The Joe Rogan Experience - #1341 - Steven Rinella

Episode Date: August 27, 2019

Steven Rinella is an outdoorsman, author, and television host. He currently hosts “MeatEater” on the Sportsman Channel & Netflix, and a podcast also called “MeatEater" available on Spotify.

What's going on with all the cigars? Which cigars? Those are not cigars. Those are marijuana. Oh, okay. I figured it might be something like that. It's marijuana on the outside. It's called a blunt.

That's what the youngins call it. Oh, no. I know the term blunt, but that looks like a legit. I thought it was like some kind. Well, you're younger than me. Of course you know it. Yeah, but I'm not as schooled as you. I'm not as schooled as you and the illicits.

Even though that's not, it's not an illicit now. Speaking of illicit, we've got some meat eater bourbon some elk shank bourbon yeah pairs with it's a good name pairs with beaver tail pairs with you i've had both of those things thanks to you elk shank's a great name for it because that is like one of the rare foods like if you talk to most hunters like i said have you ever had elk shank, ossobuco? They'd be like, what? Most hunters have never eaten that. No, and it was revelatory to find out about it.

And then it's the thing that I became, I started to proselytize, you know. I found out about eating it because my brother found out about eating it because he has this old cookbook called the L.L. Bean. It's like the L.L. Bean Wild Game Cookbook by a guy named Angus. First name Angus, if I remember right. And he's got a shank, like he's got a shank recipe in his book for antelope shank. And so we started making it. antelope shank and so we started making it that's the funny thing about wild game cooking that you've probably picked up on is that you could um you could have a thing where you could say like hey here's a recipe for a whitetail deer heart right and someone would be like but do you

have one for a mule deer heart have i explained this to you before no well they're interchangeable aren't they that's yeah that's thing so obviously like when we did our cookbook i tried really hard to steer away from things that would be elk recipes deer recipes and just take it from a cut basis cookbook is excellent have you messed around with it many times that's great quite a few things from it it's really great um we got away from saying that like here's an antelope recipe or whatever because it's just like the cut is more important especially all these ungulates like horned and antlered game what it is is more important than what it came from so by putting elk shank on that bottle i'm kind of like going against my own advice but if i just put shank

people might not know what you're talking about well it could be like lamb shank but it's just a cool name we're gonna do a limited run of those where we write all kinds of weird stuff in there that it pairs well with. Is it good? Is this good stuff? Yeah, man. It's five years old. Should we get a taste? Let's get some ice and some glasses. I took a long break from drinking. How long? I just slowed way down

on it when my kids were born. Started to be born, and then gradually me and my wife have gotten back into it. Gradually. Clink. Yeah. You guys are working together. Yeah.

Right? Which is really crazy. I know. We haven't toasted. Giannis took a year off booze. Wow. Just for whatever Giannis. Reasons.

Whatever Giannis. I can't remember. He had some reason for it. He had a birthday once and took a month off. Then he had a birthday and took a year off. He's got four months to go. For the end of the year, and then he's going to drink? Yeah, but he says his family.

I think his wife was explaining to me. There's a lot more disposable income around the house now, because she's like, I never realized. How much boozing takes up? How much all those fancy beers adds up. What all those fancy beer adds up to. That's an interesting thing. Yeah.

People don't think about that. When you run your tab at the end of the week and then add that times four and then add that times 12, that's real money. Yeah. And I don't know if you remember, you probably like this when you're younger, where it was just, it was impossible that you would have leftover booze in your house you know because everybody just drank so much right right right like now we're like such grown-ups in our pantry we have like a little liquor section right and you have like oh there's

you know yeah i have a wine fridge yeah but in the old days you couldn't because you just drank it and it was gone. Right. You know? Yeah. I want to interview you for a minute. Okay. Go ahead. How comfortable? Do you ever tell your listeners about the comedy stuff you're working on?

Yeah. Or do you like to keep it big secret? Yeah, I tell them some things. I don't like to give up premises. Cheers, sir. You don't like to give up premises? I mean, punchlines. Oh. I'll say like a subject I'm working on. You do or don't like to give up premises. Cheers, sir. You don't like to give up premises? I mean, punchlines. I'll say like a subject I'm working on. You do or don't give up subjects?

I want to engage you about a subject that we were texting about. Oh, about the missionary? Yeah. Yeah, sure. I just don't understand. This is good. I know that you will. I like it.

I know that you will have, knowing it. I know that you will have, knowing you and how good you are at what you do, I know you'll have done it, but I don't understand how you could have had a novel thought about the missionary. Yes. Who got killed. Just to refresh people's memory, there's an island, East Sentinel.

What's funny, by my fish shack, there's an island called Sentinel Island. Really? Yeah. No one lives on it. I've been past it many times and have yet to been shot at. It's funny, by my fish shack there's an island called Sentinel Island. Really? Yeah, no one lives on it. I've been past it many times and have yet to been shot at. It's North Sentinel Island. Sorry. North Sentinel Island.

And my shack is East Sentinel. North Sentinel Island. You know it better, so you should tell people what it is. I want to go to your shack. I want to catch some halibut. Really? Yeah, let's next one, instead of a hunting trip, let's do a fishing trip. I would love to have you out there. We'll have Calum come out there and we'll catch some halibut. So you Yeah. Next one, instead of a hunting trip, let's do a fishing trip. I would love to have you out there. We'll have Calum come out there and we'll catch some halibut.

So you're not interested in bringing your family? Yeah, we could do that too. We kind of take a family approach up there more and more now. Your kids like flipping rocks and seeing what's under the rock? My youngest loves fishing. Loves it. She loves everything. She's really big in that. How young is the youngest? Nine.

Oh, yeah. Perfect. Dude, we fish so much. Maybe we'll see everything she's really big and now how young's the youngest nine oh yeah perfect yeah she's dude really we fish so much maybe uh we'll see how it goes but i have a nine-year-old oh perfect isn't your nine-year-old the same name as my nine-year-old no okay my six-year-old is the same age same name yeah well you guys mine's rosemary mine's just rosy yeah how do you guys spell it r-o-s-y oh really yeah you did yeah huh that's what we did but then uh we started thinking we messed it up why well because i think it's supposed to be e-y says who i don't know and then my daughter in her first act of rebellion started spelling it different than how we spell it oh that's she busts out the ie but her name is rosemary so it doesn't matter

but uh no i want to get like i just can't i can't i've i i've thought about and thought about it and i can't think not that i don't have faith in you i just can't think of what the take would be the problem is if i explained it what the take is it would fuck up the bit for people that haven't seen the bit. I'll show it to you tonight. Tonight you'll see. No, I'm going tonight. I can't wait to go see. You'll see.

I'll explain off air. I'll explain off air. Okay. Yeah. Are you feeling good about the bit? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's a fascinating subject.

You know the guy, Commander Maurice Vice vidal portman you know who that guy is no he was the uh the pervert that traveled around from island to island uh measuring guys and taking weird photos oh dressing them up like roman soldiers i read the i read a big piece about this which i actually sent to you to see if you'd read it too yeah i'd read uh you said you read everything about it yeah i'd read quite a few things about it because there was a guy on Twitter. His name is Respectable Law, at Respectable Law. And he posted a whole series of things. He had actually been studying this case or this place before because of this pervert guy.

And so when this man, this missionary showed up on that island and got murdered, like he knew all about the history of this island. So he made like a chain of posts on twitter which were really interesting informative and then i started going deep into and i read the guy's journals the journals were hilarious man like the kid that got killed no the guy who was the pervert the english the english pervert in the 1800s probably wrecked like that whole area for those people because they had this idea of what white men are now these people don't have a written language and they they just have stories so they probably still have stories of these white men that come carrying diseases and want to touch your dick

and measure them yeah so this is a guy he was into that's why i make sure i remember this right he was into like skull morphology but with sexual organs he was, it's hard to tell what he was into, but it was, it's so obviously perverted. Like it's, it seems like he was doing sexual stuff with these people. Trying to legitimize it by. Yeah. I mean like, yeah, just measuring them and, and, and doing detailed descriptions of their sex organs and yeah he's really into that that seemed very important to him and he survived he survived the island i

can't decide which to go with my new uh my new laird hamilton turmeric coffee or the whiskey mix it up back and forth yeah it's really interesting it's like it's like soup yes with coffee in it it's very good for you too like i said that turmeric you know people think of it as curry because it's a great spice for food but it's a it's a potent anti-inflammatory very very good for you no it's good uh so i'll have to wait and see what your take on it is yeah yeah are you i'm almost done interviewing you um are you drawn to that uh are you drawn to that idea i certainly am the which idea that you'd get to that idea? I certainly am. Which idea? That you'd go and hang out and spend time with uncontacted people.

Well, you've done it in, what part of South America were you at? Well, yeah. They're not uncontacted, but they're semi. Definitely not uncontacted, but yeah. but uh yeah some tribes that like the chimane and the makushi and wapashan um are all tribes in northern south america who have a long long history of of contact and engagement with the outside world but uh individuals who can still very much like hanging out with individuals who can still very much, like hanging out with individuals who aren't that old, who in their youth were very much like living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. With a mix of native materials and also some western materials. And this was Guyana?

Guyana and Bolivia. Guyana and Bolivia. People that would still make their bows from native materials. People that grew up using canoes that were made, like hand-dug dugouts, using plant toxins to kill fish. But also other very modern stuff. One of these guys that I really appreciate hanging out with, I mean, this guy an email address but i might have told you the story before he's got an email address but he also told us about um we interviewed him on our show on our podcast and and he's telling me about how their peccaries their white lip peccaries aren't around right now because there's a shaman in

another village who's jealous of their village for being so prosperous and has locked their peccaries up inside of a mountain and that they're training their own shaman to free the peccaries from the mountain and you can shoot this dude an email so right explain a peccary to people oh people here are familiar with a javelina yeah yeah a javelina is a collared peccary and then there's a and they'll run in little troops of now you might see anywhere from 1 to 13 or 14 white lip peccaries are a bit bigger and they'll run in groups of 200 wow yeah they'll ravage like like these um these people have a somewhat agrarian lifestyle they hunt fish and also have farms scattered throughout the jungle and they'll just come in and ravage farms in groups of you know like i said groups of 100 200 i should be honest here and say i've

never laid eyes on a white lip peccary there's a third peccary a chacoan or chacoan uh peccary that is much more rare than the collard and white lipped yeah picture this jamie there is the white lip fuckers yeah those those supposedly taste a lot better than collard peccaries. I've hunted collard peccaries in West Texas and in Sonora, Mexico. Are they native to West Texas or did someone bring them in? No, no, no. Collard peccaries are native. Oh, okay. Like portions of New Mexico, Arizona, and West Texas.

So they look similar to javelina. That's a javelina. No, a javelina and a collard peccary the same damn thing okay they got you you'd appreciate this because uh just knowing your tastes they have a large breast with a nipple on the top of their back like what would be the neck of your ass has a nipple whoa that's their scent gland so it's an actual nipple that someone nurses from nope it's just a scent gland oh i'm sure you're you're trusty um jamie jamie can find a nipple on the back of it yeah he'll find a picture uh they somehow related to pigs

no people like people like to think they are but they're not wow oh there it is yep see that yeah javelina tits when you clean them you need to cut that away um because it really like stinks to high heaven is it like a tarosal gland the same sort of it's a scent gland very powerful smell and you usually smell them well ahead of seeing them and they're really um they're they're pugnacious. You can call at them and mimic the sound of a distressed young one, and they come in ready to kick your ass. I saw that on your show.

When you and Remy went bow hunting them, they run at you. Remy's got a lot of experience messing around with these things. It's funny because they're pretty popular. They're good to eat, but they're much more popular south of the the border mexico it's much more common to eat javelina they make sausage out of them yeah yeah they grind them up make sausage i'm gonna cook just various things like you know i don't know anybody maybe someone's out there that like actually takes like a back strap off of a javelina and throws it on the grill But you generally do like preparations with them where you cook them a fair bit. Yeah, you'd have to break down.

They've got to be tough, right? They are. You couldn't just grill one. You couldn't just grill one. They're lean. You've got to cook them down. But you can see how – you can see why it would be popular, though, because, I mean, it's a pretty – like it's a nice little bundle like of meat right and and i think that in some areas like especially

you know in sonora and elsewhere um people aren't likely to like turn their nose up at good protein sources it's one thing that's like it's one thing that's like made for bow hunting because i think that uh with rifle hunting and people do hunt with rifles and i've shot with rifles but it's a it's it's a little bit it can be kind of feel like a little bit of a gimme because they're not you have to get very close to them before they're concerned about your presence they're tough they got tossed you know they can kill stuff and rip stuff and they have like a they're almost you know you think of the most like i would imagine of all the creatures like a snapping turtle is least concerned with things that like

a snapping turtle doesn't care about anything until it's within six inches of its face and javelina's there's not that exaggerated but kind of have this like their world sort of seems to end at 60 yards but they don't care what's going on outside of that buffer and so um so you can kind of creep up to them kind of walk up to them when you see them did they see bad are they like pigs they seem to have very poor eyesight they seem to have poor eyesight and have an amazingly varied diet um you know they'll eat like i, if you lay there long enough, they would come up and eat you. Yeah, they ate my friend's dog. Oh.

Yeah. Well, my friend's friend, Doug Stanhope, my buddy. He lives in Arizona. Was he pretty tore up about it? Well, they were, you know, they hate those fucking things. They just piled on this dog and ate the neighbor's dog. And apparently it's not too uncommon. Yeah.

It happens. Flesh eaters. Yeah, they'll fuck up a dog. They're weird. You know, it's like one of the things, I think it points to a certain amount of sociopathy that I have. when I hear about someone losing a cat or dog to wild creatures, I don't, like, my initial instinct isn't to be sad. I see what you're saying.

You're like, wow, that's part of the game. Because you kind of view, you sort of, I have this view that, yeah, I have this view of that sort of like settlement and development v wildlife is is a global problem right and one always wins like the destruction of wildlife habitat always wins and then when you see it when you see it play out like that in some ways you kind of like hope like ryan callahan, who you know. Yep. Recently, you know, that kid got a young kid. It was like a 9- or 10-year-old girl got thrown up in the air. By a bison?

Yeah, did you see that? Yeah. In Yellowstone? Yeah. And by no means does Cal hope to see someone, you know, especially particularly a child, get hurt. But he's like, you know, they a child get hurt but he's like you know they still got it yeah you can't you can't just close in on a bison they apparently got within 15 yards of that thing which is just ridiculous yeah i think i keep thinking about making a shirt that says um

yellowstone national park uh habituating wildlife since 1877 they do it is weird uh i've only been once well i went once when i was a kid but i went once recently with my family and it was uh very weird that you could take selfies with elk yeah these big herds of elk are so confident that people won't shoot them when they're in like the public tourism area that they just go and hang out near the vending machine yeah so i'm getting a diet coke and there's an elk like 30 yards away from me it's so strange that's that's a little bit in line with what that's a little bit in line with what i'm talking about when i talk about like that when i hear someone's dog got killed by a coyote yeah

you know and again man i know like like my brother has this little dog that he just loves, and they're inseparable. If that dog got carried off by a great horned owl, and a healthy great horned owl could carry this dog off, it's like a little shitting dog, I would feel real bad for him. So with that said, I do have this thing where you kind of root, and I do feel sad when I see, like, in a place like Yellowstone, this is where it gets a little bit weird. When I see wild animals, especially animals that people hunt for, when I see that they've lost their fear of humans,

some people would look and be like, oh, this is, like, what naturally they should be like. Okay? So this is animals where they've had to give up their human, where they've lost their human fear because we've given them this wild place. I see old-timey, old-timey Steve Rinella. Dude, I'm real sorry, man. That's a good dude.

Joe Farinato, call him. He's a good guy. People see, in like a Yellowstone Park atmosphere, you see where wildlife becomes habituated to humans and they feel like they're seeing something more natural right because outside of human hunting they all of a sudden don't have that feeling anymore i look at that and i see that it's like um to me it feels like something's been subverted and something's wrong with that situation yeah because it sort of depends on how fresh your perspective is. Because, I mean, people have been hunting in that area, I mean, at least 10,000 years.

So then we take like a 100-year break and the animals become very accustomed to people. It's shocking how quickly they can get it back. And oftentimes those same elk that live like the same elk that will spend their summer in that park will migrate out of there and go into national forest and on ranch land and then they'll be where they can be hunted and they know they cross that line so the same elk that some dude could basically walk up and touch there will just something in his head switches and he enters and they enter into a new mind space when they leave and they're still exposed to human predation and

if they wind you they'll bolt oh yeah it's it's it's shocking how it's shocking the degree to which they the degree to which they can keep this together in their heads and it's also pretty surprising how how quickly they adapt like i would imagine if you were to open up this would be a pretty controversial idea but i'll throw it out there let's say you were to open up hunting in yellowstone national park i think that it would probably be less than a year i think like a season a fall hunting season would have them right back into the same mindset that all the other animals that live with human predation their sort of attitude toward people i think they'll very quickly get it back it makes sense but yeah people going up and petting stuff um again like referring to cal his idea is that like people have gotten to where they

his idea is that like people have gotten to where they confuse national parks with amusement parks and they feel that the animals are like on rails you know they're on tracks yeah they just and it's like they're programmed to do a certain thing but it's still wild it's one thing that i've discovered over the last seven years thanks to you and thanks to you getting me hunting is that most people have no idea what it's like to be around actual wildlife to sneak up to them most people have no idea about their sense of smell like to see an animal wind you and then just fucking bounce to see that and to know that like you're dealing with some superhuman ability, impossible to imagine with the confines of your own biology what these animals can do. And when you're out amongst them and there's no cell phone service and it's just footprints and trekking your way through mountains, it's amazing. I mean, it's not yellowstone what yellowstone is

and what anything like that and zoos is the worst example right but when we think of animals like people always tell me like like because you know i have a famous dog i've run with him all the time and he's on my instagram it's like everybody loves him he's the sweetest dog in the world they're like i know that dog if you love you love dogs, how could you hunt animals? And I'm like, well, he's not an animal. He's a dog. He's a pet. He's a science project.

An animal is a wolf. An animal is a deer. That's an animal. What a dog is, they don't survive outside of us. If you don't take care of them, they won't know what to do. They'll hope that the dog catcher comes and gets them and somebody rescues them. They're not wild animals. It's not.

It almost has less to do with how they're raised and more to do with their ancestors. Like their biology has changed. They've literally been bred to something different. They're a fucking science project. Yeah. And you see my dog. He's got floppy ears. He's a sweetheart.

Everybody who meets him, he drops to his back and he wants you to rub his belly. He's just the sweetest dog in the world. That is not a dog. I mean, it's not an animal. There's not an animal like that that would ever exist out in the wild. Because if he sees another dog, he's like, hello, are you my friend? He's not like checking to see if that thing's going to his food or or rob him of his mates or your kill his babies yeah he's a it's it's the result of a 20 000 or whatever year experimentation with the domestication of an animal yeah so most people

when they say they love animals they don't even fucking know any they don't even know what they are they see the caged animals at the zoo. They see the animals on a rope that they take to the dog park. They think they know what an animal is. They don't even have any experience with it. We've been so domesticated and so isolated in cities. Most people, especially most people that have opinions on this shit, people that live in rural areas, you know that. on this shit you know people that live in rural areas i mean you know that you live in bozeman and bozeman is you know surrounded by these areas that are just fucking completely wild i mean if

you're in bozeman you can drive an hour from your house and then you're around bears and deer and eagles i mean it's a completely wild place but people that are in those areas people around boise idaho for example they have a totally different idea people in wyoming i have a totally different idea of what wildlife is versus somebody who lives in santa monica like there's a video that just somebody sent me today of um a guy in thousand oaks uh is on his street and he's filming a fucking enormous mountain lion. I mean, it is huge. It's a big boy.

It's like 150 pounds. And they're in the car, and they're looking at it through the window, and him and his son, it seems like, are filming this thing going, holy shit, look at this thing. It's right there on the street, a big-ass cat. And he was saying that somebody was feeding it, apparently, and they're trying to figure out what. You want me to send it to you?

I'll send it to you but this uh you know that's that's super rare i mean that's a real wild animal it's super super rare that that anybody would have any kind of experience with one of these things and most people that are talking about animals they just really don't know what that even means they're just saying it yeah i think that there's developed a like a a pretty big cultural division between people who um a pretty big cultural division between people who kind of like live around work around and deal with animals and people who view them or think of them as very other a friend of mine who's a biologist Oh there you go No I'm sending you another one I sent it to you It's from Thousand Oaks

I just sent it to you That's a recent one too A buddy of mine who's a biologist With the Forest Service A guy named Carl Malcolm He might have heard on our show He just sent me a paper That was about kids' attitudes to wildlife,

and it was comparing rural people's attitude and knowledge of wildlife kids with urban and suburban attitudes about wildlife. And you can see the input of media when you look at this thing because people who live in a urban or suburban environment when they tell you the top of mind wildlife that they know about it's non-native stuff like lions yeah they're likely to know like what's what's an animal right and an animal be like a more um rural or remote viewpoint would be are much more likely when they think of wildlife to think of things that they interact with you know and not like the things that are on your mobile above your crib when you're a little baby and it sort of

points and also there's a slight tendency i got to look at this more carefully but there's a slight tendency to have uh negative feelings or think things are dangerous or bad the more urban you are in terms of native wildlife to more recognize it as like a negative or bad thing and what they're pointing to is um again i want to look at this much more carefully and pardon me to the authors of authors if i'm messing this up i was just looking at this morning um what they're pointing to is the the the stirrings of there being a greater acceptance of decreased biodiversity meaning that you're kind of like okay with the bad things having gone and we're focused on like what are animals.

Well, animals would be like a giraffe and hippopotamus and the things that Disney tells me about. And not like opossums and raccoons, which are kind of gross. You know? You get that video? Yeah. Look at this fat boy. Play this thing. It's a collar, didn't it? Yeah, it's got a collar on it it's interesting i could

see that better there's a lot of them out here that have collars we got a photo that we just had uh commissioned and uh it should get here soon right yeah it's huge of uh the the big cat that they photographed near the hollywood sign yeah it looks like it's staged i mean the cat is walking right by the trail camera and the hollywood dude that sets up those famous uh yeah it was in national geographic yes yeah that's a good picture yeah we got one uh printed on step that picture right there i mean come on man that's crazy that is a goddamn crazy picture it's a giant cat like look at the forearms on that motherfucker well it's got that saggy stomach but it bums me out looking at that collar there was a conversation that you had on your podcast about shooting a deer

that's wearing a collar and i'm with you i'm with you 100 i don't want to shoot a deer that's wearing a collar i don't care if it's wild as fuck if they caught it when it was a baby and they just waited and measured it and then let it go and it didn't have a collar and uh i saw that deer i wouldn't think twice about shooting it but if i measured it and then let it go. And it didn't have a collar. And I saw that deer. I wouldn't think twice about shooting it. But if I saw it and it was wearing a collar, I'm like, I'm out. Oh, totally. I'm out.

But there's a really funny thing. And you probably caught wind of this or know about this. It's a big deal. Yeah. To shoot a duck with a band on it, everybody knows it's cool as shit. Like, I know that. Everybody wants to shoot a band. Most people listening to this don't know that. It's cool as shit if you get a banded duck why is that well it's a little bit

social science because long ago like we used to not understand this is kind of a little bit tricky to explain we used to not understand how migrations worked because everyone only knew what they saw okay and there wasn't someone who was sort of like coalescing all of this information people would know very well like you know wherever you you live along the mississippi river okay um and you might know very well that like in november shit loads of ducks that you haven't seen they haven't been here all year are coming from the north and going to the south and you knew that very well you knew that ducks moved you knew that they moved through here but you didn't put all of

the you had no way to put all the pieces together. Over time, we wanted to understand animal migrations better. This is way pre-collars, like GPS collars and pit tags and shit. We started this banding system where you could go and catch a duck in its nesting area. There's times a year when it's really easy to catch ducks. One, you can catch them when they're young and you can catch them when they molt. So people would go out and put a band on a duck and you could go up in the Arctic

or the upper Midwest, anywhere, and throw a band on a baby duck. And that band would have a phone number on it. And you were encouraged to, when you got a banded duck, it was like they made it be that it was a good thing. And you were encouraged to call that 1-800 number whatever the hell they were before 1-800 numbers and give them the the band the band number and then we started to really with like great detail map out flyways how ducks migrated like the ducks in on the arctic slope in alaska tend to follow along this path and they

tend to end up here at this date and they're down in you know whatever they're down in texas all of a sudden or they're down in southern california and they're they're hanging out in rice fields around sacramento whatever the hell it is we started to put together this whole detailed picture and it was one of the great achievements in wildlife biology was what we learned from the duck banding system so i think that over time it became like i said it was sort of like social engineering where people were taught to think it was cool and you would wear a band you would if you had a lanyard where you keep your duck calls on this still goes on if you got a lanyard you have a duck calls on any banded bird you get you put that band on your lanyard i even met these knuckleheads from north

dakota who have a lot of bands on their lanyards from banded birds they've shot and you'd be like dude that's a lot of bands he goes yeah not one of them's reported. They think that it remains more pure to, dude, I don't know. That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard. It's the dumbest shit. I wish you guys did like call. Why would anybody want to contribute to all this? I don't know. You'd have to have like a calling component to your show,

and we would call one of these dudes and have him explain in greater detail. I remember thinking like that's the most fucked up thing I've ever heard. I don't think you'd want to talk to that guy. It was like, he's like, yeah, they're all unreported. Anyways, I don't know if it's like an anti-science thing. You love to argue. Did you talk to that guy about this? You know, it was long ago.

I could take it where I was standing. I was in my brother's kitchen in Miles City, Montana, beneath this crazy chandelier he bought online. And I remember everything about it, but I don't remember if I challenged him on the sense of being proud of having not contributed to our scientific understanding of waterfowl migrations and why maybe like a sort of anti-government sentiment like some black helicopter stuff okay regardless yeah some malicious shit it's cool to have bands and i have like in my sort of i have like a box

where i put important stuff to me but imagine if you had a box of deer collars dude there's no way if i i wouldn't put a deer collar that's what i'm getting as like those are cool but collars are not and we had a friend there's a there's a friend of mine who's a she's a does a lot of carnivore research and other research projects named carmen van bianchi which is a cool name but she says that you know i'm someone that collars animals and i even think that she's like when you get one with a collar on it she said it was cool we talked about this the other day she's like someone has already got the best of them that they become tainted when they've been held by someone else and that's a little bit how i view it where like a wild animal you want to imagine it being like the wildest wild

animal and once it has a collar it's like someone it's it's all sloppy seconds man yeah well isn't that why the allure of alaska is so interesting because it's one of the rare places where like if you run into a caribou in alaska there's a high probability never encountered a person never doesn't even know what you are like you've seen videos of hunters walking towards caribou with like their bow on their head yeah and the caribou is like what in the fuck is this they don't even know they think that bow is a rack their assumption in areas where i've been um particularly like like up on the arctic slope uh no that's not true because i've seen a lot of in the mountain ranges too in south central alaska when they see your movement their assumption is that you're a caribou that's's like, it seems, you can't get in their head.

But their assumption is that like, oh, I better go check it out. And then I'll circle downwind and make sure it's not a grizzly or a wolf or whatever. But they're like, you know, something that weighs a few hundred pounds, a couple hundred pounds, whatever, walking around. Probably a caribou. And they're just like, come on over. They come to you. Until they can rule it outou and they're just like come on over they come to you until they can rule it out but they're gregarious they want to find each other and it it that sort of thing like winds up and giving you a little bit of a sense of uh

it makes you feel a little bit bad for them right they're they're not tuned in like a mule deer is yeah and then you realize it's just like living like that. I mean, these things are, these are things that could migrate, you know, they migrate hundreds, hundreds of miles. Have you hunted an axis deer yet?

Yeah. Axis deer in Hawaii is the most perverse, strange, but necessary hunting that I've ever experienced. Yeah. And you know what? And they don't have that like on Hawaii, they're not dealing with natural predators.

Zero. It's all, it's all, they're just like like they're just very in tune to like their predator being people yeah i imagine that they probably um care the same way that we carry with us and a sort of natural abhorrence of snakes you know a natural abhorrence of spiders. I would imagine that they come from a, that you probably know a little bit better than me because you spent more time with axes deer. They probably come from a very predator rich environment, I'm guessing. Oh, originally. Yeah.

And so like. And carry with them a real high strong sense from having dealt with like very efficient predators. Tigers. Yeah. Yeah. They evolved to get away from tigers. Like they gotta be high strong they're the fastest things i've ever seen in my life i have videos of one where i shot at this one from 55 yards 15 yards away he sees

the arrow coming 15 yards away from him and he's like he's out of there it's crazy it's like they kind of understand that things coming towards them kill them yeah because they are hunted 365 days a year because they have to they're so overrun there's some somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 000 deer on this one island with 3 000 people and you you've never seen herds like this before it's crazy i want to bring you it wasn't that when i i hunted them years ago um and and I remember the area I had been had been hunted very, very heavily. Do they call them does or hinds? Hinds.

They had been hunted very heavily. Stags and hinds. And my God was the, from my very limited perspective, from just a small set of experiences that happened over a couple days it seemed like um the pressure on the males had been extraordinary where it seemed like you would see a hundred hinds per stag and i don't know if that's common there or not no it's not it's i remember being like very surprised by that it almost 50-50 when you go to these areas that are in Lanai and apparently the same thing with Maui. They're everywhere. There's so many of them.

Maui has a real eradication sort of program underway. Which is controversial, right? Very controversial. But they're also selling it. very controversial right very controversial but they're also selling it there's uh they're selling uh venison sticks and venison jerky and they're there's companies that are establishing these they're they're establishing these uh conservation efforts where they're going out and they're shooting x amount per year like six thousand per year which is like doesn't even put a dent on yeah is the goal eradication or is the goal just to limit limit them but they eradicated them from

the big island somebody had put them on the big island somebody had taken them from one of the other islands and put them on the big island and they had spent millions of dollars to eradicate them forgive me stop me if we spoke about this before but there's uh kind of an interesting perspective that someone gave to me about hawaii where we we have, you know, Hawaii is just dominated by non-natives. Okay. I might be wrong about some of these, but I don't think I am. Bread, fruit, coconut, all these, like all the major fruiting trees are non-native. And so much of the wildlife is non-native.

I mean, they have like surprising shit. They have wild turkeys. There's cattle pigs axis deer i think there's like black buck antelope running around wild horses chuckers pheasants just they hunt horses yeah yeah i was talking to a guy one time that snares cattle wow i don't know if he does it illegally or not wow i don't know if he does it illegally or not but he snares cattle my mom's uh um i guess i would call you know technically he'd be my stepfather but it feels funny my mom my stepfather my mom's husband who she married after my dad passed away he grew up snaring white-tailed deer with garage door cable but they they were like they were farmers and they just ate and that was sort of his relationship was deer setting snare setting garage cable snares yeah and just using that as

a source of food they were just hungry you know poor um but uh anyways in hawaii right those were count those islands were colonized by humans like 1,100 years ago. And so now we have like native Hawaiians or Hawaiians, right? And I've spoke with some native Hawaiians who feel that there's this uneasy relationship between what we're regarding and describing as non-native wildlife, even down to pigs. regarding and describing as non-native wildlife even down to pigs even though that their ancestors you know 1100 years ago brought the pig to the island and someone expressed me very simply he's like how can i be hawaiian like i'm native hawaiian i damn sure i'm hawaiian why is the thing that i hunt regarded as a non-native and needs to be eradicated he's like if we really want to talk about non-natives i feel like that would be you

right yeah and he was like and he was kind of pissed about this this attitude towards because these are guys that like to hunt need a lot of wild game about this attitude to access deer and this attitude to pigs and you hear the same thing out of australia you're the same thing out of new zealand which is guys who have this this difficult relationship with uh the things that they've come to hunt and the things that have sort of been culturally accepted culturally accepted as as wildlife right um where people you know i don't want to use i don't want to use environmentalists here in a way that makes it be that the hunters aren't necessarily environmentalists, but in ways where some people with what they would describe as an environmental agenda want to see species eradicated, that people have been interacting with for 100 years, in some cases, like in Hawaii, in some cases, perhaps 1,000 years. They've been interacting with it on the landscape. But then someone wants to to come and say we want to get rid of it because it's not

native and it causes like a ton of tension where it creates a weird situation for people in in some of these places is that hunters have long justified their actions to the public as being that we're controlling, right? We're like controlling non-natives. So we're doing a good thing. But then someone says like, oh, you know, I got a better idea. Let's just kill all of them. And then the hunter's like, whoa!

Well, you know they did that off the coast. I don't mean like that. There's an island off the California coast that was filled with elk and deer. Oh, what was it called? I don't forget. See if you can find it. They eradicated all of them. They just machine gunned them. Yeah.

Just helicopters and just eradicated all of them. Are you familiar with the practice in those cases where they could have a Judas animal? Yes. That's good shit. There's a great article about or podcast about that from Radiolab where they kept sending this Judas goat to the Galapagos and he'd find the other goats and they'd gun them all down. This Judas goat would be like, where are my friends? Fuck.

And just keep wandering off. And he's sterile, so he can't breathe. Oh, is that right? And he'd go to find these other goats and they'd follow the collar, the GPS on the collar and find the new group of goats and they'd gun them down too. That would begin to wear on a human yeah i don't think goats entirely know what's going on the other day we had a meeting with our kids okay we had a meeting with our kids oh santa rosa island yeah so santa rosa island

dude i was just i was there not long ago it used to be filled with elk and deer and people had sort of set it up santa rosa island elk they had set it up pro hunters hit santa rosa island i mean they mean professional in that case i would have used professional not pro murderers deer murderers this is in 2011 so it's a fairly recent thing where they eradicated all these animals yeah i was just i just not long ago fished off there It's supposed to be amazing fishing Catalina apparently Is like the greatest mako shark fishing in the world

Which is a here's a weird one Shark fishing all of a sudden you're an asshole It used to be with jaws Like you caught a shark hey good get that Fucking thing out of here they're gonna kill people Now it's like you monster Sharks fin soup don't you care about the don't you know there's global warming like everything is conflated it's all like piled on

together like you what are you doing with a shark you used to be able to buy mako shark in a restaurant oh you still see it but there is a there is i saw a thresher shark the other day on a menu i did a story i did a magazine story about this long long ago it was like it was right when i got out of school and i it was the first like assignment i had to go write an article and i was writing for outside magazine and um this is 19 years ago man and there's a thing called mako madness and it was this thing in montauk uh you know what's funny about doing this this is in 2000 and i got sent out there and never had never, ever been to New York. I didn't even go into the city.

I just flew into wherever the hell I flew into and got a car and stupidly took a cab to – I didn't understand the – I was just very young. I didn't understand. I took a cab from the airport out to Montauk. Oh, my God. How much did that cost? I don't even remember. I remember when I had to determine my expenses.

People were like, hold on, what? I didn't know. But anyways, it was funny because I remember driving along and seeing the, it was like the summer before and seeing the Twin, it was like a year before and seeing the Twin Towers, you know? And it was like my first ever view and I never saw that place again. I never saw it again until after. But there's this thing called Mako Madness, and it was like a shark tournament.

And traditionally, it had been like a contest to get the biggest shark, and they would bet money on it. And there was the general registration fee. So all these captains who had charter boats would join Mako Madness, and they would book clients on their boats for Mako Madness. And you had to pay some amount of money to, this probably still goes on, you had to pay some amount of money to register your boat to be in the contest. But the real money was in all these side bets called Calcuttas. And so you could, there was enough side betting going on around all the various captains that the biggest Mako could win a hundred thousand, a couple hundred thousand dollars to catch the biggest mako could win a hundred thousand couple hundred thousand dollars to catch the biggest mako but the sort of the fatal flaw in this tournament from a public

perception standpoint would be that there was a category for just biggest shark and there's a category for like biggest mako so people going out like at a time this is when at this is when shark populations are still you know and globally they're still on a decline but there was still a lot of shark bycatch from swordfish long lining and other things and there was people were getting very worried about shark stocks and shark numbers um and at one time mako madness there's a lot more makos like people be registered makos but there had been some years where Mako Madness had no Makos. People weren't bringing in a Mako. So everyone would go out and just make damn sure that, like,

I don't want to come back empty. So they would catch a blue shark. Because if no one caught a Mako, you still might get biggest shark from catching a blue shark. And at the end of this thing, man had dumpsters they were not dumpsters they had they would fill a dumpster with blue sharks and no one would eat it dude it would no it would go into a dumpster you can eat blue shark yeah well you can they're high in urea and just you know it's like everything else like yes you can so mako is the most edible mako thresher um can you eat a great white you know what's funny about great whites is there's

a guy there's a writer i love and he does all these fisheries guidebooks named vick donnelly i don't know if he's dead or alive but i got all of his books he's got like gulf coast pacific ocean atlantic coast um he does these books like it's like all the fish that you're likely to catch kind of like how to catch them and then what i like about he's got like a food quality section and his food quality sections are really funny and like the the highest praise he can give something like excellent or one of the best right so if you look up snook it'll be like one of the best um his his headline for great i looked in great white shark it says don't even ask but people feel that they'd be good because salmon shark are good they used to call them poor beagles

like salmon shark have a very good reputation and makos have a good reputation and threshers have market value and there's other sharks in other areas that have market value but those ones are like are ones that are popular table fare um the assumption is that white that great white sharks would probably be good it must be somebody's eating one oh i'm sure there's plenty people that have eaten them but at this mako madness thing i can't remember the point i was getting at what the hell was i driving at by talking about mako madness oh in this article i got into like the history of where like shark hunting and killing sharks came from is you're familiar with jaws right well sort of the shark fisherman character and killing sharks came from is you're familiar with jaws

right well sort of the shark fisherman character and jaws is based on this like very real dude frank mundus and frank mundus used to fish out of montauk and at a time montauk was his premier destination for people catching swordfish and big bluefin tuna and as those big pelagic fisheries had collapsed from overfishing in the 70s, Frank Mundus, he'd go out and he'd just go out and find a, you know, he'd go out famously, he'd go out and find a beach whale or not a beach whale, but a floating dead whale. And he'd anchor up on that whale and catch big ass great whites. And then come in and hang the bloody carcass up on the docks. And he made necklaces with tooth sharks and shit. And he became like the monster man or something or the monster hunter and started booking all these crazy trips where tourists would come and be like,

holy shit, I want to go kill a big monster. And he's credited with having created this like culture of like going out and getting. Yeah, that's Frank Mondes. Let me see that picture up at left. Dude. There he is yeah he kind of like built this idea of like shark hunting and shark bite in his forearm going back to that that'd be interesting if frank mondes forearm something took a bite out of that motherfucker yes he's got the necklace yeah the dead shark and frank mondes kind of like like spawned this sort of thing

where you'd want to go out and catch a big shark and hang it up and then throw it in a dumpster wow and people look at like when people look at that history they look at it being is like it's like in some ways mundus and shark hunting was symptomatic of declining fisheries. Look at that picture of him and the dude from the movie. They're so similar. Look at that. The black and white and the color next to each other. Look at that.

Oh, yeah. What was that guy's name? The guy in the movie? Can't remember. What was the actor's name? That guy was fucking awesome. What a great scene. You know Mo Fallon?

Yeah. That's still his favorite movie, I think. It's a great movie. Dude, he loves Jaws. It's a great movie. It's interesting that the narrative. Next time you see him, have him convince you that Jaws is the greatest movie ever. It's a great movie.

It's a great movie. Richard Dreyfuss? I mean, come on. The narrative of sharks fin soup and sharks being something that we need to protect, it's a new thing it's only existed over the last decade or so i think so yeah it used to be if you caught a shark like good for you you keeping it from killing someone who's swimming or someone who's surfing the the the idea of shark's fin soup and and it's a lure was driven home to me one time when we were in berkeley and we were at a boat launch we'd come off fishing and we'd been out fishing for leopard sharks um remember the life aquatic that's a good movie do you like his stuff or no bill murray love him i mean like the director anderson west oh what has

he done besides that fucking uh world tenenbaums oh okay yeah i like that yeah yeah i think his masterpiece is the life aquatic But In there they got You know the famous shark And there's the jaguar shark Which is a good idea for a shark I don't think it exists But there are leopard sharks

And we were fishing for leopard sharks And we came back to the boat launch And there's a dumpster there And everybody cleans their fish And throws the fish guts In the dumpster And I remember there was a gentleman Digging through the dumpster

Getting out leopard shark fins And heads and stuff in the dumpster and i remember there's a gentleman digging through the dumpster getting out leopard shark fins and and heads and stuff and i took pity on him i thought that he was acting out of some sort of desperation and i said uh hey man do you want like a nice filet i'd be happy to give you a filet he's like no he just wanted just the fins just to make soup yeah yeah have you ever had it no i've had it shark fin soup yeah did you enjoy it it was weird it was weird it was like it's okay it's okay it's definitely not worth eradicating a fucking entire species for. No, it's a little disgusting. It's a little disgusting. And I'm always reluctant to sort of oversimplify things around harvest harvest and animals and stuff because uh i think people can take it too far but if you've seen footage of people cutting fins

and dumping the sharks in the water and kicking the sharks off the deck into the water dark and i think but it speaks to something i think that seeing like live finless sharks going into the water speaks to something about just your level of care do you know i mean like whether you view something as as sacred yeah or not it's hard to see that the individual engaging in that is viewing it as as sacred and there's like all you know there's a lot of stories about even like swordfish captains uh you know burning blue sharks and stuff and effigy because they lose so much their swordfish catch the blue sharks and stuff and effigy because they lose so much of their swordfish catching blue sharks. But to see people

kicking them off, it speaks to something about animal suffering. It speaks to something about what is that person's view of the resource? How do they respect it? But it also speaks to a general thing where you don't see things wasted.

My understanding about one of the things that slowed in U and my understanding about like one of the things that slowed in u.s waters one of the things that slowed finning was just used to be able to go out and you could fill your hold full of just shark parts if you were a fishing captain you could just be like i'm just gonna keep the fins and eventually they made it um i'm sure someone will correct me if i'm wrong here i don't think i am they eventually made it that whatever you have for shark materials in your boat on a commercial operation only a certain percentage can be comprised of fins and since when you're on a commercial vessel your hold like your the way where you keep iced fish is finite it's limited um it wanted being not worth it because let's say only like 30 percent of your

shark parts could be shark fins and you had to keep the rest it wasn't worth it to fill your hold full of like shark meat and so it sort of de-incentivized people to go out and fin in u.s waters that makes sense i had it a long time ago i had it back in probably the 90s at a Chinese restaurant. In the U.S. or overseas? In the U.S. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure it was the U.S.

Yeah, I don't think I'd ever traveled overseas in the 1990s. I barely remember it. How old were you when you first went overseas? Overseas. You sound like old sailors. I'm trying to remember. I think i was in my 30s so canada doesn't count as overseas no you can walk there nor because of like the dairy and you know gap and in central america like when you go to argentina is it overseas it can be depending if you come from florida right it depends on how you

go if they flew dead nuts over central america did you go overseas it seems like it's kind of overseas yeah it seems like a bad term but you didn't you didn't have occasion to travel a lot no when you were young well i traveled a lot from fighting all around the country when i was young and then i traveled a lot for comedy inside the country the same thing so there traveled a lot from fighting all around the country when I was young, and then I traveled a lot for comedy inside the country, the same thing. So there was a lot of traveling. But, like, traveling to another country was like, ugh, what am I doing? What am I going over there for?

Oh, really? Yeah. It's just more travel. Yeah. You know, it took me a while to get used to the idea of traveling for a vacation. Like, when, you know, the idea of vacations, like going on vacation somewhere in Europe, I'm like, get the fuck out of here.

I'm not traveling for fun. I don't like traveling. I want to sit still. Yeah, I got you. Whenever I get a vacation, I just want to stay put. And then I realize, ah, you just swallow it, just deal with the flight, and the next thing you know, you're in this really cool place.

It took a while for me to sort of adjust my view on that. Yeah, like you have a hard time taking leisure. I used to. I used to have a hard time taking leisure. Now I look at it like sleep. Like you need sleep, and I think you need leisure. And I think particularly for a creative person, for a person who writes and comes up with things, you need downtime. I just had a buddy of mine we were

having this conversation about that we were saying that um he feels like he's just working too much he's doing too much comedy he's not taking in enough just putting too much out not taking in enough yeah man that's a pretty good point yeah you have to it's almost like you have to think of it as a diet like what is your mental diet you know your physical diet is obviously very important if you're an athlete but if you're a creative person you have to have an awareness of your diet like what is your mental diet you know your physical diet is obviously very important if you're an athlete but if you're a creative person you have to have an awareness of your mental diet if you're just taking in sugar all the time just nonsense junk food and bullshit like your your brain is filled with uninteresting uninspiring thoughts and you know the same sort of typical

narrative over and over and over again whereas if you can figure out a way to go to Thailand or something like that, you go, whoa, these people are living a totally different life. This is a totally different way to live. Even if it's ever so slightly, it broadens your perspective. I can only really relax when there's nothing I could possibly be doing, and my kids aren't fighting. I was laying – I had to do this insurance policy thing. I told the story a thousand times but I haven't told you I do this insurance policy thing and and uh I like to lay on my couch this dude this dude comes over my

house to take my heart rate and do a bunch of I don't know health tests anyways I'm laying on my couch and he's got this monitor hooked up to me. He's got to do it for a long time. I can't remember how many minutes. But it's like a long. It's not like going to the doctor for a checkup where they just take your pulse for a minute. He's really checking your shit out. And I can hear my kids now and then, like a little fight flare up upstairs. And I asked the dude, I'm like, can you see that?

He goes, oh, I can see that. Me hearing it. Me hearing that like now right like your heart but my older brother matt who's who's a very thoughtful um somewhat eccentric person he's he's now says that he needs going to sleep nine hours a night, which seems like an extravagance, but he's done the math on it. And he says, if you're going to measure me in terms of productivity, I'll actually do more on nine than, let's say, six, and you give me all those extra hours,

but those extra hours aren't as productive anyways. I had a podcast with a guy named Dr. Matthew Walker, who's a sleep expert, written books on sleeping. And he talks about the vast amount of Americans that are under rested and, and what an impact it has on your hormonal production, on your body's ability to recover, on your happiness,

your, your, your body's ability to produce endorphins and all these different variables that are extremely important to happiness and to productivity and he's like the vast majority of people are fucking themselves over vast majority in in great ways it increases uh the possibility of dementia and alzheimer's and all these different factors if you go you look at guys like uh like ronald reagan, famously slept like four hours a night.

Yeah. Got fucking Alzheimer's. It's really common with people that have a very small amount of sleep and they take pride in the fact they're always pushing the needle. Those people, eventually, the fucking bearings start going. Yeah. Yeah. Do you take caution to sleep? I sleep a lot.

I get good sleep. I'm very lucky. One of the things about because i exercise so much is i'm always tired yeah like when when i hit the hay at night and i get home from the comedy store i fucking crash i go down hard i get a good solid eight hour sleep almost every night that's good when i when i'm in a groove of like like being careful about taking care of myself and and uh yeah doing like a lot of regular exercise how much your appetite for food and your appetite for sleep the appetite for meat that's the big one increases great well my wife started lifting weights and one of the first things she

said it's like god damn i want meat like all the time she's doing squats and shit she's got this crazy russian lady who's her trainer lady the fucking savage and they're just doing all these crazy squats box jumps and that kind of shit and she's like that russian in the rocky movie but it's just that dude was on to like that dude was on to what's it called where the people go to like the clubhouse and roll rocks and shit oh like uh crossfit yeah that dude was on to crossfit oh yeah man he's a trainer in russia machines in rocky that i have out there the fuck versa climber the first i found out about versa climbers watching that rocky movie when drago was on that thing i was like man he looks like he's working

hard that fucking versa climbers but that's a bitch man you ever do that thing no i haven't i'd like to you do 30 second sprints and it's like your legs and your arms yeah you're just pedaling and and it's like you're climbing and you can increase the resistance so it's like for grappling there's nothing like it it's amazing picture it everybody hates it though he but most people they'll they'll gravitate towards the treadmill the elliptical machine or other thing they look at that thing like no no no yeah because it's not fun you don't get lost yeah you don't get lost in it it's horrible it's horrible but it's amazing when you refer to like how you fill your head up like what you fill your head up if it's just like junk and sugar and how much time you have to process stuff one of the things i've noticed and it's kind of started it's begun to startle me a little bit is i used to find in social situations that i would be very interested

in letting people know what i thought about stuff even shit that had no business talking about and i think that you see people like when you see like someone who's older and we have this idea that like old older wiser person and they're just taking in everything and they've learned to be quiet yeah people don't really think about the fact that maybe they're just like sick of hearing themselves talk that too you know the saddest thing is though is an old moron right i want to say yeah but i mean i think you need to explain like an old racist oh an old dummy an old person who has like ridiculous archaic views of women or ridiculous archaic views of society and culture and immigration all these different things like a person without nuance an old person who's not learned from the humbling experiences of life and who's not looked at himself in his own folly

and and has a humorous take on it that's a good description yeah you paint a flattering portrait yeah man i think about it a lot i don't want to be that guy you know i encountered a dude like that not long ago where we decided that we're going to take our kids like we're going to take our kids out to eat and i don't want to have to deal with any kind of like added noise. And I was, uh, trying to, I wanted to go to, there's like this like truck that sells tacos. It's called like El Rodeo or something. Let's go to that taco truck and eat. Cause I'm going to talk to anybody and deal with anybody. My wife convinced me to go to, uh, this brew pub. So we go down to the brew pub. I'm kind of like in a, I'm already pissed off because I'm like half mad at my wife for making us be in a potentially social situation.

And I'm sitting there and this old man walks past me on his way out of the restaurant and he's got a do not resuscitate bracelet. Ooh. Okay. He's got a little, you know those four pegged canes? He's got a four pegged cane. There's probably a name for that. And a do not resuscitate bracelet and he walks out with his wife girlfriend whatever and she wanders off and he's just standing outside the restaurant

and it's just killing me to know what that's all about so i grabbed my older boy and we walk out and i'm like you know i couldn't help but notice you have a bracelet that says do not resuscitate uh what's that all about you know and i said do you just feel that if it's your time it's your time and you shouldn't and you don't want modern shit to like interfere and sort of what you imagine to be like the way things go and he explains to me is like no he goes he's like he's pissed he's already pissed he was probably pissed before i talked to him he's like, no, he's pissed. He's already pissed. He was probably pissed before I talked to him. He's like, I don't want oxygen. I don't want CPR. I don't want nothing.

And he goes, because I was having a heart attack. And they resuscitated me and broke two of my ribs. Therefore, I don't want to be resuscitated. I remember thinking, but you were having a heart attack. Like the trade-off seems minor. Yeah. But just like he was so kind of just pissed. That they broke his ribs.

That he couldn't even see. I'm like, another way of looking at it would be that they saved your life. that they saved your life. But he's like, he just wanted to suffer his heart attack with ribs intact and at this point would just rather die

than have broken ribs. Or something like, I couldn't even begin. And all of a sudden, I thought he was interesting and all of a sudden I didn't think he was interesting anymore.

Such an unfortunate perspective because if he said like, It's not a great story, but do you see what I'm saying? No, it is a great story because it's like because if he said like it's not a great story but you see what i'm saying no it is a great story because it's like if he said hey i had a good time it's you know there's only enough room for so many people that's what i thought i was gonna get uh you know that's what i thought i was gonna get looking forward to meeting jesus yeah i thought i was gonna get that so much so that I brought my boy with me. Oh, boy. Because when I was a little kid, my dad would go out of his way to have weird people over to the house.

It was important to him to expose his kids to weirdos. So I was like, come on, son. We're going to talk to this crazy old man with the do not resuscitate bracelet, and you'll learn something about life. That's crazy. But I'm like, no, never mind. Forget that guy. How hilarious is that? The trade trade off of broken ribs for life broken ribs it takes like a couple of months and

you're fine yeah you might be like dude you're at a brew pub with your girlfriend and she's going to get the car you don't want to continue this far like that's not bad not bad it's not bad it's not bad you just suffer for a little bit one of the things about growing up with martial arts is you're always injured so you don't look at injuries the way some people look at injuries you look at injuries like ah i gotta go get this fixed you gotta get it fixed i've had both my knees reconstructed i've had a bunch of my nose reconstructed i've had a bunch of shit fixed you just get it fixed it's like i fucking tore this thing i'm gonna go get it. I don't view it that way. Giannis had meniscus surgery. Giannis Putellis had meniscus surgery on his knee.

And what's crazy, you'll have something to say about this because this is kind of in your world a little bit. I developed a knee ache that I had for months. Left knee. Because of him? No, I don't know. Well, now I don't know. Pregnancy weight gain things? At the time I would have told you.

No, after this. At the time I would have told you that my knee absolutely hurt. And my knee hurt. And the pain drifted around and it hurt all the time. And I was acutely aware of the pain in my knee. And I had it built up. And then I had made the mistake of having like a passing conversation with an orthopedic surgeon who's like, oh, you know,

it's probably this or that. You can fix it. But then it got worse and worse and worse and i finally go down to a doctor to do all the scans and shit he's like you know you have some arthritis you could probably solve the problem with some physical therapy there's like a band that runs down from your hip and i think that's like flaring up and that that's why the pain bounces around. And dude, it wasn't two days later that pain was gone. I said to Giannis, I'm like, man, I feel like psychologically frail. I feel that there's a very thin membrane that separates my brain from my body. And Giannis said, there is no membrane that separates your brain from your body.

and yana said there is no membrane that separates your brain from your body and i i don't i can't rule out now that um i can't rule out now that i'm like mentally pretty weak because the minute someone told me there's not actually a problem where i need to get a surgery i like i i like i now try to feel the pain but i can't find it so it's no corresponding like hiking or anything that has contributed to it where you weren't doing it once it felt better well one day um in the spring uh me and my buddy pete munich went out looking for black bears during black bear season and this was when i was really like thought i had a knee problem and we went out and we didn't hike a long ways. We like maybe six miles. And,

um, and I came back and noticed, but it was real mucky. You know, when you're walking and your feet keep sticking in the muck and it, and then your feet build up a layer of muck on your boot bottom and then it comes off and then you're walking cockeyed cause your other boot hasn't shed its boot mud layer.

Yeah. We had one of those walks. And after that walk, the pain went away for two days. But yeah, man. I don't know. It's like a deep fear of being old and shit. That's real.

My eyesight's going bad. Mine too. I see you wearing those little glasses. All the time. And I saw you a minute ago. You didn't have them and you couldn't barely look at your phone. No, I can read that. You had to hold it unusually far away, I felt what was i reading like that like that i can read i can read

that that's not a problem no you had a thing i'm gonna be honest with you you tipped your head up and tipped your eyes down and held it far away i felt i do do that i do do that sometimes but mostly with my phone that's not an issue. Like, I can read emails and shit. The real problem is laptops. Like, a laptop with small text or reading that. Like, that piece of paper in front of you. That's fucked. Like, if I had to read that.

I mean, I could do it, but I got to do this. Talking Monkey Incorporated. Podcast called. Joe's reading my release. Yeah. It's just reality you know your body starts to deteriorate there's nothing you can do about it yeah yeah i guess views it as like all this like journey of life shit right yeah but he's all into like weird

janice is into strange stuff like he thinks you can kind of like you you can kind of like uh conjure things manifest yeah He just believes that, he believes, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I feel that, this is a long debate we have about psychological states. I feel that you can have pessimistic thoughts, but as long as you behave like an optimist,

you'll, you'll get the same outcome. Meaning, let's say you go hunting and you have feelings that like, it's never going to work out. We're never going to get one, but you do everything right. It doesn't matter what's in your head because your actions are such.

He doesn't like to entertain the negativity. He doesn't like to entertain the negativity because he feels that but i'm like but what does it matter if we still hunt hard what does it matter if i feel like it won't work as long as we hunt hard it doesn't matter and i think that he feels he would argue that that mental state affects outcomes. And so he applies this to all the aspects of his life. Having a sense of positivity. I think there's a benefit to having a sense of positivity in the sense that you're going to enjoy the experience more. If you're always walking around pessimistic and then things happen that are good,

you're like, well, look at that. All right. Well, tomorrow's going to suck. That was a fluke whereas if you just are appreciating the fact that hey here i am living in america you know i'm healthy i don't have cancer like uh could be so many things worse that are wrong with me i could have been born with weird birth defects i could have been born in you know el salvador with no feet i could have been you know living in some fucking drug ravaged community i'm lucky just extremely unbelievably lucky like if you had given the opportunity to be steve ronell if you were some guy who was living in

some terrible third world country with you know awful drug cartel violence all around you. What would you give to be like a regular guy living in Bozeman, Montana in a beautiful place and have a healthy, happy family and a great way to make a living? You're like, what do I got to do? What do I have to do? You're giving me patriotic stirrings, which I'm inclined to.

I'm inclined to it. That's why I got an American flag back there. But dude, yeah. Be like Oh I can have a TV show I can start a business Yes Just have children

I don't think people In this country They go to like Great school Yes For free Insanely fortunate Down the road

Yes Yes I mean there's not a lot Of places like that anymore Because people Have fined those places And fucked them up And overpopulated them. But there's a few of them left.

You just got to deal with extreme weather. The extreme weather is the barrier for pussies. It keeps them out. You think so? Yeah. No one's moving to fucking Montana. It's hard. That's why we just tried to buy Greenland.

Yes, exactly. Got shot down. Well, I think Trump— I like the idea of that, though. I like it, too. I. Got shot down. I like the idea of that, though. I like it, too. I think it's hilarious. Did you see his fucking post where he said, I promise not to do this? And he showed a picture of Greenland with a giant Trump tower.

I looked at it this morning. That guy's funny. He might be an asshole. People might hate him. It might be a problem as a president. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can't deny that occasionally he is fucking hilarious. No, it is funny.

And I think that people try there's certain people that try hard to not see the humor in any of this i've retweeted it i was like get on with your bad self mr trump look i don't read my my twitter posts i'm sure a bunch of people got mad at me for that but i don't read it i just post and forget it i just get out of dodge i just leave little packages and i get the fuck out of there you know what's funny about that picture that i found myself uh zooming in trying to see what those people in those houses had going on i was like oh these guys look like they probably hunt well greenland has so much natural resources and it's also probably a place it's going to be an awesome spot to live in 100 years when the fucking rest of the world's on fire maybe i'll

wind up there man yeah well muskox we were talking about that yesterday musk ox jamie pulled up a thing a statistic on muck socks musk ox that um the success rate for bow hunting is 100 percent in some units yeah that's crazy yeah in greenland oh okay 100 percent in greenland because you know they they huddle you know they huddle up to protect themselves against wolves, so they just stay in a spot when they see a threat, which is great for wolves, but not so good for projectiles. Yeah, and I've hunted them

before. Yeah. Apparently, they're delicious. Brendan Burns said that they taste like the best Kobe beef. Yeah. He said it's like really marbled. It's tough, but good and marbled. Yeah. You know what's funny is the, well, I mean, tough, like, yeah, tougher. But what's funny about, I drew a permit, like in Alaska, the way they, so, I'm trying to find another way to approach this.

Any American, speaking of America, land of of opportunity any american can apply for a permit to hunt for muskox in alaska um and what units are available to you if you're not an alaska resident very and i believe right now um the only area that you can apply for a permit as a non-resident might be nunavak island and i drew a permit to a permit to hunt muskox on Nunavak Island. I saw that episode. Yeah. And then there, the Chupik Eskimo, and a bunch of people would be like,

you can't say Eskimo, but it was funny because I asked the Chupik man who I was staying with. I'm like, you know, feel like uh i'm always told not to use eskimo and he said what the hell else would you call me so i'm gonna say in in in deference to what this man prefers to be called he's chupac as he explained i'm chupac eskimo i'm not something else i think the canadian folks like to be preferred to as Inuit or First Nation. Yeah, in the high Arctic, yeah.

But I think it's created a lot of confusion. Yeah. But it was just interesting that on this western Alaska coast along the Bering Sea, a Chupac man was telling me that that is what he prefers to be referred to as chupac eskimo yeah but the way that we you know like we you know people consume wild game or talk about meat we're always like when we're raiding meats we tend to talk about tenderness or not tenderness right it was tough it was tender it was tough it was tender tender being good tough being bad i mean you've been involved in a hundred of these conversations he like uh this tubic man was like we prefer it

to be tough you know that tendon that like if you look at the spine of an animal the the the vertebra above its shoulder will have like a what's called a thoracic a longer thoracic process like that blade that comes up there's a tendon that runs from the top of those thoracic processes out to the neck and it allows like big animals it's really exaggerated on moose bison muskox where it's like the size of your wrist this giant tendon that's moored to the top of those thoracic processes it allows this thing like to hang its head which i mean the head is 80 pounds or whatever and it hangs off there they like that thing whoa real chewy meat and they even would cook that they would cook the muskox they would basically like boil them

they would take the tough parts of the muskox and almost like purposefully make it more tough but kind of like boy like flash boiling it and they would talk about like this cuts good it's tough not oh it's so tender why do they like like that? Did they explain? Just varied preferences. Wow. That's weird. But I liked it quite a bit, man. What was funny is I gave a bunch of muskox to a Guatemalan woman in Seattle that we knew. And I gave a bunch of muskox to her, and she made me a bunch of tamales. So I had Guatemalan-style tamales. With muskox. With muskox. And we made a deal where I gave her a bunch of tamales so i had guatemalan style tamales with muscox with muscox and we made a

deal where i gave her a bunch i said you can keep half of what i give you like make tamales and give me half the tamales so we struck a deal i had a freezer full of freaking tamales like wrapped up nice but uh and i would laugh about that that uh you know my kids would have muskox sandwiches or muskox tamales and they'd go down to school with them. That's hilarious. Yeah, it was great. My kids freak out other kids at school. You know, like kids at my kid's school would be like, what's your favorite food? My daughter would be like, I like bear.

She thinks it's hilarious that she's eating bear. She likes to tell people, bear sausage, it's my favorite. And the other kids are like, what the fuck? Kids that have never experienced any wild game. And my kids have eaten since 2012 when I started hunting. They've basically eaten everything. They've eaten elk. They've eaten deer.

They've eaten ducks. They've eaten wild turkey. They've eaten deer they've eaten ducks they've eaten wild turkey they've eaten everything what's their uh how are they viewed in their community like how are you viewed in that that like school parent community i don't know it's hard to tell because do you go to the events yes i gotta go to one today yeah i'm a weirdo for sure but are you ostracized friendly no i'm really friendly so like most of the it's all hugs you know like the parent like i'm a nice guy so like when i see those folks it's all like friendly and hugs but some guys will pull me aside and ask me about manly activities because they feel like how did you you're you're actually allowed to be a man and you're everyone's

neutered you know like so many guys are their wives are yelling at them and i'm off doing cage fighting events you know and and i took where were you last week i was bow hunting you know i was in the mountains with no cell service you know so they might be inclined to be like oh i don't like that for like middle america rednecks but it's okay for you well they know me right so they don't that the preconceived notion and they know i'm a good dad they know i'm very active and i'm constantly around my kids and i take it very seriously and it means the world to me so like parents one of the most important things that i find is good parents respect good parents they see that you love your children.

That's an interesting point. Yeah. I mean, if you find someone who's like a dismissive parent and is not interested, a disinterested parent, it's like one of the most disturbing and disappointing things. If you love someone, you care about them, and then you find out they're a bad person or a bad parent, you have to reevaluate your perspective on them. Because to me, being a parent, and my wife is huge on this, it's like it's everything to her.

She will not talk to someone or hang out with someone if she feels like they're a bad parent. She forms her relationships with her friends based on whether or not they're good parents. It's everything. You're contributing to this community. So when I'm around these parents, I'm a nice guy. So it's all friendly.

But they all have questions. All these poor men that are stuck in cubicle jobs. Men are tortured. It's like that, who was it? Thoreau? Yeah. Most men live lives of quiet desperation. Yeah.

It's one of my favorite all-time quotes. Including Thoreau. Yeah, right. Isn't it? Well-time quotes. Including Thoreau. Yeah, right. Isn't it? Well, he knew what he was talking about. You know, it's these most people are just living this boring-ass fucking life, and I'm living this life where I'm telling jokes in front of thousands of people, and then I'm doing podcasts in front of millions of people,

and then I'm hunting, and then occasionally I go off and I do cage fighting commentary. It's like a caricature of masculinity, really. Yeah, people get confused. Well, it is. And then I smoke pot, so it's like, what's going on here? One of the early things that surprised me about you is, man, I don't want to use that word because I don't want it to be insulting. One of the things that uh yeah one of the things that

surprised me about you but it's something that sounds like asshole ish is how serious you take being a parent because i think that someone could look like someone could someone could at a glance look be like oh you know discussion of drugs and and like dirty humor and sort of go like those are not congruous with parenting but you take super you paint do you take parenting like extremely seriously well but you don't i don't think you you're not like you don't you're not so concerned with uh people understanding a full package you need need to spend shitloads of time telling everybody about how good of a parent you are. Yeah, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in love.

And as a kid who grew up with sort of a deficit of it, and it's very important for me to spread as much of it as I can, whether it's through my friends or through children. And children, it's like the most important responsibility because my friends, they're fine. I met them. They're grownups. They'll figure it out on their own. I'll help them when I can.

But, but kids, you know, it's like you get one shot at that. You get one shot at raising kids, man. You know, it's not, you can't redo it. You can't go, oh, this one sucks. Let me rip it up and start from scratch. Like you have to do it right. And you're going to make mistakes for sure, but you have to spend as much conscious time talking to them

and interacting with them. I like it. I enjoy it. One of the things that you get afraid of about damaging your children is that you would leave a legacy of damage yes like you can have i have all kinds of things that i did in my life and ways i treated people and i could sit here and name names right like things i did to people that were very unfortunate i wish i hadn't done it someday maybe i'll call them and apologize but if you when you damage your kid, man. Man, yeah.

You're setting, you're like creating a string of decades. Yeah, yeah. Decades of destruction. And maybe perhaps they will do the same to their kids. And it's also, it sort of reflects how selfish or selfless you are, you know, whether you do a good job or a shitty job you know i've you know i've unfortunately i have some friends that are not that good at it and you know comics in particular like there was a i don't want to say any names but there's a guy who was friends with the son of a famous comedian let me track that for a minute and uh a guy who i know

who grew up with the son oh yeah i got it sometimes i get confused when people talk about like my cousin's brother's uncle yeah i know i'm with him and he was telling me that his dad was a piece of shit and he he hated him and i'm like god damn your dad's one of my heroes yeah it's hard when you talk to the actual son of the man and he he's like, yeah, my dad's a piece of shit. And I'm like, fuck. I don't know what to do with that. What do I say? I mean, his art is amazing, is what he did to the world.

But what he didn't do was take care of his own backyard. What he didn't do is take care of his own children. I find that that creates some difficulty because there's some writers not some i mean so many of them writers musicians um actors who have uh blessed the world with what they've put out but then you look at the destruction they sowed in their immediate vicinity yeah and you want to be like well do you condemn it or are you just thankful that or is that like collateral damage unavoidable collateral collateral damage in order to have the things that to have the things that we appreciate yeah well there's also you kind of follow what i'm saying 100 well hendrix you know i mean this project this podcast is called the

joe rogan experience because i stole it from h Hendrix oh really yeah that's funny I was just thinking about that earlier when I was sitting in your your uh in the back room there and you had that I was just looking at the experience wondering about where that came from yeah Jimi Hendrix experience yeah it's 100% stole it from Hendrix um and then I read that he beat his girlfriends really yeah I was like what is that real like I don't want to think hendrix even got mad i want to think he's that dude who put the bandana on and just played voodoo child you know when uh i worked with phil hartman when phil hartman was a kid i think he was like 17 or 18 hendrix played at the whiskey and uh he was there uh as like a roadie and his job was to keep the amp uh the speakers

from falling over you know so he stood there on the stage and hendrix was right there playing guitar in front of him yeah and the the way he described it was like his eyes were alight he was like describing like he was like he was right there he was right there. He was right there. And he's playing. You know? There's been, I grew up just a giant Hendrix fan. Like a giant fan of Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, The Doors. Like, it's all classic rock when I was a kid, you know? Yeah. Suburban, Boston neighborhood type shit. You draw Van Halen on your fucking notebook, that kind of shit.

ACDC logos. You know? It's like, that's how I grew i grew up you know so i was trying to figure out a name for this podcast i was like man who the fuck has affected me more in terms of motivation than hendrix because i'd listen to his music when i worked out i'd listen to his music that's great driving to gigs you know and plus he just seemed like so different you know just such a crazy anomaly in pop culture this african-american dude was like the greatest guitarist of all time you have all these rock guys and one of the things that eric clapton had said like he thought he knew how to play guitar

then he saw jamie hendrix he was like what the fuck i realized he didn't like what am i doing because he was just so out there he was so out there he was so different you know just a freak just an anomaly it's like hunting remy warren i'm glad you guys got him doing a podcast it's great i love it uh yeah yeah hendrix i always point out to people that how i grew up uh my dad discovered that i was left eye dominant dominant and uh all the hand-me-down shit guns were always right-handed but i had to relearn how to shoot everything left-handed so now i talk about how i was like hendrix where i had to shoot left-handed with right-handed guns well i shot my first deer with your gun a left-handed gun your rifle i had a cocking on the wrong side

remember no yeah i believe your rifle it's out there man the deer's here yeah yeah where did it lost its position of uh prominence to this this is not the helmet table yeah it's a nazi helmet right yeah it used to be right there. Hey, did you see, I don't want to change the subject, but I do want, did you see the video I sent you? Which one? Of the shark tagging the dude, the Instagram video. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's crazy.

Yeah. Which one? Let me see. That's one of the things. This is so crazy. I get so many of those goddamn things sent to me. No, I thought you'd appreciate it. I'm sure.

If a guy getting, I don't know what kind of shark it is. Yeah, I'll send it to Jamie. What kind of shark is it? I don't know. I think it's a bull shark maybe. I'm not sure. Oh, yeah. Here it is.

That was almost dinner, he says. Yeah. Here, share two. Oh, that was, yeah. Dude. It's fucking terrible. It's terrible. I'm terrified of sharks sharks do you think it's yeah uh i thought you'd appreciate it yeah because the where the the the the um mental presence of that guy yeah he kept together yeah just to like he's getting attacked by a shark

and puts not only thinks to put its spear gun in its mouth here it is right here but pull the trigger boom suck it bitch yeah i mean look that thing was coming in hot that's amazing and that's some sharp thinking and he's attached to this fucking shark now right yeah but he stones it he stones it. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's dead. That's hilarious. Yeah, fuck sharks. I wish there was more of them so you could say fuck sharks and not worry about it. Yeah, no, you can't.

It's funny, man. Like, you were talking about sharks. You hear about guys that fish the Gulf Coast and Florida and shit. You got to be very careful because pulling a shark up on the beach, people will get pissed. Oh, yeah. And they'll get pissed that you're fishing sharks because it lures sharks in. Oh, so it's a double whammy. Yeah, sharks have kind of entered.

They've almost gotten like they've climbed. They've sort of moved in how we view wildlife they've made the jump they're up there with elephants yes yes they like almost it's great news for a species man if i was a different species and i was trying to like make my plan my three-year plan i'd be like i want to elevate my species up to i want to look at like what the sharks done and get there because that shit that's for safety lies right like if you were an entertainer and you wanted to get to i want to get to where kanye is like if you were an animal i want to get to where the sharks yeah like if i was a possum yeah if i was a possum, I'd get with other possums and I'd be like, what does it take to get to what an elephant enjoys? I was discussing with my kids last night.

Because right now people don't consider possums. No. They hit them with a car. No one cares. People are like, oh, it's just a greener. Just keep moving. Yeah. I was talking to my kids last night about racism in the insect world.

I was talking to my kids last night about racism in the insect world. We were hanging out outside, and my youngest daughter goes, Hey, it's a roach! Oh, it's a cricket. And turns her back on this thing. Has no concern at all. She goes from being, oh, it's a cricket. And just turns her back.

Same size. Same prospect of danger. There's none. It's just wandering around. She thought it was a roach. She was terrified. And then it was a cricket. I find crickets in my house all the time. I capture them and I let them go.

Yeah. I bring them outside. I let them go. So we do this. You know, this cricket is hanging out behind my daughter. And then my dog comes over and just fucking scoops it up and eats it and we're like hey man why the fuck are you eating a cricket he's like laughing and smiling he thinks it's hilarious it's like fuck man he's ate a cricket

yeah we uh the racism the species or whatever is uh you know we used to have a rat infestation what is this Jamie? is the dog going to eat that bird? oh wow oh man that bird was like hello friend

Jamie's one of the better internet thing finders he's the best he's got a gold medal what do you call that? stuff finding? internet finding. Have you seen that cat? Yeah, I've seen that cat. Somebody sent me that.

That's a muscular cat. Yeah, he's rippled. That cat looks like he's been running mountains. He's been taking down some elk. Yeah, he's ripped. You know, you had, was it your podcast? I mean, I know you had Elk 101. What is his name? No.

Corey Jacobson? No. Jason Phelps. Oh, that's right. That's right. Different guy. Phelps Game Calls. Right.

I love that guy. Dude. Yeah. Great podcast, too. Well, he's a good guy for a ton of reasons. You've never had Corey Jacobson on? No. No, sir.

Never met him. I'd like to. I haven't met him. I'd like to, too. Phelps. Yeah. jacobson on no no sir never met him i'd like to have met him i'd like to too uh phelps uh yeah like one just as an isolated specimen okay like a like no context nothing if he's like met him because whatever you like wanted trying to park at the airport and you're trying to find a spot and he's pulling out like hey you pulling, hey, you pulling out? Like, you'd like him in that context. He would just seem like a good dude.

But kind of his business, it's kind of – when I see him and his company, like there's a thing that always pops in my head was – there's this term like American elbow grease. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? I do. Let's tell people what he does.

He makes elk calls. Yeah yeah he makes a wide variety game calls but he's like he's like very much specialized in elk calls but it's like grew up in a logging family um you know in like a logging area and that industry at this particular time is a little bit in the autumn of its of its life expectancy in the area where he grew up but that's kind of his background. And this dude was interested in something, good at something. Remember talking earlier about the benefits of being an American? Yeah.

Not that we have a monopoly on it, but we have a lot of it. Just great benefits. And this dude just starts making game calls. And with his mom and his wife, builds a business man and is a good dude he you know it's called blowing a game call right so he sends me his t-shirt that says i blow phelps and uh my wife is like throw it out i was like no you're never gonna wear it i'm like it doesn't matter. It stays. He's the nicest guy. When you ever say someone's the nicest, like, oh, he's the nicest guy.

Like, I don't know. I value that. That means everything to me. Just like such a good dude. I lose a lot of respect for people when they're really good at what they do, but they're not nice. It's like, I get it. You had to figure out how to be good at what you did

and what was sacrificed is community. but they're not nice it's like i get it you had to figure out how to be good at what you did and what was sacrificed is community yeah if you sacrifice friendliness that's not necessary yeah it's not necessary it's it's a weakness i really believe that you know and um it's uh it's common it's a common weakness like the thinking of yourself before others the problem is it's goal-oriented right you're all you're worried about achieving success or achieving a certain position or a goal but the problem is when you get to that goal you're going to be fucking you're going to be depressed you're going to be sad because you don't have any friends yeah that's the point your way to the top you know it's like

you can't you can't you have to see the the trees you got to see everything you got to see the whole forest you can't just keep your eye on the prize because you fuck over people and push them aside along the way and eventually you're going to get but you have to fuck over some people and i don't mean fuck them over but tell them to fuck off like there's some people that will get in your way people that are selfish that would trip you up because you'll wind up being completely absorbed in their own problems and you're like hey you're not dealing with your own problems you've made me the curator of your problems sometimes you have to like know when to cut people loose but you also have to like i don't know i know that you're big on this too you're you're big on tribe like you have like those guys that you travel with you do shows with

this is like a tribe of you like yeah a community and it's very important. I respect that. I think that's huge. But it's a thing I've learned from my interactions with you, and a thing I've seen is you don't parade it around, and you don't talk about it too much, but you do talk about that there are some things where you just put up some firewalls in your life and the people that you're around and i have heard you refer to at times that that something got too someone was maybe like too damaging and referring to people that it wasn't even like you were condemning them or thought

they were bad but you just referred to like times you've had to like just sort of protect what you had and what what you care about and just make some things not part of your life anymore. Yeah. You have to do that sometimes. Yeah. You have to realize that there's some people that are not looking out for themselves. Some people don't make that jump well, and they keep that around. Yeah.

They keep that influence around because of maybe misplaced loyalties. Yes. that influence around because of maybe like misplaced loyalties. Yes. But I've noticed you bring that up a handful of times where you're like something just got to be where you had to like build. You had to be like, I love you, respect you, whatever, but I got to protect these other things. Well, some people get completely self-absorbed,

and they burn everything around them because they're only thinking about themselves. And even if you love them and care them or appreciate what they're doing, like some people are amazing at certain things. Like, you know, we were talking about Hendrix. I mean, if Hendrix did beat his wife, I don't know if that's true, or beat his girlfriends. Yeah. But it's like some people are so good at what they do that, like, that's all they're thinking about. And they didn't develop these interpersonal skills or relationship skills or whatever. They didn't develop a sense of nuance in terms of their perspective of the world or a sense of introspective thinking when they're looking at themselves and being objective about how they interface with the people around them and life.

Those people that are just like wholly focused on the self especially pure narcissists which you run into a lot of them in show business and some of them it's not their fault you know you talk to me if you believe in determinism you know and you believe that they're a product of all the things that have happened to them and then you run down the list of all the things that have happened to them it's fucking bone chilling i mean so many people that i know particularly in show business are there because of just a giant hole that they developed in their self-esteem and who they are as a child. They didn't get enough love.

They got too much abuse and hate and bullying and all these varying factors that made them push so hard to achieve success, to let everybody know, hey, I am special. Hey, I am something. You were all wrong and then they but along the way they burn everything around them yeah and it's i don't i don't you know i mean i don't want to it's it's possible to get there without that that's what i want to say it's like it's possible to get there without being a piece of shit and some people

think you have to be a piece of shit to be successful. You don't. You don't have to. Or I think some people get to where, remember earlier I mentioned the collateral damage? Yeah. Some people think you could develop such an inflated sense of what you're bringing to the world that you personally come to accept the idea that there is a price to pay. Yeah.

That price being other people. Yeah. Yeah, that's a problem. But then again, if you don't have certain standards, then other people will chew up all your time. And their problems become your problems, and they're not even thinking about their problems. They're thinking about you thinking about their problems.

I mean, there's many people that pawn off their problems on other folks, and they think that if you're a good friend, you're helping me. Like, you're not a good friend. You're not taking care of me. You're a good friend you're helping me like you're not a good friend you're not taking care of me you're not helping me like you're not even helping yourself yeah the fuck are you doing for yourself like this is a trap that a lot of people get stuck into it's codependency it happens in a lot of relationships there's a lot of people that get involved in relationships boy and girl that they find that the person who is their their soulmate is also the source of all their fucking problems. And they're the curator of this person's life.

They're supposed to be helping this person because this person has deemed them the person who's most important to them. And it's like you got to find out what's the boundary where you won't cross, where you realize someone is becoming an impediment to your own happiness and success? It's amazing the degree to which people deep down do care about what someone is, quote, like, you know, where I find that because I've been on your show a number of times. where I find that because I've been on your show a number of times, people are curious about you. And people will often ask me, you know, what's Rogan really like? But they know what answer they want to hear bad.

People would love a story, okay? You think of something like Oprah Winfrey. I've found that people love a story about how bad, like people are going to eat up a story that she's awful. Yeah. They're like, yeah. For sure. Like people want a story about something bad. But what's funny about what you've done and how you've done it is that, and this happens quite often, where people are like, they're like, he's a good guy, right?

Like they want to know. Like they feel like you are, and they want to have it confirmed. Not that they're like, ooh, yeah, tell me a story about him being bad. Like they would with a lot of people. If someone has a really bad story about Oprah, I'm like, oh, I'm all ears.

Why? Of course. Why? Well, I think first of all, because Oprah is enormously enormously successful like in some sort of preposterous way she's worth a billion dollars for just talking she can't sing she can't dance she's not in good shape like what is she doing she's just talking she's got a billion dollars fuck her i hope she's i hope she's a meanie i hope she's doing terrible things yeah you know there's a thing about that it's like you want to find out Oh she got that way because she's fucking people over Yeah I heard she beats her assistant

You know what I mean I heard she lit her sister's house on fire Like it makes sense to the world Yeah in some ways you want to think That someone who's achieved that ridiculous level Of success is mean Like I passed by Oprah Oprah has a house in Montecito

I passed by the house like that has a house in montecito i passed by the house like that is a ridiculous house for a person it's like a giant lawn 50 million dollar house a fucking huge estate it's a castle she's a queen you know you don't want that like fuck her you know my house is 250 grand why what the fuck is she doing with that 50 and that's not even a house she lives in she just visits that like once a year takes takes a shit there, has someone cook for her, takes a nap, gets up. Stirs an animosity. Flies to Jamaica. Stirs an animosity.

Yeah. Well, preposterous success breeds animosity, and that lady's got a lot of preposterous success. There's certain people, you meet them, you want them to – like Dr. Phil. He's a similar thing. I would be want them to Like Dr. Phil Like he's a similar thing I would be receptive To a bad Dr. Phil story Yes I'm sure He's great Dr. Phil is fucking great

My friend Jay Is Dr. Phil's son I became friends With Dr. Phil Through another guy Through another guy Because my friend Ron White My friend Ron White

Is a good buddy of mine He's one of the best comedians On earth Is good friends With Jay With Jay McGraw who's dr phil's son so i became friends with jay before i became friends with dr phil and then i had dr phil on the podcast dr phil's the fucking nicest guy ever he's a regular guy like you hang out and talk to him He's got a ridiculous amount of success, but he's hilarious. He's like a regular dude. Yeah. It's good to hear.

Yeah. And Jay saved Ron White from a terrible marriage. He was supposed to... Like prevent him from getting married. No. No, he married him, but he didn't. They didn't sign the papers. So when Ron went to get divorced,

turns out he wasn't really married. Dude, that's a technicality. Yes. And before we started, we talked about how we're both pro-marriage. We root for marriages. Right, but with kids. Yeah.

But marriage, when there's no kids involved. I still root for them. Yeah. Do you? No, I root for marriages. I root for happiness. And sometimes happiness means divorce. i root well or i'm able to make the switch by even root for marriage i just root

for marriages no that's it well because you i know why because you grew up in a fucked up sort of situation where it didn't you know you grew up with broken promises and divorces and separating and that kind of shit. A lot of that had happened. Yeah. Yeah. There was stuff that had happened. Well, for children. Not for me, but it was like it was around, right?

And it was in our family history for sure. Yeah. Mine too. Yeah. I root for happiness. Sometimes happiness means someone getting the fuck away from somebody you know my favorite story about um people being a good guy mo i mentioned mo fallon earlier he's been on the show so i feel like i can mention him um assuming that your

listeners like have this like amazing capacity for retention do but so mo fallon's been on the show and mo fallon talks about dude this is like a third this is like a fifth hand story but Mo Fallon's buddy meets the guy that uh used to be like who's the dude in in the nerds movie who'd go like nerds oh yeah who was that guy ogre yeah okay check this out wow what a reference Mo's buddy meets the dude who was ogre in the nerds. In nerds, not the nerds. Nerds. Like a fucking old man. And the guy doesn't want to bring it up, but he can't help himself but bring it up.

He's like, you know, I loved you in nerds. So the guy goes into this big thing like, he's like, do you have any idea what it would be like to have like your whole life defined by some role you did long ago? And I'm a thespian and I do theater now. And you people that bring this up all the time, oh, nerds, you know, and he does it. Like he like is cool with it. Right, right. and rolls into it and the dude's relief that he enabled him to like have that recollection you know that he was always like yeah okay people gonna look and when i hear that now if i see that guy i'm like that guy must be a

cool guy right because he doesn't take himself too seriously yeah because he could roll with it yeah there he is nerds was did you do pro wrestling or something maybe what's going on there ranger the nerds oh that's the movie yeah yeah i mean looks like a guy that you would cast in a row a role where he'd be mean to nerds. Yeah, some people take themselves fucking super seriously. That's one of the best things about my career is I will forever always be the fear factor guy. I don't think that that's true. It's definitely true with some folks.

Really? Yeah, you can watch it. It's on TV. No, I understand that, but I don't know that that's really the case with you. I feel like you might have a wrong impression of your legacy. It's in there. It's definitely in there. It's in there, but it's not it.

Maybe it's not it, but if anybody wanted to poke fun at me, that's always there. And I would welcome it. I don't think that happens. Well, it would prevent me from taking myself and my – I want to pretend I'm some sort of moody artist that has always followed the path of creativity and artistic expression. No. I whored myself out for like six years. I think it's in your head, but I don't think it's in people's head. Maybe.

Yeah. I don't know. It's in some people's heads. I can remember the first place i you know what you know it helps substantiate what you're telling me i know where i was sitting the first time i ever heard your name i know who i was talking to and unfortunately i don't like to admit this this is a long time ago unfortunately the point of contact when i was like oh you're right fear factor yeah yeah i mean fucking millions of

people saw that goddamn thing i need to tell you too that was the first conversation when i ever heard the word podcast really i know where i was sitting i was talking to helen cho who you know oh yeah i heard the word joe rogan and the word podcast and had no idea what either of those things were. That's before you came on. Dude. Yeah. I'm talking a long time ago. 2012.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not like, I'm not, I mean, I have, I don't want to say I have my finger on the pulse, but I'm not like a Luddite. Well, that was when I heard the word. The podcast was only three years old back then when you first came on. Now it's 10 years old. I think it was longer ago than that. It was it was 2012 okay because that's when we went hunting maybe in 2011

and we went hunting in 2012 yeah yeah so it was probably two years old the podcast was two years old and she said for your fact i'm like oh the world the world of podcasting man there was a funny variety article that was just written that conan o'brien is blazing a trail in the world of podcasting, man. There was a funny Variety article that was just written that Conan O'Brien is blazing a trail in the world of podcasting. And, you know, just got just openly shit on by the entire world who read that. Like, what are you talking about? Like, no one's even, like, his podcast gets like 100,000 downloads or something in comparison to like Marc Maron or Adam Caroll. All these people have been doing it forever and ever and ever. in comparison to like Mark Maron or Adam Carolla,

all these people have been doing it forever and ever and ever. But it's still to this day like this sort of in mainstream views, in mainstream eyes, it's like just starting to gain recognition. When some people like Carolla has been doing podcasts for 10 years. And I think Maron has been doing it longer than me. I've been doing it for 10 years. So Maron's probably 10, 11 years in. It's a weird world. How many years have you guys been doing it longer than me I've been doing it for 10 years So Marin's probably 10, 11 years in You know it's a weird world How many years have you guys been doing it now?

Five? Yeah Five years in? Yeah I listen to your goddamn podcast every week I get excited on Monday Monday's my exciting day You're in on Monday

Yes That's nice of you man I really enjoy doing it And I've tried to point out I've tried to point out that If it wasn to point out that uh yeah if it wasn't for you i hadn't i wouldn't have gone into it well you were really good as a guest and i was like man this guy has so much unusual knowledge in his head you're so good at articulating thoughts and you have a background in journalism you're you're so eloquent like why wouldn't you do it i'm like it's

so easy and there's like this market for for people that enjoy hunting and enjoy the outdoors there's you know there's and i don't mean any disrespect to anybody who's making podcasts do your best but there's a lot of clunky uh poorly articulated thoughts that are being put out in podcast form. And my thought was like, this is – the word spiritual is a very weird word, right? Because it's been sort of co-opted by assholes. But there's this –

Has it? Yeah, sometimes. In L.A., for sure. There's a lot of bead-wearing dipshits. Oh, yeah. No, I'm with you. I'm with you. But there's a spiritual aspect to hunting it's real you know and one of the things that i really appreciate

about you is like this idea like no shooting collared deer speaks to it it's like there's there's something about this that's not just about shooting an animal and eating it it's about the difficulty difficulty of the pursuit what it means and what you're getting out of it as a human being and then also the recognition of what you're eating then when you're eating this animal that this is a this is a wild beautiful creature that you respect and that there's a certain amount of like there's a certain amount of a feeling of loss and sadness when that animal dies and this is this is recognized and this is real and it's hard for people to articulate that and i think it's very important that there's people like you out there that are articulating this and then the people can digest this in a podcast form and get it over and

over again and they also get because you always do these big groups of people they get a sense of camaraderie too and where people are talking and there's also like an a pride of hard work you know there's a pride that comes through that which i think is very um contagious like this uh the feeling of appreciating and respecting hard work and like you were the way that you were talking about jason phelps you know it's like that kind of a that appreciation for ingenuity and hard work i think it's very important for people it's very important for people to hear it gives you something that i don't in in terms of like outdoor like the outdoor world like whether it's hunting and fishing and just appreciation for wildlife, it's not publicly articulated on a broad scale. You know, when you referred to the camaraderie,

which is super important to me, when I thought about making a show, you know what I always had a lot of nostalgia for? It was Howard Stern in the mid-90s. Yeah. I don't know what his show's like now. I remember that era when it was, I mean, maybe he might still be on there. He'd have all these dudes around that were kind of funny.

Yeah. And there were so many people in the room, you couldn't tell who was talking. It was just like people, it felt like people hanging out. Yeah. I liked that, and i liked um fresh air by terry gross sure i was like dude you should do a combo of howard stern and terry gross yeah that's like a thing that was the thing i thought about but the camaraderie that's one of the one of the things i like to see most when people write in

they feel like um they feel like it's that like people sitting around shooting the shit. Yeah. Which, you know, it's a very controlled shooting of the shit. Sure. Has to be. It's controlled. Well, that's why I personally think it's important. There has to be one person that sort of is like aware that we're all shooting the shit,

but sort of like gently guiding it you know opie and anthony was the same thing for me when i started doing opie and anthony in like the early 2000s uh i i realized like wow what is this crazy people don't people that weren't fans of it back then it doesn't exist anymore unfortunately it was an amazing hangout for comedians we would all go there and i would i would show up and ricky gervais would be there and jim norton would be there and all these guys would be there and louis ck would be there bill burr would be there we'd just be talking shit and ari shafir we'd all be just laughing and chiming in and even though it was six o'clock in the morning like you went and did it man you had a cup of coffee you showed up and everybody

was happy to see you and it was a hang And it was a really loosely structured hang that they put together. And that inspired me to kind of do my podcast in a similar way. I don't know how comfortable you are pulling back the curtain or showing how the sausage gets made. But I was talking to someone recently about you and sort of how you do your deal. I was like, if you imagine, does this make you uncomfortable? No. Okay.

If you imagine that someone, I don't want this to seem like at all negative. If someone read a transcript of what you ask, you wouldn't be like, oh my God. But you bring out things in the people that you interview. I like to listen to your show and you get something from people that people don't get. Do you get it on purpose?

Like, I don't know what I'm getting. I'm trying my best. You are? Yeah. So I'm trying my best to relate to people. Do you like, you know what I'm going to do?

You ever say to yourself, you know what I ought to do different? No. That's the beauty of it all is not that much thinking. I mean, I do think with some people, like there's certain people like Cornel West. I read his book before he came on. I really wanted to be prepared because he's such a brilliant guy. Same thing with like Sean Carroll, like scientists uh scientists you know anyone who's like yeah you got you're paying respect to the yes the complexity of their ideas yes and i like if say someone like um like richard dawkins

we're talking about doing a podcast soon if i if i have him on i will devour his material for like a week or two beforehand i will read his book so listen to recordings and conversations and debates that he's had and i already am a big fan of the guy so i'll get a good understanding of like where i'm at when we lead into the conversation but then i won't have an agenda. I would just like let the conversation flow. And if there's a moment in time where I want to ask him, like, you said this thing about Islam once, like, do you mean this in terms of like a general understanding of the religion itself? What about the individuals that are just trying to be good people that are born into this environment and this sort of a, you know, I will have some places to go to if we get stuck,

some things that I will, but I won't force those things in. Yeah. But I think it's like, I mean, without the risk of sounding pretentious, I think that podcasting is in a weird way an art form. And the art is in the people listening. I know sometimes I talk over people or interject too much. I disagree. It happens.

It happens. It just happens. There's no way you can have a perfect conversation because I don't know when the person's going to stop talking or I don't want to lose a thought and I want to jump in with it. But I'm way better at it now than I was five years but I'm way better at it now than I was five years ago and certainly way better at it now than I was 10 years ago. And then I think that there's an art to the way the things you're saying sound and how they sound to people.

And there's an art to expressing genuine open-mindedness and genuine curiosity and like just a purity of thought it is not there's you're not trying to make people feel about you a certain way you're not you're just trying to explore ideas and there's a there's a smoothness to the way that's that's that's uh devoured by people when people are listening the way they're consuming it it's easy and the easier you can make it on people listening the more they'll like you so like the like if they know they're like hey that's steve rinella guy he loves his kids he's a nice guy he's his friends love him like i like that guy listen to what he says when he talks to John Norris.

You know, what is John saying about this and about that? It adds to it. Whereas, is there someone who's clunky and loud and they're just trying to toot their own horn? And all that comes through, especially in this long-form podcast genre. It's like, this is the fucking mirror, man. All that comes through, especially in this long-form podcast genre. It's like this is the fucking mirror, man. Like with long-form podcasts, you find out who the fuck everybody is. Yeah, that's a good point.

Like Bernie Sanders. Like I had Bernie Sanders on. There's a lot of people that like the fucking comments were insanely positive. They're like, I thought that guy was crazy. Like I thought he was a nut. I would see him in these little interviews. I'm like, he just wants to give away everybody's money. Like, there was a picture with Bernie with my dog. And one of the fucking hilarious comments, like, he just wants to give your dog treats to other dogs.

That's the caricature. I mean, everyone has a caricature, right? The caricature of that guy is he just wants to take money from successful people and give it to lazy people. That's the worst view of Bernie Sanders. And you get to see, instead of this narrative that gets established through these little short sound bites on these panel talk shows, there's three people talking over each other or debates or whatever it is, all are ineffective and what's interesting about is all those are fueling podcasts all those things that have so for so long been thought of as mainstream venues for getting your ideas out now they highlight all the problems with those and they highlight all the strengths of podcasts

that's encouraging yeah it's very encouraging and are you a bernie sanders man he's a nice guy you know i i i like some of his ideas i do not have a problem with giving up more of my money as a person who's made a lot of money if I know that it's going to benefit the greater good of mankind in a real way. You just don't want to see it squandered. I don't want to see it squandered. I don't like bureaucracy. I don't like red tape. I don't like government.

I don't like people that are so lazy that they just want to take everybody's money and then do what they will with it and take long lunch breaks. This is the problem with a lot of what we think of in terms of government. Government is bloated it's filled with assholes it's filled with people that just got government jobs and they're they're not good at it you know they just no one else wants that job so they take that job and they do a shitty job with it and they squander resources that's what drives people crazy and especially hard-working people that know how hard it is to make a living you have to give you

know if you're a fucking logger you're gonna give it away certain percentage of your money and you're tired all these splinters in your hands you're exhausted and some asshole is going to take away your money and you know allocate a certain amount of it to nonsense yeah you know gender research and all sorts of stupid shit that you think is just fruitless and it's just it's infuriating for people for hard-working people with dirt under their fingernails they don't want to think about stupid shit that you think is just fruitless. And it's just, it's infuriating for people, for hardworking people with dirt under their fingernails. They don't want to think about anybody squandering their money. Yeah.

I'm instinctively, uh, yeah. Fiscally, very conservative. Yeah. Um, not very fiscally conservative.

People might look at where I'm at and think that I'm socially liberal, but in social issues, I'm somewhat libertarian. But I feel that I need the right to come my direction quite a long ways on conservation issues. Land. Yeah, that's instinctively where I belong. Yeah. But the right, but I need them to move back

When I say back my direction because historically The right and left is confusing But Yeah I need them to come my way on conservation Well I like the way you've described yourself in the past That you're politically sort of Alone

That you're kind of without a party Because the left wants to take your a party because the left wants to take your guns away and the right wants to take your land away yeah and this is what we see fiscally that what the the most disturbing aspects of uh right-wing administrations is they want to sell off public land they want to figure out a way just a little bit just a little bit we just take a little bit we're going to use it for mining just take a little bit well we might lose this salmon river but who the fuck is paying attention to that come on yeah i'm watching yes me too and uh that's uh ryan callahan talked about that with uh what is it called pebble beach is that what no pebble pebble mine yeah that um i mean gigantic salmon fisheries

the biggest most important it's a yeah deeply on yeah i don't want to get in too hard but yeah you can get into the weeds with this stuff but yeah it's like there's no perfect party and there's no perfect politician there's no perfect ideology which pisses people off when you point that out yeah dude we've gotten hit hard for that kind of stuff for pointing out that it's just not um you know we as a company like at meteor we've been like hit stuff for pointing out that it's just not um you know we as a company like at meteor we've been like hit hard for pointing out that um it's unfortunate that someone's not speaking for our wholly for our concerns yes well what's interesting about you guys is uh people think that you're some sort of a green trojan horse which is hilarious yeah i've heard

that we don't really like you don't like oh dude we don't really like to hunt I love it But it's so preposterous I work with the hardest I work with the hardest hitting I work with the hardest hitting hunters And fishermen that there are Ever That have ever lived

You don't really like hunting It's hilarious No it's like Some like beltway lobbyists You don't really like hunting Oh is that right? It just shows you how silly people are. It's like, let's line them up.

Yeah. Yeah. Come on, bring your side over here. Let me see what you're doing. Yeah. It shows you how ridiculous people can be in their desire to put people into a very small, easily dismissed category. It's like, this is what people love to do.

Yeah. That's what you do that drives people crazy is you defy you're so hard to buck it i love it i don't sit around night thinking about you but i love it i don't think about you either if it makes you feel comfortable but i think we need more people like that that yeah most people would think that i'm conservative, that I'm a Republican or an alt-right or something like that. I vote left on almost everything except gun control. I just don't think the people understand what they're talking about when they're talking about gun control. I don't think they understand the nuances of the Second Amendment or the nuances of taking away people's ability to defend themselves or to hunt or to own something that may or may not be used against someone else,

but they never would use it. You don't have the right to tell people what they can and can't have just because some people abuse things. It's like this is a very complex conversation that people on the left want to boil down to guns equal bad. Oh, for sure. It's like I don't have them, and I can't understand why someone would. Yes. But therefore, I don't know why you would,

but at the same time, we're sitting here with a drink, but at the same time, you look at alcohol, and one could make a very cogent argument about the overall destructiveness of abused alcohol. For sure. But people, I don't hear a lot of people talking about prohibition. No.

No, I had this conversation with Dan Crenshaw. I don't drink and drive. Dan Crenshaw is a congressman. He's not for legalized marijuana. But he likes scotch. So we had this weird conversation. I'm like like come on man stop you know i'm like when we're standing in front of a ashtray filled with blunts i'm like

come on and this is this idea that like if you're a marijuana smoker that somehow or another you're lazy like work out with me come get up with me just stop just stop that nonsense i would like to tackle with this with you because I have questions. About? Yeah, about that, being lazy, being a weed smoker. Weed smoking makes me work harder because it makes me paranoid. I don't want to be lazy. I want to earn my keep.

I don't want people to ever think that I'm slacking. I love it. That's great. That's how I think about comedy. When I smoke pot, I think about comedy. I'm like, I better get to work. That's good that you get so paranoid and the paranoia is that you don't work hard enough. A hundred percent.

It's all of it. All of it is what I don't deserve. My wife gets where she thinks not that she's going to pee her pants, but that she has peed her pants. That's the most innocuous concern when it comes to alcohol or marijuana ever that's a great one i wish i only had that one that would make it so easy to live with but mine aids productivity my my fears aid productivity whether it's exercise whether it's um um you know doing stand stand up is a big one because you don't want to suck. You just don't want to suck. You don't want anybody to pay money and have a bad time.

That is the worst feeling in the history of the world. Well, I'm going to go see it tonight. Yes. If you suck, I'm going to fucking be like, boo. I'm working hard, dude. I might heckle you, but I've seen people heckle you and it doesn't work well. They don't come out on top. It's not a smart move because you're interrupting a show for your own idea you're and people are already rooting for the guy on stage because when people heckle you

it doesn't work out well for them well occasionally people are rooting for the heckler if the heckler has a good point like so i look people have heckled me and said hilarious shit and i'll laugh along with them it's like as long as we're not filming anything the real problem is people that want to heckle when you're filming you know like you're filming something like don't heckle yeah dude you're funny but you're not funny like to not for like posterity it's alcohol it's all alcohol it's like you get a couple of drinks and you're like i got some funny shit to say too and you know by god you're not the only funny one this bald and i'm not this bald man up here telling me what's funny i know what's funny and i'm not and sometimes people have good here telling me what's funny. I know what's funny. And I'm not.

And sometimes people have good points. But that's the beauty of live performances. You live in this world where from ready, start. Who knows what's going to happen? You press start and this thing goes off on its own little journey. And you have this idea of the way you're going to steer it. And you're bringing up subjects and you're making people laugh. But anything can happen.

Anything can happen. Dude, when I saw saw you last i saw you in seattle and uh you know i want to say this but the people destroyed this by saying it we laugh my wife and i laugh so much i wish no one had ever pointed this out because people it hurt my stomach it hurt my stomach. It hurt my stomach. People are like, I laughed so much it hurt. I laughed so much I cried. Like, ah, shut up. But like we laughed so much my stomach hurt.

My stomach muscles hurt. That's as good as a person could ever get. Yeah, that's the best compliment. Literally, I had like stomach. Afterward, we were talking about our stomach muscles like we're doing ab it's like we had been doing a bunch of crunches comedy's a crazy art form man it's a crazy art form it was a beautiful it was like because we're like in the mix of it man we have three kids that are under 10 it's hard everything's hard and we went to see you and it was just like we went to see you we watched your shit and um

it was just for you know for this like glorious whatever i don't know 60 minutes 45 minutes it was just like two people like like fucking like having fun that's the best thing it was really it's really nice and laughing at stuff that we thought what makes it especially fun and especially cathartic is we're laughing about stuff that we felt like we're not supposed to laugh about. Yeah. But you have this moment. You have this epiphany. You're like, oh, you know what, though?

But it is funny. It is funny. And it's okay because you're with 3 000 other people and everyone's drunk yeah you're like oh we're all on the same page but it is funny yeah but also like this that you can be a good person and laugh at things that are ridiculous and that you probably shouldn't be laughing at these things are possible no we loved it that's the art form of that is the art form of comedy you know the my favorite kind you know my favorite kind of comedy my favorite kind of comedy

is fucked up I mean I love all kinds of comedy if somebody like is like a Jerry Seinfeld you ever notice like that's great to me he's an artist

he figures out a way to craft these things you can take your kids to or your grandma but I'm a Joey Diaz fan yeah I like that kind of

I like Kennison I like Pryor I like that kind of comedy I've told you this before I like Pryor. I like that kind of comedy. I've told you this before, and I've told your listeners this before, and now I have to excuse me. Then I don't mean to wrap your own show, but I got to go. But you didn't like this one. I felt like you didn't like it when I said it before.

But your comedy comes from a position. I think you didn't like this because it sounds, you're modest. How do you know if I liked it? It's your body language. Your comedy comes from a position of strength. So much comedy comes from a position of self-loathing, which self-loathing is funny.

I can't get it up. I can't please my girlfriend. I'm a horrible husband. It comes from self-loathing. But to have someone come at comedy from a position of strength is unusual. Because the formula is that it's self-deprecating. I'm so pathetic. But to have comedy coming from an individual who isn't mired in self-loathing is a really fresh angle.

And I feel like I brought this up to you before and you seem to not dig it. I probably just didn't want to talk about myself. Yeah, it could be. I just didn't want to talk about comedy. Because you come from a position of strength. Yeah, it's like, eh, it's like yeah it's fine it's just jokes if you came from a position of self-loathing you would have luxuriated in the compliment right probably like well thank you wow i never thought about that way i guess i'm okay yeah i guess i'm okay yeah so there's a compliment for you it's tricky business um you you gotta go you're filming some shit with brian count today yeah when are we getting together what are we doing come on man well i think well i know and i last

time was it turkey hunting or was it alaska turkey but i if you remember i proposed you not long ago i was asking you about your availability to hunt elk in september but it kind of petered out two i have two hunts i have one i see i have that's the thing about having kids and a family and everything like that but what i would like most is about having kids and a family and everything like that. But what I would like most is to bring you and your family up to my fish shack for a few days. Let's do it. Because I think our children. Let's do that.

Our kids like kids. Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that. I'm into that. And like I said, my youngest fucking loves fishing. We'll have a great time. It'll be good. Steve Rinello, ladies and gentlemen.

Meat eater. Meat eater. Bourbon coming soon. Elk shank in the house. fishing we'll have a great time it'll be good steve renell ladies and gentlemen meat eater meat eater uh bourbon coming soon elk shank in the house uh the meat eater podcast pairs with elk shank meteor podcast everywhere um and live tours you guys are doing live podcasts everywhere which i enjoy as well great thank you bye everybody