On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, we have a guest on the show, Cliff. Cliff is a hunting guide, guide guide, and entrepreneur. We talk about how he became a guide, how he got into hunting, and what it takes to be a guide and guide in the wilds of Colorado. We also talk about what it's like to be an outfitter and guide guide and how important it is to take the time to get to know someone who is willing to share their story and give back to the community. It's a great episode and I hope you enjoy it! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. We appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Cheers, Joe and Cliff! XOXO - The Joe Rogans Experience Team xoxo - and - and "All Day All Day" - , & . And of course, Cheers! and Cheers ! Cheers. - Joe and the Crew! - The Rogans Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show! Love ya, Joe & The Crew! Cheers!! - Your Support is so Much! - Joe & the Crew, :D - Joe and The Crew XO - The Crew. xOXO Thanks to: ( ) - Jake & The Rogan Podcast by Night Podcast - All Day Podcast by , All Day, All Day podcast by Night, All day, All Day by Joe and All Day - By Night, by the Crew - by The Crew, By The Crew at The Joe Experience Love, x ~ by & All Day - by The Joe Podcasts Podcast, - Thank You, , The Crew @ ? + Please Rate & Thank You! - Thank You For Your Support & Support Me & , Thank You - Love Ya'll, Thank You So Much Love & Blessings, Love You, Joe - Cheers - - P. & The Cheers & P. @ , Cheers? - MURCH - JOGA - XO - THE COFFEE BOYS
00:04:22.000So how did you make this choice to get off the path?
00:04:27.000Because for a lot of people, I think one of the problems with the path is you get married, you get a house, you have kids, you have responsibilities, and then you're stuck.
00:04:37.000Because you really can't change careers because you have so many dependents.
00:04:42.000There's so many people depending upon you.
00:04:46.000You have to kind of just suck it up and keep doing this thing that you don't enjoy for your family.
00:04:51.000Yeah, so to answer that question, man, I think I have to be a little humble about it, Joe, because I came from a family, including my wife.
00:05:01.000When I met my wife, man, I was a guy that was well-educated and looked like a guy that was going to be on a traditional path to...
00:05:13.000You know to great success as a finance guy and that's when I met my wife and then I like I tricked her man because I switched it up on her you know but she stayed with me the whole time and so I gotta I gotta give her that but also my family too man like you can imagine like you know my my parents you know wanted me to get a great education I mean they my family man like basically lived the American dream like none of them they didn't grow up wealthy you know nor did I but they kept me comfortable And
00:05:43.000then, you know, they got great success and they wanted, you know, they got success through hard work and they wanted to see me, you know, have a path of like, you know, go to Wall Street, go be an attorney, go do something like that because that seemed like the easy path,
00:05:59.000I think, in their mind and seemed to make sense and they were giving me that opportunity.
00:06:03.000But when I decided not to do that, man...
00:06:05.000Not one time have my parents or my brothers for that part said like, dude, you're doing, you're being an idiot.
00:06:13.000Like when I told them like, hey, I'm going to buy.
00:06:16.000So essentially I bought an outfitting business that had been, you know, pretty much run into the dirt, you know, and it was just, it was just federal permitting where I could expand into a bigger, you know, guiding business in Colorado.
00:06:29.000When I told them, I was going to do that.
00:07:12.000So what, how did you, so if you're in the middle of this world, this financial world, how did you make that transition?
00:07:19.000Like, what were the steps involved in making the transition?
00:07:22.000Did you just immediately up and quit and just figure out how to get a job as an outfitter, or were you already doing some outfitting?
00:07:28.000Yeah, so I've been in, I mean, all through my childhood, you know, and then even when I was an undergrad in school, I hunted all the time.
00:07:38.000And I had done a bunch of guiding, and I was exposed to it.
00:07:41.000And the other thing, for my type of outfitting and guiding, I had been exposed to livestock and horses and mules my whole life.
00:07:49.000And that's a big part of, like, wilderness outfitting.
00:07:52.000You've got to be familiar with how to pack mules, how to pack horses, how to ride horses up in the mountains because that's a huge proportion of what I did just to get into remote areas.
00:08:05.000Not to dive into the depth of my childhood, but I was exposed to that.
00:08:10.000It, you know, the first 20 years of my life where, you know, I had that skill set.
00:08:14.000So that's, that's the first part of it.
00:08:16.000And then, you know, how I actually mechanically did it.
00:08:21.000I mean, so the, just to give you some context, me and my brother start when I was young, at a business school, me and my brother started a financial company, and it changed, changed in a bunch of different ways, and he still operates it.
00:08:35.000But when I was, I think I want to say like 22, 23, I started working for our biggest client.
00:08:41.000And he was a phenomenal guy and I was doing more like family wealth management for him.
00:08:46.000And literally, Joe, I was just kind of struggling day to day with being, I always wanted to be in the outdoors and I wanted to go do something else.
00:08:54.000And I literally just walked into his office and And I was like, Bob, I love you, man, but I gotta go.
00:09:59.000So how did you go about starting and getting clients?
00:10:02.000So if you're starting an outfitting business, you're a young guy, you're leaving the financial sector, and you're going and starting and getting clients.
00:10:09.000How do you go about making that happen?
00:12:19.000What you do is fascinating to me because it's one of the more interesting kinds of hunting.
00:12:27.000Where you go really deep in with animals.
00:12:31.000You bring in mules or horses, and you go very, very deep in to find these animals.
00:12:37.000And I think most people on the outside...
00:12:43.000That think about hunting, they don't really understand how grueling it is, how unbelievably difficult it is to get, you know, 15, 20 miles in.
00:13:11.000No, I mean, you have to, in a lot of these areas, I mean, people think about Colorado, Joe, and they think, so I hunted what technically would have been the, they say the White River elk herd is the largest elk herd in the world, right?
00:13:27.000So you have that perception that, oh, okay, well, you go there, you go into the flat tops, or you go into the surrounding forest, you know, Forest Service property, and you just put your backpack on, get off the road, and there's going to be elk everywhere.
00:14:50.000Just because a lot of the habitat that mountain goats and sheep live in, it's not really conducive to packing with horses just because you end up getting above timberline and there's just some logistical reasons.
00:15:04.000A lot of times it's just better to backpack on them.
00:15:07.000But on elk, it's almost always, so you're packing your camp with horses and mules, and then you're coming back in.
00:15:16.000You know, if the camp's in a situation where you can cover ground on foot and hunt, then you'll do it that way.
00:15:23.000But a lot of times you'll actually bring horses back in and hunt a horse back, too.
00:15:27.000And that's like a whole, people don't, I mean, you know, taking care of horses, you know, if you got 15 horses and mules in camp, like, you know, 12 miles back in the wilderness, like, it's, you know, it feels like going back in time, man.
00:16:07.000So, dude, I got some Amish buddies that I love, man, and I don't, so I don't want to like, like, Mark, if you're listening, man, and you probably shouldn't be listening because you're Amish, but...
00:16:22.000But no, so the answer to your question, man, is it just depends on, you know, what church they're from and the rules, you know, the rules that they have established, you know, and what they're doing.
00:16:33.000So if it's for a business, a lot of them can use email.
00:17:20.000Yeah, they would be kind of in that process.
00:17:23.000For people who don't know, they have like a time period of an indefinite time period where they're allowed to just run around and party and do drugs and sleep around.
00:17:33.000And then they have to come back to the church if they want to.
00:17:42.000But anyways, they would come out and what I noticed, man, is if you take an 18-year-old Amish guy and you're just doing stuff around like ranch, because we were outfitting and guiding a lot of time, but we also had to manage the livestock and we had kind of a ranch that we had to take care of.
00:18:00.000Those guys at 18, they know a ton because they've already been working for seven years.
00:18:10.000They could show up to my place, Joe, and they're wearing sandals and shorts, and you're thinking, this guy's never been around livestock, and you'd be like, hey man, go grab that mule and saddle it.
00:18:24.000Every single one of them knew how to do it, because they grow up catching horses and putting them on a buggy every day.
00:18:33.000It's just wild that they learn all these skill sets really early on.
00:18:39.000So in some ways, from an education standpoint, None of them had a hard time communicating with me or, you know, we always could get through all that.
00:18:49.000You know, maybe they didn't have as good as spelling or they didn't have as good, like, algebra skills or something because they missed out on some of that education, maybe.
00:18:57.000But I can tell you from a work ethic and, like, a hands-on skill set, they're amazing, man.
00:19:04.000It's interesting because we all want to think about education in terms of, like, things you can use in the corporate world or You can use in the business world, but the reality of education is you're learning things, and they learn so many things, I'm sure, that the average person who works in an office is never going to understand.
00:19:23.000Take an average guy who works over at Google and say, hey man, go put a saddle on that mule.
00:19:30.000And they're like, what the fuck are you talking about, right?
00:19:57.000I've met some homeschooled kids that are phenomenal.
00:20:00.000They're really interesting kids, but the parents did a great job of giving them a very nuanced education and then also committing them to activities so they interacted with a lot of kids on a regular basis.
00:20:10.000They just didn't go to school during the day with kids.
00:20:13.000And it's like if you have that kind of time and that kind of commitment and you You know, maybe you're just not very happy with the regular school system.
00:20:23.000People used to think that it was a bad idea to homeschool your kids, but during COVID, I think a lot of people kind of opened their eyes.
00:20:29.000First of all, A, how difficult it is, but also that there's a value to being there while your children are learning things, so you can kind of communicate with them and go through, especially if you have an expertise in something.
00:20:41.000My youngest daughters used to do martial arts, and It was kind of like a mixed martial arts class and I would go with them to mixed martial arts class and sit on the sideline.
00:20:56.000And then a couple of times some stuff came up, and I said to the instructor, I said, actually, you shouldn't really do it that way.
00:21:03.000Because, like, they weren't, you know, as a black belt in jujitsu, I'm like, you're actually going to get your back taken if you teach people this path.
00:21:30.000These people that are learning from their families and from their community, it's a completely different way of life, but it's probably a more healthy way of life than the average person experiences just going to a regular,
00:21:47.000mundane, very regimented, traditional school system.
00:22:33.000And he actually had a rational explanation.
00:22:36.000He said, look, man, like, we make these judgments...
00:22:39.000And I think a big part of it is we're just trying to judge, like, we know the value of having a certain pace of life, and these technology judgments are based on that.
00:22:50.000We want to be able to still, you know, succeed, feed our families, because they still got to deal with, like, the realities of, you know, they got to buy land to have their farms, all that stuff.
00:23:00.000But he's like, look, it's all about pace of life for us.
00:23:03.000So if we look at a technology and it's going to change that dynamic, then certain churches may choose not to do that.
00:25:36.000I think that was like, I don't know whether it was factory farming, what kind of farming.
00:25:41.000It might have been like, I know they feed a lot of silage, you know, like processed, feed that's been basically fermenting, and that's what that smell is a lot of the time.
00:27:24.000But, you know, if you're in a wall tent camp, and you're hunting elk for like seven or eight days, and, you know, it's like half snow, or it's half snow, and then it melts, so it's like muddy, you got all these horses tied up.
00:27:37.000It's in every lead rope, it's in everything, and you don't realize, you know, you're out there, you know, out there feeding the horses in the dark, and then you go into the cook tent, and And, you know, you start eating and you don't realize, you know, you got horse shit on your hands.
00:30:48.000I feel like as a person who has spent some time in the woods, not nearly as much as you, but I've spent enough time that I understand what...
00:31:25.000And wolves are dominant, intelligent, calculating predators that they eradicated from the West for a reason.
00:31:36.000Yeah man, so I think you hit on a bunch of things that would like bring me back to my opinion on it and that's that A lot of this stuff, so I know they've basically described two different areas in Colorado where they're going to put the two first sets of transplants.
00:31:56.000And one of them is like right in where, I mean, I rode that country with a horse like all over the place and the circle of where they're going to put those wolves is right there.
00:32:06.000So I know where they're going to put those, you know, one of the spots.
00:32:12.000How many wolves are they going to put in?
00:32:14.000So my understanding is off the bat, the first year, and I believe their goal is by December of this year, it's going to be like between 15 and 30, I believe is the first bunch.
00:32:30.000And they're going to have them in two different spots.
00:32:33.000But in that, you know, in that Vail, Vail corridor, you know, up to the flat tops in there, you know, so they're probably going to put 15 to 20 wolves in there.
00:32:44.000The thing that you hit on, Joe, that I think kind of forms my opinion is, I mean, these areas, when you go in them, man, they seem so wild, right?
00:32:53.000Like, you know, I could, the flat tops, I could get on a horse and I could ride for 15 hours and not see a road, you know, Ten hours and not see a road.
00:33:03.000And they seem so wild, even to me, being there.
00:33:06.000But I don't think that people realize how much humans have already affected that landscape and how it doesn't matter.
00:33:17.000This myth that putting wolves back in that landscape is going to turn it back to some ecosystem that was here 300 years ago.
00:33:29.000I think it's a figment of their imagination, man.
00:33:33.000And the reason I say that is because I've also spent a fair amount of time in British Columbia that seemed so much more wild to me.
00:33:42.000And let me kind of like give you context of why that is.
00:33:54.000Okay, so if you look at the dynamic of that area, there's a huge highway that goes from, Highway 70 that goes from Denver on the Front Range up, you know, past all the ski resorts into Vail, into Eagle,
00:34:09.000and then it kind of goes down through a big canyon, Glenwood Canyon, and kicks back into Aspen.
00:34:16.000All the winter range there is split by this massive highway, and then that highway has an eight-foot game fence along the whole thing, and then along that Vail Valley where they are going to put these wolves,
00:34:31.000there's 50,000 full-time residents, and there's probably double that in the high season, ski season, plus you've got these huge ski resorts.
00:34:42.000I guess what I'm getting at is when somebody tells me that the low-hanging fruit to kind of rewild that areas as wolves, it's just bullshit.
00:35:20.000I don't know the exact laws, Joe, but the CPW, and that's the Colorado Parks and Wildlife, they're in charge of managing the wildlife in Colorado.
00:35:31.000How can they put something like the transplanting of wolves, a very complex, It's a biological problem.
00:35:42.000I mean, you're dealing with biology and wildlife.
00:35:45.000How can they put that as a ballot initiative?
00:35:48.000How can they put that in the hands of people other than wildlife conservation experts, wildlife biologists?
00:35:57.000Well, I mean, the reality is our laws allow that.
00:36:35.000And if you're cool with going outside and seeing wolves eat your dog, Well, then you've made the right choice.
00:36:41.000But if you're not, if you don't think they're gonna go after low-hanging fruit, if you don't think they're gonna go after easy prey, you don't understand wolves.
00:36:49.000Anybody who lives in British Columbia, they have real fucking wolf problems up there.
00:36:56.000And these are wolf problems that we used to have in the West, but they eradicated them.
00:37:01.000I mean, I don't think it's good to eradicate them.
00:37:04.000I'm not saying that what they did was right when they poisoned horses and left dead horses filled with strychnine and the wolves all died off, but they did it for a fucking reason.
00:37:16.000And that's the thing that's so crazy about, you know, back to the process of how it happened.
00:37:23.000Everybody who wants wolves in Colorado, and we can get into the depth they want them, because that's not really clear.
00:37:32.000They just went through this whole setting up the plan for the CPW, and it became very clear in my mind, watching that process, that they don't really want there to be any management of wolves in Colorado either.
00:38:36.000Well, it turns out the ballot initiative basically says that wolves are a non-game species, and that was in the language of the ballot initiative.
00:38:45.000They can't really now say, the CPW can't really say that they're going to someday be a hunted species in Colorado.
00:38:54.000I personally think, and everything's like 20-20 hindsight, but even when the ballot initiative originally was out there, I always thought it was going to pass by a landslide.
00:39:07.000That's what's so crazy because it just barely passed.
00:39:09.000But, um, I always thought, like, the problem with Colorado is it's different than these other western states, you know, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, because they're gonna keep the population in line through hunting or other, you know,
00:39:25.000other methods, but in Colorado, I don't think the politics are gonna allow that, man.
00:39:29.000I think it's just gonna be, like, who knows what the top is on, you know, how many there is, how much they affect the ungulate population, you know, who knows, you know.
00:39:39.000But what I was going to say is what's crazy about this ballot initiative and the bummer part about it is everybody that's going to deal with the negative consequences, they're people that voted no, but they're in the areas where the wolves are going to be transplanted.
00:39:55.000Everybody that voted for it, they don't have to deal with the downside.
00:40:06.000The problem is, is every person that I've interacted with in British Columbia, you know, or even in the western states that have a fair amount of wolves, every person that's just trying to make a living on the landscape, you know, he's a guide, an outfitter, a logger,
00:40:22.000a cattle rancher, whatever, like he's out there living, he or she's out there living with them and dealing with them.
00:40:28.000They're all just like, when you ask about wolves, they're like, it's just like, you know what I mean?
00:40:33.000Because they got to deal with the negative consequences all the time.
00:40:36.000They're a totally different kind of animal than any other animal because they act as a pack.
00:41:27.000I know a guy in British Columbia that's...
00:41:30.000I mean, his whole world is focused on trapping them.
00:41:34.000And I've sat and talked to him just about, like, the details, you know, like, boiling his snares, you know, how he goes in and puts his snares in, you know, how he goes in and checks them, like, all that matter.
00:45:18.000Yeah, so I've heard mixed things, and this will be interesting because right where they're going to put some of these wolves in Colorado, there's some pretty big domestic sheep guys that run these Pyrenees dogs.
00:45:58.000Yeah, they'll have like a horse with them, you know, maybe, I don't know, probably five, six hundred sheep and they'll have a couple of those dogs.
00:47:37.000At least the way it's happening, it'll probably be more sustainable than just dropping off a patch of them in an area that has domestic animals.
00:48:06.000But that guy, do you know the guy who made that?
00:48:09.000He's a fan of wilding and he wants to bring lions to the UK. He's fucking insane.
00:48:18.000There's no limit to this logic of this trophic cascade idea.
00:48:24.000Yeah, well, what's crazy to me, man, is like, so if you watch that video, and it's got like 50 million views on YouTube or something like that, it's narrated by a guy, I mean, it's really well done.
00:48:38.000But you watch it, I mean, if you listen to the first 90 seconds, And the reason I bring this video up is because I actually think that this video was the start of what happened in Colorado.
00:48:50.000A lot of people watch this and they're like, yeah, it makes sense.
00:49:47.000One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery of widespread trophic cascades.
00:49:56.000A trophic cascade is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down to the bottom.
00:50:05.000And the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park in the United States when wolves were reintroduced in 1995. Now, we all know that wolves kill various species of animals, but perhaps we're slightly less aware that they give life to many others.
00:50:28.000Before the wolves turned up, they'd been absent for 70 years.
00:50:31.000That the numbers of deer, because there was nothing to hunt them, had built up and built up in the Yellowstone Park.
00:50:37.000And despite efforts by humans to control them, they'd managed to reduce much...
00:50:52.000No, it's not true at all in Yellowstone.
00:50:54.000So the history of Yellowstone actually, you know, until like the 60s, there's two things going on in the park when they had excess elk, which makes sense.
00:51:07.000Because what people don't realize, I mean...
00:51:10.000They were killing predators before the 60s in Yellowstone.
00:51:13.000They were suppressing lions in addition to the fact that they had already killed the wolves.
00:51:18.000So there was predator suppression going on, even in the park before the 60s.
00:51:23.000Well, in the late 50s and 60s, and I might be roughly off on these dates, but the park was actually capturing elk, and they were transporting them to all the other states that needed elk.
00:51:37.000I think that's where they got them in California, for Tohono Ranch.
00:51:42.000Yeah, that might be, man, because all the big transplants in Colorado, Idaho, outside of the park, they were Yellowstone genetics.
00:51:52.000You know, and I actually even know, I know that some of the, you know, some of the elk that ended up down on the Indian reservations and stuff, they were originally...
00:52:01.000Can I ask you about that before we move on?
00:52:04.000Someone, I was hunting with this guy in Utah and he was telling me there's literally two different kinds of elk and the reason why these elk like in the Gila mountain range and the elk in Tohono Ranch and They're so big is because these are Yellowstone elk and that the Yellowstone elk have wider bases,
00:52:37.000I don't know specifically related to Yellowstone elk, but I actually do know some people who had original Yellowstone genetic elk on their place.
00:52:55.000It's a big high fence place owned by the natives in New Mexico.
00:53:00.000And they actually started to bring in genetics out of Alberta.
00:53:05.000And those elk out of Alberta are way bigger than the Yellowstone elk.
00:53:31.000When we were like, the cow popped up in the brush there probably like 500 yards from us and I hadn't picked up my binoculars yet, there's no way you could have convinced me that was a cow.
00:53:44.000Because it was probably like a 750 pound cow.
00:55:16.000I mean, part of that's probably, like, genetics, you know, or, like, you know, selective breeding of elk, too, over time, which, you know, that does exist.
00:55:23.000There's an industry that does that, so that might be part of it, too.
00:55:26.000It could be that these animals, too, like, much like what we're talking about with California, with Tihon Ranch, you have these animals that are used to living in Montana, say, with the California Tihon Ranch, and then all of a sudden they're living in...
00:55:39.000You know, the Tachapi Mountains, and they have no winter to speak of, where they're deprived of food.
00:55:46.000They have food all year round now, and so they have this body that's designed to consume as much food as possible, because winter's coming, and then winter never comes.
00:56:10.000It's like, dude, I've, I mean, I've put a ton, quartered up a ton of bulls in my life, and a big wild bull is, you know, 650 pounds, 700 pounds would be a big one, you know.
00:56:23.000They don't get as big as a lot of people say, you know what I mean?
00:57:26.000I remember, you know, it's funny, like when you're riding in the mountains with, you know, you're riding a horse and maybe you've got like three or four mules with you, a lot of times you'll pick up off of them that they sent something before you see it, you know, because they smell something.
00:57:40.000And usually they'll start like puffing their nostrils.
00:57:48.000Those mules and horses, what they're trying to do is they're trying to get more scent in so they can be like, they know exactly what it is.
00:57:56.000And a lot of times as you're going around a switchback or something, you can hear them huffing and sure enough you come around the corner and there'll just be like a bull moose standing there in the trail.
00:58:09.000You seem like you'd be kind of like a big...
00:58:16.000Intimidating mass of people and animals.
00:58:19.000Yeah, and they just look at you like, you're going to have to go around.
00:58:23.000So several moose, I literally drug a string of mules up the hill, through the aspens, and crashing through a bunch of crap just so the moose can stand there on the trail.
01:00:27.000In 1979, Ed Wiseman, a Colorado hunting guide, crossed paths the Grizzly Bear during an expedition near the headwaters of the Navajo River.
01:01:47.000And I've seen the videos and, you know, personally, I don't know that I could say 100% either way, but I do know that people for sure who have seen them in northern Colorado, like across the border, seen tracks, something like that.
01:02:14.000Well, dude, the thing about them is they can, people don't understand, they can roam.
01:02:17.000There's something that gets in, you know, bears' heads where they will, well, not just bears, like, I mean, Cats.
01:02:25.000Yeah, cats, a little bighorn ram who he's just tired of getting the shit beat out of him from this band of rams he's been hanging out.
01:02:31.000All of a sudden he just starts moving, man.
01:02:34.000He's just gonna go find like a new place to live and they'll travel like crazy distances.
01:02:39.000There's a cool bear study, and man I wish I knew the gal's name that did it, where they collared a bunch of bears and it was done I believe in New Mexico.
01:02:50.000And it's crazy to see how far these bears will move.
01:02:54.000They'll go where they're denning, and they'll travel, I want to say like two, three hundred miles, hit up an elk calving ground, and then they'll go another hundred miles for somewhere else that they like to hang out in the fall to hit acorns or something.
01:04:17.000Yeah, when they get that, I can't remember the term that people use for it, but they get that golden kind of like blondness at the end of the hair.
01:06:16.000Well, the thing is, man, it's not like...
01:06:20.000I mean, I've been around grizzlies a fair amount.
01:06:23.000I've never had a threatening type of interaction with them.
01:06:27.000But I've actually had like a few little things with black bears.
01:06:31.000And every time I guided a black bear hunt, Joe, and like I walked up to a black bear, you know, with a hunter, it's not like they're not scary.
01:06:39.000You know, you look at their claws and you're like, well, man, dude, it's like...
01:06:59.000And there's these scary black bear encounters or black bear things you hear about where the bears are habituated to like campgrounds and stuff and they attack people in their tents.
01:07:10.000I was listening to somebody talk about it recently.
01:07:13.000I can't remember who it was, but there's something about when you get attacked in a tent and they think that in general, if it's grizzly or black bear, that is more of like a predatory, I'm going to eat you type of thing.
01:08:34.000I mean, I've had them, you know, they, uh, have you ever, have you ever been around black bears when they're, when they're, they kind of, we call it jacking their jaws, but they jack their jaws.
01:08:41.000It's a real, it's got, you, you can, you know, even if you never heard it before, if you hear it, you know exactly what they mean.
01:09:31.000I was guiding a hunter, and we were watching these bears, and they were in oak brush.
01:09:35.000They were basically stripping acorns off this oak brush.
01:09:39.000And a lot of times, what these black bears will do, the sows will kick their cubs up in the oak.
01:09:46.000Like, this oak brush could be as high as this room, man.
01:09:49.000And what will happen is they'll kick their cubs up in the oak brush, and when you're glassing the oak brush, You'll be looking in the oak brush and you'll just see the little furry cub and he'll be just hanging in the tree, you know?
01:10:01.000And then you don't see the sow because the canopy of the oak brush is covering her, you know?
01:10:08.000So a lot of times when I was guiding bear hunters, I always would look for that, you know, because you can't, you know, you, you know, obviously just from like, nobody wants to kill the mom of two little baby cubs, but it's also illegal to do that, you know?
01:10:40.000And then a boar black bear came up the hill right in front of us.
01:10:44.000It was probably like 200-yard difference or something.
01:10:47.000And we watched him and the hunter wanted to shoot him but we didn't have a clear shot so we just kind of kept watching him and the bears kind of started mingling together and it was getting maybe the last like 30-40 minutes of light and finally this bear got out and I actually remember because he was he got a hold of like something that had been dead forever like and it was in the ground like an old winter kill or something this this bored black bear and he was just trying to tear it up you know and he's digging on it but that gave the hunter the shot And so he shot the bear and I saw
01:11:17.000the bear start rolling down this canyon.
01:11:20.000And so I was like, all right, you're good to go.
01:11:22.000He goes down and he lands on a tree, like, you know, off to his left a little bit, just kind of came down the topography of the mountain.
01:11:28.000I'm like, you're good, but we should get over there while we got light just to maneuver around the canyon.
01:11:33.000So I get over there, and we get above the bear, and it's pretty steep, and I'm looking down, and I see him against the tree, and then I hear a cub up in the tree, up in the canopy, and I'm like, what is going on?
01:13:43.000But those kind of situations, man, anytime I got between, you know, near cubs or like where the sow didn't have visual to the cubs, that would freak me out regardless if it was grizz or black bear, you know.
01:15:23.000I don't want them to be eradicated off the earth.
01:15:27.000But I do realize that they have negative consequences for some folks.
01:15:33.000I mean, you have to look at it, man, and it's like, well, everybody, you know, you've got all these people who have to deal with the problems.
01:15:40.000They don't, you know, other people are voting in for them to basically have to deal with them day to day.
01:16:14.000You understand what, you know, you understand the ecosystem.
01:16:18.000You understand these animals and you spent so much time with them.
01:16:21.000It's like those are the people that really should be making that assessment.
01:16:25.000It's like if you want to vote on certain things and you do not have an understanding of that thing that you're voting on, you really shouldn't vote on it.
01:16:33.000It's like, you know, it's like you can't If you don't have an educated perspective on it, then this is crazy.
01:16:43.000Just allowing people to just guess whether or not it'd be good to bring back wolves.
01:16:48.000And of course these pro-animal rights groups that want these animals, and look, they love these fucking animals, and I get it, and it's not that they're bad people.
01:16:58.000It's just they're also misguided because people who love these animals aren't hunting them.
01:17:41.000You know, if it weren't for the fact that I don't know the guy that he was with, I don't know him personally, but we're acquainted.
01:17:51.000He worked in a different part of Colorado, and he has a very good reputation.
01:17:55.000If it weren't for the fact that I knew that he was with him, I would say that that's bullshit, because I never heard of a lion being 180 pounds.
01:18:04.000Yeah, his buddy Alex, who was his guide.
01:20:06.000Like, you know how a deer or an elk, if you just go with your knife and you just get through the hide, like circle the joint, you know, maybe you nick the tendons a little bit.
01:20:15.000You know, most guys, if they hit it right, they can just snap it, right?
01:21:16.000What I've noticed about them, just my observation, so I might be talking out of my ass a little bit, but it sure seems like if they can do it, They want to hold stuff with their mouth, and they're using their hands to bring it, you know, to bring it to their mouth.
01:21:30.000That picture to me, can you put that picture up again?
01:21:32.000That picture to me, I love that picture.
01:21:36.000And one of the reasons why, first of all, it looks like it's staged, but it's just a camera trap.
01:21:43.000And the fact that it's wearing a collar, and the fact that it's with the Hollywood sign in the background, so this thing is in the middle of An incredibly dense, heavily populated area.
01:22:25.000The craziest thing about them to me is that if you're not actively hunting them, you don't realize how many are around.
01:22:33.000In all my years of guiding men, I think I've glassed up maybe three or four, and then all my other experience with them is hunting them.
01:22:42.000But I can only imagine like the dozens and dozens that have just been sitting up on a rock or something as I cruise by and I never knew about it.
01:25:35.000Well, they're showing, and I can't, I mean, let me see if this, if I can skip ahead to something.
01:25:40.000Literally right now they're doing the demonstration of it live for everybody to see.
01:25:44.000They've just showed some of the, like, I'll show you the test scores.
01:25:48.000On their website, right after they announced this this afternoon, they showed some exam scores they put it up against, against like GPT 3.5.
01:25:56.000Down here it's like passing AP Calculus, which I guess the blue would have been GPT-3.
01:26:35.000It says, the humor from this image comes from the absurdity of plugging a large, outdated VGA connector into a small, modern smartphone charging port.
01:26:58.000I even saw already there's like a robocall company that's going to make it so that if you get a call from like a scammer, you hit a button on your phone, and I'm not even sure where you hit it, it instantly creates a thousand word lawsuit to go against them.
01:27:58.000There's so many different outdoor stuff, even beyond what I've done.
01:28:03.000Over the last couple of months, I've become obsessed with tarp and fishing and go fishing with my kids every day.
01:28:09.000I'm like, dude, there's a million different little outdoor adventures that I can take and I can learn about the gear and learn about the skill set.
01:28:18.000I don't want to have anything to do with...
01:28:52.000Yeah, but even billfish, like marlin, sailfish and stuff, a lot of the times they don't eat them because, you know, they want to recatch them.
01:28:59.000So it says, tarpon are rarely eaten because their flesh is filled with small, hard-to-clean bones.
01:29:05.000In the United States, the tarpon usually is caught for sport and then released as a bony, strong-smelling saltwater fish and maybe more trouble than pleasure to eat.
01:30:22.000Because there's so many, like for people that don't know, like say if a guy catches, like one of my neighbors is a big time bass fisherman and he just sent me, I'll pull it up for you because he's pretty hardcore and he just caught this, shout out to my friend Alan,
01:30:45.000So what he'll do is he gets all the measurements and the photos of that and then he brings it to a company that basically makes him a plastic fish.
01:32:54.000That is a weird, like some people have trophy rooms in a house where their entire room is filled with these animals like a sheep that's on fake rocks looking around.
01:33:07.000Dude, I'll admit, if I go somewhere and somebody has one of those, I like walking around it with them and they tell me all the stories about all the hunts.
01:34:33.000Well, I think a lot of the topics we're talking about, Joe, it's just a reflection of this distance between the reality of being a human and the distance that we've put in between.
01:34:48.000If you go behind any fancy steakhouse, like you go behind Gibson's in Chicago, one of these fancy steakhouses or somewhere in Manhattan, and if you went through the dumpster, you would find a bunch of half steaks.
01:35:06.000You'd find three quarters of a steak, half a steak.
01:35:10.000To me, it's crazy to think about that probably a lot of people that are eating in that restaurant, they're probably against hunting, but they're willing to take half a steak and throw it away.
01:38:57.000Anyways, back to the fishing part, man, I didn't mean to get sidetracked, is what's crazy with the catch and release thing, like my little boy, he cannot believe that we would release anything.
01:40:14.000Yeah, if you knew you could just like, I got you bitch, and no one gets hurt, that's what people like.
01:40:19.000Do you feel like you get that from, do you feel like the feeling like when a bull comes in when you're archery hunting or you make a good archery shot on a bull elk, do you feel like you get a similar feeling than you do like a related feeling when you're fishing?
01:40:35.000Yeah, it's a very minor version of the bull elk feeling when you're fishing.
01:42:11.000I'm like, bowhunting elk is about as heart-pounding and as exciting as possible.
01:42:17.000When you're hiding behind a tree and you're at full draw and you see the tips of those antlers moving through the brush and you know he's about to make it into the opening, and you're like, Holy shit!
01:42:30.000And you're at full draw, just sitting there, and then he comes in there, and then the arrow releases, and I use Illuminoc, or Nocturnal.
01:42:39.000You see that green knock just sending it right through the golden triangle.
01:44:18.000Dude, it's amazing to hear the rundown of the process of how they kill them.
01:44:25.000I don't want to get into the depths of it because I'll butcher it, but if I recall, they essentially go in the field and they have a mobile USDA-approved system that they put it through.
01:44:40.000Just, like, the marksmanship component they went into, because they have to kill them all by hitting them in the skullcap, even though they're wild deer, you know?
01:47:14.000Because there's so many people, I think, that pick up their bow like two weeks before elk season and shoot it 20 yards a few times like, oh, we're good.
01:48:05.000But you get into those situations where something gets hurt, and I'm talking like, you know, you could be following stuff for days, you know, trying to get it killed, and, you know, once you're exposed to that enough, you become like,
01:48:22.000you just want everything to be right, you know what I mean?
01:48:26.000And the reality is, as a hunter, it keeps you from taking sketchy shots.
01:49:44.000And I've guided people who, you know, adults, you know, they seem like competent guys, and there's so much pressure around a shot opportunity, or at least they're manifesting it around them.
01:49:59.000Like, you know, you've been in the mountains, you've been, you know...
01:50:02.000You're on a backpack, you know, sheep hunt or something for six, seven days, and there's a bunch of money involved, a bunch of time involved, and then the guy gets a shot opportunity, and there's so much pressure, and there's like, at that moment, and then boom, the gun goes off, and the first question I always ask,
01:50:19.000because it tells me a whole lot about, you know, what probably happened, I always ask a hunter, how did it feel?
01:50:26.000You know, that's my first question to a hunter after he shoots, because that'll tell me a lot about, you know, what's going on.
01:50:31.000And I can, several times I've had a guy go, I wish I wouldn't have shot.
01:50:56.000Because my deal is like, and this is a very basic way to look at it, and I'm sure Joel would have a more sophisticated way for people to have time to go through the process.
01:51:06.000But I always tell guys with rifle hunting, the primary thing you have to do is you have to get a good rest in the mouth.
01:51:15.000That's the beauty of rifle hunting over bow hunting.
01:51:20.000Is that with a good rest and if you're prone in particular, like, God, I'm reasonably certain I'm going to fucking hit that animal every time.
01:51:29.000Yeah, and that's what I, like, in the discussion I have, is like, look, first thing we're gonna do is gonna get a good rest, and then if you cannot keep the crosshairs within a defined vital area that we're talking about, you tell me, and we're gonna move your rest,
01:51:44.000get you a better rest, adjust your rest, maybe go from your pack back to your bipod, something like that, or we're gonna get closer.
01:51:56.000Like, I don't want to trek my ass around looking for those rams now that they're hauling ass over, you know, two rims.
01:52:03.000It's also for the experience of the person that you're doing it with.
01:52:06.000Right, but it's also, I don't want one to get hurt and it to go, you know, it to become, you know, a negative experience for everybody, you know, the animal.
01:52:16.000Sheep hunting, to me, is a fascinating thing because it's these weird rich guys...
01:53:04.000If I was being totally honest, I would say that part of the whole, you know, the whole, like, chic of the whole thing is just that it's scarce.
01:53:15.000Because, you know, a sheep hunt, a Rocky Mountain bighorn hunt is not that different than a high country mule deer hunt in a lot of ways, you know.
01:53:25.000But the animal, obviously, just there's a species difference, right?
01:53:57.000Dude, I cannot tell you how many times I've sat on goats and been like, there's no way we're going to kill them there because there's no way we'll get them.
01:54:05.000And then, I was actually talking to one of my guides about a week ago about it, and he's like, Cliff, you know, there's like There's three times that I felt like there was a chance of me dying in my lifetime, and two of them when I was guiding mountain goats for you.
01:54:21.000Dude, it's just, they live in the steepest shit you can imagine, man.
01:56:45.000And in terms of hunting opportunity, you know, because they have so much over-the-counter stuff, which is starting to change a little bit, it's way more than other states.
01:57:00.000Back to what we were talking about on that, man, because I don't think I did a great job of explaining myself with the Yellowstone deal.
01:57:08.000In that video, what I was getting at, Joe, is that people don't realize that when Yellowstone originally had a problem with the elk, they were sending all these elk out as transplants.
01:57:19.000So that was a way to actually control the population in Yellowstone.
01:57:42.000I'm a nerd, so I've read the history of it.
01:57:44.000But they wanted to have a hunt on the park.
01:57:48.000To do exactly what this video claims the wolves did in the 90s, there was a lot of discussion in the 60s of having a draw or whatever and getting a bunch of hunters on the park to solve the range issue.
01:58:03.000Because see, what happened was they quit transplanting the elk off of it because they didn't need to.
01:58:10.000So the elk started to do some damage to the range there.
01:58:14.000So one of the proposals was to have a hunt in Yellowstone, you know, maybe just a temporary one or whatever, to dissipate the elk.
01:58:22.000And one of the main reasons it didn't happen is that the park officials, and then I know there's some push from Washington, is they didn't want the elk to not be habituated to people.
01:58:35.000In the 60s, it's documented that one of the reasons they didn't have hunters in there is they wanted the elk to be comfortable with people.
01:58:43.000So to me, and people listening may not find this interesting, but to me, it's like a total bastardization of history, right?
01:58:51.000It's like, look, you're saying that the wolves did what they did in Yellowstone.
01:58:56.000And yeah, they did help because there was way too many wolves or way too many elk, particularly in those valleys and stuff, and they were hurting their range.
01:59:04.000But saying that it was attempted to do it with human intervention and it failed is a total lie, man.
01:59:11.000Well, also, there's a lot of value in taking those elk from there and, like, moving them to Kentucky and Pennsylvania and all those places where they've repopulated elk.
01:59:24.000Because elk used to be in basically every state, right?
01:59:46.000They're buying up all this land and they want to convert it into this...
01:59:50.000But they're going to allow hunting on it.
01:59:53.000They're going to turn into this wild area with bison and pronghorn and everything.
02:00:00.000And it's like they have this design to sort of rewild that, but in a way with undulates.
02:00:07.000I think all that stuff to me is a good idea as long as we rewild it and it makes sense in a way that hunters or people can still utilize it.
02:00:22.000It's so weird, Joe, because I think sometimes we forget that it's not like we're aliens.
02:00:50.000That, oh, because Joe Rogan, there's a picture of him with a dead elk, that somehow that's different than somebody who indirectly still just lives their life and consumes, right?
02:02:56.000When I did the UFC last weekend, when Jon Jones fought, Daniel Cormier, who's the commentator next to me, and he's a good friend of mine, I always would bring him snacks.
02:03:13.000Carnivore snacks, and they make these delicious snacks.
02:03:16.000So I'll bring him beef jerky, and this time I brought him deer sausage.
02:03:20.000And he's like, man, I can't eat deer, because I ate bad deer once, and I eat deer, I get sick, and I go, just try a little piece of the summer sausage, just try.
02:05:50.000From individuals that started hunting that are older than 25 and didn't have a father that hunted or a family that hunted, you're responsible for way more than 1% of them, man.
02:06:31.000If you're in the U.S., from a hunting perspective, regardless of, like, your economic situation, you got the best opportunities on the hunting front.
02:06:48.000But here, it's like, I mean, it's, like you said, like, you know, it's probably the most economical hunting situation I think there is in the world if you're an American.
02:07:42.000When I got into hunting them, Joe, when you know dogs have one treed or in a cave or something like that, and you're making your way up there, it'll make your heart blow out of your...
02:07:56.000You know, I love going and just taking pictures of them.
02:08:00.000Like, I got a bunch of pictures on my phone of just me, like selfies, just me being a jackass with a lion up here in the tree, you know, or whatever.
02:08:07.000The thing that's interesting to me is also the pushback on the dogs, and I get that.
02:08:12.000I really do get that, especially as someone who loves dogs, because sometimes the dogs die.
02:08:18.000But the fairness aspect of it, which is interesting, and that's where I think education is very important and people understanding, especially from someone who's being honest and objective about it.
02:08:31.000Like, I could absolutely understand why someone would say it is not fair to hunt mountain lions with dogs.
02:08:39.000But I will tell you, That if you want to shoot a mountain lion, you're not going to unless you use dogs.
02:10:39.000They kill the same amount of mountain lions.
02:10:41.000They kill them, though, with mercenaries.
02:10:43.000So they bring in some guy who's a mountain lion hunter, and he uses dogs, and he finds these mountain lions that are troubled mountain lions, and they wind up killing the same number of them.
02:10:55.000This guy to go do it, instead of you paying the state.
02:11:00.000So instead of the Pittman-Robertson Act applying where all this money now, where all these people apply for tags, all these people get tags, they go mountain lion hunting, and all that goes towards conservation.
02:11:12.000Yeah, so you're talking about the direct tag revenue.
02:11:15.000And Pittman-Robertson is the tax on like...
02:13:54.000I mean, I have pictures from outfitting from cameras and stuff like that where you'd see these female lions with two kittens, and if I showed them to you, you're like, dude, that's not...
02:14:29.000Well, and the thing is, I get what a lot of people are going to say about the wolves thing.
02:14:34.000They're going to be like, well, Cliff, Joe, you guys are being dicks because really what you want is you just want more animals to hunt and you want to suppress the wolf population because of that.
02:14:50.000But there's the other point too, man, that you said, Joe.
02:14:54.000If you're being rational about the economics and you assume, like take Colorado, you just assume, hey...
02:15:01.000This ecosystem, there's a lot of people living here.
02:15:04.000There's a lot of, you know, other activities that affect the ecosystem.
02:15:07.000We have to have a rational, you know, economic approach of how we're going to take care of these animals and manage them.
02:15:13.000The wolf deal, like, I just did the rough math in my brain.
02:15:18.000And you take a wolf, and a wolf's going to kill 10 to, I think it's like, I think the estimate's like 12 to 18 elk per wolf per year, right?
02:15:28.000And so, I was doing the math, like, your elk hunting in Colorado is basically, the success rate on most of the units is, you know, 10 to 15%.
02:15:38.000It's tough hunting, you know, in these, in their, I call them over-the-counter units, and just so your listeners know, that just means you can go buy a tag.
02:17:14.000Jamie, see if you can find that photo that I put up on Instagram when I was hunting with my friend Mike Hawkridge and Ben O'Brien up in B.C. Where these wolves...
02:17:28.000We had found this moose calf right after these wolves had torn it to shreds.
02:19:07.000You get in areas in British Columbia that used to be real remote, and then they put in logging, and then logging, you know, there's a bunch of logging infrastructure.
02:22:23.000You know, like this is like, I get infatuated with these things.
02:22:27.000So me and my little boy, like every morning at sunrise, like we're going to go catch bait to go fishing, you know?
02:22:33.000So, what you realize is I get up at, I call them like my little glassing points, but they're literally like, I mean, my house is in a country club there, dude, so I'm like cruising down on my golf cart with my cast net.
02:22:44.000Like, I'm the only guy in the country club that does this kind of shit, you know?
02:22:48.000But anyways, we go to my little glass spots where we can look, you know, down the marina, we can look on the ocean for birds or whatever working bait, but a lot of times how we find the bait is you can see the tarpon, like, kind of pushing them around.
02:24:34.000I thought that was an interesting moment in, you know, technological history.
02:24:39.000Because, you know, when you got a guy who's as influential as Mark Zuckerberg and with a giant company like Facebook, they literally changed their name to Meta.
02:28:07.000That, you know, gear to go out and do a backpack hunt or something like that in, you know, pretty rough conditions where it's cold at night and all that, it's so much easier now.
02:30:53.000That's the most pressure, the most stress, but it's also the most relaxing.
02:30:57.000Just being in the woods, no cell phone service, no nothing.
02:31:03.000Just stalking and just hiking the mountains.
02:31:06.000And also knowing that I have to be in amazing cardio shape.
02:31:10.000When I'm working out in fucking February, I'm literally thinking while I'm working out in February, the more I push, the less tired I'm going to be in September.
02:31:36.000I really do, because I think complex...
02:31:40.000Difficult things that are very rewarding and I don't think I don't think there's very many things that are as rewarding as hunting because you're actually getting food from it and actually feed family and friends and you feed yourself and it's so nutritious and so much better for you than any other kind of food that I think that it's it's one of the most rewarding difficult things and I think the more difficult things that a person does on purpose that are rewarding you know I'm not talking about like life struggle I'm talking like Choosing
02:32:11.000to do things, whether it's workouts or tasks or problems you're trying to solve on purpose, those are very valuable to your overall resiliency as a person.
02:34:59.000I'm sure I got some pictures on my phone, but it's pretty neat how they'll cover it up and it'll be tidy and they'll come back and they'll peel it back.
02:35:10.000I don't think hunting's for everybody, but I think it's for a lot of people.
02:35:22.000One of the things about Texas, there's a lot of opportunities for invasive pigs.
02:35:26.000And my friend Jesse Griffiths, who is the head chef and owner of Dai Due Restaurant in Texas, he has an organization that trains people, teaches people how to hunt,
02:35:43.000takes them out hunting, shows them how to hunt, how to butcher the pig.