The Joe Rogan Experience - #1215 - Ben O'Brien

Episode Date: December 17, 2018

Ben O’Brien is a writer, editor, host of The Hunting Collective podcast, a member of the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Board of Directors and MeatEater’s Editorial Director.

Jamie, 3, 2, 1. Was this beverage concocted by you when you were the first one? Yes. You created Rhybrine. If you ask me, yes. If you ask Dudley, what does he say? He would say maybe he was there. Maybe he was there. He might have been there.

He was definitely there. Yeah. But whose idea was it? It's hard to say with these things, Joe. Cheers, sir. Cheers. Good to was there. He might have been there. He was definitely there. Yeah. But whose idea was it? It's hard to say with these things, Joe. Cheers, sir. Cheers. Good to see you. You look good.

You look good, too. I look even better with this shirt, right? Look at that shirt. This is the new Ben O'Brien special. Get that shirt. Can you get this from your website? You go to TheMeatEater.com. You go to the store, and it's there.

Yeah. So what people, you know, I had Steve onve on steve ranella our good friend and yes we were talking about what they're doing with what meat eaters doing but it's this very strange thing where they're this giant multimedia corporation has stepped in and they're throwing a ton of money at meat eater and all these different companies that are involved in the outdoors, all these outdoor activities. That is true. And they're putting it all together into one super network. Juggernaut.

Juggernaut of outdoor activities. It's true. It's true. Yeah. It is something I've never been a part of before. Something like I've never seen before in the hunting industry. Has it ever existed before? I don't think so.

No. I don't think so no i don't think so can't be can't be so we would have known yeah well what better to try than something that's never been done well you had been doing your podcast for what like a year now how long have you been doing about 10 months about 10 months about 10 months and uh and we were just saying that i i tried to get you to do one five years ago five years ago yeah ben and i met on a moose hunt in british col British Columbia And I would say That it was like

Friendship at first Yeah we had a great Fucking time We had a great Fucking time Shout out to Mike Hockridge Yeah

Mike Hockridge Out there in BC Love you buddy And Sam Sohalt Yes Was with us as well And we had like I would always describe that

As like the most fun That I've ever had On a hunt It was a good time Maybe ever I don't know We've done a lot of stuff We were laughing a lot

That's why It was like a lot of fun And a lot of It wasn done a lot of stuff We were laughing a lot That's why It was like a lot of fun And a lot of It wasn't a lot of hardship Like we didn't sleep in tents No We slept at Mike's house Which is great

And then you know It was a lot of hiking and stuff And you know It wasn't successful Until like the very Last couple of days And you shot a moose And the celebration

Was fantastic We had a good time We had a great time We got super hammered. The last night, remember last night? What were you drinking? Like some kind of spiced rum or some kind?

I don't know. It got real. When you're drunk and you're drunk in the middle of nowhere and there's wolves everywhere, it's a different kind of drunk. But remember we,

remember that we went and we shot your bull, right? But then we took the heart and the liver. Yep. And we started drinking heavily. And you were up there just cooking liver and onions, cooking up a giant moose heart. So we had like the fuel of organs of an animal you just killed.

Like just killed. And then some kind of like trash bag Canadian rum that was terrible. Yeah. And that's what we party, dude. But it worked. It worked real good. I don't know what's good rum or bad rum at all to me. Like I kind of get good whiskey now. I understand whiskey. Sort of. but it worked it worked a real good i don't know what's good rum or bad rum at all to me like i

kind of get good whiskey now i understand whiskey sort of but being irish it's just like it's all just goes in gets in there and then it just does what it does when it's in there yeah once the party's begun like uh here's what i don't get tequila people oh this is good tequila this every tequila i ever drank i go like this what about that george clooney tequila what is like that he's got his own tequila? Yeah, doesn't he? Is it tequila, Jamie? Jamie will know. Listen. Avion. I'll tell you what. It sounds like a fancy water.

George Clooney tequila can suck a fat dick because Ron White's got his own tequila. Numero one. Sarcastic tequila. It's just, that's what he calls it. Numero one tequila. I think that's what it's called, right? Number one? Or is it number one? It's just, that's what he calls it, numero one tequila. Numero one tequila. I think that's what it's called, right? Number one, or is it number Juan?

It's number one? Number one. Number one. But like if George Clooney wasn't good enough at everything else and all handsome and wonderful, he made a tequila company and like did it right. If you listen to the origin story of it, they did it right. Well, fuck his tequila company. There's number one. Ron White.

Numero one. It's good shit too. Ron's is good shit. But I think George Clooney's got enough money, so fuck him. But I think he sold it for millions and billions of dollars. Yeah. See, what happened is he got married and he realized, listen, I'm going to have some money on the side in case this shit hits the rocks. What do I like to do when I'm a little bit bored and not feeling it?

Tequila. Yeah. Every man who has ever heard an awful divorce story, no matter how good it's going, every awful divorce started with, I do. It did. It all started with, I do. They all started with, I love you. You're amazing.

And good intentions. It started with good times, man. I will say, again, I won't say the name of the person because that would just be mean. Sprout them out. Fuck it. name of the person because um that would just be mean them out no no there was a feller that i like i knew in um my younger years that got married and i was in the the wedding party yes so she got there what she got there that's weed it's very dangerous it's dangerous for you uh yeah it is you live in montana you can't handle this yet no no no it's not legal there they made it

illegal medical they made medical legal and then they voted it out. Well. Fucking savages. California, buddy. They made medical legal and then they had dispensaries and then they voted the dispensaries out. When I was in Bozeman, last time I was there, they were shutting down the doors of the dispensaries. You're living in golden land here. Yeah, but you know what? I hesitate to say this, but it's probably for the best.

Just to keep people like me out of Bozeman. We're in a safe space. It's just me and you. We're in the trust tree. We're in the nest. Bozeman is so special. It's such a cool little town. We shouldn't be talking about it. I shouldn't be telling people about how great it is.

It's a terrible place. Bears will eat you alive there. They will eat you alive. In the streets. They're in the streets, Joe. But the good thing is the dumb people get eaten by bears. That's true. People turn up missing, like some asshole

steals lawnmowers. He'll just turn up missing. What? He'll just turn up missing. He'll be out there wandering through the forest. Yeah, they get cocky. People that just make it to live to be 100 in LA, they get eaten when they're like 35 in Bozeman.

Look at that. That's Bozeman. It's beautiful. Jesus Christ, it's a beautiful place. Yeah, but that's in the summer. I don't give a fuck. Yeah. In Bozeman. Look at that. That's Bozeman. It's beautiful. Jesus Christ, it's a beautiful place. Yeah, but that's in the summer. I don't give a fuck. I was there in the summer. In the winter,

it's like. It's like that, but white. Yeah, you ever seen the show Game of Thrones? Yeah. In the winter,

it's like White Walkers. Right. There's a large ice wall. When did you move? We just, my family just moved there. We just moved into our brand new home

about three weeks ago there Mr. Rogan But you were there before Were you renting? Yeah I was renting Living out of a I lived out of a storage unit For a time

Oh I'd heard about this There was a rumor There was a rumor Yeah Wild Ben O'Brien Wild Ben O'Brien Lives in storage units Put a fucking cot

In a storage unit I did It was a nice storage unit Shout out to Airport North Storage So did you sleep in there? Well Did you get a gym membership Or something? It was a nice storage unit. Shout out to Airport North Storage. So did you sleep in there? Well, did you get a gym membership or something?

Listen, Airport North Storage, it's time for me to tell the truth. Oh, my God. I can't believe you're coming clean with this. I'm coming clean. I did sleep in there some nights. I slept in a storage unit. Are there laws against that? It's probably in the contract when you sign not to do that. Really?

But I did it anyway. What do you think will happen to you? They would probably be like, get out of the storage unit and get a hotel, you weirdo. You fucking loser. But I just did that as a sacrifice for my family. We were building a house. I needed to be where my job was. Plus, you can camp out there.

Yeah, you camp out there. It's beautiful, man. It's beautiful. And Bozeman is so popular at that time of year that it's hard to... Oh, that's right. Yeah. It's hard to find a place to stay for a short period of time. Airbnb's and all that stuff.

That ain't really going down. Yeah. Amazing Airbnb. They just figured out a way to rent houses out and make money when no one's there. Yeah. I'm good. How did nobody ever figure that out before? It's kind of crazy.

There's a lot of these technology companies. Why weren't we doing that before? Uber is a great one. Dude, I was coming home the other night, and there was five Lyfts behind me. So Lyft is different because they have that weird thing on the dash, that little light on the dash. And it was like I was being chased by these purple robots. I was like, what the fuck is this? This is strange.

I was going to ask if you heard the big storage unit story from the other day as you guys were just talking about that. No. This big storage unit story? Yeah, you remember like the show that was on the storage wars or whatever? Oh yeah. The guy that was responsible for selling them to people sold one to a guy for $500 and inside was a safe

that had $7.5 million in cash in it. Look at that guy. Was this on the show? No, it wasn't on the show. It just happened recently. So the guy that bought it actually was contacted by lawyers from the people who owned it

and he made a deal with them. What's the deal? He kept like a million or something like that and gave the rest back. Joe, do you want to go into a business? What, Burl Storage Wars? Yeah. Look at that guy's face.

Look at his face. What the fuck? That's what he's saying. I sold that fucking thing. This lady is happy. Imagine how dumb you have to feel when you have a whole show about people finding things in storage units. You sell a storage unit, and it's got $7 million in it.

Seven and a half. Seven and a half million dollars. Still, though. The dude gets to keep a million. How does that work, though? Isn't it his storage unit? How about he tells that guy to fuck off? I mean, if someone lost $7 million, they're going to come a million. How does that work, though? Isn't it his storage unit? How about he tells that guy to fuck off and start to go to war?

If someone lost $7 million, they're going to come after you. How dirty is that money? Was it just the safe only in the storage unit? That's got to be something bad. You're going to get that handsome dude that was in the beginning of Ozarks, that handsome Mexican dude.

He's just a straight-up murderer. He's going to come visit you. Hello, man. Yeah. That guy was my favorite. I was so sad when they, spoiler alert, so sad when they killed him.

Like the dude from Breaking Bad that comes around? Yeah. The twins. But did you see Ozark? You ever see Ozark? I watched the first couple episodes and I got it.

Well, I fucked it up for you. Yeah. Because it was a pivotal moment that I just gave away. There's so many shows, though. There are so many shows, but that's a damn good one. That is a damn good show.

What's the guy who stars in that? Jason Bateman. He's excellent. And the woman, Laura Linney. She's amazing. The family's amazing. The kid's amazing. It's a fucking show, man. It's a show. It's a show. You get sucked in and that Netflix lets you watch

them all. Are you ready? ready Listen let me ask you a question I ask a lot of people this And I said this at a Christmas party And I got With a bunch of hunters And I got You know

Like the stink eye Like what's this guy talking about Conservatives I don't know about that Maybe I'm just weird Have you ever seen the movie The Greatest Showman Oh is that the

The musical It is I've been forced to watch segments of that with my wife and children it is fantastic very good movie hugh jackman's an angel he's an angel an australian angel he is he's sent down here to save us save us you ever seen him dance and sing he's magical i'm a hunter i got a hunting podcast but i'm telling you you're a manly man look at that beard yeah look at this thing but i love that movie it's a great movie i listen to it on the pandora the greatest showman channel and i sing the tunes listen dude my favorite comedy on tv is the

unbreakable kimmy schmidt okay so i can't be talking about manly things or non-manly things hugh jackman perform announces world tour set to perform the greatest showman songs he's gonna just sing look at him look at him look at him wow a one-man show gorgeous man he's just i mean it's unbelievable unbelievable but yeah i get i get i get made fun of for this like my of course my son likes it my wife likes it but i enjoy i i get into like your son how old is he he's two he doesn't know any better but he's like the music he's just happy that something's going on yeah he's just like there's something on the tv yeah he's not like, there's something on the TV. He's not writing a critique after.

But if you put on Dora the Explorer and then you switch it over to that bullshit, he'd be like, is this fucking guy dancing? No. Put Dora back on. Put Dora. Listen, I think that I watch, like, if you watch things like Game of Thrones, where they are burning children. Yeah.

And, like, it's entertaining, but sometimes I need a break. I like to watch a man dance around and sing. Or a woman, whatever, doesn't matter. Those shows can get dark where you're like, what am I doing to myself? You know, like Narcos. Oh, yeah. And they would just go into a fucking nightclub and gun people down. Just sitting there watching like women and children get smoked.

And it's, what's the other, the show with Anthony Hopkins on HBO? What's that, the robots? That one. Oh, Westworld. Westworld. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. what's the other the show with anthony hopkins on hbo what's that the robots oh west world oh yeah yeah that's the same way yes they're shooting kids on there though well the kids are robot we can just yeah they shot one right in the face dark so every once in a while you need to sprinkle a little bit of musical in your life i believe yeah what is that do you think and here's coming from a person that's been on a bunch of life-changing experiences and i know you have and i want to talk to you about some of them. Yes.

Especially the one in Nepal where you almost died and you saw children and wolves. Babies. We talked about that on the last podcast, but it would be worth revisiting. What do you think this is? Why are we so obsessed with life or death drama that's artificial? Well, you see it in the show Westworld, they talk about like it being a game. Yeah. It being this game of excess, like what can't I do in my real life?

Right. So when you watch TV and you watch murdering and you watch this evil thing come to life, you're just, it really is something that you can be transported. You can't do that you can be transported. You can't do that in your regular life. Well, for sure with Westworld, what you're getting is basically a real live version of that Red Dead Redemption. Yes, right. So when you play that, we were talking about the other day how this guy got in trouble because they have all these things in the game that you can do to people.

And this guy, like, tied this hooker up and threw her off a cliff and shit. It's dark. You can do whatever you want. It want but they were they were filming this stuff and putting it on youtube and then youtube would get mad and youtube pulled them off but then people were like well wait a minute though why how come you can just do it like what do you why did you have that in the game but it when my dad was my age 30 40 years years ago, they would never have ever done anything like Game of Thrones or Westworld. Ever. Ever. In fact, there was a Westworld.

It wasn't anywhere near like it is in the modern day. Good movie. Yeah. But I think we've just stretched out the limits to which we're willing to explore like really terrible and evil things for entertainment we've definitely changed what we're willing to accept and where the bar is in terms of quality the bars through the roof through the roof it's immersive to the point where you can't even like you can't even explain what you're experiencing when you're watching these shows yeah so like if you go and you see some great comedy from the 1990s like you see watch a dave chappelle or chris rock special from the 90s that holds up 100 and seinfeld like if

that but what i'm saying is like if that was out today it would be a 100 stand-up special it'd be like oh you see the new chris rock bigger and blacker it's fucking amazing but if you tried to put some bullshit ass 1990s tv show on on netflix if you try to like finagle some csi miami type shit you know what i mean some some nonsense i don't know if csi miami is that even a show? Is that a real show? Yeah, it's a show. There's a CSI Miami? There is. There's several.

There's many CSIs. I guessed. Law and order. Law and order. There's so many of those. But we've expanded our willingness to explore things that are... I mean, Game of Thrones, for example, is one of the best shows ever created, in my opinion. For sure.

But it explores some unthinkable things awful things awful things well it's the whole show spoiler alert is uh around a brother and sister who fucked and had a whole family yeah yeah so it explores these like these things that in we would never even touch upon in our media in the 50s 60s even the 70s we'd be touching upon those things in the 50s, 60s, even the 70s. We'd be touching upon those things in the way that we do now. No, not only that, but here's the thing. Law & Order is not a bad show. If you watch it, you'll be entertained. No, it's not a bad show. So what happened?

Why did we go not good enough? What was it? Was it that we – That's a question. Did they go not good enough? Or is it like porn? Like if you watch porn, okay, and you watch some porn from the 1980s, and then you flip through like you porn. Not that I would ever do that.

But if you did do that and looked at all the different categories, you'd be like, what the fuck happened? Yeah. Like why are people – why is gagging something people are looking for? It's not an accident. It's like a category we've are we've expanded our ability to conceive of things yes in a media space where we can create you can create dragons that that breathe ice you can create yeah there's there's things you can be

transported like listen this isn't real so i can i can do this right i can have this scene of of rape or infidelity or incest that seems it's appropriate to me only in this fantasy world. Man, sometimes I get down on that stuff. I watch enough of it. You're just like, I need a musical. I need to be inspired that life is grand. And that's how I feel about it, man. And sometimes it comes across and like this dude watches musicals, but I do for a little bit of a break sometimes.

Nothing wrong with it. What I'm weirded out about is this natural human inclination towards progression in everything, good or bad. Is that things just keep ramping up. Well, but we're progressing with our storylines for humanity in a weird way in media, but we're also suppressing a lot of our, we're trying to suppress through social justice, a lot of the same things, right? Well,

some people are, but I think it's a small, very vocal minority. I think in reality, there's the vast majority of people find out about said suppression are upset by it. And they're like, what in the fuck are you talking about with this safe spaces and all this

nonsense? Most people that hear that stuff are going, Oh, this is just nonsense by a few like really loud activist types yeah like even on my podcast it's something like as serious as hunting is because you're killing stuff like that's yeah going out into the world and taking plucking something that you didn't put there yeah taking it away but like i think that the core of what i think you do well and what I think others should try to do is ask why. Why are we willing to – why is Game of Thrones the most watched show that's on? Right.

Why? Why? Why? I can't answer that question, but it's a conversation. I think they get away with it because it's so fictitious, right? It's so obviously fiction. You're living in this fictional world you have fictional white walkers you have dragons you have people that can survive in fire yeah but it's like it's

so parallels to real life and then these these ridiculous fantasies but then these parallels to real life that that travel along the same path and like you don't get to choose between the dragons and the incest they're both there at the same time i think it it fulfills a lot of like base needs but it does so in this way that's obviously false yeah it's like why are superheroes so huge to us if you stop and think about the number of blockbusters that are superhero movies, that are comic book movies. They're coming out like once every couple of months now. It's crazy! That was a rare beast

when I was a kid. When I was a kid, if there was a Hulk movie, I would have jumped for joy. There was no goddamn Spider-Man movie when I was a kid. There was a TV show and it sucked. It was a goddamn cartoon TV show. Spider-Man Okay? It was a goddamn cartoon TV show. Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can.

Spins a web any size. Catches thieves just like flies. Look out. Here comes a Spider-Man. It was terrible. And I used to get up early to watch it. Because I was a huge comic book nerd. You've watched the Lou Ferrigno Hulk, right? Fuck yeah, I watched it.

That was a little bit. I mean, like, you've watched the Batman with Adam West. Yeah. You watch him now and you're like, what is happening here? So they came out with Superman. He was like the first movies. What is this, a Spider-Man TV show? Wow, that's another TV show. What's that guy in the background

doing? Who's that guy? He don't look like he's doing anything good. He's got a wooden stick. He needs to know those shits are just for practice. He needs to know that Spider-Man can shoot webs out of his hands, and that wooden stick's probably not going to do much. Then Spider-Man sort of changes his ability, right? Yeah. Because what he used to be able to do, like now, he can just basically fly.

I mean, just hurls himself through the air and sticks to buildings. You know? It used to be a little harder to swing around back then. He's like, let me drop my backpack full of textbooks. Yeah. Get to it. But he's... There was no Spider-Man movies

when I was a kid. And there was a Superman movie and the Superman movie beget the Batman movie. Batman movie came out. Michael Keaton, it was a big, big success.

People were shocked that Michael Keaton was Batman. But it worked. It was not like Danny DeVito was the Penguin. Yeah. Everybody got a shot at Batman.

It was one of those things. If you were Batman, you must be the it guy. George Clooney was Batman. George Clooney was Batman. George Clooney was Batman. Christian Bale was Batman. Arnold Schwarzenegger was Mr. Freeze. That's right.

But they got to Ben Affleck and they went, no, player. They went, whoa. Isn't that funny? That's real. The amount of people that will see you as Batman, it's whether or not they really believe it. Christian Bale, I believe that guy could be Batman. But Michael Keaton, for the longest time, was Batman. Yes, but see, he started it off.

The difference between Michael Keaton is there was no one before him other than Bruce Wayne, and he was the first dark, real Batman. I forgot about Val Kilmer. I forgot about Val Kilmer. God damn it. Val Kilmer was fucking Batman. What a talented human being Val Kilmer. I forgot about Val Kilmer. God damn it. Val Kilmer was fucking Batman. What a talented human being Val Kilmer is. He's a beast.

Dude, him as Doc Holliday. What's the name of that movie? Tombstone? Tombstone. God damn. That's one of the best Westerns ever. He was believable. That was a straight up murderer.

Probably still the most quoted. But see, nobody will think back on Ben Affleck's career and be like, he was spooky. Westerns ever. He was believable. That was a straight up murderer. Probably still the most quoted. But see, nobody will think back on Ben Affleck's career and be like, he was Batman. It's not just that. He's done some good movies. Yeah. But he's also. He almost has, there's nothing around his career that he must feel like, oh man, if this goes bad, it's going to ruin me.

He's done so many great things. He's a very good actor. Don't get me wrong. But what is it about him? Is he too handsome? No, because Val Kilmer is gorgeous. All those folks were very handsome. What is it?

Is it Jiggly? Is it him and Jennifer Lopez? Is that it? That was a tough time for him. It was a tough time. Did you say Jiggly? Jiggly? What is it?

I think it was Jiggly. Whatever the fuck it is. Whatever the fuck it is. The man lost his mind. Jiggly. Look, not everybody should get that kind of pussy. It shouldn't be on your diet. It's too rich for you.

Some people get diabetes, right? They need to lay off the sugar. Everybody's got different tolerances. You eat cake every morning. Jennifer Lopez, obviously, besides being beautiful and having a body like some sort of a test tube person, some lab-created super freak, obviously, she knows how to throw that thing. She knows how to throw that thing.

I mean, it would be hard to argue with that fact. Yeah, that's some goddamn Nolan Ryan pussy. Shrink! Yeah. And together, I'm not unaware of what you're talking about. I love the fact that those things go so hard. They go so hard, and then they fizzle out. They just, you know what it's like?

It's like having a Pinto with a fucking Corvette ZR1 engine stuffed on the hood. It's stump on the gas on the highway. And there's no structure to it. It's not designed. Those wheels are not designed for that relationship. Well, is that why? You live in Hollywood. You tell me.

Is that why these Hollywood relationships always become huge and then go away? Sometimes they do. Sometimes they work. I live in Montana. I don't know. Here's my thing. This Alex Rodriguez guy that she's with, super athlete, smashes it. Obviously, it seems to be working.

They've been together for a long time. How long have they been together, though? Months. Weeks. They've been together for six weeks, Joe. When she was with that little dude, the singer. She got mad he was at the UFC that one time, remember? Oh, that's right.

That's right. Yeah, she left. No, which one was that? That was the dancer. That was the dancer. Can we take a quick, this is kind of a PSA, public service announcement. Can we take a hard left to General Lopez and get ourselves over to Kanye West real quick? Yeah, we can, but look at that.

Alex Rodriguez. Okay, take a look at that man. Super athlete. Probably got a dick like a goddamn baseball bat, right? Anybody that has that many buttons. Look at his hands. Look at those top buttons coming down. The size of his fist.

The size of that guy's paw. He's had two plus 200 million dollar contract yes so he's he's got 400 million dollars and a giant heart but that and he's a super athlete of course it's gonna work he's gonna smash he's gonna keep it together let's talk about hunting he knows that guy knows how to keep it together right that guy knows he knows how to play when the ball's coming his way he smashes that fucking thing you gotta think jennifer l Lopez is not tolerating any losers in her life at this point. That's all

that's left. She's had a few. But that's all that's left. Look at that guy. Yeah, there you go. Super athlete. Big, giant, handsome. I'm a big sports fan. I came up when he was just a god. A baseball god. They seemed to get along together. See, that makes sense to me. Just like it made sense when Val Kilmer was Batman. That made sense to me.

But when Ben Affleck was Ben Affleck I don't know what how his relationship was with her I don't know maybe it was great it seemed like it was a tumultuous but I'm not I'm just observing I know nobody knows yeah but there's like some people where you need to like have an online vote should this person be Batman and the people will tell you they would not have voted I do not believe they would have voted For Ben Affleck Right I do not believe Here's the problem

Like The Rock Too big for Batman Here's why Because everybody would be like Oh it's you The Rock You're wearing a fucking bat suit Is that The Rock? Not everybody's 6'9

They could do that In the movie though They could make it funny And be like Yeah Are you? In the movie They could make it funny

Yeah Right Is this The Rock? Are you The Rock? He could never be Superman No He takes his fucking glasses off You're like you're still a giant dude well the last time that shit doesn't work but that's how it works you have to be a regular sized person that's how it works the last guy that was a superman was an unknown henry uh superman they ran out they ran

out of the well the well's dry it's like if they try to make another hulk people know enough you've had eight hulks they're gonna keep making them dude they're to make another Hulk Enough, you've had 8 Hulks They're going to keep making them dude They're going to make 100 more Star Wars in the next 5 years And you're going to have to sit through Han Solo The pre-pre-prequel How can they do that? That doesn't make any sense because Harrison Ford was Han Solo when Han Solo was young

You can't just do that They just came out with a Han Solo movie I think they decided to reel back on that Because that last one didn't do it They need to ask me. Just ask me. Then you didn't ask Joe. I'm here for you, George Lucas.

George Lucas is right now bathing in money. He's just lying back in a warm, wet money bath. He just forgot to listen to the podcast. He just gets touched all day. Rocky is going to be a superhero. What? He's going to be coming out or start shooting next year. What is that?

What is that? Black Adam. It's a DC. Oh, It's going to be coming out or start shooting next year. What is that? It's a black Adam. It's a DC. Oh, they're making up. They ran out of superheroes. Is that Superman in the background? That's Superman in the background. It's in the DC universe? There he is.

Look, there he is right in the background. They ran out of superheroes. I mean, he looks good. Yeah, but as long as they don't try to make him Superman. Is he a bad guy? Jamie, is he a bad guy or a good guy? Honestly, I've never heard of this character, so I have no idea where he fits in I remember when Netflix came out

with Luke Cage I was like wow that's an obscure one that was a good one though but the Black Panther was good yeah the Black Panther was good too

it's a great movie yeah it's amazing it took so long to make a Black Panther movie racist took so long and it was a giant

smash hit there you go white people get it together no comment Ben O'Brien in the conservative world has to be careful this podcast could sink his ship i'm pro nuance yeah how'd you come up with the shirt pro nuance i don't know shit listen i think the way that i came up with it is because in the in the hunting world there is this speaking of conservative there's this like there's a

conservative traditionalist right yeah and there's the more progressive folks that you have met and been around. You've been around both, but been around both that are more environmentalist, more public lands, more access, right? So there's kind of like two, of course, there's always two sides in politics, but there's, in this case, two distinct sides, right? And the line kind of gets drawn around one, a little bit around guns, but also a little bit around the environment. So part of the biggest issue in politics for a hunter or angler right now is like I really like guns. I like the Second Amendment. I dig what's going on there.

I'd like to support that. But what I also like is healthy ecosystems and environment, and I like habitat for wild game to live and public lands and access. Well, it just so happens that a lot of the A-plus rated politicians for the NRA are like F-minus or D-plus rated in protecting wildlife and wild lands. And a lot of that's around extraction and different things like that. Extraction of minerals and oil and natural resources from those lands. Right.

So then change the way these lands are scheduled scheduled like what it's under yeah i mean there's a lot of those are around monuments of course that was one big one but it's it's just around like the general basis of even as a hunter but all americans but as a hunter i'm faced with like i love wildlife i love wild places clean water clean lands i'm all for that that's a huge part of what I believe in. But I also believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in my right to defend my family. I believe in my right to own firearms and to do that. So I believe in those two things. But because our politics are the way they are, it doesn't leave room for those two beliefs when I'm at the voting booth sometimes. Not all the time. It hardly leaves room for those beliefs in normal

conversations with people unless you absolutely know that the person's going to be objective and as your shirt says pro-nuance this the idea that you you shouldn't be able to defend your family is where it gets crazy yeah it doesn't get crazy that you want to be able to defend your family. Why do these movies all have robberies and break-ins and bad guys? These are real things. These are real things. So the idea that you should just be a sitting duck because there's so many crazy fucks out there that want to shoot up schools and go on mass shootings. Somehow or another, you're being conflated with them, that you're being confused with them or categorized with them. Like, how is that?

These are different things. They are different things. They just both involve guns. They are different things. It's like the insult that drove all those people in Toronto. Remember that? Yep. You know, what if that keeps happening?

That's happened many times. You've seen people kill people with cars over the last few years. It's been like four or five big events. Are they mutually exclusive? Like, I want to be able to defend my family and own firearms and have that freedom. That's a big part of this country. But I also don't want people to die in mass shootings. I don't want that.

Of course. On the other side of the coin, when it comes to environmental issues around hunting public lands and things of that nature, I want coal miners to have jobs. I want people that work in the extraction industries to have an opportunity to work and live and do what they need to do. But I also want to protect our ecosystems at all costs because you can't replace that shit. Right. Right, and there's got to be other jobs out there if the government put its resources instead to propping up old ways of doing business that pollute the environment versus new ways of doing business. With subsidies and with government programs, it's entirely possible. Yeah, there are certainly reasonable and healthy ways to mine copper. Is there? I don't know.

healthy ways to mine copper or or there are ways i don't know there is i mean there's responsible ways to do that but at what you know at what cost you're still you're still extracting right you're still you're doing something doing you're still changing the natural environment there yeah someone was trying to make that argument with fracking with me i was talking to him about that is it josh fox's documentary um what is uh he he was on the podcast the um something fracking nation what was his uh he made a it was a very good documentary and it was he when i got had him on the podcast was interesting because he seemed like he had been attacked a lot for it and even misunderstood like some of the questions i was asking like maybe they were coming from me and i was saying no this is just like what is it called fracking nation what is it gasland gasland that's it oh yeah okay it's um it's disturbing like you're

watching some aspects of it like when they're lighting their water on fire and then someone tried to say oh there's some places where you've always been able to light your water on fire i was like okay wait okay that's a long been able to light your water on fire. I was like, okay, wait a minute. Okay. That's a long American tradition of lighting your water on fire. This was a real argument that someone said, that that's not really from fracking. And I said, okay, these people said that there was no lighting the water on fire. Then people started fracking the water smell like shit. They started lighting it on fire.

You're saying those are not connected. Over the years, Joe, we've been able to light our water on fire for a number of reasons. Fourth of July. Here's the thing. I would think to be confident about that, and I'm not confident about it, but to be confident about what that guy said to me when he was saying that it's always been like that, you would have to have done massive research. You would have to have spent time there.

You would have to have been working either directly or indirectly with the scientists that are collecting the data. You'd have to get it from them. You'd have to know. You'd have to see it. You'd have to know for sure. Of course you would. Or you have to be a person who is not interested in the actual truth. They just have an idea that they want to push through. And this is a weird thing with certain right-wing folks there's a weird thing they want to push through that business is good and environmentalists are all pussies and hippies and weirdos and losers and these things don't jive in the world of someone who actually loves and appreciates the actual earth of course man because weird but there is

no way that anyone could argue, right? In the hunting world, there's nothing like access and public land and all these things become a big deal. But you can define access in a ton of different ways. Yeah. To me, access could be, I like wilderness, where the only way you can access it is on foot via a trailhead. Someone else might say, access to me is elderly folks or disabled folks being able to get into a car and drive through a road in public land or get into an ATV and drive. And so, politics are, being what they are, politicians take this term of access. It happened around national monuments. They take one side said, the president is stealing your land.

And the other side says, the president is giving back your land. Somebody there, either both sides are full of shit or one of them is. I remember when this came up, Patagonia, which is a giant company in the outdoors,

had a big ad on the internet that said the president just stole your land. And then I heard Ronella talk about it and he said, I'm going to paraphrase, but he basically said if you say that the president stole your land, you're not being careful with your words. And you're not being accurate. You're being inflammatory.

You're being absolutely inflammatory. Because it's not, again, we're talking about Grand Staircase-Selante and Bears Ears, Nash Romani. Bears Ears being in Utah being – Explain to people what happened. Oh, boy. I'll do my best, Joe.

Thank you, Ben. So the Antiquities Act. Let's go back to the Antiquities Act. The Antiquities Act is to protect culturally or socially, but mostly culturally significant pieces of land, all the way to things like the Grand Canyon, right? And so, spin it up to the end of, there's a lot that I just skipped over, but I'm going to spin it up to the end of the Obama administration. President Obama used his executive power to protect large swaths, millions of acres around Bears Ears National Monument to protect not only the significant places for Native Americans and for Native tribesmen around Bears Ears, but many millions of acres around that.

And so then it becomes, the problem I have and why that kind of that t-shirt exists, it becomes a political football throwback and forth. It's not at this point in time what's best for Bears Ears, what's best for that national monument, what's best for it to be federally owned, what's best for the people, the jobs, the place. It becomes what's best for each side and their rhetoric. place it becomes what's best for each side and their rhetoric and so president trump asked secretary former secretary interior ryan zinke to review i think it was like 10 monuments to see if they should be reduced based on the predictions that obama had put put into place so he reviews

these 10 monuments he cuts out eight of them and hones in on two places. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante. They then say we're going to reduce the size of these monuments. When you say cuts out eight of them, what do you mean by cuts out? They review the other eight and say they're fine. They're good to go. No changes

necessary. Some would say they did that as a straw man. As eight straw men to knock them over and look at those other two. They said we will reduce the area that is designated as a national monument. And here

again, it comes to both sides. They would say because President Obama wielded his powers corruptly to protect, to be, as an environmentalist, to protect lands that didn't need protected under the Antiquities Act. Because the Antiquities Act does say it should be the smallest acreage possible to protect. So now you get into stuff that I'm not an expert in around legal jargon and going back to things that were written in the 1930s. 1930s but we get to a point where one side saying here is the republicans trying to

shrink down these monuments so that they can then go companies that are can then go and lease these places for mining but they can't currently do under protections as a national monument the other side is saying we're trying to protect culturally significant lands, and these millions of acres need protected. They need protected for lots of reasons. So you end up with those two sides talking. Now, it's easy to sort of make a hyperbolic argument one way or always want to say that wrong got that backwoods hyperbolic uh argument one way or the other right yeah i mean you could kind of exaggerate your position one way or the other and it's being done that way yeah it's been done that way are they drilling there now

or there was something let's look that up but there's some leases that were that were approved for for bears ears i know for sure see that's one of the things where people talk about the president doesn't have any real power. There's Congress and the Senate, and like, not really. They have some fucking real power. There's checks and balances, but there's executive orders that can come down. But yeah, listen, I'm not the expert on this. I'm sure I fumbled through some of the details on that,

but to me, the bottom line is something like that, why I like to live in the center is because something like that becomes, it becomes a thing that, it becomes a PR hit. Yeah. It becomes a thing that people are throwing back. They're throwing Bears Ears back and forth because at the end of Obama's administration, he made the designation and they repealed it or reversed it a year later. Right. Or some amount of time around a year later. So it was only the way it was for a year.

And everybody's making it look like the government stole your land. They just brought it back to exactly where it was before. But they did open up the possibility, which is why Obama did it in the first place. Yes. They opened up the possibility for drilling and natural resource extraction. They did. And that's what scares the shit out of people. Yeah.

resource extraction and that's what scares the shit out of people yeah so like there's there's this two there in these situations there always seems to be spin on both sides and being a part of these debates on a daily basis and being a part of this like bringing in this information on a daily basis it's tiresome yeah you get tired you get tired of being uh pandered to by people you get tired of having to hear that this value system is right or this value system is right. And there's no room to be anywhere close to the center around this stuff. So you just get, it's tiresome. You know, public lands are the only place where I look at it and say, no, you got to leave that to the government. You got to leave it to the federal government.

Don't leave it to the states. You got to leave it to the federal government. Don't leave it to the states. It's the only place. I mean, when I think about all the different things, like with legalization of marijuana, now they're going to legalize psilocybin, apparently, in Oregon. They're talking about doing that. I'm like, yeah, leave it to the states. They should be able to vote that in.

They should be able to vote in. Like all the crazy laws you have in weird states, and some states have state taxes, some states don't. It's all good. That's all good. But when it comes to federal land, the problem is if these states get into debt, and this is what people need to understand, they can sell it off. Yeah. So if Utah is in debt, I'm just not picking on Utah, but if they just, for some reason, they wind up in debt, which states do all the time, and then they sell off a giant chunk of land to some oil company now you

can't camp there anymore you can't and by the way that's your fucking land and not just taxes not just utah that's your land you live in arizona you live in florida that's your land you live in massachusetts it's yours the land in utah is the whole fucking all of us the collected human race living on north america listen to this listen to this shit this is like there's a guy named senator mike lee out of the great state of utah which you rightly put that a lot of these things uh revolve around utah for some reason do you know why they have a lot of the percentage of it's like something that 70 of their acreage is is controlled by the federal government. That's why. Plus Mormons. Let me, I'll take the first point. You take the second point. Okay, go ahead.

That, so Senator Mike Lee comes out and says, right, this is like the perfect, the perfect way to spin this type of thing. He starts, he calls back to, and Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah has also done this, call back to like the sagebrush rebellion and things like that. Calling back to, saying that wilderness is akin to the European aristocracy because only a certain few can go there because you have to have two working legs that can get you up into wilderness. Part of the basis of a speech he gave, he's given it several times is that public land and wilderness specifically is is akin to the the european aristocracy because only certain folks can go there if you would open up access cut roads through it then it would be for everyone so then it gets back

to like the semantics and the spin and the things that politicians push forward to try to convince you. And they're still for you. He's right in a certain way. What he's right in is that if you put roads through, anybody could go through anytime they wanted. On a car, if they had no legs, if they can

barely walk, if they are in a wheelchair normally, but they can drive a car, yeah, they can go in deep into the woods and they can enjoy all all of the wilderness they surely can't stop that is true that's true however it's not like there's a lot of places that they can't also go to they can go a lot of places where they can do that you can go to yellowstone yellowstone's damn gorgeous you just drive through that you see all the trees and the animals. Yellowstone is a wonderful proxy for going outside. Yeah. It's an introduction to what it is without really being in it. Yeah. It's like a zoo that's free range. Yeah. It's exactly what it is. I live an hour from there and I've taken my family there and it just feels like I used to

feel like, oh man, this is an illicit place. As somebody who's gone into the wilderness and tackled these big challenges and hiked around in crazy places, this Yellowstone is like, it makes me feel uncomfortable. Then somebody said to me, I feel like it was this guy named Cody Rich who has a podcast called The Rich Outdoors. He said to me, it's like it's an ambassador for real wilderness. It's like a way to present to people that this thing exists without them having to actually strap on a pack,

get some trekking poles, and hike miles up into the wilderness. This is part of the problem. Whenever you're talking about the wilderness, so few people go to it. It's like if we were talking about the surface of Mars with the people that create the rover.

Well, you know how the surface of Mars is. It g the wheels it's red it's definitely red how many people are going to mars how many people are really going to the wilderness yeah i mean not that many there's more people going to the wilderness than mars but i've always said like the the public lands movement and i am definitely part of it um i feel like i could probably represent the money of things better but like i i'm definitely part of it it it's it's scary in a little in a lot of ways because people can say like keep it public man keep it public that's like apple pie and bald eagles and freedom it's an idea that we all pay into a thing we all own anybody right can go there right it's super easy to get on that train it is real easy to get on that train and lose your critical thought around what what is the idea of wilderness i mean because

when i think of my hunting now like we first went hunting like five or six years ago you would ask me this question i would have given you a whole different answer what would you have said then i don't know what i would have said then but not this answer i might have said like well you're fairly youngish man. I'm only. You're growing. I'm growing. 31? 33.

Oh, you're a beautiful person. Look at you. I love you too. Perfect complexion. Look at you. All your cells are firing correctly. No liver spots yet. This whiskey is really good stuff.

I'm Irish. So what do you think you would have called it then? So what I probably would have said like when we first went hunting and bc together for moose what i probably would have said would have been around it would have been less value-based and more like i do it because my dad did it i do it because it connects me to to my dad like my dad my family my people i do it because humanity did it we talked we filmed a video remember sitting on the thing we talked a lot about our humanity right like the drawing back through the history of time when the hunter was exalted in a tribe of people it was the only way to get meat it was the only

way to get meat so your skills that you acquired as a hunter made you important to the culture the society the everyday life. I would have probably called back to that. Not that I would say that's wrong now, but what I've come to find out over some other years of hunting in a lot of places is that I think my hunting is more about healthy ecosystems now than it is about anything else. I think all of my efforts should be around clean water, clean air, places that we can go and explore and what that brings to our world. That brings more wildlife.

That brings places for my son to go and experience these things. And so I've changed over this very short time and the way that I do it. Well, the more you experience the wilderness and then go back to the city and then go back to the wilderness, the more you realize how special it is out there. And the more you realize when, like today I went flying in a helicopter over LA with my good friend Bill Burr.

And as he was taking me up, I was looking at all this development. We were talking about all these apartment complexes that are being developed. And he's like, yeah, he goes, you really see it when you're up here in the air because you see where there was nothing and then like a couple weeks later it'll be flattened out and then a couple weeks later they start construction and you realize like oh this is how it spreads and that

this is just something that people do and if you don't put a put a line you don't draw a line we're going to keep going we're going to make our way across the country and i've heard that argument from people that don't go to the wilderness. Like, look how much of the United... We don't overpopulate it. Look how much of the United States has no one living in it. Fly over and look down at all the places that don't have cities and don't

have roads and don't have houses. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. For now... Do you know that none of this shit was here 200 years ago? That's nothing. But we plowed ground to plant the corn so you could have the things you have. Well, fly over in 1819. Yeah. You know?

Fly over 100, 200 years ago. Bitch, there was nothing here. Yeah. There was zero here. Slide around with Wilbur Wright. Yeah. And Orville. Come on, man.

Let's see what you saw. But you could just go 300 years. You have nothing. You have zero things. Yeah. Well, I think there's some the perspective and i think hunting has a lot going for it around the fact that as urbanization happens you know as jobs even for me like as jobs become more prevalent in urban places and people have to travel from wherever they're growing up to to these urban

places and live so removed from wilderness so removed from wilderness, so removed from sustainability. I think for a long time, because hunting peaked in 1982. There was like 17.5 million hunters around that year. Is that because of Ronald Reagan? Yeah. He was president. It was all Reagan. Reagan was president in 1982, wasn't he? Listen, I wasn't even alive, so let's not get into that shit.

I don't know. But like post-World War II, was a rise in in the modern hunter modern sport hunter however you describe it there's there's this rise in 1982 and then a precipitous fall right from there until 2016 there's around 11 million hunters in this country it's it's a big drop it's a big drop and i will always say that like the three things that i think happened were urbanization so people are getting removed from they're getting moved away from having hunting in their lives on a daily basis not that they're anti-hunting in any way they're just getting removed from from that thing and getting your meat on your own they're removed from that and a lot of times you're removed from like gardening and other types of sure sustainable use things the other thing is

disney like walt disney's a nice man but bambi was not a good thing for our our collective psyche around hunting not just bambi but essentially all cartoons involving animals the animals were your friends yes even predators like yogi was Like Yogi was your friend. He was your friend. He wore a tie. He was a gentleman. He was a bear attack. He was a gentleman. He had a hat on. Yeah.

He had a picnic basket. He wanted your picnic basket. Jamie, look up. There was a guy. There was a dude recently who was caught poaching in Missouri, and the judge said that he had to watch Bambi once a month during his entire sentence. What? See if you can find that.

That is real. That judge just needs a reality show. He's like, I know what to do, honey. I know what to do. We'll make you watch Bambi. He poached a deer. This is a guy who's like the whole, there was like a whole family of guys here were in like a poaching ring or something.

I read this on the way over here. Here it is. Deer poach or sentence to watch Bambi every month During a year in Missouri jail Yeah this might be a judge that's like looking for a little Found who legally killed hundreds of deer Sometimes taking over their heads And leaving the rest to rotten fields How about you keep that guy in jail for more than a year

There he is Look at him David Barry Jr Fucking dork Here's one thing, man. If that guy was killing him because he was poor and he was just eating deer and that's how he got food. That's not the case here.

I don't care. He chopped the heads off and just took the heads. Fuck that guy. Just fuck anybody who does that anyway. Fuck anybody who just wants to shoot something as damn delicious and massive as a deer. A deer could feed a family for months do you understand that of course it could you understand that but i mean the people listening or this asshole do you understand that this asshole who shot this fucking thing

hundred deer head off you piece of shit yeah i'm i fucking look forward to eating deer and you shot it and you yeah anyway back back like walt disney i think like that kind of treatment of animals has been something that's hurt hunting and the third one is hunters have hurt themselves like that guy like maybe that's a poacher not that guy's way worse that's a poacher not a hunter though but he's a guy who's hunting illegally that's what poaching is he's a hunter yeah but like camping camping illegally he's trespassing that's it's same thing. Yeah, but you're camping. You're trespassing and camping. You're still camping.

All right. Maybe. Listen, I know you don't want to call him a hunter like someone who goes on stage at a company picnic is not a comedian. Yes. It's the same thing. I get it. He's a hunter, though.

He's still killing animals. Yeah. He's killed more than me. That's 100. Yeah. I'm a hunter, and he's killed more than me. You're the fish and poacher. That's true. He's a piece of shit. He is. But that's just like everything else, yeah. He's killed more than me. That's 100. Yeah, I'm a hunter, and he's killed more than me. He's an efficient poacher. That's true.

He's a piece of shit. He is. But that's just like everything else, man. There's people that are good Uber drivers, and there's some that will try to pull you under a bridge and fuck your mouth. Look, it's bad people out there. That's a good point to bring up. Like, is there a time, like, I always bring up with hunting,

it's like, oh, somebody killed a giraffe, or somebody, a guy killed a family of baboons and did a photo photo i saw that do you see that not good not good but it's a fucking primate bro yeah i mean there's nothing good about that but the idea it's never gonna go well for you online it's never gonna go well for you yeah did he put it online no he didn't put it online to his i guess the the credit that would give the guy who put it online to his, I guess, the credit that we would give the guy. Who put it online? The Idaho statesman or whatever the Idaho local paper was. How'd they get the pictures? I don't know.

Probably from one of the folks. He sent a mass email out to some friends and colleagues and things of like recapping his hunt in Africa. Like, here's all the things I did. And he, I think, from my reading on the guy, and I got a lot of mutual friends with him, say he's a good guy. He just screwed up, made a bad choice. That's a tough sell. I would say so, too. Yeah, they should put him in a sell and make him watch some monkey movies.

Yeah, I think he knew. If I put this on, that's going to spin up after this. Planet of the Apes, you got to watch. The a year. Planet of the Apes. You got to watch the Mark Wahlberg Planet of the Apes. The reality of baboons, and I've studied the work of Robert Sapolsky, who's a guy who's been on the podcast before. And it's really pretty amazing stuff, what they found out about baboons that he studied, actually,

because he actually studied a baboon tribe that the um alpha males died off they were all eating out of a poison garbage patch uh there was a garbage patch that had sick food in it and um just bad food and the alpha males who got to eat first uh always chased everybody they wound up dying off and for more than one generation i think it was several generations they became like really peaceful and calm and they weren't the vicious violent baboons that are the norm yeah and that it's really if you google it uh sapolsky studies baboons and i and radio lab also had a podcast about it which is where i first heard about it and then i read what sapolsky wrote about it but it is unbelievably fascinating it shows how you can have this insane violent animal culture and then the the cunts get removed and when the cunts get removed everybody chills the fuck out yeah it's

really really quite fascinating yeah but um baboons for the most part i mean maybe he shot the nicest baboons ever but for the most part they're a bunch of baby eating cunts and they'll steal your fucking kid that little two-year-old that you love so dearly that little motherfucker be on a porch somewhere and if there's baboons around they'll snatch him and eat his head well that's like when i was in africa i hunted africa one time in my life and the our ph and our guide both said and our track is a professional hunter right the structure is like there's a professional hunter which is essentially your guide and then there's trackers which are usually native folks that that help tracking the game spotting the animals things like that but our

ph he was like if you see a baboon shoot it he's like we have we have lots of irrigation here to maintain this ranch and they rip it up and they're you know basically terrorists around you know coming around our camp messing with our fires messing with our food you see one shoot one and that was the instruction that i got and i never never did but you know given that instruction from somebody like that like hey this is a good thing for our landscape go and do it now that's very far removed from stacking them up yeah like stack very far and and with a big smile on your face holding a bow isn't it doesn't didn't shoot a baby there's some babies like a whole family dude how you can't they don't stay in one place either if i would have came to you and i said like listen joe here's my plan what i'm gonna do is go to africa and hunt and then you know I'm going to shoot some baboons.

I mean, it's a good thing for this. I'd be like, don't tell anybody. Yeah, you'd be like, don't take, certainly don't take a photo of you posing with an entire family of deceased primates. I had a friend who was in Africa and he got attacked by a baboon. A baboon tried to steal his food. Yeah. I forget what the context of it was.

It was quite a few years ago but he said it was spooky he said they don't seem like a monkey and they don't seem like they seem like a dog monkey like it's like a wild you ever see when they open their mouth yes it's like a dog mouth it's like a dog fucked a monkey like if you really like show a baboon let me see a baboon with its mouth open never thought of it that way but i'll give it to you but they have a long stretched out mouth like a wolf or something it's not it's like a werewolf yeah it's not like a regular person they're real weird man they they have all these characteristics that are of primates but then they have this extra weirdness to them. Yeah, and there's wildness to them too.

But doesn't that come down to like the core of some of these? Oh, my God. I mean, come on. Look at that. That's like a werewolf. Yeah. That is a werewolf. That's like part – look at that face.

That lion and that baboon. Look at those canines. It's like a rolled back. But look at even the shape of the jaw. It's very dog-like. It's very elongated and dog-like. It's a very strange animal. Look at that face, man.

That is a crazy beast. And my friend said, I forget the story. It was quite a long time ago, but he stole some food and snarled at him and snatched something from him. But he said it was very scary he said and you know it wasn't even that big whether like 60 70 pounds or something like that he said but it's depending they'll fuck you up they're not they will you know it's different if you're living around them it's just these things are different like we we were talking about around the old media to incorporate offices the other day around how do you how do we as hunters who are around these animals all the time and shit how do we when something happens somebody gets mad about this

guy killing all these these baboons what do we say when there's a hunting scandal yeah let that one go so do i say of course i let it go well most people don't even know about it yeah it hit the hunting world but that one was on like n NBC, CNN. This one went pretty big. And there's invariably these things happen where. How come that didn't go as big as Cecil? Stop and think about that. Because to me it's more kind of fucked up. It's more egregious than.

The Cecil thing, it's a normal thing. But I just think we're desensitized to it. Right. Cecil came at a time where there was more sensitivity to it, and it just hit a news cycle. Like, the Trump news cycle probably dominates any other thing that happens in the news. But here's what my take on it is. It doesn't get the time. Well, the reason why I say that Cecil's normal, I don't think that it's good.

I don't think you should just go over there and shoot lions. But people have been doing it forever. Yeah. Like, if you ask me how many people go over there to hunt baboons i'd be like do they really is that like a normal thing like does it doesn't seem normal right like even though i don't i mean i've had this conversation many times on this podcast i don't think you should shoot things that you don't eat unless there's a need in terms of like some sort of an imbalance like just as a joke imagine if eagles were like rats yeah they were everywhere there's a reason why you could just kill rats it's because you

have to yes okay this is what overpopulation looks like you you put a trap in your fucking garage and you smash the head of this living creature and you you're happy. Almost all things are categorized as rodents. You would do that, too. Well, not true, really, right? Like, squirrels are cute. They're adorable. Yeah, but they just don't get in your house. But if there was half a dozen squirrels in your garage, and you could set traps and get them out of there, you would.

But it's a different thing. Like, you would feel bad if you stomped one. Probably. You'd stomp a rat. You saw a rat in your kid's room, you'd fucking stomp that thing to death. Twice, right? If you saw a squirrel in your kid's room, you'd try to throw a blanket over it. Why don't we put those types of value, why don't we apply those value systems to animals like that?

Because they're overpopulated. And because traditionally they've been carriers of plague. Yeah. Well, the real story about the Black Plague is not just that the rats were carrying it, but in fact that the ticks and the, was it ticks or fleas that were on the rats were carrying the black plague? I want to say it's fleas. Could be.

And that this is how the bubonic plague got spread. It got spread actually, in fact, through the ticks that were carried by the rats. Is that what it is? Fleas? Fleas. Thank you, Jamie, with Google search. The difference is that squirrels are not overpopulated and that raptors are killing them off left and right.

It's a primary source of food for a lot of these flying raptors, like eagles and hawks and stuff like that. I'm sure a lot of other things eat them too. Of course. But there's enough balance out there. But rats lock into us. I mean, they lived without us for a long time but once they found us they're like oh look at this shit these dumb motherfuckers have holes in their ground you can live under their houses you just they put garbage out every day yeah you just go jack their garbage you got

plenty of food this is great we treat all types of animals very differently right and and we apply our own specific feelings about these animals to them like the bear with a name doesn't know that it has a name right the wolf with a name doesn't know it has a name it it's not aware that we've applied this special meaning to it it doesn't know that right it's still it our our application of our feelings and our like engendering this that doesn't change the nature of the wolf or the bear it will rip your face off it will kill as many elk as it can well there's a real problem in depicting them the anthropomorphization of animals depicts them as your friends and that's a hard thing to shake yeah there's not that they're bad and this is where the real problem with someone going around shooting baboons and posing like you did a great thing is

it's it's not that these animals are bad they should be respected and understood and appreciated now if you are a part of a baboon cleanup crew like if you're like i was listening to uh ranella's podcast today and they were talking about kangaroos in australia yeah and that there was a guy on the show that had killed somewhere near what is like seven thousand many thousands yeah thousands like his dad's there was a what was it like there was a flood i'll probably mess this up there's some sort of weather event that pushed all these kangaroos onto his dad's ranch and his dad was going out every day and just whacking ad nauseum thousands of kangaroos and that they have to do this because they don't have any natural predators.

And they'll just devastate landscapes. And we've played videos. Let's see if we can find one real quick. After we play, we get kicked off of YouTube? Probably, right? There's a video of like a swarm of kangaroos in Australia. Dude, I had no idea. Yeah.

We were reading about it, about the overpopulation. I had no idea. Yeah. It's like 100-pound locust. Yeah. That's what it. Yeah. We were reading about it, about the overpopulation. I had no idea. Yeah. It's like 100-pound locust. Yeah. That's what it's like. I was reading.

I can't remember the guy's name, but I was reading this paper. Pull it up just so I can see it. I was reading. Don't put it up on the YouTube. I don't want the kids to get mad. Oh, there it is. This is nothing. This ain't shit in comparison. Are those kangaroos?

Yeah, these are all kangaroos. This is pretty crazy, but we were watching one when there was a swarm running across a field. Like, look at that, bro. That's rats. Come on, man. If you saw that many rats in a field, you would go, I am going to go get my gun, and I'm going to kill these fucking rats. Right? You wouldn't tolerate that, but these are cute.

Is our, like, the endangered species has come into play here in a weird way, because is our caring for animals dictated by the number of the animal that there is? It isn't and it is. See, it's not for us, right? We're over here in the valley of Southern California. Very nice. Sipping rye brains, having a good old time. Me buddy, Ben O'Brien, young Jamie. We're wonderful.

It's air conditioned. It's fantastic. Very nice. We live a good life here. If you're in Australia, you're killing those fucking ducks. Oh, let me tell you. When I went, Remy Warren, our mutual friend, first took me to New Zealand. He took me to a sheep station. A giant.

This is basically a ranch. A big sheep ranch. We hunted fallow deer there. There were deer everywhere. On the way out, we met a guy. And we call him the rabbit man or like he he looked like a superhero he was riding on like just a two-stroke bike with like a rabbit hide covers for the handles he had a helmet on he looked like a superhero like a leather jacket and like a 22 and

he was riding around his job was to ride around and shoot rabbits all night long every day seven days a week he had killed millions of rabbits millions millions and he he would log every night come back and log the number of rabbits he killed they weren't eating these rabbits it was population control these rabbits were were digging under fences these rabbits were destroying the landscape they couldn't run sheep that the land was invaluable because these rabbits were, it's almost like turn of the century America. Right. We had some of the same situations.

But we met this guy whose job it was to, with impunity, kill as many rabbits as he possibly could. Are rabbits an invasive species? Down there they might be. Yeah. Well, find that out because. This was New Zealand and most – Almost everything. Almost everything is non-native.

That is a crazy spot. Yeah. That's one of my favorite spots. I could be on the board for tourism for New Zealand. Really? I love that place. European rabbits were introduced to Australia in the 1800s. Okay, but what about New Zealand?

Yeah, what about New Zealand? Jamie, not paying attention. It's right next to it, I figured. It's right next to it It's right next to it They can't swim, bro Rabbits don't swim, but I bet it's the same thing It's the same thing, I'm sure We never did get so deep into

Invasive species, a number introduced European rabbit Yeah, I think everything In New Zealand was introduced Yes, most of them Sorry, New Zealand really needs to kill these adorable rabbits. Yeah, they have to.

By the way, you can eat them. They're fucking delicious. Oh, the rabbits are delicious. Yeah. I mean, but the problem is my daughter has

a fucking pet rabbit, okay? And we put it in this little cute cage and when it wants to come out and be held, it puts its little paws on it. It makes noise. You open the cage up, take the rabbit out.

Ooh, delicious. It can't go out and fuck. I love hunting rabbits, man. They're delicious. But I was reading this environmental, it was like a theorist. This guy was talking about the types of hunting. And I was reading this. I'm like, this is not, this might be a smart guy, but he don't have it.

He was talking about three types of hunting. Therapeutic. What is that, Jamie? I don't know. It was in that pic with the rabbits. It said stoats. Stoats? I've never heard of it.

It's eating a nested bird. Probably another. They look cute, but except when you see them. Well, you know, that's one of the things that also I learned about from the Meat Eater podcast is how many squirrels kill birds oh yeah they kill and eat birds like that's a big part of the decimation of the population of certain bird species is attributed to squirrels i'm interested in this look at he eats fucking mice he's a murderer it's a little fucking badass that's crazy that little thing eat a mouse that's about what's

a rat it's eating a rat that's like his size. Is this something on New Zealand? I think, I believe so. It's a little New Zealand murderer. The only thing I've run into that was native to New Zealand was a Kia. It was like a parrot that flies around. Was the thylacine native to New Zealand or just Australia? That's Australia, right?

That's the Tasmanian tiger. He's also known as short-tailed weasel. Look at that. He's nine ounces as short-tailed weasel. Look at that. He's nine ounces. North America. What? North America? Is that little fuckers out here?

He's a merc in the jeans and stuff. Oh, okay. He got over here. Distinguished by... Oh, he's a weasel. He looks like a weasel. Larger size and longer tail with a prominent black tip. It's kind of weasel.

Terrific level of carnivorous. Isn't it funny that weasels are thought to be like little bitches. It's kind of weasel. Terrific level of carnivorous. Isn't it funny that weasels are thought to be like little bitches? Ah, you little weasel. Weasels are badass. Look at this weasel. There he goes. Look at him.

Yeah. And weasels will fuck up a cobra. How about that? Look at him. What is he doing there? He kills rabbit. That's how he's killing? Look at it. Stoat kills rabbit 10 times its size.

Jesus Christ. 2 million views. There it is. Oh, there 2 million views Look how small he is Look how small he is and he's chasing a rabbit That's insane What a little ruthless motherfucker Don't show it but we'll talk it through It seems very cute

Should we do the play by play on this show Life Stout Stout kills rabbit 10 times its size BBC 1 I don't know I don't know I'm running into this critter of mine Oh life Stout Stout kills rabbit 10 times the size Stout or stout BBC one I don't know Is it stout or stout I don't know I've never run into this critter

In my time outside Look at this little motherfucker Look at him go He really is 10 times his size He's chasing this rabbit down He's very adorable He's kind of adorable though The way that he's doing it

What a ruthless little What's he gonna do Is he gonna go for the The hindquarters like a wolf The other rabbit Tried to stop him That's like Captain Savoho Over there

Look at this one Just let some pass by Oh he's going low How about the other rabbit tried to stop him. That's like Captain Savoho over there. Look at this one. Oh, oh. Let some pass by. Oh, he's going low. How about the other rabbit just sits there while his friend gets jacked? There's dozens of rabbits that aren't. Like, let's gang up and get this stoat, man. How crazy is he doesn't try the rabbits that are really close to him?

Oh, now he goes. Where's he going? Is he going like? So he's probably going to hit those. He's going to hit those hindquarters. He's going to get some shock and some blood loss. Look at this. He's going to get the neck. Yeah. No, he's going for that. Oh So he's probably Going to hit those He's going to hit those Hindquarters He's going to get some Shock and some blood loss Look at this

He's going to get the neck Yeah No he's going for that Oh he's going He's going to pull him Down with the legs You get blood loss And you get

No he's going Oh Joe Rogan He's going up Oh Joe Rogan Oh my god He's going deep Look at the other rabbit He's like

What's going on He's like This doesn't seem right The other rabbit's Just going to look away You pussy We're not friends Not even going to help Your friend you pussy. We're not friends.

Not even going to help your friend. What a little monster. That is so crazy. He's deep on it. That is so crazy. So he's got his teeth, for those, I don't know who's watching, but he's got his teeth like behind the ears of this rabbit. He's killing it by biting the back of its neck, and he literally is 10 times smaller than it.

That's amazing. Is it dead right there? Wow, yeah. The other rabbit was like, dude. Thank you, BBC. Fucking d than it. That's amazing. Is it dead right there? Wow, yeah. The other rabbit was like, Thank you, BBC. Fucking dorks. Help your friend. That's why you're going to go extinct, you cunts.

You fucking asshole. You have big teeth. How about you turn him into a bitch? Turn him and bite him in the neck. I'm really mad at that rabbit. Is it stout or stout, you think? S-T-O-A-T. It seems like it would be stout.

No, but a U would be stout. Stout. Stout. Gotta get that back loose. Stout. I've never seen one of those before in my time outside. Have you? Never even heard about it. No, I didn't even know it was a thing until 10 minutes ago. They're savage. Next thing you know,'re gonna be like nipping at your calves

trying to take you down that should be the american animal not an eagle i know weasels in ireland and here everywhere else they're called short-tailed weasels oh so it's a kind of weasel yeah weasels are vicious little motherfuckers that's what i'm saying like why are weasels like the weasel when you think about like paulie sure when he would do the weasel you thought of him weaseling you didn't think of him as being a ruthless killer of something 10 times the size weasels are cute like if paulie shore was taking down giant bitches like huge 25 feet tall women and just smashing them you know like that would be what that's a sweet little animal so but that

even the way that that um the weasel was chasing the rabbit was kind of cute like he was just bounded along adorable very adorable it was adorable so he would run by he was so mean he would run by the other rabbits like he had determined about this rabbit this brings up like we were on my podcast we had a guy on there named randy newberg You know about that guy? I know Randy, yeah. Randy's awesome. Yeah, he's great. Lives in Bozeman, and he's great. And we did a deal about ethics. And a lot of folks wrote in, and they said, I'd be interested to hear what you think about this.

If an animal is wounded, and say you're up in a tree stand or you're hunting spot and stalk, or in the case of Randy, hunting over a waterhole. If you're doing that and you're a hunter, you hold a tag, you can choose which animal you'd like to kill. You have a buck or a doe, a male or female tag, you can choose which one you want to kill. If an animal comes by you that has been wounded,

clearly been wounded clearly struggling you know in the case of uh randy newberg he was sitting on a water hole and i believe he was in arizona and with a trophy tag which means there was a lot of big mule deer walking around a lot of big antelope walking around that in that situation pronghorn well let's explain to people that are listening that don't know what we're talking about. When he says a trophy tag, what he means is there's some units that are designated as trophy areas. It doesn't mean you don't eat the animal. What it does mean is that it's very difficult to get into this area. You have to have a certain amount of points, which means you're putting in to the pool of money that is for conservation, for habitat protection.

You're putting in every year to try to get a tag. And you can only get a tag in a lot of these places once a lifetime for some places. Yeah, in some places it's once every 10 years. I've drawn tags that are once every 15 years. I mean, it's a very complicated point system. But let's explain why they do that. They do that to preserve the population of big, mature animals so that this, you can't just let anybody go in.

Like there's some places that are called over the counter. What an over the counter unit is, is they know that there's a large, healthy population of animals and they either, the wildlife biologists and the state representative, they choose to just let anybody go in. And when they think that the animals are diminishing too much, then they'll put a cap on it. But for now, it's an over-the-counter unit.

Yes. And then they have places that are very difficult to draw units. Yeah. And those difficult to draw units is one of the places where Randy Newberg was because he was looking for a big, old, mature animal that had spread its genetics. And it's tough. The term trophy has been so weaponized that it's tough. It's my fault for using it. I use it not in the term that most people think of it.

I think of trophies as a lot of different things. A mature animal, that's, again, once in a lifetime. It takes somebody many years to draw. I think you should just call it a limited draw unit. Limited draw unit, right? Yeah, limited draw unit, hard to get area. Once in a lifetime hunt where you're never going to hunt there again and you're looking for the most unique animal that you can find, the most mature animal that you can find.

But along the way. Yeah, but along the way, like in this case, ethically, he runs into a limping antelope, pronghorn. It comes into a water hole and it's limping to the point where he thinks, oh, and this happens to a lot of hunters. He thinks, oh, I have this tag. I've waited a long time to get it. It's a very unique tag. Of waited a long time to get it it's a very unique tag of course the way you explained it and would i you know i can eat this animal just the same as i would any other one but to add you know to to exercise some mercy around this antelope

that's clearly suffering clearly injured who knows how got injured. It's limping up to a water hole. He's having this ethical pondering in his head, like, should I dispatch this thing and end its suffering? Fill my tag this way. Because with a tag in that nature, you have a tag, you can then choose to do anything you want with it in legal bounds. Right. You didn't wound this animal, so you could let that animal pass and choose a larger, more mature, more impressive animal. And you can let nature take its course, whether predation or not in the case of this one, but win or kill or something may take that animal. Or you can

end its quote unquote suffering. You don't know. We can't talk to the animal and ask it its opinion, but you can end what looks like it's suffering and fill your tag in that way. That's not the way normal hunts play out, but a lot of hunters are put in that situation that ethical situation it's pretty rare but it can happen it can happen it's never happened to me but what was your answer so the answer his answer was to shoot that was to shoot that antelope i agree with that you know why because also here's another possibility no antelopes come by yeah so if no antelopes come by just by fate you don't get an animal yeah so you spend seven days out there in the wilderness and you you come home empty-handed

you don't get to eat an antelope yeah or you're presented with this opportunity to be merciful to take this animal out that's injured and you get to keep an antelope and although it's not the antelope that you dreamed of it's something but it's still healthy meat yeah and you get to keep an antelope and although it's not the antelope that you dreamed of it's something about but it's still healthy meat yeah and you get to feel good the fact that you really did yeah you put an animal out of its misery and and we all like mercy is a virtue yeah right it's virtue we all would like to you know be able like and i and i said this and randy kind of we talked through it but i said that that this is a unique situation to a hunter if you're a hiker and you come across an animal wounded in this way or injured in this way, there's very little you can do. Yeah.

But this is unique to the hunter's responsibility to look at this animal and make this decision. Here's another argument. Another argument is you really should do nothing because those are the animals that are designated to be taken out by the predators and you want to keep the predator population healthy that was more my answer randy's answer like we went back and forth of course and um i see both sides i see both sides too and i think this that's one of those situations where as a hunter there was a you know i'll go

back there's another podcast i did with a guy named dushan smitana and he uh is this his real name that's his real name he's fantastic man tana duchon smitana he's from czechoslovakia he's a outdoor photographer and he's he's a dope individual and a wonderful human better be with that name he lives up to that name sporting name he'd like sip eyes fire like let me say like sip eyes fire does he wear handmade boots of course he does joe the fuck out of. What do you think he's wearing? Seems like he would. Make his own moccasins.

The most interesting man in the world. He is very much this. He, like, so I did a podcast with him. We sat by his fire and we drank plum brandy that he makes himself, of course. He does, really? He makes his own honey. He has Icelandic sheep that he shears and eats. He does a soda.

He kills a lamb every year and feeds everyone a soda. Wonderful human being. He grew up in Czechoslovakia and part of his describing his, his growing up is like in, there's a term and I'll, I'll butcher the pronunciation of it, but Miklavik is the term that he used to describe a hunter as like hunter or the one who thinks. And the way he described the, the culture described the cultural significance of a hunter in his, when he was growing up in the late 80s in Czechoslovakia, was that the hunter had to be, was the judge and jury. So there was like a reverence around hunting,

a reverence around a hunter because that hunter got the privilege in his culture to be the judge and jury for what animal gets taken out of the herd like making that very serious decision to say this animal is wounded this animal is too old this animal is young enough right you've talked about a lot on this podcast with very uh some other smart hunters that i think what hunting needs to become now that it isn't is this exalted status in our society where they think we're at we're giving somebody with a hunting tag or a hunting license you're giving somebody the opportunity to make a decision about something's life well you say exalted status the problem is you don't have to earn that status right it's like

right you could just go out and do it and one of the things that i've found out about hunting that is uh i don't i don't know if it's necessarily surprising but it's it's very difficult to express without personal experience is that the consequences, it's so different than what you would think. It's very difficult to do. It's very physically exhausting. The consequences of your actions are so grave and the rewards are so much different than any other way of acquiring food. Even fishing, which I love.

I love fishing. I love fish. I like to eat them. They're delicious. They're delicious. I like to catch them. They're fun. I like catching fish. I like to eat them. They're delicious. They're delicious. I like to catch them. They're fun. I like catching fish.

It's not the same. There's something that we, and I don't think this is a learned thing. I think there's a connection to difficult to I think one of the reasons why we enjoy fishing is because those reward systems were put in place by people that survived by eating fish. Yeah. By all those generations of people that did catch fish and that was how they ate that day. That excitement lives inside of you.

And you spark that up when you get a big steelhead on the line. That's right. You hear that reel go. Because you're being informed you're being informed by people that didn't have a choice man like these are people that had to have that fish to live exactly so even though it's recreation to you it's a thrilling recreation but then the consequences aren't as grave there's something about a wounded deer or a wounded elk that is so horrific and a merciful killing that is so it's so such a relief it's there's something powerful about it like i told you i shot that elk yeah that it's out there

that it walked four yards yeah and i'm not exaggerating four yards and fell over it was dead like that like and the guys who were there they said it was quicker than any rifle shot they had ever seen an elk die so they usually stand up longer from that that's what everybody wants that of course they do it wants it they want it of course they do but if i catch a fish and uh he's uh i pull him out of the water and throw him on the ice and he's flopping around for a few hours, I'm just happy I got him. Yeah. It's different.

Well, like you've had Michael Pollan on the show before. He wrote that Omnivore's Dilemma. And in it, he just said basically, and I'm paraphrasing, but he said hunting is so different from the inside than it is from the outside. Yes. It's so easy to view hunting in the lens of like there's a dude sitting behind a deer smiling and grabbing its antlers. There's also the problem that malnutrition in this country is almost non-existent.

Fat people are poor people in this country, which is fucked. Like poor people are fat, which is one of the weirder things about our society. This has never happened in the history of human beings that the poor people were the big fat ones. They got cell phones. I mean, there's a lot of rich people that are fat, too. Don't get me wrong. But people don't have a problem being fat. Sure.

And this doesn't mean that there's not a lot of malnutrition. There most certainly is. But it's nutrition. It's not a lack of calories. Lack of calories was a massive problem throughout most of human history. Of course. The lack of food. So the access to food is so normal to us.

It's so easy. But the unfettered access to food is what's really normal now. Yes. That's what's changed with industrialization and coming on. Yeah, fast food. Fast food is fucked. Processed food is fucked Yeah even if you go back To when People When hunting

Was more normal In the 1920s Or the 1930s It was really normal There was also No fast food Yeah So when you would

Get a roast Even if you went To a butcher And you got a roast And you brought it home And you were making Roast beef And you're cooking it

Or your uncle Shot a deer When was the last time Milk was delivered to your door? Yeah, right? Not my dad. So there's a lot of different – It was raw. It was raw.

Yeah. So there's a lot of different – yeah, like the removal from the actual process that hunters go through. Actually, it might not have been raw. When did they start pasteurizing and homogenization? Yeah, that's a Jamie thing. That was Louis Pasteur. Pasteur.

That is who it was. Pasteurization, right? That's what it came from. Yeah. Pasteurized milk. When did they start implementing that? Like when you would get the milk on your door in those glass jars. Didn't that milk go bad quick, though?

But that's my grandparents. That's what they would describe the milkman. 1880s. That's when it started. That's when it started. I wonder when it was common. I wonder if it was. But you think about like market hunting,

we always talk about in hunting, like the turn of the century being this huge moment in hunting conservation. Market hunting really became a thing when, when it accelerated, when refrigeration became a reality. Right. And accelerated when railroads could take meat from the great American West back to the cities in the East Coast. And so those things like accelerated, that technology and those things accelerated market hunting and the depredation of things like the whitetail deer and the buffalo as we all famously love.

of things like the whitetail deer and the buffalo, as we all famously love. I'm just trying to flavor this in the context of most people that hear these conversations don't really know what we're talking about. Yeah. You're obviously well-versed in this, but for a lot of folks, they don't understand that what happened was after the Civil War in particular, there's a lot of soldiers that weren't fighting anymore in the war, and they got jobs as hunters, and they would just go out with no rules and shoot as many animals as they wanted. The term we call that is market hunting.

The market hunting means that they're out hunting for marketing the meat or marketing the hides or marketing parts of the animal to themselves. Sometimes just the tongue. They would shoot buffaloes for just the tongue. Yep. So in that time at the turn of the century, right, 1880s, in the turn of the century, we had mass, mass killings of, people just think of buffalo, really,

but white-tailed deer, mallard duck, wild turkey. Elk. Elk. Black bear. Black bear. Look at that. Jesus Christ. Yes.

We're looking at a photograph of like so many fucking animals just hanging from these. Ducks there. Mostly ducks. Looks like all ducks. I don't see anything yet, but there's nothing. What are those all? What are those? Easter eggs. Like bears?

Those are all ducks. Yeah. So there's deer. Those are all deer. Yeah. So there's deer. Those are all deer. Market hunting deer. But they decimated massive just quantities of these wild game animals. Yeah. If you were to compare, there's more whitetail deer today than when Christopher Columbus landed on this continent.

At the time, you know, at the turn of the century, when at the height of the market hunting crisis in this country, there were enough whitetail deer that they probably would have been on the endangered species list or been close. And so the model of conservation that we then enacted, I don't want to say, like, I don't want to overexert this for people who have never heard of it, but if you look up, Jamie, the North American model of wildlife conservation, there was a ton of key figures in taking what America had at that point, which was basically the Wild West, where animals were dying at mass. And with railroads and refrigeration, like we said, they're then feeding and clothing at that time the masses in in the urban settings you know in new york and different places but as as these centuries turned over and you get into the the teens and the 20s guys like teddy roosevelt giver pinochet there you know john muir there was a bunch of figures who essentially kicked off what is America's

conservation movement. The movement to conserve not only the wildlife populations, but wild lands and wild waters and significant places in this country that we needed to protect. Because around the turn of the century, we did not have that feeling of value as a society. There wasn't like, we have to go value that thing we've never seen because you could never see

it. Right. And so we, they were, they went, they set about building a value structure for not only wildlife, but wild places. And they also set about a,

a way that the user would pay for this conservation. And this, these are the constructs of what we now know to be the North American model of wildlife conservation. Which, I mean, this is, if you look at it today, it's like one of the most successful in like the seminal systems of conservation in the world. In the world. It wasn't really codified until the 80s. Until guys like Dr. Valerius Geisterius geist and shane mahoney and folks

wrote it down and said this is what it is but pull it if you could pull up the tenets of the north american model because i could list them off but north american model of wildlife conservation wildlife as public trust resources elimination of markets for game like that's why people say hey where can i buy some elk you can't you can't you can buy it from new zealand so let's say let's go wildlife wildlife is a public trust that just basically means the states hold the wildlife in trust for the public these animals belong to us state holds them in trust and manage them in trust for us now for people that have a problem that as an idea that we would own a living thing, the only reason for that is to protect those living things. I understand on semantics that you would have issue with, you know, humans shouldn't own life, man.

We don't. And maybe own is the wrong word to use, bro. Maybe own is the wrong word to use, but it's like manage and cohabitate with. Maybe that's a better way to say it. By being, by, look, whether we protect them or whether we decimate them, right? We are the stewards of the land. We are. We are the ones, the monkeys with the guns.

Okay, that's just a fact. We have the ability to say, here's this number of animals. Here's this number of land. Here's how we encroach upon that land. Right. Let's study that and make sure that's all good. Yes. of land here's here's how we encroach upon that land right let's study that make sure that's all good yes and then let's manage it as actively manage it as hunters and anglers to make sure the carrying capacity of this land meets the wildlife populations everything is working in order it's the sustainable use of a natural resource that's what hunting is if anybody

asks you like hey hey dude what's hunting you say hunting in the north american model is the sustainable use of a natural resource yes to eat to eat elimination of markets for game we covered none of these animals that we're talking about whether you're eating black bear or whether you're eating deer you cannot buy that stuff if you buy it you're going to get raised farm raised meat and most of it is from New Zealand. Yep. Allocation of wildlife by law. Right.

There's laws, right? There's a law to say how many animals you can kill. Just like that fellow in Missouri that's got to watch Bambi. If you kill more than you're supposed to kill, you're a poacher now. You've broken the law. And the law is dictated in most really good states like Montana by wildlife biologists, conservationists, and people that understand the population and what's a healthy population for the area and how to maintain a correct balance. And there's a real science to that, folks. Yep.

The science of when you talk to wildlife biologists about this. I mean, we had a great podcast with Doug Duren. Yes. And love brian's last name love doug duran what was uh i fucking can't remember my shitty brain um but we we were talking about cwd chronic wasting disease the spread of it amongst wild animals and then just richards brian richards shout out to brian richards and me pal d Doug Duren. We love you, Doug. You're great. Doug's the best.

Keep fighting that CWD fight over there. So what we talked about was the actual science behind this one particular issue, but you grow to appreciate when you hear someone like him talk, you grow to appreciate the complex nature of wildlife biology

and maintaining the populations of animals keeping keeping them healthy and making sure that these habitats are preserved this is very complicated stuff oh it's it's it's impossible to really understand the scope of these like you take to take wyoming or montana like we we tend to cordon off things we really care about like oh grizzly bears and the greater yellowstone ecosystem we really care about that that's the thing to talk about but really what we should be talking about is in really what most wildlife managers are are looking at is this like biodiversity and health of all wildlife populations and it predator prey predator prey balance like these are things that we've um that we've said about in this model of conservation to say we're not just by license, by license.

We are using science and biology to dictate the way in which hunting is used to benefit these populations. Put that back up, Jamie. Oh, it's gone. Jamie, you Googling porn? Wildlife can only be killed for a legitimate purpose. That kind of says it all. Right. Jamie, are you Googling porn? Wildlife can only be killed for a legitimate purpose. That kind of says it all. Right.

It does, but what does that mean is where it gets weird with people. Here's one. Here's one where people get really crazy. They get really crazy when you kill predators. Right. Even if you're going to eat them. I was looking at Adam Greentree's page, and Adam Greentree shot a cougar. Did he send you that meat?

He has not. He's going to be here, and we're going to cook it together. Whoa. We're going to cook some mountain lion back straps. I hear tell it's delicious. I've never had. You? I have. I haven't had it that I've shot, but somebody else has prepared it.

You say you hear tell, but you have had it. I have had it, and it is delicious. Are you being coy? I'm not being coy at all. Are you saying hear tell? I hear tell. I like to sound folksy so people understand what I'm saying. But no, I-

You always said it's superb. It's like lean and delicate and it's like pork almost. It's really good. And then people will go crazy. Like, why are you killing that? Do you understand how fucked it is that you have zero problem with someone killing a deer, but you have a problem with someone killing a mountain lion? And this is a real

issue you have a problem with someone killing something that will fucking for sure kill you if it catches you alone in the forest yes fucking for sure kill your dog for sure kill your kids definitely kill those cute little deer and kill a shit load of them absolutely one every couple of days for its entire life and forever. They're experts at it. And for whatever reason, we get in our head that if, and I think this comes from this whole idea of trophy hunting. Yeah. That if you kill something like that, you're only killing that thing because you have a little dick and it doesn't work. And you want to be a big man.

So you kill this thing that's better than you. You ruin this beautiful animal. It's the definition of a surface-level examination. It is, but it isn't. Because this is the narrative that's been pushed through all the channels. They don't – unless they go out and research this stuff objectively in depth, then why would you? They can't. They won't.

But let's be devil's advocate. Why would you if you're an accountant? What do I want to look into the subtleties of predator hunting for? Yes. Keep that up, please. Why do I give a fuck about that? Like, why do I get some assholes wants to shoot mountain lions? What crazy, oh, is he going to use dogs?

Oh, wow, great idea. That's not fair. That's so unfair. Can we talk for a minute about baiting bears? Yes. Can we? Let's keep. Legitimate purpose.

Legitimate purpose, right? Baiting bears. I read a thing. Do you want to keep that down for the light is that what it is oh so just put it back up when we need we'll get to it um there's i've read us i've read stories and you and i've baited it when hunting for bears baited before and so i've heard a lot of we in hunting they have the term fair chase which means a legitimate you know reason for the ability for the animal to escape you're hunting the animal in all fairness in the pursuit um people beat beat up on baited bear hunting a lot probably because bears are involved probably because it seems unfair to sit in a chair and put out some donuts or put out some a dead beaver or put out whatever attracts a bear to put a smell out into the forest the bear smells it it comes to eat and you're there to kill it that seems like what lazy seems like this seems a lot of cheating cheating so people would say that's not fair chase that's not ethical right and in some ways i agree with

that in comparison to other ways of hunting right but at the same time i can say i can tell you this there's no more ethical if the idea is to kill the animal kill the right animal especially in in bear hunting you're trying to kill a specific boar a male bear that is past holder past breeding anybody who's bear hunted will tell you one of the hardest things to judge on its on while it's living is a bear whether it's a male or a female how big it is how old it is they are hard to judge because they're black they they slide through the forest they all look they don't stand there's no markers like if the bear is standing next to a Volkswagen bug, you go, oh, okay, I know how big a bug is.

I know how big the bear is. If the bear is next to some tree that's 100 yards away, you really can't tell. It's hard. So spotting and stalking, what we call spotting and stalking, which is like walking around, trying to find a bear, looking at it far away and getting close enough to kill it, whether it's with a rifle or a bow.

There's a lot of problems with what seems to be a fair way to achieve the pursuit of that animal there's a ton of problems around that because they're hard to judge you could come up on a sow a female bear that has cubs in a bush not see the cubs not know that it's a sow you're far away with a rifle you crack you kill it two cubs run out of the. That is not what you were trying to do. You made a mistake there. In the scenario where you are at a bait site, this animal comes in, it's walking around very close to where you are. You get to judge it. You get to look between its legs, see if it has a dick or not, and then determine it's the animal you want to dispatch and dispatch it ethically because it's closer to you. It's 20 yards. It's stabilized. A lot of times it doesn't know, hopefully doesn't

know you're there rather than doing it from further away or having to stalk close to it. So I say all this to say like, this is complex. What you think might be fair chase, what you think you might want to apply your own, you you know levels of fairness to doesn't always equal the reality of pursuing that animal if the end game is to dispatch it fairly and kill it fairly bears are a very unique animal in that there's so much more criticism because of teddy bears and yogi and fucking coca-cola commercials we have this idea of what a bear is. Yes. And it's also, the thing is, and this is hard for people to accept, those old boars that we're trying to kill, if you kill them,

it's better for the whole population of bears because they eat bears. Now, this is where it gets really fucked up. eat bears now this is where it gets really fucked up and uh you know my friend jonathan who is uh you met john and jen of course we're up there with them jonathan their son saw one of the bears kill and start consuming a cub oh yeah the female scared the bear off and then ate her own kid yeah i've you listen my podcast i got a guy named cole kramer who i've hunted on kodiak island with he's seen bear he's seen male bears chase down sows run them into a cave rip i mean he's watched them rip cubs and rip them in half and eat them and spit them out like yeah you know and once you've seen that you're you're you know no matter how many bear cartoons we show no matter how many times the bear has suspenders on and is talking to us, it doesn't change.

No matter how many times we name a bear, it doesn't change the bareness of the animal. It doesn't change its prime. It's a different animal. It's a different kind of animal. So there's nothing we can do to change a bear being a bear. I don't think there's any evidence that they don't eat their own kids either. Yeah. I don't think there's any evidence that they don't eat their own kids either yeah i don't think there is right i mean i'm sure somebody you know somebody way more educated than

me can tell you exactly what's happening there but we know you and i both know that they're killing those two they're killing as many clubs as they can to get the sow to come back and heat they're doing that and they're also doing it for food food as well they eat them and they also try to bring the sow back into estrus so the whole thing is you've talked about this before like hunters are in a specific you know are in a really interesting position to have seen to see these things and be intimate with these animals which is if you just explain what you explain to most people they would just snap their head back like what yeah they're cannibals 100 of them are cannibals yeah even the ones that were suspenders like it it is it it's this i think what non-hunters want from hunters is is to one say listen this is

a complex thing that we're doing right we're going into a wild place and removing from it something we didn't put there fuck that's serious that that's not we shouldn't be nonchalant about that we shouldn't celebrate it in ways that make it seem irreverent like that that right we should we should understand it's serious and take that action seriously we should be you know again that guy dushan and he was explaining in in czechoslovakia to go hunting you had to go take a class and learn flora and fauna and learn how many pheasant eggs were in you know in a nest and and really yeah and then once you became a hunter in the terms that that they describe it then you had to like it was the amount of work you put into the forest that denoted what you could then hunt you know so if you went to cut down this many

trees you could go hunt a deer if you only only did one certain thing, you could hunt a rabbit. They had this. Really? Yeah. He describes it as this interaction with nature. So that was their conservation model. That was their model of conservation. It was very much like accountability.

So I think what most non-hunters want from hunters, because for me, I don't think about anti-hunters as much as I think about somebody who just is smart, thoughtful, has never been, you were this way at some point. Sure. You're like a person who really thought hard about what you were eating and wanted to explore what is happening here. Yeah. And is there alternative ways? So I think what non-hunters want from hunters is for us to say, listen, we get it's complex, we get it's a serious thing,

and we're doing our best to unpack the moral and ethical entanglements in what we do. Yeah. And it's not easy. I mean, we flush pheasants when we could shoot them on the ground, and that's the way we do it. We call that fair chase. But we don't like when an animal comes close enough to us and eats the corn and we can shoot it. We don't like that either.

So these things are just entangled. It's a hard activity to reckon with. Well, the baiting part of it is absolutely not as good. Yes. I'm not saying I'm out there baiting every animal but i'm saying i can just see as like a somebody that likes the nuance of this and likes to explore this and likes to ask why yeah why why is it that that's the case why is it do we look down on people that that bait animals and or use dogs or use dogs the same same reason they do it for the exact

same reason yeah so they get a close-up ethical shot on the difficult to pursue animal. Yeah. And it always goes back to like the reasons we do what we do. But again, I would hope that everybody listening to this, lots of people do that don't hunt, that they would ask themselves like, what do I expect from hunters? Like, what is the thing that I expect you to do to earn? Because I very much feel as a hunter I need to earn the respect of the non-hunter. Yeah. Like, I have a duty to my hunting community to actively earn the respect of every non-hunter I run into. I feel like I got to do it.

And maybe I'm just making it harder for myself. But I feel like there's. It's an almost impossible task. Yeah, but you've probably done it. I've done it on a one-to-one level. Yeah. I definitely have flipped people, especially easier – it's much easier when they eat meat. Yeah.

When they eat meat, it makes sense. Yes. But then they'll still have a problem with the bear thing, and the bear thing is one you've got to sit them down with. I don't prefer to hunt bears. I don't in any way because I don't – i get weirded out about trichinosis it's just the meat is not as good to me yeah it's good it tastes great you have a nice roast or bear stir fry or something it is delicious it's not like you spit it out but it's not also like comparative to elk it's like okay yeah you can't even have it medium rare Which is the best way to eat meat

That's right So it's not the same to me But if I lived like in Alberta Where John and Jen live I would realize that it's imperative You have to do And if you do like to eat elk And if you do like to eat deer

And if you do like to eat moose It's really your responsibility to hunt bear Yeah Because they kill 50% of all the moose calves The elk calves and the deer fawns. 50% get killed by black bear. Now, here's the other thing you could say. Well, that's because nature has a balance.

And the reason why they're there is so those fucking deer don't look like those kangaroo in that park. And that's true too. Yeah. That's true too. They're right. And I think it's our job to not have any sort of bias when it comes to our examination of this information whether it's flattering or not we have to be able to look at

this objectively yeah you got to be pragmatic yes have to and you have to be honest and i think this is you have to address the complexity you have to realize that this is very complex but guess what fuck face if you wear leather shoes you got leather clothes you got a leather interior in your car you're eating cheeseburgers you should probably shut the fuck up like we're humans we're consumption engines we breathe in we breathe out we consume the world around us that's the way it works as you always say life eats life and that but the reality of the situation for me is like i've tried to not stray away from but try to add on to

the pragmatic arguments for hunting like to try to examine like the emotional issues we have around caring for the single animal over caring for the entire species of of that animal or in any case subspecies of that animal like that that to me is something i've tried to add on like let's first start with pragmatic arguments like you eat meat you're fucking killing things like why aren't you thinking as hard as i'm thinking about this and and i i really would love to build a bridge with people to say i care like if you're an uh let's say you're an anti hunter and you love animals you're a vegan you've had a lot of conversation around vegans i'm a vegan i really care about animals. They're sentient beings. They all deserve life.

Put that person in front of me, and then I'll stand right beside them and be like, I fucking agree with you. I agree that all animals are sentient beings. I agree that they all deserve life, and then I go to preserve that life for that animal. That's what I go to do. We start, me and that anti-hunter,

I'm a hunter, start at the same point and over the years sort of sort of at its core you want to eat those animals i do so that that eliminates you from their side but that's instantly yes because your diet but you're an animal consuming machine this person is an animal consuming machine. They're just not admitting it. They just don't understand. They just don't understand it. They're an animal consuming machine because they don't organically garden.

Yes. If they organically garden, they need everything that they grow themselves. Even then, it's hard to detach yourself from your consumption of the world. Yeah. Because it's hard. Like, what's in your compros, bro? Yeah. If it makes it easier for you, let's just leave the vegan out of the conversation and

say the non-hunter. Yes. It's like, I don't kill animals myself, but I care about them. I'm like, I care about them and I kill them. We're at the same, like, if you remove the second part of the sentence, the first part is I care about them. Right. We both care about animals. We're standing at one point and over time, whether it's mass media or just the way hunting has been marketed and the poor PR agent that we've had, we've kind of walked away from each other, right? We started with we both care about animals, and we've kind of walked away from each other. And over time, we've been unwilling to turn around and face each other

and be like, remember when we started out thinking we all value these animals, we value their lives, we all care about them. Hunting is just a version, our version, and it's worked given that model of conservation we were talking about. It's worked for the whitetail deer and the mallard duck. It's worked. There's more than ever. I'm just doing it a different way than you've chosen to do it. I'm doing it in a more proactive way than you've chosen, you know about it and so i would if a vegan came up to me i'm like listen man there we have more similarities in my opinion than we do differences we've just chosen the difference the one big fat thing that's different it's the difference though it's the most

important difference you want to kill animals and eat them they don't think you should be allowed to they don't think it's right they don't think it's moral they don't think it's ethical they don't just think everything is wrong with what you're doing okay we both but we both care about animals that is a fucked up way to look at i care about people too i just like to eat them people are great i'm gonna be president but i'm gonna eat five people a week i don't know we got a lot of people imagine if you run for president say i really love people but i like to eat them they would say say, well, those are people. Don't eat them. That's simple. That's what vegans would tell you about animals.

I would say I'm telling you that by taking the lives of these few animals, I'm working on the full breadth of this animal. They would tell you if you really cared, you'd just donate the money. You'd just donate the money to conservation. Fuck the Pittman-Robertson Act. I'm still feeding my family. I'm still making myself a better person. i'm still enriching my fucking life so don't tell me i don't have the right to do that because you think animals are sentient you're still killing animals by driving on roads

and eating corn and doing the things you're doing right but they're not directly killing them by their food choices well they don't know they are they're so indirect like proxy killing is better than than actual killing well consciously right okay actual consciously killing or buying something that's actually consciously killed is different than if you buy look if you buy soy if you eat tofu there is a fact and that fact is there has to be a lot of animal displacement in order to make that amount of field available to grow soy in yeah or to grow um soybeans in it's just a fact and then when you talk to anybody that's ever seen what happens when a crop gets hit by a combine and then the vultures start flying overhead there's a reason it's because there's a bunch of little fucking squirrels and

rabbits and all sorts of shit that just got ground up and anything else that gets stuck yeah in that field as those gigantic machines come whirring by and that's what that's how and when you're talking about large-scale agriculture that's how things are harvested of course they're not plucked one by one now if you're one of those people that has an organic garden and you pluck one by one you take your rotten apple cores and your fucking orange peels, and you throw it all in a compost pile with some dead leaves, and you use that as fertilizer, you're going to run out of nitrogen because you need fish, bitch. Oh, shit.

I like how you switch from devil's advocate to, like, you're on my side now. We're in there, baby. No, folks, guess what? When you're buying fertilizer, it's dead fish. Look, there's a fucking unusual cycle. It's really weird, but the cycle is that dead animals actually fuel the plants that you consume. So if you're a person that is, you know, even if you're eating wild plants, right,

you want to eat some wild plants, I guarantee you some dead fucking squirrels and rats and pigeons and anything else went to fertilize that you probably had that i mean they've proven that there's salmon dna sometimes in plants because those plants have actually used salmon for a fertilizer like people have used that those dead fish and that shit gets into the plants themselves yeah it's all it's all very strange there's no way out man there's no way out of this. But in their eyes, even if there's no way out, it's the path of least pain and suffering. And I would tell those folks, I respect the shit out of that. And I'm trying to do, I'm trying to take my own, this into my own hands and actively go

and do the thing that I know to be enriching to my life, to make me a better person, to make me a more skilled person, to give me more perspective on the world. But at the end of the day, the byproducts of all that activity is a healthier ecosystem and more wildlife, because that's proven via the model we've said, and I feed my family with that. And I'm just trying to do what you're doing in a more tangible way. You're hands-off. I'm hands-on is the way that I would say that. And I respect the hands-off. I respect like I'm cognizant of what's happening here, and I'm trying to make it better. I respect that.

I feel what you're saying, and I see what you're trying to do. But if I'm thinking through the eyes of a vegan, you can go fuck yourself. I'm being the nice guy, and you're being the dick. Well, that's like vegans. A lot of them are dicks. Why can't I give a fuck? Why can't I give a fuck

all the time? Because you're killing and eating animals. You're killing animals. You fucking asshole. You think you get a free pass to just kill animals anytime you want,

but you don't. Some of them, so. I like this devil's advocate side of you, Joe. Thank you. Did you see Moby? You ever look at Moby's page? Never have.

Moby has a wonderful Instagram page. He had something that was so preposterous the other day and I read the comments under it and I was like, this is so hilarious. It's about eggs. And this is what it said. I mean, first of all, folks, you come talking to a person who has chickens, eggs are like the most karma-free

thing. It says, eggs cannot legally be labeled as healthy, nutritious, or safe to eat. First of all... This is true because eggs are full of cholesterol and saturated fat, and because every year over 100,000 people in the U.S. contract salmonella from eggs, they cannot legally be advertised as healthy or safe or nutritious. Okay. First of all, that's not true. Okay.

I don't know why you posted that, Moby. You didn't look into it. Is there something called... First of all, let's not true. Okay, I don't know why you posted that, Moby. You didn't look into it. Is there something called at animal equality? First of all, let's just Google how many people get salmonella from eggs every year. Because if it was 100,000, the fucking egg market would collapse so goddamn fast. So let's dismantle, Moby, please go ahead, do that. Just dismantle this preposterous idea that 100,000 people get salmonella. Okay, here we go.

Even with safety steps in place, it is estimated that about one in 20,000 or one in 10,000 eggs are contaminated with salmonella. Wow, that's a lot. Is Moe right? Maybe. What did he say? 100,000 people get it? That's what he. Is Moby right? Maybe. What did he say? 100,000 people get it? That's what he said.

Right. But see if you could find how many people in the U.S. contract salmonella. Okay. Because if they find out that there's salmonella in eggs, are they finding out that's from uncooked eggs? Every year, about a million people get salmonella infected from foods that have been contaminated by one of the many kinds of salmonella. Is he right? Okay, let's see if it's 100,000 people from eggs.

How many people per year get salmonella from eggs? What does it say? Salmonella in the United States. 142,000 people in the United States are infected each year with salmonella. Whoa. Hold on. That says from chicken eggs. Wait a minute.

142,000 people in the United States are infected each year with salmonella from chicken eggs. And about 30 die. Dude, not only is Moby right, but he's off by 42,000. Now you're going to be way more of a devil's advocate than you were before. I'm going to hit you hard with this devil's advocate. All right, let's go. Hold on. What did you do, John?

I don't have any egg-related arguments. I was going to say that was a specific kind of salmonella. Oh, yeah. Salmonellosis. That's, I guess, what it is when you get it. So we found that this is true? Yep. Not only is it true It's from 2010

Maybe it's different in 2018 142,000 people in the United States Are infected each year With Salmonella Enteritis Enteritis Enteritis Enteritis

From chicken eggs And about 30 die So we lost 30 pussies In 2010 An analysis of death certificate. Joking. My dad died from. I was joking.

It's just a joke. It's a comedy podcast. We're in the comedy section of iTunes. Identified 1,316 salmonella-related deaths from 1990 to 2006. Whoa. Whoa. Now. Thanks, Moby.

But this is a problem. These fucking dummies are eating them raw. This is what I want you to google How nutritious are eggs How about google this There's a lot of ways to look at this I've been eating eggs my whole fucking life I've never gotten salmonella

By the way if you eat chicken raw you get salmonella too stupid You're not supposed to eat it raw You're supposed to cook it One egg has only 75 calories But 7 grams of high quality protein, 5 grams of fat, and 1.6 grams of saturated fat along with iron, vitamins, minerals, and

carotenoids. The egg is a powerhouse of disease fighting nutrients like lutein and zeaxanthin. Okay Moby, so shut the fuck up. They're super, super nutritious for you. Just occasionally. Back off Moby. Somebody gets salmone. They're super, super nutritious for you. Just occasionally... Back off, Moby.

Somebody gets salmonella. How about just cook your fucking food, bro? Your fucking eggs. But here's where it gets really dark. Why don't you Google this? How many people die every year from E. coli from vegetables? That's right. Because of a shitload.

Anti-corn. Anti-corn is actually from farmed animals. It's actually from agriculture run off from the let's google how much methane comes from how much methane comes from vegans broccoli it's deadly i like how let's go back to this like where you play the vegan and i'm like dude it's fun dude moby's so right he's not not just right. He's more than 40,000. Moby, please. Six degrees of Moby. Edit your post with the correct number.

You're right about eggs are dangerous, bro. Don't eat them raw. Good die. Yeah, don't eat them raw, stupid. Okay, here it goes. CDC estimates 260,000. Wow, 265,000 infections occur each year in the United States of E. coli. Wow.

infections occur each year in the united states of e-coli wow 36 percent are caused by e-coli 015 7.87 dude it's almost all from animal agriculture it's almost all from uh from shit from shit water here types of e-coli that can cause illness can be transmitted through contaminated water or food through contact with animals or people. Yeah, but when they say contaminated water, what they really mean is that water is contaminated with shit from animal agriculture. I think almost entirely. What is the source of E. coli?

Google this. Most prominent source of E. coli in vegetables. I would guarantee you it's animal agriculture. I mean, if you see those gigantic factory farms and the runoff. Most prominent source of E. coli in vegetables. Is that what you said?

You're better at this than me. Just so you can figure it out. I'm just like, get it, Joe. You find it. You find the evidence. I'm trying to be. I'm trying to be. Fucking Moby.

Yeah, I'm trying to be vegan. I'm not arguing for the vegans. I like this. I like this. It's not hard to do. No, it's not hard to do. It's a respectable position, man. It just is. What does it say? It's all three, actually. What does it say? The thing that popped up is the most common way

to acquire E. coli infection is by eating contaminated food. Ground beef, unpasteurized milk, fresh produce. And that fresh produce means not cooked. So if you get broccoli or... Yeah, you have like a... Yeah, just spinach. You're supposed to cook spinach.

Celery. That's the problem with romaine lettuce, right? Because romaine is... Nobody ever cooks that stupid fucking shitty lettuce. If the world had no romaine lettuce, do you think you'd be okay? I think I'd be fine, bitch. My dad calls it the hard lettuce.

He's like, I don't want that hard lettuce. Give me the soft. Oh, I don't like iceberg. Give me the soft lettuce. Iceberg is just a joke. It's just room for meat. I could be putting meat in my stomach instead of that shitty ass white clear lettuce. Delicious, delicious.

Listen, I would say to you, Joe Rogan, vegan, you're a very handsome man. You seem healthy. Healthy as fuck. Do you have an organic garden're a very handsome man. You seem healthy. Healthy as fuck. You have an organic garden in your backyard? No. No. No.

I got some shit I grow. Oh, okay. A little bit. A little bit. Not a lot. Get a lot of it from the store, to be honest with you. Me too.

Me too. But I don't buy meat from the store. I get to opt out of Factory Farm because I have a lot of wild game stuff in my house.

I have definitely still bought meat from the store. I buy way less of it and I eat meat almost every day. Yeah. I buy way less, but I'll still go to a restaurant and order steak. Yeah. I feel like this is something that people probably heard before, but it's like the feeling of eating wild game meat is just different. It's way different. It tastes different.

It's better for you. It feels different. It feels different for my body. Yeah. You know? I mean, I have, I remember watching this thing about Ted Nugent once. I was like, how's that guy got so much fucking energy? I mean, he's like 65 years old at the time.

Spirit of the wild. Well, he's eating deer every day, all day. All day. I mean, love or hate that guy. There's a lot of power to his diet. And he's a good guy. You get to know him. He really is.

Remember, we would like – People are saying to me, like, how could you have Ted Nugent on the podcast? I love him. How about that? Does he say things that I agree with 100% of the time? No. I love the guy. If you've ever sat and talked to Uncle Ted, which, you know, shit, I worked at the NRA for a while.

I used to get assigned to the Ted Nugent talk that he gave at the NRA annual meetings. Like I was a writer for the NRA and like worked for the digital websites. And I would get assigned to like the Ted Nugent seminar at the NRA annual meetings. I would go and sit in the back with Ted and he would go, brother. And he gets crazy. He's not fake. He ain't faking that no that ain't like something he just puts on for the cameras that's ted and but he is smart man like he is as you found out on that podcast which i thought was amazing like that dude is sharp as they come you don't want also he's reasonable and open to new information you don't want to think i turned him on yes i turned him on to marijuana yeah you did okay first of all he's using CBD on a regular basis

in fact if you go to Ted Nugent official go to his fucking his Instagram he was actually he was advertising Jombo CBD

that I hooked him up with yeah man he was having some serious knee pains he's had a you know he was telling me about his days

of rock and roll jumping off of amplifiers and he destroyed his meniscus his knees are shot I ran into him like three years ago at a concert and went backstage and we were chatting and he had um huge ice packs on each one of his knees and he just had surgery and i don't know what the surgery was for but it like he clearly he was clearly in pain and like he just looked you know

run down but then we went out in the crowd he came on stage and he looked like a 25 year old rock guy yeah he fucking he's a hard-working man yeah i mean when when the time comes the lights are on that guy goes after it and people like so you support with the racist things you said or there's like no unfortunate you know whatever the fuck he said that you didn't like that either he shouldn't have said or maybe you didn't understand what he meant or maybe it's out of context anything that hurts anybody's feeling unfortunate and i don't support it but guess what we're all we all have unfortunate things about us that's just a fact of being a fucking human being and one of the parts one of the things that we're doing when we're screaming out and calling out someone and we want someone deplatformed and dismissed and never to be heard from again, we're worried. Part of us are worried that that's going to happen to us.

We're worried that we would ever exhibit that sort of reprehensible behavior or language. And we want to put a stop to it in ourselves, in other people. We want to eliminate it from our society and culture. We want to do it harshly and ruthlessly. And we terrified that's going to be done to us yeah you know and there's a lot of people that make some fucking really terrible mistakes and i think there's got to be some sort of a path to redemption i really i really believe that always because i meet you know in hunting i certainly don't meet the caliber of folks that you have in this room but like i meet these people in hunting and then i run around in the in these circles and people

are saying this person thinks this and had you seen that instagram post i don't believe in that and like knocking people down yeah and um i just think i know that person that's a good person you know and maybe he's not he or she is not depicting this in the way that you like it in this instance. But that's a good, well-meaning person, right? People are more than capable of mistakes. And we should be more than capable of allowing them redemption and forgiveness. Because we should want the same thing for us. Should I be on this podcast right now and have said something in the last couple hours that was terrible?

And, like, I would hope the folks that know me would know that, like, this is a mistake. For us. Should I be on this podcast right now and have said something in the last couple hours that was terrible? And, like, I would hope the folks that know me would know that, like, this is a mistake. And as long as I own up to the mistake and say, hey, it was in the moment, I apologize. You had a little bit of right brain going through my brain. A little bit of right brain. My brain was going. Yeah. I apologize for that thing. And it's not – that doesn't define me because that's a very scary

and slippery slope to get down is like one moment in your life can't define you. It's also something that's really, it seems way more recent. This idea that you want someone to never be heard from again.

They fucked up and they should never be heard from again. And also, I think, and this is my own bias, I think it's a product of a shitty way of distributing information that has existed all of our lives until recently.

And I feel like the long-form conversation is the only way to get to know somebody. And when I sat down with Ted, after the three hours of talking, I'm like, I like this guy. I like him. Well, like you always say, I love when I get off of a good podcast. this guy i like him well like you always say i love when i get off of a good podcast when i when i mean there's like an episode of the hunting collective and i sit down with somebody and they're like oh my god this person is like what they just brought to my life in two hours i'm so fucking happy to have had that yeah it's like a high you get yeah it's a legitimate high because you don't you say this all the time you don't get to sit down in your life and take two hours or

three hours with somebody and just talk and exchange ideas and disagree and agree. No distractions. No distractions. Yeah. And that, like, what that gives you, and if folks haven't done that, like, that gives you something almost every time. It's the only way you get to know people. Yeah.

It's really, it's very, I mean, I don't mean just through podcasts. I mean, in your life. I mean, if you don't have a podcast, sit down with someone and talk to them for several hours. I mean, how often do you do that with your wife? No, man. It's fucking rare. You know, I mean, I have made a vested interest in long form conversation, not just on the podcast, but in my life really over the last like five or six years. Yeah.

Who better than you to say that and be like, this has informed the way that I think, the way that it's impacted our society and our culture, this show. It's changed the way I feel about people. Yeah. It's changed the way I feel about what communication is. I have convenient perceptions of people. I think we all do. I conveniently go, oh, that guy's cool. Oh, that guy's not.

Or this girl's an asshole, or whatever my convenient perceptions of people. I find that a lot of them are based on these brief interactions. They're based on small amounts of information that's been distributed over long periods of time. And maybe one time I caught someone when they were hammered and they were being an asshole. Or maybe I was hammered and I was annoyed by them. Or who knows what it was but to really understand who a person is you have to sit down with them i think and just talk to them and you have to do it for a long time yeah and it takes a long time and you also observe their actions and observe them when they're tested and observe them under duress and there's no way to get out of like get out of a long-form

conversation you can't say like hey i gotta go now yeah um i'm i'm out of my depth all the things i said about myself how great i was before this now you're you're opening up this chasm where i don't know the things i said i knew but i could for a 30 second or one minute tv spot i could train i could i could yeah read the lines and i could come off like I look like I know what I'm talking about. There's no way to escape this freaking thing. I just thought about something. How fucked up would a show be if you had just a husband and wife alone in a room with no one reacting to them? Just them sitting down at a podcast, and then that podcast gets broadcast to the world,

and the whole world gets to watch their fucked up dysfunctional relationship and how it plays out, all the weirdness. You know this weirdness that you see around people and their wives, or sometimes you have a couple of cocktails, the wife will say something really shitty and walk off the bathroom. It's like a cup that spills over. You're just keeping all of it in the cup, and then every once in a while you can't keep it in you can't keep it in and then there's just like the

guy does something douchey or the girl does something cunty or whatever the fuck it is and then you're like whoa it first starts to it starts to trickle out in this passive aggressive way and then eventually if you're there long enough it just becomes aggressive there's no passion long enough if and that's one of the things about alcohol it's so beautiful how that aggression just comes out of people okay i got you tell me if you like this you tell me if you like this idea i had this idea the other day that's basically what we're doing right now is that i would do a show about ethics around like hunting and the outdoors and things but it would just be called drunk ethics where i would just be drinking with people and having intelligent conversations that would increasingly get more and more fucking weird more

fucking weird and open because i'm getting yeah it's great idea i'm in favor of people drinking i don't mind drink i'm drinking right now through this whole thing we are too other than other than the fact that i had to pee like yeah it's been great yeah i'm not uh i'm not anti-drinking i think um there's something to be gained from the the release of inhibitions yeah you know there's something that's i mean there's a reason why it has such a strong place socially well plug for rye brain i mean i'm releasing inhibitions but also increasing brain function at the same time your brain's so confused hashtag it's like what what hashtag what is Hashtag what? Hashtag who?

Hashtag RyBrain. I think that would be a wicked podcast, though. Every week you get together a couple that's been fighting, and you get them to go over their, the way they feel about things. Maybe have a therapist in the room, something like that. Fuck the therapist. No, therapist. Those people ruin everything. That's true.

People who fight should just break up. They should just duke it out until they can't take it anymore and then just just go with the way of ben affleck and j-lo just fall for a short period of time you were in love let it hit the rocks move on folks don't you want to have a new person in your life like do you have any listen do you have any like um marriage advice like i've been married for coming up on five years i have a two-year-old my wife wants to have more children i just bought a new house living in a brand new house in a new town you got a lot of things going on that are pressure points right living the american dream a little bit i'm very happy with

my family they're wonderful people i love them but like i want to sustain this i have a great thing i'd like to put my arms around and keep. It's like, ah, this is so great. I don't want it to go away. Well, just that attitude alone,

your awareness of how special it is. You know, you are doing the thing that everybody thinks of when they think about like fulfillment in life. You're raising a child.

You're having children. Yeah. You're, you know, you're engaged in this intense relationship with another human being. We've created a person,

all those things. Those are giant, man. Those are giant. And also you're engaged in an activity that 50% of the people fail at. And then they fail at it. Fucking goes down hard, man.

It goes down hard. It's screaming and swearing. Lawyers of all the levels of failure in life. Like there's nothing more, no failure, more impactful than a divorce. I've met, I mean, I have so many friends that have been fired from jobs,

and it's not fun. It's not good, but they bounce back. Yeah, you bounce back. I've seen guys lose who they are from divorce. I've seen it happen. I've talked about this too many times, but it's a true story. I have a friend who has been divorced to a woman for 14 years.

He's been married to a new one for 12. He has a family. He has children with this new woman. It's over with the old one. He still pays her every year. And they have no children. Because he fucked her so hard she can't work it's because it's crazy because the laws are insane the laws are insane they don't make any

sense we're not talking about a woman who is like 80 years old and can't work anymore either we're talking about a completely you know viable human being dude it's bananas it is bananas for that to flip like you said when when back to like the i do thing like when you say i do there's never i did have a buddy who when he said i do and they turned around she looked mad he looked scared why was she mad i probably that that she didn't say it right. You didn't say it, right? Yeah, you didn't say that. You didn't say it right. Why did you say that? I want to be like a movie. Yes. And some people just don't, they're not supposed to be together, but they think they should be with somebody.

Yeah. So they find somebody and they talk that someone into doing something fucking insane. Yeah. Like signing a legal contract that says you're going to be together forever and ever till death. But see, my problem is a very lucky problem that I've got something that, at least in its early years, it seems to be the right thing. Love you, honey.

Love you, honey. Hope you ain't listening. What are the odds she made it this far? What are we, two hours and what, 30 minutes? Yeah, she ain't listening. She's got a two-year-old by herself at home. She ain't listening. She checked out a long time ago.

But my challenge right now is I think about life i'm like i got this wonderful beautiful thing yeah and i'm just the stress is that i'm gonna fuck it up well that is um always the stress and i think that's one of the reasons why a lot of marriages fail is because of this intense pressure of the relationship you know like there's a finality and and i understand the need for this finality right there's a need for and and i understand the need for this finality right there's a need for this contract and that everything locked down if you're a woman you can't like you when you're raising children you need help right you need the man to be there to help you raise it hopefully yeah but you also need financial help it's difficult you know it's it's

this is all it makes sense that the woman would want to lock things in like that it makes sense it's also a weird cultural tradition right it's this weird thing that we have this law like we we we bring the law involved into relationships and it's it's very strange like legal contracts yeah and some of them are fucking preposterous, right? Like sometimes you see a guy who looks like Rupert Murdoch, right? And he's got this banging wife and she's like 30 years old and she's got big tits. Or how about Harvey Weinstein and his wife? She's in it for the right reasons. And you're like, hey, son, I see what happened here.

But he sees it too. He can't be, but he's not blind. Of course. He sees it too. It was his whole business. When they say I do, they're like, well, okay. Yeah. This is his whole business. When they say I do, they're like, well, okay. Yeah. This is where we are.

When you have a disgusting troglodyte type, you know, just gelatinous looking, job of the hut looking man and a beautiful hot young wife because the guy's got fucking kajillions, that's a normal thing. Don't put up any pictures. Don't put up any pictures. thing and they're both enters don't put up any pictures but they're both going those folks there was we're both going into that knowing like hey look this isn't a traditional or who parents maybe he was really sweet with her and that's all she needs maybe she's just this rare soul that if he had five dollars in his pocket she'd be super happy with him. Could be. Doubt it. Fucking doubt it. I would doubt it as well.

Doubt it like a motherfucker. Fucking doubt it. Fucking doubt it. Yes. It's a preposterous union in the first place. Listen, there's some relationships that you could define as legal prostitution. They are absolutely legal prostitution. A woman has made a determination that she will let this sloth shoot fluid into her

vagina on an intermittent basis if she could be bathed in diamonds and drive a ferrari and live in a mansion this is a normal part of life some people would say and i might even say like as long as they're consenting and they're both aware that's going on then well that would be a good argument for prostitution as well though wouldn't it's a bit of a transaction i guess i don't know it's a transaction yeah i guess it of a transaction I guess It's a transaction When you look down at it it's right that way I've always said why is it okay to give someone a massage You give someone a massage

You can't even jerk them off It's not legal That's weird The government decides who can touch your penis Like if the massage therapist said Hey I really enjoy giving you a massage. Let's go somewhere afterwards of my own free will and I'll jerk you off. I'd be like, that'd be fine.

That's fine. Yeah, you're right. You just can't do it right there. But in the confines of the massage parlor. Unless it's a public health issue. Imagine if loads smelled like gunshots and you were... You go to a massage parlor, it smells like a shooting range like what the fuck is going on this place this is a dirty massage place i'm out pew pew pew

imagine if loads smell like sulfur like jesus the devil's coming out of you boy the devil purify that man. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of laws that are ridiculous. But there seems to be some sort of- Someone here is the marriage advice I'm looking for. I got it. Maybe it was what we were talking about earlier.

Maybe it's long form conversations, having long conversations with each other. Having a long respect, like respecting the fact that you can't get through some of this stuff in a very short time i've i've always said like i appreciate a nice road trip for that reason like yeah you can't yeah you're hanging out with each other for long periods of time yeah like i'd much rather the stress of an airport with a kid and a wife is not i'd much rather just drive it and take the time because you get this like connection if you can get the phones out of the way yeah for the passengers you just get this connection that you wouldn't get otherwise yeah doing things together that are unique that that helps you know yeah experiencing things together but also you also have to both have the mindset that you enjoy each other's company yeah and you want to make it work good yeah i mean some people

just don't man and this is we've all seen that happen right we've all seen relationships where the girl's just like check please yeah and the guy's like baby i'm different but it's a 50 like you said it's a 50 50 thing so like you have been married for quite some time and and we were talking about prior when we're shooting our bows out there like you're you know like there's things you've done to to make it work like you like your wife and she likes you and it works and it's been working for a long time. And the percentages say that's, what did you say, 50-50 is... Chris Rock had a great joke about it. He said, he goes, 50% of the people leave. He goes, but how many cowards just stay?

Look, relationships don't always work. But here's the thing. You don't always know, but here's the thing. You don't always know who the fuck you are. Yeah. And I'm a different person than I was five years ago. Yeah. I just am. Yes.

I hope I'm a better person. I'm trying very hard to be a better person. I certainly know more about myself. I understand myself better. This is a long, slow process. I think we are all a work in progress that's right and not everybody engages in this work so you could be a person who's on this path of you know being present and and trying to be kinder and trying to improve and then you have

a spouse male or female that just shits on you and i've seen that too man i've seen me too really brutal toxic relationships where they insult and say rude things around your friends to try to fuck with you and and people get into these these relationships where they they genuinely hate each other yeah but they're stuck together and what that does to children too because i i told dad, I wrote my dad this letter recently. This is getting real deep. Hour number three of the podcast. We get real deep.

We're pro-nuance. I even sent it to my dad, but he won't listen to this. But I wrote this letter that was like, listen, man, because I had seen like his developing relationship with my son and like it shot it put this thought in my head that you know my relationship my dad like his caring for me the fact that he stayed with my mom and they developed this like place for me to grow and nurture me and allowed me to become a person in that environment like it was a north star for me when then i left that environment like i always i never wondered what my path was going to be i always could look up and be like that bond that i developed my family their love for me is like the thing that i'm always

you know i'm looking back to but also looking forward to because that's what defines me and regardless of what i do i can always fall back on that, that my dad loves me. My mom loves me. I love them. And I grew up like with this strength of soul because I knew I don't have, I have friends that came from the same place that I did, same town I did in Maryland that OD'd on heroin. They lived in the same little suburb, suburbia community that I did. They had parents that were the same age. They went the same high school they lived in the same environment they went down one way i went down another and i truly do feel that that me going down that way was the way that my parents like built this structure around me that was always around that bond and that love and the things that that's

very very fortunate yeah very fortunate and i and It's very fortunate. And me being able to later on in life see how fortunate I was to have that drove me to not fail and to not let whatever other failures creep into my life around maybe I'll take drugs. I have a lot of friends. The place I grew up in Maryland, there's a lot of people that succumb to drugs and alcohol and things like that. A lot of friends die. Yeah, Baltimore is a rough spot. Yeah, man. I come from a town called Hagerstown, Maryland.

I don't know why I say it like that. I come from a town. But Western Maryland is a corridor for Interstate 70 and Interstate 81, and there's a lot of drugs there. And there's a lot of my friends that are either in jail or no longer around. A lot of successful ones, too, but that happened to me. Yeah. And I was able to look at that moment and be like,

I came from the same place they did, the same environment, the same friends, the same activities. We all hunted and played sports, and we hung out together. I went one way. They went another way. same activities we all hunted and played sports and we all you know we hung out together i went one way they went another way do you attribute that entirely to your parents or is it possible that it's like who you chose to hang out with as well and the activities you engaged in because i unfortunately i know people that were good parents yeah that had kids that od'd yeah and listen i can't look that's i'm not trying to

generalize in any way about you know any one situation my situation was that i could always i felt like and i told my dad at some point in my life where i said um i went to him and i was like maybe 20 or 19 and i said i'm gonna get all a's now i'm done fucking around like because i was a c plus student you know i was the dumbest kid in the smart class through high school. And there was a time in my life where I realized that I had to pay back what my parents and my grandparents and my family had done for me because I knew that they had given me something that not everybody had. And I knew, I was like, I know that I have to pay this back. And I've got to stop messing around now and go and do something.

That's interesting because they did a great job then. Because sometimes what happens when people were raised with a giant safety net of love, they become unambitious. Yeah. They become little mama's boys. I think I was close to that. I was close to that a little bit. Like fall, like, oh, I'm going to community college and smoking a lot of weed.

But that could just be you just trying to have a good time yeah yeah no but there was a time in my life there was a legitimate time in my life where i said my dad i don't remember it but my dad remembers it or i just came to him like all right it's over now it's time for me to just buckle down and get it done well the difference between a child that you're taking care of and then someone who has to be on their own is 10 years right an eight-year-old no one expects an eight-year-old to taking care of and then someone who has to be on their own is 10 years right an eight-year-old no one expects an eight-year-old to take care of themselves but an 18 year old time to get your shit together that's fucking quick that's a hard concept that's quick it's a hard concept it's it's it's unbelievably hard and unless you introduce that child to hard work and the rewards of hard

work in your in their life you're probably going to set them up for some kind of failure. I was extremely fortunate that I found martial arts while I was at my biggest struggle in my teenage years. And I found something that was insanely difficult, but the highs, the rewards were like nothing I'd ever experienced in my life. So I realized like, okay, to get really good at something, you have to be able to put in the kind of energy that most people are not willing to do and that's what separates you from them to find a discipline put a massive amount of energy and focus into that discipline and then be obsessed with it then the rewards come if you analyze it correctly and pursue it with everything that you have you're going to figure out how to get better as long as you don't get really fucked up along the way.

And there was a real possibility of that. So what I realized early on, very lucky, was that all these people that I saw around me that were engaging in all this really risky behavior, really crazy violence and drugs, what they were doing was looking for thrills. That's what they were doing. But they were looking for thrills in an easily accessible way it didn't require discipline it didn't require years and years of training and focus and commitment it didn't require that what i was doing was something and i was just lucky that i found this thing i just didn't want to get bullied i didn't want to get picked on i was i was little i wasn't a big kid you exerting like some control over your life that well i was just realized i was like i can't fucking do that i'm tired of like being scared of people just tired of this dude give me this the fucking tough

guy look and i gotta go the other way because i'm scared i just didn't want to be that i didn't want to be that um so that carried on with me for my whole life yeah but i've seen so many people that didn't find a discipline and they just bounce around like a cork at sea forever yeah man it's one of the reasons why i push it so much i was like whatever the fuck it is that you can do that you like to do that's competitive like one of the things about competition is not just that you prove i'm the fucking man no what it is is hard it's fucking competition is one of the hardest things because if someone's trying to do it and you're trying to do it it's like how much do you want it how much more do you want than they want that's right and that's that becomes this crazy fucking battle internally

as well as externally yeah but you say like all the time, say pressure creates diamonds, right? Yeah. And in my case, I realized that I didn't – I realized somewhere in my life that like I have the opportunity to – there's not enough pressure, right? I have this like soft, like you said, soft thing to fall back on, which is like middle class family. They'll probably let me live there in their basement for as long as I want. There's a lot of guys right now that can relate. Right.

Yeah, but it's like I had the opportunity to do that, probably let me live there in their basement for as long as I want. There's a lot of guys right now that can relate. Right. Yeah. But it's like I had the opportunity to do that, but I think I just realized that part of the reason I wanted to push forward and find something that I was passionate about is because I knew that I had a choice. I had a choice that I could do. I could try to do something different or I could fall back on what I'd been given.

And I felt that what I'd been given was significant enough to my life that I owed it I owed it something I owed it to drive toward whatever happiness I could find right and it was it was that the stability of my family life and it wasn't perfect but it was it was pretty good and rather than sink into that I was like I'm gonna just push push through that and use that as fuel well that's intelligence you know i mean you have an awareness you you figured out what you can do and what what where this can go wrong and you recognized it and you decided to make some changes not you know i'm sure i'd like it'll have ups and downs but hunting is is a thing that enriched my life truly did and as much

as it is problematic in the way that's presented in society in the way that that um people see it when they look at it through like a shallow lens um i can say truly that it's enriched my life in ways i'll never be able to like truly like I met you through it like I met a lot of people I met I've I've met a lot of good people through yeah man this is what people that that again the problem is looking at it from the outside versus experiencing it the people that you're meeting these are people that are doing something that's insanely difficult and it doesn't seem like it is for a lot of folks you look on the outside like what do you what's so difficult shooting an innocent animal bow hunting which is what you and i mostly do is one of the most difficult things i've ever done in my life and i've done a lot of difficult shit it's fucking

difficult it's incredibly difficult and the people that you meet are not just disciplined but they're in great shape you have to be like there's a physical exertion aspect to it that's completely ignored and misunderstood or people are ignorant of it not that it's ignored um they just don't understand it it's it's almost like an athletic pursuit that sustains life yeah it's very very there's a reason why cam haynes is out there running marathons and ultra marathons right now he's i mean he's not just doing that because he enjoys fitness and he most certainly does He's doing that because it helps him as a hunter. It does.

And that, to a lot of people, they're like, wait, what are you talking about? Like, that doesn't make any sense. I've seen hunting. Yeah. I mean, if you listen to this podcast and you've never hunted, like, I would encourage you to go and find these people on the internet, on social medias and things, and understand that each one of them represents, in my opinion, a layer of hunting, right? Yeah. of hunting right john dudley represents to me i mean he's a wonderful human being but like at his core on social media he represents the expert archer yes that's a layer of hunting that you need to have

if you're going to be successful cam ains represents the physically fit hunter and that's a layer that you need to have if you're going to be ultimately successful like remy warren represents like the ultimate predator being able to think about it like an animal does and move like an animal does and that's a layer that you have to have if you're going to be ultimately successful and steve ranella represents the great thinker the great you know theorist um and all these are like layers that you have to have at some level to be a good hunter to be the best hunter like to be successful consistently yeah you have to know so some level to be a good hunter, to be the best hunter. To be successful consistently. Yeah.

You have to know so much. And one of the things when I got into it that was interesting that Steve said to me, he said, you're going to really like this because it has so many layers to it. It's like there's a lot of room to learn and grow. And you never can master it. No. You can't. Especially bow hunting.

Yeah. What are the possibilities you're going to run into the same scenario over and over and over and over again? Never. I mean, you get lucky a couple of years in a row, but eventually you're going to run into some sort of a situation where the wind catches you or something goes wrong. You step on a tree branch and snaps. And it's like it teaches you accountability too, because when you release an wrong, you step on a tree branch and snaps. And it's like it teaches you accountability too because when you release an arrow, you can say whatever you want.

And I've had all these situations where the arrow has landed in a place I didn't mean it to. And it teaches you accountability. It teaches you ultimate accountability because when you release that arrow, you can't go get it back. And if it hits the animal in a place and wounds it and that animal suffers it is on you 100 and there is no way to get out of it there's no way to get out of that feeling and i've i've had i don't know about you but i've had like months months like six months of just like i don't want to overstate it's not hyperbolic but like just really a lot of pain around like

i did that and i it was my fault i got lazy i was presumptive i got too confident i just screwed up in the moment i don't know what happened but i've sent a very sharp object into the rump of a big elk and it ran off and never to be seen again well the consequences of that one motion the one movement that's going to release that arrow are so significant that it fucks with your head. It does. And that's what we were talking about.

We've talked about this many times, but target panic. That's what that is. That's the realization of the anticipation of the moment and the consequences, the understanding of the potential negative consequences. And they're overwhelming. Yeah. And they haunt you. They do.

Don't fuck this up. Don't fuck this up. And you never should think, don't fuck this up. they haunt you they do and that's don't fuck this up and you never should think don't fuck this up yeah and to me there's massive parallels with martial arts but also with with playing pool like if you're about to shoot a ball that's what i was gonna bring up yeah don't miss don't miss don't miss you're gonna fucking miss that white ball ain't gonna go where you want but also there's no part of pool that like you if the ball goes where you didn't intend it to an animal gets maimed right right the consequences are so much so you can equate the consequences in

your mind to be successful because at some level you have to right it has to be an important motion for you to really care to do it right but there's real and that's why i say like one of the reasons why i continue to do what i do is because this is this thing is complex and I see other people's confusion around it and I appreciate their confusion and I understand that it's hard to get. I desperately want to find ways to make it easier. An analogy would be

for pool, imagine if every time you played pool you waited days and days for one shot. Yeah. And you didn't know what the shot would be, and sometimes you had to shoot it quickly. And if you missed and didn't make the shot, an animal would scream out in agony and die a slow death, and you would be sick for months. When you think about how difficult it is to perform under that moment, this intense pressure of the one moment, it's like nothing else. It stresses me out just thinking about it because it's real life, though.

I think Steve Rinella probably said it at some point, or you did, or somebody really smart did. It's a three-dimensional experience. It includes riding a roller coaster is thrilling thrilling but the third dimension isn't there because when you get off nothing happened really right you got the thrill but there was no consequence of the thrill and really that's kind of the point of buying a ticket to ride on a roller coaster getting a thrill without having to take part in anything substantial with hunting you there is thrills there's fun you everybody's seen videos of dudes hooping and hollering and hugging you and i've done it around the killing of an animal it's not

that because i always ask myself like some really key questions like why is killing gratifying like what's what's the answer to that really what's the answer to that and i was like man that's going to be hard to explain there's a bunch of things going on pretty hard to explain one to someone who doesn't know what it is one thing that's going on is you just accomplish something that's insanely hard to do and you're relieved that the animal died and that relief manifests itself in uh exuberance you you you high five you hug you like go you go fuck yeah but you But you're happy that it happened, that it died quickly. That's a big part of it. That is a part of it.

Yeah, and I made this post on social media yesterday around like... Grip and grins. Grip and grins, man. Yeah, you're anti-grip and grin for a long time. You gave a big sticking point. It did. Explain the grip and grin for the uneducated. We were talking about it.

I was talking about this about we're going to try to write an article for TheMeteor.com about it. A grip and grin is there's... I mean, this goes back many, many years. I mean, it goes back to Teddy Roosevelt. It goes back to the turn of the century market hunters like the photos we showed earlier. Taking a photo with the thing you

just killed is no new thing to us. It's as old as photos. As old as photos. Grip and grin just means you're with the animal, you're gripping its antlers or gripping a part of the animal and you're smiling and and you're happy that you did that um what i think what i say about grip and grins is that it's been weaponized right we everybody that's listening to this may has likely seen the girl with the giraffe the girl with the giraffe, the guy with the lion the girl, like the other girl with the giraffe, the guy with the baboons it's been weaponized

and it's been weaponized to a point where it's the thing the first thing that somebody like say like Ricky Gervais might he finds this thing online. He eats meat by the way. He does? How about that? How about that? How about that? Have you ever had him on here? No but I talked to him on Opie and Anthony. He does? Fuck. How about that? How about that? How about that?

Have you ever had him on here? No, but I talked to him on Opie and Anthony. He's a nice guy. I remember listening to that. He says he's fine with people hunting if they eat the meat. Yeah, and it's like, so we've weaponized the term trophy. We've weaponized the Skrip and Grin thing and the overall society. And we know, I know that hunting is a, if if hunting was a business not a lot of people

would buy stock in it i mean it there's less people doing it it's less relevant to society and the weapon that a lot of folks are using that don't like it is this photo and the photo depicts a person smiling next to or over top of a dead animal. And so at its face, it absolutely says, I'm happy that there's a dead animal in front of me. It's not enough information for such a significant moment. So what I've said around the photo is it happened for a very long time, but then social media became a deal, right? And during the 80s and 90s, grip and grins were like,

I remember going to my first trade shows as a kid, and people would have flip books of grip and grins were like i remember going to like my first trade shows as a kid or and people would have like flip books of grip and grits they would like get them out and be like you see what i killed this year before before cell phones or whatever they would bring them out and be like look at that look at all the things i killed and it was like this this this communication between hunters that was legit like they i know what a gripping ring is i'm not questioning it like they i know what a gripping ring is i'm not questioning it but then social media becomes prevalent people start posting these photos to everyone where they can't control the messaging anymore and it's it's one of the easiest things one of the most oxymoronic things to go pluck from hunting and be like don't understand this this looks fucked up let me apply that to trophy

hunting and let me damn this person for this photo and so with that lady with the goat recently yeah invasive species yeah on an island where they have to kill it it's killing all yeah all the native wildlife yeah but then later on they find that there's a photo of that young lady with a bloody dildo with goat blood on it did you not hear about that part what yeah we're gonna have to get that on the old google machine what yeah that's a tough subject for three hours in but that happened um what do you mean just pull it up something's hard for me to explain this there was like a some sort of bachelorette party or something and that young lady the same lady that was in the skyline correct yes um with the goat was also photographed with a bloody dildo goat blood i believe so what was she trying to say i don't know maybe she's just partying

she could have been just having a great time what if there's a photo with me with a bloody dildo you would go figures i got them rogan get that jambo get that jambo with that dildo he's had too much rye brain i hope i'm right about that i hope i didn't just make that up no but we've discussed that internally at a bunch jamie say hit me up jamie what's up it's like the fist thing it doesn't look like it's not like a dildo like you're thinking of oh it's like a fist dildo is it uh this a dildo. It's not like a dildo like you're thinking of. Oh, it's like a... It's a fist dildo. Is it a...

Which is even more... Are you not going to show us? Oh, yeah, I can show you guys. Keeping it to himself. There you go. Okay. That. That's the thing.

Okay. Oh, it's a fist. Is that for fisting? This says, Hunter and Hunter blah, blah, blah, slammed for photo with dead sheep, bloody sex toy. Fox News. Okay. toy. Fox News.

Okay. That's Fox News. Huh. So that's recently. Is this recent? When is this? Yeah, this is... November 21st.

Oh, really recent. Yeah, this is recent. So it's quite a few months after the initial image was published. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a different animal she's with. It looks like some... Yeah, she's got... What she's got there looks like an ibex. And then she's got what looks like a mooflon.

Another dead animal on British soil. She posed with a sex toy and the dead sheep. Well, maybe there's some context to it. I mean, maybe it was a. I don't, like I said, I don't. Maybe she lost a bet. It doesn't look good. Let's just say that.

Yeah. In the context of. context her husband said listen if you do shoot one this is what you have to do yeah maybe there was a bet that's I don't know any of the details around but that photo is just like the baboon one just it don't look good what are you saying Jamie okay it says gearing said that the marital aid had been given as a birthday present, but said Swiftlick. How do you say her name? Swidlick. Swidlick.

Sort of was rude and arrogant throughout the trip. Who's Gearing? I think. Must have been her international host, maybe. She was on the trip with her. Oh, was on the trip with her. One of the women on the trip. Yeah.

Okay. Well, that sounds like two chicks didn't get along. Oh, was on the trip with her. One of the women on the trip. Okay. Well, that sounds like two chicks didn't get along. I like to hear her side of it. It was a bit of fun during the party. Marital aid. Okay, the marital aid had been given as a birthday present. I have no idea why it was brought out the following day on the hunt. It was an appalling thing to do.

A complete show of disrespect to the animal she has just killed. Well, the animal doesn't know because it was dead and i don't i mean it's weird but i don't you know i don't know if i'm horrified by it i'm not friends with her any longer in fact she's the reason i left the hunt early because i was so against what she stood for and her more okay i don't want to read this yeah i don't know who chicks chicks ladies i love you i don't know that person you get conti with each other i've never met that person i don't know them but that happens like this this is just an example of who knows the weaponizing of these situations where somebody dildos get pulled out everybody

gets upset every time um i did not know about that though. Yeah. Oh, it's interesting. That's one, one example, but that's, that's what ends up happening around these images.

Now, when I posted this thing the other day, half people would say like, don't stop doing what you're doing. If you feel it's right and you feel respectful as a hunter and you're telling the entire story and want part of that story is to sit behind the animal and smile and signify how great you feel about it, then go for it. Exactly. That's what you should be doing. Don't let someone else change your behavior. The other side of things is like every hunter has a chance to impact somebody that doesn't

go hunting. Every hunter, there's 11 million hunters, they have a chance to impact the millions and millions of folks who aren't exposed to hunting at any point in their lives and so i can see i can really see both things but for me it's it's an issue of if i want hunting to continue in the way that it does and i want my social media privileges to to make hunting better i would probably choose not to put that out there unless it was in the context i felt very comfortable with that's very fair it's that's not just fair it's honest and um it makes sense but obviously if you had those photos and you showed them to someone like me who's hunted it wouldn't bother me at all be like oh you got a nice deer it's all about context it's

all like i could slide it across the table to you or text it to you and you would say cool man congratulations you and i have been on several hunts. Yeah. We know what it's like. We don't have to explain what it is. The problem is it's like fast food for an idea. Yeah. You're just, it's a tiny little thing.

It's not real. You're not getting the full context of where the food came from or how the animal was raised and how it was killed and turned into a burger. You're just getting the burger real quick. And this is like what you're getting with the photo you're just getting a photo yeah you're not getting the full context of the experience that led up to you shooting this deer that might be like this 200 inch mule deer that's the deer of a lifetime you have this giant smile and you're like ah because you can't believe you outwitted this old monarch of the forest and put an arrow in his on his his rib cage for sure and i and i i think that that's a totally legitimate way to express your hunting for me if you were

to ask me today i would say i would probably not give anybody the chance to misrepresent my shit i don't put pictures like that up anymore you don't very same reason but i don't in the past but i put a lot of elk meat up oh i put a lot of that's that's for me it's like i i put the meat up i put all the whole story up but if i was to say like i always i said in the very beginning of the whole me not liking grip and grins conversation i said if if someone said ben can you give that up for the betterment of hunting like could you just give that one thing up that's traditionally it's been done for decades where a guy kills a thing it sits in front of it.

Yeah. Would you be willing to give that up if, for some way, shape, or form, even if you didn't agree with it, it made for a better hunter-to-non-hunter relationship? I'd be like, fuck yeah, man. Yeah. I'm down for that. Yeah. And so I think that's what the conversation is now, trying to determine is that the best thing or not. I'm not sure I have the answer to that.

I think for anybody who's listened to this three-hour conversation and sort of gets an understanding of where we're coming from, they'll appreciate that there's a lot of thought involved here. For anybody that sees that photograph of you smiling with a dead bear, they're not going to appreciate that. It's going to be real quick and they're going to have this. they're not going to appreciate that it's going to be real quick and they're going to have this how many people are willing to sit here and listen to this whole conversation and get a conversation to get an understanding rather of how your mind works yeah and how you think about things not nearly as many as we'll look at a photo and go that guy's a cunt you know and that's the ricky gervais tactic right as much as i do enjoy ricky's comedy and when he looks at these things like that first of all that fucking

giraffe one that giraffe one was super complicated and Glenn Greenwald and all these other people they sicked a lot of people on that lady that giraffe had to be killed that giraffe apparently had killed at least two or three young bulls and it was a non-viable male

and they made it out like it was this rare giraffe it's rare because it's old it was dark non-viable male and they made it out like it was this rare giraffe it's rare because it's old it was dark because the darker ones are older ones but then we that's we always get down these rabbit holes these things somebody says i'm mad about this photo and the next thing we know we're debating the age of a fucking single giraffe exactly it matters it's like yeah it does matter but it doesn't matter to the extent that they try to make it they don't understand what they're looking at but they are looking at something that they find displeasing yes and that's you're right about that and i find it displeasing as well i'm like when i see that i'm like listen i'm not a giraffe hunter i've

never been to that part of africa i don't know that person but just to look at that i feel the same way as everyone else because giraffes are awesome yeah the thing about giraffes i had a bit about them in my act like they're the only animal that looks fine with being in the zoo. Yeah. They're like another day with no lions. And they're just strolling around. Babies feed giraffes. My fucking daughter, when she was two, I held her up.

And she had a piece of leaf. And she put it out there. And the giraffe comes over. It's the only wild animal that they let babies feed. Yeah. They don't let little kids feed polar bears. There's a fucking reason. The polar bear would be like, there's a fucking reason the polar bear would be dining on fingers yeah give me your arm yeah man so i i get you're right no you're right it makes i just it makes sense i want it to be better i want the conversation between not between ricky gervais r Ricky Gervais acts like an asshole in this context.

He enjoys getting angry at people, but in his defense, the stereotypical hunter that is in his mind, what he's fighting against, is an asshole. Yeah. Yeah. And I would agree. And I would be like, dude, I agree with you. Most hunters agree with you.

Some fat guy wants to fly to Africa and shoot an elephant and is not even going to eat it. Yeah. And he just wants it because he's getting the big eight there's a lot of there's a lot of weird shit yeah the problem the problem i have with that is like the specifically calling out that single person or smaller group subset of hunters that you don't agree with to paint the the entire group like that they think that that's the only way they can get people to stop yeah they think that what they've done with cecil look they enacted real change yeah there's been real change around a lot of this stuff yeah with with cecil they enacted real change but unfortunately a lot of it has been negative what people don't understand is how much it costs the people that live there and about these

hunting concessions get closed down and then these animals go wild and then what happens is poachers just take over and a lot of the animals get decimated the same way they did in the united states before market hunting was outlawed well they you look at what what a concession is right a concession and this happened i want to say it happened in like the late 70s and early 80s in africa where there was you know especially antelope and african antelope and all these other species that were there. They were not at the brink of extinction, but they were suffering. A concession is essentially a bunch of landowners get together and be like,

let's put a fence around our stuff to keep poachers out and keep the animals in. Once, you know, in Africa, especially South Africa, when concessions became prevalent, wildlife populations skyrocketed you know tripled doubled times 10 hundreds of thousands of antelope that weren't there before unfortunately because that's the only way they could have value they have value because they have monetary value yeah and i'm not i i'm conflicted about that me too yeah i'm conflicted about it it's like a thing that worked but is that the way? I don't know. I've been over there.

I'll probably never go back over there because there's just so many things in North America I'd like to pursue. But it's something I was involved in. I went and did, and I realized, hey, look, this is way too complicated. And there's way too much American influence based on the money we bring over there, that isn't rooted in exactly what's good for Africa. Right. So I think African hunting is valuable. You can paint that picture all day long. You can be like, it's valuable. It's valuable for these reasons.

And nobody can really argue the end result of the thing. But what's being argued. You can argue the end result because it's been so much more effective than just conservation based on donations. Yeah. And that's what people don't understand that argue against it. You're wrong when it comes to the numbers. The numbers, you're wrong. You're just wrong.

You would like to think that people hunting zebras don't help, but they do. They help way more than people that go over there to take photographs. Yeah. So am I willing to say, like, get rid of that so i can feel better about hunting no fuck no because i want there to be more animals i mean the number is so different in the amount of money they contribute this is where people have to understand because they'll throw some numbers at you like you know 5 000 people go to safaris only two thousand people hunt yeah sure but the two thousand people that hunt they hunt and they spend way more fucking money it costs a lot of money to shoot

a lion it costs like fifty thousand dollars as much as you find lion hunting distasteful you have to understand that if you remove it it's like when you take a dictator out yeah and then you have like a power vacuum how do you replace it you replace it well and it's just like they're they're just some like on the ground things that happen to around look if you want to do wildlife viewing you got to cut roads like yeah you got to put if you want to do wildlife viewing people are gonna pay less so means you have to have more people encroaching on on these places where these wild animals are you have to make parks where humans can't go and

and you have to be prepared when humans get attacked by animals which is gonna fucking happen and so it's never as simple as it seems it is as simple as it seems to say like the numbers say that that african trophy hunting is benefiting the wildlife now is it benefiting in the way that everybody thinks is best that's debatable but you can't you can't sit here and say like if we end this today there'll be more game it'd be like it's probably the reverse it is the reverse it's probably the reverse it might it'll hurt your feelings but it's the reverse yeah um what's going on right now in africa with what the exact area that cecil the lion happened in is that they had a call 200 lions they had to shoot 200 lions which means

they had to pay someone to go and shoot these lions because their their population had gotten so high they were decimating the angelic population so all the antelope and all the different animals that the lions were hunting they were destroying them yeah because they have to eat a lot man but you're a 600 pound cat and all you care you're a you're a meat processor on four legs bro like there's no you can't be like hey listen man listen just lay off for a couple of weeks listen i know they're delicious i know you really like to eat them also you know they're they were just breeding unchecked yeah and then their populations quickly got to a very unmanageable number. Well, it seems.

It sucks. It's never as simple as it seems. Mountain lions in California, Washington, and Oregon, like this year in Oregon and Washington, two people were killed, one in each state. That hasn't happened in 100 years. I've talked to a lot of people that say that's an anomaly, but it happened it doesn't mean anything it's an anomaly it's also a reality is it yeah it's something that happens those are predators yeah and they're big and they're they've killed i think 55 bears in the greater yellowstone ecosystem this year just probably that number could be

skewed in some way for me but i think that's what i heard and that could be a lot of black bears right that invade into i think this is this was all grizzly bears that had either been hit by cars or were nuisance or were getting around somebody's cattle that have been shot i think that's the number you'd have to look that up and confirm i'm right about that because that's a pretty serious accusation if i'm wrong but you know that happens in that happens in that. So there's no simple way to put it, man. What happens here with mountain lions, I mean, mountain lion hunting is outlawed in California, but they kill the same amount of mountain lions. Yeah. And the way they kill them is they have to hire people and they have to use public funds,

these tax dollars, and they hire a guy with dogs to go catch these fucking cats and kill them. Yeah. I mean, hours ago, we talked about the North American model of wildlife conservation, but that's a thing. It's not infallible, but it's pretty fucking close in my opinion. It's a very good system and there's more stuff that we didn't cover,

but shit dude. We're deep. We're deep. Three hours into this motherfucker. How long, Jamie? Three hours in. It's a good, it's a good it's a good jerry

it's a solid one it's a solid one let's wrap this bitch up see ya ben o'brien i'm glad we did this my brother always good love you buddy i love you too man great to see you you're the man let's uh go play some techno hunt yeah all right everybody bye bye see ya