The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #879 - Steven Rinella

00:00:00.000 He's about to click the button and we're waiting on him.

00:00:03.000 I'd hate for you to drop some awesome knowledge.

00:00:05.000 Hey! 0.99

00:00:06.000 And we're live.

00:00:07.000 That's it.

00:00:08.000 Steve Rinella, the only hunting show ever in the history of Meat Eater.

00:00:11.000 Or excuse me, of Netflix.

00:00:12.000 Of Meat Eater.

00:00:14.000 That's an awesome accomplishment, man.

00:00:16.000 You're the first hunting show. 0.96

00:00:18.000 See, I tell everybody that if you want to watch a hunting show, like people watch hunting shows and they go, oh, what the fuck are these guys doing? 0.98

00:00:25.000 They're sitting around. 0.99

00:00:26.000 They go, well, look at that.

00:00:27.000 Look at the size of this book, man.

00:00:29.000 This is amazing.

00:00:30.000 Your show is so different from all those other shows.

00:00:33.000 It belongs on something else.

00:00:35.000 It belongs on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel or something more mainstream.

00:00:40.000 So I'm glad that Netflix picked it up.

00:00:41.000 Oh man, I'm delighted.

00:00:42.000 They picked up 32 episodes.

00:00:45.000 I'm glad we got to this plug-in part right away.

00:00:47.000 Right away!

00:00:48.000 Yeah, because if I turn people off and they tune out, they'll remember this, man.

00:00:52.000 This is great. 0.99

00:00:53.000 I can just walk out the fucking door right now. 0.99

00:00:55.000 How many episodes have you guys done, all told? 0.99

00:01:00.000 I don't know.

00:01:01.000 Really?

00:01:02.000 More than 75. Way more than 75, I think.

00:01:05.000 I just remember one day we had a little...

00:01:07.000 I remember one day us having a drink to celebrate us having rap number 50, and that was a long time ago.

00:01:14.000 So we're way past that now.

00:01:15.000 Wow.

00:01:16.000 That's a good question.

00:01:17.000 That's a lot of weeks.

00:01:18.000 Upwards to 75. That's a lot of weeks out in the field.

00:01:21.000 Yeah.

00:01:22.000 The 100th, yeah, we'll probably have a little party on the 100th episode.

00:01:26.000 But no, it's been great, man.

00:01:27.000 I mean, the Netflix thing is really just, I mean, it really, you know, Exposed to a lot of, you know, a lot of people.

00:01:34.000 And it was cool.

00:01:35.000 Instead of starting with season one, you know, they put up season five and six on Netflix, which is nice because it makes people real curious about the other ones.

00:01:43.000 There's one episode that's probably one of my favorite episodes you ever did where you never shot anything.

00:01:48.000 It's that one episode with you alone deer hunting.

00:01:51.000 You started talking about your dad.

00:01:52.000 Yeah, Arizona coos deer, yeah.

00:01:54.000 No music.

00:01:56.000 A lot of ambient sound, a little loud wind.

00:01:59.000 Who makes those choices, like those editorial choices?

00:02:02.000 That was, you know, the editor, one of our editors, kind of one of our core editors that's been doing it for a long time, a guy by the name of Guy.

00:02:11.000 He, yeah, he did that.

00:02:15.000 And at first I was like, huh, what?

00:02:18.000 Because he wanted, yeah, he wanted to do one, no music.

00:02:20.000 There's no VO in it.

00:02:23.000 And we're pretty VO-heavy, tend to be a VO. Voice over for the civilians.

00:02:28.000 I do a lot of narrating.

00:02:32.000 In fact, I was just writing some narration for The Hunt United recently.

00:02:36.000 But I do a lot of narrating, and then we just did one where there's no narrating.

00:02:39.000 And I think a lot of times it comes down to how talkative I'm feeling in the field.

00:02:46.000 And yeah, for whatever reason, I was suffering a little bit of exhaustion or something.

00:02:51.000 I just did a lot of rambling.

00:02:53.000 And then when he started cutting it together, he just wanted to run it like that with no sound at all.

00:02:58.000 We want to do one now with no music at all.

00:03:00.000 No voiceover.

00:03:02.000 No narration, just all spoken to camera.

00:03:05.000 No other people there.

00:03:06.000 So everything just not delivered as dialogue, but just two-camera addressing.

00:03:10.000 We talk now about doing one that has no words in it, but it's all music.

00:03:18.000 Maybe.

00:03:18.000 I was looking for excitement to register on Joe's face.

00:03:25.000 And I got the opposite.

00:03:26.000 Yeah, well, that's one of the things that I think is most ridiculous about a lot of hunting shows is how terrible the music is. 0.99

00:03:33.000 Some of the music choices, just like, what did you guys just go to fucking... 0.88

00:03:36.000 What is that iProgram that you have on your Mac? 0.97

00:03:39.000 What is that?

00:03:40.000 Garage?

00:03:40.000 GarageBand?

00:03:41.000 Yeah.

00:03:42.000 Pick up some beats and just shove it in there?

00:03:44.000 I don't know the name of the system.

00:03:46.000 That we use, but it's a searchable database of music, like a catalog of music.

00:03:53.000 The documentary we're doing, we're beginning now to work on, we're in the initial stages of having it scored, which is fun, because it's not something I've ever messed with.

00:04:03.000 Like, I think very rarely in a television show do you have a television show scored.

00:04:07.000 You know, you're usually using library music or licensed music, you know?

00:04:10.000 Yeah.

00:04:10.000 I was watching Westworld the other night, which is an awesome show if you haven't seen it.

00:04:14.000 But there was this one scene where this music started playing.

00:04:17.000 I'm like, this is so bad.

00:04:19.000 I hate this.

00:04:20.000 I hate when I'm being manipulated by music during a scene.

00:04:24.000 Like, if the music's telling you to, where you're like...

00:04:27.000 Where they come up to it and they're like, man, you're not going to feel like this isn't making you feel how we wish it made you feel.

00:04:34.000 Perhaps if we played this, you'll feel this way more.

00:04:36.000 Yeah, it's weird that we just accept that.

00:04:38.000 This is the part where you're supposed to feel, you know, kind of like feelings of nostalgia and, you know, and like these remorseful feelings.

00:04:47.000 And we have no idea how to invoke that in audiences.

00:04:50.000 But this musician did a wonderful job.

00:04:52.000 Some years ago.

00:04:54.000 Let's play this. 0.99

00:04:55.000 It's always like violins and shit, piano. 0.99

00:04:59.000 There's something about that that's just, I feel so manipulated. 0.99

00:05:03.000 I should just give in to it, right?

00:05:05.000 Because you're already accepting.

00:05:07.000 There's always this acceptance of like, you're giving me a program.

00:05:11.000 You're showing me something in an hour.

00:05:13.000 There's all these edits.

00:05:15.000 We're going back and forth.

00:05:15.000 Why can't I just accept that?

00:05:17.000 You know, there's a musician I like quite a bit named Micah P. Hinson, and he's out of Abilene, Texas.

00:05:25.000 And he has a song called The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea.

00:05:29.000 And a friend of mine who's a screenwriter, we always have joked about someday writing a movie so sad that you could play that song at the end and it would not feel manipulative.

00:05:39.000 Like, a movie so sad it could earn to have the day Texas sank to the bottom of the sea he played in the end of it.

00:05:45.000 What's his name again?

00:05:46.000 Micah P. Henson.

00:05:47.000 Micah?

00:05:47.000 M-I-C-A? Yeah.

00:05:49.000 A-H. A-H? Yeah.

00:05:51.000 Seems like a young fella.

00:05:52.000 I don't know him.

00:05:54.000 Seems like a young fella.

00:05:55.000 Seems like he's got a background in drug taking.

00:05:58.000 Ah, one of those guys.

00:06:01.000 Yeah, he's a good musician, man.

00:06:04.000 Yeah, there's something about music in movies that we just totally accept it.

00:06:10.000 In television shows and music, when there's a scene and they want to manipulate you and they want to establish some sort of a feeling that you're supposed to invoke, they just shove it in there.

00:06:19.000 The Radiohead album OK Computer has a song called Exit Music for a Film because I think they just felt like they were trying to send a message to the licensors.

00:06:32.000 Yeah, I wonder who was the first...

00:06:34.000 I guess they did that back in the movies before there was talkies.

00:06:38.000 You know, it was all when movies were silent.

00:06:41.000 I mean, that's how they sort of manipulated you, and then they showed the screen, and they had the words on it, and da-da-da-da.

00:06:46.000 Oh, yeah.

00:06:47.000 Yeah.

00:06:47.000 And then, like, the Peter and the Wolf thing and all that.

00:06:49.000 Yeah.

00:06:50.000 And then it just carried over.

00:06:51.000 But, yeah, when we're working on the show with music...

00:06:57.000 I have a hard time describing visual stuff, you know?

00:07:02.000 Like, I'll often see something, like a visual treatment for something, you know, or artwork or whatever.

00:07:09.000 I'm like, I don't know, I can't describe it.

00:07:10.000 When I see it, I'll know that I like it, but I can't tell you what I like.

00:07:14.000 And when we're doing it and I listen to music, when an editor's putting something together and I hear music, I never have suggestions.

00:07:20.000 I always just have no suggestions.

00:07:24.000 To me, it's like, yes, no.

00:07:26.000 Yes, no.

00:07:27.000 And I never can be like, make it more, you know, I don't know.

00:07:31.000 I just have to hear it and I'll be like, oh, that's, it's too heavy handed or not.

00:07:37.000 I saw one show where they were deer hunting and there was electronica music playing.

00:07:42.000 I was like, who chose this?

00:07:43.000 Well, they might be trying to create like a weird tension.

00:07:47.000 Yeah, make you upset.

00:07:49.000 Yeah.

00:07:49.000 That way you want the deer to die.

00:07:51.000 Because they're forcing you to listen to this music.

00:07:54.000 There's a great compilation of hawks.

00:07:58.000 I think they're rough-legged hawks, maybe.

00:08:01.000 I can't remember what kind. 0.99

00:08:02.000 But just bitch-slapping mallard ducks up in Canada. 1.00

00:08:05.000 And the guy said it to hell's bells. 0.99

00:08:07.000 And I always thought that was...

00:08:08.000 It was an obvious choice, but it just has a great effect watching hawks kill ducks to hell's bells.

00:08:17.000 But other than that, no, I like it to be...

00:08:19.000 I always kind of like it to be not obvious.

00:08:24.000 Like, you know, let's say you're doing a show in West Virginia and someone will be like, oh yeah, kick it off with some banjo music.

00:08:30.000 You know what I mean?

00:08:31.000 It's like, I hate that kind of decision making.

00:08:33.000 Right, right.

00:08:35.000 Cliché.

00:08:35.000 Yeah.

00:08:36.000 And then I don't like it to be like electronica to deer hunting.

00:08:41.000 Like, you kind of want it to be sort of...

00:08:45.000 Like, not obvious, but right.

00:08:47.000 Yeah.

00:08:48.000 Like, who was it that decided that outer space sounds the way it does?

00:08:51.000 Like, no one shows images of outer space to banjo music.

00:08:55.000 That's a good point.

00:08:56.000 You show images of outer space, like, doo-doo-doo-doo, you know?

00:08:59.000 Or it's gotta be, like, Star Wars Symphony type music.

00:09:01.000 Yeah.

00:09:02.000 Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun.

00:09:03.000 Like, someone decided that outer space feels like a kind of music.

00:09:07.000 Mm.

00:09:08.000 So if I was doing something about outer space, I would want to find something that you'd never guess was outer space-y sounding, but...

00:09:15.000 In the end, you're like, yeah, you know what?

00:09:18.000 That's not out of place for outer space.

00:09:20.000 Like a harmonica?

00:09:22.000 Sure.

00:09:23.000 Sure.

00:09:23.000 I'll know it when I hear it.

00:09:25.000 I'll know it when I hear it.

00:09:27.000 You'd have to enlist a bunch of the world's best harmonica players to come up with something spacey.

00:09:33.000 Yeah, to watch outer space stuff.

00:09:35.000 I think like a Diggory-Doo would work for space. 1.00

00:09:37.000 No, you could do that.

00:09:38.000 But all the editors used all that music up for when they got to cut to an Australia thing.

00:09:44.000 That's true, right?

00:09:46.000 They're like, what's Australia sound like?

00:09:47.000 Oh, that's right, the Diggory-Doo. 1.00

00:09:49.000 But yeah, man, Netflix, it's got a lot of emails from people kind of stumbling out of the show.

00:09:57.000 And it's funny because you make a show about hunting, and in your head you're like, people that like to hunt would have found it.

00:10:05.000 But then you hear from people who hunt their asses off, and they're like, hey, I just discovered this show.

00:10:12.000 And you realize all these people, all the untapped millions that are out there. 0.66

00:10:16.000 Yeah.

00:10:17.000 Well, there's a lot of people like me before I ever started hunting that are interested in it.

00:10:23.000 They think it's interesting.

00:10:24.000 And I think the gateway drug for them is those Alaska shows.

00:10:27.000 Those subsistence hunter shows, like The Last Frontier and The Mountain Men shows.

00:10:32.000 They show these people like, wow, that looks cool.

00:10:35.000 And then I think...

00:10:37.000 The next step is to switch on over to the Sportsman's channel or something like that and find something interesting.

00:10:42.000 Yeah, that's a good point.

00:10:43.000 But you can get turned off really easily.

00:10:45.000 You could go to the wrong kind of show and it could be boring.

00:10:48.000 Or you can stumble upon, like I always say about Uncharted, the Jim Shockey show.

00:10:52.000 Have you seen that show?

00:10:53.000 I have.

00:10:53.000 It's a great show.

00:10:54.000 And to me, it's not really a hunting show.

00:10:56.000 It's a show about cultures.

00:10:58.000 Yeah, traveling culture.

00:10:59.000 Yeah.

00:11:00.000 It's about a really curious, open-minded guy who loves to go to different cultures, and he goes there, you know, and the premise is he goes there to hunt.

00:11:08.000 But he's traveled to some really, really incredible places and filmed some amazing stuff.

00:11:14.000 Did you see the one where he went to, I forget what river it was in Africa, where these people have a significant problem with crocodiles eating people?

00:11:22.000 Oh, no, I didn't, but I've talked to some people about that one.

00:11:24.000 Whew! 0.99

00:11:25.000 Everybody in the village was like missing an arm.

00:11:28.000 They had a hole in their head.

00:11:30.000 Everybody had been jacked.

00:11:31.000 And while he was there, a woman got taken.

00:11:34.000 Yeah.

00:11:34.000 It was crazy watching these people wail and cry and sob.

00:11:38.000 It was really, really intense.

00:11:40.000 You know, when I was in seventh grade, we had a teacher named Miss Merkel.

00:11:47.000 I don't know if she's alive anymore, but I remember she lived on the Muskegon River.

00:11:51.000 She was in the Peace Corps, and one day...

00:11:53.000 This is one of those things that happens when you're a kid and you realize later it's weird.

00:11:56.000 One day she brought in a photograph of her...

00:12:01.000 I believe it was her fiancé at the time, of his body after it had been removed from a crocodile's stomach. 0.99

00:12:13.000 Holy shit. 0.99

00:12:14.000 To show us. 1.00

00:12:16.000 Whoa.

00:12:17.000 Yeah.

00:12:18.000 Now, to set that...

00:12:20.000 To set the times, I also, when I was in ninth grade, there was a teacher named Mr. Wright, and he wanted me to re-blue a shotgun for him.

00:12:29.000 You know, the bluing on a shotgun, like the coating on a shotgun.

00:12:32.000 Re-blue it?

00:12:33.000 Yeah.

00:12:34.000 How do you do that?

00:12:34.000 What is it?

00:12:35.000 It's a chemical dip.

00:12:36.000 You strip it and then it's like a chemical treatment.

00:12:38.000 Blueing. 0.88

00:12:39.000 Blueing has kind of fallen out of favor, but everything used to be blue.

00:12:41.000 Anyways, just set the scene.

00:12:43.000 Like for what you could do back then that you don't do now.

00:12:46.000 He gave a shotgun to a kid.

00:12:48.000 Brought the shotgun to school.

00:12:49.000 Gave me the shotgun.

00:12:50.000 I took it home, re-blued it.

00:12:51.000 You know what he paid me back with?

00:12:53.000 What?

00:12:53.000 He gave me a.25 caliber semi-automatic handgun in a sweat sock.

00:12:59.000 At school.

00:13:00.000 I brought it home and my dad confiscated it from me and I never saw it again.

00:13:05.000 Wow. 0.99

00:13:05.000 So the teacher gave you a handgun and your dad said, what the fuck is this teacher doing? 0.99

00:13:11.000 Give me that. 0.99

00:13:12.000 Yeah.

00:13:12.000 Wow.

00:13:13.000 The.25 caliber semi-auto in a sweat sock as payment for ballooned shotgun.

00:13:18.000 The transaction all happened at Reese Puffer.

00:13:21.000 Is that in Michigan?

00:13:22.000 It's my high school, yeah.

00:13:26.000 So, when I say that she had a photo of a guy's body coming out of a crocodile, it's like, just a, you know...

00:13:34.000 That's not that long ago, though.

00:13:35.000 No, I'm 43. How old am I? 42. Times have changed pretty radically.

00:13:39.000 Oh, yeah.

00:13:41.000 I remember when they instituted the rule that you couldn't have firearms at school.

00:13:44.000 And I remember going down and talking to Mr. Beckman and being like, hey, you know, and he's like, oh, yeah, of course.

00:13:51.000 I mean, you know, you guys hunt and everything.

00:13:54.000 Yeah.

00:13:55.000 So you can stick a gun in your locker?

00:13:58.000 No, you can have it in your car in the parking lot, though.

00:14:00.000 Wow.

00:14:01.000 Now, for our documentary, we interviewed a guy who used to get on his school bus with his shotgun. 1.00

00:14:07.000 Holy shit. 0.99

00:14:08.000 In Martha's Vineyard, of all places. 1.00

00:14:10.000 And he would get on the school bus with a shotgun.

00:14:13.000 Wow.

00:14:15.000 In Martha's Vineyard?

00:14:17.000 Yeah, so he could hunt ducks after school.

00:14:19.000 Whoa.

00:14:20.000 How old is this guy?

00:14:22.000 Old.

00:14:22.000 He's a Vietnam veteran.

00:14:26.000 What happened?

00:14:27.000 What happened to people?

00:14:28.000 People started shooting people at school. 0.99

00:14:30.000 What the fuck happened there? 0.99

00:14:32.000 We can answer that. 0.99

00:14:33.000 I've been talking about this on stage a lot.

00:14:35.000 What happened to going postal?

00:14:36.000 What did the post office figure out?

00:14:38.000 How did the post office get it together?

00:14:41.000 Like, why did that stop happening?

00:14:42.000 Yeah, going postal was a real issue.

00:14:44.000 Like, was it?

00:14:45.000 It was a huge issue.

00:14:46.000 There was a game called Postal.

00:14:48.000 There was a video game that you could play in the early days of video game called Postal.

00:14:52.000 And this is another thing that you probably couldn't do today. 0.95

00:14:55.000 But there was a video game based on mass shootings where you'd go to a post office and just fuck everybody up. 0.61

00:15:00.000 But was...

00:15:00.000 I don't remember.

00:15:02.000 I know, of course I remember that.

00:15:03.000 But I don't remember, were there actually, like, more than two...

00:15:09.000 Yeah, I was going to say, it's called Running With Scissors was the company that made it. 0.99

00:15:12.000 Look, this is the fucking game. 1.00

00:15:14.000 You would just run around and mass shoot people and chop them up and gun them down. 1.00

00:15:19.000 I mean, it's terrible graphics because it's the early days of video games.

00:15:24.000 No, it looks like my six-year-old did the pictures.

00:15:28.000 But this is the game.

00:15:29.000 I mean, this is like the original Grand Theft Auto.

00:15:32.000 Really?

00:15:33.000 Yeah.

00:15:34.000 How come you could just go over the roof like that? 0.97

00:15:36.000 Shitty-ass physics.

00:15:40.000 Yeah, I mean, going postal was a thing that people used to say all the time. 0.98

00:15:45.000 But if you said he went postal to like a 20-year-old, they wouldn't know what they were talking about.

00:15:50.000 I think people use it as being, you got real mad.

00:15:54.000 I think it's a murderous thing.

00:15:56.000 No, I know, but also, once it became in the lexicon, you know, you could say, like, oh yeah, you know, he went postal about me, not...

00:16:05.000 Right.

00:16:06.000 Sending him the check.

00:16:07.000 But you could say going postal because you're 42. But could you say postal if you're 22?

00:16:12.000 I don't think a 22-year-old would have any idea what you're talking about.

00:16:15.000 Something happened.

00:16:16.000 It ended.

00:16:17.000 The phenomena.

00:16:20.000 Yeah.

00:16:21.000 What did the post office do?

00:16:22.000 What I'm questioning is, what was it based on?

00:16:25.000 Two things?

00:16:27.000 Three?

00:16:30.000 Monotony?

00:16:31.000 Inbox, outbox.

00:16:33.000 Inbox, outbox.

00:16:35.000 Inbox, outbox.

00:16:36.000 I mean, how many postal...

00:16:38.000 How many mass shootings were there at post offices?

00:16:42.000 Jamie's pulled them up here.

00:16:43.000 Look at this.

00:16:44.000 There's quite a few.

00:16:47.000 1986, 1991, 91 again.

00:16:50.000 Two events in 93. And it took a 13-year hiatus.

00:16:53.000 Yeah, and then it came back strong in 2006. Baker City, Oregon, 2006. So 2006, it seems like that was the last postal event.

00:17:03.000 It says that it was based around these ones in 1986 is where the term started.

00:17:07.000 Hmm.

00:17:08.000 So, it probably is just a novelty thing.

00:17:11.000 Like, one person did it, and then a bunch of other people...

00:17:15.000 Well, I wonder if there's a disproportionate amount of mass shootings in post offices compared to other warehouse jobs or other...

00:17:22.000 I mean, because there's been mass shootings at work before, but for some reason that distinction got put on post office.

00:17:31.000 Said 35 people in 11 incidents.

00:17:33.000 Hmm.

00:17:34.000 That is high.

00:17:35.000 It's fairly high.

00:17:37.000 But when you're dealing with the number of people that come in and out of the post office.

00:17:41.000 Irate.

00:17:41.000 Yeah.

00:17:43.000 But it's one of those weird things.

00:17:46.000 Like, why don't you see that about Jiffy Lube?

00:17:48.000 There's no Jiffy Lube mass shootings, you know?

00:17:51.000 Yeah, I can't answer that.

00:17:54.000 I bet there's people who've studied it carefully.

00:17:56.000 I read the book Columbine.

00:17:59.000 Oh yeah?

00:18:00.000 Did you read that book?

00:18:01.000 No I didn't, but I just got a book from one of the kids that survived.

00:18:05.000 Met him, he was with Marilyn Manson at this podcast that we did for the election night, the End of the World podcast.

00:18:12.000 And he gave me a copy of his book.

00:18:14.000 He survived.

00:18:15.000 They came up to him right before the shooting.

00:18:17.000 They said, hey man, we like you. 1.00

00:18:19.000 Get the fuck out of here. 1.00

00:18:20.000 Really? 0.98

00:18:20.000 Yeah, and he left and guns started blazing and he survived. 0.98

00:18:25.000 Yeah.

00:18:26.000 That'd be a good guy to have on your show.

00:18:27.000 I'm gonna have him on.

00:18:28.000 The guy that wrote Columbine.

00:18:29.000 No, no, I mean, yeah, him, but I mean the guy that wrote Columbine.

00:18:32.000 Columbine's a good book, man.

00:18:33.000 I mean, as far as the psychology of, you know, the psychology and background and context of shooters, it's a good book.

00:18:42.000 It's an intense phenomenon, you know, that is attributed to To North America more than anywhere.

00:18:48.000 I mean, you're starting to see a lot more mass shootings all across the world, but a lot of them are religious-related.

00:18:52.000 But it's a very confusing one to people because there's so many factors involved.

00:19:00.000 And it's one that gets lumped in with the gun culture.

00:19:02.000 This is a tweet that I put on my...

00:19:07.000 Yeah.

00:19:22.000 And the amount of mass shootings, in relative, obviously they're all horrific and terrible, but relatively, to the amount of people that we have, it's relatively small.

00:19:35.000 And I think the kind of person that can engage in something like that, there's so many factors, and you can't blame it on guns.

00:19:43.000 It's like blaming forks on people getting fat.

00:19:45.000 It doesn't make sense.

00:19:47.000 I think when you look at The tendency to want to grasp onto somewhat easy solutions for stuff, it's something people go to.

00:20:00.000 Yes.

00:20:00.000 Because it seems conquerable.

00:20:02.000 So people look at it like a really complex thing.

00:20:05.000 We saw so much of this during the run-up to the presidential election, where to make a point really fast, you look at something that's terrifically complex.

00:20:14.000 And then it's not just that you want the magic solution, but people kind of go like, well, what possibly could be done?

00:20:21.000 And I think people move in the direction of the Second Amendment.

00:20:26.000 And there's also sort of an agreement that people have when discussing it.

00:20:30.000 Like, yes, guns are a problem.

00:20:32.000 And that guns are a problem because these things happen.

00:20:34.000 And then they all start talking about guns.

00:20:37.000 And then we get lumped into two groups.

00:20:39.000 You get lumped into people that are pro-Second Amendment that go, no, no, no, it's not guns.

00:20:43.000 And then the people that say, well, those crazy people with guns...

00:20:47.000 You know, like Obama, one of the famous statements that he said during his administration is how people are so attached to their guns.

00:20:55.000 And the Second Amendment people got so mad.

00:20:59.000 The NRA people got so mad.

00:21:00.000 You mean they're clinging to religion and guns?

00:21:02.000 Yeah.

00:21:02.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:04.000 It's, you know, if you just look at the sheer number of people who actually have guns in this country, it is a little crazy.

00:21:10.000 I mean, the volume is very, very high, the actual number of firearms.

00:21:15.000 And the thing that always gets me is they don't, it's not like they stopped making them.

00:21:19.000 I mean, they're making guns every day.

00:21:21.000 A lot less now since the election.

00:21:23.000 Really?

00:21:23.000 Yeah, I had friends that were so convinced that, like most people in the country, whether you liked it or not, were convinced that Clinton was going to win.

00:21:37.000 I got one friend in particular that went out and bought a bunch of stocks for firearm companies, and he said they took a little hit after the election.

00:21:47.000 Because people relaxed.

00:21:48.000 They didn't worry about stockpiling ammunition.

00:21:50.000 Because people weren't worried about stockpiling.

00:21:51.000 I mean, we were all talking about it.

00:21:53.000 It's like the stockpiling thing is self-perpetuating where...

00:22:00.000 When I was a little kid, in our Christmas stocking, we would get bricks of 22 shells.

00:22:05.000 We'd hunt a lot of squirrels and rabbits with 22s.

00:22:10.000 You always had 22 shells.

00:22:11.000 You could go anywhere and get 22 shells.

00:22:13.000 A buddy of mine, one of our camera guys, he grew up on a ranch.

00:22:16.000 At the ranch store, they had two items.

00:22:20.000 Chew, so tins of chew, and 22 shells.

00:22:24.000 You could get on credit at the ranch store.

00:22:26.000 The ranch store had a very limited inventory, but that's how pervasive.22 shells were.

00:22:32.000 Now, when Obama won, no one's going to use a.22.

00:22:36.000 A.22 is not a go-to caliber for inflicting harm on other human beings.

00:22:41.000 It's a very small, small game round.

00:22:45.000 But the hysteria about guns drove people to gobble up guns.

00:22:49.000 22 ammo.

00:22:51.000 So all of a sudden then it was, you couldn't find 22 ammo.

00:22:53.000 And not being able to find it, like I used to just buy these little boxes of 50, right?

00:22:58.000 You go like, oh, it's hard to buy it.

00:22:59.000 And then all of a sudden you got in the need where you wanted to buy all you could get because it was in your head that you couldn't get it.

00:23:05.000 So then you'd see a thousand of them and I'd be like, well, I'm going to buy it because everyone's buying it.

00:23:11.000 And I think it was self-perpetuating.

00:23:13.000 Now I got shitloaded to 22 shots.

00:23:15.000 But it's like, I had no need for them.

00:23:17.000 I felt in this thing, like, there's this thing that I've always had access to, and now I won't have access to it.

00:23:22.000 You know?

00:23:23.000 And it, I don't know where it came from.

00:23:25.000 And I think that now, all through the last eight years, there's been just this, there's been this, like, great arming of America, because I feel like so many people were worried about having their rights infringed.

00:23:36.000 There's, like, at least now, in that community, of which I'm a part, I suppose, there's a sigh of relief, you know?

00:23:45.000 Yeah, there's a great relaxation among sports when they think that Trump is going to come in and, you know, protect the Second Amendment rights, but a lot of people have to be worried about private land or public land.

00:23:59.000 Yeah, that's the thing that I'm really watching, and I'm curious about it.

00:24:04.000 You know, at this point, you know, the talk's over, right?

00:24:10.000 The rhetoric's over, so now I'm a...

00:24:15.000 Whether someone was for it or against it, for or against Trump's victory, I think now the responsible thing to do in my mind, or the realistic responsible thing to do in my mind, because there's so many unknowns, just to approach the administration with an open mind.

00:24:31.000 I mean, now I'm like, okay, talk's over.

00:24:32.000 Now what's going to happen?

00:24:35.000 What sorts of things are we going to see come out of it?

00:24:36.000 And I don't know if anyone really knows the answers to that.

00:24:39.000 And in my outward, public-facing way, I don't generally talk about politics outside of issues that relate to wildlife, issues that relate to hunters and fishermen.

00:24:54.000 I kind of focus in because politically I'm a mess.

00:24:57.000 I'm all over the place.

00:25:00.000 I have no use for, and I know you don't either, I have no use for, like, classic definitions of conservatives and liberals. 0.99

00:25:07.000 That shit makes no sense to me. 0.91

00:25:08.000 Like, I don't get, I don't draw my viewpoints from going and looking and finding out how I'm supposed to feel about it in order to be, like, a consistent partisan individual. 0.99

00:25:18.000 Last January, though, for people who aren't even, I'm sure there's probably a lot of people that aren't familiar with this.

00:25:24.000 Can I give a quick rundown on public lands?

00:25:26.000 Sure.

00:25:27.000 The federal government owns millions and millions of acres of land in the U.S., primarily in the western U.S., and there's a handful of different land-holding agencies.

00:25:40.000 The Bureau of Land Management manages lands.

00:25:43.000 The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages lands through the refuge system.

00:25:46.000 So when those boys in Oregon took over the wildlife refuge there, that was...

00:25:53.000 That was actually U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service land.

00:25:57.000 It wasn't BLM land.

00:25:58.000 You got the National Forest Holds land, National Forest Service, which is under the USDA. I already said the BLM, right?

00:26:04.000 Yeah.

00:26:05.000 And then, of course, you have states own public land, but the federal land management agencies, of which there are several, hold deed to millions of acres of land.

00:26:14.000 And it's owned by the American people.

00:26:18.000 And it's represented through, you might think of it as represented through a trust, and the trust is administered by the federal government on your behalf.

00:26:26.000 That's our public lands, where people recreate.

00:26:29.000 Another large holder of public lands is the National Park Service.

00:26:32.000 I didn't mention that one.

00:26:35.000 In the lower 48, you don't hunt on national park land.

00:26:40.000 You fish on national park land, and you generally hunt national forest land, bureau land, management land, refuge land.

00:26:46.000 And there's a push right now that people feel that the federal government should be dumping a lot of federal land.

00:26:57.000 Now...

00:26:58.000 For what reason?

00:26:59.000 Well, yeah, that's what I'm good at.

00:27:01.000 So...

00:27:02.000 People get frustrated with dealing with the federal bureaucracy, and the reason that is, is generally the feds are pretty, I mean this is a gross generalization, but generally the feds are much slower on exploitation.

00:27:18.000 Of natural resources, less responsive to demand for exploitation of natural resources than state agencies are.

00:27:25.000 So federal lands, you know, they're...

00:27:29.000 In exercising the will of the American people, federal land agencies are...

00:27:38.000 It's not as easy to deal with when it comes to mining and development and other issues as state agencies are.

00:27:52.000 For developers, miners, loggers, others, they want to see people able to more readily make a buck off the land.

00:27:59.000 They'd like to see these lands, our federal lands, they'd like to see them go into private hands or like to see them go into state hands.

00:28:06.000 Because they know that either way it goes, if they go into private hands or state lands, they're going to have a much easier time doing extractive industries and development on those lands.

00:28:16.000 So that's like under the surface what's going on.

00:28:20.000 And then, for instance, one of the reasons the guys that took over the refuge, the Malomir Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, one of their gripes was they run cattle on public property, right?

00:28:32.000 So they pay a fee that one of those families is heavily involved in running cattle on federal land, and they pay a fee far below the going rate.

00:28:43.000 To run cattle on public land.

00:28:45.000 So what you'd go pay a rancher if you wanted to run cattle on his land, they'd pay about 10% of that by some estimations to run it on public land.

00:28:52.000 And then when federal land managers don't want to renew those contracts because, again, because people are thinking about other uses for the land or whatever they want to do with it, it causes an intense amount of, like a serious amount of frustration with people.

00:29:07.000 So there's people that want to dump lands.

00:29:09.000 Now, I heard Donald Trump speak last January, so almost a year ago, in Las Vegas.

00:29:19.000 And he was standing 40 yards away from me and was talking about that he has no desire to see our public lands privatized.

00:29:29.000 However...

00:29:33.000 He's, you know, one might argue kind of by name only, he's Republican.

00:29:38.000 I mean, he definitely hasn't demonstrated any sense of being beholden to party orthodoxy.

00:29:43.000 I mean, he's like he takes an issue-by-issue stance on things and doesn't really care for how things are done at the party level.

00:29:49.000 However, his party is very much, you know, it's right in their, it's one of the planks of their platform.

00:29:56.000 It's right in their agenda to see us dump federal property.

00:29:59.000 To see us offload American public lands into state or private holdings.

00:30:06.000 So I hope he has luck in resisting that, if in fact he is still standing by that statement that he made.

00:30:14.000 I don't think most people in America understand how unique the situation is, that we have these massive swaths of public land.

00:30:21.000 No, they don't.

00:30:23.000 It's one of those things where, and even the people that do, even the people that know don't really conceptualize.

00:30:29.000 Like, I grew up about two and a half miles south of the southern terminus of Manistee National Forest in Michigan.

00:30:41.000 A significant portion of our outdoor activities took place on that national forest.

00:30:47.000 We took it like it fell from, like our perception of it was that it fell from the sky.

00:30:52.000 It was that it just existed.

00:30:56.000 It just had always existed.

00:30:58.000 We took it for granted how you'd look at the sun and be like, the sun's just there.

00:31:02.000 So I think even people who are public lands users often don't take the time to be like, how is it that I'm able to be on this land?

00:31:12.000 Right.

00:31:14.000 I never considered it at all until I hung out with you.

00:31:17.000 No.

00:31:17.000 But I'm saying I hung out on public lands and it wasn't for...

00:31:21.000 It wasn't until I was, you know, it took me 25 years to start being like, now how am I now?

00:31:27.000 What is this now?

00:31:28.000 This public lands you speak of.

00:31:30.000 Yeah, that you hold deed, like, as an American citizen, in most ways, as a global citizen, because our national, our public lands are open to anyone, American or not, right?

00:31:41.000 But as an American citizen, you hold deed to hundreds of millions of acres of land.

00:31:45.000 Now, there are conditions to your use, just things you can and cannot do, but you're free to roam, camp, hunt, fish, look at the stars, whatever.

00:31:55.000 You're extraordinarily wealthy.

00:31:59.000 And these things that came about, they came about in various ways, probably the most influential person in creating the public land system we have now is Theodore Roosevelt.

00:32:10.000 We're good to go.

00:32:33.000 To Roosevelt, right?

00:32:34.000 Right.

00:32:34.000 He's like one of those dudes who you can just be like, like Teddy Roosevelt, and people are like, yeah, positive feelings, positive feelings.

00:32:40.000 He's achieved Rushmore.

00:32:43.000 This was a guy who was like a radical.

00:32:45.000 You see a little bit of that with Reagan.

00:32:47.000 Yeah.

00:32:47.000 During the Reagan administration, during the time where he was actually president, he was a massively polarizing figure.

00:32:53.000 Yeah.

00:32:53.000 People hated him.

00:32:54.000 I mean, there was so much going on during the Iran-Contra hearings, where it's like, oh my God, who is this asshole that we let run president? 0.99

00:33:02.000 Yeah, I think around the time, like, by the time he died, he had sort of ascended to political heaven. 0.98

00:33:06.000 Yeah.

00:33:07.000 Where now you can, like, Kennedy enjoys that position. 1.00

00:33:10.000 I mean, Kennedy barely won the damn election. 0.99

00:33:12.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:33:13.000 It's debated whether he actually won the election.

00:33:15.000 You know, people say that all these votes wound up in Lake Michigan. 0.99

00:33:17.000 Well, there's a lot of fucking shenanigans going on with that election with the mafia. 0.98

00:33:21.000 That was a big part of how he got elected. 0.98

00:33:23.000 So, but later in life, we like to look back and say, now there's a guy, right?

00:33:29.000 And so...

00:33:30.000 Roosevelt creating our national forest system, yeah, he was considered a radical.

00:33:36.000 Yeah.

00:33:37.000 It was like this outlandish idea, like, you mean to tell me you're just going to take huge chunks of land that could earn some individuals an extraordinary amount of money right now and just set it aside for just Joe Blow future person to enjoy?

00:33:54.000 Yeah.

00:33:56.000 And he even made a point where he went on to say at one time that he was doing it for those in the womb of time.

00:34:03.000 Whoa.

00:34:05.000 Because at the time people were arguing like, okay, if public land...

00:34:09.000 Because here's the other thing that kind of pertains to this, is wildlife in America is publicly owned.

00:34:15.000 It's not like most countries, it's not like that.

00:34:17.000 Wildlife in the U.S. is publicly owned.

00:34:18.000 So if you've got a deer standing on your neighbor's place...

00:34:24.000 You, as not a federal citizen, but you as a citizen of your state, own that deer.

00:34:30.000 That person can control access to it, but it's not his deer.

00:34:34.000 He can prevent you from going up to it because you can't go on his land, but he has no more right to that deer than you do, generally speaking.

00:34:40.000 So when people said to Roosevelt, like, how are you blocking industry?

00:34:45.000 Out of all these lands and how are you blocking industry from getting at the wildlife so we can sell the wildlife back when we had commercial hunting?

00:34:52.000 He goes, if it's for the people, give it to us.

00:34:57.000 And that's when he had his line.

00:34:58.000 He's like, yeah, but it's for those still in the womb of time. 0.98

00:35:02.000 That's deep.

00:35:03.000 Yeah.

00:35:04.000 That's deep.

00:35:05.000 People didn't like him.

00:35:06.000 I'm sure.

00:35:07.000 Someone tried to do that today.

00:35:08.000 Dude, he had a thing one time where he had a timeline.

00:35:10.000 He had to draw.

00:35:11.000 There was an end of when he could... 1.00

00:35:13.000 He kept just throwing shit into the National Forest. 0.96

00:35:15.000 I mean, for every day that guy was in the office, I think he saved about something like 50,000 square miles of land or something. 0.99

00:35:21.000 Yeah, some absurd amount of land for every day.

00:35:23.000 I could be wrong with that, but an absurd amount of land for every day he was in office.

00:35:26.000 And there's a thing he did called the Midnight Forest, where he had a deadline that expired.

00:35:31.000 Like, his ability to keep drawing up big chunks of National Forest was set to expire at a certain time on midnight.

00:35:37.000 And he was up to the last minute of midnight with a couple of aides marking up maps, making giant National Forests.

00:35:43.000 Now we celebrate them all.

00:35:44.000 Wow.

00:35:45.000 Right?

00:35:45.000 When they made Yellowstone National Park, people were pissed.

00:35:50.000 I'm sure.

00:35:51.000 Yeah.

00:35:51.000 Mineral resources in there, man.

00:35:53.000 People are still pissed today.

00:35:54.000 Timber in there.

00:35:55.000 Yeah.

00:35:55.000 But I'm saying all these big decisions, like, these decisions happen.

00:35:59.000 Did we create a public land system in America?

00:36:00.000 Like, the decision happens.

00:36:02.000 Generally, people look and go, wow, what foresight, you know?

00:36:07.000 It's kind of this insane idea that you would have a country as prosperous as ours.

00:36:13.000 With our GMP, 350 million citizens, right?

00:36:18.000 You'd have this thing as huge as us that would still have an intact suite of megafauna. 0.86

00:36:28.000 No one else pulls that off.

00:36:30.000 So...

00:36:33.000 We've accomplished a lot, but then now and then people just get pissed because they want to be able to do stuff.

00:36:38.000 There's like interests that want to make money.

00:36:40.000 And when they want to make money and then someone tells them no, they get a little bit pissy.

00:36:45.000 And then the smart ones of them, and I would never detract from their intelligence, the smart ones of them, rather than walking away, they go like, well, how is this law?

00:36:56.000 Why is the law this way?

00:36:59.000 And what can we do about it?

00:37:01.000 And right now, those folks have an idea that the solution to their problem is that we would begin undoing the great work of people like Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and Aldo Leopold and all these seminal American figures,

00:37:19.000 that we would undo their work and go back to a system where these landscapes are privatized.

00:37:29.000 People who've never been to Yellowstone, and even if you're not a hunter, you should go once in your life.

00:37:35.000 Yeah, you can't hunt Yellowstone anyway.

00:37:36.000 Right.

00:37:37.000 That's the point.

00:37:38.000 I have a problem with that.

00:37:39.000 Do you?

00:37:40.000 I'm joking.

00:37:43.000 Forget about hunting.

00:37:45.000 Just the fact that we have this immense state park that you could go to.

00:37:49.000 I took my kids there this summer, and we hung out with buffalo.

00:37:53.000 We're standing there.

00:37:54.000 There was a buffalo that was 100 yards away.

00:37:56.000 We're just looking at these giant...

00:38:00.000 Huge, prehistoric animals.

00:38:01.000 Yeah, it's a great place for introductory wildlife viewing.

00:38:05.000 We took a lot of selfies with elk.

00:38:06.000 Because the wolf population has increased in Yellowstone, the elk have decided, look, there's one spot to hang out. 0.99

00:38:12.000 It's the fucking visitor center. 0.99

00:38:13.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:38:13.000 So you can... 1.00

00:38:14.000 You go by the visitor center, there's a Coca-Cola machine, there's a vending machine, and right next to the vending machine, there's a fucking elk, just chilling, just laying down there. 0.98

00:38:24.000 I mean, they have zero fear of people. 0.97

00:38:26.000 And it's amazing how they become sort of acclimated.

00:38:31.000 Yeah, habituated.

00:38:32.000 Yeah, they know.

00:38:32.000 Yeah, habituated is the word.

00:38:34.000 It's funny, when you look at, there's a problem I've identified As much as I love Yellowstone, in my perspective as a fellow that does what I do for food and enjoyment, which is to hunt, I look at it from a grand wildlife thing,

00:38:52.000 and I look at it as it serves the purpose of being this fantastic wildlife sanctuary.

00:38:58.000 And everyone, like our mutual friend Doug Dern, even on his farm, he has established Like a sanctuary area, like on his farm, a place where you don't go.

00:39:10.000 That it's always a spot where deer go and they don't get harassed in that area.

00:39:14.000 And it's like a self-imposed sanctuary.

00:39:15.000 And so you have, Yellowstone provides that.

00:39:17.000 But I've identified this sort of thing, an idea I've been working on called Yellowstone Syndrome, though.

00:39:24.000 It's where people, Americans, some of them, their only idea about wildlife and wildlife politics and wildlife management comes from the Yellowstone story.

00:39:35.000 That they wind up having a difficult time understanding wildlife and wildlife management in situations that are outside of a national park setting.

00:39:44.000 Which is to say, they don't have a very good grasp on the inevitable conflicts that are going to arise between wildlife and society.

00:39:54.000 And that's a large chunk of ground where you just do not have those sorts of conflicts.

00:39:58.000 Like what kind of conflicts are we talking about?

00:40:00.000 Oh, like for instance...

00:40:02.000 A thing that's been very difficult and very vexing for wildlife managers is what happens to Buffalo when they leave Yellowstone National Park.

00:40:13.000 To back up on the Yellowstone issue, just to get a sense for how revolutionary that idea was, the Indian Wars weren't even over when they made Yellowstone Yellowstone.

00:40:27.000 We were still battling American Indians on the Great Plains when Yellowstone went into effect.

00:40:32.000 Matter of fact, Yellowstone was a park when the Nez Perce were chased through by the U.S. Army.

00:40:39.000 And they actually killed a couple tourists in Yellowstone right at some of the buildings that are still there.

00:40:45.000 Wow.

00:40:46.000 Yeah.

00:40:46.000 So you went to a park and got shot by Indians who were engaged in a war with the U.S. Army.

00:40:57.000 Wow.

00:40:58.000 It was like, they hadn't even, you know, the West hadn't even been, in some ways, the center West hadn't even been settled.

00:41:06.000 And they made the National Park.

00:41:09.000 And Roosevelt went there at the commemoration.

00:41:13.000 Went there to applaud it.

00:41:15.000 So, I just get a sense of, I mean, it was just an outlandish idea.

00:41:20.000 It was so far ahead of its time.

00:41:21.000 But with the buffalo situation, for instance, how it's colored the broader conversation would be Yellowstone is one of the few places where the animal buffalo or a bison,

00:41:39.000 their Linnaean name is bison-bison.

00:41:42.000 Some people say it's bison-bison-bison, as opposed to bison-bison-athabacus.

00:41:49.000 Athabascas.

00:41:50.000 But, uh, buffalo.

00:41:51.000 I call them buffalo.

00:41:53.000 It's very controversial to call them.

00:41:54.000 You're not cool if you call them buffalo.

00:41:55.000 Really?

00:41:56.000 No, you're supposed to call them bison.

00:41:58.000 Who are you hanging out with?

00:41:59.000 Old-timey folk.

00:42:01.000 They use coyote? 0.97

00:42:03.000 Yeah.

00:42:03.000 Well, yeah, well, coyote!

00:42:06.000 So...

00:42:06.000 Let's get to that in a bit.

00:42:08.000 Yeah, we'll call them buffalo for now.

00:42:09.000 I'll read in Dan Flores' book.

00:42:11.000 Oh, you are?

00:42:11.000 Yeah, I'm almost done with it.

00:42:12.000 Good.

00:42:13.000 No, you know, I'm going to call them bison. 1.00

00:42:15.000 What the hell? 0.94

00:42:15.000 So... 0.94

00:42:17.000 Yellowstone is one of the few places where bison have always existed.

00:42:19.000 Now, at a time, the ones there were fenced and fed, but they've always been there.

00:42:25.000 And the other thing you have there is you have a genetically pure strain where there's been no cattle introgression into those animals.

00:42:33.000 There's only a handful of herds in the U.S. where there hasn't been some amount of cattle introgression.

00:42:38.000 You can't see it usually, but it's there oftentimes.

00:42:42.000 There's some in New Mexico that don't.

00:42:44.000 There's some of the Dakotas that do not, and the Yellowstone ones do not.

00:42:48.000 They've never interbred or been interbred with cattle.

00:42:51.000 So they're valuable in that way.

00:42:52.000 And at various times, there's a few thousand of them in the park, and the snows pile up.

00:42:57.000 And one of the things they like to do when the snow piles up is they like to leave the park.

00:43:02.000 And they go out at West Yellowstone, which is one of the primary entrance points into the park, and they'll go out at the Gardner entrance in the late winter.

00:43:12.000 That would be fine, probably.

00:43:15.000 Maybe it'd be kind of fun if it weren't for a couple issues.

00:43:19.000 There's a livestock disease called brucellosis, and it's a Eurasian disease.

00:43:26.000 We don't normally think of diseases as being native or non-native, but it's a non-native disease called brucellosis.

00:43:32.000 And brucellosis causes cattle to, it causes heifers.

00:43:37.000 Heifer is a cow that's With just one young. 1.00

00:43:42.000 So a heifer is a cow that's going to have her first calf.

00:43:46.000 It causes heifers to abort their fetus.

00:43:50.000 Now, they've gotten brucellosis eradicated from cattle herds.

00:43:58.000 Generally.

00:43:58.000 When a state is getting brucellosis cases, they have to pay for testing.

00:44:02.000 So it's expensive to get all your cows tested, but if you have brucellosis in your state, then the producers got to pay the testing to get them tested to make sure they're not brucellosis positive.

00:44:13.000 Well, cattle long ago passed brucellosis to the bison.

00:44:17.000 When the bison leave the park, they carry brucellosis with them and could reintroduce it into cattle herds, though there's no known case of that happening yet, I don't think.

00:44:28.000 How's it spread?

00:44:30.000 Well, the primary way it's spread is animals eat their own afterbirth, and they'll eat afterbirth of other animals.

00:44:41.000 That's the interesting thing why they eat their own.

00:44:42.000 You know, some folks eat their own.

00:44:44.000 I proposed that to my wife.

00:44:45.000 She was not down with it at all, but I've got friends that take their placenta. 0.98

00:44:49.000 I got some buddies that had their wives' placentas made into pills. 1.00

00:44:53.000 Pills?

00:44:54.000 Yeah, there's some gal that dries it up and puts it in capsules for you. 1.00

00:44:57.000 I've heard of people cooking it with carrots.

00:44:59.000 Yeah, I wanted to cook some, man.

00:45:01.000 But the other thing is, when my wife... 1.00

00:45:03.000 I swore up and down that I was going to drink the breast milk.

00:45:06.000 You know, I got a buddy that puts breast milk in his coffee and everything, man.

00:45:10.000 You know?

00:45:11.000 And dude, in the end, I couldn't go near it.

00:45:13.000 Does he wear a diaper, too?

00:45:14.000 No, but if he's going to have coffee, you know when women are breastfeeding, they have little bottles in the fridge and everything? 0.97

00:45:20.000 Yeah.

00:45:20.000 Yeah, he'd just go in there, grab one of those, put it in his coffee.

00:45:22.000 Jesus.

00:45:23.000 Just drink it.

00:45:23.000 I tried it just to taste, but I felt like I was stealing from my kid.

00:45:27.000 I felt like I was being a cannibal.

00:45:30.000 Which is one thing.

00:45:32.000 That's where I draw a line.

00:45:33.000 That's where you draw the line?

00:45:34.000 Well, you ate a monkey.

00:45:35.000 Yeah, I know, and I felt horrible.

00:45:37.000 Did you?

00:45:38.000 Yeah, I felt real bad.

00:45:39.000 Well, not so bad I didn't eat it, but it was emotionally complicated for me.

00:45:45.000 We'll get back to that.

00:45:46.000 Yeah, the brucellosis deal.

00:45:48.000 I'm trying to explain Yellowstone Syndrome.

00:45:51.000 So, the brucellosis deal...

00:45:54.000 It's a real issue for some people.

00:45:57.000 So conceivably, a buffalo could leave Yellowstone, give birth, the afterbirth could be there, a cow could eat that after birth and get brucellosis.

00:46:05.000 Yeah, and like everything we're talking about, there's so many caveats and complications to this thing, such as elk have brucellosis, but elk come and go as they please.

00:46:15.000 Right.

00:46:15.000 So, the minute a buffalo, or a bison, when he leaves Yellowstone National Park, if he walks into Montana, Now, it's not even fenced, right?

00:46:25.000 It's like he doesn't know.

00:46:26.000 But when he crosses the line, he goes from being a wild animal from being native wildlife to being livestock.

00:46:36.000 So he goes from being the property under the administration of the National Park Service to the administration of Montana's Department of Livestock.

00:46:47.000 Wow.

00:46:47.000 Native animal.

00:46:49.000 How does that work, though?

00:46:50.000 If the native animal crosses over onto private property, is he owned by the- He's the only animal that that happens to.

00:46:56.000 So, coyotes, fox, wolverine, grizzly bears, black bears, bighorn sheep, elk, mule deer, white-tailed deer, moose.

00:47:06.000 They leave.

00:47:08.000 They're wildlife.

00:47:10.000 Buffalo leaves.

00:47:11.000 He becomes errant livestock.

00:47:15.000 Wow.

00:47:16.000 Therefore, every year, there's a perennial story every year where a bunch of buffalo leave the park and get rounded up by the Department of Livestock and sent to quarantine or usually sent off to slaughter.

00:47:28.000 Yeah, they just killed a bunch of them.

00:47:30.000 They killed like 2,000 of them.

00:47:31.000 Yeah, man.

00:47:31.000 They get a lot of them.

00:47:33.000 But, you know, that place cranks out a lot of animals, too.

00:47:35.000 So it's like they're always throwing out these humongous numbers of animals they've gotten, and then every year you wind up having quite a few animals in the park.

00:47:41.000 So...

00:47:42.000 But it's a thing.

00:47:44.000 Now, people point out this, because elk have brucellosis, and elk are calving in proximity to cattle.

00:47:52.000 And as far as we know, there's not like ironclad cases of cattle, of elk transmitting brucellosis to cattle.

00:48:00.000 People wonder, like, well, why are bison picked on?

00:48:03.000 You know, why them?

00:48:05.000 And one thing might be to say that we got, and this is generally true of wildlife in America, I think There was a brief period around 1900 when we had, you know, maybe about 75 of them left in the U.S. People got very used to there sort of like not being buffalo,

00:48:23.000 bison.

00:48:26.000 And now it's becoming like a player again.

00:48:29.000 The animals are becoming a player again.

00:48:30.000 We were down to 75. We've got 500,000 in the U.S. now.

00:48:35.000 94% of them are privately owned, but we have a population of a half million buffalo in this country.

00:48:43.000 So, but we got really used to them not being around, and so it was this thing that was like this additive thing.

00:48:48.000 Like, I think if there had been a long period when there were no elk, and then all of a sudden someone said, hey, guess what?

00:48:53.000 We're bringing these big-ass ungulates back that eat tons of stuff. 1.00

00:48:58.000 And they're huge, and they might have a disease, and we're just going to let tens of thousands of them cut loose across the landscape. 0.53

00:49:06.000 People have been up in arms, but they were used to elk, because elk were always on the ground.

00:49:09.000 So that's why buffalo recovery has been so hard, because it's kind of like you're trying to sell people on this new thing.

00:49:14.000 Even though historically it's hardly new, they've been around, but there was a period of...

00:49:20.000 You know, a century, not quite a century, when it wasn't an issue.

00:49:23.000 So it's really hard to get livestock interests and private landowners around these areas to unanimously get on board with the idea that we're going to have animals roaming out of the park that has been proven to happen that will get into your corral and kill your horse.

00:49:42.000 Or, you know, take out a school bus if it hits them.

00:49:46.000 Or...

00:49:48.000 Possibly transmit disease.

00:49:49.000 And the big thing that people don't really talk about, which is a huge issue, is impact grazing rights.

00:49:55.000 Impact cattle grazing. 0.93

00:49:57.000 Get back to kill the horse. 0.99

00:49:58.000 Yeah, the gore. 1.00

00:50:00.000 That gore stuff. 0.99

00:50:01.000 They just go into the horse's stable and fuck them up? 1.00

00:50:04.000 It's happened. 1.00

00:50:05.000 Wow.

00:50:05.000 They rut in June.

00:50:06.000 When they just get crazy.

00:50:07.000 Yeah, they rut in the summer and the bulls get very, they get real fired up.

00:50:12.000 And then, you know, the funny thing there too with the Yellowstone ones is you're dealing with animals that are habituated.

00:50:17.000 So it's only been like, you know, it's been a hundred years that you can't, you haven't been able to hunt in the park, but animals have gotten habituated to humans.

00:50:23.000 We like to look at Yellowstone and think you're seeing something kind of natural, but you're actually seeing something pretty unnatural because that landscape was hunted for 12,000 years.

00:50:31.000 The last hundred years notwithstanding.

00:50:34.000 People had always hunted Yellowstone.

00:50:35.000 The unnatural thing is these animals being super comfortable.

00:50:38.000 Being habituated to humans is unusual.

00:50:40.000 But we go there and be like, this is what animals were like.

00:50:42.000 I'm like, not if you draw a line back to when humans arrived in the new world.

00:50:46.000 Well, that was one of the more fascinating things about Dan Flores on your podcast, where he was talking about buffalo and that at one point in time...

00:50:55.000 The Indians, or the Native Americans, when they had guns and they had horses, they were on their way to extirpating the buffalo on their own before the market hunters came into place. 0.85

00:51:06.000 That's an incredibly controversial idea.

00:51:08.000 Yeah, that was a controversial idea, and that was put, again, in my book that I wrote, and I have a book, American Buffalo, about the history of the animal.

00:51:19.000 And my own personal experience is hunting for the animal and finding a skull of one that I found and sort of a journey that led me down.

00:51:25.000 But in working on that book, I spent quite a time reading the work of Dan Flores, and he was a mentor of mine in graduate school.

00:51:32.000 And he wrote this very interesting piece called Bison Ecology, Bison Diplomacy.

00:51:38.000 And what he looked at was, he was trying to find, was there a period when...

00:51:43.000 When Plains tribes...

00:51:45.000 Was there a period when Native Americans had actually reached equilibrium with the bison herds? 0.95

00:51:54.000 And he argues that they had not achieved equilibrium.

00:51:59.000 That even if...

00:52:03.000 One of the points, he makes many points in this thing.

00:52:06.000 I don't want to sell his piece short.

00:52:07.000 It's a very large piece of scholarly work.

00:52:11.000 But one of the things he talks about is just the introduction of the horse.

00:52:17.000 Had humongous impacts on the animals, on buffalo, for a handful of reasons.

00:52:21.000 Grazing competition.

00:52:23.000 Okay, so enormous herds of wild horses.

00:52:26.000 And the horse was distributed, so you trace, and Flores explains all this as well, you can trace horses to Native American tribes on the Great Plains and elsewhere.

00:52:34.000 They go back to the Pueblo Revolt.

00:52:37.000 So, you know, the Spanish conquistadors lost a lot of their animals, and the animals are traded up.

00:53:00.000 It didn't last as long as the U.S. has been a country.

00:53:09.000 Like, it did not last long.

00:53:11.000 Between the introduction of the horse and the Indian Wars, they wound up largely removing free-roaming Yeah.

00:53:43.000 We're good to go.

00:54:10.000 To support that amount.

00:54:11.000 You had tribes migrating out onto the Great Plains and fighting over those resources.

00:54:19.000 And I believe it was one of his graduate students that later looked at this piece, where when Lewis and Clark did their big westward journey in the early 1800s, the places where they talked about seeing the greatest amounts, where they were just blown away by how many buffalo they were seeing, generally fell upon sort of a no-man's-lands areas between warring tribes.

00:54:42.000 So the buffers of traditional hunting zones, like where the Blackfeet and the Sioux met up The edge habitat there was where you had a lot of animals that weren't getting exploited by people.

00:54:54.000 So you started to see these regional extirpations of the animal.

00:54:58.000 And then firearms was another big blow.

00:55:02.000 Where even outside of white hide hunters just showing up, but just those European technologies of horse...

00:55:09.000 Gone.

00:55:10.000 You were seeing a steady depletion that would have not, and it seems like the resource would not have lasted.

00:55:16.000 You'd have had the same outcome.

00:55:18.000 What was interesting about his paper was that he was saying that the early settlers, or the early explorers of the United States in the 1500s and 1600s, they didn't talk about Buffalo.

00:55:27.000 No.

00:55:28.000 So when the Spanish, the Spanish would go through places.

00:55:33.000 And they would name wildlife.

00:55:35.000 Now, some of the Spanish came through, they go through into Florida, some of the first guys to step foot in Florida.

00:55:42.000 They talk about everything they see, right down to possums.

00:55:45.000 They're not describing buffalo.

00:55:50.000 They're describing everything else.

00:55:52.000 The English go in there 200 years later and they're talking about buffalo.

00:55:55.000 So there's sightings in what's now New Orleans.

00:55:58.000 Cabeza de Vaca ran into Buffalo around what's now Houston.

00:56:03.000 There's sightings of Buffalo in what is now Washington, D.C. Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone, figures like that, were hunting them around the site of Nashville and Memphis.

00:56:14.000 They were all the way to the East Coast.

00:56:16.000 It seems there were only a handful of states that at some point in time didn't have any.

00:56:20.000 My home state of Michigan doesn't seem like there were any.

00:56:23.000 For a long time, people thought that there had been buffalo in New York.

00:56:28.000 But it turns out the evidence for them in the paleontological and archaeological record is two skulls.

00:56:35.000 Both the skulls have cultural markings on them.

00:56:38.000 And it seems that they were the same way that me and Joe here will hunt an animal and bring the head home, that they might have been just things someone had, trophies that were traded or whatever, because there's no other faunal remains from the animals in New York.

00:56:51.000 But most places had them.

00:56:53.000 Now, the mound builders, so you have all these, like, Mississippian cultures along the Mississippi River and Ohio River Valley.

00:56:58.000 It's called the mound builders.

00:56:59.000 They made these giant effigy mounds that people didn't even realize they were there until we had airplanes to get above and see the snakes and, like, serpents and deer and all these creatures they were building out of earth mounds that were so big that guys would, like, live around the mound and never recognize it for what it was until they could look at it from above.

00:57:18.000 You can see these things with satellite imagery.

00:57:20.000 They never built buffalo mounds.

00:57:23.000 But, once we emptied...

00:57:26.000 And this is one argument.

00:57:28.000 It's kind of a two-pack argument.

00:57:32.000 Once, smallpox and other diseases carried off 90% of Native Americans.

00:57:36.000 90?

00:57:36.000 That's an estimate.

00:57:37.000 Jesus.

00:57:38.000 Many people say that.

00:57:40.000 I think the scholarly consensus is that it's in that ballpark.

00:57:45.000 What are the numbers?

00:57:47.000 Do they estimate the actual physical numbers?

00:57:49.000 You know, I've seen it, but I don't know what it is.

00:57:50.000 I think that there was a number that was floating around for a while, 10 million.

00:57:54.000 But I remember a lot of people criticized that number.

00:57:58.000 As being high.

00:57:58.000 I don't know what the fashionable number is now.

00:58:00.000 But 90% approximately wiped out by diseases from the Europeans. 0.67

00:58:04.000 Yeah.

00:58:04.000 And that this was primarily responsible for this explosion in the population of the buffalo.

00:58:10.000 So that's why when the Spanish would go into places, this is a theory now.

00:58:15.000 The Spanish would go into places, first contact, like first people's traipse through an area.

00:58:20.000 They would go into places and they would describe village after village after village after village.

00:58:27.000 And they never talk about Buffalo. 0.98

00:58:29.000 The English, a while later, they'll go down, some guy will go down the Mississippi River, he don't see shit for people, but there's Buffalo crawling everywhere. 0.99

00:58:38.000 Wow. 0.95

00:58:39.000 So, and another issue, another thing people talk about is changing agricultural practices that slash-and-burn agriculture was becoming used.

00:58:47.000 And slash-and-burn agriculture was conducive to spreading, it was conducive to buffalo because it created open spaces for them.

00:58:56.000 That's another thing people look at as slash-and-burn agriculture.

00:58:58.000 But either way, it's proposed that the apex of that species...

00:59:07.000 It was at the moment we found it.

00:59:10.000 The fashionable number used to be 60 million and that was put forth by a guy named Dodge City.

00:59:18.000 Dodge City, Kansas.

00:59:19.000 It got its name from a guy named Colonel Dodge.

00:59:22.000 Colonel Dodge, if you're interested, I could explain how he came up with it, but Colonel Dodge is the one that floated the idea that there were 60 million buffalo.

00:59:30.000 Now, the fashionable number is, you know, 32, you hear 32 million, you hear 40 million, and people say that that was an extraordinary amount of those animals, and we witnessed it at its apex.

00:59:45.000 And that other times in the history of the continent and other times of the natural history of our continent, there weren't nearly that many of the animals.

00:59:53.000 That's such a fascinating concept, and I never had heard it before.

00:59:57.000 I'd only heard that there was giant numbers of them and that the Europeans came over and Americans wiped them out because we wanted the skulls and the fur.

01:00:05.000 We wiped out the tail end of them.

01:00:07.000 So if you get to the end of the Civil War, At that point, there's maybe $15 million, and that's when it was in 1871 and 1872 that what you might call the commercial-scale harvest of the animals happened.

01:00:30.000 And it happened in the south, what was called the southern herd, around 1871, 1872, in the areas surrounding Dodge City, where there was a large population of them.

01:00:40.000 And then it took 10 years.

01:00:42.000 By 1882, you couldn't find one.

01:00:45.000 So the last big slaughter happened around Miles City, Montana.

01:00:50.000 And it happened when the railroad made it to Miles City.

01:00:54.000 The Northern Pacific made it to Miles City and provided a way to get hides to market.

01:00:59.000 And they did the last big kill there and killed about a million of them up there.

01:01:03.000 And then a year later, Roosevelt came out.

01:01:07.000 To Medora, North Dakota, thereabouts, hired a guide and scoured the countryside, hunting through the carcasses of rotting animals, trying to find one last one.

01:01:20.000 Wow.

01:01:21.000 So they could save him.

01:01:22.000 No, he wanted to get one.

01:01:25.000 It was his epiphany. 0.96

01:01:27.000 To think about that guy, he kills one and does a war dance around it.

01:01:31.000 What kind of dance is that? 0.99

01:01:33.000 I don't know.

01:01:34.000 I've always heard it described as a war dance.

01:01:35.000 Hooting and hollering, dancing around like a hunting show.

01:01:38.000 Wow.

01:01:38.000 Right?

01:01:40.000 So, but then, whatever kind of effect it had on him, he then went and became the most influential conservationist we've ever had in this country.

01:01:50.000 So it struck him somehow.

01:01:52.000 But as a young man, yeah.

01:01:53.000 He was like, man, I missed it.

01:01:56.000 There's gotta be one left.

01:01:57.000 So he found one. 0.96

01:01:58.000 He got one, killed it. 0.99

01:02:00.000 Wow.

01:02:01.000 The Montana-North Dakota border there.

01:02:03.000 And then went on to do all these kind of amazing things.

01:02:07.000 But that was the big slaughter.

01:02:10.000 What's cool about that, the time that worked out, is photography was just coming out.

01:02:14.000 People were starting to have portable cameras.

01:02:15.000 And there was a photographer named L.A. Huffman who'd been sent out to Miles City, and he actually took a lot of images.

01:02:22.000 Of those hide hunters working the last big hurt, the last big shoot.

01:02:28.000 And then shortly after that, there was some number of animals left, and they allowed a bunch of Plains Indians to leave one of the reservations, and they went and did a little bit of a mop-up. 0.81

01:02:38.000 But yeah, then shortly thereafter, there was a guy named Hornaday who was kind of writing letters around, trying to find out who had one of these things laying around, because it had all fallen into private hands. 0.99

01:02:48.000 You know, those guys like buffalo hunters would kill them and they'd be like, holy shit. 0.96

01:02:54.000 There's like none left. 0.99

01:02:55.000 And some of these guys actually went out and caught a couple.

01:02:57.000 There was a guy named Buffalo Jones down in Texas that went out and lassoed a couple calves, raised them on cow's milk.

01:03:04.000 And that's why we even have some now.

01:03:06.000 Now, it turns out no one knew this.

01:03:09.000 But it turns out there were several hundred in Canada that no one knew about.

01:03:12.000 Really?

01:03:12.000 They didn't know about until much, much later.

01:03:14.000 And how'd they get to Mexico?

01:03:16.000 Oh, they probably always roamed into Mexico.

01:03:19.000 Now, the first buffalo that a European ever laid eyes on was in what's now Mexico City.

01:03:27.000 But it was in...

01:03:28.000 Who was the emperor there?

01:03:35.000 Jamie, what was that dude's name?

01:03:37.000 The Aztec leader in Mexico.

01:03:41.000 Tenochtitlan?

01:03:43.000 Hmm.

01:03:45.000 Um...

01:03:46.000 What years?

01:03:48.000 What year are you talking about?

01:03:49.000 Oh, in the 1500s.

01:03:51.000 Cortez found one in Mexico City, but it was in a zoo.

01:03:55.000 Montezuma.

01:03:55.000 Try saying that.

01:03:57.000 The city of Tenochtitlan.

01:03:58.000 Oh, okay.

01:03:59.000 Tenochtitlan, which is now Mexico City.

01:04:05.000 He had one in a zoo.

01:04:07.000 That was the first one described by a European.

01:04:10.000 But he was hundreds of miles away from their native range.

01:04:13.000 He had a menagerie.

01:04:15.000 He had all kinds of animals that he'd collected throughout their domains.

01:04:20.000 So that was the first one described by a European.

01:04:22.000 But he didn't realize at the time that it was from far north of there.

01:04:25.000 But they did stray down into Sonora.

01:04:29.000 And they strayed well up all the way up.

01:04:31.000 Still today, we have them all up by Great Slave Lake. 1.00

01:04:34.000 They extend well up into Canada.

01:04:36.000 So there's a number of them.

01:04:37.000 Some people call them wood buffalo.

01:04:39.000 Some people accept the idea that there's subspecies.

01:04:43.000 Remember I was talking about bison, bison, Athabasca, bison, bison, bison, plains bison, wood bison?

01:04:50.000 There's morphological differences.

01:04:51.000 They look different.

01:04:52.000 In the boreal forest, there were hundreds that we didn't know about.

01:04:56.000 And some of those populations are still in now in Canada.

01:05:00.000 So we have, you know, like in all things with Americans, we have an American-centric view of everything.

01:05:06.000 We have an American-centric view of wildlife where we'll say there's only 75 left.

01:05:09.000 And I feel like our Canadian neighbors are oftentimes being like, you know what?

01:05:13.000 We didn't quite handle it quite as badly as you folks did.

01:05:18.000 So, yeah, it was...

01:05:21.000 You know, it's a long, bizarre picture.

01:05:23.000 I can't remember what the hell even got us on the subject.

01:05:27.000 Dan Flores.

01:05:30.000 I don't remember either.

01:05:31.000 Yeah.

01:05:32.000 Public lands.

01:05:33.000 Yeah.

01:05:33.000 Oh, Yellowstone syndrome.

01:05:34.000 Yellowstone.

01:05:35.000 Bruce Losis.

01:05:36.000 Yeah.

01:05:37.000 So, there's a tremendous background to the Buffalo story, as we just explored.

01:05:41.000 And...

01:05:44.000 If you follow wildlife politics, it's a conversation happening in places.

01:05:50.000 Alaska, which is a whole other long story about how it's happening there.

01:05:53.000 It's happening in Alaska.

01:05:54.000 It's happening in Montana.

01:05:55.000 It's happening in Wyoming.

01:05:56.000 It's happening in the Dakotas.

01:05:59.000 Which would be, are we going to welcome this animal again?

01:06:06.000 Back onto the landscape.

01:06:08.000 As a free-roaming, wild animal.

01:06:12.000 Like all of our other...

01:06:13.000 Earlier I mentioned how this country, we have an intact suite of megafauna.

01:06:17.000 Like, we haven't lost...

01:06:19.000 We might have damn few of some things.

01:06:22.000 We haven't lost any of our large mammals.

01:06:25.000 It's kind of mind-boggling.

01:06:26.000 During the colonial period, Western Europe, I think, lost five or six species of large mammals.

01:06:35.000 The oryx, many things.

01:06:36.000 We haven't lost any large mammals.

01:06:39.000 We came pretty close though, right? 0.96

01:06:40.000 Damn close! 0.94

01:06:41.000 With the buffalo in particular. 0.98

01:06:42.000 Yeah, and we've lost birds.

01:06:44.000 We lost the passenger pigeon, and we lost the ivory-billed woodpecker.

01:06:47.000 We've lost many kinds of things.

01:06:50.000 Not many, but we've lost substantial numbers of things.

01:06:52.000 We haven't lost any large mammals.

01:06:53.000 Extinction is terrifying for us.

01:06:55.000 That's one expression.

01:06:59.000 Man-made extinction.

01:07:02.000 That's terrifying for us.

01:07:06.000 It's a moral sin.

01:07:09.000 It just is like, you know, we have all these conversations in bioethics and other things about playing God.

01:07:14.000 I think that extinction, like, human-caused extinction is terrifying.

01:07:18.000 Do you support if there is evidence of human-caused extinction, if there is the opportunity to bring something back through scientific methods, through, like, some sort of cloning?

01:07:27.000 Do you support that, or do you think it's gone?

01:07:29.000 It's gone, it's gone.

01:07:30.000 Man, I'm on the fence about it, and my understanding of the technology is probably too limited for me to really speak to it with any authority, but the most interesting aspect of that is when you get into the Pleistocene extinctions, where,

01:07:46.000 you'll notice, just to kind of bring people up to speed on what that means, if you just look globally at Where and when we lost pachyderms, so elephants, including the woolly mammoth mastodon on our own continent.

01:08:06.000 If you look around where we lost pachyderms, we always lose pachyderms right around the time humans show up.

01:08:18.000 We lost them.

01:08:20.000 Humans arrived in the New World. 0.87

01:08:23.000 It's a hotly debated number, 14,000-15,000 years ago, and kind of contemporaneous with the extinction of woolly mammoths.

01:08:30.000 We know that to some degree, humans were preying on woolly mammoths and preying on mastodons.

01:08:36.000 There's context of hunting equipment in context with woolly mammoth remains.

01:08:42.000 There's butchering sites.

01:08:43.000 There's all kinds of stuff, and they vanished right around then.

01:08:47.000 Yet, we didn't reach an island out in the Bering Sea until 4,000 years ago, and there was a woolly mammoth on that island until 4,000 years ago.

01:08:55.000 And then dudes show up, it's gone.

01:08:58.000 So some people look, there's a thing called the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis, which holds that all these large mammals, nine genera of large mammals that went extinct when humans arrived in the New World, that they were somehow human-caused extinctions.

01:09:11.000 Now, other people argue that it was...

01:09:13.000 You know, other things.

01:09:14.000 Climate change issues.

01:09:15.000 Randall Carlson is a guy who I've had on my podcast before, and he argues that it's due to asteroidal impacts.

01:09:22.000 Yeah.

01:09:22.000 I hung out with a guy who was doing research on that.

01:09:25.000 There was a lot of evidence.

01:09:26.000 A lot of evidence of massive impacts.

01:09:26.000 This guy was looking for nano-diamonds.

01:09:28.000 Yeah, they found nano-diamonds.

01:09:29.000 The nano-diamonds.

01:09:30.000 I think you say it's called tritonite, but it's nuclear glass.

01:09:34.000 It's the same exact glass that they get on sand when they have nuclear explosions when they do test sites.

01:09:39.000 They find that all throughout Europe, and it's all around 12,000 years.

01:09:42.000 And there's also more somewhere around 10,000.

01:09:45.000 So it seems like somewhere between 12,000 and then another 1,000 years or so later.

01:09:50.000 There's another series of impacts, and it has to do with this asteroid belt that we pass through. 0.74

01:09:57.000 And it was a fucking fascinating but terrifying conversation. 0.83

01:10:00.000 Oh, it is. 0.98

01:10:00.000 I went with a guy, there's a famous Paleo-Indian site north of Denver called the Lindenmeyer site. 0.98

01:10:09.000 And the Lindenmeyer site was one of the few, not one of the few, the only place that we now know were large gatherings of the Folsom culture.

01:10:21.000 We're good to go.

01:10:31.000 And it's presumed that it was just a place that you could describe and people could meet up.

01:10:36.000 But the Lindenmeyer site has been studied extensively, and tons of radiocarbon dating has happened at the Lindenmeyer site.

01:10:42.000 And I was with a guy there who was working on that theory, the theory with the asteroid impact and the nanodiamonds, because he was able to go draw samples from strata that had been tested and studied so much Which is an expensive,

01:11:01.000 laborious process to get datelines, you know, and he was there drawing those things out.

01:11:04.000 And then I had other people who work professionally in this space talking about how, sort of ridiculing the idea and saying it's just like one of these ideas that never dies and never quite lives but never quite dies.

01:11:21.000 But, you know, when you look at it, it's just so hard to believe they hunted them to extinction so quickly.

01:11:25.000 Well, the massive amounts.

01:11:27.000 65% of all the North American mammals died really quickly.

01:11:31.000 And it wasn't just big stuff.

01:11:32.000 Yeah.

01:11:32.000 That's the other thing.

01:11:34.000 When they used to do digs, right?

01:11:37.000 They used to do, like, archaeological digs. 0.99

01:11:39.000 You know, they would use high-pressure hoses and shit. 0.97

01:11:42.000 And they were only looking at the big stuff. 0.99

01:11:45.000 But many, many things went extinct.

01:11:46.000 Did you see that?

01:11:47.000 Bird species, small species, you know.

01:11:49.000 Yeah.

01:11:50.000 It's kind of hard to picture.

01:11:53.000 It's just so hard to picture what exactly happened.

01:11:56.000 It's just...

01:11:57.000 I don't know.

01:11:58.000 I don't understand.

01:11:59.000 Especially people killing them with atlatls.

01:12:01.000 Yeah. 0.68

01:12:01.000 Those goofy things, which, I mean, how far can you throw an atlatl? 0.68

01:12:04.000 People kill stuff out to...

01:12:06.000 40 yards?

01:12:06.000 I think that's a real reach.

01:12:08.000 Crazy.

01:12:08.000 That's a reach.

01:12:09.000 You have to be like the Hulk.

01:12:10.000 Yeah.

01:12:10.000 But then the thing they say is, you know, we talk about wildlife in Yellowstone being habituated.

01:12:16.000 That wildlife probably would have been the other extreme.

01:12:18.000 They probably would have been like the elk in Yellowstone when wolves showed up.

01:12:22.000 Was it like, oh, what's that cute dog?

01:12:24.000 Right.

01:12:25.000 So...

01:12:26.000 And then they have very low fecundity, you know, pachyderms.

01:12:30.000 But we're not just talking about, that's the problem.

01:12:32.000 We're not just talking about pachyderms.

01:12:34.000 We're talking about like short-faced bears, the American cheetah, giant ground sloths, on and on and on and on and on.

01:12:41.000 Did these guys really hunt it all to extinction? 0.98

01:12:43.000 It's hard to imagine, but it's also hard to imagine all that shit going to extinct for any cause. 0.97

01:12:47.000 Well, it also coincides with the end of the Ice Age, so something happened, something radical that created the Great Lakes. 0.96

01:12:52.000 Yeah, but the end of the Ice Age is just an idea that we've created.

01:12:55.000 Right.

01:12:56.000 Like, you know, there were interglacial periods, like if you look at the Ice Ages or the Pleistocene, right, there were interglacial periods where the water was much higher than it is now.

01:13:09.000 There were interglacial periods when the water would have been up over the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

01:13:15.000 Really? 0.99

01:13:15.000 And then shit froze again. 0.99

01:13:17.000 But the idea that the Pleistocene-Holocene transition is just like a... 0.99

01:13:23.000 It's just a point we divided in our heads.

01:13:28.000 There was many glaciations.

01:13:31.000 Time will only tell if we ever see another glaciation again.

01:13:34.000 But I don't know...

01:13:35.000 And that's one of the things that emboldens people who contradict...

01:13:42.000 One of the things that emboldens people who contradict human-caused climate change is that we've been through so many cycles, they'll often point out and say, well, how do we know this isn't just another warming trend between Ice Age periods?

01:13:56.000 And then a lot of people point out and go, because there's no evidence that they ever happened this quickly.

01:14:00.000 This is like radically fast.

01:14:02.000 These are things that played out over 10,000 years.

01:14:04.000 These aren't things that played out over human lifetimes.

01:14:07.000 You know, an interglacial period being a 10,000 year thing.

01:14:11.000 Interestingly, interglacial periods Are really important to understanding all these issues because interglacial periods and glacial periods mark moments when wildlife could have come into the New World, when wildlife such as,

01:14:27.000 you know, buffalo and then later elk and other things, when they would have had the opportunity to come from Asia and cross the Bering Land Bridge and come down onto our continent, and when they could have not done that.

01:14:41.000 So when you look at, like, when did humans show up?

01:14:43.000 When did these other things show up?

01:14:44.000 Like, when did horses disappear?

01:14:45.000 When could they have come down?

01:14:47.000 When could buffalo have come down?

01:14:48.000 How did elk get here?

01:14:49.000 You're sort of always looking at, assuming they didn't come down when the entire north was swathed in 40 feet of snow and ice.

01:14:57.000 Presumably they came down when it was an ice-free corridor.

01:14:59.000 And so you can kind of fine-tune all these comings and goings by looking at moments when there was an ice-free corridor to come down in.

01:15:07.000 So it's beautifully intertwined, man.

01:15:09.000 It's so complex and there's no way to really lock it down yet.

01:15:13.000 There's no way to really totally figure it out yet.

01:15:15.000 But it's so fascinating when they find these animals still.

01:15:18.000 They just pulled a big giant skull with tusks out of a ranch in Montana really recently.

01:15:25.000 I think I tweeted it.

01:15:26.000 I think it was...

01:15:28.000 See if you can find it on...

01:15:29.000 My buddy found a jaw.com.

01:15:32.000 With the molars in it, but I went to a museum.

01:15:34.000 Wow.

01:15:34.000 Where?

01:15:35.000 He just found it a couple years ago.

01:15:36.000 He found it in the tongue.

01:15:38.000 My friend John, his buddy owns a ranch in Montana, and he was talking to some sort...

01:15:44.000 This might be the same guy.

01:15:46.000 Do you know where it was?

01:15:46.000 No, I don't know.

01:15:47.000 I'm talking about a dinosaur.

01:15:49.000 Oh, but if it had tusks.

01:15:49.000 Oh, never mind.

01:15:50.000 Okay.

01:15:50.000 They found a dinosaur on his property.

01:15:52.000 He said the archaeologist came...

01:15:55.000 What was it?

01:15:55.000 Paleontologist?

01:15:56.000 Paleontologist.

01:15:57.000 Paleontologist came to his property.

01:15:58.000 He said he went for a walk up the hill.

01:16:00.000 He stopped.

01:16:01.000 He found something on the ground.

01:16:03.000 He looked around.

01:16:05.000 He made some calculations and he came back to him.

01:16:08.000 He goes, congratulations, you got a dinosaur on your property.

01:16:10.000 He goes, what? 1.00

01:16:11.000 They came back, they have a fucking T-Rex on his property. 1.00

01:16:14.000 No way. 1.00

01:16:14.000 The guy got a million and a half dollars because they pulled a fucking T-Rex from his property. 1.00

01:16:19.000 That's what he got for it? 0.99

01:16:19.000 The paleontologist found it and literally found it in five minutes. 0.99

01:16:23.000 He said he started walking around the property.

01:16:25.000 He found a tooth or some sort of chip, a piece of bone.

01:16:28.000 He recognized it immediately as being a dinosaur, made some phone calls, called some people, and next thing you know, like within weeks, they had started excavations. 0.99

01:16:36.000 No shit. 0.99

01:16:37.000 Found a fucking T-Rex on his property. 1.00

01:16:38.000 And because it was on private land, you could sell it. 1.00

01:16:41.000 A million and a half dollars.

01:16:42.000 Yeah.

01:16:42.000 Because on public land, once something's fossilized, you can't touch it.

01:16:46.000 Yeah, that's interesting.

01:16:48.000 But do I agree, because I don't want to escape your question, about...

01:16:54.000 Undoing human-caused extinctions.

01:16:57.000 What I was getting at is, the animals that I'm most interested in, just from a boy, in a very boyish way, are those Pleistocene critters.

01:17:10.000 And if I knew, you know, if I had the diamond bullet, right, that would tell me that, yes, absolutely, we lost the mammoth.

01:17:21.000 Because of human hunting behaviors. 0.99

01:17:23.000 At the place of seeing Holocene transition, I would be like, let's bring them sons of bitches back right now. 1.00

01:17:28.000 Wow. 0.99

01:17:29.000 If you could prove without a shadow of a doubt that human hunters created that problem.

01:17:34.000 Yeah.

01:17:35.000 And I knew the technology.

01:17:35.000 Let's say the technology was just fail-safe.

01:17:38.000 You want to talk about some controversy.

01:17:39.000 You think people are up in arms about some buffalo running around.

01:17:43.000 You cut loose some short-faced bears, you know?

01:17:45.000 That would be a giant issue.

01:17:47.000 Yeah, you'd think the wolf reintroduction was shaky. 1.00

01:17:50.000 Well, the short-faced bear is a scary goddamn animal. 1.00

01:17:53.000 It's a huge bear. 1.00

01:17:54.000 Very fast.

01:17:56.000 Really?

01:17:56.000 Yeah.

01:17:57.000 Yeah, they were a fast runner.

01:18:00.000 And they're bigger than polar bears.

01:18:01.000 Yeah, and you know there's the American cheetah. 0.92

01:18:04.000 Yeah.

01:18:05.000 Well, that's the reason why antelope are so fast, right?

01:18:08.000 That's a theory.

01:18:09.000 The antelope are ridiculously fast for any predator.

01:18:13.000 Their speed doesn't make sense through the context of what's chasing them right now.

01:18:19.000 Why do people call them speed goats? 1.00

01:18:20.000 They haul ass. 0.99

01:18:21.000 But why goat? 1.00

01:18:22.000 Because they're... 0.99

01:18:24.000 I think there's a dumbass reason, and there's a taxonomical reason. 0.91

01:18:31.000 And I know dear friends of mine on both sides of that spectrum, where if I put it to my brother, who on occasion calls them goats, he'll talk about how taxonomically they're distinct, like they're the only thing in their... 0.88

01:18:44.000 They're the only thing in their family, right?

01:18:47.000 They don't have any close relatives.

01:18:49.000 But they're a horned animal that sheds its horn.

01:18:54.000 Now, antlers shed.

01:18:56.000 Elk, moose, deer, all the cervids.

01:18:57.000 Antlers shed.

01:18:58.000 Horns don't shed. 0.62

01:18:59.000 Animals carry their horns for their whole life, like a crat in a sheath.

01:19:03.000 But antelope shed their horn.

01:19:05.000 But it turns out that some people like to point out that they're close to a goat.

01:19:11.000 The goat is close.

01:19:13.000 Other people say it just because they kind of look like goats.

01:19:16.000 I don't know.

01:19:17.000 I think it's a derogatory term.

01:19:18.000 I don't like it.

01:19:19.000 Really?

01:19:19.000 I don't like derogatory animal terms.

01:19:21.000 But why is goat a derogatory term?

01:19:23.000 Well, goat is what people call the greatest of all time.

01:19:26.000 It's the goat.

01:19:26.000 Now, a mountain goat is a noble, majestic animal.

01:19:29.000 Right.

01:19:30.000 A barnyard goat I don't think is noble and majestic.

01:19:32.000 Oh, okay.

01:19:32.000 And I don't think they're equating it to a mountain goat.

01:19:35.000 Right, the mountain goat being those beautiful, white, fluffy goats.

01:19:38.000 Well, being a wild animal.

01:19:39.000 Those are awesome.

01:19:39.000 Yeah, it's a wild animal.

01:19:40.000 And to be like a speed goat, you're saying like, oh, it's like a goat. 1.00

01:19:44.000 A lowly barnyard goat that hauls ass. 0.99

01:19:47.000 I feel that it's derogatory. 0.99

01:19:49.000 This is a minor issue I'll point out, but it does bother me.

01:19:53.000 I don't think it's derogatory to call it a goat, but I do think that an antelope for whatever reason...

01:19:58.000 I haven't met anyone who does think it's derogatory except me.

01:20:00.000 It's just you?

01:20:01.000 It's so funny because mountain goat, you agree, is a noble animal.

01:20:05.000 Mountain goats are gorgeous.

01:20:06.000 I don't want to interrupt you.

01:20:07.000 I was in Hawaii and goats are everywhere.

01:20:09.000 It's bizarre. 1.00

01:20:09.000 Driving down the road, there's fucking goats everywhere. 1.00

01:20:11.000 Wild goats. 1.00

01:20:12.000 And they're like a wild animal.

01:20:14.000 Yeah.

01:20:15.000 Man, you want to talk about wildlife politics.

01:20:18.000 Hawaii.

01:20:18.000 Hmm.

01:20:19.000 If you ever want to get into that.

01:20:21.000 Yeah, it's crazy. 1.00

01:20:22.000 That's interesting shit. 0.99

01:20:22.000 Where you have your whole suite of mammals is all non-native. 0.99

01:20:27.000 Yeah, all of them.

01:20:28.000 But here's where it's interesting.

01:20:31.000 So, Polynesians colonized the Hawaiian Islands.

01:20:34.000 The first people, the first humans to colonize the Hawaiian Islands. 0.88

01:20:37.000 Polynesians who carried with them rats, dogs, pigs, right? 1.00

01:20:44.000 We have native Hawaiians. 0.98

01:20:48.000 Right?

01:20:48.000 Like Hawaiians, indigenous Hawaiians people carry native rights, they regard themselves as native Hawaiians, yet people are always telling them that the wildlife is non-native.

01:20:59.000 So you've got people that showed up with pigs, and now the Nature Conservancy will get chunks of land in Hawaii and eradicate the non-natives. 1.00

01:21:10.000 And the native Hawaiians will be like, but we're contemporaneous with these animals. 1.00

01:21:15.000 Well, how am I native?

01:21:16.000 Right.

01:21:17.000 But you're telling me that the thing I like to hunt is non-native and needs to be gotten rid of. 0.97

01:21:21.000 It's ridiculous. 0.89

01:21:22.000 They sure think it is. 0.98

01:21:24.000 I don't mean to say they like it's a unanimously held viewpoint, but people who hold the viewpoint that they hunt pigs, their father hunt pigs, their grandfather hunt pigs, their great-great-great-great-great-grandfather hunted pigs.

01:21:37.000 Now, what's the pressure coming from to eradicate them?

01:21:39.000 Is it from agriculture?

01:21:41.000 No, it's from people who are worried about losing yet more.

01:21:45.000 And we've already lost a dozen, you know, speaking of regional extinctions or extirpations, and in some cases, extinction extinctions, we've lost dozens of species of Hawaiian flora and fauna to, considering a wide range of ground-nesting birds,

01:22:03.000 have been lost to rats and pigs.

01:22:05.000 So now it's not so much focused on the animals, but flora.

01:22:10.000 So there are people who would like to, and I get where they're coming from, who would like to restore large areas of native plant communities in the Hawaiian Islands.

01:22:26.000 Because when you go there, all the fruit you see, the coconuts are not native.

01:22:30.000 Papayas, mangoes, breadfruit, none of that stuff's native.

01:22:33.000 Wow.

01:22:34.000 It's all introduced.

01:22:36.000 That place is a Petri dish, man.

01:22:38.000 Yeah.

01:22:38.000 They're hunting turkeys, pheasants, chukar.

01:22:42.000 Axis deer.

01:22:43.000 Axis deer. 0.99

01:22:43.000 They're hunting everything there, but none of that shit's from there. 0.99

01:22:46.000 So there are some people who look and they say, like, we have an ecological responsibility to try to salvage some part of this. 0.98

01:22:53.000 But meanwhile, another perspective would be, like, we made this place bloom.

01:22:58.000 This place oozes with life.

01:23:00.000 And there's people who, you know, they're able to glean all of their food...

01:23:07.000 Sources from the island, from things that their ancestors have established on the island, and it's offensive to them.

01:23:14.000 Do you know about Darwin visiting the Galapagos Islands, and that's one of the ways that he sort of formulated his theories about evolution and all the various variety of wildlife through visiting the Galapagos Islands?

01:23:30.000 And unintentionally, people have had seeds that they brought with them on the bottom of their shoes.

01:23:35.000 Oh, I'm sure.

01:23:36.000 Which is really crazy.

01:23:37.000 And all these animals, plants rather, are growing that are non-native.

01:23:41.000 And this debate pops up as to what to do with them.

01:23:44.000 And then there's all these turtles that live there.

01:23:47.000 And this debate pops up as to how to protect these turtles.

01:23:51.000 And they brought in goats to eradicate some of the plants.

01:23:55.000 Right.

01:23:55.000 Now they've got a goat problem.

01:23:56.000 Yeah, some people brought goats over there, like some sailors brought goats over there as a food source, left them on the island, figuring, hey, we'll stop back when we need food, and now they've got goat problems.

01:24:05.000 So they're trying to figure out how to eradicate the goats, and there's a great radio.

01:24:09.000 You know, the idea of the Judas goat?

01:24:12.000 Talk about that, that's good. 0.96

01:24:13.000 Well, they take one goat and they sterilize that goat, and so that goat can't breed, but that goat will find all the other goats and hang out with that goat, and they put a radio collar on the little fucker, and then he lets them know where the other goats are, and then they gun down those goats and let this one goat live. 0.66

01:24:28.000 And he goes, well, I gotta go find some other goats. 0.69

01:24:31.000 And he goes and finds the other one, and they're like, oh, we found them.

01:24:33.000 And the thing is, the poor guy don't even know.

01:24:37.000 He's like, man, am I lucky?

01:24:40.000 They show up in his helicopter.

01:24:42.000 I mean, they're taking him out like platoon style.

01:24:45.000 You know, the writer Tom Robbins, is he still alive?

01:24:49.000 Skinny legs and all.

01:24:50.000 I think he's alive.

01:24:51.000 Jitterbug perfume.

01:24:52.000 Yeah, I think he's alive.

01:24:53.000 You know, he was talking about, in one of his books he talks about Hawaii, how Hawaii had a rat problem.

01:24:59.000 Then they brought in the mongoose, and they had a mongoose problem.

01:25:04.000 And he makes a joke that we had a crime problem and we brought in cops.

01:25:12.000 Well, that's sort of what Australia did, right?

01:25:14.000 I mean, Australia brought in fox to deal with the rabbits.

01:25:17.000 They brought in rabbits.

01:25:19.000 The rabbits got out of control.

01:25:20.000 They brought in fox to deal with the rabbits.

01:25:21.000 The fox started eating ground-nesting birds.

01:25:24.000 Yeah.

01:25:24.000 And they brought in cats as well.

01:25:26.000 They have a huge feral cat problem in Australia to the point where their hunting magazines are really bizarre.

01:25:31.000 Because people hunt cats?

01:25:32.000 Holding up cats.

01:25:34.000 Like, what? 1.00

01:25:34.000 Like, my friend Adam Greentree lives in Australia, and, you know, it's a crazy place, because it's similar, in a lot of ways, to Hawaii, is that a lot of the animals they hunt are non-native, but their hunting magazines are filled with fucking dogs and cats and shit. 1.00

01:25:50.000 It's just really weird to look at. 0.99

01:25:53.000 It would really shake in America.

01:25:54.000 If you left one of those on an airplane so the next passenger to find...

01:25:57.000 Well, I was looking at it on an airplane, and I got to the part where the guy was holding up the cat, gripping, grinning.

01:26:02.000 I just turned the page real quick. 0.99

01:26:03.000 I was like, whoa, fucking Jesus. 1.00

01:26:05.000 It's heavy. 1.00

01:26:07.000 Yeah, the non-native thing is...

01:26:10.000 It amazes me our inability to anticipate...

01:26:15.000 I'm going to say something that's weirdly contradictory.

01:26:19.000 Our inability to anticipate unintended consequences, which doesn't entirely make sense, but you see what I'm getting at.

01:26:26.000 Right, right, right.

01:26:27.000 Well, there's no forethought.

01:26:29.000 To bring in foxes or cats...

01:26:33.000 Like, and say, well, they're just going to eat the rabbits that we left behind. 1.00

01:26:36.000 You're out of your fucking mind. 1.00

01:26:37.000 They're going to eat everything. 1.00

01:26:39.000 Like, how do you not see that coming?

01:26:41.000 Don't you know what a cat does?

01:26:42.000 Cats kill things. 1.00

01:26:43.000 You can't even throw a ball of yarn in front of a fucking cat. 1.00

01:26:45.000 And it kind of doesn't end. 0.99

01:26:46.000 Like, we're doing it now.

01:26:49.000 Something.

01:26:50.000 We won't know yet.

01:26:52.000 In 10 years, or 20 years, we'll be goofing on something we're doing right now that we think is a good idea.

01:26:59.000 Probably, right?

01:26:59.000 Yeah.

01:27:01.000 We'll be like, can you believe those dumbasses? 1.00

01:27:03.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:27:04.000 In 2016, thought X? I have some theories about what those things might be, but I mean, you know, we're not done making big mistakes.

01:27:13.000 Well, commercial large-scale agriculture, in a way, is not only just really, really recent.

01:27:18.000 It's completely unnatural to have these giant swaths of land that's filled with corn.

01:27:23.000 Yeah, like monoculture stuff.

01:27:26.000 Very unnatural.

01:27:26.000 So people that think about, like, oh, I'm eating vegetables, I'm eating natural, I'm not a part of this whole factory farm system.

01:27:33.000 What the fuck? 0.99

01:27:34.000 You're not. 1.00

01:27:34.000 You're part of factory agriculture system. 1.00

01:27:37.000 You're eating corn.

01:27:38.000 If you're buying corn, you're eating corn on a cob, thinking you're all healthy. 1.00

01:27:41.000 That shit is coming from a really unnatural place. 0.99

01:27:44.000 It's coming from this ground that has been filled up with all this nitrogen that's been sucked out of the air through the Haber method. 0.99

01:27:51.000 They've dumped it into the earth because the earth's been depleted with minerals to the point where it no longer supports growth of plants unless you add stuff to it.

01:27:59.000 And then you have these large-scale machines that you need to tend to this stuff.

01:28:04.000 And there's nothing natural about large-scale agriculture.

01:28:06.000 No.

01:28:07.000 We just don't consider it because we consider...

01:28:10.000 Factory farming when it comes to living animals as being horrific, whether it's pigs or cows or chickens, that disturbs almost anybody with a conscience.

01:28:20.000 But we don't think twice about the consequences of large-scale agriculture on actual wildlife and the wild ground.

01:28:27.000 When you picture that we have, I mean much vaster than this, but that we have entire counties that support a single species, Of plant.

01:28:37.000 Of plant.

01:28:37.000 Oftentimes, a single species of a non-native plant.

01:28:40.000 And kill everything else.

01:28:42.000 Like, corn is...

01:28:44.000 It's kind of a native, you know, it's derived from maize.

01:28:47.000 It's like kind of a native species.

01:28:48.000 Sort of.

01:28:49.000 But oftentimes, it's like entire counties given over to a single non-native plant.

01:28:56.000 Well, isn't corn sort of like looking at a domestic dog and saying, well, that domestic dog is a wild animal?

01:29:02.000 Yeah, really.

01:29:03.000 I don't even know.

01:29:04.000 Like, if you took someone from pre-Columbian times and showed them a corn cob, I don't think that they would probably recognize that. 0.99

01:29:12.000 They wouldn't know what the fuck that was. 0.96

01:29:13.000 They were dealing with a corn that was smaller than when you are making a stir fry and get the little baby corn things. 0.99

01:29:22.000 Were they that small?

01:29:23.000 Small little things, yeah.

01:29:25.000 They can't tell how it even came to be.

01:29:29.000 Some people have a theory that it was bred from a grass.

01:29:34.000 The lineage of corn is hard to track.

01:29:37.000 Wow, so was this Native Americans that did this? 1.00

01:29:40.000 Were they figured out how to splice these plants together and tie them together?

01:29:43.000 Yeah, there's a book, I can't remember the name of the book that gets into it, but just trying to like track down sort of the history of corn and how it came to be.

01:29:51.000 You know, they oftentimes point to a domestication of animals and plants.

01:29:55.000 Sometimes it was sort of an accidental domestication.

01:29:57.000 You know, like you go out and gather something, right?

01:29:59.000 And you bring it home, you process it near your home, you're scattering seed, right?

01:30:04.000 And eventually you're creating these things.

01:30:06.000 But yeah, corn's difficult to track.

01:30:08.000 The lineage of corn is not clear.

01:30:10.000 It's just so bizarre what kind of a foothold it has in American culture.

01:30:15.000 It's everything, man.

01:30:16.000 It's everything.

01:30:16.000 It's crazy.

01:30:17.000 I recently interviewed for...

01:30:19.000 I was talking about the documentary project we're working on.

01:30:22.000 I interviewed an animal...

01:30:23.000 He's from California.

01:30:24.000 He's an animal rights activist and he teaches animal ethics.

01:30:29.000 And...

01:30:30.000 He has a brand of veganism that I think would be refreshing.

01:30:33.000 You should have this guy.

01:30:34.000 I keep telling people you should have him on your show.

01:30:36.000 What's his name?

01:30:38.000 His name's Robert Jones.

01:30:39.000 He has a very refreshing sort of veganism.

01:30:46.000 I'd have this dude over to dinner.

01:30:47.000 Really?

01:30:48.000 Yeah, but he doesn't hold out ideas that he's pure.

01:30:54.000 Because of what we're talking about.

01:30:57.000 He's educated enough about agriculture and educated enough about the inherent struggle, the inherent life and death through all food production, that he doesn't think, oh, I have all the answers.

01:31:11.000 I am the gentle, kind one.

01:31:13.000 Because he's seen cornfields.

01:31:14.000 Right.

01:31:15.000 He knows you're violently churning the land with equipment.

01:31:19.000 Things are dying when you grow vegetables.

01:31:23.000 We're enmeshed in a cycle of life and death that is inescapable.

01:31:29.000 His point, and I don't want to totally steal the guy's point, he'd do a better job of explaining himself, but his point is that if we agree that we should minimize suffering, There are steps we can take to minimize suffering.

01:31:43.000 Not saying that I've got it answered and I've got it figured out, but if we want to minimize the suffering of sentient beings, then that's a conversation we should have.

01:31:54.000 The best thing that he said in explaining the animal rights movement, which I've always been a little bit baffled by, is he gets into this idea of...

01:32:04.000 He uses the term speciesism.

01:32:07.000 Yeah, I've heard that one.

01:32:08.000 Yeah.

01:32:08.000 So...

01:32:10.000 You know, we've dealt with and deal with racism.

01:32:14.000 We've dealt with and deal with sexism.

01:32:17.000 And we are, he would argue, I think he would say we're on the cusp of tackling our problem of speciesism.

01:32:24.000 And he would say, like, if you went to someone, like, you know, if you went to the Mississippi Delta, you know, in the late 1700s and said to someone, like, hey, you know, have you ever thought about the fact that,

01:32:41.000 You know, you kind of like own and abuse these people.

01:32:44.000 Have you ever thought about how they're like people too?

01:32:47.000 You know, they're like you and me.

01:32:49.000 He was saying like the guy wouldn't be able to cope with what you were saying.

01:32:53.000 He'd be like, oh, clearly.

01:32:55.000 I mean, come on. 1.00

01:32:57.000 Any idiot could tell you that that slave is not. 1.00

01:33:03.000 I mean, come on. 1.00

01:33:05.000 Right?

01:33:05.000 Right.

01:33:07.000 He says that's where we're at right now with animals.

01:33:09.000 Hmm.

01:33:10.000 He's like, when I say it to you, you're like, well, clearly we're so...

01:33:14.000 Does he aim to stop animal on animal crime?

01:33:17.000 You know, I asked him about that, and that was one of the things.

01:33:22.000 At the end of our conversation, I even said to him, I'm like, you got a couple things you need to work on.

01:33:26.000 Because he didn't have a great one for that.

01:33:29.000 Another one that he didn't have a great one for is he had...

01:33:34.000 Not that he had a great one, not that I was trying to stump him, because he's a very intelligent, well-thought person, very respectful to people he's talking to, even people that disagree with him.

01:33:43.000 I have nothing but admiration for the guy.

01:33:45.000 But we had a conversation that I was not totally satisfied with, where he has a deal of reverence, it seems, and again, at the risk of putting words in his mouth, he has a reverence for indigenous hunting cultures,

01:34:01.000 that they had this sort of respect.

01:34:03.000 They had a respect for animals that we don't have, and somehow that made it okay for them.

01:34:07.000 Like, they had a spiritual connection, and so that made that okay.

01:34:10.000 And we don't have that, so we're not okay.

01:34:12.000 And I asked them about, are you able to identify the point in human development, in cultural development?

01:34:20.000 What is the point when you're supposed to give up the chase?

01:34:23.000 Like, at what point do you have a responsibility to stop hunting?

01:34:27.000 Because you're saying that it is okay for some people.

01:34:30.000 It's absolutely not okay for us now.

01:34:33.000 When should we have made the jump?

01:35:01.000 And they would write letters back to the king complaining about how these people refused to stop go hunting. 0.99

01:35:11.000 Like, you give them a chance and these sons of bitches take off to go hunt. 1.00

01:35:14.000 And here we are giving them everything they need to be sedentary. 0.99

01:35:17.000 And they just won't get with the program.

01:35:19.000 So there is this struggle where people are like, you're supposed to be like, I think some people expect you, like, if you're a human, they think that the end result of humanness...

01:35:30.000 Is that you wind up not hunting.

01:35:33.000 That it's sort of the goal of civilization is to make you not a hunter.

01:35:37.000 And I think he's a little bit guilty of that.

01:35:39.000 Because he thinks it is okay for some people.

01:35:42.000 And where he runs into trouble is he talks about that I asked him about ethics.

01:35:47.000 He says, but the animal doesn't care about your ethics.

01:35:50.000 To him, he's dying.

01:35:52.000 If he dies and you have a good feeling in your heart, or if he dies and you have a bad feeling in your heart, he's dead.

01:35:59.000 It doesn't matter.

01:36:00.000 They don't know what trip you're on.

01:36:02.000 They suffer the same, regardless of your motivations.

01:36:06.000 Which leads me to want to point out, okay, but the indigenous cultures that you say it's okay for them to hunt, their animals are suffering too.

01:36:14.000 The animals they kill don't know that they're being killed by indigenous peoples, and therefore it makes the suffering more palatable for them. 1.00

01:36:20.000 They're dying.

01:36:22.000 So there are some traps there that to me weren't answered in a satisfactory way.

01:36:28.000 Does any of that make sense?

01:36:29.000 Absolutely.

01:36:29.000 It's a very messy situation if you want to try to confine behavior that way and you want to impart moral judgment on people.

01:36:37.000 Because what do you do with people with pets?

01:36:40.000 What do you do with people that have cats?

01:36:41.000 He has companion animals.

01:36:43.000 He has good stuff to say about that.

01:36:45.000 Really?

01:36:45.000 Yeah, he has very interesting stuff to say about that.

01:36:46.000 What does he have to say with those animals that are mistreated and confined and ground up in the cat food?

01:36:50.000 Oh, no.

01:36:50.000 He wouldn't like that.

01:36:52.000 And I don't know if he feeds...

01:36:53.000 I would imagine...

01:36:57.000 You can feed your cats a vegan diet.

01:36:59.000 I've got a whole bit in my act about it.

01:37:02.000 Because I got into it.

01:37:03.000 I got harassed by someone online and I went to their Twitter page and it said, hashtag vegan cat. 0.98

01:37:08.000 And I went, you gotta be fucking kidding me.

01:37:10.000 And then I found this entire community of people that feed their cats Vegan food. 0.98

01:37:15.000 The problem is the cats go blind.

01:37:17.000 Is that right?

01:37:18.000 And they die.

01:37:19.000 Robert Jones didn't like that.

01:37:20.000 He wasn't that interested in that argument.

01:37:22.000 And I was saying to him, do you feel that we should separate predatory animals from prey and put them on a soy diet?

01:37:31.000 And I understand why.

01:37:32.000 He felt that I was being like... 0.99

01:37:34.000 Ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous. 0.98

01:37:35.000 Well, it is, but how are you going to feed those cats? 0.99

01:37:37.000 It's a real question.

01:37:37.000 It's a very real question.

01:37:40.000 You're taking this cat and you're putting this cat above the animals that it eats.

01:37:44.000 You're deciding that these chickens and the fish and all the different things that you need to grind up to make cat food, that's okay, because you love this cat.

01:37:51.000 You have a hierarchy of animal life, and we all have a hierarchy of life.

01:37:55.000 I've seen vegans slap mosquitoes.

01:37:57.000 I've seen it.

01:37:58.000 I've seen that.

01:37:59.000 I've seen them kill ants.

01:38:01.000 There was a lady, I used to live near an ashram.

01:38:03.000 The lady that ran the ashram was spraying bug spray. 1.00

01:38:06.000 What's an ashram?

01:38:07.000 It's a Buddhist temple.

01:38:08.000 Okay.

01:38:09.000 You used to live in an ashram?

01:38:10.000 Next to it.

01:38:11.000 Oh, next to it.

01:38:12.000 Next to it.

01:38:12.000 Sorry.

01:38:14.000 And she used to spray bug spray. 1.00

01:38:17.000 On the ants. 1.00

01:38:18.000 And I was like, what the fuck are you doing? 1.00

01:38:19.000 On the ants? 0.99

01:38:20.000 On the ants.

01:38:20.000 She killed the ants.

01:38:21.000 She was killing them. 1.00

01:38:22.000 And I go, what are you doing?

01:38:23.000 She's like, well, we don't like to, but they get into our food. 1.00

01:38:25.000 I'm like, holy shit. 0.99

01:38:27.000 Like, you're a vegetarian who's committed to a Buddhist life of do no harm, but yet there's no way around this. 1.00

01:38:34.000 You have to poison these fucking ants with death from the sky that comes out of these containers, these metal containers, these aerosol containers of death. 0.99

01:38:43.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:38:44.000 This is bizarre lines that we draw.

01:38:46.000 But as long as I am taking the liberty of putting myself in Robert Jones' position, I think that he would have some interesting stuff to say about this conversation we're having where we're like, 0.99

01:39:04.000 because some harm happens, Then, let's just say fuck it and we'll open up the gates. 0.99

01:39:11.000 Well, no, but let's talk about life. 1.00

01:39:13.000 Is life in a small form more insignificant or less significant than an elk?

01:39:21.000 Who decides that an ant is less significant than an elk?

01:39:24.000 If I shoot one elk, I can eat it for a year.

01:39:26.000 That's one life.

01:39:27.000 One life for a year.

01:39:29.000 You don't like ants getting on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich. 1.00

01:39:32.000 So you spray a whole colony of these fuckers. 1.00

01:39:35.000 You've killed thousands of life forces. 1.00

01:39:38.000 And even ruling out the insect thing.

01:39:40.000 I remember a guy...

01:39:42.000 That wrote a pretty scathing review.

01:39:44.000 I think he might have been...

01:39:45.000 I can't remember if it was in the Wall Street Journal or somewhere.

01:39:48.000 This guy wrote a pretty scathing review of my third book.

01:39:51.000 And there he's like, just the number of animals this guy has killed about me.

01:39:58.000 And I remember thinking, if you go and get a 12-pack of McNuggets, how many chickens...

01:40:07.000 And you sorted out the parts...

01:40:11.000 You're probably eating hundreds of chickens.

01:40:14.000 Probably.

01:40:15.000 Yeah.

01:40:15.000 Because it's all scraps.

01:40:17.000 It's emulsified scrap.

01:40:19.000 Yeah.

01:40:19.000 They're not like, okay, we're going to take this chicken here, and we're going to produce 30 nuggets.

01:40:25.000 Well, my problem is they never turn that force on themselves.

01:40:28.000 They never turn that high-powered... 0.99

01:40:31.000 Vision of you know the consequences of their actions on themselves if someone's talking about like if this guy's a vegan and he's a vegetarian He's talking about how many animals you've killed how many animals are you responsible for for your fucking your Whole-wheat pasta. 0.97

01:40:44.000 He wasn't even he wasn't even he was so he was a meat-eater. 0.99

01:40:47.000 Yeah, well, that's preposterous.

01:40:48.000 No, no, that's Ricky Gervais It's Ricky Gervais constantly talks about hunters and hunting the guy eats meat.

01:40:56.000 Yeah Like, there's so many weird laws, and I get it that he doesn't think people should hunt animals just for trophies, and I agree, but it's very rarely do these animals get hunted just for trophies. 0.97

01:41:08.000 Like, if you shoot a fucking elephant, the village eats the elephant. 0.59

01:41:12.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:41:13.000 You're feeding hundreds of people with that elephant.

01:41:16.000 And I'll point out, too, and I do all the time...

01:41:18.000 Not that I'm pro-elephant shooting.

01:41:20.000 It's illegal.

01:41:21.000 No, I, like...

01:41:24.000 We're going to talk about Yellowstone Syndrome.

01:41:26.000 I'm almost having a personal...

01:41:28.000 I'm taking a couple year long break from discussing wildlife in Africa.

01:41:33.000 Really?

01:41:35.000 I should point out that your article that you wrote was one of my favorite on that subject and it was right around the time that the Cease of the Lion thing was going down.

01:41:44.000 And it also referenced that Kendall Jones girl who got a lot of hate online because she was a Texas cheerleader and she was really cute. 0.58

01:41:53.000 Yeah, people hate a good-looking woman hunting in Africa. 1.00

01:41:57.000 With a big smile on her face and lipstick.

01:42:00.000 Some dude did real good in heating and cooling and winds up going to Africa a lot. 0.64

01:42:05.000 Heating and cooling. 0.98

01:42:06.000 People are like, yeah, that's fucking cool. 0.99

01:42:08.000 As long as hot girls, hot American girls don't go there. 1.00

01:42:11.000 Well, and it's also like, what are you shooting?

01:42:12.000 If you're over there and you're shooting a kudu and you're going to eat it and you feed the villagers, everybody goes, well, it is an antelope.

01:42:18.000 That's okay.

01:42:19.000 This is traditional something that we eat.

01:42:21.000 Oh, yeah.

01:42:22.000 I was going to talk about the hierarchy because we spend a lot of time at work.

01:42:26.000 When we're out filming Meat Eater, we spend a lot of time talking about the hierarchy.

01:42:29.000 Because, for instance, we have a camera guy we work with, Rick Smith, has a long professional history in working with wildlife and filming wildlife and didn't grow up hunting.

01:42:43.000 He's coming around.

01:42:44.000 He's curious about it, but he asks a lot of good questions.

01:42:46.000 And we were looking.

01:42:47.000 We had killed a moose.

01:42:51.000 And the next day, we were up in Alaska, and we killed a moose.

01:42:54.000 And the next day, we rolled out of our camp and happened to go near there, and there was a wolverine dragging off moose parts.

01:43:02.000 You talked about this on your podcast.

01:43:03.000 Yeah.

01:43:04.000 It's a great story.

01:43:05.000 Rick was like, in that area, between September 1 and March 31, you're allowed to kill a wolverine.

01:43:13.000 And my friend Buck Bowden, you know, he has eaten and enjoys Wolverine meat, and the hides, as we all know, are phenomenal.

01:43:20.000 I don't think we all know that.

01:43:23.000 Most people listening to this are like, we all know.

01:43:25.000 Traditionally, parkas are trimmed with wolverine because wolverine will not freeze up when it's got frost on it.

01:43:32.000 By trimmed, you mean around the hood?

01:43:34.000 Around the hood, yeah.

01:43:35.000 Because when you're exhaling, stuff gets frost.

01:43:38.000 Wolverine doesn't frost up.

01:43:39.000 Wow, why is that?

01:43:40.000 I don't know why.

01:43:41.000 It's a hollow hair, but I don't know what it is about it that it resists frost.

01:43:45.000 So anyways...

01:43:46.000 We're kicking around.

01:43:48.000 I'll tell the end first and say we didn't shoot the Wolverine, but we were just talking about, you know, we legally could have gone and take a crack at it.

01:43:55.000 Did you have an opportunity to do so?

01:43:57.000 Yeah.

01:43:58.000 You would have had to have acted quickly, but yes.

01:44:01.000 Or you could have staked it out and just waited for him to come back. 0.98

01:44:04.000 He's a little thief. 0.96

01:44:05.000 He's stealing your moose. 0.98

01:44:06.000 But we already butchered it.

01:44:07.000 Right.

01:44:07.000 He's taking the hooves.

01:44:09.000 Oh, okay.

01:44:09.000 Guts, right?

01:44:10.000 But you're a marrow eater, so he's taking bones.

01:44:13.000 He actually stole two of our marrow bones, because we then... 1.00

01:44:15.000 Motherfucker. 0.99

01:44:15.000 Because we took the four big marrow bones, and he wound up getting over on another night at dark and stole some of our marrow bones out of our cache. 0.99

01:44:26.000 But we didn't see it happen.

01:44:28.000 Anyhow, Rick's pointing out, I don't think you should mess with...

01:44:32.000 He's like, that's an animal that I think is off.

01:44:35.000 We're like, why is that?

01:44:36.000 He's like, well, they roam...

01:44:37.000 One of the things he was talking about, he's like, man, they cover so much ground.

01:44:42.000 They'll have a home range.

01:44:43.000 They'll go 250 miles.

01:44:46.000 It's like, yeah, but we just killed a caribou.

01:44:48.000 And caribou will go...

01:44:50.000 A thousand miles.

01:44:52.000 Hundreds of miles.

01:44:52.000 So it's not distance traveled.

01:44:54.000 No.

01:44:55.000 It's just something.

01:44:59.000 It's just something.

01:45:00.000 Well, people have that about bears, of course.

01:45:02.000 The way you describe it.

01:45:04.000 Charismatic megafauna.

01:45:05.000 Yeah, that's not my term, but it's a great...

01:45:07.000 Hats off to whoever did.

01:45:08.000 I'm sure you can find out who invented charismatic megafauna.

01:45:11.000 I always attribute it to you, so I'm going to leave it with you.

01:45:13.000 No, I didn't come up with it.

01:45:14.000 I heard a linguist one day...

01:45:16.000 You could find it.

01:45:17.000 I heard a linguist one day talking about he was interested in tracking where things come from.

01:45:21.000 That would be an easy case, but you know what he was interested in tracking was waitresses saying, are you still working on that?

01:45:32.000 Because there was a time when no one said that, and then all of a sudden, everyone said it.

01:45:38.000 Huh.

01:45:40.000 And he was interested, where did, are you still working on that come from?

01:45:43.000 The one mouth that it first came out of.

01:45:45.000 So yeah, charismatic megaphone is great.

01:45:48.000 And I think that there's some things that are so charismatic, wolves and grizzlies, that like New Jersey cat ladies... 1.00

01:45:56.000 Know about them.

01:45:57.000 Did you see the billboard that they had up?

01:46:00.000 We're all Cecil.

01:46:02.000 There was a lion hugging a bear that was trying to stop the bear hunt in New Jersey.

01:46:07.000 No.

01:46:07.000 You never saw it.

01:46:08.000 I know that guy, someone pedals the bear.

01:46:11.000 Someone shot pedals.

01:46:13.000 How rude.

01:46:16.000 Whenever something like that happens, man, I remember reading it.

01:46:18.000 I read it right when it came out.

01:46:20.000 The Fish and Game Agency there.

01:46:22.000 Just a little background.

01:46:23.000 There's a bear...

01:46:25.000 It was kind of a neighborhood bear in New Jersey and he had had some kind of injury or possibly a birth defect where He wasn't able to...

01:46:37.000 He spent a lot of time walking bipedally.

01:46:39.000 Yeah.

01:46:41.000 Which is not uncommon, which is probably where the big foot rumors come from.

01:46:44.000 No, but he had obvious injuries in his front section.

01:46:47.000 So would walk...

01:46:48.000 Yeah, definitely not uncommon.

01:46:49.000 And probably, you know, it could be a lot of the things we have about hominids, you know, like large, mysterious hominids could come from, you know, obviously bears walking around on their back feet.

01:46:58.000 But, you know, New Jersey had...

01:47:02.000 I don't want to have this mean too many, but they have an exploding population of black bears.

01:47:09.000 I'm always reluctant to say something's overpopulated because you always got to ask according to whose definition.

01:47:13.000 Is it like the automobile insurance industry?

01:47:16.000 Because they'll say everything's overpopulated that you might run over with your car.

01:47:21.000 Agricultural interests have a different definition of overpopulated.

01:47:23.000 So they have a shitload of bears.

01:47:25.000 That's a fair statement.

01:47:27.000 They had a hunting season.

01:47:28.000 Turns out some guy comes into a check station and he had shot this bear that walks around on his back feet and they'd given him the name Pedals because he'd taken two scavenging bird feeders and stuff around the neighborhood.

01:47:38.000 And so I can't remember the magazine, one of those dipshitty New York online magazines that just basically steals shit out of the New York Times and writes its own interpretations of New York Times articles. 0.61

01:47:52.000 It wasn't Gawk or something like that. 0.93

01:47:53.000 It said that Pedals had been assassinated.

01:47:55.000 Yes.

01:47:59.000 I read that.

01:48:00.000 Like one of those websites that all they do is like...

01:48:02.000 Hack on traditional media, but then they just write articles commenting on traditional media stories.

01:48:08.000 Yeah.

01:48:08.000 But they're not out, like, generating leads.

01:48:11.000 Look at this billboard.

01:48:13.000 Ban the bear hunt.

01:48:14.000 They're all seesaw.

01:48:15.000 Oh, they're crying.

01:48:16.000 They're crying.

01:48:16.000 They have cartoon tears, like, literal.

01:48:18.000 And look how the bear is hugging, or the lion, rather, is hugging the bear.

01:48:22.000 Poor babies. 0.85

01:48:24.000 Yeah, that's a nice billboard.

01:48:26.000 What about pedals?

01:48:29.000 Oh, the people, yeah, the charismatic megafauna thing.

01:48:32.000 Because another thing we talked about on our podcast recently, we had a biologist on who works for the Kalispell tribe, an Indian tribe that historically were in Idaho, portions of Washington,

01:48:48.000 portions of Montana, and they're very involved in mountain caribou recovery in the U.S. So most people do not know that Traditionally, we had a caribou population that drifted from Canada down into northern Washington,

01:49:07.000 northern Idaho, northwest Montana.

01:49:09.000 We don't have that now at all?

01:49:11.000 Well, there's about a dozen of them.

01:49:13.000 At this moment that we're talking right now, there are a couple miles from the U.S. border inside Canada.

01:49:21.000 But there used to be...

01:49:22.000 The last legal one to be killed...

01:49:26.000 It was back in the 1920s.

01:49:28.000 What happened to them was just disturbances to habitat.

01:49:32.000 There was always a small, like, not a large number of them, and we had a lot of things that messed with their travel corridors, development, road construction, logging activities, and now they rarely ever drift down into the U.S. But it was an active recovery area there,

01:49:49.000 so we got about a dozen No one gives a shit about mountain caribou. 0.98

01:50:06.000 The amount of, like, energy, the amount of mental energy that goes into people's favorite animals. 0.97

01:50:18.000 At the expense of other good wildlife projects we could be working on, it kind of boggles my mind.

01:50:25.000 Black bears, we have enough black bears that we have black bear hunting seasons in I think 36 states.

01:50:33.000 Wow.

01:50:34.000 Rapidly expanding population of black bears.

01:50:37.000 And people will expend enormous amounts of energy and resources because it's like, I don't understand it.

01:50:45.000 And they just are willfully ignorant about other wildlife issues that are much more important because it's not cuddly.

01:50:52.000 It doesn't look fuzzy.

01:50:54.000 Well, they don't have a stuffed one.

01:50:56.000 I don't know what it is.

01:50:57.000 Stuffed teddy bears.

01:50:58.000 There's a lot of it.

01:50:59.000 I mean, what...

01:51:01.000 We've gotten accustomed to thinking of these things as our friends.

01:51:04.000 It's Yogi Bear.

01:51:06.000 We've done these anthropomorphizations with these cartoons and television shows, and it's ingrained in the consciousness of a lot of people.

01:51:14.000 No matter what you do, you can't get it out of there.

01:51:16.000 There's some legitimate differences between animals.

01:51:20.000 We were talking about that yesterday.

01:51:21.000 We were talking about the differences between bears and deer, like how a deer looks at you and a bear looks at you.

01:51:27.000 You know, about how, when I was talking before the show about whitetail deers, like, catching one...

01:51:32.000 He looked at you in a way nothing's ever looked at you.

01:51:34.000 They look at you, they're electric, their eyes are like, they're like, no, you're there to kill them. 1.00

01:51:38.000 And they're like, oh, that's a fucking person, I gotta get out of here! 1.00

01:51:40.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

01:51:41.000 Or a bear looks at you like, hmm...

01:51:43.000 What's going on here?

01:51:44.000 Can I eat you?

01:51:45.000 Can you eat me?

01:51:47.000 There's a weird sort of relationship that people have with bears.

01:51:52.000 They look at you, but they don't look at you with the same sort of intense fear that a game animal looks at you.

01:51:57.000 There's this blurring of the lines there.

01:52:01.000 And I think that when we think of animals that we eat, we have very distinct classifications.

01:52:07.000 You tell people you eat bear, they go, oh God.

01:52:09.000 And I did.

01:52:10.000 You know, one of the first hunts that you tried to take me on was a black bear hunt.

01:52:14.000 And I was like, man, I don't want to go.

01:52:15.000 Yeah, it took some getting used to.

01:52:17.000 Now I'm like, when are we going?

01:52:19.000 Let's go get some blueberry bears.

01:52:21.000 Yeah, I have...

01:52:23.000 I have the same problem.

01:52:25.000 I do create a hierarchy, but I also try to question where the hierarchy comes from and to suss out contradiction.

01:52:34.000 But the only problem to me, where it gets problematic for me, is the way in which it seems that you can get some Americans so excited about...

01:52:48.000 Preventing any kind of exploitation of a handful of species, yet they remain completely uninvolved with the issues in politics and recovery efforts of other things that need it right now.

01:53:05.000 The fact that with wolves and certain populations of grizzly bears, certain populations of wolves have reached recovery objective, yet we still cover them under the Endangered Species Act.

01:53:16.000 Because people want to use the Endangered Species Act to save things from any threat of exploitation at all.

01:53:22.000 Like, nothing to do with what the legislation was meant for.

01:53:25.000 It's become the Favorite Animal Act.

01:53:28.000 And if you want to initiate something called the Favorite Animal Act and try to get it passed by Congress, feel free.

01:53:36.000 But don't steal the ESA and take it away from its intended purpose.

01:53:42.000 In order to protect your stuffed animal animals.

01:53:45.000 You had a very important point on one of your podcasts where you're talking about population numbers, population objectives.

01:53:52.000 And you were saying that, well, like if you look at elk, for example, in some places elk are extremely common.

01:54:00.000 You know, in Colorado, for instance, there's more elk in Colorado than I think any other state.

01:54:04.000 Yeah, by I think almost like a factor or two.

01:54:07.000 There's a lot. 0.99

01:54:08.000 So if you tell people in Colorado that elk are endangered, they're like, what the fuck are you talking about? 0.98

01:54:11.000 If you go to Florida, there's no elk. 0.99

01:54:14.000 Yeah.

01:54:14.000 Elk are gone.

01:54:15.000 Wolves, same thing, right?

01:54:16.000 Elk are gone from 90% of their historic range in the U.S. Wow.

01:54:20.000 90%.

01:54:21.000 Yet no one has a problem with elk hunting seasons.

01:54:25.000 Right.

01:54:26.000 Exactly.

01:54:27.000 But we eat them.

01:54:28.000 That's the thing.

01:54:28.000 Who's eating wolves?

01:54:30.000 Well...

01:54:30.000 That's the problem.

01:54:31.000 Wolf looks like your dog.

01:54:32.000 No, I don't think it's...

01:54:34.000 Oh, an Arctic explorer is his favorite wild meat.

01:54:36.000 What?

01:54:37.000 Loved it. 1.00

01:54:37.000 Oh, he's a psycho. 1.00

01:54:38.000 Dude, you know what he ate, too? 1.00

01:54:40.000 Carpaccio?

01:54:40.000 He ate...

01:54:41.000 They found a...

01:54:46.000 A desiccated whale, beached, and it had been in the salt, and its tongue was dried out.

01:54:56.000 And he cut the tongue out, and he said how they boiled it repeatedly, repeatedly to try to get the salt out, and they eventually ate it.

01:55:02.000 And then they ran into some Eskimo hunters who said that thing had been laying there for three years.

01:55:08.000 Jesus Christ!

01:55:11.000 He was hardcore. 1.00

01:55:12.000 How the fuck did he eat a three-year-old tongue? 0.99

01:55:14.000 He just, like you said, just kept boiling it and reboiling it. 1.00

01:55:16.000 Dude, anyone, like, if you want to, too bad you can't have that sumbitch on your podcast. 1.00

01:55:20.000 Wow. 0.89

01:55:21.000 He made, Stephenson, he's got a book, My Life with the Eskimo.

01:55:24.000 So he made first contact with a lot of people in the high Arctic.

01:55:29.000 They knew, he was meeting people who knew about whites, but hadn't met any yet.

01:55:35.000 Wow. 0.99

01:55:35.000 And what was funny about this dude is how frustrated he would get with trying to show them his shit, which he thought they'd be blown away by. 0.99

01:55:44.000 So he'd, like, get out a gun. 0.99

01:55:46.000 Or one day he's explained to people that, you know, we can do, he's like, my people, you know, we can do surgery.

01:55:51.000 What year was this?

01:55:52.000 He was making first contact in the early 1900s.

01:55:55.000 Up, like, Coronation Gulf, Victoria Island, way up in the Canadian High Arctic.

01:55:59.000 Again, they knew, they knew that there was...

01:56:02.000 Whites.

01:56:03.000 They hadn't met any whites yet. 0.88

01:56:04.000 And he'd come to them and he'd expect to blow them away like he showed some guys his firearm.

01:56:10.000 His gun.

01:56:12.000 And this dude's like, yeah, that's cool.

01:56:14.000 But I know a guy that can shoot his bow and his arrow will travel to the far side of the mountain and kill a caribou that he can't even see.

01:56:25.000 Or he was saying, we can do surgery on people and do an appendectomy.

01:56:29.000 And he says...

01:56:31.000 I know a guy that can take your whole spine and skull and brain out and put it back in again.

01:56:39.000 He was talking about telescopes, and he's like, you can see the moon craters.

01:56:43.000 And they're like, I know a guy that's been to the moon and hunted there.

01:56:50.000 So... 0.99

01:56:52.000 That's one up and shit. 0.98

01:56:53.000 No, dude, it's like, it's the greatest book, man, how frustrated it gets. 0.99

01:56:56.000 But one of the cool things he describes is, he describes how they would kill, you know, when they killed a polar bear, they would bring the head back and put it in their lodge.

01:57:10.000 I don't want to push this too far, but much in the same way you might bring a head home and hang it on your wall.

01:57:16.000 They'll bring it home and put it in their lodge.

01:57:18.000 And the thinking, as explained to Stephenson, was that I'm bringing him home so that he can observe me and my family and see that we're good people.

01:57:31.000 And when he goes to the afterlife, he will tell other bears...

01:57:35.000 If you gotta get killed by somebody, not a bad guy to have it happen.

01:57:40.000 That guy's okay.

01:57:42.000 And I often point out about the animal skulls and hides in my own home that I feel like, you know, I don't want to make myself seem too spiritual in some ways.

01:57:50.000 I think of that.

01:57:53.000 I think of that with the animals I have in my home.

01:57:56.000 Just a concept that you run in your mind.

01:57:58.000 Yeah, that I run in my mind.

01:57:59.000 I think about him.

01:58:00.000 Why was I talking about Stefan?

01:58:01.000 Oh, loved wolf. 0.98

01:58:01.000 So he ate every damn thing, like muskox, caribou, walrus. 0.98

01:58:05.000 He ate everything and talks repeatedly about his preference for wolf meat. 0.99

01:58:10.000 Preference?

01:58:10.000 Above all.

01:58:11.000 I'm telling you, reading my life with the Eskimo.

01:58:13.000 Well, you ate a coyote.

01:58:14.000 Yeah.

01:58:14.000 What was that like?

01:58:15.000 Didn't like it.

01:58:18.000 But here's the problem that I've run into.

01:58:20.000 Because in Vietnam, I ate a fair bit of domestic dog.

01:58:25.000 I ate a coyote and I ate a monkey.

01:58:30.000 A red howler monkey.

01:58:31.000 Those are my big transgressions of me.

01:58:35.000 Like I said, I admitted earlier to having my own animal hierarchies.

01:58:39.000 And those are the times when I've sort of strayed into uncomfortable ground for myself.

01:58:44.000 Canines and hominids.

01:58:45.000 Are they a hominid?

01:58:46.000 No, not a hominid.

01:58:47.000 Primate.

01:58:48.000 Primate.

01:58:48.000 So, yeah, I get where I can't really tell what it tastes like.

01:58:56.000 It's difficult to tell what it actually tastes like because you're feeling that there's so many other things going on.

01:59:02.000 Emotions, thoughts, contradictions.

01:59:04.000 Yeah, and I get like a hot, guilty feeling.

01:59:09.000 But when I was in Vietnam, they described dog as a hot food.

01:59:15.000 And I kept asking what that meant, because I didn't really understand, but it does.

01:59:18.000 It makes me sweaty.

01:59:19.000 I thought it was like a guilt thing.

01:59:21.000 But people would eat it and serve it around the Tet holiday, so the Lunar New Year.

01:59:28.000 It was auspicious.

01:59:29.000 It's auspicious to eat dog meat in the days leading up to the Lunar New Year.

01:59:35.000 And it's a food that you have.

01:59:38.000 It's like a risky enterprise.

01:59:41.000 In some areas of Vietnam, it's kind of a risky enterprise.

01:59:45.000 To eat deer.

01:59:46.000 To eat dog.

01:59:48.000 I'm sorry, to eat dog.

01:59:50.000 These restaurants open up that are only open that time of year.

01:59:53.000 And there's people coming in to bring in good luck.

01:59:57.000 Risky Enterprise, how so?

01:59:58.000 A guy told me that...

02:00:01.000 One of the guys I interviewed told me that he was unable to get his...

02:00:06.000 He was unable to have children.

02:00:09.000 And they determined that it was on him.

02:00:11.000 His wife was fertile, he was infertile. 1.00

02:00:14.000 He ate dog.

02:00:17.000 And it changed his fortunes.

02:00:19.000 It changed his luck.

02:00:21.000 And he got his wife pregnant. 0.74

02:00:23.000 Now, he says, I will not eat dog again.

02:00:27.000 For fear that I would undo what I did.

02:00:31.000 It's a powerful food.

02:00:33.000 This is a sentiment held more in the North.

02:00:36.000 I spent time in Hanoi and I spent time in Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City.

02:00:40.000 It was a sentiment that was expressed in more of a semi-spiritual way in the North than it was in the South.

02:00:49.000 Now, a translator that I had hired told me, I don't eat dog.

02:00:56.000 He said, I don't eat dog because I have a dog.

02:01:00.000 I went to his house to see his dog.

02:01:03.000 I come in and the dog is in a small cage.

02:01:08.000 Probably...

02:01:09.000 I'm not exaggerating.

02:01:10.000 I say it was probably maybe two feet by three and a half feet.

02:01:15.000 And it's a wire mesh cage and there's like a drip pan below it basically to collect the animal's waste.

02:01:22.000 Whoa.

02:01:23.000 And there's a bowl of rice.

02:01:25.000 And the dog... 0.92

02:01:27.000 Just goes apeshit when we come in. 0.95

02:01:30.000 And just looking at the dog, it just did not seem like a well dog. 0.85

02:01:35.000 I said to him, and he lives on a very busy street in Hanoi.

02:01:40.000 You walk out and it's just full Vietnam mayhem. 0.99

02:01:43.000 Scooters, it's just insane.

02:01:45.000 And I said to him, so you just take him out, you can just go walk him here.

02:01:51.000 And he kind of looks at me like he doesn't understand what I'm talking about.

02:01:55.000 And it turns out that that dog hadn't been out of that cage since he brought it home.

02:02:01.000 That was his pet dog, which he kept like a parakeet.

02:02:04.000 Jesus Christ.

02:02:06.000 He said, I wouldn't eat.

02:02:07.000 Now, conversely, in Natrang, I went out to a farm.

02:02:15.000 Or a guy has a small plot of land.

02:02:19.000 Basically, there's a system there where you have very poor farmers who don't own the land, but it's state-owned land, government-owned land, but they have subsistence farms.

02:02:28.000 And this guy raised sugar cane.

02:02:31.000 He had an air gun.

02:02:32.000 He can't have a regular gun, but he had an air gun and he would hunt various arboreal marsupials and things to eat.

02:02:39.000 And he had some water, a river flowing through his place.

02:02:42.000 And he had a small amount of livestock and raised some crops and peppers and various things.

02:02:47.000 And he had a bunch of dogs running around on his place.

02:02:49.000 Just pet dogs.

02:02:51.000 He was explaining to me that now and then, when the dogs are bred up To a number that's hard to support them.

02:02:59.000 The dog buyer comes.

02:03:02.000 And the dog buyer will give you some cash for your excess dog population.

02:03:07.000 And those are the dogs that go into the markets of Vietnam.

02:03:13.000 Other countries actually have places where they're like breeding and rearing dogs for slaughter. 0.97

02:03:18.000 But that was the Vietnamese system.

02:03:22.000 So, it wound up being like, of many interesting things about this whole thing, it wound up being like, comparing this guy's pet To this guy's livestock.

02:03:31.000 You sort of got into this thing, which is the more enviable position?

02:03:36.000 Livestock. 1.00

02:03:37.000 I'll take that life over and live it in the cage and shitting onto a grate. 0.98

02:03:42.000 And I went to visit a guy, actually a wholesaler, who buys the dogs from farmers out in the countryside. 0.99

02:03:51.000 And he comes back and they would fatten the dogs on beef stomach, beef trim.

02:03:58.000 Basically the stuff that in the U.S. we send to rendering plants.

02:04:01.000 Like when they slaughter cattle, most everything, you know, once the meat's gone, everything goes to a rendering plant.

02:04:06.000 He would buy basically what U.S. production facilities send to a rendering plant, and that's what he would fatten dog on.

02:04:12.000 And you'd go to the markets and they'd have dogs stacked, like just dog parts stacked up in pyramids at the market.

02:04:19.000 It was bizarre to see, man.

02:04:20.000 And I tell you, I went out in different places and with different people and different things.

02:04:27.000 I went out for seven nights in a row.

02:04:29.000 And I could never get beyond my own biases.

02:04:37.000 About what's food and what's not food.

02:04:39.000 It was just very difficult for me to eat it and fake my way through.

02:04:46.000 And it was hard.

02:04:47.000 So I do understand.

02:04:49.000 When people come to me and they're looking, they're like, hey man, a bear?

02:04:53.000 I'm a hunter.

02:04:55.000 I've hunted and eaten hundreds and hundreds of pounds of black bear meat.

02:05:00.000 When people come in, they're like, dude, I just...

02:05:01.000 I don't want to act like they're coming...

02:05:04.000 When people come to me and express disapproval, I don't want to act like I can't understand where they're coming from, because I had the same thing I felt there.

02:05:13.000 I remember making the argument, and I never fact-checked it, but I feel like there are more people in this world who live in a country where it's socially acceptable to eat dog meat than not.

02:05:27.000 I haven't formally fact-checked that, but I remember looking at some basic figures and thinking that that was true.

02:05:34.000 Well, it's interesting that we choose to not eat pigs, but pigs are probably as intelligent, if not more so.

02:05:40.000 Choose to eat pigs.

02:05:40.000 Choose to eat pigs, rather.

02:05:41.000 Probably as intelligent or more than dogs. 0.76

02:05:45.000 Yeah.

02:05:46.000 And dogs are probably more dangerous when they're feral than pigs are.

02:05:51.000 Yeah.

02:05:51.000 When pigs are feral, they generally avoid people.

02:05:53.000 When dogs are feral, they don't always.

02:05:56.000 I mean, there was an instance a couple years ago outside of Atlanta where an elderly couple was attacked and someone was killed by wild dogs.

02:06:04.000 The Australian dingo traces back to being a dog who owes its ancestry to human activities.

02:06:13.000 Does it really?

02:06:14.000 So it used to be a domesticated animal?

02:06:16.000 Yeah, it was a very early form.

02:06:18.000 Wow.

02:06:19.000 Jamie, check that out and make sure I'm right about that, what the genetic history of the dingo is. 1.00

02:06:24.000 What's their wild dog called?

02:06:25.000 The dingo, right?

02:06:26.000 The dingo, yeah.

02:06:27.000 It's the dingo, yeah. 1.00

02:06:28.000 Yeah, I think it's some kind of, it's like a dog breed. 1.00

02:06:32.000 You'd probably find Adam Greentree holding one up by his ankles with a fucking bow hole. 1.00

02:06:38.000 Arrowhole. 1.00

02:06:39.000 It says it's a wild dog.

02:06:40.000 It says wild.

02:06:41.000 But what's its ancestry?

02:06:47.000 Just Google dingoes were once domestic dogs.

02:06:53.000 Dingo domesticated animal.

02:06:58.000 I'm looking at the genetic status, origin.

02:07:02.000 Here, I'll just pull it up so you can see it.

02:07:03.000 Indian wolf and Arabian wolf.

02:07:05.000 Where did it evolve from?

02:07:07.000 Hmm.

02:07:09.000 Man, I don't feel like I'm wrong.

02:07:13.000 Hmm, interesting.

02:07:14.000 Widely held that dingoes have evolved into bred from the Indian wolf.

02:07:19.000 Yeah, right there.

02:07:20.000 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

02:07:22.000 Bred from.

02:07:24.000 Was assumed for all domestic dogs.

02:07:26.000 The theory was based on the morphological similarities of the dingo skulls and the skulls of these subspecies of wolves.

02:07:35.000 However, genetic analysis indicated that a much earlier domestication...

02:07:39.000 Huh.

02:07:40.000 Oh, so there is a domestication.

02:07:42.000 New studies suggest dingos may have originated in South China.

02:07:44.000 Okay.

02:07:45.000 So yeah, they were originally domesticated.

02:07:46.000 And arrived with humans.

02:07:47.000 Interesting.

02:07:48.000 So they were originally domesticated and then cut loose.

02:07:51.000 I mean, I've told you.

02:07:53.000 I mean, I had my own thing about bear, and then I hunted bear and ate bear, and then that thing went away.

02:08:00.000 Yeah.

02:08:01.000 I mean, that's what it is.

02:08:02.000 But it still doesn't seem the same to me as a deer.

02:08:06.000 Like, if you gave me a choice, hey, would you rather go hunt axis deer, which I've never hunted, seems so much more natural to me than go hunt black bear.

02:08:14.000 Yeah.

02:08:16.000 You know, I have such a complicated sets of feelings about black bears.

02:08:23.000 And as a hunter, strangely I've gotten to the thing where, maybe, before I even say that, I'm going to say why it's not quite strange.

02:08:32.000 I have found...

02:08:34.000 That a lot of big game hunters will do some amount of bear hunting, get a couple bears, and then drift away from bear hunting.

02:08:49.000 They still respect how difficult it is and how much you can learn about bears, but I find that a lot of people who've gotten some bears are always excited to go on a bear hunt if it's someone's first bear hunt.

02:09:03.000 They're like, you know, I have no desire.

02:09:05.000 If you want to go, I would love to go along.

02:09:07.000 Right.

02:09:08.000 But it's something that happens.

02:09:09.000 Whereas something like elk, the more you get and the more you eat, the more you want to get and the more you want to eat.

02:09:16.000 Right.

02:09:16.000 But don't you think that's a public pressure thing, though, in a lot of ways about bears?

02:09:20.000 Because I've described even to my friends about hunting bear and they just put their head back.

02:09:25.000 They're fine with me hunting deer.

02:09:26.000 They're fine with me hunting pigs.

02:09:28.000 Everybody seems to be in support of hunting pigs.

02:09:30.000 Yeah.

02:09:30.000 You know how my brother put the bear thing?

02:09:35.000 Here's the conundrum for him, and it's pretty simple.

02:09:38.000 A bear has a very beautiful, very usable hide.

02:09:42.000 Okay?

02:09:44.000 So, you know, like deer hides, you can, through a process, you can get like a buckskin from it.

02:09:49.000 You can get...

02:09:51.000 Some deer hides, you can get a pretty good, usable leather that they used to use to make apparel.

02:09:57.000 In fact, everybody knows Daniel Boone.

02:10:00.000 Much of his life was spent in the business of trading deer hides.

02:10:06.000 Daniel Boone was a commercial hunter.

02:10:07.000 He would go out and shoot whitetail deer.

02:10:10.000 In the summer, when their hides were thin, and sell them, and it was used for industrial workwear.

02:10:15.000 It was used for work apparel.

02:10:17.000 Like, basically, the 1750s version of Carhartt clothes was made out of deer hide, summer deer hides.

02:10:25.000 I'm not familiar with that term.

02:10:26.000 Carhartt?

02:10:26.000 What does that mean?

02:10:27.000 Like, Carhartt workwear?

02:10:29.000 Carhartt jackets?

02:10:30.000 Carhartt pants?

02:10:30.000 Jesus Christ, yo!

02:10:31.000 No.

02:10:32.000 I know Dickies. 0.67

02:10:33.000 Yeah, same thing.

02:10:33.000 Okay, I never heard of Carhartt, though.

02:10:35.000 Yeah, same thing.

02:10:36.000 Have you heard of it, Jamie?

02:10:36.000 Kind of.

02:10:37.000 You know, like work pants. 0.96

02:10:39.000 They've got a little holster for a hammer and shit on the side of them. 0.90

02:10:43.000 So they used to make them out of buckskin. 0.90

02:10:44.000 Yeah, like work apparel in his time was made from buckskin.

02:10:48.000 I bet those things smelled great at the end of the day.

02:10:50.000 Oh, dude, my dad saved a lot of his deer and had a sport coat made out of his own deer, and dude, that thing was amazing and smelled good.

02:10:59.000 Really?

02:10:59.000 Oh, dude, it was the nicest jacket.

02:11:00.000 I should steal it. 0.89

02:11:01.000 He's dead.

02:11:02.000 I should go dig around and stuff and find that coat.

02:11:05.000 It was dyed black.

02:11:06.000 It was a beautiful coat.

02:11:07.000 How come you never had one made?

02:11:08.000 You've shot a lot of deer.

02:11:11.000 That's what I'm going to get at.

02:11:12.000 It's like, yes, you can do stuff with it, but it's not really...

02:11:15.000 In today's age of other fabrics, it's not practical.

02:11:20.000 However, a bear hide has timeless beauty and timeless application.

02:11:26.000 Have you ever thought about making a jacket out of bear hide?

02:11:29.000 Yes.

02:11:30.000 Did you ever do it?

02:11:31.000 Yeah.

02:11:31.000 Well, no, because what I was doing for a long time was saving up my bear hides, and I wanted to cut them into like 9 or 10 inch squares and have a very large comforter made out of many different bears cut into squares.

02:11:43.000 Stitched.

02:11:43.000 I haven't given up on that idea.

02:11:45.000 But I give a lot of my bear hides away to people who really like them.

02:11:48.000 Anyway, when you get a bear, it's like no one in their right mind gets rid of a bear hide.

02:11:54.000 Right.

02:11:55.000 So, you get one, and you get it tanned, and then you got a bear hide.

02:11:59.000 And once you got a bear hide, and it's like on the floor, and then you got a bear hide over the back of the couch, and you got a bear hide hanging on the wall, you get to a point where you don't need any more bear hides.

02:12:10.000 You eat the meat and you have the hides, but you don't need more bear hides.

02:12:14.000 And when you get a bear, there's an expense to getting the hide prepared, but you feel wasteful not using the hide.

02:12:20.000 So it's very hard to shoot a bear just for meat.

02:12:23.000 Right.

02:12:23.000 Because you feel like you're wasting something that people really want.

02:12:26.000 And it's beautiful and people like to use it to decorate their homes and use it as a totem of the wild.

02:12:31.000 As opposed to a white-tailed deer where very few people do anything with the hides.

02:12:34.000 Yeah.

02:12:34.000 So now, like one day Danny was like, the last bear he got...

02:12:39.000 He got up to the bear and found himself just kind of, he goes, I just don't, I don't need, you know, like I look at it and I'm like, I have like a set of obligations to this animal now and I'm not excited about it anymore.

02:12:57.000 I don't want another bear hide.

02:12:59.000 It's an expense and he just, he never killed another bear.

02:13:02.000 Wow.

02:13:03.000 He's got some bear hides that he loves, but he just got to where...

02:13:06.000 He's got enough other stuff to eat.

02:13:08.000 He's a moose snob. 0.90

02:13:09.000 He kills a moose every year.

02:13:10.000 Likes to eat moose meat.

02:13:12.000 Feeds his family moose.

02:13:14.000 Feeds his family salmon, primarily.

02:13:15.000 Well, if he kills a moose every year, the other problem with that is you're talking about like 600 pounds of meat, right?

02:13:20.000 Yeah, he's got a family of four.

02:13:21.000 He burns through it plus.

02:13:23.000 Wow.

02:13:23.000 It's all he eats.

02:13:24.000 Yeah.

02:13:25.000 So...

02:13:26.000 But that's just kind of like where he got.

02:13:27.000 I knew a lot of people.

02:13:28.000 For whatever reason, I used to hunt bears as my other brother.

02:13:30.000 And then he don't...

02:13:33.000 When he's out at his wife's ranch, he'll see bears running around during bear season.

02:13:38.000 He doesn't even think about going and hunting for them.

02:13:41.000 And he used to hunt bears.

02:13:43.000 It's just like something happens and you just quit wanting to hunt bears.

02:13:46.000 One of my favorite episodes of yours was on the Prince of Wales Island where you had a bear in your sight and you just decided, I don't want to shoot this bear.

02:13:53.000 Yeah.

02:13:55.000 It's just, like, I really enjoy watching them.

02:13:59.000 I enjoy hunting them.

02:14:00.000 I enjoy making smoked black bear hams out of them.

02:14:02.000 But it's like, uh...

02:14:05.000 Would you ever do that with any other animal, though?

02:14:07.000 Do what?

02:14:08.000 Look at it and say, I don't want to shoot this.

02:14:09.000 Like, if you saw a mature mule deer, 180-inch mule deer...

02:14:14.000 No.

02:14:15.000 No, right?

02:14:16.000 Mm-mm.

02:14:17.000 Right.

02:14:17.000 But I could picture, like, with, you know...

02:14:21.000 There's a handful of animals that...

02:14:26.000 You know what it is?

02:14:29.000 One of the things is this.

02:14:32.000 I can't help but watch a bear.

02:14:35.000 If I'm out and I glass up a bear...

02:14:39.000 When I say I'm out-glass-up, I mean if I'm sitting on a big glass and tit or a glass and knob up some high where I have a commanding view of the landscape.

02:14:46.000 Glassing meaning use your binoculars to look at the landscape.

02:14:49.000 The way I generally hunt, I hunt a lot of open country in the American West and in Alaska and things where you have good visibility.

02:14:58.000 The bulk of the time I spend hunting, I spend on a good lookout point.

02:15:05.000 A high point where you can see a good 180 degree view or maybe not always 180, sometimes 360, whatever, a commanding view of the surrounding landscape.

02:15:14.000 And we generally hunt by sitting there and observing with binoculars and just watching, watching, watching to the point where sometimes we'll spend days doing nothing but watching.

02:15:29.000 Animals, through binoculars.

02:15:31.000 And when you get good at this, you find animals that people would never in a million years find, that other people would never in a million years locate.

02:15:38.000 When I'm doing that, and I find a bear, and I'm observing a bear, I would never leave that bear to go do some other thing.

02:15:53.000 When you find a bear, like when I find a bear, I watch him until he's gone.

02:15:58.000 You can't turn away from him because I always feel like at any point he's gonna do some amazing thing that would blow your mind.

02:16:07.000 Like what?

02:16:08.000 I don't know. 0.62

02:16:09.000 Like crush something's skull.

02:16:10.000 I don't know.

02:16:13.000 They are always doing weird things.

02:16:15.000 They eat a vast array of things.

02:16:18.000 My friend John Dudley was watching a bear through his binoculars, and he saw a bear run up on a moose and smash it on the back and crush it.

02:16:25.000 That's what I'm talking about.

02:16:26.000 He saw a grizzly smash a moose on the back and break its back, literally hit it so hard that it snapped the moose's back, and then he tackled it once it was down and started eating it.

02:16:37.000 I haven't seen that, but that's what I'm looking for.

02:16:39.000 So you watch them, and there's a sort of anticipation with seeing them.

02:16:46.000 Deer, they're very interesting, and the more you watch them, the more you learn about them.

02:16:51.000 And the thing that I've always been fascinated by and was talking about with some friends of mine recently was how interested I've become in interpersonal relationships among mule deer, like the body language they use.

02:17:04.000 And how you can locate deer that you can't see just based on body language of deer that you can see.

02:17:12.000 Hmm.

02:17:13.000 That you watch them and you become aware of things they're aware of and you learn where other things are that are out of your view just by how, just by what it's doing.

02:17:24.000 Both male and female? 0.56

02:17:25.000 Generally it's dope.

02:17:28.000 Sometimes.

02:17:29.000 In a general, the most obvious one is does that know there's a buck around.

02:17:34.000 You took me for...

02:17:35.000 In their body language there.

02:17:36.000 And then does that are encountering another band of does have a body language they use.

02:17:41.000 And you just get used to this and you sort of have it in your database.

02:17:44.000 Yeah, and then once you see it, you go like, oh, he knows about it.

02:17:47.000 There's a deer somewhere that's not in that group and that deer is aware of the fact that the deer is not in the group and it's like wondering about it.

02:17:55.000 And you just see that.

02:17:56.000 So I'm interested in that kind of stuff.

02:17:57.000 But I can walk away from deer.

02:18:01.000 There's some deer and I can just go look in another direction.

02:18:04.000 Something about me makes me stare at bears.

02:18:06.000 Wow.

02:18:07.000 I can't give up on them.

02:18:08.000 I'm watching them, watching them, watching them.

02:18:10.000 Do you have the same feeling about wolverines?

02:18:12.000 That was the first Wolverine I've ever seen in my whole life.

02:18:14.000 That was the thing on my checklist.

02:18:18.000 Large land mammals, that was the one I was missing.

02:18:22.000 So you've never seen one?

02:18:23.000 Yeah, large American land mammals, that was the one missing from my list.

02:18:28.000 Do you think you'd feel a feeling of remorse if you shot the only one you saw?

02:18:32.000 That's why I said I wasn't going to touch that Wolverine.

02:18:35.000 Because of that?

02:18:36.000 Yeah.

02:18:36.000 I even said right then and there, I said, I'm not going to shoot the first one of something I saw.

02:18:40.000 That's why I feel like, when I was talking earlier about the black hole of Africa, I always imagine guys going to Africa and being like, no shit, that's what one of those shoot looked like. 0.99

02:18:48.000 Bam! 0.99

02:18:51.000 Well, that's what it is.

02:18:52.000 Yeah, so I just didn't, I hadn't built up a context about it.

02:18:55.000 So then we were talking about it.

02:18:56.000 So if you see another one, yeah, I'd reconsider.

02:18:59.000 But no, I didn't want to shoot the first Wolverine I ever laid eyes on.

02:19:02.000 That's why I was trying to get, you know, Giannis has seen, You know, he's been out caribou hunting and watched wolverines scavenging caribou carcasses.

02:19:11.000 And so I was like, you know, he's not the first one you saw.

02:19:14.000 And we just dilly-dallied.

02:19:15.000 And so he could have shot it because it wasn't the first one he saw.

02:19:18.000 Yeah, but no one was feeling any...

02:19:21.000 It was just one of those things.

02:19:22.000 No one was feeling anything.

02:19:22.000 I felt great to see one.

02:19:24.000 I remember watching my...

02:19:25.000 You talk about the way a white-tailed deer looks at you.

02:19:27.000 I remember watching the first lynx I ever saw.

02:19:29.000 And I feel that I'm anthropomorphizing...

02:19:49.000 Wow.

02:19:50.000 Wow.

02:19:55.000 And he's like, is this good?

02:19:58.000 Is it bad?

02:20:00.000 What does this mean?

02:20:01.000 And you see him kind of like run through all these calculations in his mind and then just drift off.

02:20:06.000 Like after a while he's like, eh, something about it.

02:20:11.000 This thing's got its eyes, him looking at me, like his eyes are centered on his face.

02:20:18.000 Right, like a predator.

02:20:20.000 Maybe.

02:20:21.000 Yeah, and it's standing straight up for some weird reason.

02:20:23.000 And that tells me something.

02:20:25.000 You know?

02:20:26.000 He's looking at me very intently.

02:20:27.000 He's not trying to act like I'm not there and therefore he can't see me, you know?

02:20:31.000 And you just see him kind of run it through his head and just be like, yeah, nothing good's gonna come out of this.

02:20:37.000 And then go off the other direction.

02:20:38.000 But just based on where I was, yeah, I mean, it's very safe to say he'd never run into a person and I'd never run into a Lynx. 0.99

02:20:44.000 We just had this moment of...

02:20:47.000 I carry a cultural awareness, so I at least knew about what I was looking at, but he was in this point of just processing.

02:20:59.000 Unlike the whitetail that you encountered, who damn sure knew what that thing carries with it. 0.99

02:21:05.000 Yeah, we talked about it before the podcast started, but I was hunting with my friend John Dudley, and we were in the tree stand, and we were supposed to get down at 1.30, and at 1.25, I'm like, what do you want?

02:21:15.000 You want to call it?

02:21:16.000 You want to go eat lunch?

02:21:17.000 He's like, yeah.

02:21:17.000 So I climbed down first, and at 1.25, like five fucking minutes before we said it, and this big, mature whitetail walks through, and John signals to me, does the bowwinkle thing, putting his thumbs on his head, and he starts pointing, and then I realize there's a deer coming down the path,

02:21:34.000 and so I kind of hide behind the tree, but there was all these branches in front of me.

02:21:38.000 Anyway, you've already heard the story, but for the people listening, the deer locked eyes with me.

02:21:42.000 And there was this intensity, like immediate intensity in his eyes that I'd never experienced an animal looking at me like.

02:21:49.000 It was very tuned in.

02:21:52.000 He knew exactly that I shouldn't be there, and I just froze.

02:21:55.000 I was wearing camo.

02:21:56.000 He's looking me right in the face.

02:21:58.000 And his eyes were bulging out of his head.

02:22:00.000 He turned around and bolted.

02:22:02.000 But it's like an electricity to them.

02:22:04.000 Like, they know.

02:22:05.000 I have very vivid memories of when I was 12 and had just hit legal hunting age in Michigan, and I was sitting on the ground hunting squirrels on a farm owned by a man named Alan Zerlot.

02:22:22.000 And leaning against a tree and having a four-corn whitetail coming through the woods...

02:22:31.000 And, you know, a buck like that, this isn't always true, but generally a four-crumbed whitetail is a year and a half old.

02:22:38.000 Even at that time, you start hunting squirrels September 15 in Michigan.

02:22:41.000 So, I mean, that deer was, you know, he could have been as little as 15, 16 months old.

02:22:50.000 He locked onto me, saw me.

02:22:56.000 And looked in my eyes, but didn't know what the hell I was.

02:22:59.000 I remember him coming at me and coming at me and coming at me and getting so scared.

02:23:04.000 And I had always known there's a thing, you don't yell in the woods.

02:23:09.000 You don't make noise in the woods.

02:23:10.000 You try to be quiet in the woods.

02:23:12.000 I remember grabbing sticks and trying to snap them.

02:23:16.000 To make a noise to make that deer spook off, you know?

02:23:19.000 But being, like, conflicted between just being scared shitless and doing the thing you don't do, like, as a hunter, you just learn, like, don't make loud noises in the woods.

02:23:28.000 When people make loud noises in the woods, it makes me cringe, man.

02:23:31.000 What's interesting about this mature deer that saw me and freaked out when he saw me is that literally a minute before that, because when I was down, that deer came through with two other deer, and one of them looked to be like maybe a two-year-old deer, and one of them was a baby.

02:23:46.000 One of them was like one-year-old, and the one-year-old got within 15 feet of me.

02:23:50.000 I just pinned up against the tree, and the one-year-old walked right by me, had no idea I was alive.

02:23:54.000 The other one that was a younger deer...

02:23:57.000 Walked by me, didn't look my direction at all.

02:23:59.000 The old one looked right at me. 1.00

02:24:01.000 He's like, fuck this. 1.00

02:24:03.000 He knew right away. 1.00

02:24:04.000 He'd seen people before.

02:24:06.000 They're in Iowa, and Iowa's really different because Iowa's a great state for bow hunting because they have a very short gun season.

02:24:13.000 It's only shotgun.

02:24:14.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

02:24:15.000 You don't get a big rifle harvest.

02:24:17.000 Right.

02:24:17.000 So a lot of what they're dealing with is bow hunters.

02:24:20.000 So, I mean, he might have known that I had a bow. 0.99

02:24:23.000 I mean, who the fuck knows? 1.00

02:24:24.000 He might have saw a bow and said, I've seen that fucking thing before. 1.00

02:24:27.000 Somebody shot me in the ass with one of those a year ago. 1.00

02:24:29.000 That's one of the things I like about big bucks. 0.99

02:24:31.000 You know, I think that culturally in this country, we're kind of getting where it's almost like this accepted idea that you're supposed to hate trophy hunters, right?

02:24:40.000 But I eat everything I kill.

02:24:44.000 And I will even talk about, there's like meat bucks and shooter bucks, right?

02:24:49.000 I mean, there's like big, huge bucks that are cool and meat bucks that you eat, but I always eat my shooter bucks.

02:24:54.000 It's not like you shoot big bucks.

02:24:56.000 One, it's illegal.

02:24:57.000 Two, I love them.

02:24:58.000 You can Pepsi challenge them.

02:25:00.000 I can Pepsi challenge a five-year-old deer and a two-year-old deer, and you can't...

02:25:04.000 Well, you can because you're really good at cooking.

02:25:07.000 Yeah, but I'm saying, yeah, if you know how to cut it and trim it and stuff, they're great, right?

02:25:11.000 Yeah.

02:25:11.000 So...

02:25:12.000 Point being, I do like to look for big animals.

02:25:18.000 If I have two deer and I can go after a small one or go after a big one, I like to go after the big one.

02:25:24.000 One of the things I like about going after the big one and the challenge of it is that they are harder to get.

02:25:30.000 And the reason they're harder to get is because they have learned from mistakes.

02:25:37.000 A big buck to an experienced hunter, when he sees a big buck, he sees more than the antlers.

02:25:45.000 The antlers wind up kind of becoming symbolic of something, of a very worthy, challenging quarry, because he hasn't made any mistakes yet.

02:25:53.000 Right.

02:25:54.000 You can have big bucks in areas that have very low predation and low hunter pressure, and he could get big and still make some mistakes, because he doesn't have as many mistakes that could be made.

02:26:07.000 But a really big buck in an area that has a lot of lions, a lot of coyotes, wolves, human hunters, he's big because he hasn't messed up.

02:26:17.000 He hasn't fucked up. 1.00

02:26:18.000 Doesn't fuck up. 0.99

02:26:20.000 He remembers stuff. 0.99

02:26:22.000 We had an occasion to watch, we were hunting in Colorado hunting mule deer this year, and we watched, I glassed up a pretty nice buck and they went up and do an aspen grove.

02:26:34.000 He was traveling with a bunch of does, and they all go into an Aspen Grove. 0.93

02:26:38.000 Later, Giannis was looking above there, and he said there's some coyotes rolling down into that Aspen Grove where all the deer went.

02:26:46.000 It's now the middle of the day, and it's rifle season.

02:26:49.000 It's been rifle season on and off through a couple of weeks of hunting season.

02:26:53.000 The coyotes go into the aspen grove.

02:26:55.000 All those deer come pouring out of that aspen grove.

02:26:58.000 I, at the time, commented how it seemed like someone was squeezing a tube of toothpaste the way the deer came shooting out of that aspen grove and ran out across a large sage flat, exposing themselves.

02:27:10.000 The one deer out of the group that didn't walk out of that sage, that didn't walk out of that aspen grove, was the big buck.

02:27:18.000 Never budged.

02:27:20.000 Because he ran a calculation in his head Where he's like, I get it.

02:27:26.000 Y'all scared of those coyotes?

02:27:28.000 I'm afraid of the unknown.

02:27:30.000 I would rather stay in here in my little thicket.

02:27:32.000 And he stood up.

02:27:33.000 We could see him stand up in there. 1.00

02:27:35.000 That son of a bitch would not move. 1.00

02:27:36.000 And that was during the rut. 1.00

02:27:38.000 So everything in his body is saying chase those does and breed those does. 1.00

02:27:42.000 That's all he's thinking about is breeding does. 1.00

02:27:44.000 A dumb buck would have chased those does. 1.00

02:27:48.000 If not for fear of the coyote, he would have chased the does just for fear that another buck was going to go breed them. 1.00

02:27:53.000 But he resisted that.

02:27:56.000 Right?

02:27:56.000 He resisted the fear of the coyotes.

02:27:58.000 But he's like, I know that there is trouble when you run out in the open. 1.00

02:28:05.000 Shit shoots at you. 1.00

02:28:06.000 Or whatever he knew. 1.00

02:28:08.000 Wow.

02:28:08.000 And he just sweated it out.

02:28:12.000 You know?

02:28:13.000 Wow.

02:28:13.000 So it's like, he didn't, like, and he lived.

02:28:16.000 Right?

02:28:17.000 He didn't mess up.

02:28:19.000 Well, a big buck like that is also kind of threatening to a coyote, too.

02:28:22.000 Yeah, I'm sure that's part of it.

02:28:23.000 Yeah.

02:28:24.000 I'm sure that's part of it.

02:28:25.000 But it's just like, there's a threat, instinctively or whatever.

02:28:30.000 Because here's the thing.

02:28:31.000 They were not interested in those deer.

02:28:33.000 They weren't chasing them.

02:28:34.000 I think they know because they lose fawns to them all the time.

02:28:38.000 I mean, they see stuff die from them.

02:28:40.000 But it's like, you know, right now, a couple coyotes at that time of year isn't going to drag down a healthy fine mule deer.

02:28:46.000 They weren't even chasing them.

02:28:47.000 But he just, like, he knew.

02:28:49.000 You know?

02:28:50.000 And that's one of the things I admire about, like, the old ones.

02:28:53.000 If you can go into areas that have heavy hunting pressure and consistently find those deer, it's, you know, it's like...

02:29:01.000 It's the highest challenge.

02:29:03.000 Yeah, man.

02:29:04.000 I respect it.

02:29:05.000 Yeah.

02:29:06.000 I respect it.

02:29:07.000 Well, it's a very difficult quarry, and when you're eating that animal, I mean, there's a completely different sense of not just accomplishment, but connection to that animal than...

02:29:17.000 Buying some steak in a store or shooting some button buck.

02:29:21.000 Oh, yeah.

02:29:23.000 It's such a...

02:29:25.000 That's the thing.

02:29:26.000 It winds up being such an obvious conversation that you sometimes feel like it's...

02:29:31.000 That having that conversation with people who don't get it is like shooting fish in a barrel.

02:29:36.000 Right.

02:29:36.000 It's so obvious and so easy that you almost feel like a little bit...

02:29:40.000 Like almost unfair to bring it up.

02:29:43.000 Well, you probably do.

02:29:45.000 Yeah, well, I do because I'm like...

02:29:47.000 For the same reason why you're challenged to chase after big bucks.

02:29:50.000 You're telling me that somehow, if you eat meat, that somehow the system by which you go about getting meat through farms and stores and shit like that is somehow morally or aesthetically or ethically or somehow superior To me eating an animal that I've hunted myself from a sustainable population that's well-managed and that I've decorated my home with its parts 0.79

02:30:20.000 that will be there until I die and then will decorate the homes of my children. 0.93

02:30:26.000 If you're telling me somehow that I'm like depraved For that, I have a hard time engaging in the conversation.

02:30:35.000 Because I just don't understand it. 0.98

02:30:36.000 Well, with other meat eaters, it's a ridiculous conversation. 0.94

02:30:39.000 It's a very short-sighted conversation.

02:30:41.000 And it's part of the problem is that people have so many things going on in their lives.

02:30:45.000 If you have a job, and you have a family, and you have some sort of hobby, you've eliminated 90% of your time.

02:30:52.000 Yeah.

02:30:52.000 How much time do you have to actually immerse yourself in wildlife and understand the politics of it, understand what's really going on out there in the world?

02:30:59.000 How many people have actually...

02:31:01.000 I've seen an overhead view of the Pacific Northwest and looked down at all the forest and just done the calculations in their head about these animals and how many of them there are and how much of the Wild West is filled with animals.

02:31:16.000 But that doesn't stop people from having opinions on ships.

02:31:18.000 Of course.

02:31:19.000 Of course it doesn't.

02:31:20.000 They're just not educated.

02:31:21.000 It's the reason why after all these years I still have no opinion on Obamacare.

02:31:29.000 Because I do not understand it.

02:31:30.000 So I'll point out, like, I have no opinion. 0.98

02:31:32.000 And I'm trying to have this infectious result on people where people will stop talking about shit they don't fully understand. 0.99

02:31:38.000 No, people have these knee-jerk opinions. 0.99

02:31:40.000 They lock them in.

02:31:42.000 Like, this is, as a left-wing person, I think this.

02:31:44.000 As a right-wing person, I think that. 0.94

02:31:46.000 And I think, as we pointed out, you and I both believe that that's a ridiculous perspective. 0.84

02:31:51.000 Can I close with a bit of flattery?

02:31:53.000 Please.

02:31:55.000 It didn't occur to me until I was coming down here today, but I've been railing a lot on the echo chamber that we all live in.

02:32:06.000 And I think if anyone goes and you look at your Facebook feed or any number of things, we surround ourselves with people who tell us what we think.

02:32:18.000 And it's kind of become very obvious.

02:32:20.000 And I think that this presidential election cycle really brought it out where you had just two vastly different narratives.

02:32:27.000 Playing out.

02:32:28.000 And people on each side of it feeling so absolutely certain that not only were they right, but that everyone felt the way they felt.

02:32:37.000 And it's just been a big part of the national conversation, like the echo chamber thing.

02:32:43.000 What I have found with people that listen to your show, who come up to me and be like, oh, I heard you on Joe's show the times I've been on there, is that you've somehow managed to defy that Where you have the right-wing nutjobs and the left-wing nutjobs all listening to you at the same time.

02:33:07.000 In the middle of the rotors.

02:33:09.000 But when someone comes up and says, I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast, I'm always thinking, what does that make you?

02:33:17.000 It doesn't mean anything.

02:33:21.000 It's like, I don't know.

02:33:22.000 Just the fact that you listen to it, I don't know.

02:33:24.000 That doesn't tell me anything about you, other than that you'd like to wrestle with ideas. 0.71

02:33:29.000 Because this is one of the few places where people are talking about shit, and you talk about stuff and bring it up, where it's like, people are willing, because of you and the way you handle it, they're willing to subject themselves to disparate views for a minute. 0.55

02:33:44.000 And I don't know what it is, the formula, if you've even thought about it. 0.96

02:33:48.000 But it's a nice invention.

02:33:50.000 It's just how I look at things, I think.

02:33:53.000 I have my rigid lines that I won't cross, where I think something is evil or something is ethically wrong, but I'm willing to entertain ideas, and I'm not rigid.

02:34:05.000 If someone comes to me and they tell me that I'm wrong about something, I'll go, really?

02:34:09.000 Like, how am I wrong?

02:34:10.000 If they tell me I'm wrong, I'm like, oh, I'm fucking wrong.

02:34:13.000 I didn't know I was wrong.

02:34:14.000 Like, I'm not married to my ideas.

02:34:16.000 And I think that's a real problem that people have where they define themselves by their knowledge.

02:34:21.000 They think they're smart or they think they're valuable.

02:34:27.000 Because they have a certain amount of information in their head.

02:34:29.000 And I think that's crazy.

02:34:30.000 Especially as you start getting into more things or exploring new subjects and new topics, you realize it is impossible to know everything.

02:34:38.000 It's not possible.

02:34:39.000 So for you to define yourself by the knowledge that you know or the knowledge you don't know, it seems kind of crazy.

02:34:46.000 I think you're far better off defining yourself, not even defining yourself, but far better off approaching the world By searching for the truth, you know, and not being connected or married to any ideas, it's far too often people get into these discussions with people and it becomes a game of trying to win,

02:35:07.000 you know, trying to one-up the person with information or data and then coming off of that with a victory.

02:35:12.000 Yeah, no, I'm with you.

02:35:13.000 Yeah, I mean, that's what you're seeing on all these news shows, man.

02:35:16.000 One of the things that I did during the election was while the debates were going on and post-debate, I would bounce back and forth and spend an hour on Fox News and an hour on CNN. And I was like, what is the world?

02:35:27.000 This is so baffling because these are just enforced narratives from one side and the other.

02:35:32.000 And I think the country suffers because of that.

02:35:35.000 People suffer because of that.

02:35:37.000 It's a tribal inclination that I think we have.

02:35:40.000 To support one side or the other or to adopt these predetermined patterns of behavior or predetermined belief systems.

02:35:48.000 Or that it's shameful to switch positions.

02:35:52.000 Yeah, that you're a flip-flopper. 1.00

02:35:54.000 Like, how the fuck do you not learn? 0.99

02:35:56.000 I mean, you can't be right all the time and you can have preconceived notions that turn out to be incorrect and you have to be able to recognize those. 0.99

02:36:04.000 Yeah.

02:36:05.000 It's good.

02:36:07.000 I enjoy talking to you.

02:36:09.000 I enjoy talking to you too.

02:36:11.000 Thank you.

02:36:12.000 It's always fun, man.

02:36:13.000 We should definitely do this more often.

02:36:15.000 But I think, yeah, I mean, I appreciate that perspective that you have, too, that you are willing to say, like, I don't have an opinion on Obamacare because I really don't know enough about it.

02:36:26.000 That's really healthy and really important and, for some reason, really rare, especially with a well-read person like yourself. 0.98

02:36:33.000 And it makes you sound a little bit like a dumbass. 0.99

02:36:35.000 It does! 1.00

02:36:36.000 I sound like a dumbass all the time, but I'm willing to say it, you know? 0.99

02:36:39.000 You know, I would be remiss if we ended this podcast without discussing The Revenant, because you fucking crushed me on that. 0.99

02:36:45.000 I loved that movie. 1.00

02:36:46.000 I thought it was badass, and I found out it was all bullshit! 0.99

02:36:49.000 I only have a couple minutes, so I gotta leave. 0.99

02:36:54.000 Explain everything that was bullshit about The Revenant. 0.73

02:36:56.000 First, I want to say, my dear friend and colleague, Mo Fallon, loves The Revenant. 0.89

02:37:03.000 I love Mo.

02:37:04.000 He was out of town.

02:37:05.000 He was hoping to come by and say hi, but he's in...

02:37:08.000 Where is he?

02:37:09.000 He's in the Middle East somewhere.

02:37:10.000 Is he doing parts of Oman?

02:37:11.000 No, he's in Oman right now, in Jordan.

02:37:13.000 So he loves it because of the cinematography.

02:37:16.000 And that's the end of the conversation for him.

02:37:19.000 But he's a cinematographer.

02:37:20.000 Right.

02:37:21.000 Now, as a student of American history and someone whose favorite era is the Mountain Man era, which ran...

02:37:31.000 A way to define the Mountain Man era would be it began...

02:37:35.000 Kind of like the moment Lewis and Clark made it back to St. Louis after their expedition, and a man named John Coulter turned around and went back out west to trap Beaver.

02:37:47.000 The Mountain Man era began, one could argue, that day.

02:37:52.000 And it ended when the last rendezvous was held for the Free Trappers, which was in the 1840s.

02:37:58.000 Very short period in time.

02:38:00.000 That's my favorite time period in American history, is the Mountain Man era.

02:38:03.000 And it was the great escapades and discoveries and adventures of the Mountain Men played out in the arid west.

02:38:14.000 In the willow-lined riparian zones of the American Great Plains and intermontane valleys.

02:38:23.000 By taking the most famous story from the Mountain Man era, which was the mauling by bear of...

02:38:29.000 Why is his name not Colt?

02:38:32.000 What's his name?

02:38:33.000 Glass.

02:38:34.000 Hugh Glass.

02:38:35.000 By taking that story and setting it in B.C. along the edges of the boreal forest in a sopping, dripping landscape of conifers...

02:38:51.000 Was just a distortion of everything.

02:38:54.000 It'd be like if you were making a movie about the people who came when Washington and Franklin and everyone came together to draw up the American Constitution, and you said it like in the jungles of Thailand.

02:39:07.000 Okay?

02:39:08.000 It's like, instead of Philadelphia.

02:39:10.000 It just struck me to the core.

02:39:13.000 Hugh Glass did not have a child.

02:39:17.000 He did not have a son who he was avenging.

02:39:20.000 Hugh Glass got mauled by a bear, and they left him in the protection of Jim Bridger, a very young Jim Bridger who was a teenager, and another guy.

02:39:28.000 And Hugh Glass, through much struggle, crawled his way back to a fort, and he later confronted Bridger and said, just so you know, buddy, next time someone leaves you to watch a guy die in the woods, don't leave him laying around by himself.

02:39:45.000 And that was all he did.

02:39:47.000 That's it.

02:39:48.000 It's a story of forgiveness.

02:39:50.000 Whoa.

02:39:51.000 Now, in the movie, he does forgive Bridger, who cowers, but then he has to go after the guy that killed the son he didn't have.

02:39:58.000 And it's like, if you love the story as it exists, to me it's like the Bible.

02:40:04.000 It'd be like if you were going to go film a movie about the Bible, but change real big parts of it.

02:40:08.000 He added aliens.

02:40:09.000 Yeah, or like...

02:40:12.000 It was how people felt when...

02:40:14.000 It was probably how people felt when Last Temptation to Christ came out.

02:40:18.000 And they had the Christ figure lusting for...

02:40:22.000 I can't remember.

02:40:24.000 It was an abomination, right?

02:40:26.000 So for me to take parts of...

02:40:31.000 A story that demonstrates sort of the American landscape and American grit and turn it into a British Columbian, you know, a Canadian farce.

02:40:43.000 It just was insulting to me.

02:40:45.000 Well, how about the fact that he fell off a cliff and landed on a tree?

02:40:48.000 A lot of that stuff was upsetting to me.

02:40:50.000 That's all fake.

02:40:51.000 None of that happened.

02:40:52.000 No, he did a lot of crawling.

02:40:54.000 I think he ate a rattlesnake.

02:40:57.000 He came across a wolf kill and scavenged some parts from it.

02:41:03.000 And most of what he was doing was crawling.

02:41:05.000 Could he walk at all?

02:41:07.000 I don't know at what point he started to walk, but he started out crawling.

02:41:10.000 It's a great story. 0.99

02:41:12.000 I would have done a damn movie like that. 0.99

02:41:14.000 I would have called it The Crawling Person. 0.99

02:41:17.000 Sort of like Tom Hanks in Lost when he's on the island.

02:41:21.000 It's a lot of struggle, right?

02:41:22.000 It's not like he makes his own teletype machine and starts sending messages to the rest of the world.

02:41:27.000 And I can see how it went.

02:41:29.000 I've been around in business enough where I can see that there are forces at play where they probably went and they were saying, you know what? 0.99

02:41:39.000 I get all that shit, but you better put a love interest in this thing. 1.00

02:41:42.000 Well, isn't that in a lot of ways similar to your experiences in Hollywood when you were doing your first show? 0.99

02:41:48.000 Yeah.

02:41:48.000 I mean, what was it?

02:41:50.000 The Wild Within?

02:41:51.000 Wild Within.

02:41:52.000 Yeah.

02:41:52.000 When I saw your first show, and then I spoke with you about it, and you were telling me they were trying to let a moose loose, and then you would shoot it.

02:42:00.000 They had a captive moose.

02:42:01.000 Well, it was an early conversation I had where I was trying to explain, and I'm like, you know what?

02:42:05.000 It's pretty hard.

02:42:06.000 Like, a lot of times stuff doesn't show up, and a guy who I later became friends with and have a lot of respect for, but he was new to hunting and was not new to television, was new to hunting, and he was saying, well, that's why they have animal wranglers.

02:42:16.000 And that was just one of the early conversations we had.

02:42:19.000 I wound up liking him quite a bit, but yeah, it was...

02:42:23.000 I think that one of the things that gets reality television in trouble...

02:42:26.000 There's a fake anecdote I often tell about two kinds of producers, right?

02:42:32.000 Like a...

02:42:33.000 There's a producer who would say to you, how would you do that, whatever you're doing?

02:42:38.000 And you'd say, well, I'd take this really small little knife and I'd very carefully make a really delicate little incision right here.

02:42:50.000 And they would say, great, I'm going to film that.

02:42:54.000 And then there are ones that would go, but could you use a machete?

02:42:57.000 And I think that, you know, and those are two types of And luckily in my career, now I'm able to surround myself with people who like that little small knife.

02:43:13.000 Well, you got very fortunate in that you went to the Sportsman's Channel, which gives you essentially free reign.

02:43:19.000 Yeah, they don't mess with us.

02:43:21.000 I just have loved working with them in the way that they've just allowed us to do our own thing.

02:43:31.000 There's a lot of trust there, and there's a leap of faith there, and I like to think we haven't let them down.

02:43:35.000 You definitely honor that trust, and I think that's one of the reasons why your show is the first show of its kind to be on Netflix.

02:43:43.000 I think it's educating a lot of people.

02:43:45.000 It's not just a show that's...

02:43:48.000 A show preaching to the choir.

02:43:50.000 It's not just a show for enthusiasts.

02:43:52.000 It's a show that gives you an insight and a perspective into it.

02:43:55.000 I think you're the guy to do it, too, because I think the ethics that you carry...

02:44:00.000 Here's an important distinction.

02:44:02.000 Even though it's legal to use walkie-talkies and certain things in some places, you don't want to use them.

02:44:10.000 I had this thought the other day because I was listening to this podcast And these guys were discussing different lenses for optics, they were comparing spotting scopes, and they started talking about walkie-talkies, and it became this combination of things that guys love.

02:44:31.000 Guys love gadgets and tech things.

02:44:34.000 It became tech talk and gadget talk mixed with hunting.

02:44:40.000 I started thinking, when does this end?

02:44:43.000 Does it end with drones?

02:44:46.000 What if we come up with something far superior?

02:44:49.000 It's ending with drones.

02:44:52.000 But it does...

02:44:54.000 Knowing absolutely what's...

02:44:56.000 Sending a drone up in the air, it flies over.

02:44:59.000 Okay, the herd of elk is a mile to the left.

02:45:02.000 We can't see them from here because there's a ridge over us.

02:45:05.000 But we know where the wind is.

02:45:07.000 We can hook around this way and get those animals.

02:45:09.000 That is...

02:45:10.000 In your eyes, that's cheating.

02:45:14.000 Well, categorically at this point, it's illegal.

02:45:16.000 Is it illegal in every state?

02:45:17.000 No, but every state...

02:45:18.000 Every state...

02:45:20.000 The states where it matters because of having, like, open country, it is or is becoming, and it's not, you're not going to be, it's just not going to happen.

02:45:30.000 I mean, so many states are out in front.

02:45:31.000 I think 13 or 14 states have banned drones now.

02:45:33.000 It's great that they got out in front of it, because it sort of came out of nowhere, right?

02:45:37.000 Mm-hmm.

02:45:37.000 Two-way communications is something where a lot of, you know, some states, and I'm not talking, like, liberal softy states, man, Montana, Alaska, you can't use two-way communications to hunt.

02:45:48.000 Because they've decided that that's where you draw the line.

02:45:51.000 Yeah, because they might not even discuss an ethics thing, but it's something that goes back to the great conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold, where he had said, we spent a lot of energy improving the pump, but not the well.

02:46:04.000 So we have a resource.

02:46:06.000 We have a resource of wild animals. 0.94

02:46:10.000 And if you just work on improving ways to pump them out, Without also working on ways of Improving the well and having there be a stable population of them, you're going to drain the damn well.

02:46:23.000 So when we're looking at as emerging technologies come out, you have to constantly ask yourself, with increased efficacy, like if we get it where technology means that every hunter is always successful, what will that wind up meaning for wildlife populations?

02:46:41.000 It's not going to mean a diminishment of wildlife populations.

02:46:44.000 It'll mean a tremendous diminishment of hunter opportunity.

02:46:48.000 You have a lot of over-the-counter public land elk hunts in the American West are about 10 or 20% success rates.

02:46:56.000 So you give out 100 licenses, you're going to kill about 15 elk.

02:47:02.000 This is a generalization, but it's generally true.

02:47:04.000 You're giving 100 guys an opportunity.

02:47:07.000 If you have success rates at 100%, how many tags are you giving out?

02:47:12.000 15. Right?

02:47:13.000 Yeah.

02:47:14.000 Big difference.

02:47:15.000 So, it's like you're talking about ethics, but you're also talking about access and privilege.

02:47:23.000 But for you, personally, aren't you also talking about the way it makes you feel?

02:47:26.000 Yeah.

02:47:27.000 Well, I think it makes everybody feel that way.

02:47:29.000 Guys that shoot stuff behind a high fence, the fence is never in the picture. 0.98

02:47:33.000 And guys that radio hunt, the goddamn radios are never in the photographs. 0.99

02:47:36.000 Right. 0.99

02:47:37.000 Right.

02:47:38.000 You see a guy standing there with 10 people.

02:47:40.000 In the photo. 0.98

02:47:42.000 And you know that nine of them were up on glass and tits with radios, radioing the guy in, but they sure as shit aren't wearing the headsets and the pictures. 0.98

02:47:51.000 So they kind of get, too, that they're not proud of it. 0.97

02:47:53.000 Right.

02:47:54.000 Like, one way to look at things for me is I'm like...

02:48:00.000 You know, is it something that you kind of tuck away when it's all over?

02:48:03.000 Is it something that's celebrated?

02:48:05.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:48:05.000 A guy kills something with a bow, that son of a bitch and a bow is laying on top of the animal. 1.00

02:48:09.000 Always. 1.00

02:48:10.000 Yeah, that's true, right?

02:48:11.000 Because he's like, oh yeah, I did it with my bow!

02:48:12.000 Yeah.

02:48:13.000 A guy with a gun, maybe, maybe not, who knows, he doesn't really care.

02:48:15.000 Right, it doesn't matter.

02:48:16.000 Yeah, he's like, you know, maybe I might put my gun in there, I might not, that's not the point.

02:48:19.000 A guy who never lays out a walkie-talkie on top of a bow.

02:48:22.000 That's very...

02:48:23.000 It takes a photograph of it.

02:48:24.000 That's very true.

02:48:25.000 I got it.

02:48:25.000 That's very true.

02:48:26.000 That's it.

02:48:26.000 All right.

02:48:27.000 Meat Eater.

02:48:28.000 It's available on Netflix.

02:48:29.000 30...

02:48:30.000 How many episodes?

02:48:32.000 32. 32 episodes.

02:48:34.000 Meat Eater on Instagram.

02:48:35.000 Steven Rinella on Instagram and on Twitter.

02:48:38.000 Yeah.

02:48:39.000 You can also go to TheMeatEater.com and buy all kinds of downloads of episodes.

02:48:44.000 And next time we go hunting, we should probably bring rifles.

02:48:46.000 I love them.

02:48:47.000 Bang! 1.00

02:48:48.000 Let's make something happen.

02:48:49.000 Bang! 1.00

02:48:50.000 Callan has been itching at me.

02:48:51.000 We've got to get together.

02:48:53.000 We've got to get together again.

02:48:54.000 Thank you, brother.

02:48:55.000 I appreciate it.

02:48:55.000 Take care.

02:48:56.000 Bye, everybody.

02:48:56.000 See you tomorrow with Jon Jones.

02:48:58.000 Holla.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 30, 2016

Joe Rogan Experience #879 - Steven Rinella

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript