The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #709 - Steven Rinella

00:00:05.000 It's a good fucking book, dude. 0.99

00:00:06.000 You did a great job with this thing. 0.98

00:00:08.000 Oh, thanks, man.

00:00:09.000 It was a lot of work.

00:00:10.000 I would imagine.

00:00:10.000 I don't know how the hell you have the time.

00:00:13.000 Where do you see volume two?

00:00:15.000 Live.

00:00:16.000 We live? 0.99

00:00:17.000 So tell me, how the fuck do you have the time to do this? 0.98

00:00:21.000 I'm looking at this book, The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game. 0.98

00:00:25.000 Steve Rinella's here, ladies and gentlemen.

00:00:27.000 Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Rinella. 0.99

00:00:28.000 I'm going to put on my fucking media. 0.99

00:00:30.000 Oh, I like that. 0.99

00:00:30.000 I like that, huh? 0.99

00:00:31.000 Sporty.

00:00:32.000 How do you have the time to do this book?

00:00:35.000 You know, when I got into doing the book, that was a great opening to the show, by the way.

00:00:43.000 Thank you very much.

00:00:44.000 When I started doing that book, I thought it'd take eight months, man.

00:00:49.000 We just got on this idea.

00:00:50.000 You know what I wanted to do is I wanted to do a book about field care and butchering and stuff, but then someone said it should be bigger, it should be like the complete guide.

00:00:57.000 We started using the word complete, and what I keep saying now is how I should...

00:01:01.000 For a long time, I really regretted including the word complete in the proposal, because as we sat down...

00:01:08.000 Initially, I would sit down with Dodie, who you know well, Dan Dodie, and we would just start mapping out We had like a board, you know, and sticky notes.

00:01:20.000 And we'd just start mapping out like what would complete look like.

00:01:22.000 And then it grew and grew and Doty, you know, he was working on the show and moved on to some other things and still was involved.

00:01:32.000 And other guys came in and Giannis, you know, we started working on it and just trying to manage the idea.

00:01:39.000 And pretty soon, I mean, a lot of people worked on that book.

00:01:42.000 But yeah, I mean, I was in there on the writing process, and it turned into several, it took several years to do them.

00:01:49.000 Then when I took it to my publisher, she had me in, it's published by Spiegel and Grau at Random House, and she had me into the office, and we had turned it in, it was going to be 700 and some pages long.

00:02:03.000 And she said, like, it's just books aren't, Like, you just don't really, you know, you gotta understand, like, that's a big book.

00:02:10.000 Sworn piece.

00:02:11.000 Yeah, you don't really do illustrated books that big.

00:02:16.000 So we were gonna hack a bunch out, but then we kind of hit on this idea just to publish it in two things, as Volume 1 and Volume 2. But it wasn't just as simple as splitting it down the middle.

00:02:28.000 So...

00:02:30.000 It took probably, I don't know, almost a year, maybe, to turn it into volume one, big game, volume two, small game.

00:02:37.000 That's a big effort, man.

00:02:39.000 I know how much you work and how much you travel and how many hunts you go on. 0.99

00:02:45.000 I don't know how the fuck you did this. 0.99

00:02:47.000 I remember being down... 0.99

00:02:48.000 We were down in...

00:02:49.000 I was down with my family, just vacation in Baja, and I remember sitting there, and we were fishing and stuff, and we had two babies with us, and I'm sitting there trying to, like, work on that book.

00:03:01.000 I just worked on it all the time.

00:03:03.000 But the thing is, I don't want to, like...

00:03:05.000 I did a lot of work on it, but everybody...

00:03:06.000 A lot of the guys you know worked on it a ton, too.

00:03:09.000 You know, like, all that recipe stuff...

00:03:14.000 Doty, we did a big shoot.

00:03:15.000 Doty kind of organized a shoot with some other folks.

00:03:18.000 We organized a week of just cooking and photographing.

00:03:21.000 But the other thing is, a lot of the stuff in there, too, the images you'd kind of look at, the images you'd be like, well, how would you go and get all these images?

00:03:29.000 You'd never be able to justify getting those images to make a book.

00:03:32.000 But we had...

00:03:34.000 Access to so many hours of hunting footage of all the stuff, so we're able to do something called screen grabs.

00:03:40.000 So in there's a lot of stuff where we're able to pull images to illustrate all these different procedures and stuff that you would just never go out and get those kind of photographs.

00:03:50.000 You would have to kill a ton of animals just on purpose to do that.

00:03:52.000 Yeah, it'd be really expensive, but we were able to draw back.

00:03:55.000 And the advantage of filming hunts for so many years now is that anything you wanted to explain...

00:04:01.000 We'd sit there and be like, oh, you know what?

00:04:03.000 It'd be perfect.

00:04:03.000 And we'd just go in and pull stills out of images and put them right in the books.

00:04:09.000 As you look at it, it's beautiful.

00:04:12.000 A lot of the photography stuff on the cover is by this guy, John Hafner, who's a hunter and photographer.

00:04:19.000 We became friends with John working it up, and he opened up his vast library of wildlife imagery.

00:04:26.000 Just gave us kind of like the keys to his whole catalog.

00:04:28.000 And so we had just a pick of some of the best stuff out there.

00:04:32.000 But I'm real happy with it, man.

00:04:35.000 I'm proud of it.

00:04:36.000 And I always tell people, like, if you get it, There's no way you're going to be disappointed in it.

00:04:43.000 No, it's excellent.

00:04:44.000 It's so comprehensive.

00:04:46.000 And I don't know of any other book like it.

00:04:49.000 I mean, maybe there's one out there that's like it, but there's so much involved.

00:04:53.000 And even if you're not into hunting, it's really fascinating.

00:04:56.000 The tactics and strategies and why you have to do certain things.

00:05:01.000 And what's involved in the pursuit and tracking the habitat of these animals and why they live in these certain places.

00:05:08.000 We put a lot of legal stuff in there.

00:05:10.000 The next one, that one's out.

00:05:12.000 The next one, the small game one comes out in December.

00:05:15.000 But, yeah, they've been doing well, man, and we've heard great things about them.

00:05:19.000 Well, you've expanded so much, you know, and when I first started talking to you, it was right after you got done doing The Wild Within, and then you were starting Meat Eater at the time.

00:05:30.000 And now, you know, I really think that the show has hit its stride in a crazy way.

00:05:36.000 Like, the first episode that I saw of this season was the one where you went hunting for coos deer, and you didn't even kill anything, and it was one of your best episodes.

00:05:45.000 Because it was so much involved.

00:05:48.000 It's not just a hunting show.

00:05:52.000 You were talking about your relationship with your father and how you would love to bring your father to this place.

00:05:58.000 Your father's dead.

00:05:59.000 You were talking about how you have this tumultuous relationship with him and how you'd want to bring him.

00:06:04.000 To this place to see what this is like because it's so beautiful. 0.98

00:06:07.000 And there's no music and you were just out there talking and it was like, man, this is some really deep, compelling shit. 0.89

00:06:14.000 Yeah, we had no intention of doing that show that way until later when the editor looked at it and he went out doing it. 0.53

00:06:21.000 There's no music.

00:06:22.000 It's just like the sound of the wind.

00:06:23.000 It was awesome.

00:06:24.000 It's my favorite episode.

00:06:25.000 It's mine too.

00:06:26.000 It's my favorite one we've ever done.

00:06:28.000 And I was nervous at first.

00:06:30.000 Because, you know, to do a hunting show, I mean, you're working in a really traditional genre that in many ways doesn't invite a lot of innovation.

00:06:39.000 Or one might think it doesn't invite a lot of innovation, you know?

00:06:43.000 Yeah.

00:06:44.000 You could get away with thinking that.

00:06:46.000 But anytime we've done something that really goes against the grain of what you picture is going to happen in a hunting show, it's like...

00:06:54.000 People that like the show have always liked it.

00:06:56.000 We can run shows where no one gets anything.

00:06:58.000 If we're out filming and no one gets anything, we call them skunkers. 1.00

00:07:04.000 I get real nervous.

00:07:05.000 I start getting real nervous from a production standpoint.

00:07:10.000 In the end, I think that fans of the show are willing to go along with you on that if you're giving them something else instead.

00:07:20.000 You definitely did.

00:07:22.000 We just filmed a dove hunt down in Virginia with my buddy Ronnie Boehm, who you met.

00:07:29.000 You know, the daily bag limit on doves is 15, right?

00:07:33.000 So it's me and Ronnie, another guy.

00:07:36.000 We all limit out.

00:07:38.000 That's a tremendous amount of shooting.

00:07:41.000 So then you're kind of...

00:07:43.000 It's a kill fest.

00:07:44.000 Yeah, so you're sort of thinking they're five-ounce birds.

00:07:48.000 And then you're sort of thinking, man, this is going to be a great show.

00:07:52.000 And I hope that it will be.

00:07:55.000 But it doesn't necessarily mean that.

00:07:58.000 Getting stuff doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be great because there's always a story hiding around down in there.

00:08:06.000 And when we're getting ready to go somewhere to film...

00:08:09.000 I'm always getting pressure in a friendly way from Giannis or from Doty, who are like, what's the story?

00:08:19.000 And I just feel like I understand where they're coming from.

00:08:22.000 It's their job to wonder about that stuff.

00:08:24.000 But I always feel like you're just going to wind up responding to something that happens.

00:08:29.000 What I think is important about your show, I think there's a lot of things important about you and what you represent in this world, but one of the things that I think is important in your show is there's a lot of these shows, these hunting shows, without mocking them or saying anything bad about them,

00:08:46.000 but they They're very simple.

00:08:48.000 They appeal to simple people.

00:08:51.000 They have this simple ideology that goes through them.

00:08:55.000 And I think you get caught in that genre and everybody sort of starts thinking, well, this is what these shows are about.

00:09:03.000 These shows are all about...

00:09:04.000 Go sit in a tree stand, and when you shoot this animal that you named earlier in the spring, you got trail cam pictures of it. 0.99

00:09:12.000 I mean, a lot of those shows are the same goddamn show every week. 0.99

00:09:15.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:09:16.000 And you get in your head, oh, this is what a hunting show is.

00:09:21.000 This is what hunting is and I think that's a it's a problem with the stereotype that people have with hunting They connect hunting to sort of a like a low vibration of thinking You know that yeah, you know what I mean?

00:09:34.000 I understand what you're saying.

00:09:35.000 I don't know if it's you like you being a Comedian or I noticed you guys always say comic you being a comic.

00:09:40.000 I don't know.

00:09:41.000 I'm guessing you watch other guys.

00:09:43.000 Yes I could see in that world you probably would really want to watch other guys.

00:09:48.000 I haven't found it helpful to watch hunting shows.

00:09:51.000 I generally don't watch hunting shows because I don't want to wind up I don't want to wind up having the stuff that I do be a response to that.

00:10:03.000 Right.

00:10:03.000 I'm always afraid of that, of feeling like something would get in your head.

00:10:08.000 And even if you didn't intend to, you'd wind up responding to it.

00:10:13.000 So I haven't watched a whole lot.

00:10:15.000 And I don't like to hack on...

00:10:18.000 I don't like to hack on.

00:10:19.000 People often invite me to hack on hunting shows.

00:10:22.000 There's some things I see a little bit that trouble me. 0.84

00:10:26.000 Some of the ways that female hunters are portrayed as little sex dolls with mascara.

00:10:34.000 When I think about my daughter growing up and going hunting, I don't want that to be how she finds her way into it as every man's fantasy.

00:10:44.000 That stuff bugs me a little bit.

00:10:47.000 But I haven't found it that helpful to watch, so I don't think of...

00:10:50.000 I don't do like a reaction to what's going on.

00:10:54.000 I just try to make things that...

00:10:57.000 To show the complex relationship I had with hunting before I started doing this.

00:11:03.000 Filming hunts definitely changed the way I think about hunting.

00:11:05.000 In a way, I try to react against that.

00:11:08.000 I try to recapture how I used to feel about going hunting when I wasn't having this production thing in my head.

00:11:15.000 About making a show.

00:11:16.000 Be worried about making a show.

00:11:19.000 Well, I think that it's the elephant in the room.

00:11:23.000 I mean, how do you avoid thinking about it?

00:11:25.000 While you're out there and you're doing it, you have to consider.

00:11:28.000 It's one of the episodes that you did your podcast recently.

00:11:30.000 We were talking about with Casey.

00:11:31.000 Casey LeVere?

00:11:32.000 Yeah.

00:11:33.000 Where you were talking about all the different aspects of putting together a show.

00:11:37.000 And that you kind of feel like sometimes that filming a show in a way, it kind of, it's almost like prostituting it.

00:11:46.000 Yeah.

00:11:47.000 It makes me feel a little bit evil.

00:11:49.000 I feel evil for being involved in...

00:11:52.000 I feel a little bit evil for being involved in TV. Partially.

00:11:58.000 Well, that's also because your wife is into publishing and she wanted you to stay within the world of book publishing.

00:12:03.000 It's a very respected thing. 0.99

00:12:04.000 Whereas TV, especially like hunting shows, or even reality shows, which was your first thing, it's filled with bullshit and yahoos. 1.00

00:12:13.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:12:13.000 So yeah, when I feel a little bit embarrassed... 0.98

00:12:17.000 Not so much.

00:12:18.000 I mean, I obviously do it, and I love doing it, and I fight to try to keep being able to do it.

00:12:22.000 But, like, so in the back of my head, like, you know, I do carry that with me, you know?

00:12:26.000 I do carry it with me that I think of, like, I think of TV as...

00:12:33.000 Yeah, it's just something about it feels kind of bass, man.

00:12:37.000 You know what I mean?

00:12:38.000 Well, I think a lot of that might have to do with your experience on your first show, too. 0.99

00:12:41.000 They were trying to let a fucking moose out of a cage and you shoot it with a musket. 0.99

00:12:45.000 I mean, they were trying to pressure you into a lot of really stupid fake shit because they were operating under the guidelines of, you know, quote-unquote reality TV. That's how they do it. 1.00

00:12:56.000 What's important to them is getting the shot, not whether or not the shot actually happened.

00:13:00.000 I remember one time being in a meeting early on when we were starting to work on that show, and a guy that I later became friends with, and he still does those kind of reality-type shows that come out of Alaska.

00:13:13.000 But we were talking about how much time, you know?

00:13:18.000 I was always like, we need more time, we need more time, because of finding animals.

00:13:21.000 And early on, the first time we ever met, he's like, well, that's why they have Wranglers.

00:13:26.000 You know?

00:13:27.000 And that was sort of like where we began with that.

00:13:30.000 I liked doing...

00:13:31.000 You know what I liked about doing Wild Within?

00:13:34.000 It was so many years ago now.

00:13:36.000 We did eight of them.

00:13:38.000 I liked...

00:13:39.000 I fell in love with the guys that I traveled with.

00:13:47.000 Bad.

00:13:47.000 I mean, like...

00:13:48.000 When we quit doing that show, the show didn't get renewed.

00:13:52.000 I mean, they knew...

00:13:52.000 We were still filming the last episode and we already knew it was...

00:13:56.000 Going downhill, right?

00:13:58.000 Just the viewership wasn't there, the wrong viewership and you know, or like the numbers weren't there and the numbers that were there weren't the right numbers.

00:14:06.000 Like not the demographic they were after, right?

00:14:09.000 And you weren't going to fix that.

00:14:12.000 But I had fallen in love so bad with the guys that I worked with that it was like getting broken up with by a girl.

00:14:20.000 That we weren't going to hang out together anymore and travel together anymore.

00:14:24.000 I mean, it was bad.

00:14:26.000 You know these guys.

00:14:28.000 Which guys?

00:14:30.000 Everyone, man.

00:14:32.000 Mo, Nick.

00:14:32.000 All those guys were on that show?

00:14:34.000 Yeah, Mo, Nick.

00:14:35.000 You took them over.

00:14:36.000 No, I know.

00:14:37.000 So it worked out.

00:14:38.000 I still associate with them.

00:14:40.000 But at the time, now I try to wonder, when I look at that show, and there's some good stuff about it, and there's a lot of bad stuff about it, embarrassing stuff about it.

00:14:51.000 When I look at it now and I try to go, why did I so badly want that to continue?

00:14:59.000 And I did at the time.

00:15:00.000 I really wanted to keep doing it.

00:15:02.000 Not knowing that I would find such happiness doing what I'm doing now.

00:15:07.000 That I'd find such a sense of peace doing what I'm doing now.

00:15:12.000 I feel like I'm being constructive and working with good people and doing good work.

00:15:15.000 At the time, I was just devastated that we weren't going to go.

00:15:17.000 And now I'm like, why did I feel that way?

00:15:18.000 And I think in some ways, it's just because I like running around with those guys.

00:15:22.000 Well, it's fun, man.

00:15:24.000 We had a lot of fun.

00:15:25.000 When you took us to Montana.

00:15:26.000 We had enemies that we could like...

00:15:28.000 There was like a gang of us, and we felt like we were surrounded by enemies.

00:15:32.000 Oh, the enemies being the executives?

00:15:34.000 Just all these people around.

00:15:36.000 And we're like, man, if we can go another season, we're going to clean house.

00:15:39.000 Right?

00:15:40.000 And it's going to turn us into this perfect thing.

00:15:42.000 And it was like...

00:15:43.000 Yeah.

00:15:44.000 We were like...

00:15:46.000 I don't know, man.

00:15:47.000 That's the story of every television show.

00:15:49.000 Dude, we were like warriors, man.

00:15:50.000 You know?

00:15:52.000 I loved it.

00:15:54.000 I still love those guys.

00:15:55.000 There's a fun bonding thing that goes with those shows that's different than any other show.

00:16:00.000 You film a normal show, say if you do, like, a television show.

00:16:03.000 Whether it's on a set or it's on location, you go, you film it, and then you go either to your hotel or you go, you know, back to your house.

00:16:11.000 Then you show up back on the set in the morning.

00:16:13.000 And there's a bonding involved in that.

00:16:14.000 But there's a totally different kind of bonding when you're in, say, like, when you took us to the Missouri Breaks, down the Missouri River, you know, in Montana.

00:16:25.000 You're in the wilderness together. 0.98

00:16:27.000 Your only source of entertainment is you're sitting around at a campfire at night, shooting the shit, laughing. 0.98

00:16:34.000 And there's this crazy bond that you have with people when you do something like that. 1.00

00:16:39.000 And when you're doing it over and over and over and over again like you're doing, the regular world of civilization seems so stupid. 1.00

00:16:45.000 The red lights and the fucking telephone poles. 1.00

00:16:48.000 You just want to... 1.00

00:16:49.000 You just want to go back. 0.99

00:16:51.000 You want to go back to the fun stuff when you're out there in the woods looking for a buck or trying to find a ram or whatever the fuck you're trying to do. 0.86

00:16:58.000 It's like there's this crazy heightened reality to that life that especially when you have a bunch of men together and you have the opportunity to just do it's almost like Playtime. 0.93

00:17:15.000 Like, you have this wild existence, you know?

00:17:18.000 And then it gets taken away.

00:17:21.000 Yeah.

00:17:21.000 I'm a Klansman, and I don't mean that with a K. Klansman with a C. And I do feel like, like, all through growing up, I had...

00:17:30.000 I still hang out.

00:17:33.000 I still consider...

00:17:34.000 I still regard my two brothers like the main people that I... Hang out with.

00:17:39.000 In a time sense, that's not true.

00:17:43.000 Days per year, that's not true.

00:17:45.000 But they're the main thing.

00:17:46.000 Outside of my wife and kids, I think my two brothers are this main thing.

00:17:53.000 But we always had these guys that we hung out with growing up.

00:17:55.000 The same guys.

00:17:56.000 We still hang out Like, just this summer, we had people up to our shack, our fishing shack, and it's like mostly guys from Michigan that we've known a long time, you know?

00:18:05.000 And I do kind of feel that hunting and fishing, for me, do form those kind of relationships, you know, and traveling together forms those kind of relationships.

00:18:16.000 I always feel like I would have been good in the military, maybe, because you get to, like, have this little core of guys, you know?

00:18:22.000 And, yeah, traveling with those guys that I worked with and traveling with, you know, and now it's just, like, revolving cast of members, like, faces change, but it still feels the same as, yeah, it's like this little...

00:18:32.000 Like a little clan, you know, like a little clique of fellas.

00:18:35.000 And I do, man.

00:18:37.000 I like that kind of thing.

00:18:38.000 I like hanging out with three or four people out in the woods, you know?

00:18:41.000 It's fun.

00:18:42.000 I mean, even me and Callum have only done a few episodes with you, but Callum was pestering me the other night.

00:18:47.000 He's like, when are we going again?

00:18:48.000 When are we going hunting again?

00:18:49.000 I've got to get out of here.

00:18:50.000 He's like, I've got to get out of here.

00:18:51.000 Let's go.

00:18:52.000 Let's go hunting.

00:18:53.000 Call Steve.

00:18:54.000 We were just up this summer, August 15th.

00:18:57.000 We were on Prince of Wales Island.

00:18:58.000 We got sunburned.

00:19:00.000 Sunburnt!

00:19:01.000 That's hilarious.

00:19:02.000 Killed bucks, got sun...

00:19:03.000 I mean, it was like you wouldn't have believed.

00:19:06.000 I believe it.

00:19:07.000 That pollution, man.

00:19:08.000 One of the things that I took from that trip...

00:19:10.000 It was so nice.

00:19:11.000 I would have done anything to swap the weather.

00:19:13.000 Because going up there, like...

00:19:15.000 I got Dan Doherty mentionitis right now.

00:19:19.000 But Doherty had said... 0.99

00:19:21.000 He's like, I'm never going back to this island, you know, and we're done with this stupid island after our trip. 0.95

00:19:26.000 And we went up there and he was very, like, you know, he had a very tentative feeling about the weather. 0.96

00:19:31.000 We kept watching the forecast and it wouldn't be nice.

00:19:34.000 And we went up there and it was just, like, sunshine, deer everywhere.

00:19:40.000 It was perfect.

00:19:40.000 Nah, you wouldn't have believed it, man.

00:19:42.000 It's August.

00:19:42.000 You've got to go in August.

00:19:43.000 Is that the move?

00:19:44.000 Giannis got a buck doing after hours.

00:19:47.000 Really?

00:19:48.000 After filming?

00:19:50.000 Yeah.

00:19:50.000 I took something away very important from that show.

00:19:53.000 It's something that you said.

00:19:55.000 I think you said it when we were in the tent when we were doing your podcast.

00:19:59.000 You're talking about the different kinds of fun.

00:20:01.000 That there's fun while you're doing it, like a roller coaster, but it's not fun after it's over.

00:20:05.000 But there's other things that are fun Way after you're doing it, but while you're doing it, it's miserable.

00:20:10.000 Yeah, I stole that theory from two guys.

00:20:14.000 A guy named Hardcore Jeffy and a guy named Matt Rafferty.

00:20:18.000 Why is his name Hardcore Jeffy?

00:20:20.000 He's hardcore.

00:20:22.000 Yeah, Hardcore Jeffy and Matt Rafferty.

00:20:26.000 And recently, someone sent me a link where I think that it was like an ad of some sort that alluded to that.

00:20:34.000 Like an advertisement that alluded to that.

00:20:37.000 But it was like a mountaineering thing, so I don't know.

00:20:41.000 But I don't want to take claim for that theory, but they had this thing like the four or five levels of fun.

00:20:50.000 These guys out of Anchorage.

00:20:53.000 Yeah, it was profound.

00:20:55.000 But it is profound, and I never thought about it until that trip.

00:21:00.000 Rollercoasters aren't fun after you do them at all.

00:21:03.000 No.

00:21:03.000 I was on a rollercoaster last week.

00:21:06.000 Is that right?

00:21:06.000 Yeah.

00:21:07.000 What brought that on?

00:21:08.000 Not even last week.

00:21:09.000 You kidding?

00:21:09.000 The local carnival.

00:21:11.000 It was a fucking terrifying rollercoaster. 1.00

00:21:13.000 I took photos of the base of it and put it on my Instagram because it's so fucking ridiculous. 0.99

00:21:18.000 They have this setup, and when you look at this setup, you're like, why the fuck did I? It's so bad. 0.99

00:21:24.000 It's like pictures of...

00:21:26.000 Here, let me show you.

00:21:27.000 I'll pull it up.

00:21:28.000 There's these bricks that they have or blocks that they have that's holding up the...

00:21:35.000 The base of this thing?

00:21:37.000 It's like a gambling theme.

00:21:39.000 Yeah.

00:21:40.000 Well, you can see it on the screen a little bit better.

00:21:42.000 But they have the foundation, so they have these posts.

00:21:45.000 And then a bunch of shims under it. 1.00

00:21:47.000 Yeah, it's fucking blocks of wood. 0.99

00:21:49.000 I mean, just, they're not nailed down. 0.99

00:21:52.000 I mean, it's so fucking ridiculous that you get in that thing and it's spinning people around 50 miles in a row. 0.91

00:21:57.000 That's pretty funny that they just, whatever they could find, a couple bricks. 0.98

00:22:01.000 It's a full-on carny experience.

00:22:03.000 A cotton board.

00:22:05.000 But after it's over, and the only thing that's fun is looking at this picture, but after it's over, you know...

00:22:11.000 I didn't even notice that at first, man.

00:22:13.000 I went on...

00:22:14.000 Yeah, roller coasters.

00:22:16.000 Fun in the moment, but not fun later.

00:22:18.000 Yeah, and then there's things that are terrifying while you're experiencing it, but after you survive it, you're like, ha ha, that was crazy.

00:22:27.000 That was awesome.

00:22:27.000 That trip...

00:22:29.000 It was a miserable four or five days, whatever the fuck it was, on that island. 0.99

00:22:32.000 But after it was over, Callum and I laugh about that trip all the time. 0.99

00:22:35.000 Yeah.

00:22:36.000 We just got back from hunting in British Columbia.

00:22:39.000 And it was just...

00:22:40.000 My feet are still...

00:22:42.000 Because my feet were so cold for so long that my feet are still weird.

00:22:45.000 Like, when I lay in bed at night, they feel numb.

00:22:47.000 Really?

00:22:49.000 And...

00:22:49.000 It just...

00:22:51.000 I mean, it just generally sucked. 0.69

00:22:53.000 Fog, snow...

00:22:55.000 I spent whole days sitting under a tarp because you can't see anything in the fog.

00:23:01.000 I plan on it seeming fun later.

00:23:04.000 But not yet.

00:23:05.000 Right now it's not. 0.98

00:23:07.000 Right now I still think it sucks. 0.97

00:23:10.000 I think in a couple months I won't think it sucks. 0.98

00:23:12.000 Didn't I call you when I got back to LA to tell you how fucking awesome I felt? 0.95

00:23:17.000 Yeah, you did. 0.93

00:23:18.000 It was a quick turnaround.

00:23:19.000 I was driving around LA and the sun was shining like it always is.

00:23:24.000 It was warm like it always is, but I appreciated it on a level that I had never appreciated it before.

00:23:31.000 Because being rain-soaked in that island, huddling up in that tent, and I remember turning on that little headlamp and seeing mist everywhere inside the tent.

00:23:42.000 I'm like, I thought in my stupid head that there was going to be a place that you would go to get dry. 0.83

00:23:47.000 Like, you would go inside the tent, and you would get dry. 0.99

00:23:49.000 Well, it's raining outside, but that's okay.

00:23:51.000 You get in the tent, you'll be...

00:23:52.000 No, there was no dry.

00:23:53.000 There was no dry.

00:23:54.000 The air was wet.

00:23:55.000 The actual air everywhere around you was filled with moisture.

00:23:59.000 So everything was wet, no matter what. 0.68

00:24:01.000 And so when I got back to L.A., I felt fucking fantastic.

00:24:05.000 I was like, this is amazing. 0.50

00:24:06.000 And it gave me an appreciation for LA that I wouldn't have had if I didn't go through that.

00:24:12.000 Oh yeah, to go home from something like that and then be in bed all warm with like your wife, oh my god.

00:24:18.000 You know, I've talked to you often about Rourke Denver.

00:24:20.000 You know, he was a Navy SEAL officer and ran that BUDS program, which is like this whole thing, like he'd basically go there to suffer.

00:24:28.000 And he was talking about how You think, like, you go into a SEAL's home, you think it's going to be all Spartan, you know, like he's sleeping on a stack of cardboard or something.

00:24:36.000 He goes, those guys have, like, you go in there, it's like the Egyptian cotton, the nicest, most comfortable homes, man, because you wind up...

00:24:46.000 After the suffering, you so badly want to go be comfortable that they go out of their way to have a comfortable house.

00:24:54.000 More than normal people.

00:24:56.000 Because you want to just soak up comfort when you get the chance.

00:24:59.000 Yeah, it makes sense.

00:25:01.000 They don't want to live in a log cabin, sleep on a futon.

00:25:04.000 Yeah, so you want to go home and lay on really nice sheets.

00:25:06.000 Because it might only be two nights, man.

00:25:08.000 You want to get your fill.

00:25:09.000 It totally makes sense.

00:25:11.000 I think having these conversations and what you're doing on your show, it's very important because it's giving people a different sense of hunting.

00:25:22.000 It's one of the things that I get all the time from tweets and Facebook messages and that people change their perspective because of your show.

00:25:31.000 And because of these conversations that you've had on my podcast and because of your podcast, people have changed their perceptions of it.

00:25:38.000 Because people who don't experience hunting personally and their ideas of it a lot of times are shaped by the portrayals of hunters in movies, which are almost always negative.

00:25:48.000 Yeah.

00:25:49.000 Especially the animated ones.

00:25:51.000 Yeah, like Helmer Fudd?

00:25:53.000 No.

00:25:54.000 My kids like to show about animals.

00:25:58.000 It's like there's the bad guys.

00:26:02.000 It's like these two brothers.

00:26:03.000 They have this cartoon show.

00:26:05.000 Wildcats?

00:26:06.000 Yeah.

00:26:07.000 My kids love that show.

00:26:10.000 Okay, but there's some recurring bad guys.

00:26:12.000 One of them's a chef.

00:26:15.000 There's a chef who's out in the woods.

00:26:16.000 He's always trying to hunt out in the woods to make food.

00:26:20.000 And the other one's like maybe like a gay-seeming urbanite guy. 0.98

00:26:24.000 Yeah, he's like an evil guy. 0.97

00:26:26.000 Like a dark hair guy.

00:26:28.000 Yeah, but real, like, real, you know, just like kind of bad, you know.

00:26:33.000 It's like your one hand telling you there's two people that are bad kids. 0.99

00:26:36.000 It's gay guys and chefs who hunt. 0.99

00:26:42.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:26:42.000 But I don't want to let them watch that show. 0.96

00:26:44.000 You won't let them watch it?

00:26:45.000 No, I mean, they learned some good wildlife stuff, but I'm like, I just don't want to, I'm not going to let them, no, I tell them that, I tried to explain to them why I didn't like it, they didn't understand, but now I don't like them watching that show.

00:26:55.000 That's hilarious.

00:26:56.000 Yeah.

00:26:56.000 Because I don't like the way, like, they're like, I just can't have a show where, like, the bad guy is, like, some guy that, like, a chef who is always out trying to hunt, like, he's always trying to hunt endangered species.

00:27:07.000 Yeah.

00:27:09.000 But that show, one of the guys, I don't know if it's Chris or Martin, one of them is fat.

00:27:14.000 I took my kid to their live show.

00:27:16.000 They have a live show in Hollywood. 1.00

00:27:18.000 It's fucking terrible. 1.00

00:27:20.000 But for a five-year-old, awesome. 1.00

00:27:22.000 It's really bad.

00:27:23.000 They have costumes on.

00:27:24.000 They go into their superpowers.

00:27:25.000 They have the animal powers activate, and they have these things that they do.

00:27:30.000 Yeah, they can assume the attributes of whatever animal they're talking about.

00:27:34.000 Yeah, but in the show, on the television show, it's cartoons.

00:27:38.000 So they can do all this crazy stuff.

00:27:40.000 But it starts with them going somewhere.

00:27:42.000 Yes.

00:27:42.000 Like the two bros...

00:27:44.000 And they're jovial, very chatty.

00:27:47.000 They go somewhere and then the show starts.

00:27:51.000 In the live show, though, they don't go anywhere.

00:27:54.000 And so in the live show, they just put on these outfits. 1.00

00:27:57.000 And it's so fucking stupid. 1.00

00:27:59.000 They put on, like, big rubber feet. 1.00

00:28:01.000 They pretend to be a fox. 0.95

00:28:02.000 Like, it's just ridiculous. 0.97

00:28:03.000 Really? 0.94

00:28:04.000 I didn't know about that.

00:28:04.000 And they have ears, and they jump around on a trampoline.

00:28:06.000 And they jump on trampolines to pretend that they have, like, serval cat powers. 0.98

00:28:12.000 And the trampoline's hidden behind a rock, but you can fucking see it. 0.98

00:28:16.000 If I knew that those guys were big vegetarians, I'd be like, okay, that's cool. 0.98

00:28:20.000 No, they probably aren't.

00:28:22.000 I never even paid attention to the fact that one guy is sort of a hunter or a chef, and that's why he's the bad guy.

00:28:30.000 I never even paid attention.

00:28:31.000 You're more sensitive to that than I am.

00:28:33.000 I'm overly sensitive.

00:28:36.000 When I hear people don't let their kids watch certain shows because of whatever, I don't like them watching stuff that has a negative portrayal of hunters.

00:28:45.000 That's funny.

00:28:46.000 Well, I'm writing this thing right now that I'll put out probably tomorrow about all the people that got mad at me because I put up a picture of that elk last week that got mad at me and then I went to their Twitter pages or their Instagram pages and I saw pictures of their cats.

00:29:03.000 And I'm like, what are you feeding your cat?

00:29:06.000 You're feeding your cat cat food.

00:29:08.000 And where's that cat food coming from?

00:29:10.000 Someone's killing animals.

00:29:11.000 Someone's killing chickens.

00:29:12.000 No, it's probably some guy running high seas drift nets.

00:29:17.000 That too.

00:29:18.000 Out in international waters.

00:29:20.000 Yeah, that too. 0.90

00:29:21.000 Rape in the ocean. 1.00

00:29:22.000 That's one of the things that...

00:29:23.000 It's so easy to fall in the trap talking about stuff that annoys you, but that's one thing is like...

00:29:31.000 People that you can have this holier-than-thou attitude, like a lot of catch-and-release fishermen have it, you know? 0.91

00:29:36.000 They'll go out fishing, they'll let their trout go, and you know those sons of bitches go to a restaurant that night and order fish, and they're like, well, whose fish is that? 1.00

00:29:45.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:29:46.000 Whose favorite area did that fish come from?

00:29:50.000 You know, probably some place that's a lot more imperiled than where you live.

00:29:53.000 Well, not only that, the reality of catch and release is, what, 10% of them die?

00:29:57.000 20% of them die?

00:29:58.000 Sometimes much higher.

00:30:00.000 But yeah, it's that thing that you just don't want to look at it.

00:30:03.000 Yeah, if you've got a cat and you're feeding and stuff like that, you're probably supporting some...

00:30:11.000 You're probably supporting some fisheries practices that you're glad you don't know about.

00:30:16.000 Yeah, and not just fish. 0.99

00:30:18.000 Chicken, lamb, whatever the fuck you're feeding your cat. 0.96

00:30:21.000 You're buying cat food, and cat food's animals, because cats need protein. 0.99

00:30:25.000 They're not omnivores.

00:30:26.000 They're predators.

00:30:28.000 There's very few arguments that make any sense you can feed your cat a vegan diet.

00:30:33.000 Apparently you can get away with it with some dogs.

00:30:35.000 They can feed some dogs a primarily vegetable-based diet and the dogs are alright.

00:30:41.000 It's not optimum.

00:30:42.000 But for cats, they get organ failure, cardiovascular failure.

00:30:45.000 They go blind.

00:30:46.000 It's a big issue with cats when you try to feed them a vegan diet.

00:30:50.000 They go blind.

00:30:51.000 Well, I'd also invite those people, your critics, to understand that those elk wouldn't be here if it were not for hunter interest.

00:31:01.000 Yeah, that's an interesting conversation.

00:31:03.000 They just would not be here.

00:31:04.000 Did you...

00:31:05.000 I don't know if you've listened to the Radiolab podcast on that guy.

00:31:12.000 No, I didn't.

00:31:13.000 The Lion.

00:31:14.000 No, I wanted to.

00:31:15.000 I was gone when that happened.

00:31:17.000 So many people sent me links to it, but I still haven't listened to it.

00:31:19.000 It was about the guy that...

00:31:20.000 It was about Corey Knowlton.

00:31:22.000 Yeah, about some of the complexities of...

00:31:24.000 The guy that paid, I don't know, $350,000 to hunt a black rhino?

00:31:27.000 Yeah.

00:31:27.000 I had that guy on the podcast, and he discussed it, and we talked about it.

00:31:32.000 But what's interesting is they had on another guy who was in the Radiolab show that was a...

00:31:42.000 I forget his position, but he's...

00:31:46.000 Someone who works to help wildlife. 0.93

00:31:50.000 He was saying that the idea is ridiculous that you could kill these animals and that you would say that you're working as a conservationist but you still kill these animals and that you're trying to protect them and make more of them and let them breed and let them repopulate so that you can kill them. 0.99

00:32:09.000 That's preposterous. 0.98

00:32:13.000 The real problem with any of these arguments is, I always want to know, do you eat meat?

00:32:19.000 Do you wear leather?

00:32:21.000 If you're making this argument against the hunting of these animals, where do you get your protein from?

00:32:26.000 Are you getting your protein from all plant sources?

00:32:29.000 Because in that case, maybe we can have this conversation about that. 0.99

00:32:31.000 But if you're not, man, if you're choosing animals that you think are okay and not okay to kill and it's based on which ones are captive, that seems to me more fucked up. 0.99

00:32:42.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:32:43.000 It's way more cruel, in my opinion, to put an animal in a cage and make that animal earmarked for death, and you just stuff it and keep fattening it up until you kill it.

00:32:55.000 And to think that somehow that's a better moral decision than going out and killing something in the wild.

00:33:01.000 But then there's the trophy hunting thing, and that's where it gets weird.

00:33:05.000 When you say, well, these are animals that people aren't even eating.

00:33:10.000 Yeah.

00:33:10.000 Like the lion thing.

00:33:12.000 Which that guy was just cleared, apparently, of any wrongdoing.

00:33:16.000 You know, I never...

00:33:17.000 It was so hard to figure out what exactly was going on there.

00:33:20.000 I would love to know some of the...

00:33:23.000 Some of what was really going on with the lion thing.

00:33:27.000 Because there's so many claims that were being made that just in some way didn't add up.

00:33:32.000 Like that he had...

00:33:34.000 You heard that they had lured it out of a park.

00:33:38.000 Right.

00:33:39.000 I don't really know what that means.

00:33:40.000 Now if you, because for instance, and people act like how bad that was that he had lured it out of a park.

00:33:46.000 But in the U.S., an animal can move across borders freely.

00:33:55.000 Right.

00:33:57.000 You know, it's generally illegal to fence in wildlife in some way that it can't get away.

00:34:01.000 An animal can move across borders freely and its public ownership doesn't change when it moves around.

00:34:10.000 This is something I've tried to explain a thousand times, but if you have, let's take some iconic park like Yellowstone National Park.

00:34:17.000 If you have an elk in Yellowstone National Park and it jumps a border onto private land and then jumps a border onto federal national forest land, jumps a border onto state land, jumps a border into subdivision, jumps a border into a county park, throughout all of his little journey there, he's always been the property of the state.

00:34:35.000 When elk migrate out of Yellowstone National Park, they get hunted.

00:34:41.000 Many animals that get hunted in Wyoming and Montana are animals that, as part of the year, spend time in Yellowstone National Park.

00:34:48.000 My brother once drew a bighorn sheep tag For the upper Yellowstone Valley.

00:34:55.000 And there's this peak near the Gardner entrance to Yellowstone National Park called Electric Peak.

00:35:01.000 And a lot of bighorn sheep spend their summer on Electric Peak.

00:35:05.000 When he had that tag, this was in 2005, I think, it was quite a while ago.

00:35:08.000 When he had that tag, we were just waiting for snow to pile up.

00:35:14.000 On Electric Peak, and the sheep would begin migrating.

00:35:17.000 And they would migrate down and spend the winter down in some grass, some like rangeland up and down the Yellowstone.

00:35:24.000 So we would go there.

00:35:25.000 It was on our third trip to the area when we finally found sheep were migrating down out of the High Country, out of Yellowstone National Park.

00:35:33.000 We killed the sheep within a couple miles of Yellowstone National Park.

00:35:35.000 So when people were talking about, oh, like how the lion belonged in the park, Was of the park, was lured off the park.

00:35:43.000 If you condemn that in and of itself, then you're really talking about something that would have very revolutionary implications here in the U.S. that animals aren't able to freely move or that an animal becomes the possession of whatever land administration it happens to be.

00:36:03.000 Right, but there's a big difference between an animal moving freely.

00:36:06.000 But that's what I'm saying.

00:36:06.000 When they say it lured off, that's what I would love to know.

00:36:10.000 I don't know the answer to this.

00:36:11.000 Did they physically walk into the park?

00:36:13.000 No.

00:36:14.000 What they did is they drove around the area outside the park with bait, and they dragged a carcass.

00:36:20.000 They dragged a carcass behind a truck.

00:36:22.000 That's true.

00:36:22.000 But that's standard practice.

00:36:23.000 But not within the park?

00:36:24.000 No, not within the park.

00:36:25.000 Standard practice.

00:36:26.000 Not only that, lions have a huge area that they travel in.

00:36:30.000 And they killed 28 other lions with tags, with collars, and it was never an issue.

00:36:36.000 And this idea that this one lion was like this cherished, beloved lion, that it was only by Westerners who are like outsiders. 1.00

00:36:45.000 So the people that live in Zimbabwe, they're fucking all monsters. 1.00

00:36:48.000 They're all terrifying. 1.00

00:36:50.000 Did you read that guy that wrote that piece in the New York Times?

00:36:52.000 He says, we didn't know about that lion.

00:36:54.000 Yeah.

00:36:54.000 Well, in Zimbabwe, we don't cry for lions.

00:36:57.000 I mean, that was the name of the piece.

00:36:59.000 It was all talking about his family members that were terrified, where these people would go outside, and they had a very real fear they were going to be killed by monsters.

00:37:08.000 Giant cats that would kill everything, anything.

00:37:11.000 Kill people all the time.

00:37:12.000 You know, Jim Shockey has this great show called Uncharted. 0.86

00:37:16.000 Have you watched it?

00:37:17.000 Yep, I know about that show, yeah. 1.00

00:37:18.000 It's a great fucking show. 0.99

00:37:19.000 And I was watching last night's show. 1.00

00:37:21.000 He was in Mozambique.

00:37:22.000 And there's these villagers in Mozambique that are just hunted by crocodiles.

00:37:28.000 And they showed dozens of people that were missing arms, missing feet, had giant holes in their head where a crocodile had just barely grabbed them.

00:37:39.000 And these are the people that survived.

00:37:41.000 And they all had stories.

00:37:43.000 While they were there, A woman was taken in the water while they were in camp.

00:37:48.000 One of these women was washing clothes or gathering water and a crocodile came and got her. 1.00

00:37:54.000 And there's nothing you can do.

00:37:57.000 They try to kill as many as they can. 0.96

00:37:59.000 They bring in hunters to kill as many as they can. 0.67

00:38:01.000 But to these poor people, these people are just horrified.

00:38:05.000 We don't look at that the way we look at lions because they're cold and they're reptiles.

00:38:11.000 But it's just wildlife.

00:38:14.000 But I think if you got to the point where you were facing, where you might be looking at a genetic extinction of the crocodile, it would change.

00:38:23.000 My thing, my interest in the lion controversy that came out of Africa, my interest in that is provincial, in that I was concerned about and I'm interested in the way that that's going to impact things here.

00:38:40.000 You know?

00:38:40.000 I'm not that interested in...

00:38:44.000 Not that I have antipathy, I'm just not that vested in what might happen with African big game hunting.

00:38:53.000 Outside of how people's, how the American imagination, or the way the average American perceives hunting in his own country, here in the U.S., would be colored by the actions of people in Africa and the circumstances that go on in Africa.

00:39:14.000 That's my interest in that landscape.

00:39:18.000 As far as what you're saying about the crocodile thing, I think that one of the reasons that it's so complicated with the lions is on one hand we're talking about the threat of genetic extinction of a species.

00:39:32.000 And I'm sensitive to that here as well, because we right now have, we're engaged in our own thing, we're engaged in the wolf debate right now, that in some way mirrors the kind of language we're hearing out of Africa, where you have an animal,

00:39:49.000 you have a species that's absent from much of its range, okay?

00:39:53.000 So there used to be wolves, Everywhere.

00:39:57.000 But let's just say in the most recent past, you had wolves in New Mexico and Colorado and Arizona.

00:40:02.000 They're all over the place.

00:40:04.000 Wolves here, California.

00:40:05.000 And then now they're gone from much of that landscape.

00:40:08.000 But there are some areas, like the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, area around Glacier, in the U.S. that have what I would say is on the verge of too many wolves.

00:40:20.000 And so people could look and they'd be like, well, how can there be too many if they're extinct across 90-some percent of their range in the lower 48?

00:40:27.000 You know, I'd be like, well, yeah, it's very complicated.

00:40:30.000 They're overabundant here and missing from there.

00:40:32.000 And I see both sides of the debate because a lot of people who might come from my understanding about wildlife, Who like to hunt deer, like to hunt elk, like to hunt moose, do want to see the wolves all the way gone.

00:40:45.000 And what they would point to is the effect that wolves have on livestock, right?

00:40:51.000 People's way of making a living.

00:40:54.000 There's safety implications or not, but some people say that there are safety implications from wolves being around.

00:40:59.000 And when I look at that, I'm like, okay, I take all that, but I don't think that that means we don't want wolves.

00:41:03.000 I think we do want wolves.

00:41:06.000 How many do we want?

00:41:08.000 I agree that we want them around.

00:41:12.000 I just agree that there's a limit to how many we want.

00:41:15.000 Well, there was an agreement.

00:41:17.000 There was an agreement when they reintroduced them.

00:41:18.000 When the population got to a certain level, they would open up hunting, and then they reneged on it.

00:41:24.000 So I don't think most people...

00:41:26.000 I'm sensitive to the thing where, as much as I was baffled by the Cecil the Lion thing, I'm also a little bit like...

00:41:34.000 When there was the backlash to the backlash, and people said, like, oh yeah, but, you know, people live in fear of lions, and lions kill people.

00:41:43.000 I don't know that, like, that doesn't really change anything for me.

00:41:47.000 Like, I don't think that that then means that, oh, you're right, we should kill all the lions because they kill people. 0.98

00:41:55.000 Oh, I tweeted the wrong link? 0.99

00:41:57.000 Was it a new link?

00:42:00.000 Oh, it's a different link every time?

00:42:06.000 What?

00:42:06.000 The Twitter or the YouTube link is YouTube.com slash C slash PowerfulJerry slash live.

00:42:13.000 You must have copied and pasted.

00:42:15.000 Okay.

00:42:16.000 All right.

00:42:16.000 I'll tweet that right now.

00:42:17.000 Oh, Jesus Christ, Jamie.

00:42:20.000 What was different about yesterday's?

00:42:23.000 I don't know.

00:42:23.000 If you copied it from the same place it was at yesterday, it changes.

00:42:27.000 All right.

00:42:27.000 Okay.

00:42:27.000 I'm sorry.

00:42:28.000 Keep going, Steve.

00:42:30.000 I lost my train of thought.

00:42:33.000 Wolves, blah, blah, blah.

00:42:36.000 Yeah.

00:42:37.000 You want to keep wolves alive.

00:42:39.000 Oh.

00:42:40.000 That...

00:42:41.000 The argument that like, oh yeah, man, it's okay to wipe something out because they hurt people.

00:42:48.000 I don't really buy into that either.

00:42:53.000 You don't?

00:42:54.000 No.

00:42:55.000 I think that...

00:42:58.000 Striving for, with wildlife issues, I think striving for a happy medium where you can have many different stakeholders at the table talking about it is more constructive. 0.53

00:43:08.000 And so I think as well, with the Cecil the Lion deal, I just think it really like clouded and confused tons of that shit here in the U.S. and made it harder for people to imagine the role of what I would call management,

00:43:25.000 wildlife management, game management. 0.69

00:43:28.000 Because it's not like this...

00:43:30.000 We no longer live in this Eden environment where you can act somehow like the hand of man is not at play.

00:43:39.000 I mean, we've cooked that world.

00:43:43.000 The issue that a lot of people have, a big part of it, is this term trophy hunting.

00:43:49.000 Trophy hunting is deemed to be evil.

00:43:53.000 People have respect for people that hunt.

00:43:55.000 If you hunt for your food, I can appreciate that.

00:43:59.000 But what I don't like is this idea of trophy hunting.

00:44:02.000 That's a giant issue with people.

00:44:04.000 Yeah, it's a semantics issue in some way, I see it as.

00:44:09.000 And this is something I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about in recent years.

00:44:18.000 What trophy hunting means to someone who's unfamiliar with hunting, when they hear the term trophy hunting, I think what they see in their mind, they see the wanton slaughter of an animal.

00:44:33.000 Just in order to take a piece of the animal, its head or its hide, and have it as a bragging rights thing. 0.96

00:44:44.000 That it's like this callous slaughter of animals to take part of it and take possession of part of it and use it as an emblem or to prove your manhood.

00:44:55.000 Right.

00:44:56.000 That's what they're seeing.

00:44:58.000 It's so pervasive now, that meaning of the word.

00:45:04.000 I think that it might almost be time for people who do engage in trophy hunting to think about a new term.

00:45:15.000 If I go out and I hunt and get something, I do retain parts of the animal that would be a trophy, the same way you have that skull right there.

00:45:29.000 And that skull right there. 1.00

00:45:31.000 Right.

00:45:31.000 But it was a portion of what you retained.

00:45:34.000 But you eat the animals.

00:45:36.000 Yeah.

00:45:36.000 See, I think the difference between that and a lion is you're not eating a lion.

00:45:40.000 And I think that freaks people out.

00:45:42.000 This idea of just killing something just for its head.

00:45:45.000 Stuff it and put it on the wall when it's not something that you're going to eat. 0.81

00:45:48.000 I think it freaked people out that the guy didn't eat it. 0.99

00:45:54.000 He should have eaten the damn lion. 1.00

00:45:56.000 I think. 1.00

00:45:57.000 You should have eaten it.

00:45:58.000 He should have eaten it or found someone who wanted to eat it.

00:45:59.000 And apparently he shouldn't have been a dentist because people love that that guy was a dentist.

00:46:04.000 Why?

00:46:05.000 I don't understand why.

00:46:07.000 There's no other occupation where he would have became the dentist.

00:46:11.000 If he was a welder...

00:46:12.000 The welder that killed the lion?

00:46:14.000 Yeah.

00:46:14.000 It would just be that he was the guy with a name.

00:46:17.000 Well, it's a public practice.

00:46:18.000 That's a big part of it.

00:46:19.000 There's a target there.

00:46:21.000 No, it's like there's a thing about people just don't want...

00:46:25.000 There's something people don't like about Dennis.

00:46:27.000 Or somehow that it said something to people that he was a dentist.

00:46:29.000 I don't fully understand it.

00:46:31.000 People loved Pointing out that that man was a dentist.

00:46:36.000 Somehow it just made it seem just really egregious.

00:46:40.000 Well, one of those guys, it's like one of the big game hunters that he's got the Super Slam and the Grand Slam.

00:46:49.000 He's always on that Tom Miranda show.

00:46:51.000 He's a famous surgeon.

00:46:53.000 No, he's a surgeon.

00:46:54.000 It's like one of the more famous guys that's involved in the world of bow hunting.

00:47:00.000 Yeah.

00:47:00.000 He's killed everything that walks with a bow.

00:47:02.000 Yeah, it might be that they have the disposable income and a flexible schedule in order to do that sort of hunting.

00:47:10.000 Maybe.

00:47:10.000 Brian Callen's dentist is apparently some crazy big game hunter.

00:47:14.000 Yeah, alright.

00:47:14.000 I mean, it's a common thing amongst dentists.

00:47:16.000 But yeah, I think if that guy...

00:47:18.000 There's a handful of things that I think could have gone differently. 1.00

00:47:22.000 If they had eaten that damn lion... 1.00

00:47:24.000 Yeah, but you wouldn't go kill a lion... 1.00

00:47:27.000 I'd eat that lion.

00:47:27.000 Yeah.

00:47:28.000 Without a doubt, I'd eat that lion.

00:47:30.000 What do you think it would taste like? 1.00

00:47:32.000 Shit. 1.00

00:47:33.000 No. 1.00

00:47:34.000 I think it tastes like whatever.

00:47:35.000 Even if I had to take the whole, I'd take the whole thing and grind it up and make pepperoni sticks out of it.

00:47:40.000 Dude, I'd walk around, I'd come and do a party and be like, hey man, I brought you 30 pepperoni sticks, bro.

00:47:47.000 I feel like he should have.

00:47:48.000 Well, you had a coyote on your show.

00:47:50.000 Yeah.

00:47:51.000 If he had known, I think that if he had known what was going to wind up...

00:47:55.000 He would have never shot it.

00:47:57.000 That's what he said.

00:47:57.000 If he had known it, he said it.

00:47:59.000 I think he said if he had known it had a name, he wouldn't have shot it.

00:48:01.000 Yeah.

00:48:02.000 Well, the craziest thing was the brother.

00:48:03.000 I don't know what that means, though.

00:48:04.000 I don't know what that means.

00:48:05.000 Do you know the brother Jericho?

00:48:08.000 Cecil had a brother named Jericho, and they said that Jericho was now going to take care of Cecil's young. 0.99

00:48:13.000 Bullshit, first of all. 0.99

00:48:15.000 Like, that's not real. 1.00

00:48:16.000 And second of all, they thought Jericho had gotten killed, because another lion had gotten killed, and they thought it was Jericho.

00:48:24.000 And then they found out, great relief, the lion that was killed was not Jericho. 0.99

00:48:29.000 It was just some no-name, bitch-ass lion that nobody cared about. 1.00

00:48:34.000 But it's the idea of giving a lion a name, like your dog. 1.00

00:48:38.000 It's not like some wild animal.

00:48:41.000 All of a sudden, it's a pet.

00:48:42.000 It's a pet that's in a park.

00:48:44.000 And that's how a lot of people that don't go to Africa don't have anything invested in keeping the people around there safe.

00:48:52.000 They have this idea that it's like the Lion King.

00:48:56.000 Some evil hunter is going to go over there and steal, decapitate it, like the language that they use. 1.00

00:49:01.000 First of all, they said he shot it with a crossbow.

00:49:04.000 I saw that in reputable newspapers.

00:49:07.000 He didn't use a crossbow.

00:49:08.000 That's not true.

00:49:10.000 Decapitated it.

00:49:11.000 Well, yeah, that's what you do. 0.88

00:49:12.000 If you want to take the hide, you have to cut the head off, the rest of the body.

00:49:18.000 Man, it's like such a...

00:49:19.000 That issue is such a black hole.

00:49:23.000 But I think that the people...

00:49:24.000 I mean, it just has its way...

00:49:26.000 It was kind of one of the ways it was most upsetting to me when it was going on.

00:49:28.000 Thankfully, I was gone for a lot of it.

00:49:30.000 But, uh...

00:49:31.000 It just had this way of acting like a black hole, or like we envision a black hole being where it just sucks everything around it into this thing, where it became the dominant discussion about hunting.

00:49:44.000 And I think that one of the most telling things about it is the people who seemed to be most upset by it were the people who had the least nuanced understanding of wildlife management, wildlife politics, and wildlife in general.

00:49:59.000 And just...

00:50:01.000 The least understanding of what it means to eat meat in the first place.

00:50:05.000 I looked at all these people that were protesting in front of his dental practice. 1.00

00:50:09.000 I'm like, you can't tell me you fuckers are vegetarians. 1.00

00:50:12.000 You're big fat sloppy faces. 1.00

00:50:14.000 These are not vegans. 0.99

00:50:16.000 These are not healthy people.

00:50:17.000 I mean, this is not people that are eating a bunch of salads. 0.99

00:50:20.000 These are people that probably got burgers on the way to putting those fucking signs up. 0.96

00:50:25.000 I had a FBI, one time I had to have the FBI look into a guy who was messing me a little bit, and this agent came over my house, and he was like, I can tell you that guy's not a vegan, or he's not a vegetarian. 0.98

00:50:43.000 You're talking about how the guy had just ordered a pepperoni pizza.

00:50:46.000 Which in my mind, I'm like, dude, why do you have such a problem with me?

00:50:50.000 What the hell do you think that is?

00:50:52.000 Because it's a target. 0.96

00:50:53.000 You're a target.

00:50:54.000 People aren't looking at things rationally.

00:50:57.000 I think they're finding green lights.

00:50:59.000 Like, there's a green light.

00:51:00.000 I'm frustrated by my life.

00:51:01.000 I don't like my job.

00:51:03.000 I don't like my social position.

00:51:05.000 I don't like my whole...

00:51:09.000 The whole life that I've carved out for myself.

00:51:11.000 And I find green lights.

00:51:13.000 And I see those green lights and I can just point my anger in that direction.

00:51:16.000 Instead of focusing inwardly, instead of looking at what aspects of my life that I should change, maybe I'd have a more harmonious existence, maybe I'd be happier, maybe I'd be more fulfilled.

00:51:26.000 Nope. 1.00

00:51:27.000 They just find someone like, this fucking guy, what are you fucking, you're a hunter? 1.00

00:51:31.000 You got your little dick? 1.00

00:51:32.000 You got your little dick? 1.00

00:51:33.000 You're gonna fix it with a rifle? 1.00

00:51:34.000 There's like these cliches that they always throw about.

00:51:37.000 And then they'll go eat a pepperoni pizza.

00:51:40.000 It's like, oh my god, do you know what's involved in making pepperoni?

00:51:44.000 Have you ever gone to a slaughterhouse?

00:51:46.000 Do you know what existence these animals have before they get snuffed out?

00:51:51.000 It's a horrific existence.

00:51:53.000 The existence of a wild animal's infinitely better.

00:51:56.000 And the distance between, or the time between the wild animal, even knowing that you're alive and being dead, is like that.

00:52:04.000 Yeah, it can be.

00:52:05.000 Typically it is. 0.98

00:52:06.000 The difference between that and an animal that lives in captivity and gets turned into sausage or pepperoni or whatever the fuck it is, that's horrific.

00:52:15.000 And the idea that someone who buys cat food, someone who buys chicken cat food, can get mad at someone who goes out and hunts a grouse or hunts a duck. 0.97

00:52:26.000 It's madness.

00:52:27.000 It's just madness.

00:52:29.000 I wrote this thing about the hierarchy of dead animals on social media, and I showed what you can get away with and what you can't get away with.

00:52:37.000 I'm like, cut up fish. 0.99

00:52:39.000 Nobody really gives a fuck. 0.99

00:52:40.000 You could show a dead fish, and it's a little sketchier, but you could show a steak. 0.99

00:52:47.000 That you've cooked, very few people get upset.

00:52:50.000 Yeah.

00:52:50.000 But if you show an actual animal that's dead, people get really upset.

00:52:54.000 Why do people get pissed about fur, but they don't get pissed about leather couches?

00:52:58.000 That's a good point.

00:52:58.000 Just because someone scraped all the fur off.

00:53:00.000 Exactly.

00:53:00.000 As soon as you scrape the fur off, people are like, that's awesome, man.

00:53:03.000 I'll buy a pair of shoes, and I'll take that in a jacket as well.

00:53:06.000 Can I get a belt?

00:53:06.000 If you leave the hair on it, they just do not like it.

00:53:10.000 Well, because we're mammals.

00:53:11.000 It's really disturbing to them to leave the hair on it.

00:53:13.000 They much prefer you to take that stuff and throw it in the trash, and then use it as leather.

00:53:17.000 But if it doesn't have hair, like a snakeskin belt, that's cool.

00:53:21.000 Yeah.

00:53:22.000 Another thing that really bummed me out about our dentist friend is that when I'm talking about hunting, one of the things I'd like to try to promote or try to explain is,

00:53:41.000 in a term I use a lot, is trying to form...

00:53:50.000 We're good to go.

00:53:59.000 In the world, and you understand the world that you're walking into.

00:54:03.000 Have you heard of the writer, Aldo Leopold, who wrote Sand County Almanac?

00:54:07.000 Yeah, I've heard his name.

00:54:08.000 I'm not familiar with his work.

00:54:09.000 He was writing in the 40s, and he was kind of the...

00:54:12.000 He's like the grandpappy of hunter conservationists.

00:54:16.000 I recently had occasion to reread his book because I went to...

00:54:22.000 I gave a talk at the University of Wisconsin.

00:54:25.000 It was sponsored in part by the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

00:54:27.000 So I reread Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac, and he was a hunter in the 40s.

00:54:32.000 And relative to the 40s, we live in the good old days.

00:54:36.000 We have phenomenal, phenomenal hunting and fishing here in this country. 0.74

00:54:41.000 In the 40s, it sucked.

00:54:43.000 In the 30s, It really sucked. 0.82

00:54:46.000 There was very few hunting seasons for anything.

00:54:49.000 Most things were just gone.

00:54:51.000 Habitat destruction was off the charts.

00:54:55.000 You could legally hunt turkeys almost nowhere.

00:54:59.000 Waterfowl was just about wiped out.

00:55:01.000 Deer were just about wiped out.

00:55:03.000 So now, if all the Leopold could be alive now, he'd see a lot that would make him very, very happy.

00:55:09.000 Because we've done such a good job on this continent with wildlife management.

00:55:14.000 But in this book, he pushes this idea.

00:55:17.000 He's talking about hunting, but he's using the metaphor of a forester.

00:55:22.000 Because he had been trained in forestry and worked in forestry.

00:55:25.000 And he talked about how a forester, or you might say a hunter, goes out on the land and with each stroke of his axe...

00:55:39.000 Is writing his signature on the land with each swing of an axe.

00:55:44.000 And when I say he's talking about hunting, because he's kind of talking about this in the conversation with hunting, meaning when you go out on the land, you are writing your signature out there.

00:55:54.000 You're building a legacy.

00:55:56.000 You're making decisions and having implications for the landscape.

00:56:02.000 Impacting it.

00:56:04.000 What it seemed to be with that guy, I think one of the things that upset me about that guy and that might have upset other people about that guy that shot the lion, was that he seemed to be claiming in some way that he just had no idea.

00:56:23.000 Didn't know where he was.

00:56:25.000 Didn't know what was up with the lion.

00:56:28.000 Didn't know the lion had a collar.

00:56:30.000 And be like, I just didn't know, you know.

00:56:33.000 I think that in some ways, obviously you're in another country, it's hard to follow what's going on, you rely on other people's judgment, but in some ways I think it was upsetting to people that he wasn't doing like, he wasn't following that thing that Leopold set out about writing your signature on the land,

00:56:49.000 because it was sort of like he just had no idea where he was, what he was doing.

00:56:53.000 And I think that when you hunt, you do have an obligation to understand your role and your place.

00:57:03.000 And understand the context that you're working in.

00:57:07.000 What are the limits and the needs of the resource you're trying to exploit?

00:57:13.000 Can the resource withstand exploitation?

00:57:16.000 Are you generally behaving as a force that's ultimately for or ultimately against wildlife?

00:57:23.000 Like, you have an obligation to answer all these questions.

00:57:25.000 You can go in a situation like that and rely on the judgment of someone else But that judgment can get really confused, I think, when money enters the picture, you know?

00:57:36.000 But the money thing's funny, too, because people were very upset.

00:57:40.000 I was joking earlier about them being...

00:57:42.000 I was joking about the dentist thing.

00:57:44.000 It was just funny how often it was pointed out, his occupation was pointed out.

00:57:47.000 But what I'm not joking about is people were very, very upset about the amount of money that traded hands, which puzzled me because the old narrative...

00:58:00.000 From a century ago was that people of European descent go into Africa and take resources and pay for nothing. 0.96

00:58:11.000 That we go there and just rob the place of its resources and we take what we want and we leave and we don't pay a dime for it.

00:58:20.000 That was upsetting and is upsetting to me.

00:58:23.000 Now it's like he's being criticized for paying too much for a resource.

00:58:30.000 It's like, and he paid $350,000 for a rhino.

00:58:34.000 Would it be better to you if he paid $5?

00:58:37.000 It would seem to me that him having...

00:58:41.000 Expressed the value of the animal in some way is almost a compliment to the pursuit Rather than just going in there and robbing what you want never paying for anything that makes sense But I think a lot of people have an idea a real problem with the idea of putting a value on life at all like saying that it's three hundred fifty thousand dollars you can go kill an endangered animal instead of The real issue is that animal was killing...

00:59:07.000 We're talking about the rhino.

00:59:08.000 Yeah.

00:59:08.000 The endangered black rhino.

00:59:09.000 No, I'm conflating.

00:59:09.000 I'm doing a Brian Williams.

00:59:11.000 I'm conflating the...

00:59:12.000 They had a real problem with that rhino.

00:59:14.000 They had a real problem with these older, non-viable rhinos because they were killing young rhinos.

00:59:19.000 This rhino had killed a female. 0.99

00:59:22.000 And in the NPR piece, the radio lab piece...

00:59:28.000 They actually found the dead bodies of this female and a male that this rhino had killed.

00:59:35.000 Like, he took them to these spots, the guy who was the professional hunter.

00:59:39.000 So, you know, in Africa, they have these things called professional hunters, where you would call them a guide in America.

00:59:45.000 But they took them to the spot where the bones were of this female. 1.00

00:59:50.000 I mean, this rhino really fucked this young female to death. 0.99

00:59:55.000 Like, he kept mounting her and fucking her and horning her, you know, hitting her with his horns and wound up killing her and killed a male who had, you know, gotten in the area and wanted to breed with the female, too. 0.99

01:00:07.000 So he had killed two other rhinos. 0.99

01:00:09.000 They had Targeted him anyway, because he was dangerous to the population, because he was killing breeding males.

01:00:15.000 The money that had come in from that $350,000 that that guy gave was going to stop poaching, was going to protect the environment that this animal lived in, was going to protect habitat.

01:00:27.000 So the argument is real weird, because on one hand, it does seem strange that we're talking about value for life, like that this life would be valuable.

01:00:37.000 But on another hand, The real value is like you've got to kill this thing anyway because it's a non-breeding male. 0.95

01:00:44.000 Either kill it or you have to capture it and take it somewhere and make it live in a cage. 0.99

01:00:49.000 But if you kill it, this guy's willing to pay you $350,000. 0.99

01:00:52.000 And he was saying that that was undervalued and that if there wasn't so much bad press, there would have probably been over half a million.

01:00:59.000 Yeah.

01:01:00.000 If they had had a park ranger go out or some kind of land manager go out and shoot it and act like, you know, just something that had to be done, you know...

01:01:07.000 There would be no protest.

01:01:09.000 The guy would have been applauded.

01:01:10.000 But they would lose all the money.

01:01:11.000 And all that money that would go to wildlife, to preservation of the land, and protecting of the habitat, all that money would be gone.

01:01:19.000 Protecting against poaching.

01:01:21.000 It's one of those things in life that it's not clean.

01:01:25.000 No, I was reading this morning this article in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik.

01:01:29.000 He was writing about...

01:01:31.000 He was actually writing a piece about books about the Holocaust.

01:01:35.000 But in there he had this line that stuck with me, or at least it stuck with me for the last few hours, where he said that something to the effect of, the only way to simplify history is to make it complex.

01:01:50.000 You know, it's like any time...

01:01:54.000 Any real explanation of something, particularly with wildlife, you don't get any real aha moments until you get into the deep complexities surrounding the issue.

01:02:08.000 I think that's how we can sit here and all these whatever number of months after that, and I can sit here and still Hold in my hand, or hold in my hand simultaneously, a disdain for this guy and what he stood for.

01:02:26.000 We can talk about the line, like some kind of disdain for it.

01:02:29.000 Like something about it, I just like, it's a visceral reaction about some of the things I know about what went on and what might have been in people's mind.

01:02:35.000 And at the same time, disdain for the general public.

01:02:41.000 For feeling the disdain that they felt.

01:02:44.000 It's like, I just see it as such a big thing that I haven't really made that much sense out of it.

01:02:50.000 And whenever I get that conflicted about an issue, I start to feel like I'm getting somewhere.

01:02:58.000 That's fascinating.

01:02:59.000 Why do you feel like you're getting somewhere when you get conflicted?

01:03:02.000 Because then I realize that I'm probably seeing it from the necessary number of angles.

01:03:06.000 Well, it is one of those things where there are a bunch of different angles to look at.

01:03:10.000 And it is complex because this guy, whether or not the Zimbabwe government cleared him of any wrongdoing, which they did, he still tampered with the collar, which is illegal.

01:03:20.000 He still...

01:03:23.000 He was a poacher.

01:03:24.000 He had been convicted of poaching already.

01:03:26.000 He had killed a bear 40 miles outside the area that he claimed to kill it, tried to bribe the people that he was with to claim that he killed it in a legal area.

01:03:36.000 So this guy was already unethical.

01:03:39.000 So he was a perfect guy to pin all this on.

01:03:43.000 Yeah.

01:03:43.000 But you want to say, like, okay, yeah, this guy...

01:03:47.000 Was an asshole doing some asshole stuff, but does that mean that we're not going to manage large predators? 1.00

01:03:55.000 Do we have to manage lions? 1.00

01:03:58.000 Is this a critical issue like it is with wolves?

01:04:01.000 You're talking about the wolf population getting out of control, and this is from a biological wildlife management standpoint.

01:04:09.000 The guys who are wildlife biologists Gave a number that they think a wolf population should reach before it should start being managed.

01:04:18.000 That number's been far exceeded.

01:04:20.000 And when that number was exceeded, that's when all the blowback came back where they were saying, no, no, no, we've changed our mind.

01:04:26.000 We don't want to open up a hunting season.

01:04:28.000 And that became a real issue because Then the elk population dropped radically.

01:04:33.000 Then the deer population dropped radically.

01:04:35.000 And then there was all these positive spins on it.

01:04:37.000 Like, did you, uh, there was this one guy who, um, there's another radio lab.

01:04:43.000 Oh, the guy that, you told him the guy that, like, how wolves save the rivers.

01:04:47.000 Changed the river.

01:04:47.000 Yeah, that guy's fascinating.

01:04:50.000 I saw that piece and I thought, well, maybe this guy is making some interesting points.

01:04:55.000 Until I listened to this TED podcast about him recently, where he's talking about reintroducing lions and even hippos to England.

01:05:07.000 Because he thinks that at one point in time, they found in London, they found ancient bones of lions, and he thinks bringing megafauna to areas of the UK would be beneficial.

01:05:20.000 There's areas of the UK, millions of hectares.

01:05:23.000 How do you say it?

01:05:24.000 Hectares?

01:05:24.000 Hectares.

01:05:25.000 Hectares that are not being used, utilized, and they could turn into a wildlife park with fucking lions! 0.99

01:05:32.000 And this is all the result of a self-admitted midlife crisis this guy had. 0.99

01:05:38.000 So he got interested in the concept of rewilding.

01:05:41.000 I'm interested in the concept of rewilding, and I'm interested in the concept of rewilding in that if you can correct mistakes...

01:05:50.000 If you can correct extirpations, or let's say scientifically you had the ability to correct extinctions, but you can't, so we'll not talk about that for right now.

01:06:00.000 If you could correct extirpations, like regional extinctions of animals that were brought on by human causes, then I think we have a moral obligation to remedy those mistakes.

01:06:15.000 Elk, okay, the American elk.

01:06:18.000 Only occupies 10% of its native range.

01:06:23.000 Elk live in 10% of the land in the U.S. that they lived in at the time of European contact.

01:06:29.000 No one talks about elk being endangered or near extinction, even though they're absent from 90% of their range.

01:06:38.000 Why is that?

01:06:40.000 Because there are many areas where they abound.

01:06:46.000 So we've come able to go like, yes, elk are missing from areas, and there's a number of groups, many state agencies, and most notably the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, work to, where plausible, bring elk back.

01:07:01.000 To areas in the east that used to have them that no longer do.

01:07:04.000 In my lifetime, elk have come back to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and on and on and on through reintroduction efforts.

01:07:12.000 So we're working to repopulate elk.

01:07:14.000 The biggest piece of resistance you get on repopulating elk is public approval.

01:07:20.000 People don't want to be inconvenienced by big-ass animals that they're going to hit with their cars, and they don't want to be inconvenienced by animals that eat crops.

01:07:27.000 So that's the resistance.

01:07:29.000 The resistance is that it's just that we don't have the technology for it.

01:07:32.000 It's just that we gotta get public approval.

01:07:34.000 So we're trying to bring them back.

01:07:35.000 Meanwhile, we have hunting seasons for elk all over the place, right?

01:07:41.000 I mean, just down the line, you got elk seasons, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, California, Nevada, while they're gone from other places.

01:07:58.000 Why is it that we can't extend the same logic to the wolf and say, yeah, the wolf's absent from much of its range.

01:08:05.000 In some of its range, it's thriving.

01:08:08.000 We're going to manage the areas that are thriving, and we're going to work toward bringing wolves back to the areas where they're not the same way that hunters, by and large, not even by and large, solely Hunters are responsible for bringing elk back all over the place.

01:08:24.000 But I think the way the general public looks at things is very different from the way that you're looking at things.

01:08:29.000 You're looking at these animals as a renewable resource.

01:08:32.000 The general public looks at them as magical creatures that live in the forest that we need to bring back because we made them extinct because we're greedy and vicious.

01:08:41.000 Yeah, because we're fundamentally flawed.

01:08:42.000 And on top of that, we're talking about animals you eat versus elk versus animals you don't eat.

01:08:47.000 Wolves. 0.59

01:08:48.000 Why do you want to kill these wolves? 0.99

01:08:49.000 You must be a cruel person who wants to go out and kill something that looks like a dog. 0.98

01:08:53.000 Because to people, wolves are these magical creatures. 0.98

01:08:56.000 You hear it.

01:08:58.000 Whoa, I hear a wolf.

01:09:00.000 Wow, that's cool.

01:09:01.000 And it is cool to hear a wolf.

01:09:02.000 Yeah, but I like wolves more than those people do.

01:09:04.000 Do you think so?

01:09:05.000 Yeah.

01:09:05.000 Why do you think you like them more?

01:09:07.000 I just have more familiarity with them.

01:09:10.000 I go to more places where they might be found.

01:09:12.000 I spend more time looking through my binoculars trying to find them.

01:09:16.000 I just am more interested in them.

01:09:17.000 I like them more.

01:09:18.000 It means more to me.

01:09:19.000 Not every one of them, but your average guy that's never even laid eyes on one, I have more of an appreciation for the animal than they do.

01:09:25.000 I'm sorry that sounds like a bold, offensive statement, but I just do.

01:09:29.000 I would back you up on that.

01:09:31.000 I think you do.

01:09:32.000 I like grizzly bears a whole bunch.

01:09:35.000 A whole bunch.

01:09:36.000 I've been hunting for grizzly bears a lot.

01:09:38.000 Never shot a grizzly bear.

01:09:39.000 I've never found the one I want to get, and I will get one in my life.

01:09:42.000 Are you going to turn it into pepperoni sticks?

01:09:44.000 No.

01:09:45.000 No, I'm going to eat it straight up.

01:09:47.000 Really?

01:09:47.000 I do get one.

01:09:48.000 I just got back from spending 12 days looking for grizzly bears.

01:09:50.000 Why would you decide to eat it straight up and not turn it into pepperoni sticks? 1.00

01:09:54.000 Because isn't it going to taste like shit? 0.99

01:09:55.000 No, because I hunt them in the interior. 0.99

01:09:58.000 The areas where I go to look, you know, anytime I've gone out with the intention of getting a grizzly bear, I go to areas where they don't have access to fish.

01:10:09.000 Purposely?

01:10:10.000 Yeah.

01:10:10.000 So that you can get a big one.

01:10:12.000 Because I want a big one.

01:10:12.000 I want a mature male.

01:10:15.000 Preferably one who tomorrow will die of old age.

01:10:19.000 And I want him to not be eating a lot of dead fish.

01:10:21.000 So that you can eat them.

01:10:22.000 Yeah.

01:10:23.000 Cam Haynes, I showed you the pictures of the two grizzlies that he shot.

01:10:26.000 He's eating them.

01:10:27.000 He's chewing his way through them.

01:10:29.000 And I go, how do they taste? 0.99

01:10:30.000 He's like, they're fucking awful. 0.99

01:10:31.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:10:32.000 He goes, I just eat them.

01:10:33.000 And I'm like, man, see...

01:10:35.000 I'm not interested in that.

01:10:37.000 Unless it was for a legitimate wildlife conservation reason and I was going to eat it, I don't think I would be interested in hunting something like that.

01:10:48.000 Even if it was...

01:10:50.000 If I'm going to spend my time hunting something, I want to eat it.

01:10:55.000 100%.

01:10:55.000 That's the thing.

01:10:56.000 That's my connection to hunting.

01:10:58.000 I grew up...

01:10:59.000 I told you about this a handful of times, I feel like, but I'll say it again.

01:11:04.000 I grew up always hunting since before I can remember.

01:11:07.000 But for a long time I got interested in trapping.

01:11:10.000 And that's what I was going to do for a living.

01:11:11.000 I was going to be a fur trapper.

01:11:13.000 I caught my first muskrat when I was 10 years old. 1.00

01:11:16.000 And I trapped until I was 22. So I trapped for 12 years.

01:11:19.000 And the latter part of that I was trying to do it where I was going to be a professional trapper.

01:11:24.000 I eventually quit trapping because fur markets got so low.

01:11:29.000 And moved away from home.

01:11:32.000 Got more serious about college and started just feeding me and friends, my brothers.

01:11:37.000 By that point in time, we were feeding ourselves on wild game, buying no protein besides what we hunted for.

01:11:45.000 And at that point was when I really sort of found my place in the natural world.

01:11:53.000 That was like the relationship with animals and the relationship with the natural world and the relationship with hunting that Really spoke to me and made me feel very good about my decisions, very good about my lifestyle.

01:12:06.000 And I've lived that lifestyle now, you know, for 20 some odd years.

01:12:12.000 But I did at a time, yeah, I did trap, you know, and I would trap in order to sell the hides.

01:12:19.000 So when I now talk about Why I like to hunt.

01:12:25.000 And that I don't want to hunt for something I'm not going to eat.

01:12:26.000 Because that's what I like to hunt for.

01:12:28.000 I think that some hunters will look at that and act like you're being divisive.

01:12:33.000 That you're being...

01:12:34.000 That you have this holier-than-thou attitude that you're somehow condemning other practices.

01:12:40.000 I'm just talking about what I... My approach, what I like to do.

01:12:45.000 What to me is the value of an animal.

01:12:49.000 I think in many, many cases...

01:12:52.000 When it comes to predator management, I think there are many cases where you're going to have harvests of predators that are just not going to be a food-driven harvest.

01:13:07.000 You know, it's just not.

01:13:08.000 We're looking right now, like, in the same areas, in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem around Glacier National Park, you're looking at coming up on a thing where the same thing that happened with wolves is going to probably have to happen with grizzly bears.

01:13:21.000 In many of these areas, they're getting way above objective.

01:13:25.000 It's starting to have negative implications for prey animals.

01:13:30.000 It's having negative implications for people who use the land.

01:13:33.000 These bears have, they're just not afraid of anything.

01:13:37.000 You know, you go up in Alaska where grizzlies get hunted, you can generally get upwind of the thing, let it get a smell of you, it's going to take off.

01:13:46.000 Oftentimes, typically the case.

01:13:48.000 In these areas, they're drawn to the smell of humans.

01:13:50.000 No one can touch them.

01:13:51.000 They have ESA protection.

01:13:53.000 You know, we had drawn out decades ago what recovery would look like.

01:13:58.000 We far surpassed what recovery looks like.

01:14:01.000 It's going to happen.

01:14:03.000 It's going to be ugly, but they're going to delist bears. 1.00

01:14:06.000 They're going to delist grizzly bears. 0.93

01:14:08.000 They're going to put grizzly bears under state management.

01:14:11.000 It's inevitable.

01:14:12.000 They're going to put them under state management in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, and people are going to be killing grizzly bears.

01:14:18.000 Some limited amount, and there probably is not going to be a meat salvage requirement on those bears.

01:14:25.000 Am I going to now condemn that hunt?

01:14:27.000 No way.

01:14:27.000 No.

01:14:28.000 Well, you wouldn't, because you understand it, and you know about it, and you understand the importance of it.

01:14:33.000 But to the average person, the average person has a very cursory knowledge, like very peripheral when it comes to wildlife management.

01:14:43.000 They don't even consider it. 0.99

01:14:44.000 They think of trophy hunting as just being some evil person who wants to kill things, again, to make their dick hard, right? 0.99

01:14:50.000 Isn't that what Jimmy Kimmel said on TV when he started crying, when he started talking about Cecil? 0.99

01:14:55.000 He cried.

01:14:56.000 I don't know.

01:14:56.000 I heard about that.

01:14:57.000 He cried, and he did the whole cliché where he talked about, is that what you need to get your dick hard? 1.00

01:15:02.000 I just kind of like that guy, too, man. 1.00

01:15:03.000 Well, I do too.

01:15:04.000 I like him a lot.

01:15:05.000 But I just don't think he understands.

01:15:07.000 I don't think he understands.

01:15:08.000 I don't think he educates himself about it.

01:15:09.000 I think he works 16 hours a day on a show.

01:15:11.000 And I think he has very little knowledge about what it takes to manage wildlife.

01:15:16.000 Now, this is coming from someone who doesn't agree with the lion hunting.

01:15:20.000 That guy.

01:15:20.000 Like, I don't think the lion populations are low.

01:15:23.000 I mean, or high, rather.

01:15:24.000 I don't think it's anything where you have to manage.

01:15:26.000 I mean, I don't think that's the issue that they're having in Zimbabwe.

01:15:29.000 I think this is just a way that they make money.

01:15:33.000 Yeah.

01:15:33.000 And you can look at it that way, like it's sustainable, and if it is sustainable and these people use it to make money and they benefit from the resource of people coming over there and hunting them, I guess you could see a positive benefit of it.

01:15:45.000 You know, Did you ever see the Louis Thoreau documentary on those hunting camps, the high-fence hunting camps in South Africa?

01:15:52.000 No.

01:15:53.000 It's pretty good.

01:15:54.000 I should say it's really good.

01:15:54.000 You told me about it, and I failed to ever watch it.

01:15:57.000 Now I'm going to redo it.

01:15:58.000 I'm going to rewrite it down in my notes.

01:16:00.000 It's excellent.

01:16:01.000 You gave me a notepad, I'm going to write it on my notepad.

01:16:03.000 All right.

01:16:04.000 One of the craziest parts of it was the lions.

01:16:07.000 They had this fenced-in area, and it's a small area.

01:16:12.000 Where they have these lions, and they're throwing these cows literally over the fence. 1.00

01:16:16.000 They're in the back of a truck, and they have this high fence, and these lions are staring at them with these fucking ruthless killer eyes. 0.98

01:16:24.000 I mean, they are right there. 0.97

01:16:26.000 There's two sets of fences in case one of them fails.

01:16:29.000 There's another fence behind it. 0.99

01:16:30.000 And they chuck these lions, this cow, this calf, they throw it over the top like fucking Jurassic Park. 0.99

01:16:37.000 And they just tear this thing apart. 0.98

01:16:39.000 And then meanwhile, some guy goes and acts like he's hunting the lion.

01:16:42.000 Exactly.

01:16:42.000 They're going to let one of those loose.

01:16:44.000 They let them out of the cage.

01:16:46.000 And lions are used to their territory, right? 0.99

01:16:48.000 So when they let them out of the cage, the lions are going to get out of that cage and they're going to go, where the fuck am I? I'm just going to sit down here. 0.99

01:16:53.000 Try to figure out where the hell they are, right?

01:16:56.000 So they're going to sit down, and then they send this hunter out, and the hunter finds the lion, shoots it, poses, does the whole picture with it.

01:17:03.000 That guy Pigman did that.

01:17:05.000 They had a whole episode.

01:17:06.000 And you can tell these lions have just been released.

01:17:10.000 But does he show what he was doing?

01:17:12.000 Does not.

01:17:14.000 That's the thing I don't understand about high fence.

01:17:16.000 This thing I don't understand about guys who like to hunt high fence.

01:17:19.000 Why do they love...

01:17:23.000 The trappings of hunting, the appearance of hunting, the methods of hunting, the tools of hunting, the clothes of hunting, the photographs that come from hunting.

01:17:35.000 Why do they like that so much, but they just don't like hunting?

01:17:41.000 The doing of.

01:17:43.000 Is that what it is?

01:17:44.000 Or do they want guaranteed success?

01:17:46.000 And do they want to hide the fact that it's in a high-fence environment because they're doing it on television?

01:17:52.000 And don't things like the Outdoor Channel, don't they have rules?

01:17:55.000 They have rules like you can't show high fences.

01:17:57.000 You can't show fences on television.

01:17:59.000 Whether or not you hunt inside of one.

01:18:00.000 But if you could show, do you feel like they would show it?

01:18:02.000 Nope.

01:18:03.000 Because I feel like people are often doing non-fair chase hunts, but masquerading.

01:18:10.000 Yes.

01:18:11.000 That it was a fair chase hunt.

01:18:13.000 If you like to do hunts that aren't fair chase, if you like doing it, why do they have such a hard time just saying that's what I like to do?

01:18:22.000 I spend an enormous amount of time explaining why I like to do what I do.

01:18:32.000 I would love for one of them to explain to me what they like about it instead of doing it and acting like they did something different.

01:18:39.000 Well, part of it is the network themselves, right?

01:18:42.000 The outdoor channel and the sportsman's channel, they don't allow you to show high fences.

01:18:47.000 That's part of their bylines, right?

01:18:49.000 I don't know if they say don't show high fences.

01:18:51.000 They might not want...

01:18:52.000 This is coming from Ben O'Brien.

01:18:54.000 Yeah, so they might...

01:18:56.000 I can't say if they say don't show it or if they're saying don't do it.

01:19:00.000 I think they say don't show it.

01:19:01.000 Don't show it.

01:19:02.000 Don't show it because Ted Nugent is on that program, right?

01:19:05.000 He's on those networks, right?

01:19:07.000 He's got a huge show on that network. 1.00

01:19:08.000 He hunts in his fucking yard. 1.00

01:19:10.000 I mean, he's not on a big piece of property. 1.00

01:19:12.000 I think he's less than 300 acres or maybe 300 acres.

01:19:15.000 That's not that much.

01:19:16.000 And in that 300 acres, it's all high fence.

01:19:19.000 He's got African animals. 1.00

01:19:20.000 He's got all kinds of shit in there. 1.00

01:19:22.000 Whitetails, pigs, all in this one area. 1.00

01:19:25.000 And he hunts high fence almost exclusively.

01:19:28.000 And when he's hunting on, you know, it says like spirit wild ranch.

01:19:32.000 Yeah.

01:19:32.000 That's his yard.

01:19:33.000 I mean, he's essentially hunting his pets.

01:19:36.000 If you really want to look at it that way, leaves his house, sits in his favorite tree stand, probably got a bunch of them all over his property.

01:19:42.000 But I don't think in and of itself, I don't feel there's anything wrong with that because my brother raises sheep.

01:19:48.000 Right.

01:19:49.000 And when he goes out to get the sheep, he goes out with a.22.

01:19:55.000 He's got irrigated pasture.

01:19:57.000 He runs lambs.

01:19:58.000 When he goes out to get a lamb, he gives a lot of it away, eats some of it for himself, shoots a lamb with a.22.

01:20:04.000 However...

01:20:06.000 He doesn't dress it up like he's hunting the lambs out on his pasture.

01:20:10.000 Like it's a wild animal that he's going to sneak up on.

01:20:12.000 No, I mean, he doesn't put a picture of him in his.22 and a dead lamb on Facebook.

01:20:18.000 He's a hunter.

01:20:21.000 He's a very avid hunter.

01:20:23.000 And never once in his life...

01:20:24.000 I wish he was here, because I'd like to ask him this question.

01:20:28.000 Never once in his life has he confused the act of farming animals Organic sheep with the act of hunting wild elk.

01:20:39.000 It's not confusing to him.

01:20:41.000 No.

01:20:42.000 But is it confusing when you fish the stock pond?

01:20:43.000 When you say, did you have a good hunting year?

01:20:45.000 He'd be like, so far he got an elk with his bow on National Forest land.

01:20:50.000 He got an antelope with his bow on BLM land.

01:20:54.000 And he would never be like, oh, and I got 10 lambs in my yard.

01:21:00.000 Yeah, it's very different.

01:21:01.000 It's just like, I don't get it.

01:21:03.000 It's just so weird to me that...

01:21:06.000 I feel like we talked about this with Doug Dern too.

01:21:08.000 Doug Dern has to go out now and then and kill cattle on his farm.

01:21:12.000 He doesn't get gussied up in camo and get a bunch of pink accents and put pink accents all over his gun and go out...

01:21:22.000 Pink accents?

01:21:23.000 He's not a girl. 1.00

01:21:24.000 And go out and shoot the cows on his property. 1.00

01:21:27.000 Right. 0.99

01:21:27.000 He'd be like, no, I went and shot my cow. 0.99

01:21:29.000 Right.

01:21:30.000 He wouldn't make a TV show where he's acting like he's hunting his cows.

01:21:33.000 But his fence is only, you know, 20 yards, whereas Ted Nugent's fence is 300 acres.

01:21:42.000 Yeah, I can't really speak to it because I'd have to just go see it.

01:21:45.000 Right.

01:21:45.000 No, I haven't seen it.

01:21:46.000 You only see it on the show.

01:21:48.000 You see him, he takes around one of those little ATV vehicles, you know, those little things, and drives around on this beautiful piece of property.

01:21:56.000 It's kind of a cool way to acquire your meat.

01:21:58.000 If you have all these animals, you're 100% guaranteed there's animals there.

01:22:02.000 It's not like there's a big search. 0.99

01:22:05.000 You're like, fuck, let's keep hiking. 0.98

01:22:07.000 But it's so weird, because if my brother all of a sudden told me, the one who raises sheep, and I was like, he... 1.00

01:22:15.000 I want to explain the sheep thing a little bit better.

01:22:16.000 This might be interesting to your listeners.

01:22:19.000 He has pack llamas.

01:22:21.000 He uses llamas.

01:22:23.000 He hunts backcountry for elk.

01:22:25.000 He hunts very remote areas.

01:22:27.000 And elk are big and he hunts by himself.

01:22:29.000 So he keeps llamas to carry...

01:22:34.000 His elk meat.

01:22:35.000 So he'll go in the mountains with his bow, and he'll go in there for a long time sometimes.

01:22:40.000 And when he kills an elk, he can put a whole bull on three llamas and pack the elk out of the mountains.

01:22:48.000 He hunts some areas where he's nine miles from a trailhead. 0.99

01:22:51.000 And he did that because he fucked his back up carrying it out himself, right? 0.99

01:22:54.000 Carrying elk meat. 0.99

01:22:55.000 That's when he first got motivated to buy llamas.

01:22:57.000 Now, because he has llamas, he bought irrigated pasture to keep the llamas on.

01:23:01.000 It's flood irrigated.

01:23:02.000 But he's gone a lot.

01:23:04.000 So to incentivize his buddies to come over and check on his llamas and make sure everything's cool, he lets them run sheep with the llamas.

01:23:13.000 So they come over to watch to check on their sheep, thereby checking on his llamas.

01:23:19.000 Now if he told me one day, if all of a sudden he said, hey man, let's get all done up in our camo, and I'm going to put a blind out with the sheep.

01:23:34.000 And let's sit in there and shoot arrows at the sheep.

01:23:39.000 Right?

01:23:40.000 I would just think it was weird.

01:23:41.000 Yeah.

01:23:42.000 It's not like, I think there's like moral stuff, right?

01:23:46.000 We have things in our lives that are just like moral obligations.

01:23:50.000 I feel like you have like a moral obligation to take care of your children.

01:23:53.000 I think if you're not taking care of your children, I think you're like, that's an immoral move.

01:24:00.000 For my brother to go out and, like, decide that he wanted to shoot his bow at the sheep in his pasture would just strike me as just strange.

01:24:09.000 Yeah, it is definitely strange.

01:24:11.000 But is it strange to stock a pond with fish?

01:24:16.000 You have a small pond.

01:24:17.000 No, in fact, in fact, his neighbor just dug a big fish pond.

01:24:21.000 Right, but isn't that strange?

01:24:23.000 It's the hierarchy.

01:24:24.000 Oh, the hierarchy of animals.

01:24:26.000 Yeah.

01:24:27.000 Yeah.

01:24:28.000 It's just, I can't explain it.

01:24:30.000 You one time posed something to me that still troubles me now.

01:24:33.000 We were talking about baiting.

01:24:34.000 When I was a kid, we baited deer.

01:24:37.000 I now realize that we would have done a hell of a lot better deer hunting had we not gotten involved in that.

01:24:41.000 But that was just how, when I was a kid, We'd go to this town, Grant, Michigan.

01:24:45.000 They raised a lot of carrots in Grant, Michigan.

01:24:48.000 They'd size the carrots and sort the carrots, and you could fill the back of a pickup truck.

01:24:53.000 It seems outlandish now.

01:24:54.000 I'm 40 years old, and this was when I was 12. They would fill your truck with carrots for $5.

01:25:03.000 Wow.

01:25:03.000 I mean, the bed of a pickup.

01:25:05.000 That's amazing.

01:25:06.000 Yeah.

01:25:06.000 The bed of a pickup would be full of carrots for $5.

01:25:10.000 How the fuck did carrot farmers make any money? 0.96

01:25:12.000 I never understood it. 0.97

01:25:14.000 There was a time when they were harvesting, you'd go down there and you'd pull up under a grain hopper type thing and it'd fill your truck with carrots.

01:25:20.000 All of a sudden I want a carrot.

01:25:21.000 We'd sit in the back, dude.

01:25:22.000 We'd sit in the back eating carrots, man.

01:25:24.000 You'd find carrots all that looked like...

01:25:27.000 You could find carrots that look like humans. 0.91

01:25:30.000 You could find carrots with genitalia. 1.00

01:25:31.000 I mean, just carrots are crazy. 0.70

01:25:33.000 Like, I have carrots in my garden now, and you pull up the carrots, you expect that you're going to pull up a thing that looks like a carrot from the store?

01:25:39.000 Right.

01:25:39.000 One in ten.

01:25:40.000 Yeah.

01:25:41.000 One in ten.

01:25:42.000 Most of them are, like, three-legged carrots.

01:25:44.000 So they had it down a little better than I do, and they had better carrots.

01:25:47.000 But anyway, we'd get all these rejected carrots.

01:25:49.000 We'd have a snow shovel, and we would go out to areas we hunted, and we would put down a canvas tarp, I can picture the tarp right now.

01:25:58.000 We'd lay down a canvas tarp and you'd snow shovel carrots out of the back of the truck onto the tarp or into what's known as a Duluth pack, a big canvas leather strap backpack.

01:26:11.000 And we would hike, either drag the carrots onto the tarp if possible, or load them in backpacks and hike them back into the intersections of deer trails typically, where two big deer trails would come together, and you'd dump the carrots out.

01:26:26.000 And then you do this a week before season, and then you'd hunt.

01:26:29.000 You'd sit in your tree stand with your bow.

01:26:31.000 You're picking an area that deer frequent anyways.

01:26:35.000 You're picking, like I said, usually typically like a confluence of a couple good deer trails, or an area where deer might stage up in the evening before going out into ag fields to feed.

01:26:46.000 You know, they kind of will mill around a little bit oftentimes before committing to a field at nighttime.

01:26:52.000 You'd set them up in these areas.

01:26:54.000 The problem is, as soon as you put down the carrots, you'd be creating problems for yourself because they would start to associate The carrots with hunters, like they knew trouble was brewing.

01:27:08.000 Your smell was around.

01:27:09.000 You got deer, you know, doe can be, I mean, they can get really old, but let's just be realistic.

01:27:14.000 And you got all kinds of deer, does around that are five, six, seven years old.

01:27:17.000 You accumulate a lot of knowledge in that time.

01:27:19.000 So you put the carrots down, you're kind of screwing yourself.

01:27:22.000 But you would get shots at young deer.

01:27:25.000 That would come in to hit the carrots. 0.97

01:27:29.000 So I grew up hunting bait.

01:27:32.000 Now I look at it and I go like, man, I would have learned a hell of a lot more about deer and a lot more about deer hunting early on if I hadn't gotten, if I hadn't been involved in that practice.

01:27:44.000 I now look back, I'm like, man, did I miss a lot of chances to get educated about what deer need and how to actually find deer instead of trying to manipulate their movement patterns.

01:27:54.000 You know?

01:27:54.000 So now I don't hunt, like I don't hunt bait anymore.

01:27:58.000 I'm not even kind of interested in hunting bait.

01:28:00.000 And I was explaining this to you. 0.91

01:28:02.000 This is a long ass story.

01:28:03.000 I was explaining this to you because you were like, well, why is it okay to use bait when you're fishing?

01:28:08.000 Yeah.

01:28:09.000 I don't know.

01:28:13.000 Why is it?

01:28:14.000 I just, I wish I could explain it.

01:28:17.000 I don't know.

01:28:18.000 It's more sporting in my mind.

01:28:20.000 To use...

01:28:21.000 I hate that word.

01:28:23.000 No, I don't hate that word.

01:28:23.000 It's more sporting in my mind to catch a fish with bait than it is to catch them in a seine, a beach seine.

01:28:30.000 Don't you hate that argument, though, that people say, you're a real man. 0.99

01:28:34.000 Why don't you go fucking fight that animal one-on-one? 1.00

01:28:38.000 With a sniper rifle? 1.00

01:28:40.000 Yeah.

01:28:41.000 Or you're sitting around with a rifle? 0.97

01:28:42.000 That's silly. 1.00

01:28:43.000 Why don't you go hit it with a rock? 0.99

01:28:45.000 Why don't you use your bare hands?

01:28:46.000 Crazy Horse had a rifle.

01:28:48.000 Did he?

01:28:48.000 Well, he was an Indian.

01:28:49.000 I'm saying like for- Indigenous or whatever. 0.87

01:28:52.000 People have, yeah, I'm just saying like if someone was posing that argument to me, I would point out how people that hunt for their food have always gravitated toward technology.

01:29:05.000 And if you look at our progression from rocks to hafted rocks to adalattles, To bow equipment.

01:29:15.000 To flint locks.

01:29:17.000 To percussion cap.

01:29:19.000 To paper cartridge.

01:29:21.000 To rifling.

01:29:22.000 On down the line.

01:29:23.000 I'm not doing anything that revolutionary by using what an effective means.

01:29:29.000 It's kind of a new idea.

01:29:32.000 It's a new idea.

01:29:34.000 Yeah, but it's not interesting to me.

01:29:36.000 I'm talking about interest.

01:29:38.000 I like knowing about animals.

01:29:40.000 I'm not interested in...

01:29:42.000 Let's take the area where I have to hunt bears.

01:29:44.000 I hunt bears in a coastal area, okay?

01:29:47.000 And it's at a northern latitude.

01:29:50.000 There's a lot of snow there.

01:29:52.000 But because of maritime influences, you know, it's warm enough down around the water where the snow's melted off in the water.

01:30:00.000 So when I go to hunt bears in the spring, 90% of the land mass is covered in snow and is of little use to a bear, okay?

01:30:11.000 When they come out of hibernation, they're going down to the waterfront.

01:30:15.000 Because on the waterfront, they're going to find beach rye and some other grasses they like to eat.

01:30:20.000 They're going to find blue mussels, and they like to eat crabs under rocks and logs.

01:30:26.000 So, I know about mussel beds and grass flats, where bears are going to go to all the time.

01:30:33.000 I can tell you when we go out at night, I can tell you, I'll be like, we'll see more than one, probably less than five.

01:30:40.000 And I'll tell you, and I know some muscle beds where some are gonna show up. 1.00

01:30:46.000 I like that.

01:30:48.000 I don't like, I've never done a baited bear hunt.

01:30:51.000 I have no desire to do a baited bear hunt.

01:30:53.000 Does that mean it's super hard to hunt bears where I hunt bears?

01:30:58.000 I can't tell you that it's super hard to hunt bears there.

01:31:01.000 Because once you learn the rhythms of the land, What they want, why they're coming there, what they're coming to get, it becomes easier and easier the more you understand bears and the more you understand why bears do what they do.

01:31:17.000 But I like having that knowledge.

01:31:19.000 But I can't say it's like super hard.

01:31:21.000 It's not super hard.

01:31:22.000 Once you know it, it's pretty easy.

01:31:24.000 So when I say I don't want to go hunt bears over bait, personally, I'm not saying, oh, because it's so easy.

01:31:31.000 I'm just saying because it's just not of interest to me.

01:31:34.000 It's not interesting to me, personally, as a hunter, that bears will come to donuts if you put them out in the woods.

01:31:41.000 It's not an interesting...

01:31:45.000 What's interesting to me is they like muscle beds.

01:31:47.000 Like, for whatever reason, I find that interesting.

01:31:49.000 When I lived in Michigan, my brothers each drew a black bear tag in Michigan.

01:31:53.000 You could live your whole life in Michigan, which has a lot of bears in the North, and never lay eyes on a bear because the landscape's flat and it's thick.

01:32:01.000 If you want to hunt a bear there, You're going to either have to use dogs or you're going to have to use bait because that's the way the landscape is.

01:32:10.000 So when they drew bear tags, I helped them run baits.

01:32:12.000 I helped them collect bait.

01:32:13.000 We shot carp and all kinds of stuff and froze bait and trapped beavers.

01:32:17.000 Baited bears for them.

01:32:18.000 It was the only way to do it.

01:32:19.000 I had a blast doing it.

01:32:21.000 But right now, no.

01:32:22.000 It's not interesting to me.

01:32:23.000 Well, in Alberta, they have two places that they hunt bears.

01:32:28.000 They hunt bears over bait in the spring, and then in the fall, they go to these open fields where they find blueberries.

01:32:36.000 And...

01:32:37.000 The open fields is rifle hunting most of the time.

01:32:41.000 And then in the baits, most of the time it's archery.

01:32:44.000 Yeah, because you can bring them in close and figure out what size they are.

01:32:48.000 Exactly.

01:32:48.000 Not kill sows or cubs.

01:32:50.000 I understand it, man.

01:32:51.000 No, but I understand what you're saying, too.

01:32:54.000 It makes total sense because what you're doing...

01:32:56.000 Is you're going to places where they would be no matter what, without human influence whatsoever.

01:33:00.000 They would be there for those muscles.

01:33:02.000 They'd be there for those grasses.

01:33:03.000 And so you are experiencing the actual natural progression of them waking up from their hibernation and heading down to feed.

01:33:14.000 You're just going where you know they will be.

01:33:16.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:33:17.000 And there's no donuts, there's no cookies, there's no bullshit, no fucking big blue jugs that are set out for them to paw at and try to get their oats out of. 0.98

01:33:25.000 Yeah, there's something less cool about that. 0.98

01:33:28.000 Like elk hunting.

01:33:31.000 When elk hunting in Colorado or over here in Tohono Ranch, when you're out there, those animals would be there whether you existed or not.

01:33:40.000 Yeah.

01:33:40.000 They're out doing elk type stuff.

01:33:41.000 They're out breeding and eating, and you're just trying to find them, locate them, and then put a stalk on one and get one.

01:33:49.000 That's a pure way of doing it, for sure.

01:33:51.000 But then there's people that would argue, you know, like the argument of, well, you're using a rifle.

01:33:55.000 How hard could it be?

01:33:57.000 You know, and then there's also people who would say, well, you know, I prefer to hunt with a bow because it's more difficult.

01:34:02.000 Like, what you're talking about is more difficult.

01:34:04.000 But then there's also people that would say, well, if you hunt with a bow, you have more of a chance of wounding an animal and not killing it.

01:34:10.000 And you should use a rifle.

01:34:11.000 I mean, you're not going to make everybody happy no matter what you do.

01:34:14.000 No, the difficult argument is...

01:34:17.000 It gets really circular and hard to pin down because if you say...

01:34:24.000 You know, I hunt with a compound bow because it's harder than hunting with a rifle.

01:34:31.000 Then you have to go, okay, well, then by extension, hunt with a recurve.

01:34:34.000 And if you're going to do that, you should hunt with a longbow.

01:34:38.000 And then if you're going to do that, you should hunt with an atlatl, which is certainly more difficult than a long... 0.99

01:34:43.000 What the fuck's an atlatl? 0.98

01:34:44.000 Like a throwing board with a dart. 1.00

01:34:46.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:34:47.000 Yeah, predated the...

01:34:50.000 Predated the bow.

01:34:51.000 The bow's only, like here on this continent, the bow's only been around for, people debate it, but somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 years.

01:34:57.000 So you had 10,000 years of human history or more here where they were hunting with adalattles. 1.00

01:35:02.000 I bet they were skinny as fuck. 0.99

01:35:04.000 Yeah, guys hunting woolly mammoths, they weren't hunting woolly mammoths with bows. 1.00

01:35:07.000 Wow.

01:35:08.000 So that's that thing where you put the spear on it and it's got like a cup.

01:35:14.000 Exactly.

01:35:14.000 You put a couple fingers in there or some kind of holding board and you fling a spear.

01:35:18.000 It makes your arm...

01:35:20.000 Jamie, I'm a ball.

01:35:22.000 It's an extension of your arm.

01:35:24.000 It makes your arm essentially longer.

01:35:26.000 You know when you go to a dog park and they're hucking tennis balls, that little...

01:35:30.000 Yeah, same thing.

01:35:31.000 It's like an adalattle principle.

01:35:33.000 Oh, right.

01:35:34.000 So yeah, there was, for 10,000 years, people hunted here with adalattles.

01:35:38.000 How accurate are those things?

01:35:40.000 I've seen guys get good, man.

01:35:41.000 Really?

01:35:42.000 Yeah, I've seen guys get good.

01:35:43.000 How much distance can you get?

01:35:44.000 15, 20 yards?

01:35:46.000 Tops.

01:35:47.000 Tops.

01:35:47.000 Yeah, I'm sure some guy will be like, oh, da-da-da.

01:35:49.000 But yeah, guys that kill stuff with Adaladles kill stuff with Adaladles.

01:35:52.000 So is that a thing that's going on right now?

01:35:54.000 Like people are doing that?

01:35:55.000 Yeah, but the problem is that's why guys that hunt with Adaladles will tend to hunt wild pigs or other things like that because most places you can't use them.

01:36:04.000 Oh, okay.

01:36:04.000 So you can do it with wild pigs because they're considered a nuisance animal?

01:36:07.000 In some areas you can use other means to kill them, but in most states they don't...

01:36:13.000 All states have somewhere they spell out legal method of take.

01:36:17.000 We looked into this once.

01:36:18.000 I think that in Alaska, I think for the most part, yeah, you could hunt caribou with an atlatl.

01:36:24.000 I could be wrong.

01:36:25.000 Don't know and go out and do it because of that.

01:36:27.000 But I remember looking at the way it's worded, and I think you could hunt caribou with an atlatl.

01:36:31.000 But states spell out legal method of take in exquisite detail.

01:36:37.000 For instance...

01:36:39.000 Hunting waterfowl, which is, waterfowl is federally regulated and state regulation because they're migratory.

01:36:45.000 They move across state lines.

01:36:46.000 So the feds step in to try to make sure the states aren't taking more than their equal share of their resource.

01:36:51.000 Now they'll spell out the diameter or bore of the shotgun you're allowed to use.

01:36:58.000 You can't use an 8 gauge And then they'll spell out you can't use anything bigger than a 10, and you can't use anything smaller than whatever, 410 or something less than that, or not allowed to use a 410. So they'll spell out in exquisite detail what you can and can't do for legal method to take.

01:37:16.000 So a lot of what I'm saying about if you want to go back, back, back, back in time to have things get more and more and more difficult, it's hypothetical.

01:37:26.000 Because the guy that is doing, as far as weapon choice, The most difficult thing you can legally do for general big game hunting in the U.S. for a weapon choice would be that you'd hunt with a longbow.

01:37:38.000 Because you're still legal.

01:37:40.000 It's still a legal method to take for most archery seasons to hunt with a longbow.

01:37:44.000 So if you want to cripple yourself or handicap... 0.80

01:37:48.000 I don't want to say cripple.

01:37:48.000 If you want to handicap yourself equipment-wise, the guy who uses a longbow is going way back.

01:37:55.000 Now, I recently looked at an ad where...

01:37:59.000 A guy is getting out of a helicopter in space-age dress with a longbow.

01:38:11.000 So we all, it's a hunting clothes ad, okay? 0.99

01:38:15.000 So we all find our little ways of mental masturbation. 0.98

01:38:19.000 And this isn't just something that happened. 0.99

01:38:21.000 This is like an image that they thought is cooler than hell.

01:38:24.000 They're like, it's so cool, it'll be the front of the catalog is climbing out of a helicopter with a longbow.

01:38:30.000 So we occupy the...

01:38:32.000 And in the U.S., for the most part, like in Alaska, for instance, you can't hunt with a helicopter.

01:38:36.000 You can't use a helicopter to supply a hunting camp.

01:38:38.000 You can't scout for animals from a helicopter.

01:38:40.000 We decided it's just not fair to use helicopters because you can land them anywhere you want.

01:38:47.000 And you can't hunt, for the most part, you can't hunt and fly on the same day.

01:38:52.000 Just not fair.

01:38:53.000 But here's like a longbow and a chopper.

01:38:58.000 So we all come up with our ways of finding comfort.

01:39:06.000 Our ways of finding that right mix.

01:39:10.000 Of challenge and not challenge.

01:39:11.000 I heard a guy say, people have really struggled to define fair chase, and I heard someone recently, I don't think it's a new thing, but I heard it recently, where he was saying that in fair chase, the animal has a better than 50% chance of escape or something to that effect.

01:39:27.000 My brother is a statistician.

01:39:31.000 He's an ecologist, but he does a, he specializes in like statistical modeling. 0.99

01:39:37.000 And I asked him what he thought of a statement like that and he couldn't even find the language to begin telling me how stupid that was. 0.98

01:39:46.000 That it has a 50% chance to escape. 0.99

01:39:48.000 Under what requirements?

01:39:51.000 It made smoke come out of his ears when he heard that.

01:39:56.000 But what the guy's trying to get at is this idea that there's an unknown element.

01:40:04.000 Not guaranteed success.

01:40:06.000 There's not guaranteed success.

01:40:07.000 When my brother goes out to shoot his sheep...

01:40:10.000 It's 100%. 0.89

01:40:11.000 Who knows that it's time to shoot the sheep.

01:40:14.000 Right.

01:40:15.000 Now, this is the same guy that recently spent 21 days hunting elk with his bow on National Forest Land before he finally got a bull.

01:40:27.000 And he's a very good elk hunter.

01:40:29.000 He uses a recurve though, right?

01:40:30.000 No, no.

01:40:31.000 Hunts with a compound bow.

01:40:32.000 Which brother?

01:40:32.000 Matt.

01:40:33.000 So does Danny use a recurve?

01:40:37.000 He shoots a recurve, but he generally hunts with a rifle.

01:40:40.000 Did Matt decide at one point in time he was going to use only a recurve?

01:40:43.000 No, I don't think...

01:40:44.000 Which brother was the one that...

01:40:45.000 Danny.

01:40:46.000 Danny.

01:40:46.000 Is more and more interested in hunting with his recurve.

01:40:48.000 He does hunt with his recurve, but he all...

01:40:49.000 I mean, he drew the same Copper River buffalo tag that I drew in 2004, and two days ago he got a buffalo up there and he shot it with it.

01:40:58.000 He got it with his rifle.

01:40:59.000 So did he go by himself for 21 days?

01:41:01.000 My brother, Matt?

01:41:02.000 Yeah.

01:41:03.000 Wow.

01:41:04.000 And it was a couple different trips added up to 21 days.

01:41:07.000 So it was just trying to locate the right bull or trying to locate any bull?

01:41:10.000 Just hunting, man.

01:41:11.000 A bull.

01:41:12.000 Yeah.

01:41:13.000 But he hunts in a very...

01:41:14.000 He hunts in an area where there's about...

01:41:16.000 The herd...

01:41:18.000 When we started hunting that area...

01:41:20.000 This is in Yellowstone.

01:41:20.000 It's kind of funny now looking back at the return of this whole wolf thing.

01:41:24.000 It's like, you know, the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, okay?

01:41:27.000 The GYE, let's say. 0.88

01:41:29.000 The area surrounding Yellowstone and Wyoming and Montana.

01:41:32.000 We started hunting that area in 97. Now it seems like this, like, you know, is prophetic the right word?

01:41:38.000 Now it's like this watershed moment because it's right when wolves, right?

01:41:41.000 It's right around the reintroduction of the wolf.

01:41:45.000 There's now less than half as many elk in that area as there were the time we started hunting it.

01:41:50.000 But he's way more than twice as good at hunting them now.

01:41:55.000 So...

01:41:56.000 How he's grown and developed as an elk hunter, he has a higher success rate now hunting half as many elk as we used to hunt.

01:42:04.000 That's fascinating.

01:42:05.000 So he's balancing that with his knowledge.

01:42:07.000 Yeah, because he just learned it.

01:42:09.000 He's one of the best hunters that I know, and it's not because of any particular thing, it's just a tenacity thing.

01:42:18.000 He's tenacious.

01:42:19.000 Well, speaking of tenacity, that's one of your qualities as well. 0.98

01:42:24.000 And one of the things that I found fucking unbelievably ridiculous about your show was when you made a decoy of a grouse. 0.98

01:42:31.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:42:32.000 And you tried to figure out whether or not you had someone make a reed.

01:42:36.000 I mean, a grouse, for people who don't know, is a very small bird.

01:42:39.000 A blue grouse, though.

01:42:40.000 Blue grouse.

01:42:41.000 It's a big, small bird.

01:42:42.000 Well, big.

01:42:43.000 Like, what is it?

01:42:43.000 Half-bound?

01:42:45.000 Is it even?

01:42:46.000 No.

01:42:47.000 I mean, a dove's almost a half pound.

01:42:48.000 No, not quite.

01:42:49.000 How much does it weigh?

01:42:50.000 A few pounds.

01:42:51.000 Oh, it does weigh a few pounds.

01:42:52.000 A couple pounds.

01:42:52.000 Okay, so a football size?

01:42:54.000 How big is it?

01:42:55.000 Yeah, the body.

01:42:56.000 But I mean, yeah.

01:42:57.000 Okay, that's a decent size.

01:42:59.000 It's big.

01:42:59.000 You know what it'd be?

01:43:00.000 If you plucked one out, it'd be like a not-fat Cornish game hen.

01:43:04.000 Okay.

01:43:05.000 So a very small chicken.

01:43:06.000 Have you seen my chickens?

01:43:08.000 I got some really, some of them, we've got a couple really tiny chickens.

01:43:12.000 Yeah, but they're like a sinewy.

01:43:13.000 Blue grouse is a sinewy bird.

01:43:16.000 Okay, you know what?

01:43:17.000 They're not as heavy as a pheasant, let's say.

01:43:19.000 Okay.

01:43:19.000 They're not as heavy as a cock pheasant.

01:43:21.000 But meanwhile, you spent fucking days trying to figure out how to more effectively hunt this one little thing. 0.99

01:43:29.000 Yeah, I became obsessed with I use that word with such hesitation, man. 0.98

01:43:38.000 Obsessed?

01:43:38.000 But no, it's a good word.

01:43:40.000 Because we used to...

01:43:42.000 Fully concentrate upon.

01:43:44.000 Yeah, so there's this bird called the blue grouse.

01:43:48.000 Now, blue grouse used to be...

01:43:50.000 People used to know blue grouse as dusky grouse and sooty grouse.

01:43:54.000 And it's...

01:43:57.000 Then for a long time they lumped them together as blue grouse.

01:44:00.000 And then in a decade ago or sometime maybe 97 or sometime around there, no no I'm sorry 2007, the ornithological society realized that there is a difference between the different species, the different types of blue grouse and they re-split them or they suggested that they be re-split into sooties and duskies.

01:44:21.000 So you have dusky grouse in the interior mountain ranges and sooty grouse from the coastal ranges.

01:44:28.000 And there's a normal bird.

01:44:29.000 People call them fool's hens and they call them like dumb birds and all this kind of stuff because they don't, when they think of the things that they're afraid of, They're just not afraid of people. 0.94

01:44:39.000 They don't have much exposure to people. 0.99

01:44:41.000 They live in places where most people don't go.

01:44:45.000 So when a predator approaches, when a human approaches, what they typically want to do is jump into a tree.

01:44:50.000 They want to get off the ground so they can't get nabbed by a bobcat or a fox or a coyote.

01:44:57.000 And they get under some limbs in a tree so the avian predators can't smack them. 1.00

01:45:03.000 And then people walk up and there's this bird sitting in the tree and they shoot the bird and they're like, oh, that bird's stupid. 0.99

01:45:08.000 When in fact, the bird's not. 0.99

01:45:10.000 The bird has his way of surviving his typical threats.

01:45:13.000 And they just haven't adjusted to human predation because there's just so little of it on them.

01:45:19.000 Um...

01:45:20.000 We used to hunt black bears in the spring on avalanche slides.

01:45:24.000 When the mountains are all snowy, you get avalanche slides that are swept clean of snow.

01:45:29.000 And those areas are the first to green up because the snow slid off and it doesn't need to melt off.

01:45:34.000 And so when bears come out of hibernation, they'll come and find those avalanche shoots and feed on them.

01:45:38.000 And we used to sit just at the base of an avalanche slide all day Waiting for bears to come out.

01:45:45.000 And doing this now and then, in the spring, you'd hear this noise that would go, ooh, [...

01:45:52.000 And I can never forget what the hell it was.

01:45:54.000 Because I was brought up in Michigan where these grouse don't live.

01:45:56.000 Eventually realized that it's a blue grouse.

01:45:59.000 And that's their mating call in the spring, is that hoot. 0.95

01:46:03.000 It's haunting.

01:46:05.000 What's haunting about it is you can't tell what direction it really came from.

01:46:09.000 A couple years ago, I was out on Revilla Island or Revilla Gigado Island in southeast Alaska, and we were messing around there one day.

01:46:16.000 We got up on this big high ridge, and I could hear five or six of these things going off.

01:46:23.000 And I just thought, man, we'd come back here and pound them.

01:46:26.000 Because Alaska is the only place you can hunt these birds in the spring.

01:46:29.000 They call it the spring hooter season.

01:46:32.000 I thought it would just be a matter of going up there and hearing it and walking down and getting it.

01:46:39.000 So, we even talked about doing an episode that was 22 minutes long with no cuts.

01:46:44.000 It would just play straight time.

01:46:48.000 From the time you heard one to the time you shot it.

01:46:51.000 Time it out so we would just run a continuous loop of film.

01:46:55.000 Now, we went out and started looking for the first bird, and about like 10 hours into trying to find the first bird, we realized you were not going to do that.

01:47:03.000 Can't find them.

01:47:04.000 But you can.

01:47:06.000 I learned how eventually.

01:47:07.000 Very difficult to find them because it's just a ventriloquist sound.

01:47:10.000 It's just like you can't locate the sound.

01:47:13.000 I had a guy, there's a game call company where I knew some guys called Down and Dirty Game Calls.

01:47:18.000 And I sent them a bunch of sound recordings that are on the Cornell University website.

01:47:25.000 They have this Macaulay Library of Bird sounds.

01:47:28.000 I sent them some of the sounds that the females make. 1.00

01:47:31.000 And the females make a noise that sounds like, it's almost like... 1.00

01:47:34.000 And they made me a call that sounds like that.

01:47:40.000 And I played the other, the male sound, the whoop whoop sound, to musician friends and people.

01:47:47.000 And I've been like, what in the world would make that sound?

01:47:49.000 And people talked about this Australian instrument that might...

01:47:52.000 The Diggory Doo? 0.95

01:47:53.000 Yeah, they said that you could maybe use that.

01:47:55.000 We tried beer bottles, all kinds of stuff.

01:47:57.000 Like blowing over the top?

01:47:58.000 Yeah.

01:47:58.000 Could never make a satisfactory sound, but I got to where I was making a female sound.

01:48:03.000 And then this guy I know in Utah named Shad Brunson got me a female Blue Grouse.

01:48:11.000 And I had to go to a Taxidermist named Colton in Montana, and he stuffed that blue grouse for me.

01:48:19.000 Just a real rudimentary stuff job.

01:48:21.000 And I took that thing out, and I would hear where I could hear a bird, but I couldn't tell where I was hearing it from, but I'd get where I kind of knew I was in the area he was in, and set that decoy out, the hen, and then make the call, like a tending call that they make to their young.

01:48:39.000 And, um, nothing.

01:48:42.000 Nothing. 0.99

01:48:43.000 They didn't give a shit. 0.99

01:48:45.000 Couldn't call them in. 0.99

01:48:48.000 Yeah, and man, it was just really frustrating.

01:48:51.000 And then I wound up Finding, I was so pissed about how this was going and so baffled that I couldn't find these birds, I called my brother who put me in touch with a buddy of his, who put me in touch with a buddy of his,

01:49:07.000 who knew a guy, who knew a lady, who was very, very good at finding blue grouse.

01:49:15.000 And she's out of Juneau, Alaska.

01:49:18.000 And I went hunting with her.

01:49:21.000 And we were standing under a grouse in a tree by 9.30 in the morning the first day.

01:49:26.000 After spending four days and found a bird.

01:49:31.000 One bird.

01:49:32.000 She and I, we were together three days.

01:49:34.000 I think we found 15 of them.

01:49:36.000 She just knew how to find them.

01:49:38.000 When she hears that noise, she's hearing something that I don't hear.

01:49:42.000 Well, that's the tenacity I'm talking about.

01:49:44.000 Yeah.

01:49:45.000 She's got it.

01:49:45.000 Bad.

01:49:47.000 Barb.

01:49:49.000 Is a tenacious, tenacious hunter.

01:49:51.000 You know, my older brother who I keep talking about, he's got this term.

01:49:54.000 He talks about people having grr.

01:49:57.000 Grr, like grr. 0.98

01:49:59.000 Yeah.

01:50:00.000 And, like, he's got a lot of grr when it comes to hunting.

01:50:04.000 Yeah.

01:50:06.000 I got a lot of girls. 1.00

01:50:07.000 That's my only thing.

01:50:07.000 I'm not actually, like, I'm not a bad hunter.

01:50:10.000 I'm definitely not a good hunter.

01:50:11.000 But what I have going for me is...

01:50:13.000 You're a very good hunter.

01:50:14.000 What I have going for me is I like to stick with it.

01:50:16.000 Yeah.

01:50:17.000 Well, how could you possibly say you're not a good hunter?

01:50:19.000 Because sometimes I go out with guys who are just so good.

01:50:23.000 Just good.

01:50:24.000 But are they good at a specific type of hunting?

01:50:26.000 Yeah, they get really good at specific things.

01:50:28.000 You're a broad-spectrum guy.

01:50:30.000 Yeah, no, I'm a good generalist.

01:50:32.000 I'm a good generalist.

01:50:34.000 But then I'll go out with guys who just know their stuff, man, you know?

01:50:38.000 And it's almost a little bit shocking when I'm with someone who really knows what they're doing.

01:50:46.000 And it just...

01:50:47.000 Yeah.

01:50:48.000 Well, doesn't that make sense to them?

01:50:49.000 If you're going out with a guy who only hunts mule deer in Utah...

01:50:54.000 This guy just patterns mule deer every year.

01:50:57.000 He knows all the trails.

01:50:58.000 He spends time in the spring searching for them.

01:51:02.000 He spots them.

01:51:04.000 He keeps an eye on them.

01:51:05.000 He's watching them.

01:51:06.000 He's getting ready for the season to open up.

01:51:08.000 That guy is obviously going to have a greater database of information about mule deer than a guy like you who just got back from Bolivia eating a monkey. 0.89

01:51:15.000 Then you arrive in...

01:51:18.000 You did eat a monkey.

01:51:19.000 Yeah.

01:51:20.000 I want to talk to you about that, too. 0.99

01:51:21.000 That was a crazy fucking episode. 0.96

01:51:24.000 That was a fascinating episode, too, because you're talking about ancient stuff and ancient methods and the difference between people that are eating or existing primarily just their subsisting hunting. 0.99

01:51:36.000 I mean, there's no sport involved in what they're doing at all.

01:51:38.000 They're just trying to survive.

01:51:40.000 Yeah, man.

01:51:40.000 They love the...

01:51:42.000 Well, this was...

01:51:43.000 I wanted to point out real quick.

01:51:45.000 One guy that I... One guy that I hunt with that's just, like, good, and you know him, Remy.

01:51:52.000 Oh, yeah.

01:51:53.000 Yeah.

01:51:53.000 Remy Warren's very, like, I don't use this word very often to describe hunters.

01:52:00.000 He was what I would call a talented hunter.

01:52:02.000 Like, has talent.

01:52:04.000 Like, it's just, he gets it, you know.

01:52:10.000 So...

01:52:12.000 We were down in Bolivia.

01:52:14.000 I haven't been on your podcast talking about this?

01:52:17.000 I don't believe so.

01:52:18.000 I don't think you've been on the podcast since you got back from Bolivia.

01:52:21.000 Have you?

01:52:22.000 I don't think so.

01:52:24.000 So we were down in Bolivia.

01:52:25.000 We went down there to go up a river, the Casare River, and travel with the Chimane, which is an autonomous indigenous group in Bolivia.

01:52:39.000 A way to approach thinking about it would be to think about the reservation system that we have here in the U.S. where there's a fair bit of autonomy on reservations.

01:52:50.000 They might be able to have a casino, other stuff that violates state law because they're sort of a nation within a nation.

01:52:58.000 And Bolivia had these huge areas of jungle that are autonomous zones, and we were in the Chamane area.

01:53:05.000 So they're self-governing.

01:53:09.000 We went and traveled up a river, just doing like a basic river trip.

01:53:13.000 At the surface level, we were going down there to fish a type of fish called dorado, but the main thing I was interested in was just traveling with and hunting with these guys.

01:53:22.000 And they hunt with bows for the most part.

01:53:27.000 Firearms are starting to come into their area, but they hunt fish with bows, homemade bows.

01:53:34.000 And they hunt Birds with bows, and they do some big game hunting with bows.

01:53:40.000 But 90% of their protein comes out of the river in the form of fish, and they poison fish with a plant.

01:53:48.000 So we went out, we went into a village, and they were cultivating one of these plants.

01:53:52.000 There's a handful of plants down there.

01:53:53.000 We use a fish poison here in the U.S. when we're trying to get rid of invasives or whatever, called rotenon.

01:53:59.000 Rotenon is a root, is derived from a root of a South American plant.

01:54:04.000 And these guys had leaf...

01:54:06.000 They had a tree that bore just like a green waxy leaf, and you'd pound that into a pulp, and they'd go out into a river, and they'd try to find a little channel, like an isolated channel of a river or a pool that doesn't have a lot of current coming into it, and they'll pulp that plant and put it into a woven bag and just go out in the water and stir the Pulped up leaves in there and pretty soon all the fish come up and the fish are suffocating.

01:54:34.000 It somehow affects a fish's ability to pull oxygen from the water.

01:54:37.000 So the fish come up and they're gasping for air at the surface and then they just shoot the fish with their bows.

01:54:44.000 They do some netting for fish but most of it's bow hunting and I fell in with a couple older guys there and we did some hunting and one of these guys had only ever hunted with a bow but a year earlier He'd gone into some town and somehow got a Russian-made 16-gauge single-shot shotgun that was held together with wire.

01:55:12.000 I was nervous about being around him when this gun went off.

01:55:16.000 And they like to hunt at night because now they have flashlights.

01:55:22.000 So they got flashlights and they got a shotgun and they got their bows.

01:55:26.000 And they would wait till dusk, and then we would head off into the jungle, and these guys only speak their native language.

01:55:34.000 They know a teeny bit of Spanish, but they speak Chimane.

01:55:37.000 I would go out with them, and I would have no idea.

01:55:40.000 What they're talking about.

01:55:42.000 And we would leave at dusk and just go into the jungle and the noise of the jungle at night is just deafening if you've never experienced.

01:55:48.000 I mean, it's like, it's to the point where, I mean, have you ever been like out in a windy area for a long time where you start to feel like it's like affecting your sanity or affecting your ability to think clearly, you know?

01:55:58.000 Or when you're on like small aircraft, the engine noise, you don't realize how agitated it's making you until you get away from it and all of a sudden it feels like...

01:56:08.000 Relaxing in some way.

01:56:09.000 The noise of the jungle is so loud, it's almost like that at night with the bugs and stuff going off.

01:56:16.000 And we go out into the jungle, and I knew from going into it that their favorite food, even though they drive 90% of their protein from the river, their favorite food is spider monkey.

01:56:27.000 Their second favorite food is howler monkey.

01:56:30.000 And before it even gets dark out, we go down this trail for a while through the jungle.

01:56:35.000 And they come to a date tree, and dates will fruit periodically throughout the year.

01:56:40.000 And, you know, you're getting closer to the equator now, so you don't have seasonality as much, so plants will fruit all the time rather than just in the summertime.

01:56:49.000 And they get to this date tree, and this date tree's fruiting. 0.96

01:56:53.000 And he's looking at these dates on the ground, and he finds some shit that I now realize must have been monkey shit, and they got real interested in what was going on up above us. 0.98

01:57:02.000 And pretty soon, he sees this howler monkey starts going through the treetops, and he shoots it down out of the tree with that shotgun he had with him. 0.98

01:57:14.000 And the first thing he does is he takes the tail and cuts the tail off the monkey, the tip of the monkey's tail, and buries it in the ground.

01:57:22.000 I couldn't even ask him why he was doing this, but later I learned you do that so that the next monkey you kill, he doesn't get hung up in the tree by his tail.

01:57:31.000 Then, just like a belief, you know.

01:57:36.000 Then he cuts some bark off a tree and makes a little harness so he can carry the monkey across his chest.

01:57:44.000 So he's just got the monkey slung on him like a baby carrier.

01:57:49.000 And we just head off in the jungle and hunt for several hours that night.

01:57:53.000 And then the next day, we got back and they gutted the monkey out and kept all the intestines and everything out of that monkey.

01:58:03.000 And eventually they burned the hair off it.

01:58:06.000 And trust it.

01:58:07.000 Like how you'd trust a turkey.

01:58:09.000 And smoked it over a fire.

01:58:11.000 And I did not want to eat a monkey.

01:58:14.000 Like I did not want to eat a primate.

01:58:16.000 You know.

01:58:17.000 But at that point I'd been out with them and you know, I was going to eat it but it was very difficult for me to enjoy.

01:58:23.000 Psychologically.

01:58:24.000 I had the same problem being in Vietnam and being served domestic dog where I ate domestic dog seven nights in a row and just was never people go like what did it taste like I was like I can't even tell you there's like something I would get so hot like my body would feel so hot eating that just like it's like just this like wrongness Well,

01:58:48.000 it's like because of nerves?

01:58:50.000 Yeah, man.

01:58:51.000 I couldn't tell what it tastes like.

01:58:52.000 Psychological heat.

01:58:53.000 Yeah.

01:58:53.000 Very hard to eat the monkey.

01:58:55.000 If I could say what it tastes like eating that monkey, it tastes like if you took steel cable and put liquid smoke on it.

01:59:02.000 They loved it.

01:59:04.000 Why do they...

01:59:05.000 Well, they have a specific preference.

01:59:07.000 They like...

01:59:08.000 Howler over spider or spider over howler?

01:59:10.000 No, they like spiders, then red howlers.

01:59:12.000 Now, a couple nights later, we're coming back from fishing one night, and we had...

01:59:18.000 We had a giant catfish with us and a handful of other fish with us.

01:59:25.000 And we're coming back to the jungle and it's just getting, starting to come out into darkness.

01:59:30.000 And they see another kind of monkey.

01:59:32.000 I can't remember, like a capuche or capiche or something.

01:59:35.000 That's not what they call it in their language.

01:59:37.000 But another kind of monkey. 0.83

01:59:38.000 And I'm like, surely they're going to go after this monkey.

01:59:40.000 No interest in that monkey.

01:59:42.000 Not a good one.

01:59:43.000 The same night they got the red howler monkey.

01:59:47.000 We go down the trail, and it's just getting dark, and I see a possum.

01:59:51.000 Same marsupial, same possum we have here.

01:59:54.000 And I'm like, surely these guys are going to want that. 0.99

01:59:56.000 If they'll eat a damn monkey, they're going to want a possum. 1.00

01:59:58.000 People in the U.S. eat possums. 1.00

02:00:00.000 They look at that thing and just walk by like it doesn't even exist.

02:00:03.000 And later, I was able to ask them through, like, by asking them, by asking someone who speaks some Spanish, he was able to, so it was like a three-way translation.

02:00:12.000 I was like, why didn't you guys want the possum?

02:00:15.000 And he explained to me that you'd only eat a possum if you were real hungry.

02:00:19.000 But meanwhile, they're after monkey.

02:00:23.000 And when they get a monkey, it's a party.

02:00:26.000 A party?

02:00:27.000 Yeah.

02:00:27.000 Everybody comes and they're real excited.

02:00:30.000 And the thing I say in the show, we did a whole three-part series about Bolivia and the Chimane, but the thing I say in the show when we're talking about this is think of the...

02:00:40.000 There's only two things I know about that...

02:00:45.000 That get the kind of enthusiasm from a culinary perspective in the U.S. to get the kind of enthusiasm these guys had from monkeys.

02:00:53.000 It'd be someone who has homegrown tomatoes and morel mushrooms are the only things I know about that people have that level of love for.

02:01:02.000 They were more excited about eating that red holler monkey than you've ever been about eating anything you ever ate, I promise you.

02:01:09.000 And they eat them on a regular basis.

02:01:11.000 No.

02:01:12.000 They rarely go up to this area, and that's one of the reasons they like to go up to this area is because you can get monkeys.

02:01:20.000 They hadn't had a monkey for eight months, I think.

02:01:22.000 I remember, I think it was eight months.

02:01:24.000 That was the last time they had gone into an area where they would find the monkeys.

02:01:29.000 So did you specifically ask them to go to this area where the monkeys were?

02:01:32.000 No, we're just going to an area that's like the Happy Hunting Grounds.

02:01:36.000 Wow.

02:01:36.000 A lot of fish.

02:01:37.000 They were very excited to go, and it was several days upriver.

02:01:42.000 It was like apocalypse now.

02:01:43.000 They were very excited to go up this area they liked to go to to hunt and fish.

02:01:48.000 So this monkey thing tastes like steel cable.

02:01:51.000 Like it was just unbelievably chewy.

02:01:52.000 You know, have you ever had a smoked turkey drumstick?

02:01:54.000 Yes.

02:01:55.000 Okay, imagine the lowest part on that smoky turkey drumstick where you're getting close to the joint.

02:02:00.000 Just pulling it off. 0.61

02:02:01.000 Yeah, that's what that monkey's like.

02:02:02.000 But I'll tell you something that's like, They had a baby monkey at one point.

02:02:10.000 A very young baby monkey at one point.

02:02:13.000 And they just cooked it in a wok.

02:02:15.000 And I wasn't even offered any of that.

02:02:18.000 They just saved that for themselves.

02:02:20.000 A couple of the guys had it.

02:02:21.000 I remember one of them had a head in a bowl.

02:02:24.000 Loving it.

02:02:25.000 And what's funny about it too, dude.

02:02:27.000 What's funny about it is I remember being in a...

02:02:29.000 I remember...

02:02:32.000 I don't know why I'm seeing this now.

02:02:33.000 I hunted with another indigenous group in Guyana, and I remember this guy had a shirt with Muhammad Ali on it, and I was trying to ask him about it.

02:02:44.000 He had no idea.

02:02:46.000 Another one had a shirt from a pizza place.

02:02:48.000 He had no idea what pizza was.

02:02:50.000 Not that they have a responsibility to know about Muhammad Ali and pizza, but just saying, for them to hear from us, be like, dude, it is very rare.

02:03:02.000 To eat a monkey.

02:03:05.000 To them, it was just baffling.

02:03:08.000 They weren't like, yeah, I know some people don't like it. 0.99

02:03:11.000 If you go down and someone gives you squirrel brains, they're like, yeah, man, it's kind of fucked up. 0.99

02:03:15.000 We eat squirrel brains. 0.98

02:03:18.000 In their mind, it was like their fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, great-grandfathers like Howler Monkey.

02:03:25.000 How would you not be excited about this?

02:03:28.000 Like, no idea of it being, like, globally fringe.

02:03:31.000 It's just so strange that you don't have their language available.

02:03:37.000 So you can't have, like, a real conversation about it, like, what is it about this that you enjoy more?

02:03:41.000 Because you guys shot a deer, too.

02:03:43.000 Yep.

02:03:43.000 But they wanted the monkey more than the deer.

02:03:45.000 They liked the deer more than the monkey, and that deer was phenomenal.

02:03:47.000 They want the deer more than the monkey.

02:03:48.000 No, no, no, they liked the monkey.

02:03:50.000 More than the deer.

02:03:51.000 The deer was very good.

02:03:53.000 They were very glad about the deer, but they liked the monkey more than the deer.

02:03:56.000 What do they think about your bow?

02:03:58.000 Because you brought a modern Hoyt compound bow.

02:04:02.000 Did you feel like you wanted to leave it with them?

02:04:06.000 You know...

02:04:07.000 But if you did, they wouldn't be able to get arrows for it anyway.

02:04:10.000 Yeah, there's that.

02:04:11.000 And you have all these weird...

02:04:15.000 Hanging out with people who like that, you have all these weird hang-ups, or at least I do, like all this colonial-type guilt or something where you don't want to...

02:04:27.000 I'll put it to you this way.

02:04:29.000 I was bummed that that guy had that shotgun.

02:04:32.000 Really?

02:04:33.000 He's glad as hell, right?

02:04:35.000 It's the greatest thing that ever happened to him. 0.99

02:04:36.000 He's got a damn shotgun, right? 0.99

02:04:39.000 He couldn't be happier. 1.00

02:04:41.000 But I was like, man, you know, I just wish you didn't have that shotgun and you started to hunt with your bow.

02:04:46.000 So it's like me, you're exercising some kind of weird, I don't want to call it like racism.

02:04:52.000 It's not racism, it's something, it's just like some kind of like the new colonialism.

02:04:57.000 There's a Puritan aspect of it.

02:04:59.000 Yeah.

02:05:00.000 Like, for instance, there's these guys down there, there's these Bolivians who are from the urban area down there, like, of mixed European indigenous ancestry, and they're very...

02:05:10.000 Like, in Bolivia, the ruling class, the urban people, are very different than the indigenous people, okay? 0.61

02:05:18.000 There is...

02:05:19.000 They have a...

02:05:21.000 I don't want to say categorically, but there's a view of the indigenous people that would have seemed more like the 1870s here in the U.S. in some circles, the way they view the backwardness of the indigenous people and trying to bring out missionaries to, you know, help them find religion and get them to settle down and stop being nomadic.

02:05:39.000 And, you know, there's all this kind of stuff that we were having that conversation 150 years ago here.

02:05:46.000 There's these guys that are doing these trips, who we orchestrated our trip through, who are trying to get these guys hip to the idea of not eating one of their favorite fish, which is the Dorado, because rich white guys will pay a lot of money to come down and catch Dorado.

02:06:03.000 That was kind of our in to go down here, was to go up to this area where they catch Dorado.

02:06:08.000 So they're trying to sell these dudes on not messing with Dorado.

02:06:14.000 I was bummed out about that.

02:06:15.000 Like, I hated seeing that.

02:06:17.000 Because, like, that's their favorite fish, man.

02:06:19.000 You're trying to tell them that, like, now we want to tell them to not eat their favorite fish because guys like me might want to come down and catch the thing.

02:06:26.000 And it's not even going to have a negative implication, a ramification.

02:06:29.000 Anyways, you're not going to, like, over-harvest them with bows and arrows, you know?

02:06:32.000 Right.

02:06:32.000 But it was just, like, this weird thing.

02:06:34.000 So, yeah, I didn't like that the guy had the shotgun, even though he was glad about the shotgun.

02:06:37.000 I had my bow, and when I brought my bow down, my main goal in having a bow You're not going to bring a firearm down there.

02:06:45.000 They can't have firearms.

02:06:46.000 They're not supposed to have firearms.

02:06:47.000 So, I wasn't going to bring a firearm.

02:06:48.000 I would never be able to get it in there anyways.

02:06:50.000 It would probably have been very bad to bring it.

02:06:53.000 But I could bring a bow, no problem.

02:06:56.000 My main goal in bringing the bow was that I would have like some, that I would establish some credibility with them.

02:07:03.000 And it did.

02:07:05.000 We got up, and I was shooting their bows and doing some fishing with their equipment and stuff.

02:07:10.000 When I got out my bow, they were very, very surprised by a compound bow.

02:07:18.000 Well, they see how fast the arrow shoots, right?

02:07:20.000 They couldn't believe it.

02:07:22.000 A lot of them, they didn't want to shoot it.

02:07:24.000 Some of them wanted to shoot it.

02:07:25.000 A lot of them were just deeply...

02:07:29.000 Not impressed with me, but I was impressed by the technology.

02:07:31.000 Did you let them shoot it?

02:07:32.000 Yeah, I let a couple of them shoot it. 0.95

02:07:33.000 Did they use a wrist release?

02:07:35.000 Yeah, but it was just like, it's hard to keep them from dry firing.

02:07:39.000 I mean, it's just like, because you can't tell.

02:07:41.000 I can't explain to them.

02:07:42.000 So you're trying to demonstrate things.

02:07:44.000 Someone was going to get hurt shooting the bow. 0.99

02:07:46.000 And it was funny, these guys had beat my ass all over town. 0.98

02:07:50.000 A lot of them couldn't come close to pulling the bow back. 0.99

02:07:52.000 That's bizarre.

02:07:53.000 How heavy is the bow?

02:07:55.000 70. They couldn't pull it back?

02:07:57.000 No, because you develop a muscle for pulling those bows back. 1.00

02:08:00.000 And these guys beat my ass. 0.99

02:08:01.000 They couldn't believe how hard that bow was to pull back. 1.00

02:08:03.000 And I just want to be like, it's just, I just can pull it because I pull bows.

02:08:07.000 You know?

02:08:08.000 Hmm.

02:08:08.000 It's hard, yeah.

02:08:09.000 It's like they had a, I'm sure if they would have spent a day at it, they would have gotten the pull down.

02:08:12.000 It was just different.

02:08:13.000 They're like going about how they pull their long bows.

02:08:16.000 Right, right.

02:08:16.000 It's just a different kind of thing, you know?

02:08:18.000 Yeah, their bows didn't seem very strong.

02:08:21.000 No, not at all.

02:08:22.000 Not at all.

02:08:22.000 So it's just about, and they had really long arrows, too, which is very strange.

02:08:25.000 Yeah, those super long arrows, and they would carry three kinds of tips.

02:08:28.000 They'd carry a big game tip, a bird tip, and a fish tip, so every guy's got three arrows with his bow.

02:08:32.000 But they loved that bow, but I wound up being, I just really wanted to be able to hang out with them and have them not, like, stop.

02:08:39.000 Like, when I would walk up into them, they'd be standing around eating some fish around their fire, and I would walk up and they'd all quit eating.

02:08:46.000 And I eventually got where we were comfortable together.

02:08:48.000 Like, they would kind of show me stuff, and they kind of, you know, I don't want to say they liked me, but they sort of accepted me, and I eventually got explained to them through actions and otherwise that I was very interested in their food.

02:08:59.000 I was very interested in how they hunted.

02:09:02.000 I would go out into the jungle at night with them.

02:09:05.000 You know, I got stung by a bullet ant, and, you know, that's excruciating, and they watched me kind of, like, suffer through that and come out of that.

02:09:13.000 And eventually we became...

02:09:16.000 Friendly, you know?

02:09:17.000 And I had the bow just so, because I wanted to go out and hunt with them.

02:09:21.000 And because I had the bow, they were impressed by the bow, and it was just better.

02:09:24.000 It just worked better me having a bow.

02:09:26.000 So they took you in once they saw that?

02:09:29.000 They were like, yeah, they felt that, um...

02:09:31.000 You pulled your weight.

02:09:32.000 Yeah, they wound up kind of liking, like, you know, and the guys that we were traveling with, I was down there with, uh...

02:09:38.000 Giannis was there, Dan was there, and a guy named Phil was down there.

02:09:43.000 A camera operator named Phil was down there.

02:09:44.000 And we all wound up being cool with these guys.

02:09:47.000 We got along well.

02:09:48.000 But it took a long time to get in with them and have them start showing you their world a little bit.

02:09:55.000 Because you realize that they're used to being viewed...

02:10:01.000 They had enough exposure to the outside world to realize that the outside world usually carried a certain amount of disapproval for their food and dress and other things.

02:10:16.000 I gathered.

02:10:18.000 That was my impression.

02:10:19.000 But after a while, they were like, oh, this guy's cool.

02:10:20.000 We would just hang out.

02:10:21.000 Did you guys have to pay them?

02:10:23.000 How did they accept you into their fold?

02:10:29.000 These guys are trying to develop a recreational fishery in this area, but they're going into places no one goes into.

02:10:38.000 And they're trying to establish, they were in the process of trying to establish a thing where they would have paying clients come down, and the paying clients would go on these river trips up to fish in these areas.

02:10:52.000 The only way you can do it, because it's Chimane land, the only way you can do it is by going through the Chimane.

02:10:56.000 And the only people you're going to hire to get the boats up the rivers and paddle the boats and run the boats and run the engines and get them stuck out of the rapids and all the...

02:11:05.000 Difficult traveling that involves you to hire Chimane guys to do it. 1.00

02:11:09.000 So we hired the guys that hired the Chimane with the sole goal of I was just interested in traveling with the Chimane.

02:11:18.000 How did you get this in your head?

02:11:20.000 Is this something you researched in advance?

02:11:22.000 How do you make a decision to go to one particular indigenous tribe?

02:11:26.000 I did a similar thing for TV down in Guyana.

02:11:31.000 I was just blown away by it.

02:11:34.000 Just traveling with guys.

02:11:35.000 And the guys in Ghana, they were still actively hunting with bows.

02:11:40.000 In some ways, they were more modernized people, but they were still avid bow fishermen, hunted with bows.

02:11:47.000 I took my bow down there and hunted.

02:11:49.000 I remember I shot a big game bird, a big turkey-like game bird out of a tree with my bow from about 40 yards, and they were blown away, man.

02:11:58.000 It's like fun.

02:11:59.000 I learned more about...

02:12:01.000 Hunting and about looking at the landscape and about indigenous food paths in those weeks that I've been fortunate to do that kind of trip, then I would learn in years of hunting with American hunters.

02:12:18.000 Wow.

02:12:18.000 Because you've got to understand, let's say you're with someone who's 35 years old, 40 years old.

02:12:26.000 He's hunted...

02:12:30.000 Probably five, six days a week for his entire life within a hundred mile radius of his home.

02:12:42.000 The level of understanding that you get, but it's raw jungle.

02:12:48.000 It's like undeveloped jungle.

02:12:50.000 The level of understanding you get about What's going on around you is just different than what we're able to achieve today.

02:12:58.000 Especially someone like me, I travel around a lot and experience a lot of different things, but what I lack, what I miss out on from the way I do things is I miss out on that level of detailed local understanding that I had as a kid.

02:13:09.000 For instance, for the lake where I grew up.

02:13:11.000 The lake I grew up on, I knew it well, better than anybody, or as good as anybody.

02:13:16.000 They have that about the jungle.

02:13:17.000 So to go out with guys like that and just watch how they interact and what noises make sense to them, You know, it's really informative, and it just helps you kind of understand humanity better.

02:13:27.000 I remember going out in the jungle with them one night, and Meryl was talking about how loud it is.

02:13:31.000 You can't even believe how loud it is.

02:13:33.000 And all these noises, you're like, what is all this stuff?

02:13:35.000 It must be whatever.

02:13:37.000 And then one time I hear a noise that sounds like this.

02:13:40.000 Off in the jungle.

02:13:42.000 Everything, they just stopped.

02:13:43.000 I was like, oh, so that noise, of the thousands of noises going on, this...

02:13:49.000 It's very interesting to them, you know?

02:13:51.000 And what was it?

02:13:53.000 They didn't go after it?

02:13:55.000 No, but they were real interested in that noise.

02:13:57.000 Like, something made that noise, and they're like, of all the sticks snapping and things dropping and birds going off and insects, you know, getting bit by bullet ants, they hear what sounds like a stick way the hell off, and it just means something to them.

02:14:11.000 Was the bullet ant as bad as everybody says it is?

02:14:13.000 Dude, yeah.

02:14:13.000 You ever see that Schmidt pain index?

02:14:15.000 Yes.

02:14:16.000 The Schmidt pain index, he scores all insect bites.

02:14:22.000 And the bull ant's the only one that gets a 4-plus rating.

02:14:25.000 Like a 5-star hotel.

02:14:27.000 It's the highest rated.

02:14:29.000 He has found, and he studies insect toxins and insect stings, he's found nothing else that's as painful.

02:14:37.000 So what does it feel like?

02:14:38.000 It feels at first like you got zapped by a wasp or hornet.

02:14:45.000 And maybe 10 minutes into it, A minute into it, it becomes something very different than that.

02:14:53.000 Ten minutes into it, you feel like something's really wrong.

02:14:57.000 Like arthritic pain.

02:15:02.000 Throbbing, throbbing pain that goes way away from the source.

02:15:04.000 And we couldn't speak, and we're out in the jungle at night.

02:15:06.000 And first they'd go and find a vine and pulp up some of the vine and put the vine where I got hit.

02:15:14.000 I don't know what the vine was.

02:15:16.000 I couldn't tell that it had any difference.

02:15:17.000 It didn't mean anything different.

02:15:19.000 But it always bit on my ankle.

02:15:21.000 And the camera guy, Phil Baraboo, was bit on his hand at the same time.

02:15:26.000 And he kept pointing to Phil's hand, but then running his finger, the Chimane guys, pointing to Phil's hand and running his finger up his arm, like, to his heart. 0.99

02:15:39.000 He keeps doing that to Phil.

02:15:40.000 And he keeps taking to me and pointing his finger to his ankle and then running his finger up the inside of his leg to his groin.

02:15:46.000 And I thought that means that the poison or toxin or somehow is going to travel up and get you.

02:15:51.000 I couldn't tell what he was talking about.

02:15:53.000 And all I knew was it was bad to get bit by a bullet ant.

02:15:56.000 Pretty soon it was so bad I couldn't even, we weren't even able to walk.

02:15:59.000 I wasn't able to walk.

02:16:00.000 I just had to lay there and just like writhe.

02:16:03.000 For how long?

02:16:05.000 Well, I'll tell you this, an hour and 45 minutes later, I couldn't remember what the hell ankle it was.

02:16:10.000 Really?

02:16:10.000 No mark.

02:16:11.000 No mark and you couldn't figure out which ankle it was?

02:16:13.000 I was walking under two hours later.

02:16:16.000 I remember thinking like, I realized that I couldn't think of what ankle it had been on.

02:16:21.000 Do you think that's because of the medication that they use?

02:16:23.000 Because of the plant?

02:16:24.000 No, because I've read that from a lot of other people.

02:16:26.000 Really?

02:16:26.000 Yeah.

02:16:27.000 Well, I thought it lasted for like 24 hours.

02:16:30.000 For me, now they do a thing where they take some kind of mitt and fill it full of them, and you put the mitt on, it's like an initiation, and you get bit a lot, and then it's a whole other world.

02:16:42.000 But for me, I think it was, I could be wrong.

02:16:46.000 No, I don't think I am, man.

02:16:47.000 I think that it was, the peak was 30, 40 minutes into it.

02:16:55.000 And then it just tapered, tapered, tapered, and gone.

02:16:59.000 Now, if I got hit by one now, knowing what I know now, I don't want to say that I would enjoy it, but I would be more interested.

02:17:07.000 I would be interested in what was going on and watching the progression.

02:17:11.000 But I was so scared because I didn't know what it meant. 0.98

02:17:13.000 I didn't know if it was like getting hit by a rattlesnake, where you need to go and figure shit out, or what. 0.95

02:17:20.000 And they weren't able to tell me. 0.94

02:17:23.000 What was happening? 0.94

02:17:25.000 What I later learned, what they were saying, was make sure you don't have any in your sleeves, and make sure you don't have any, because they'll come up and get you on the chest, which might be bad, or they'll get you on the balls, which is bad. 0.86

02:17:39.000 Oh, yeah, I would imagine. 0.56

02:17:40.000 So he's saying, like, not that it's traveling up to your groin, but don't let an ant get up your pants and get you.

02:17:48.000 Oh, there's the Schmidt pain index.

02:17:51.000 300 MINs?

02:17:53.000 300 minutes.

02:17:54.000 300 minutes, okay.

02:17:58.000 Boy, he's really souped that index up recently. 0.97

02:18:01.000 I got stung by a wasp recently in Colorado, and it was the most fucking painful sting I've ever felt in my life. 0.95

02:18:10.000 And I don't know what happened. 0.97

02:18:12.000 I was walking.

02:18:14.000 And all of a sudden, I go, ah!

02:18:16.000 It was unusual.

02:18:17.000 It didn't make any sense. 1.00

02:18:19.000 I was like, what the fuck just bit me? 0.99

02:18:21.000 I've been stung by bees before. 0.99

02:18:23.000 I think I've been stung by hornets.

02:18:26.000 I think it was a wasp.

02:18:28.000 Was it a wasp or a hornet?

02:18:29.000 I didn't even see what the bug was, because I was going through this heavy bush. 0.99

02:18:34.000 And my fucking arms swole up like Popeye. 0.98

02:18:37.000 It was so weird. 0.99

02:18:38.000 Like, it was hard.

02:18:39.000 Like, the bottom of my forearm turned...

02:18:42.000 Ronnie Bam got hit by something like that down in Virginia that the next day turned into a big, hard knob.

02:18:47.000 Like, he had a softball stuck under his skin.

02:18:49.000 Yeah, and it lasted for like five or six days.

02:18:51.000 And it was...

02:18:53.000 It was so itchy, like I had to do everything I could to keep from clawing my arm apart, where I would go under the shower and I'd turn the shower up really hot to the point where it would be painful with any other part of my body and just shove that arm underneath the super hot water like I was scratching it with the insanely hot water.

02:19:12.000 It was burning my arm.

02:19:15.000 But nothing like a bullet ant.

02:19:17.000 I got hit by a lionfish.

02:19:19.000 Oh, I've seen those things.

02:19:20.000 Yeah, and that, again, scared the shit out of me because I didn't really know what all it meant.

02:19:25.000 We were spearfishing and I got hit by a lionfish.

02:19:28.000 And the thing you do is you heat water up to boiling and let it cool.

02:19:36.000 And the minute you can even kind of stand to put your hand in there, You dip your hand in there, and it takes the pain away.

02:19:45.000 Wow.

02:19:47.000 That was another thing.

02:19:49.000 It was just like my hand swelled up like not really usable, like an old Mickey Mouse hand.

02:19:55.000 For how long?

02:19:56.000 A couple hours again.

02:19:58.000 We were out.

02:19:58.000 I had gone down.

02:20:00.000 We were spearfishing in the Bahamas, and I had gone down and shot a lionfish because they're good to eat.

02:20:11.000 I mean, we were doing like ceviche.

02:20:13.000 They're very good.

02:20:13.000 Really?

02:20:14.000 White flesh, yeah.

02:20:15.000 You got to be real careful with them.

02:20:16.000 I'd gone down and shot a lionfish.

02:20:18.000 Careful how so?

02:20:20.000 What's that?

02:20:20.000 Careful how so?

02:20:21.000 You have to avoid the stings?

02:20:22.000 Oh, so what we would do is when you get a lionfish, we'd take the lionfish and leave it on the spear and then open the cooler up.

02:20:29.000 And stick the spear and the lionfish into the cooler and shut the lid and pull so that your spear would come out and the lionfish would fall into the cooler.

02:20:38.000 Now lionfish, just for your listeners, it's a non-native that has been introduced.

02:20:45.000 Into the Caribbean is wreaking much havoc from Florida southward, and they're doing a lot to try to get rid of them. 1.00

02:20:52.000 You see why?

02:20:53.000 Because they're so viciously territorial.

02:20:55.000 And out there in the Bahamas, you have these small little coral heads, and a couple lionfish would move in there, and they would just move out all their fish.

02:21:02.000 So there's no regulations on lionfish.

02:21:04.000 You're allowed to kill as many as you want. 0.70

02:21:05.000 They encourage you to kill as many as you want. 0.98

02:21:06.000 So will the people let them loose from aquariums or something?

02:21:09.000 Yeah, I think somehow they escaped through the aquarium trade of some sort. 0.99

02:21:12.000 Fucking Florida and aquariums, man. 0.99

02:21:13.000 I don't want to say for sure. 0.99

02:21:15.000 Maybe your internet whiz over here, Jamie, will tell you the answer to that.

02:21:19.000 But how they got in the first place.

02:21:22.000 But anyhow, then later we'd take poultry shears and just get big rubber gloves, once the fish is dead, and take poultry shears and cut all the thorns off it.

02:21:33.000 Then flay it.

02:21:35.000 So the thorns are where the toxins stored, not in the glands underneath it?

02:21:38.000 Yeah, they got injected in you with the thorns, or the spines, you know?

02:21:42.000 Right.

02:21:42.000 And these spines, is the toxin in the spine itself, or is there a gland underneath it?

02:21:47.000 No, it's on it.

02:21:48.000 It's on it.

02:21:48.000 Huh.

02:21:48.000 That's my understanding.

02:21:50.000 Huh.

02:21:50.000 Now, I ran out of breath and left my spear stuck in a lionfish down on the bottom.

02:21:59.000 Came up, got a breath, went down, and as I'm trying to get my lionfish out of this area he was in without pulling them off the spearhead, I noticed a grouper in a hole.

02:22:08.000 So I went up and I got a lionfish on my spear, and I'm waving to my brother.

02:22:14.000 To come over because I can't take the lionfish off my spear.

02:22:17.000 I'm waving him to come over about the grouper.

02:22:19.000 And he comes over and he's got a snapper on the end of his spear.

02:22:22.000 So I take the snapper off his spear and I'm holding the damn snapper in my right hand and I have a lionfish on my spear in my left hand and I'm going underwater trying to point to the hole that has the grouper in it and somehow swung that lionfish into my hand.

02:22:40.000 And it got all weird and puffy and I crawled up into the boat and was just kind of like writhing in the bottom of the boat. 0.67

02:22:47.000 And I started getting really scared because my hands started to feel hot and all bloated.

02:22:51.000 And, uh...

02:22:53.000 Eventually waved my brother and our buddy Eric over and we went in.

02:22:58.000 We were 45 minutes from the shore and went in and by then I was really scared.

02:23:01.000 My buddy Ronnie Bain was there and he's like saying I should put it under cold water and I went and typed in the internet and it's like do not put it in cold water.

02:23:12.000 Dude, yeah.

02:23:13.000 It was something, man.

02:23:15.000 Here it goes.

02:23:16.000 Speculated the root of the problem was only six lionfish accidentally released from an aquarium during the Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Wow.

02:23:26.000 That's crazy.

02:23:28.000 Genetic research supports this finger-pointing, but it's likely many more have been intentionally released by retired aquarium enthusiasts.

02:23:35.000 We're tired aquarium enthusiasts.

02:23:37.000 That's a funny way of looking at it.

02:23:38.000 But Florida has a gigantic issue with invasive species when it comes from aquariums.

02:23:42.000 Yeah, man.

02:23:42.000 It's amazing.

02:23:43.000 Whether it's pythons or, you know, they found Nile crocs in the Everglades now.

02:23:47.000 Oh, really?

02:23:47.000 Yeah.

02:23:48.000 God.

02:23:48.000 I was reading a whole article how they have just a kill on site for Nile crocs.

02:23:54.000 They're just terrified these fucking giant crocs are going to grow to be these 28-foot-long killers like they have in Mozambique or wherever the fuck it is. 1.00

02:24:01.000 Florida's the future... 1.00

02:24:05.000 Of wilderness.

02:24:06.000 How so?

02:24:07.000 Because as we move species around with reckless abandon, intentionally, unintentionally, and we eliminate biodiversity in some areas through habitat destruction,

02:24:30.000 And if current trends continue and the Earth continues to get hotter and we lose a lot of the climatic diversity, different climates that we have, different places, if that continues, I think that you will have,

02:24:46.000 we'll continue to see like the great mixing, you know, and we'll just wind up with a situation where there are certain Every animal is going to get a shot at every biome, and you're just going to have it be that certain ones that can thrive are going to thrive,

02:25:04.000 and you're not going to have the levels of indemnism that we have now.

02:25:08.000 And I think that, yeah, in the future, you know, just look at what the wild pig has managed to do here in the U.S. You know?

02:25:17.000 It's the dominant large animal on some landscapes.

02:25:20.000 It's a non-native. 1.00

02:25:24.000 In my lifetime in the Great Lakes, the round gobies, zebra mussels.

02:25:30.000 If you go now and drop a baited hook down in places that I grew up fishing, the first thing you would pull up is a goby.

02:25:36.000 They were not there.

02:25:38.000 It's just certain things are winners and certain things are losers.

02:25:41.000 Not all the winners are going to be non-natives because... 0.96

02:25:45.000 White-tailed deer do well around people.

02:25:49.000 Crows seem to do well around people.

02:25:51.000 Canada geese do very well around people.

02:25:53.000 It's just going to be more and more and more aquarium-like.

02:25:58.000 Isn't it weird how people have this desire to manipulate and manage all the other wildlife?

02:26:05.000 I mean, it is strange when you think about the evidence that points to the contrary.

02:26:09.000 The evidence that points to...

02:26:10.000 I mean, there are, like you said, more white-tailed deer in the United States now than when Columbus landed.

02:26:16.000 So they've done a great job in bringing back healthy populations to certain animals. 0.99

02:26:21.000 But then you see the shit they've done in Florida, where the pythons are fucking eating alligators. 0.99

02:26:26.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:26:26.000 I mean, have you seen that image? 0.99

02:26:28.000 Yeah, it's a famous image. 0.99

02:26:30.000 That is a crazy image, a 20-foot-long python that ate a fucking alligator. 0.98

02:26:35.000 I mean, there's a crazy system going on down there where these non-indigenous animals are just crushing all these other animals and surviving and thriving in an environment that's pretty compatible for them. 1.00

02:26:49.000 You know, as far as, you know, tropical, hot climate, moist, plenty of things to eat, plenty of life out there for them to snuff out.

02:26:58.000 In some areas they're finding, a friend of mine, Robert Abernathy, who's a biologist and conservationist, big hunter, he...

02:27:07.000 He was working with some guys that are going down there, and there's a whole class of mid-sized animal that's just missing from those python areas now.

02:27:17.000 Whoa.

02:27:18.000 Basically, like, possum raccoon-sized critters are just gone.

02:27:24.000 You know?

02:27:25.000 You will see it, like...

02:27:26.000 That's why...

02:27:28.000 To bring this full circle back to some things we were talking about, a lot of the conservation groups that I get involved in...

02:27:36.000 Things like, you know, National Wild Turkey Federation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

02:27:43.000 They pick, you know, they're powered by hunters and powered by hunter money in the effort to preserve habitat for certain species, but like native animals.

02:27:58.000 That wind up, by helping those, you know, you're helping all other creatures.

02:28:03.000 Because you can't fix elk.

02:28:05.000 Like, if you fix elk habitat, you're fixing everyone's habitat.

02:28:08.000 You know, it's like a keystone thing.

02:28:10.000 If you help elk...

02:28:13.000 By salvaging riparian areas, you're helping all critters across the board.

02:28:17.000 You're enhancing wildlife.

02:28:19.000 And a big risk that you have, if you look at native wildlife and you cherish native wildlife, and I do, one of the big risks we have coming down the line is just the non-native stuff.

02:28:29.000 I mean, as far as even just vegetation, we have a lot of areas that we're seeing those high-quality plants being displaced by You know, plants that make native wildlife sick that they can't live on.

02:28:45.000 It's a big, big problem.

02:28:47.000 And in some ways, you want to look at Florida and it's almost like the wildlife situation in Florida has almost kind of become a joke where it's so outlandish.

02:28:56.000 It's like this Jurassic Park environment.

02:28:59.000 Yeah.

02:28:59.000 But at the same time, you look at it and you're like, God, you know, it's like this wild place and it's...

02:29:04.000 And, you know, it's the new wilderness in some ways, but in some ways it's just like it's really sad what that's going to mean for the endemics.

02:29:11.000 Well, Florida sort of attracts that even with human beings, though.

02:29:15.000 I mean, those are non-native human beings that went down there and took over, too. 0.99

02:29:20.000 It's all people that escaped from the mob from New York and weird people from Cuba that came up and rapsed. 1.00

02:29:27.000 Yeah, you've got to read the books of, like, Carl Hiaasen, man.

02:29:29.000 And then the cocaine thing.

02:29:30.000 That's also a non-native plant.

02:29:32.000 It's, you know, its main byproduct introduced to that area that changed the entire ecosystem financially.

02:29:39.000 You know, there's more banks per capita in Miami than there are in the rest of the country. 0.99

02:29:43.000 And the reason being is because that's where they fucking laundered money. 0.99

02:29:46.000 I mean, it's really clear. 0.99

02:29:47.000 I grew up with just a tremendous affinity for Florida because in Michigan, that's...

02:29:52.000 In my area of Michigan, when you went on vacation, you went to Florida.

02:29:56.000 Sure.

02:29:56.000 It was just where you went.

02:29:59.000 It's a great place to vacation.

02:30:00.000 Yeah.

02:30:00.000 And now, in other parts of the country, people are like, you went where?

02:30:04.000 I'm like, yeah, man, Florida.

02:30:06.000 Why?

02:30:07.000 I'm like, because it's Florida, man.

02:30:08.000 It's amazing.

02:30:09.000 It's great fishing.

02:30:10.000 But yeah, it's just like we associated so strongly.

02:30:15.000 With Florida and the fishing in Florida that I do.

02:30:18.000 I have a soft spot and I was down there and I was talking to this kid who likes to hunt down there not long ago and he was telling me this is the hunting and fishing capital of the world.

02:30:26.000 Florida.

02:30:27.000 Yeah.

02:30:28.000 Well they have a lot of game down there.

02:30:30.000 Yeah they do.

02:30:31.000 He was a wild pig hunter.

02:30:32.000 A lot of wild pigs right?

02:30:34.000 Yeah.

02:30:34.000 Isn't that where you shot the wild pig with the Brian Gumbel in that episode?

02:30:38.000 Yeah.

02:30:39.000 Florida's a nutty spot, and they're saying that it's not even going to be there.

02:30:43.000 If the water rises the way it's rising right now, they're thinking Miami won't even exist in 30 or 40 years.

02:30:49.000 Because it's all very porous.

02:30:51.000 Porous limestone.

02:30:52.000 Yeah.

02:30:53.000 It's not going to be like New Orleans where they could dam it up.

02:30:55.000 It's just going to come right through the ground, and that's going to be a wrap.

02:31:00.000 There's a thing I like to fish called flats.

02:31:03.000 It's going to be a lot more flats.

02:31:06.000 You've got to be flats near the Miami hotel.

02:31:08.000 Yeah, knee-deep water, man.

02:31:09.000 How strange are you to be here?

02:31:10.000 It's going to be like a lot of redfish, hopefully. 0.98

02:31:12.000 Taking a fucking boat ride for fish around the Miami hotel. 0.97

02:31:16.000 What time is your flight? 1.00

02:31:17.000 I've got to get going.

02:31:19.000 Right now? 0.99

02:31:20.000 Well, I think he was saying I'd be stupid to leave after 3.30. 0.97

02:31:23.000 Okay. 0.94

02:31:24.000 Well, it's 3.13. 1.00

02:31:26.000 Don't be stupid. 1.00

02:31:27.000 We'll get you out of here in a few minutes. 1.00

02:31:30.000 What else did I want to ask you about?

02:31:32.000 Oh, one of the things about Bolivia that I found fascinating was that the people seemed to have adapted physically to that environment.

02:31:39.000 Like, you were saying that you were traveling with those people, and they didn't sweat.

02:31:44.000 Yeah.

02:31:44.000 Like, you're sweating like crazy.

02:31:46.000 It's pouring out of your pores.

02:31:47.000 We would go out.

02:31:49.000 At night.

02:31:51.000 Well, first off, these guys chew coca leaves, which we all got into big time.

02:31:57.000 I could never tell what it's actually doing.

02:31:59.000 It's what they make cocaine from.

02:32:00.000 They take the coca leaf and they put lime on it.

02:32:04.000 Was it lye or lime?

02:32:06.000 No, bacon soda.

02:32:06.000 That's what they put on there.

02:32:07.000 Lye, that's what they use with that betel nut. 1.00

02:32:09.000 No, they take a leaf.

02:32:11.000 And you pack your cheek.

02:32:13.000 They call it bola, a ball.

02:32:15.000 I mean, to the point where your cheek looks seriously puffed out and inflamed, full of leaves.

02:32:20.000 And then you put baking soda in there because it somehow activates the alkaloids.

02:32:24.000 And it's supposed to give you a boost and keep you going at night.

02:32:28.000 So I'd be out there and I'd have a couple water bottles and I'd just be slamming water and just pouring sweat.

02:32:33.000 And I'm not like a sweaty dude, but I'd be sweating so bad out in the jungle, drinking all this water.

02:32:37.000 And these guys each got a bag.

02:32:40.000 They wear these little shoulder things.

02:32:42.000 It looks almost like a woman's purse, but it's like a handmade bag they carry.

02:32:46.000 And it would have a kitchen knife in it, like a paring knife, which would be their hunting knife, or they just have that in their back pocket.

02:32:52.000 They don't wear shoes.

02:32:54.000 What?

02:32:54.000 They don't wear shoes?

02:32:55.000 Yeah.

02:32:56.000 You know what?

02:32:56.000 One of the guys put shoes on when we were going out and he couldn't get used to them because he never wore shoes.

02:33:02.000 But he wanted to try them out.

02:33:03.000 They go out barefoot.

02:33:05.000 And they got this leaf.

02:33:07.000 They're coca leaves.

02:33:09.000 They got a bag of baking soda.

02:33:11.000 And then they had one of these water bottles.

02:33:15.000 And I thought that they were somehow able to get through all night.

02:33:19.000 Two of them.

02:33:21.000 With one water bottle of water.

02:33:22.000 And I was impressed by that.

02:33:24.000 But later someone told me it's a distilled spirit.

02:33:28.000 So it's not even water.

02:33:29.000 No, it's like vodka, but not.

02:33:31.000 So they're drinking vodka and drinking Coke.

02:33:33.000 Yeah.

02:33:34.000 Chewing Coke leaves, drinking them.

02:33:36.000 It's not vodka, but it's like a rice.

02:33:38.000 It's like some kind of thing.

02:33:40.000 Like you take rice wine and somehow distill it.

02:33:42.000 I don't understand how they did it.

02:33:43.000 Wow.

02:33:45.000 The guys I was with remember what it was.

02:33:47.000 And it was real strong.

02:33:49.000 Like a moonshine almost.

02:33:50.000 Yeah, and they would be out there with a mouth packed full of coca leaves, sticking bacon soda in there, drinking that stuff out of a water bottle, and they wouldn't drink water all night.

02:33:59.000 Wow.

02:34:00.000 I was dying.

02:34:01.000 Yeah, they're accustomed to it.

02:34:02.000 But here's the thing, when you want to get into that, if you took those boys, because they've never experienced a temperature below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

02:34:15.000 You know, in their life.

02:34:17.000 Right.

02:34:18.000 So, if you took those boys and I was like, hey man, we're going to go hunt in the Arctic for caribou and there's going to be snow on the ground, you know, they would go home and talk about how we are some kind of Superman heroes.

02:34:38.000 Sleeping out in the snow.

02:34:41.000 Right.

02:34:42.000 It would blow their mind.

02:34:43.000 What if you took them to Nunavac?

02:34:45.000 It'd blow their mind.

02:34:46.000 You just get really like, you get set in your...

02:34:49.000 Remember how everybody always likes to make that big deal about how in the Inuit language they have like 24 words for snow?

02:34:58.000 I just don't think that we have a difficult time describing people who like to ski.

02:35:04.000 Have many ways of describing snow.

02:35:07.000 It's kind of a...

02:35:08.000 It's like a little bit...

02:35:09.000 It's almost dishonest because we have like...

02:35:12.000 Yeah, we have like light powder, heavy powder, slushy snow.

02:35:16.000 You know, on and on and on.

02:35:18.000 Like we have ways of describing snow.

02:35:19.000 And it's easy to sort of mythologize...

02:35:25.000 People, or you go down, you get the feeling that there's like these super, I do, these super human beings, but then, you know, I look at it, it's just like, they're just used to a landscape that's baffling to me.

02:35:36.000 You know?

02:35:37.000 Like, look, there's four of us out, two of us got hit by bullet ants.

02:35:40.000 Who got hit by bullet ants?

02:35:42.000 Me and the other white guy.

02:35:44.000 Right?

02:35:45.000 Those guys didn't get hit by a bullet ant.

02:35:46.000 And they're barefoot.

02:35:47.000 Yeah.

02:35:48.000 Why did they not get hit by a bullet ant?

02:35:49.000 Because they walk through, they just know the risks.

02:35:53.000 The same way if I took them and we were walking around somewhere in some urban environment, they might not know when it's a good time to cross the street and walk off the other side of the other one. 0.99

02:36:03.000 I'd be like, what, are you dumb? 0.99

02:36:05.000 But no, he just doesn't know. 1.00

02:36:06.000 I don't know.

02:36:07.000 I wasn't tuned into the threat of bullet ants.

02:36:11.000 They would notice snakes that I didn't, you know, they would see a snake and they would notice that I didn't notice.

02:36:15.000 They would always, when they got to a log, they would inspect the log very carefully.

02:36:19.000 If it had a bullet on it, they would kill it very delicately with the tip of a bow.

02:36:24.000 They just had a way that they'd like to, like... 0.99

02:36:26.000 Yeah.

02:36:41.000 Yeah.

02:36:53.000 They're so aware.

02:36:54.000 But then I feel like had I been brought up there hanging out, I might have not got hit by a bullet.

02:37:01.000 I might have not got hit by a bullet.

02:37:03.000 Well, they've probably all been hit, right?

02:37:04.000 I asked them and they couldn't.

02:37:06.000 I later was able to ask them.

02:37:07.000 And one guy was saying he had probably been hit maybe.

02:37:09.000 I remember I thought he'd said somehow around nine times.

02:37:12.000 And another guy was saying he had no way of even recollecting how many times he'd been hit by a bullet.

02:37:18.000 Wow.

02:37:18.000 It's just crazy that they walk around barefoot.

02:37:20.000 Yeah.

02:37:21.000 They do things barefoot that are...

02:37:24.000 What do their feet look like?

02:37:26.000 Not like yours.

02:37:27.000 Just thick.

02:37:28.000 Flattened out.

02:37:29.000 Flattened out.

02:37:29.000 Your feet get real flattened out.

02:37:31.000 Your toe, your thumb toe, let's say, starts to move away.

02:37:37.000 Like a monkey.

02:37:38.000 Mm-hmm.

02:37:38.000 Starts to move away from your other toes.

02:37:40.000 I've never seen anything like it quite as much as I was in the Philippines in the Highlands.

02:37:45.000 And...

02:37:47.000 The guys there, they're in the mountains, like in serious mountains, barefoot, you know, growing up hunting their whole lives in the mountains, barefoot, on just bad rock and everything all the time.

02:37:57.000 And their feet, you wouldn't have been able to put that foot in the shoe, no way now.

02:38:01.000 Wow.

02:38:01.000 Their toes are so spread.

02:38:03.000 You can find pictures of that stuff online, which is kind of like a famous sort of thing that happens to those guys in the Central Highlands and Luzon Island.

02:38:12.000 Their feet are just incredible.

02:38:14.000 Makes sense.

02:38:15.000 Your toes are held inside your shoes.

02:38:20.000 Your toes are held in the way that if you're walking on a rock and in mountainous landscapes all the time, your feet just fan out.

02:38:27.000 Wow.

02:38:28.000 Like hands.

02:38:30.000 Yeah, man.

02:38:31.000 Like creepy.

02:38:32.000 Yeah.

02:38:33.000 Creepy.

02:38:34.000 I don't want to say creepy in a bad way, but it's kind of creepy to you.

02:38:37.000 Yeah, and when I was there, I spent more time looking at people's feet than I did their faces.

02:38:43.000 Just to try to figure it out.

02:38:44.000 Yeah, and some of these old guys had these tattoos that recounted when they used to headhunt for the Japanese after World War II. Whoa.

02:38:52.000 These guys were, you know, they were pretty hardcore fellas.

02:38:56.000 Wow.

02:38:56.000 Because after, you know, when they took the Philippines, some of the Japanese went up And just hit out, you know, and they would make a big sport out of finding them.

02:39:06.000 Wow.

02:39:07.000 Because the Americans wanted them, you know, and they'd get these tattoos that are exploits. 0.67

02:39:10.000 We met old people and they were introduced to us as such, but who'd been headhunters, you know.

02:39:16.000 And they would have their tail narrated on their thing.

02:39:20.000 And they would go out in the jungle and they had these souped up air rifles.

02:39:23.000 And they'd go out in the jungle and hunt with air rifles.

02:39:25.000 And then they had these, you ever hear of electro-shocking for fish?

02:39:29.000 Yeah.

02:39:30.000 They would have homemade electro-shocking kits.

02:39:32.000 They'd have a car battery.

02:39:34.000 I saw this guy that had a big, huge detergent bottle that he turned into a backpack.

02:39:40.000 And in that detergent bottle, he had a stack of batteries.

02:39:44.000 And he had a negative and a positive wand.

02:39:47.000 And he would stand out on rocks in the river.

02:39:50.000 We were floating down the river with these guys.

02:39:52.000 He'd stand out on a rock in the river.

02:39:54.000 And put those wands under rocks and under logs, electroshocking fish and shrimp, freshwater shrimp. 0.99

02:40:03.000 And how was he grounded?

02:40:05.000 He would just stand on a rock and stick them in there, the same way when you're electrofishing for anything doing a survey.

02:40:10.000 And he would shock them up, then run down the river with a net and net up all the stuff that he shocked, and he'd get a log burning and roll the log over and lay the shrimp and crabs on the log until they turn red and eat them.

02:40:19.000 Wow.

02:40:20.000 My brother was shocking fish one time.

02:40:23.000 And got done shocking fish for a fish survey, was walking back from having shocked fish, and he had the fish in a gunny sack, and a bolt of lightning came out of the sky, hit the ground next to him, and a shot of that electricity shot up into the sack of fish and shocked him.

02:40:40.000 Whoa.

02:40:41.000 I'd like to end on that.

02:40:42.000 Because...

02:40:45.000 Some kind of cosmic retribution.

02:40:47.000 Yeah, I would imagine. 1.00

02:40:49.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:40:50.000 Well, Remy got hit by lightning. 1.00

02:40:52.000 You know that story, right?

02:40:55.000 Remy's got some good stories.

02:40:56.000 He's got some real good stories.

02:40:57.000 He's got a story about that they were burning brush one time.

02:41:00.000 Someone burned a big brush pile, and it was dry conditions, and they burned a big brush pile, and all kinds of rodents.

02:41:09.000 Started running out of the brush pile on fire, starting little fires all over the place as they ran away.

02:41:15.000 Oh, no.

02:41:16.000 It's a horrific story.

02:41:17.000 Oh, my God.

02:41:19.000 I want to end on that.

02:41:20.000 Let's end on that. 0.99

02:41:23.000 Well, listen, this book is fucking excellent. 0.98

02:41:26.000 The Complete Guide. 0.98

02:41:27.000 Can you turn off the fade music?

02:41:30.000 Yes.

02:41:30.000 I forgot this thing I got to talk about.

02:41:31.000 We got seven more minutes.

02:41:32.000 Yeah, this is important because...

02:41:37.000 If you have Verizon Fios, all your listeners, Verizon Fios is in some kind of piss and match.

02:41:46.000 I don't really understand it.

02:41:47.000 But they've pulled, for now, they've pulled Outdoor Channel and Sportsman Channel off their lineup.

02:41:54.000 And they're suggesting that you go and watch...

02:42:00.000 They're, like, suggesting alternative content.

02:42:03.000 They're pointing people to, like, reality-ish shows that deal in hunting in some way.

02:42:09.000 It'd be like if you told people that, you know, that we're not going to cover the UFC anymore.

02:42:17.000 So watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

02:42:19.000 No, go watch WWF, right?

02:42:20.000 It'd be like, that's like, so, if you have Verizon, if you use Verizon in any way, shape, or form, Do me a favor and just do people a favor and make sure to go and complain about that.

02:42:34.000 And what is this?

02:42:37.000 It's a contract dispute of some sort.

02:42:41.000 So the way it was explained to me was that there's some sort of an agenda to push out outdoor programming.

02:42:46.000 You don't believe that's the case?

02:42:47.000 I don't know if that's true or not.

02:42:49.000 You think it's just a contract issue?

02:42:50.000 The reason I do wonder if there's something like that is it could be that it definitely came about It seems to have definitely come about at the time of the Cecil the Lion deal.

02:43:02.000 For sure.

02:43:03.000 And they also said, oh, it's lower viewership.

02:43:05.000 But they carry networks that are lower viewership.

02:43:07.000 Al Jazeera.

02:43:08.000 They carry a lot of networks that are lower.

02:43:11.000 I think with some pressure, it'll get...

02:43:14.000 Just pressure from viewers who want to explain that they want the show, what the shows mean.

02:43:20.000 I think that if someone, if they are making some kind of stand and it is like, oh, we don't approve of hunting, I would say look at my show and ask yourself, is my show a negative or a positive for wildlife and conservation?

02:43:33.000 I think the answer is pretty clear.

02:43:34.000 I would like to see them really change their mind about that.

02:43:37.000 And how do people get in touch?

02:43:39.000 There's a website, right?

02:43:40.000 There is a website.

02:43:42.000 Also, just go and let, if you use any kind of Verizon product, man, your phone, I use Verizon for my phone, and I've definitely let them know.

02:43:49.000 Yeah, I do as well.

02:43:50.000 I hope people can get in there and demand access back.

02:43:55.000 Yeah, I'm trying to find the website because I think it was explained to me.

02:43:59.000 Did someone send it to me?

02:44:01.000 You know, you can all...

02:44:02.000 Information...

02:44:03.000 Yeah, here it is.

02:44:03.000 Here it is right here.

02:44:05.000 Okay.

02:44:08.000 You can also...

02:44:09.000 Keep outdoor...

02:44:09.000 Here it is.

02:44:10.000 I'm sorry.

02:44:11.000 Keep...

02:44:13.000 It's keepmyoutdoortv.com.

02:44:15.000 So go to keepmyoutdoortv.com.

02:44:18.000 One word, TV, the letter T, letter V. Keepmyoutdoortv.com.

02:44:23.000 And a link, there's a link to call and write their representatives in Washington.

02:44:29.000 And there it is, right there.

02:44:32.000 So that is, that's the issue.

02:44:35.000 And this is a way to voice your disapproval of this issue.

02:44:39.000 And there's a handsome Steve Rinello right there.

02:44:41.000 All right, man.

02:44:42.000 Now, you can always get my show at meeater.vhx.tv, but it's important, man.

02:44:49.000 It's like the network Sportsman Channel has been so good to work with over the years because they never...

02:44:58.000 We don't ever mess with us about content.

02:45:02.000 We do the kind of show we want.

02:45:04.000 We put out the kind of message we want.

02:45:06.000 It's just so nice and they just allow you to do authentic stuff that you think is best.

02:45:13.000 They've been great to work with and I hate to see them crippled in any way.

02:45:18.000 Whatever the reason is.

02:45:19.000 We'll put the word out.

02:45:19.000 I'll put this out on Twitter and Facebook tonight.

02:45:22.000 And hopefully we can make some sort of an impact. 0.94

02:45:25.000 In the meantime, you've got to check out the Meat Eater podcast because it's fucking excellent. 0.77

02:45:30.000 I've been binge listening this week. 0.92

02:45:32.000 It's no Joe Rogan experience.

02:45:33.000 How dare you?

02:45:34.000 It's excellent.

02:45:35.000 It's very good.

02:45:36.000 And if you're interested in hunting, it's very good.

02:45:37.000 And if you're not interested in hunting, you might get interested in hunting from listening to it.

02:45:41.000 But it's excellent.

02:45:42.000 And then the book.

02:45:43.000 The book is the complete guide to hunting, butchering, and cooking wild game.

02:45:48.000 It's available as of August, right?

02:45:50.000 It's available right now.

02:45:50.000 Volume 1, big game is out now.

02:45:52.000 Volume 2, you can pre-order.

02:45:53.000 All right, that's it.

02:45:55.000 And when are we going hunting again, man?

02:45:56.000 We got to figure one out.

02:45:58.000 Let's do it.

02:45:58.000 Let's figure it out.

02:45:59.000 You got to figure out what you want to go for.

02:46:00.000 Okay, we'll figure it out.

02:46:01.000 I want to do pandas bad.

02:46:02.000 Panda bears?

02:46:03.000 No, I'm joking.

02:46:04.000 Jesus Christ.

02:46:07.000 All right, we'll end on that.

02:46:08.000 See you later, folks.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 15, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #709 - Steven Rinella

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript