publish with Random House.

02:25:59.000 So we have certain people who are very, very intimate with our material.

02:26:04.000 Being okay with it and distributing it and allowing us to monetize it and at the same time feeling like someone at any minute is just going to drop it out because we use firearms.

02:26:17.000 The funniest thing is through all this, it's like you'd imagine we get attacked from the right more than the left.

02:26:26.000 Really?

02:26:27.000 Oh, far, yeah.

02:26:28.000 I mean, we get attacked from the left and the right, but we get attacked from the right more.

02:26:33.000 Over what?

02:26:35.000 You know, I think it's kind of like, I think that a lot of what we do makes people uneasy, that there's sort of a new, like there's this kind of like new emerging thing that has maybe disrupted some traditional, that has disrupted some traditional Monopoly.

02:26:54.000 They held on certain audiences.

02:26:57.000 It would be that somehow, even though virtually everything we make has firearms in it, every show we put out has firearms in it, is that you don't love firearms enough, which is just like, it's always confusing to me.

02:27:13.000 We get attacked from the left.

02:27:14.000 We get attacked from the left some.

02:27:16.000 It'll always feel very nuanced when you're attacked from the left, but we get a lot of heat.

02:27:21.000 Most of the heat we get would be from the right.

02:27:23.000 Wow!

02:27:23.000 I would have never expected that.

02:27:25.000 Yeah, be that you do something.

02:27:29.000 It's like, you're too woke.

02:27:30.000 You're not woke enough.

02:27:32.000 You glorify guns, but then the louder voice would be like, but they don't glorify them enough!

02:27:41.000 Dude, all the time.

02:27:42.000 It's crazy.

02:27:43.000 I can't imagine.

02:27:43.000 But I think it's because it's from getting to a position where there's some people that probably feel a little left out.

02:28:00.000 Yeah, that's probably it.

02:28:02.000 You know, they feel a little left out and it's like a little bit like...

02:28:06.000 I had a guy explain that to me.

02:28:08.000 It was really interesting.

02:28:09.000 He said, you have to be careful because you give off the impression that you're having a party inside of a walled garden. 1.00

02:28:15.000 He said, people on the outside are like, well, fuck those people. 0.99

02:28:19.000 And that's, he goes, you're getting a lot of hate in that way, where people misconstrue you purposefully. 0.99

02:28:26.000 They do it on purpose, because they don't like the feeling that they're not invited to this thing.

02:28:32.000 And some of them might even be your peers.

02:28:34.000 They're like, wow.

02:28:36.000 I never thought of it that way.

02:28:37.000 He goes, you have to reach out to those people and try to welcome them. 1.00

02:28:44.000 But I don't want to reach out when they've already been an asshole. 0.99

02:28:47.000 Yeah, I've looked at another thing in my life where I've seen that a Christian might be deeply troubled by a Mormon. 1.00

02:29:03.000 Okay?

02:29:04.000 And they might be very fixated on the threat of Mormonism. 0.75

02:29:08.000 And you'd be like, man, I feel like you'd be worried about devil worshippers. 1.00

02:29:13.000 Yeah.

02:29:14.000 Like, that, to me, seems like...

02:29:16.000 Yeah.

02:29:17.000 Like, I would have a...

02:29:18.000 I'd be after the devil worshippers. 1.00

02:29:20.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:29:21.000 But they're like, no, I'm after this thing that's a little bit different than me, you know?

02:29:27.000 Yeah.

02:29:28.000 And it's such a crowded, confused world, and when you kind of, like, survey the enemies, when you sort of find that, you know, you find that...

02:29:43.000 It'd be like if during World War II we had decided to go and bomb England because they weren't totally on board with our plan rather than staying focused on the freaking Germans. 0.89

02:29:56.000 And so I think that a lot of that heat is coming from people who they're looking and like, you're a lot like us, but maybe you're a little bit different.

02:30:06.000 Maybe.

02:30:06.000 And it also could be that you're getting all these accolades that they're not.

02:30:11.000 And so then they try to find reasons why you suck. 0.99

02:30:14.000 Yeah, sure. 1.00

02:30:15.000 There's a lot of that.

02:30:17.000 Yeah.

02:30:17.000 Plenty of reasons why.

02:30:19.000 Yeah.

02:30:22.000 It's interesting.

02:30:23.000 And that's one of the more interesting things about social media, right?

02:30:25.000 It's like a lot of the things that if people have said sort of behind closed doors, now they're said in sort of an open forum, you know?

02:30:33.000 And it just shows you how petty...

02:30:38.000 Also a lack of emotional development that some intelligent people have. 1.00

02:30:45.000 They could be accomplished and intelligent and successful and they still act like fucking babies. 1.00

02:30:53.000 Why do you care? 1.00

02:30:56.000 Like, if there's a show and you don't think they glorify guns enough and you're angry at them, like, don't you have enough shit in your own life to focus on? 0.99

02:31:04.000 Oh, yeah, I don't know. 0.99

02:31:06.000 Why are you focusing on that?

02:31:07.000 It's usually because, you know, you're probably at least a little jealous.

02:31:12.000 Unless you've done something egregious, like you've actually campaigned against Second Amendment rights, which, of course, I know you would never do, but if you did...

02:31:20.000 Then they'd be like, well, this is crazy. 0.98

02:31:22.000 This fucking show, they use guns, and then they campaign against guns. 1.00

02:31:25.000 So hypocritical. 1.00

02:31:26.000 But that's not the case. 0.93

02:31:28.000 No.

02:31:29.000 So for you saying that you're getting a lot of hate from the right, that means there's a lot of dummies on the right. 0.96

02:31:34.000 That's what I think. 0.96

02:31:35.000 Yeah, I do wonder about it.

02:31:37.000 And again, it's...

02:31:41.000 You get, like, you experience this all the time.

02:31:43.000 You get in trouble for having, and talk about getting in trouble from the right and the left, you get in trouble for having conversations with certain people.

02:31:49.000 Yeah.

02:31:50.000 You know, we had a Native American historian and activist named Taylor Keene in our podcast, so he said some things that people view as controversial around Like, you know, around things like picking up an arrowhead.

02:32:06.000 Yeah, I listened to that one.

02:32:07.000 Picking an arrowhead up off the ground.

02:32:08.000 Or the land back movement, right?

02:32:11.000 So, people are pissed.

02:32:15.000 They're pissed that, you know, he said the things he said.

02:32:19.000 You deal with this all the time.

02:32:21.000 Tucker Carlson came on the show and people are then...

02:32:24.000 Mad about that you talk to him.

02:32:28.000 They're mad that you...

02:32:29.000 We had...

02:32:30.000 You platformed him.

02:32:31.000 Yeah, we had a woman named Ru Map on from Outdoor Afro, okay? 0.99

02:32:37.000 So she talked about her experience as a black woman in the outdoors, right?

02:32:44.000 Great conversation.

02:32:45.000 People get really pissed.

02:32:48.000 They're just mad that she came on.

02:32:49.000 And she said, not only in talking to her, Ru pointed out to me that people are going to be mad at her for talking to me.

02:32:57.000 Yeah.

02:32:57.000 After we got into recording, she's like, you know, you're going to get in trouble for talking to me.

02:33:00.000 And you know what's funny?

02:33:01.000 And you'll never...

02:33:01.000 You probably don't realize this.

02:33:02.000 I'll get a bunch of shit from coming and talking to you guys. 0.99

02:33:05.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:33:05.000 Meanwhile, it was an interesting conversation. 0.99

02:33:07.000 I enjoyed it a lot.

02:33:08.000 But the right...

02:33:12.000 They get...

02:33:14.000 As much as people on the right right now are against cancel culture, you know?

02:33:22.000 And I'm glad they are.

02:33:25.000 They seem like oftentimes representations of that perspective seem to be guilty.

02:33:31.000 They seem to be guilty of their own crime by being very eager to restrict certain voices that don't conform to them.

02:33:40.000 And I... I do try to invite a variety of voices and represent opinions that I think are interesting,

02:33:56.000 and not every opinion that comes out in my material is necessarily my opinion.

02:34:00.000 But I try to do it, and it just makes people mad because people want you to be their thing.

02:34:07.000 Yeah, I experienced that with Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee. 0.97

02:34:11.000 He was experiencing some weird cancel culture shit from the right online. 0.99

02:34:18.000 And I was like, what the fuck is going on? 0.99

02:34:20.000 I called him. 0.98

02:34:20.000 I go, come on the podcast. 0.98

02:34:21.000 I go, we got to talk about this because this is so ridiculous. 0.75

02:34:24.000 These are the people that have been rallying against this. 0.90

02:34:31.000 We're good to go.

02:34:48.000 Wildly successful.

02:34:50.000 That's part of the problem.

02:34:51.000 Like, Black Rifle Coffee is a wildly successful organization.

02:34:54.000 I watch that with great interest.

02:34:59.000 I'm friends with Evan.

02:35:01.000 We have a hunt together coming up.

02:35:03.000 I watch with great interest.

02:35:05.000 I feel like, how...

02:35:10.000 Yeah, like the friendly fire incidents.

02:35:12.000 Yeah.

02:35:12.000 How is anyone justifying that?

02:35:14.000 Yeah.

02:35:15.000 It's nonsense.

02:35:16.000 We're fighting people.

02:35:18.000 We're definitely that.

02:35:19.000 In this country.

02:35:20.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:35:21.000 Well, people love to talk shit, too. 1.00

02:35:23.000 And they get caught up in petty bickering. 1.00

02:35:26.000 Do you know what, though?

02:35:27.000 I got to say this, man.

02:35:32.000 All the divisiveness...

02:35:34.000 It's like the thing that blows my mind though is when I go about my daily existence, if I didn't know it wasn't all going on from the news and social media and stuff, when I go about my daily existence and just the interactions I have with people, 0.99

02:35:52.000 fuck, I would never know what was happening. 0.98

02:35:55.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:35:56.000 How is that possible?

02:35:57.000 Because that environment is- I just think that like, oh, you know, hey.

02:36:01.000 Because the environment of social media is a terrible environment for human communication.

02:36:06.000 The environment when you're going about your daily business is normal.

02:36:09.000 You're talking to people.

02:36:10.000 And most of the time, like sometimes people have like a weird opinion of someone and then they talk to them like, oh, he's a good guy.

02:36:16.000 Yeah.

02:36:17.000 This happened to me a couple of days ago.

02:36:19.000 Someone told me that there's this business thing that I'm doing, and this guy is a real problem.

02:36:27.000 He's very full of himself.

02:36:28.000 You're not going to enjoy it. 1.00

02:36:30.000 I'm like, wow, shit. 1.00

02:36:31.000 Okay, well, I'm just going to put my best foot forward and see what happens. 0.99

02:36:34.000 I meet the guy, and he's wonderful.

02:36:36.000 He's friendly.

02:36:37.000 He's nice. 1.00

02:36:38.000 And then I'm like, oh, maybe that other person was a fucking pain in the ass. 1.00

02:36:41.000 And they met this guy, or maybe that guy... 1.00

02:36:43.000 I had a cold that day.

02:36:45.000 I mean, I don't know.

02:36:45.000 When he met that other person, maybe...

02:36:47.000 Who the fuck knows what it is? 0.97

02:36:48.000 Like, people are different on different days for different reasons. 0.99

02:36:51.000 But I had it in my head, but then I met him, and he was great.

02:36:55.000 I had a great time.

02:36:57.000 So... 0.76

02:36:58.000 Something about human interaction when you're together with the way we're supposed to look each other in the eye have a conversation Be close to each other like physically in the room with each other That's how humans are meant to communicate when we're communicating anonymously through text messages or arguing about things on Facebook and these fucking long verbose Passages like it's not normal.

02:37:21.000 It's not a normal way where you get to just Fucking expand upon something for paragraph after paragraph where no one says well that's fucking wrong and that's not true That's not what I said and this is not what I meant and you're changing this and taking this out of context people people get more Angry with each other when you don't get to respond when someone says something and you're like you're like well,

02:37:44.000 that's not me fuck you and then they it's designed in a way That is not compatible with human emotions, with normal human interactions, with social cues, and reading each other's... 0.96

02:38:01.000 Like, Louis C.K. had a bit about this once, about kids and kids doing things online, that kids like to be mean online, because it's like fun and they don't feel anything. 0.97

02:38:12.000 Like, if some kid is in front of you and they say something mean, and then the other kid feels bad and starts crying, they go, oh, well that doesn't feel good. 0.99

02:38:19.000 But they say it online, they're like, oh, fuck him. 1.00

02:38:22.000 Hey, you fat fuck. 1.00

02:38:23.000 And they say it, and then they don't feel anything, because there's no one there. 1.00

02:38:27.000 But the impact on the other person is real.

02:38:30.000 It's a terrible way to communicate.

02:38:32.000 And this is the way that a lot of ideas get discussed.

02:38:36.000 A lot of people are communicating that way.

02:38:39.000 And as detailed by these documentaries like The Social Dilemma and, you know, these different books that have been written about this problem and that woman who just testified, which is kind of crazy, right?

02:38:51.000 The day the woman's testifying about the problems with Facebook is the day Facebook goes down.

02:38:55.000 And there's a lot of conspiracies about that, right?

02:38:58.000 But this is an issue.

02:39:00.000 It's an issue that they're aware of inside the company and that they chose profit over rectifying this issue.

02:39:06.000 They're like, well, this is what we do, though.

02:39:07.000 They're like, we're making a lot of money doing this.

02:39:10.000 And I think that in the wild, when people are just running into each other, we're still just people.

02:39:23.000 Maybe I'm wrong about this, but isn't the inception of that app, like what they were fixing to make, was they were fixing to make a way you vote people up and down?

02:39:32.000 I think it was just a dating app.

02:39:34.000 Wasn't Facebook originally a dating app?

02:39:37.000 To vote, yes, to who you wanted to be, like, yeah.

02:39:42.000 Yeah.

02:39:42.000 There were other apps around the same time like that where you would find someone hot and you'd click, yeah, they're hot, and they'd get, like, ranked higher.

02:39:49.000 So it's like, maybe it hasn't drifted too far.

02:39:53.000 Maybe.

02:39:54.000 Yeah.

02:39:54.000 Well, the thing about Facebook is I think when they do their prognosis on the future, it skews so old that Like, it's young people are dropping off of the use of Facebook pretty radically.

02:40:10.000 See if that's true.

02:40:11.000 Pretty sure that's true.

02:40:12.000 I read something about it today, but I was only, like, gave it a cursory examination.

02:40:15.000 But I think what they're saying is that Facebook is kind of doomed.

02:40:18.000 And so they're in this sort of desperate, even though they're making billions and billions of dollars.

02:40:24.000 Yeah, you can see the end in sight with your age thing.

02:40:26.000 Yeah, whereas TikTok is the opposite.

02:40:29.000 It scales very low. 1.00

02:40:30.000 Like, my fucking kids are into TikTok. 1.00

02:40:32.000 A lot of people, young folks, are into TikTok. 0.99

02:40:34.000 You know, Instagram is kind of like the middle ground. 0.99

02:40:37.000 Twitter is where people go to throw shit at each other. 0.99

02:40:39.000 You know? 1.00

02:40:41.000 Here it is.

02:40:42.000 Facebook misled investors about shrinking user base.

02:40:46.000 Complaint to SEC, Facebook mishandling of duplicate accounts was extensive fraud.

02:40:51.000 So what is it saying about user base?

02:40:54.000 Facebook is leading investors about shrinking teen and young adult user bases and about the actual number of Facebook users.

02:41:01.000 Former employee Francis Haugen alleged a whistleblower complaint.

02:41:06.000 Facebook stock valuation is based almost entirely on predictions of future advertising revenue.

02:41:12.000 Thank you.

02:41:34.000 And advertisers, including the amount of content produced on its platform, failed to disclose internal data showing a contraction of the user base in important demographics,

02:41:54.000 including American teenagers and young adults.

02:41:57.000 The company is also hidden to the extent of which content production per user Has been in long-term decline, the complaint said, but obviously these are allegations from a whistleblower.

02:42:10.000 We don't know if they're true.

02:42:12.000 That was a good little bit of news thing there.

02:42:14.000 You put that in the end?

02:42:15.000 Yeah, you got to. 0.99

02:42:15.000 Because who the fuck knows? 0.99

02:42:16.000 She might be crazy. 1.00

02:42:18.000 And apparently she's donated a lot of money to AOC and some heavy-duty left-wing. 0.97

02:42:23.000 And she was like...

02:42:24.000 Upset that if you are a young woman, this is a very good complaint, a valid complaint, that if you're a young woman, if you have issues with anorexia, Facebook will send you anorexia content your way, which may exacerbate someone's predilection towards anorexia. 0.99

02:42:43.000 It's fucking terrifying. 0.97

02:42:45.000 They're the people that get it the worst, apparently, is young girls. 1.00

02:42:48.000 Young girls get... 0.86

02:42:49.000 Social media, they get the impact of social media worse than anybody.

02:42:54.000 According to Jonathan Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, he talked about that, that higher suicide rates, self-harm, all that stuff, the bullying, online bullying, young girls are the victims of that more than that.

02:43:07.000 Yeah, I read a statistic that of teenage girls, I can't remember, like a pretty staggering majority of teenage girls go to sleep at night with some level of anxiety about social media.

02:43:17.000 Yeah.

02:43:18.000 I can only imagine.

02:43:20.000 Our kids now, they're not on social media, and they don't read the news, so they don't know that everybody hates everybody now.

02:43:28.000 And when they see someone coming down the road, they wave.

02:43:31.000 And their head is like, this guy's probably not bad.

02:43:33.000 Let's go talk to that guy.

02:43:36.000 They're totally cool with everybody.

02:43:38.000 No one's really let them down yet.

02:43:41.000 The amount of things that Facebook has influence on, having owned...

02:43:45.000 They own WhatsApp, they own Instagram, they own Facebook, and this gigantic multimedia empire.

02:43:53.000 I mean, it's enormous.

02:43:54.000 There was an argument...

02:43:55.000 But you have to...

02:43:56.000 In some way, you have to sit and acknowledge that they made a thing.

02:44:02.000 They made a thing that's useful, and...

02:44:06.000 For me, as a content producer, me as a media personality, I'm able to use the tools they made and reach people that I otherwise wouldn't make.

02:44:17.000 I can't be unbridled in my...

02:44:22.000 Hatred when...

02:44:23.000 I didn't come up with the thing.

02:44:25.000 Someone else came up with it.

02:44:26.000 And it's very useful.

02:44:27.000 Yep.

02:44:28.000 Yeah.

02:44:28.000 There's a real good argument there.

02:44:30.000 But there's also an argument that it needs some sort of regulation.

02:44:33.000 Because in other countries, they've used it to have people murdered, to lie about...

02:44:40.000 To overthrow governments.

02:44:42.000 They've used it to put out...

02:44:45.000 Political rivals have put out false information completely unchecked that's led people to... 0.74

02:44:51.000 Kill people and overthrow... 0.98

02:44:53.000 Sure, but you could make the same condemnation of our First Amendment rights. 0.98

02:44:59.000 You could say, like, these people use their First Amendment privileges and it creates riots.

02:45:06.000 They use their First Amendment privileges and it radicalizes people.

02:45:10.000 It's just gotten too far.

02:45:12.000 It's too much now.

02:45:13.000 It's too much influence, right?

02:45:15.000 The idea is that, first of all, Facebook comes on phones in a lot of countries.

02:45:19.000 Like, in a lot of countries, they make deals with cellular providers so that, like, if you buy a phone...

02:45:24.000 It was like when U2 was able to put that album on all those iPhones.

02:45:26.000 Yeah, remember how mad people got?

02:45:28.000 That was probably the worst thing that U2 ever did.

02:45:30.000 Oh, dude, that thing's still like, you can't, yeah, like, now and then, when I turn my truck on, it somehow, like, finds that album still.

02:45:37.000 Like, what?

02:45:38.000 Stop it! 0.99

02:45:39.000 When the Bluetooth syncs up and just randomly plays a song, yeah, you're like, that's not on my fucking playlist! 0.99

02:45:45.000 Yeah, that was a, well, boy, what a fucking bad PR move that was. 0.72

02:45:49.000 Yeah, I mean, look, these conversations are interesting, and you're right, there's no definitive yes or no, good or bad, because they're new. 0.94

02:45:58.000 They're really new discussions.

02:46:00.000 There hasn't been a hundred years of social media influence where we get to have an understanding of what kind of impact this has on our society.

02:46:08.000 Yeah, and I still feel like I'm like a mouse in someone's kitchen, man. 0.96

02:46:15.000 That I'm able to be in there doing my shit and haven't been found out yet and thrown out. 0.96

02:46:23.000 I get it, too, especially with your line of business. 0.99

02:46:26.000 And then when you see these new regulations that YouTube's putting out and you realize, like, oh, well, this might be a real fucking problem. 0.97

02:46:33.000 Oh, yeah. 0.55

02:46:35.000 When I look at people who their livelihood is built strictly around YouTube, it feels, oh my God, does it feel vulnerable to me. 0.91

02:46:44.000 Unless you're on there showing how to make crochet or make bead bracelets and shit, I don't know.

02:46:51.000 Or you're doing those videos like Sniper Wolf does where you're reacting to things. 0.55

02:46:55.000 Like, oh my god, did you see that?

02:46:57.000 Oh my god. 1.00

02:46:57.000 Like, she's funny and she's silly. 1.00

02:46:59.000 It's G-rated. 0.96

02:47:00.000 Yeah, so maybe you're not.

02:47:01.000 Yeah, but I think there's a lot of people that I look and I'm like, man, you being what you're into and that you're only doing it there...

02:47:10.000 Yeah.

02:47:10.000 I'd have a hard time resting at night.

02:47:12.000 I would feel like someone, like the man, was coming for you.

02:47:16.000 That influenced my decision to leave and go to Spotify, for sure.

02:47:20.000 I didn't trust anybody.

02:47:22.000 I didn't even trust Apple.

02:47:25.000 Because I knew that there were certain episodes, like when Alex Jones came on my podcast once, The ratings went down.

02:47:34.000 There was no update in the ratings for like a week.

02:47:37.000 When I tell you it was my biggest podcast at that point in time, I think eventually Elon Musk became bigger and a few other ones became bigger, but at that time when Alex came on for episode 9-11, it was not just the biggest, but it was the biggest by far.

02:47:52.000 But that wasn't reflected.

02:47:53.000 Not only was it not reflected, there was no ratings.

02:47:56.000 The ratings stopped.

02:47:57.000 And then when it came back, That episode was ranked like, you know, number five or six or something like that, where other episodes where I knew what the downloads were, were number two or one.

02:48:08.000 I'm like, how is that?

02:48:11.000 They're doing some shenanigans.

02:48:13.000 They didn't want that episode.

02:48:14.000 I think somebody, I don't know if it's true.

02:48:16.000 I might be wrong.

02:48:17.000 But I think somewhere, someone didn't want that episode to be number one.

02:48:22.000 Because the numbers were crazy.

02:48:24.000 It was like 16, 18 million downloads.

02:48:26.000 It was nuts.

02:48:27.000 It was because it was a wild, chaotic, you know, alcohol and marijuana-fueled conspiracy ride with a maniac.

02:48:34.000 Yeah, well, at a certain level of influence, you know that people do, at a certain level of influence, there are people that are able to pay detailed attention to very specific things.

02:48:46.000 I'm sure, like, I wouldn't be shocked to hear that your show drew some special level of attention, the same way that there were people at Twitter assigned to Trump's tweets.

02:49:02.000 For sure.

02:49:03.000 Yeah, for sure.

02:49:04.000 And then all the other, like, you could write insane stuff that would never get discovered.

02:49:07.000 Yeah.

02:49:08.000 But at a point, you're, like, someone is forced to pay attention.

02:49:12.000 Yeah.

02:49:12.000 It had gotten to the point where the show was always number one.

02:49:15.000 So the episodes were always number one.

02:49:17.000 So if it was always number one and then he came on and it was number one, that became a problem.

02:49:21.000 And then the numbers were so high.

02:49:25.000 It was an interesting moment.

02:49:29.000 But it was also like...

02:49:30.000 I mean, they were great.

02:49:32.000 They never really, they never censored me.

02:49:34.000 They never told me what to do or what not to do.

02:49:36.000 No episodes ever got taken down.

02:49:38.000 I mean, Apple is essentially, they're just an aggregator, right?

02:49:43.000 You're saying Apple never took your episodes down?

02:49:45.000 Never.

02:49:45.000 Never once.

02:49:46.000 Never censored anything.

02:49:47.000 Never gave me a hard time.

02:49:48.000 Never gave any sort of criticism or anything.

02:49:53.000 They were great.

02:49:54.000 But they did a weird thing where they never really got involved financially in podcasts.

02:50:01.000 And I think it's a tremendous business mistake.

02:50:04.000 Tremendous business mistake.

02:50:04.000 Well, they're trying to rectify that now in a way that won't be maybe so great for producers.

02:50:09.000 Yeah, what are they trying to do now?

02:50:11.000 Oh, just like move away from applying that it's just like a random distributor.

02:50:18.000 Like if they were to do some kind of paywall situation, what it would do to download numbers.

02:50:23.000 It's hard to get people to pay. 0.98

02:50:25.000 There's too much shit that's out there for free. 0.99

02:50:27.000 You know, there's so much good content today. 1.00

02:50:29.000 There's a million podcasts.

02:50:31.000 A million.

02:50:32.000 I mean, if you go back to the day where Friends was the number one show in the country or Seinfeld was the number one show in the country. 0.98

02:50:40.000 How many fucking shows were there? 0.97

02:50:42.000 Was there 20? 1.00

02:50:43.000 I mean, how many fucking shows were there? 0.98

02:50:46.000 What's like number one? 0.98

02:50:47.000 I mean, what is in prime time?

02:50:49.000 I mean, Jesus Christ, you have seven days a week, and you have three hours every night, or whatever prime time is.

02:50:56.000 And out of all those shows, that's not a lot.

02:50:58.000 You know, we got 50 shows.

02:51:00.000 And then you got, you know, cable networks, which don't, you know, really get the same kind of numbers back then.

02:51:07.000 And then you have a show that's number one.

02:51:11.000 All these things are sanctioned.

02:51:12.000 Everything is on a network.

02:51:14.000 Everything is on a network that's broadcast through the government's pipes.

02:51:19.000 Everything is all, like...

02:51:21.000 Censored, and there's advertising that's inserted, and this is a wild west of content where anyone can have something, and a lot of them are good. 0.96

02:51:32.000 So if you have a million shows, which is really what there is right now, for someone to come along and say, I want you to pay, good fucking luck. 0.99

02:51:42.000 Good fucking luck. 0.98

02:51:43.000 I mean, even if you have a really good show. 0.99

02:51:46.000 Yeah.

02:51:46.000 Even if you have the best show.

02:51:48.000 Like, if this show...

02:51:48.000 If I did that with...

02:51:50.000 I'm not saying my show's the best show, but if I did...

02:51:52.000 It's very highly rated, right?

02:51:54.000 If I decided to make people pay for it, I would lose almost everybody.

02:51:59.000 You think so?

02:51:59.000 Yeah.

02:52:00.000 Yeah, I think so.

02:52:01.000 Unless I was the victim of some sort of censorship and I was a martyr.

02:52:07.000 And then I put it on my website and I had everybody download it from there and make some sort of a contribution and that's the only way we can keep it alive. 0.99

02:52:17.000 Then you could get people to realize like, Fuck the man, man. 0.97

02:52:22.000 And they would probably jump in. 1.00

02:52:24.000 What is this?

02:52:25.000 There's two million.

02:52:26.000 Two million podcasts.

02:52:27.000 Wow.

02:52:27.000 I'm wrong.

02:52:29.000 I'm wrong by a million.

02:52:30.000 As of 2021, there's over two million podcasts and more than 48 million podcast episodes. 0.99

02:52:36.000 Holy shit. 0.57

02:52:38.000 This is pretty startling growth considering there was just over 500,000 active podcasts from just three years ago in 2018. That's what's nuts. 0.98

02:52:47.000 These podcast statistics are completely in line with the fact that podcasts are slowly going mainstream. 0.99

02:52:54.000 Bitch, that's mainstream. 1.00

02:52:55.000 That is mainstream. 1.00

02:52:56.000 That is not slowly going mainstream.

02:52:58.000 In fact, it's estimated that 78% of the US population is now aware of what a podcast is are from 64% in 2008. They're slow playing this.

02:53:06.000 Because the reality is 75% are listening.

02:53:09.000 There's a lot of people listening to the podcast.

02:53:11.000 We regularly get episodes of 10, 11 million downloads.

02:53:15.000 It's normal.

02:53:16.000 It's like the number of people that are tuning in to shows is crazy.

02:53:21.000 It's crazy.

02:53:22.000 But it's still just a tiny piece of the population. 0.98

02:53:25.000 You know, you're going worldwide, there's 330 whatever the fuck million people there are in this country. 0.95

02:53:30.000 Yeah. 0.90

02:53:31.000 And then worldwide, you're dealing with 8 billion.

02:53:33.000 Really, 11 million is just like a tiny little drop in the bucket.

02:53:36.000 Do you imagine you'll be doing a podcast in 10 years, if you had to guess?

02:53:41.000 I don't think like that.

02:53:42.000 I never thought I would be doing this ten years ago.

02:53:44.000 Well, I'm inviting you to think like that.

02:53:45.000 Yeah, I don't know.

02:53:47.000 I'm wondering.

02:53:47.000 I don't know why not, because I do enjoy it.

02:53:50.000 When I stop enjoying it, you know, I mean, I don't want to mention any names, but there's certain people that do shows where people feel like they're phoning it in.

02:53:58.000 If anybody ever really feels like I'm phoning it in, I'll stop.

02:54:03.000 If I feel like I'm phoning it in, I'll definitely stop.

02:54:05.000 Or I'll stop phoning it in.

02:54:06.000 But I don't think I'm ever going to stop...

02:54:08.000 Wanting to have conversations with people.

02:54:10.000 If I can have you and you and I just talk, I always want to talk to you.

02:54:15.000 You're an interesting dude. 0.93

02:54:16.000 If we get a camera on us and other people can get in on it and they enjoy it, like there's someone out there on a treadmill right now enjoying the shit out of this. 0.88

02:54:23.000 I like that. 0.93

02:54:24.000 I like it.

02:54:25.000 You're providing something that people actually enjoy.

02:54:27.000 As long as it's enjoyable to me, I think it'll still be enjoyable to other people because enthusiasm, like genuine enthusiasm is contagious, you know?

02:54:37.000 And I find that if I watch someone that's cooking on TV or someone that's making things or someone that's talking about something they're passionate about, even have zero interest in it, if it's a genuine enthusiasm.

02:54:49.000 Which is why when I do this show, I don't do it based on famous people.

02:54:54.000 I don't try to get people that I know will get big ratings.

02:54:58.000 There's zero consideration of that.

02:55:00.000 I've always appreciated that about you.

02:55:01.000 Oh, thank you.

02:55:02.000 Yeah, because I'm only a little teeny bit famous, but I get to come on.

02:55:05.000 Well, I'm always interested in talking to you.

02:55:07.000 My interest is in my interest.

02:55:10.000 That was one of the interesting conversations in the beginning with Netflix.

02:55:17.000 Who are going to be the episodes?

02:55:19.000 Who's going to be the first week?

02:55:20.000 What are the big names for the first week?

02:55:22.000 I'm like, that's not happening.

02:55:24.000 Yeah.

02:55:25.000 There's not going to be any of that.

02:55:26.000 There's not going to be any of that.

02:55:27.000 We're going to try to set it up and make...

02:55:29.000 I don't think like that.

02:55:30.000 And because I don't think like that, it stays...

02:55:33.000 I hate the word organic, but it stays organic.

02:55:35.000 Because it's just...

02:55:36.000 I like talking to people.

02:55:38.000 I like talking to interesting people.

02:55:39.000 And as long as I think they're interesting, I want to talk to them. 0.54

02:55:41.000 Whether it's a fucking author that no one's ever heard of, that has some book that's interesting, or a photographer that covers wars, or whatever. 0.92

02:55:50.000 Whatever. 0.98

02:55:50.000 A comic that no one ever heard of, but I think they're talented. 0.98

02:55:53.000 That's what I want to do.

02:55:55.000 So I'm going to keep doing it.

02:55:56.000 As long as I keep, I mean, maybe it won't be interesting to other people.

02:55:59.000 Or maybe way less people will find it interesting because the medium will have shifted and it'll have moved on.

02:56:04.000 But I didn't do it in the beginning ever thinking it would be the number one podcast in the world. 0.98

02:56:09.000 I did it thinking like, oh, it'd be good to get high with my friends and talk shit. 0.98

02:56:13.000 You know, and here we are. 1.00

02:56:15.000 Fucking, how many thousand? 0.98

02:56:17.000 What are we, 1,000 something? 1.00

02:56:18.000 17. 1717. I think I've told you this every time I've been on your show, but you know Helen Cho.

02:56:26.000 Yes, very well.

02:56:27.000 The first time I ever heard the word someone say podcast was Helen Cho in reference to you.

02:56:33.000 Yeah.

02:56:34.000 I could take you and show you where she was sitting and where I was sitting.

02:56:37.000 I think that was 2011 when we met, right?

02:56:39.000 I was like, a what?

02:56:40.000 She's like, just listen.

02:56:42.000 Just go.

02:56:44.000 I was like, what is that? 1.00

02:56:47.000 Probably said something about how it sounds like a stupid idea. 1.00

02:56:49.000 I don't know, whatever. 1.00

02:56:50.000 Yeah, it's funny.

02:56:51.000 You were in it.

02:56:54.000 Early.

02:56:55.000 Early.

02:56:55.000 Yeah, 2009. Yeah.

02:56:57.000 And I wouldn't have gotten into it without your encouragement.

02:57:00.000 I knew you should get into it right away.

02:57:02.000 The first time we ever did one, I'm like, wow, that guy's interesting.

02:57:05.000 Because I enjoyed your show, The Wild Within, before you ever did Meat Eater. 0.82

02:57:09.000 I remember watching you make a fucking boat out of some moose skin and going down a river and the whole deal. 1.00

02:57:14.000 And I was like, wow, that's fucking cool. 0.99

02:57:17.000 Well... 0.95

02:57:18.000 Show and interesting kind of subjects and and before you'd ever taken me hunting I'd always had this fascination with hunting I'd always watched like Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild and watch a bunch of these hunting shows because I would be like but that's probably the best way to eat like to get the meat yourself that way you really understand where it's coming from versus this weird sort of separation between you and the act of the animal dying where you don't really understand what you're doing just eating meat you know and One of the two times I thought my career was over was

02:57:48.000 when that Wild Within show on Travel Channel didn't take off.

02:57:54.000 What's the other time?

02:57:55.000 When my first book didn't take off.

02:57:57.000 The Buffalo book?

02:57:58.000 No, no.

02:57:59.000 My first book was called Scavenger's Guide to Oak Cuisine.

02:58:01.000 Oh, that's right.

02:58:02.000 But that book's still in print, man.

02:58:04.000 Yeah?

02:58:04.000 No, in the end.

02:58:06.000 But when it came out, I had tons of media around it. 0.99

02:58:10.000 Just no one bought the damn book, man. 0.99

02:58:13.000 I thought I was over. 0.99

02:58:14.000 I don't know if he actually said it.

02:58:16.000 There's this thing that's always attributed to Woody Allen.

02:58:19.000 Maybe he said it.

02:58:20.000 I don't know.

02:58:21.000 Something to the effect of, like, his movies are always good enough that they let him make another one.

02:58:26.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:58:27.000 And I felt for a minute that my book hadn't done good enough to get to make another one, but then someone took a bet on me again, and I was able to make a successful book.

02:58:36.000 But, yeah, doing that Wild Within on Travel Channel, dude, we were...

02:58:40.000 They ordered eight episodes.

02:58:42.000 They ran them all.

02:58:42.000 But we were...

02:58:44.000 I mean, we just rapped.

02:58:49.000 The eighth episode.

02:58:50.000 Okay?

02:58:51.000 I mean, I was in the...

02:58:52.000 We were, like, getting in a car to go to the airport from the location where we were filming in West Texas.

02:58:58.000 And I got a call that...

02:59:02.000 It was effectively canceled, even though they ran some through.

02:59:06.000 And I thought that somehow you were done.

02:59:14.000 Yeah.

02:59:15.000 We could have been.

02:59:16.000 But in that year, too, you still had to jump through all the hoops.

02:59:25.000 Yeah.

02:59:26.000 And I was just, didn't realize, like emerging into a thing where, like you said, like the Wild West or you're in the open ocean or whatever the hell, like I was just emerging into a place where like the time lined up that you didn't need to be,

02:59:43.000 you could still do things.

02:59:45.000 Yeah.

02:59:46.000 You could still do things.

02:59:46.000 Otherwise, like, I don't know, a decade earlier, 20 years earlier or something, you'd have to go crawl into a hole, man.

02:59:53.000 Yeah.

02:59:53.000 Well, I was a part of TV that decade earlier.

02:59:56.000 When you had to get cast on a sitcom or Fear Factor, I had to get cast on that, and that's the only way people got to know who you were.

03:00:04.000 You had to do something else.

03:00:06.000 You had to do something.

03:00:07.000 I could never even believe that those dudes...

03:00:09.000 I was kind of shocked when the guy bought that show.

03:00:13.000 How come?

03:00:14.000 Because he came in, he came from an unexpected background, didn't last long, bought some shows, none of them took off.

03:00:22.000 We didn't know what, we had no idea what that show was about.

03:00:25.000 It was kind of a mess.

03:00:27.000 It was fun, but it was kind of a mess.

03:00:28.000 And then when that was over and we started making Meat Eater, I was like, I had learned enough from that wild NBS to understand very well what I wanted to make.

03:00:38.000 And it was going to be extremely stripped down.

03:00:42.000 And it was going to be like, and I was going to have a very high, like, a Very high level of influence over everything that happened.

03:00:54.000 I learned enough to know that.

03:00:56.000 I remember a conflict that you talked to me about where they tried to release an animal so that you could shoot it.

03:01:01.000 They wanted to guarantee that you got a moose.

03:01:05.000 Oh, yeah.

03:01:06.000 It was a conversation where we were talking about how much time it takes.

03:01:10.000 It was early on before we started the film.

03:01:12.000 I'm not going to name who it was, but this producer said...

03:01:16.000 I was like, well, you know, you just don't know.

03:01:17.000 It takes time and all this.

03:01:18.000 And he's like, that's why there's animal wranglers.

03:01:25.000 And your show is the opposite of that now because some of your best episodes are unsuccessful episodes.

03:01:30.000 One of my favorite ones are the ones that you're talking about your dad.

03:01:33.000 There's no music and you're on the top of a mountain just discussing things.

03:01:37.000 Yeah, Sky Island Solitaire.

03:01:39.000 Some play on Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire.

03:01:43.000 Man, I used to be worried sick about those ones.

03:01:46.000 Those are some of the best ones.

03:01:47.000 Yeah, they work.

03:01:48.000 Some of the best ones.

03:01:49.000 We call them skunkers. 1.00

03:01:50.000 Yeah, but they're some of the most realistic, too, because that's really what happens.

03:01:54.000 It's part of the thing.

03:01:55.000 It's one of the reasons why it's so interesting, because it's difficult.

03:01:58.000 That's like I said earlier.

03:01:59.000 I think that's one of the things that's hardest to convey when you're just seeing a success, and then the success is always towards the end.

03:02:06.000 It's all like you expect it, like a movie.

03:02:09.000 You want the good guy.

03:02:10.000 The good guy's going to win.

03:02:11.000 He's James Bond.

03:02:12.000 He's going to survive.

03:02:14.000 And sometimes, no.

03:02:16.000 I feel like I should get all circumspect about media right now, but I don't know.

03:02:20.000 You know, media reflects the culture at a certain point in its ability to express itself.

03:02:27.000 And the culture has shifted its ability to express itself radically because of the internet.

03:02:32.000 This podcast is a great example of that.

03:02:35.000 Nothing could have existed like this 20 years ago.

03:02:38.000 Your podcast is another great example of that.

03:02:41.000 You found your niche in that stream.

03:02:45.000 You caught that wave and you wrote it out.

03:02:49.000 Perfect timing.

03:02:50.000 From The Wild Within to Meat Eater to podcasting.

03:02:53.000 To the meat-eater empire now.

03:02:56.000 It's all internet-based, all influenced, all of it with these different streams of distribution.

03:03:05.000 It's fascinating.

03:03:07.000 Oh.

03:03:08.000 Yeah.

03:03:09.000 My oldest boy, my wife said the other day that he was saying that he hopes meat-eater sticks around long enough for him to get involved.

03:03:21.000 Yeah.

03:03:22.000 And we had a good laugh about it.

03:03:24.000 It's great.

03:03:24.000 But I was like, oh man, I don't know, buddy.

03:03:27.000 I bet it will.

03:03:28.000 You might need to...

03:03:29.000 I bet it will.

03:03:29.000 Yeah, I keep encouraging him to join the military.

03:03:34.000 Really?

03:03:35.000 For discipline?

03:03:37.000 Just, you know, yeah, something.

03:03:39.000 I think I have a guilty count.

03:03:41.000 I was very close.

03:03:43.000 My dad served.

03:03:46.000 I was very, very close to going in the military.

03:03:48.000 And I feel like I've had...

03:03:51.000 I have a guilty conscience.

03:03:53.000 And this thing happened to me where years ago I was invited by someone to go down to give a talk at Fort Bragg.

03:04:02.000 It was the third special forces group in Fort Bragg.

03:04:04.000 And I went down to give a talk.

03:04:08.000 And it was interesting because I call them kids or not kids.

03:04:13.000 They're all guys about a decade younger than I was.

03:04:17.000 30, early 30s.

03:04:19.000 And Sitting there in front of these guys talking to them, and these are people that had come out of high school.

03:04:27.000 They came out of high school post 9-11 and went into the military, did all their training, became Green Berets, and had spent their entire adult life either training for or in Afghanistan and Iraq.

03:04:46.000 Since they were 18. Wow.

03:04:49.000 And one of these guys, at one point, he opens up the Fort Bragg phone book.

03:04:58.000 Like an actual physical phone book.

03:05:00.000 We got to talking and he opens it up and he goes to the divorce attorney section in that phone book.

03:05:08.000 And just pages and pages, you know what I mean?

03:05:12.000 And you realize just the enormous cost and the enormous sacrifice.

03:05:20.000 And yeah, I've always felt like I was so close and didn't do it.

03:05:26.000 It's always bugged me. 0.98

03:05:29.000 I feel like chicken shit that I didn't do it. 0.97

03:05:32.000 And I feel like other people had to do a thing that didn't happen for me. 0.98

03:05:38.000 And so, yeah, maybe in some way, I would like him to go set the record straight for the family.

03:05:47.000 But my old man, he was one of the biggest voices against...

03:05:50.000 He didn't understand why would you enlist when there's no war?

03:05:54.000 What are you going to do?

03:05:55.000 That was his take on it.

03:05:58.000 Because he enlisted during the war.

03:05:59.000 Right, right.

03:06:00.000 He's like, well, if there's a war, you enlist.

03:06:01.000 I mean, if there's no war, I mean, what are you going to do down there?

03:06:06.000 And I just listened to him, you know?

03:06:09.000 But yeah, man.

03:06:11.000 I don't know.

03:06:11.000 I mean, he's a little kid.

03:06:12.000 I'm not going to lean on him too hard about it, but I feel like he would be setting things back right again.

03:06:18.000 Do you feel like you're worried that you might want him to do something that maybe he wouldn't do otherwise because you didn't do it and you feel guilty?

03:06:28.000 He's young.

03:06:30.000 He's of age where I could kind of say...

03:06:33.000 I mean, if he was 17, I'd probably handle this conversation differently.

03:06:37.000 If he was 17 and going for it, then...

03:06:40.000 But when he says what he's going to do or whatever, for whatever reason, my instinct is to encourage him to go into service.

03:06:52.000 Let's talk.

03:06:53.000 Figure it out.

03:06:55.000 Figure it out in a few years.

03:06:56.000 Yeah, he's got a while.

03:06:57.000 Maybe he'll wind up in with you.

03:06:58.000 I've got to wrap this up.

03:06:59.000 Yeah, for sure.

03:07:00.000 I've got to end this.

03:07:00.000 I've got to get out of here.

03:07:01.000 It's always a pleasure.

03:07:03.000 Tell everybody where they can find MeatEater.

03:07:06.000 It's TheMeatEater.com because you guys still haven't bought MeatEater.com?

03:07:09.000 Dude, it's such a long, weird story, man.

03:07:11.000 No, TheMeatEater.com is a great place to go.

03:07:16.000 I'm on Instagram at SteveMirnella.

03:07:20.000 If you go to, you know, wherever you could buy books, go to Apple Books or whatever.

03:07:27.000 And get the American Buffalo audio version because you finally do the voiceover for it.

03:07:33.000 Yeah, do that, but mainly right now go get Meat Eaters Campfire Stories close calls.

03:07:38.000 And then also we're doing a fundraiser right now.

03:07:43.000 At TheMeatEater.com where we're doing a fundraiser for our land access initiative where we raise money to improve and enhance places where you're hunting fish.

03:07:52.000 And we've got a big auction going on right now.

03:07:54.000 We've got a signed guitar from Luke Combs.

03:07:56.000 We've got all the kinds of Like a raccoon hide, antelope skull and stuff, all used on the episodes.

03:08:02.000 All up for auction.

03:08:05.000 You can buy Giannis Patelis' first pheasant tail, knives, all kinds of stuff.

03:08:11.000 And we're going to use all that for our land access initiative.

03:08:13.000 All right.

03:08:14.000 Awesome.

03:08:14.000 All right.

03:08:15.000 Beautiful.

03:08:16.000 Thank you.

03:08:17.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 07, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1716 - Steven Rinella

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript