The Joe Rogan Experience - #1395 - Glenn Villeneuve

Episode Date: December 7, 2019

Glenn Villeneuve is a hunter, fisherman and TV personality, best known for appearing in the show “Life Below Zero”, which showcases the life of the Alaskan hunters particularly during the harsh winters.

Boom here we go what's up Glenn how are you man hey Joe nice to meet you in person good to come down here good to meet you dude you uh you're one of my favorite characters on that show it was uh it was always weird watching you for people don't know where to life below zero it's um this crazy show where people live you know in this very rugged terrain, and you had the most interesting life because when you would live up at the cabin, you would live by yourself, just you in a very small room, just hunting all your food and hiking around. You didn't use any vehicles, and you just kind of had a rifle

and a frying pan and a pot and a place to sleep. And he seemed really happy up there. Oh, yeah. I'm having a good time. I just wanted to strip everything away that I could dispense with, you know. I got the idea. I wanted to go back to living like a hunter-gatherer. Back in 97, I just got this idea.

I was actually living in a tent in the woods down in Vermont, having such a good time. I thought, where could I go with this? What could I do with this kind of lifestyle? And I decided to move to the Brooks Range of Alaska. What was it like? So what made you go live in a tent in the first place? I just always liked the outdoors. I just love nature. And I was doing other things too, but there was this one summer when I was in my 20s, when I found this really cool spot in the woods and I thought, hey, I'll this really cool spot in the woods and I thought hey I'll set up a teepee over there and I'll just hang out there this summer as much as I can

and I just had a great time so I started thinking more about you know instead of just living in the woods kind of as a recreational thing I started thinking about hey how could you actually make a life living like this you know get up every morning with the animals around, the sky, the water. I started thinking about it. I started reading anthropological stuff about hunter-gatherers that summer. And I started getting ideas. And it took me seven years to make it to the Brooks Range and to get out to that lake that you've seen on TV

and to actually start living that way. It took me a few years just to organize my life enough to move up to Alaska. And then once I got to Alaska, I was kind of in Fairbanks for about four years before I could really spend long periods of time in the wilderness. But once I got it all arranged, I just drove up the Hall Road, which is this industrial road that goes up to the North Slope oil fields. It's very, very unimproved in in areas just gravel road for hundreds of miles i drove about 300 miles north of fairbanks i parked my van and i walked 60 miles off of that road by myself out into the wilderness and started figuring out how to live off the land how did you know where to go oh i had found the spot a few years before i had actually found that lake flying

around in a little bush plane. Because part of my plan originally, when I formulated this idea back in Vermont, I thought, I'll become a bush pilot. That'll be a thing I can do in Alaska. So I was thinking about starting an air taxi service. I had been studying flying for a few years. As soon as I got my private license, I jumped in the plane and flew to Alaska. But then when I got up there, I was getting my commercial and all that. And in the meantime, as much as I could, I'd go out and explore, look around. And I discovered this lake one day when I was flying across part of the Brooks Range. And I set up a little tent camp there that summer, 2000. But it took me another four years before I could actually walk out there and start living.

60 miles walking. Yeah. That's a long fucking way. Hey, I walked the length of Vermont when I was 13 years old. I walked, you know, Did you really? Massachusetts to Canada.

But the difference is when you're When you were 13? Yeah. I actually started when I was 12, gave up. The next, I was with my uncle. We went for about a week and then the next Summer I convinced my mom to drive me back down and drop

Me off alone where we had given up the year before But uh Just you by yourself? Yeah, when I was 13 I was alone, but that's a trail That's called the long trail And it's marked, there's a little paint mark You know on the trees up ahead of you telling you where to go Yeah but still

You were 13. Yeah. That's a little kid. Yeah. And your mom's like, go, go ahead. It was amazing. I was given a lot of freedom. I guess so.

I mean, I'd already quit school by the time I was 13, you know. Really? I went back a few times, but yeah, I mean, I never finished the fourth grade, to tell you the truth. Wow. But I went back. I went to one year of high school. Eventually, I was curious about what was going on over there. Did you ever get a GED or any of that jazz?

No, I never needed a GED for anything I did. But I went to ninth grade, and I did my own thing after that. But you seem like an educated guy. Are you self-educated? If I got any education, it's self-educated. I like to be learning all the time. Whatever I'm doing, I like to learn. But if I'm making a TV show, I want to learn everything I can about it.

If I'm flying airplanes, I want to learn a lot more than I need to know to do what I'm doing. And it's the same thing with going out there and living, just learning as much as I could. There's so much to learn out there. Now, how long did it take you when you were 13? And, like, what did you do for food? Oh, well, that was easy. Bought it at the store and carried it on your back. I never hunted when I was a kid.

Oh, okay. I mean, I remember going once or twice with some uncles of mine. We never got anything. I didn't have any real hunting experience until that summer I walked out to the lake. Really? Yeah. So you really just had a rifle and didn't quite know what you were doing? I'd read a lot about what to do.

The biggest thing, Joe, I got out there, I had two months food. I left two months worth of food at the lake, okay, to get me started. And I walked out there in July. Can I pause you for a second? When you say two months food, like what did you bring? Oh, I had left basic stuff, grains, some beans, some rice. Stuff that you knew you could survive off of. A jug of oil, basic, some flour was out there.

And I left that the year before when I had a plane. My whole plan to become an air taxi and do the bush flying, at that time I realized this doesn't go together with living off the land in the wilderness, so I actually sold that plane that summer and drove up the road and walked out to where I had left these supplies the year before and decided that's what I really wanted to do, just go live off the land. I don't need an airplane anymore. I don't need to fly. So when I got out there, there was a 55 gallon barrel and it had some food in it. It had a few supplies. I had a tent, you know, it was

insulated, but it hadn't really become a cabin yet. It's the same place that you've seen, but it was just a little less solid back then. And the cabin as it stands, you built. Yeah. Well, I flew in the plywood and stuff, and then when I got out there, I put – I had a wall tent originally. I'd had a tent camp out there since 2000. I built a plywood cabin under the wall tent basically. That's what I did.

plywood cabin under the wall tent, basically. That's what I did. But when I got out there, I had some food. I had my rifle. I had fishing equipment. I started living. I started improving that little cabin, you know. And by September, I ran out of food, like complete.

I had one bag of flour, this little plastic bag of flour. It was all I had left when it got cold enough that I figured I could start moose hunting. So that was my plan. I got to get a moose. Why did you have to wait until it got cold? Just regulations? Bugs. You got to preserve the meat.

I've got no freezer. I had to wait until, like I still do when I hunt moose, my moose hunting season starts the day I can leave a piece, a scrap of meat out on the ground all afternoon and go look at it and there's no fly eggs on it. Mmm. That makes sense. Wow, that's crazy.

See, you have to, other than the rifle aspect of it, I mean, you're really living like a primitive hunter-gatherer. I would have used a bow and arrow if I thought i could have survived there's your spot right there there it is hey well if you only want to gather meat the rifle is the way to go you know i was always trying to just let go of everything i could i could do without but i never got to the point where i thought i could make it with just a bow and arrow myself. You know, people used to survive out there before they even had archery. They survived out there with spears, but there were groups of people.

They would build a fence. They would corral animals. Yeah. They would put nooses up between trees to get a moose, things like that. There was also probably a lot more animals. I don't know that to be the case maybe not alaska alaska probably not too much different but throughout north america like if you listen to or you read rather the uh tales of um um boone and not boone and crockett uh the lewis and clark when they made their way

across the country like they found a lot of game there was a lot of animals i mean it was just an abundance of animals and then of course if they ran into buffalo obviously there was millions and millions of buffalo unbelievable that's the difference between alaska and down here down here we've modified everything yeah we've paved everything over alaska is still wild northern alaska is the most wild place left in this country that's why i I went there. It's barely this country, too. I mean, it's not even attached. Yeah, some people don't really think of Alaska as the United States. It's not.

It's not. It's a frozen Puerto Rico. It's way up there. It's not even connected to us. It's one of those weird ones. But it is wild. And you see, actually, that's what drew me to it. The first time I ever saw the Brooks Range was years before I moved to Alaska.

I was on a flight. I used to get jobs as a courier. When I was in my 20s, I was real interested in traveling. And I found out this way I could travel all over the world as a courier. So I would go to New York City. I'd get these jobs as a freelance courier and take off to wherever they need me to go. And one time I got this flight to Tokyo and I'm flying right across the whole length of the Brooks Range, great circle route, New York,

Tokyo takes you right across it. 600 miles of mountains from the Canadian border over to the Chukchi Sea across from Siberia. And there's one road across it in 600 miles. And I was just glued to the window the whole flight looking at that. Wow. I thought someday I'm going to go check that place out on the ground, you know. I mean, it's incredible when you see those mountains. They're big mountains. They're up to 9,000 feet high.

And that one road is the Hall Road? Yeah, the Hall Road, also known as the Dalton Highway. That was built in 1974 just to construct the Alaska pipeline to get to the oil up at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope, the oil fields up there. They built that road in one summer. It's an amazing story in itself. Wow. Yeah, they started in April, and they had the whole thing done in one summer from the Yukon River all the way up to the Arctic Ocean.

So when you got down to one bag of flour, was there a part in your head where you're like, what am I doing here? No, I never wondered what I was doing there. No? No. It always felt right for you. Oh, yeah. What I was doing there was looking for a moose.

Yeah. And you already had that whole shed built for meat? Oh, there's no shed for meat. Well, what's that thing that you do where you have everything like- The sod house? Covered up, the sod house? Yeah. No came that came like four years later yeah no no i didn't have that yet i didn't even have a meat pole really no i built the meat pole after i got the moose the same meat pole it's still there that you've seen it's 20 feet high and i built that

with a piece of parachute cord and a little block and tackle that you can fit in the palm of your hand that just had parachute cord around it. And I had to get, well, that big, I'm actually talking about that platform that's right beside the meat pole. Right. The meat pole's 20 feet high. The platform's 15 feet high.

Let's explain to people what a meat pole is so that they know. That's like my freezer. I don't have a freezer out there, so i just hang meat up and i live in the freezer the arctic's your freezer from september until usually sometime in may i can keep meat without anything other than the open air around it that's a long time yeah it's most of the year yeah the lakes only thawed out from june until most years around the first of october it freezes over so you get about four months open water about eight months of ice so you're basically living off of fish for those months no um there there was one

year when i caught a lot of fish there um because i stayed there i stayed there one time 15 months without going to town and just by yourself no uh i was only there for four months totally by myself but i'm not totally crazy i went back out and and i got my woman to come in there with me after she's totally crazy she may be true i got divorced from her later but but uh actually no i i've most of the time i've been out there i've had a family uh with me most of the time wow i went out there uh you know i i actually was i i got married um before i went out there. I went out there for four months.

I went back. I got Sylvia, my ex-wife, and we were out there for years. You know, we would go back and forth. We would go to Fairbanks for six months or sometimes a year. We'd go out there for a year. You know, we would go back and forth. And then what happened was after we split up up i was out there one winter totally alone and that's when i got on the show right after that um it all just the timing was perfect i'm up there by myself i'm living real close to the land. I mean, I'm sleeping under caribou hides that winter, and I'm eating just caribou.

Like, I had a little tiny bit of store-bought food with me, hardly anything. And I hadn't seen a human being in four and a half months. Wow. And the executive producer of the show flies from L.A. all the way up there to meet me in lands. How'd they know you were there? The summer before, I was in Fairbanks. And for a few years, I was trying to figure out, how can I share this stuff I'm experiencing?

Because it's incredible. I'm realizing that this is not ordinary life anymore. And there are a lot of people that don't even realize what's going on out here in the middle of the wilderness. So I'm talking to people. I'm trying to find some kind of a filmmaker or somebody, and I don't know anything about it, but I'm trying to find somebody to help me do something like a documentary or something like this. So my friends know this.

Somebody handed me an email address. They said, you should write to this person. They're looking for people like you. They told me it was a filmmaker. I didn't know what it was. I sent off an email. I said, hi, you know, I live in the wilderness. I'd like to talk to you about if you're interested in making a documentary. And a few days later, I started walking from the road again to get back to my camp. So I left them a satellite phone number.

I said, this is my only means of communication. It's a satellite phone. I don't keep it turned on because it runs on a battery. You can send a message to it. I check it once in a while. It's basically for emergencies only, but you can communicate with me this way. And I put that in the email, how to do it. Well, that whole winter went by.

Eight months went by. I hadn't heard from them. I had forgotten about that person. I'd send emails to a lot of people. And then one day I turn on my phone and there's this message there. They want to talk to me. So I call them up

and we start talking. And they tell me it's a reality TV show. And I had literally never seen a reality TV show in my life. I hadn't watched TV for many, many years. So you had no idea what that even meant? Not really. I talked to them about that, but they mostly didn't, they mostly wanted to talk

about me, not about them. And I kept trying to get information, like, what is this? Exactly. Right. You know? And, because I kept, I remember I kept saying, what I really want to do, I want to talk about nature out here. And they're like, well, we don't want to make a show about nature. We want to make a show about you. But in any case, I learned what reality TV was over the next few months. Because after we talked for two weeks, the executive producer flew all the way up from L.A. He flew from Fairbanks on a little ski plane out there to meet me.

And he landed and met me to make sure that I wasn't the biggest bullshitter they'd ever talked to. They had no idea. I mean, they're just talking to me on a satellite phone. And I was telling them, okay, right now I'm living off these two caribou I killed last month. And they came out there and they saw that it was real. And they were like, yeah, we want you in the show. Wow. And a few weeks later, we were making TV.

So they had to come out just to check to see if your story was show. Wow. And a few weeks later, we were making TV. So they had to come out just to check to see if your story was legit. Yeah. So they had to come out to the actual lake where you're living. I couldn't give them references. I mean, I was all alone out there. Wow. That must have been very surreal for you. The guy lands out there, some Hollywood jack off, comes out to visit you. It was great great it was like getting out solitary i hadn't seen anybody four and a half months that's a long time when i say jack off i mean with all due respect i just mean a hollywood person you know like a la television producer flies out to meet you when you're doing your wilderness thing like what a convergence of

worlds there's no world that's more removed from the world of living by yourself in the woods than hollywood that's like the most opposite of it in some ways but we're all human yes we're all human and we had a great afternoon together we had an awesome afternoon together so did you take them and show them your routes and all the places where you go it It was in April. I had a packed trail on the snow. That's still winter where I am. And I took him out for a walk up onto a mountainside so he could get a view of the whole country there. And it just happened that the first grizzly track I'd seen that spring

that had come out of hibernation was right there in front of us. The bear had hit my trail and was walking down my packed trail right in front of us the the bear had hit my trail and was walking down my pack trail right in front of us it was that day totally fresh track so that was exciting and did you see the bear no we didn't see the bear it had headed up the mountain it was walking a lot faster than we were but we saw a lot of beautiful things that day and you know he shot a sizzle reel and he brought it back for the network to see and everything wow so what were you thinking when the guy left like i was thinking that was fun that was cool i got to show somebody around out here you know because other than my immediate family that had been there with me my wife and

and we had two kids by then you know that that they hadn't been there since the year before, but nobody had ever seen it with me. I never had had anybody out there to walk anywhere all these years. By the time this happened, I'd been out there for nine years off and on, you know. I'd had my camp out there since 2000, actually, and I'd been my camp out there since 2000 actually. And I'd been kind of living there at least half the time for nine years. I'd gotten to know that country so well, all the mountains. I'd walk some days, 20, 25 miles over 5,000 foot mountains and everything, hunting sheep, hunting caribou, and just looking around, trapping sometimes, but always alone. Why was this life so appealing to you from such a young age?

Like the fact that you're 13 years old, you make that walk all the way across Vermont. I mean, that's a long-ass walk. You know, I grew up in a small town right near the base of the highest mountain in Vermont, Mount Mansfield. And some of my earliest memories are looking at that mountain, wanting to go up there. And I got to the top of the mountain by the time I was nine, but it took me nine years just to get up there. Things take time.

So this has always been something that you're drawn to for some reason. You're drawn to being in the wilderness. I'm drawn to a lot of things, but the wilderness is definitely one of them. When you get there, do you feel like everything's right? Like when you finally Got to your place and you finally started When you walked 60 miles out there And started living

Did you finally feel like I'm in my spot, this is where I'm supposed to be Oh yeah Like you knew I had literally been planning to do exactly that In the Brooks Range for 7 years Like that's. I had literally been planning to do exactly that in the Brooks Range for seven years. Like that's what I was doing every day was preparing to do that. Wow.

But what was it about it that was so compelling? Like why was that a thing that you were so drawn to? Because when I was living in the woods before that, when I was in the teepee in Vermont, every single day I'd wake up with a smile on my face. I'd just be excited what was going on. Get up, look out, see the fog coming up off the water on the lake. You know, oh wow, there's something over there. There's a loon, whatever it is. I was just excited about what was going on out there, and I just felt really connected to it. And there are a lot of really positive aspects to being out in the woods.

I mean, just the physical part. Like I like to stay in shape. I like to be active. And you can't help but be active out there. You can't help but stay in shape. I like the diet. I mean, once I started eating animals, I killed myself. And food that I collected myself, you know, plant food too,

that was the best food I ever ate in my life. When I ate that first moose I killed, I mean, I never had anything better. That's a crazy way to live, man. It's interesting because most people would tell you, hey, you got to get a job. You got to be a normal person. You can't just go out there and live. Yeah, yeah, well, and that's what I told him. I said, I'm going to make a career out of this.

Now, I didn't know exactly how it was going to play out, but I was always confident that it was a valuable thing to do and that it would not only benefit me, but in the long run, that I would be able to share this with people and that it would pay off. And it did. It just took time. Now, what did you do for money? What I did for money was two things. One is I didn't go out there until I was 30 years old. I didn't go out there until I was 30 years old. I didn't go to Alaska until I was 30 years old. I had to have some savings. And number two is I arranged everything in my life so I had literally no expenses or almost no expenses. I never had

any debt. I didn't have student loan, like I said. I left school early. I didn't have a mortgage. debt. I didn't have student loan, like I said. I left school early. I didn't have a mortgage. When I got to Fairbanks, I found one acre of land on the edge of town for $6,500. I built a little log cabin myself, 200 square feet, no plumbing, just a wood stove to heat it with. I lived in a tent all winter before that cabin was done. 40 below zero, that wasn't easy. And that was right on the edge of town. And then moved into that cabin. I had everything arranged. I got a vehicle, but it was all paid off. When I went to the Brooks Range, I literally didn't have any expenses except about $300 property tax a year for that little cabin in Fairbanks. What were you doing for jobs before that? You said you worked as a courierier i did a lot of courier flying that was mainly because i wanted to travel but when i was in my 20s i was managing some real estate

in vermont it was timberland and um that wasn't something that i was interested in doing as a long-term career but i was able to make some money from that and then the next thing that i was planning to do was to get into the aviation but the thing with the aviation is if you're going to have an air taxi service, you're not going to be living out in the bush. I didn't realize that when I started down that path. You see, I also did a lot of other preparation in terms of studying. And one of the things I did too was I made these shorter forays into the wilderness. The first place was in northern Canada. And I went up to northern Quebec five different times. One time, my girlfriend at the time and I, we spent six weeks canoeing across a part of northern Quebec. Never saw a single person

in six weeks. During that canoe trip, we would see these small planes flying over. And that's when I started getting the idea, these little float planes. I started thinking, okay, I'm going to become a pilot. That's one reason it took me seven years to move to Alaska, because I had to study aviation. There was a lot of different things I had to do. But that's when I got that idea. After that trip to Canada, I started studying flying.

And that did slow me down moving to Alaska. But that was a good thing, too, because now I can actually afford an airplane. I just got back into flying last year. And the next stage of my life, I think that's going to be quite important. So when you first got there and you set up your shack, you're living out there, you're hunting food. And did you feel like, I i mean this has been something that was like a calling for you for a long time it had to feel very strange that you were actually making it happen like it must have felt cool oh it always does when you do something you've been dreaming about for a long time like what was it like to wake up there and go, I'm actually doing it. Like this crazy pipe dream of living in the woods next to a lake.

Yeah. Now it's real. Yeah. Yeah. And I was, I just felt super fortunate and that's still how I feel. Like all these things that I've experienced out there, I realize how few people in this day ever get to experience these things. Oh, yeah.

I mean, you're right next to grizzly bears. Wolves, grizzly bears, wolverines, these animals inhabit the same area that I do. And I have a lot of interactions with them because I'm out there so much. You know, over the years, a lot of things have happened. I've spent a lot of time around wolves. the years a lot of things have happened i've spent a lot of time around wolves um amazing things you know that uh if you had asked me i never would have thought would have happened could have happened i mean there been times when i ran out of food and i've literally tracked wolves and taken food away from them when they've killed caribou. What? Yeah. How many wolves were there?

One time there was a lone wolf that got a caribou just ahead of me. He didn't have time to do anything except gut it for me, literally. That's what they started eating is the guts and he had opened up its belly and pulled the guts out and the whole caribou was there.

Wow. What happened that day, I was really hungry. We had run out of food. I was out there with my ex-wife. And your kids? I had one baby at the time. So you were out there with a baby and you don't have any food.

The baby was fine. She was nursing. Your wife doesn't have any food. Yeah. Well, we always had something to eat, just not enough. Well, we always had something to eat, just not enough. But I never, ever have been out there when I didn't have something to eat every single day. Some days it was just one rabbit.

Some days it was just one ptarmigan, which is very little food. But I've always been able to get something to eat. But this particular year, it was kind of early on. This was the winter 2006, 2007. I hadn't been out there that long. Made a miscalculation. I was counting on caribou showing up because so far I'd always seen a lot of caribou in the winter. That winter they didn't come. If I had known, I could have prevented the situation. But we had taken one moose in the fall. I'd killed a moose in September. And I thought, man, we've got 500 pounds of meat. We're set.

The caribou will come later in the winter. But it's amazing how much meat you can eat when you're not eating much of anything else. And all that I was eating at that time really was meat, fat, and maybe a cup of berries a day that I had gathered in the fall and froze. So the moose, we went through that pretty fast. Found out that two adults can eat a large bull moose in three months if that's all you got to eat. Wow. I've eaten by myself a large bull moose in six months.

Yeah. For people that don't know, a large bull moose is about 2,000 pounds. I don't think they're quite that big, but they're probably 1,500 pounds. You probably get 500 pounds of meat. So like a Yukon moose is like 2,000 pounds? Eh, people exaggerate. People exaggerate today? Oh, they exaggerate a lot of things, Joe.

But a big one, like a 60-inch bull, how much is that? Yeah, that's actually what that bull was. It was about a 60-inch bull. Wow. That one was actually 57, if I remember right. I don't pay too much attention to the exact measurements. So somewhere in the range of 1,500 pounds, which is like how many pounds of meat you think that is? I would guess that you probably are getting 500, 600 pounds of meat out of there.

Are you taking the femurs and getting bone marrow out of them and doing all that jazz too? Oh, yeah. That's a really important part of my diet when I'm living off an animal is I like variety. And the animal has a ton of variety in it. One caribou will give you so many different options in terms of food if you know how to utilize it. I've eaten everything out of a caribou except the poop, literally. You can even eat part of the antlers.

Really? Oh, yeah. In the spring when they're growing, they're soft on the ends. It's like a pickle. You skin them. You take the velvet off. In the last inch or two, it's got the consistency of a pickle. They're great.

Really? You eat it raw? Yeah. I eat a lot of animals raw. I eat a lot of parts of a caribou raw. But anyway, you get a lot of variety because you eat all the organs. You eat the eyes. You eat the brain.

You eat the liver. You eat the brain? Oh, yeah. Really? Spinal cord. Whoa. Like I said, I've eaten everything except the poop out of a caribou, literally. I mean, you can even, the cartilage, you can get all kinds of variety.

And it's nutritious. It's good for you. I mean, I learned about all this from the old people that used to eat this way. I would have been reluctant to eat certain things if I hadn't been educated by other people that you can do this. I was talking to this 90-year-old woman in Fairbanks, you know, and I asked her, so you eat the brains? Because I'm thinking, you know, mad cow disease, prions. She's like, oh, yeah, the brains are great. And then I did a little research.

They've never found prionic disease in Alaska and any of the animals up there. So I was like, okay, I can start eating the brains. That's an issue that's happening more and more here in the lower 48. You're getting a lot of CWD, which is another prion disease. Very scary stuff. disease very scary stuff you know it's uh there's parts of wisconsin where my friend doug durin lives where you know 50 of the deer they they test test positive for cwd yeah which is a real fatal disease and hasn't made the jump to humans yet but they're very concerned and you know this is um coming from the deer like you said there's a lot of deer.

And where deer and moose live together, the moose get it. We don't have any deer. So other than moose and caribou, that's why we don't have the prionic disease. You have no deer up there at all? Well, moose are a deer. Caribou are a deer, but we don't have anything other than moose and caribou. You don't have blacktail. Those are much further south, down in southeast Alaska.

I don't know their exact range, but nowhere near where I am. That's interesting. It's too harsh of a country. It's not the right habitat. Wow. So when you take this caribou away from the wolf, how does that go down? What happened that day was – thanks for reminding me. I'd forgotten that story

That's what we were talking about I had a trail up the mountain There's a lot of snow in the winter You know, two, three feet of snow So you've got to have packed trails to walk efficiently Pack them down with snowshoes and stuff And pretty much follow the same routes I'm following my trail to go up the mountain

Looking for food that day And I came on There were no caribou around I couldn't find a caribou anywhere I didn't see caribou track for like months they're migratory and if they happen to migrate 10 miles away i'm not going to see them that's that's out of my range i come on a track of one caribou it's wounded it's bleeding it's being chased by one wolf, and it crosses my trail. So I start chasing.

It was real fresh. It was snowing out, and I could tell that this has just happened. This injured caribou, this wolf is chasing it up this mountain. They're right ahead of me. I've got to follow this. Do you have a rifle? Yeah.

Yeah, my rifle is my constant companion. I mean, that rifle goes just about everywhere i go up there so uh i start just jogging up the mountain as fast as i can go it's 5 000 foot mountain and this this caribou is wounded pretty badly he's bleeding almost continuously you know and it's clear to me that if he doesn't make it over the top of that mountain, this wolf's going to get him. I mean, going down the other side, I don't know, but this wolf has a good chance of getting this caribou.

This is usually the way they hunt. They injure them, and it takes time. It's not like they just run up and knock them down. They usually hamstring them, right? Yeah, they'll jump on their back. I see a lot of them injured on the big muscle right here on the back leg. Is that what you mean, the hamstring right in here? Yeah.

Yeah, they'll get them in there. You find a lot of caribou injured real bad that get away. They get away with big pieces of hide ripped off of them. I killed a caribou once that only had two good legs. It couldn't even walk anymore wow but anyway uh i start chasing them up the hill they're kind of zigzagging up the hill and this caribou obviously doesn't know this mountain it doesn't know where it's going it heads in a direction where there's some cliffs on the other side of this ridge and i'm getting real hopeful at this point and i still haven't seen them they're they're ahead of me on the mountain and sure enough the tracks come right up to the edge of the cliff

both the caribou and the wolf and go right over the top of the cliff and i'm like there's no way that caribou survived getting down because i know this mountain like the back of my hand and uh i just sat down there and i listened and i sat there at the top of the cliff and sure enough it's real quiet out there in the winter the arctic is just like dead silent and i start hearing the crunching in the snow of this wolf he's down in the ravine and he knows i'm up there he can sense that i'm up there at the top of the cliff and he wants to to bug out of there at that point and he knows I'm up there. He can sense that I'm up there at the top of the cliff. And he wants to bug out of there at that point. And he just walked up the other side of the ravine.

I'm looking across the ravine and I see the wolf going up. And I know, hey, that caribou is down in that ravine somewhere. So he's just getting away from you. Yeah. Did they already know you by then? Because you had shot quite a few wolves, right? I trapped a few. I shot a few. not tons, but. You shot a few on the show, the one time on the lake where it's frozen.

Yeah. I didn't have a cameraman with me. That was actually, that story was told on the show, and I documented it a little bit as much as I could with my little camera at the time. That day I shot three wolves, but that was a very unusual situation. That was, those wolves were actually trying to get me, which is almost unheard of. But this was years before that.

This wolf and like almost every other wolf encounter I've ever had, every other wolf encounter I've ever had, the wolf wants nothing to do with you. I mean, the wolf knows I'm dangerous. And. How do they know you're dangerous? Are they having any interactions with other humans?

Wolves know this all across North America. I've only been able to find two documented bona fide cases where wolves have killed humans in North America in recent times. There was this one guy, young guy up in Saskatchewan several years ago. There was one woman in Alaska that apparently was killed by wolves. It almost never happens. They just know that people are dangerous. They've been persecuted. I mean, there were bounties on wolves.

I think it's in their DNA now. All wild animals. Grizzly bears. They don't want anything to do with people. 99.9% of the time. It's interesting you saying that grizzly bears where they're hunted don't want anything to do with people. They're having a real problem with grizzly bears in places like Montana where they don't hunt them. Right.

Where they don't have any fear. Many, many generations of no fear of human beings. And you're getting a lot of maulings because of that. Yeah. I wouldn't be crazy about walking out in a national park where you're not allowed to bring a gun yeah well montana in particular there's they have a lot but in this case the wolf wanted out of there it walked up the other side of the ravine i watched it it was about three four hundred yards from me when he got up to the top of the ridge he stopped way way up high above i remember looking at him through binoculars or maybe it was

the scope of my rifle i just remember him giving a yawn he laid down on the ground when he knew he was safe way up there and he just gave a yawn and i could see his tongue it was just like a dog i could see him give this yawn like he had just climbed up this big mountain in about 10 minutes you know so i just walked around the cliff went down down in there, got that caribou. I actually made a backpack out of his rib cage to carry it home. Wow. And it was cold. It was like 25 below. That was pretty brutal getting that thing back to the camp from up on the mountain there.

How heavy was it? I don't know. A lot of things I don't weigh, but I'd say a caribou like that probably weighs about 250 pounds, something like that. You know, I obviously don't take all of that weight at one time with me. I carry as much as I can. Did you have a backpack that, like a pack frame? I had a frame, and I just stuffed everything in the, I remember it was so cold, and I was so tired up there running up this mountain in the winter. And it's dark.

It's dark up there. There's no sun in the winter. and it's dark. It's dark up there. There's no sun in the winter. I just remember getting the head off that thing, throwing the legs and stuff in the rib cage and throwing it onto that frame I had. It was all inside of the big rib cage.

It still had the skin on it and everything. Was the wolf watching the whole time? He was up on top of the mountain. I wasn't paying close attention to him after that. I don't know how long he hung out up there. I would think that you would want to keep an eye on that fucker. He knows you're stealing his food. I've done this other times.

Wolves, I spent a lot of time around the wolves. This is in a lot of times. When the snow conditions are just right, you can actually keep up with wolves, believe it or not. I've stayed with wolves all day long going eight or 10 miles. When the snow is deep enough, they start walking single file and every wolf in the pack steps in exactly the same track.

And their stride when they slow down to a walk like that is just right for me. I can step right in their tracks. I don't even need snowshoes. Wow. If there's less snow, you can't, you can't keep up with the wolf. You know, their normal gait. They're trotting.

You can't even come close to that speed. But when the snow gets deep and they get single file, if you're in good shape, you can jog behind wolves all day long. And I followed wolves. I followed a pack of 12 wolves one time, 8 or 10 miles. They were hunting caribou right in front of me. There was another time I remember taking caribou meat away from a pack of wolves, which I didn't even see. They had killed the caribou, but, you know, there's a lot of brush and different stuff around. I discovered it because ravens flew up off it.

I went over there, and judging by the tracks, there were half a dozen wolves around. I took that caribou that time, brought it home, and ate it. But I had a lot of interactions over the years with the wolves, and I never had wolves act aggressive to me. I've had them act curious. I've had them act scared. i've had them act curious i've had them act scared i've had them act indifferent i never had wolves act aggressive to me until that time january 2012 when a pack of 20 wolves literally took after me out on the lake and i did shoot three of those wolves and what was that about why do you think they were taken after you um

it was a very unusual situation first of all there were 20 wolves in one place that's unheard of up there that's totally unheard of the largest pack of wolves i've ever heard a count of that far north was 17 wolves and that was back in the 1970s usually there's five six wolves in a pack up there it's real hungry country it's hard for them to feed themselves if the pack gets bigger than that. They have to split up and go somewhere new. But I don't know what happened that year. I don't know if two packs combined.

I don't know if the pack just grew to that size, but it was unheard of. Anyway, I'm up on a mountain. I look down at the lake. It's in January. It's just twilight in the middle of the day. I see this big brown spot on the ice. I'm like, what the hell is that? It's like out in front of my cabin about 500 yards. It's a twilight in the middle of the day. I see this big brown spot on the ice. I'm like, what the hell is that? It's like out in front of my cabin about 500 yards.

It's a big brown spot. First I thought it was water overflow that comes up through the ice sometimes when you get a crack. I get out the binoculars. I'm looking and holy cow. That's a giant pack of wolves that just took something down on the lake. I can see like one of them is breaking off, one of them is breaking off, and then coming back over, and I realize what's going on. There was very little snow that year.

Even though it was January, it had been cold since September, but very little precipitation. There was only about maybe four or five inches of snow, so I could literally run down the mountain. I was down at the lake within 20 minutes, And I went right to my cabin. I got my camera. I got my tripod. I'm like, this is phenomenal. I got to document this. And I start walking across the lake out to where they are to get pictures of this. So I get about 350 yards from these wolves. I still don't know what the animal is that they got there. And, you know,

I can hear them. You can hear bones breaking and stuff. The wolves, you know, it's just amazing. Yeah. And I start taking pictures, and I run out of batteries. I'm like, oh, shit, I ran out of batteries. So I got to go back to the cabin. That's like 150 yards behind me, you know. And I turn around.

I start walking back to the cabin. When I get about 30 yards or so from the cabin i look back over my shoulder and the whole goddamn pack of wolves is racing across the lake straight toward me i'd never seen anything like it i sprinted like jesse owens through the door of that cabin i was only 30 yards from it i turn and i look back out the window and these wolves came right up into my yard they They were 50 yards from the front door, 20 wolves. Whoa. Yeah.

Like, this is unheard of. Wolves are usually hightailing it out of there when they see people. So, I get my new batteries. I get the camera set back up. I go back out. By the time I get back out in the yard, they're back over at this thing they've killed like 500 yards away. And I want to get more pictures of this. I got my rifle too, of course. So I start heading back over. When I get about 350 yards from them, I start taking more pictures.

I got a great picture. You could pull it up maybe. Yeah, I'm going to see that. It's in the notes section on my Facebook page. There's a story, an unusual occurrence with the wolves. Anyway, on my Facebook page is a story, an unusual occurrence with the wolves. Anyway, they're all eaten, and I start taking pictures again. And after I take some pictures, first one, then two, then three, the wolves, they're like, I can see they stop eating and they're looking at me. They're 350 yards away, but I can just see that they notice that I'm back out there on the lake, and they're sizing me up kind of. And then I see some of them are just really slowly moving toward me, like walking a few steps and stopping. And I'm thinking, yeah, I got my rifle and

everything, but there's a lot of wolves there. How do I know they're going to stop when I start shooting? You know? So I decided maybe it's best to just make a slow retreat. And I started backing up and walking back toward the cabin. And the wolves, it looked like they were slowly walking towards me as I'm walking toward the cabin. When I got about, if I remember right, it was 100 yards from the cabin. Those wolves started galloping. They just, all 20 wolves started galloping towards me. Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, wow.

Look at this picture. Yeah, those wolves right there. They start galloping towards me, and I dropped that tripod right there where I was, and I was 100 yards from the cabin. They were 400 yards from me, and I ran as fast as I could for the cabin because I thought, hey hey if I start shooting

What if they don't stop It's 20 wolves there I got 4 or 5 rounds If I had one in the chamber I had 5 rounds of ammunition I ran for the cabin I go in the door and just like the time before They're right there in my front yard I look out and they're 50 yards away

They're all milling around 20 wolves I'm like Jesus Christ this is amazing i've never seen anything like this so but i'm safe and sound in the cabin so i just collect my thoughts i'm like man it's time to teach these wolves a lesson if i let those wolves leave now they're gonna think i'm just food i run away when they see me right now that i mean i be out there in the night, in the dark, not even know wolves are around and get ambushed by them or something. So I had to shoot some of those wolves. So I loaded up the gun, made sure everything was perfectly right, put some extra ammunition

in my pocket, checked everything out. Okay, I'm set to go out there with this gun and and talk to these wolves about this situation and i go back out and they were back at the moose it turned out to be a moose they'd killed they were back over there at the kill so i thought well it'd be a lot safer if i shot from close to the cabin you know rather than go out there on the open ice so i'll just see if i can lure them back over here and i started running back and forth right in front of my cabin on the, on the ice just to get their attention. And sure enough, it worked. That whole pack of 20 wolves started racing across that lake at a full gallop straight toward me. I couldn't believe it. I was right in front of my cabin. I

just run back and forth like 50 yards out to my little water hole in the ice and back to the cabin a few times. And they just started running right at me so i sat right down there on the bank on the shore right you know 15 feet in front of my porch and started shooting i think if i remember right the first one i hit was 264 yards i measured it all off the next day it was kind of interesting just checking out the tracks and seeing what had happened i hit three of them. What happened when one got hit? They stopped at, the closest tracks to me were about 40 yards. You know, when it was happening, it was happening so fast. I was just sitting down, you know, braced shooting.

I remember reloading after I shot five times. It all happened so fast but then the next day when i had time i went out there and looked at all the tracks and measured everything and sized up the situation figured out where i'd hit different wolves and stuff and i wrote that all down that's what i was mentioning in the notes section there my facebook page that story because i wanted when it was fresh in my mind to really have the details because i knew right then that something happened to me that doesn't really happen to people i mean to get have a pack of wolves come after you is uh a very unusual occurrence very you could read you could read all over the place that wolves

don't attack humans you know i've read that many times but they have they have uh at least particularly historically historically the whole little red riding hood that's all because they were trying to warn children about wolves yeah do you know the story about world war one and the wolves the the germans and the russians had a ceasefire in world war one because so many of them were getting killed by wolves they decided to stop killing each other and kill the wolves because they were losing so many guys. And then, you know, if guys got shot on the battlefield, the wolves would find out and the wolves would tear the guys alive. Wow.

Yeah. It's a crazy story. If you go to TheMeatEater.com, this was a story that I had told before. And, you know, Steve Rinello, my friend who runs the media, those guys were a little skeptical of it. So they historically researched it. It turns out to actually be accurate. And there's a lot of stories from the New York Times. And Jamie's pointing what?

There has been an update on the story as of April of this year. I'm finding an article about it where they're talking about that. And it links back to an article from the New York Times in 1917. And this team researched it a little bit further. And before you got got too far it turns out they debunked it in some way in some way trying to figure out exactly how it says there's no mentions of any wolf truce and some Russian stuff the Christmas truce of 1914 I guess is what it was called or something close I think that's a different truce yeah they just said there's no, I guess there's no, they couldn't find anything in the Russian sources, I guess, to prove that.

They couldn't find anything in the Russian sources, but didn't they find things in the German sources? I mean, there was absolutely recorded instances of people getting killed by wolves. Right. And I think they definitely did have some sort of a ceasefire to kill the wolves. Like, the guys at MeatEater.com, they went over this really thoroughly with many sources. This is the information found its way into newspapers at the time,

but no one dared to check the New York Times sources. The New York Times might have bullshitted? This says, meanwhile, Russian hunting scientist Sergei Matveichuk said there were no Russian sources for this information. The earliest information appeared February 15, 1917, in the Bridgeport Evening Farmer newspaper. Hmm. Which would be an American newspaper, I guess. Go to TheMeatEater.com.

Story on it. I think it's TheMeatEater.com. How the fuck do they not have MeatEater.com? I don't understand that. Buy that, please. But anyway. It is difficult. Wolves have killed people.

It's difficult, though, to get to the truth. I mean, there's so much BS. Who knows what's true, what's not sometimes. But I know that historically there are a lot of reports of wolves in Russia killing people for some reason. And maybe Scandinavia in the older times. Do you know about Paris? Do you know about the wolves of Paris? No.

It's a very famous story. Apparently, at one point in time, and now they're starting to see wolves around Paris again. Really? But at one point in time, wolves had actually invaded Paris. And there's an historical account of the townspeople getting together and spearing these wolves. Wow. Yeah. Google the wolves of paris their article on the media was updated in august of this year and

their takeaway at the end of that because they said that was actually mentioned in multiple newspapers but it might have been a barroom tale but there are reports of people dying from wolves hundreds of people killed wolves in the war there was a ceasefire of some kind but the actual events while being together at that exact one may not be accurate but i think what had happened was what what they were saying was because of war itself all the gunfire these wolves had moved away from certain areas and then they had found wounded soldiers and they started eating the wounded soldiers so then they started to associate gunfire with wounded soldiers so they started actually

going towards where the gunfire was which is what you hear with grizzly bears yeah people talk about that with bears i i've never experienced that i'm a little bit skeptical to be honest about animals associating Gunfire with food And going toward gunfire That to me Apparently it's an issue In places where the grizzly bears

Aren't hunted People claim that Yeah Well they have rules In certain places where If a grizzly bear Finds your elk You have to leave it alone

Right Like you're not even allowed To scare it off You have to get out of there Like it's not yours anymore Yeah Which is Fucking bummer yeah and i have that issue you know bears uh find kills and oh when you're when you're working alone you got to leave me you got to make multiple yes of course i mean

with the moose i have to make 10 trips oh of course now when you found these wolves and you like how when you start shooting and you hit one, did the other ones freak out? Did they realize what's going on? They started putting on the brakes, but like I said, the first wolf I hit was over 250 yards. I think it was 264 yards, something like that, from me. And some of the tracks came about 40 to 50 yards from me before they had stopped. They were doing U-turns, you could see, in front from me. And some of the tracks came about 40, 40 to 50 yards from me before they had stopped. They were doing U-turns, you could see in front. They were all just milling around.

When I was reloading, I just remember seeing all these wolves milling around in front of me, like running around in circles. And I was like, holy cow, and I'm reloading. And I remember shooting one more time as they were headed away, but they all took off they headed into the woods and one of the wolves that i had hit was paral paraplegic but he was still going on two legs so i ran in behind him yeah i ran in the cap the other the other two had just dropped immediately one of them was hit right in the head but i ran in the cabin grabbed my 22 because i didn't want to put a big 30 out six hole in this this wolf that was paraplegic and um i chased him down caught up with him shot him with 22 then i could hear all the other wolves howling and howling they're like you know probably almost

half a mile away from me by then they were up in the woods on the other side of the lake and i just ran toward i ran over to that uh what they had killed and this was the first time i saw it it was a year and a half old bull moose. And it was still all there. The legs were still on it. I got pictures of it and stuff. They had just started eating it not long before I started photographing it. Are the pictures on your Facebook page? Not of that moose. They put those on LBZ, I think.

What's LBZ? Life Below Zero. Oh. When they showed that story, that was way back. That was like six years ago. That was one of my first stories. That's a different moose. I got charged by one of my first stories. That's a different move.

I got charged by one out there one time. So when you find the wolves that you did shoot and you shot and killed three of them, do you eat them? You know, I ate some of those just because I was low on food. I don't like to eat wolf meat if I can help it. To me, there's like cleaner meat and there's dirtier meat i i don't really like to eat bears a lot of people eat bears i've eaten the one grizzly bear that i ever shot i didn't shoot him because i wanted to eat him i shot him because i needed to shoot him but um if i have caribou and moose i don't really want anything else um really ungulates is what I like to eat.

Right. Of course. They're cleaner. If you see the stuff that bears eat, I don't know why people are so crazy about bear meat. Some people really like bear meat. But I've seen what bears eat, and I don't really want to be eating bears. It's rotten food a lot of times, right? Oh, yeah.

And I mean, they just got a lot more parasites that can actually harm you. Yeah. Like a caribou is a clean animal. There's a couple things they can have that can hurt you, not too bad normally. But a grizzly bear, I mean, you skinning them and there's worms this long crawling out their ass. They got a lot. And those worms can hurt you. Yeah.

You know, they're bad. If they get into a person, they can cause serious problems because they don't stay in your intestines. They go into your brain in different weird places. If the eggs get into you and they hatch because they're an unfamiliar host, they don't know where to go. Oh, Jesus. They go into spinal cord. They go all over the place. What do they do if that happens to you?

A lot of kids have had big problems. The same kind of – it's a very similar kind of worm lives in raccoons. So kids playing on the playground, raccoon feces has the eggs in it. Oh, wow. It's Baelus iscarus is the genus of worm. It's like a round worm. Normally, it doesn't cause the bear too much problem.

It just lives in their intestines. But if that larva, if you get an egg in you and the larva doesn't know where to go, he's an unfamiliar host and they act differently, they'll migrate into weird places in your body, like nervous tissue. They get in your eyes and stuff. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Oh, look at that.

Someone's got one in their eyes. Oh, Jesus. The parasite on the playground. Roundworm. Wow. Look at that, man. In the eyeball. What did they do?

Well, I've never got one in my eyesight. Fuck that. Look at that thing. Traveling around inside this person's eyeball. Fuck that, man. There's a lot of parasites out there. That's the thing people don't realize is humans used to have a lot of parasites in them. How many people have them in their eyes?

Look at all those pictures of eyeballs. Yeah, I killed this one bear one time, and those worms, they were- That one on the left, Jamie. Right at the left of your cursor, right there. Click on that. It says 15 worms in that one. Click on that. Oh, my God.

Their eyeballs overcome with fucking worms. Yeah, I've had to deal with those worms, but not in me. 15 centimeters. That's what it says. That's so long. Yeah, they're long. They're about as big around as your pinky. Oh god.

There's 14 worms in this woman's eye. Oh my god. Look at her fucking eye. Oh my god. That's so insane oh fuck parasites man so there's so many parasites it's creepy like i've seen a lot of parasites but most of them won't hurt a human right those are one that will and the one that's in the grizzly bear is just a slightly different variation from that one that's in raccoons it's bayless oscaris transfuga lives in the grizzlies up there and yeah you're wearing rubber gloves when you cut them open and everything?

Hell no. No? No, but I did build a big bonfire right there because it was right in my yard, and I just burned the ground because I got little kids up there, and they were crawling around that time playing and stuff, and I just built this huge bonfire because I want to make sure no eggs. The eggs are very resilient. They can last for years and years in the environment.

They can survive being frozen all winter. Really? Oh, yeah. They're microscopic eggs. That's what you got to worry about, not the big worm. You got to worry about the eggs. Fuck. A lot of bear hunters don't know this.

When you're handling a bear skin, those eggs are on the fur. Yeah. If you're playing around with a bear skin before it gets tan and then you go like this or something, all of a sudden you got those eggs in you. Scary shit. Dude. Fuck that.

That's one of my number one fears. Something creepy crawly growing inside me. Getting in my eyeballs and into my brain tissue. I have a buddy of mine, my friend Justin Wren. He does a charity called Fight for the Forgotten. And he builds wells for the pygmies. And we help sponsor him and we do some things with him. And he goes back and forth to the Congo a couple times a year. And he went there recently, like six months ago, and has caught a parasite that they can't identify

and they think it might be in his brain they don't know where it is but like he'll work out really hard and then he'll be shivering with like pale skin and you know they're trying to do all these different things to him to try to eradicate the parasites but they don't they don't even know exactly what he has because he's so deep into the jungle. He's so deep in the Congo. He's going where a lot of Western people don't go. So they're really baffled. They're like, we don't know what the fuck you have.

And he's had it for months, months and months and months of suffering. And just it's taken a toll on him across the board. Every aspect of his health has deteriorated because of this. It's really creepy. I've heard of people dying from parasites they picked up in the tropics. So when you eat the wolf, what do you eat? You eat the backstraps?

Do you cook the hams? How do you eat a wolf? The only way that I like to eat a wolf is boil it for a good long time because wolves too will have parasites. They'll have trichinosis. They're meat eaters. Anything that eats meat, you want to make sure it's thoroughly cooked.

I like to boil it. Boiled wolf. Yeah. I haven't eaten a lot of wolf. I've eaten wolf three or four times when I didn't have much else, and I figured, hey, I better take advantage of this food I got here rather than give it to something else to eat. Do you feed it to your family? manage of this food i got here rather than give it to something else to eat do you feed it to your family um they've probably eaten wolf like my kids when they were little maybe once or something i can't that is hilarious how many people could you ask that too and they go yeah my kids probably

eaten wolf i don't know like i met these mongolians once and they were like oh you shoot some wolves we want wolf meat we love wolf meat you know mongolians they're all into it yeah a lot of native americans were into wolf meat i don't like it's a lot of trappers We want wolf meat We love wolf meat You know Mongolians They're all into it Yeah a lot of Native Americans Were into wolf meat I don't like A lot of trappers Were into wolf meat Well that's what they had to eat

But Yeah But some of them Actually preferred it Really Yeah there was something From the Lewis Clark exhibition Oh yeah

There's another thing that Expedition There was something from Ronella was telling me about Some guys actually Preferred wolf meat It was like their favorite Favorite meat

Well Domestic dog Lewis and Clark expedition they would buy dogs from the indians and eat them because they didn't want to eat salmon they had they had fish is what i heard they could have eaten but they'd rather eat dog because they wanted red meat oh jesus yeah wow when they got way out like the columbia river area so did you eat these wolves that you shot? I ate a little bit of it because I was short on food at that time, that winter. Not like the whole thing, but a few meals of it. So you boil it, and how do you do it?

Like onions, potatoes, make a soup? I didn't have anything like that. No? I mean, no. I'm out there all winter long. That was 2012, 2013. I didn't have any vegetables. Do you know where I get the vegetables?

Out of the caribou's stomach. What the caribou eats for plant food, that's what I get for plant food in the winter. That's the only. So you would actually eat their stomach contents? Yeah. Really? Sure. People's done it for thousands of years.

I believe you. I believe they have. Not only that, but I pickle meat in it. I'd take tenderloins off a caribou are great pickled in their stomach contents. Pickled in their stomach contents? Explain that to me. How do you do that? Well, you got to learn about caribou's stomach because you don't want to go too far downstream.

It starts turning brownish. Right. But like the first, the big chamber, the rumen, when they eat these lichens, in the winter, that's what they're feeding on. You can't eat those lichens off the ground. They're harsh. But when it's partially digested in a caribou stomach, it actually is an edible food. And the old people used to eat these a lot. I read about it.

And I even talked to some people who had done it, you know, when they were kids and stuff. And sure enough, it's not bad stuff. I got hooked on it, man. One winter, I was eating a lot of caribou stomach contents. And yeah, my family wasn't into that. They were like looking at me like, and I was like, oh man, it's like salad. This stuff's good. I don't eat much of that anymore.

Basically, I went as primitive as I could go. And I satisfied my curiosity about living that extreme of a subsistence lifestyle. So now, I eat much more store-bought vegetables. I eat normal foods. But for a time there, for a few years, I got down to where I was eating caribou stomach contents. I was doing anything. I just wanted to just immerse myself in that whole environment out there. I wanted to get my food right there, what I could see, what I could get myself. Just get right into it. You know, 15 months without even going out to town, not talking to other people. I mean, that time I had my wife there, but just to really get into a different state of consciousness, it puts you in a different

state of consciousness and it's a beautiful thing. Now, when you said pickled stomach contents, how are you pickling a tenderloin in the stomach contents? You just take the caribou, you get to the right chamber of the stomach. They've got four chambers on their stomach. You just cut a little slit in it just after you've pulled the guts out, and you just slip the meat in there. You slip it right into the rumen in the contents there. And what happens is, assuming the temperature is about right,

it will retain a lot of heat. It creates heat. I think the microorganisms in there create heat because if you just bury that in snow, and snow, of course, insulates it, it'll stay warm for quite a while. And if it was really cold, it might not work out. It might freeze solid before it pickled. if it was really cold, it might not work out. It might freeze solid before it pickled. But if it's the right temperature, the meat will turn brownish color over time, and it'll be pickled.

Old people used to do this all the time. I read about this, you know, 20 years ago. And then I talked to people, and I said, yeah, this is safe to do. So I tried it, and there was a winter there where that's where I got a lot of my vegetables was out of the caribou's stomach. And the meat will just, it'll turn brownish first on the outer part of the meat and then all the way through it. And it gets pickled. I've done a lot of different things with meat.

You know what I like to do with meat? A lot of people don't realize because you live in the modern world. And just like me when I grew up, right, meat's dangerous if it's raw. You got to be careful. You got to like wash everything, be careful. Actually, what I found is that it just all depends on the conditions. Once you learn how to handle meat properly, you can do a lot of things with meat that most people would be scared to death of. And it's completely safe as far as I'm concerned. I never had any problems with it. But

like moisture is very important. If you buy meat in the store it's wrapped in plastic that keeps it moist you let it sit around for a while it spoils and it doesn't take long leave meat out of your refrigerator be spoiled in a day right but if you take a muscle out of an animal and you butcher it properly you separate the muscle as one piece you don't make a bunch of cuts in the fascia you can take a muscle that's two or three inches thick. Don't put it in plastic. Don't wrap it up. That'll cause it to spoil. You leave it right out in the air. Two or three inch thick muscle. I set them on a rack up high above my wood stove. It's like a hundred degrees up there sometimes. Other times it's cold up there. Just

varies during the day depending on how the fire is stoked, right? I'll let it sit there for a week, 10 days, and then I'll eat it. Never cook it. Just let it sit there. Really? Yeah. Never cook it? No.

Just let it sit there. So it gets a crust on the outside? It gets a crust on the outside, but it's too thick of a piece to dry like you would dry jerky or something. Right. It stays moist inside. It's like making making cheese almost it turns into something like cheese it gets different flavors you're aging it yeah you're aging it's actually fermentation that's taking place i believe it's actually a fermentation process but it takes on different flavors i really like i call it gummy meat because that's what my kids used to call it. Gummy meat?

Gummy meat because it gets kind of gummy. Oh, God. No, it's good. It's good. Yeah. It really is. I wish I had some. I was saying when I left Alaska, I wish I had something like that to bring Joe down,

but I didn't have anything. So when you're – what's going on here? I was looking for something about the caribou stomach And there's this thing called the Polar Manual Made by the government I think the Navy It says that caribou back fat is better than chewing gum I think this was made in 1961

So it might be even older Old timers from the north mention Many interesting Eskimo, Indian, and Siberian foods Pemmican, I've heard of that It's the meat of bear seal caribou and walrus mixed together with fish eggs and dried into a hard frozen block trappers peaches and cream is chewing dried beaver tail caribou back fat is better than chewing gum don't overlook the contents of a seal stomach for a fresh fried fish dinner nor the contents of a seal's stomach for a fresh fried fish dinner,

nor the contents of a caribou's stomach mixed with the trip lining as a tasty, in quotes, salad of reindeer moss and lichens properly, how's that word, acidulated? Acidulated? I like the next one there. Walrus milk that death gives 16 quarts of milk. I love, yeah. Sigilated? Yeah. I like the next one there. Walrus milk that death gives 16 quarts of milk. I love dairy products. You know, you can't get enough of them.

16 quarts of milk from a walrus. One time I was thinking about milking a caribou after I killed her, but I didn't just because she was in bad shape. She had been attacked by the wolves, and she had an infection in her leg, and I was afraid that somehow i might get sick but i i just remember this lactating caribou that i had killed and i was thinking i'd never heard of people doing that but you know milking an animal after died until you just read that but walrus so you were worried you would have taken the milk but except for the fact that she had been infected

she was the one that only had two good legs. And her back leg going right up there towards her udder. Oh, it was in terrible shape. It was full of pus. Damn. I encountered that with an elk shot once. He had been stabbed by another elk in one of his back legs. And it was just all filled with pus. Like when we were quartering him and taking it apart,

there was this one section that was just all pus. It was fucking nasty. I've seen the same thing in a moose, stabbed in the back, like in the haunch there by one of the tines. So when you boil the wolf, how are you eating that? Just plain. Just plain. Just plain? Just chopping it up? You can fry it after you boil it, give it a little extra flavor.

Is that what you do? If you've got some fat, yeah. Was that what you were doing or were you just eating it boiled? Both. What is it like? Is there something you could? Tastes a little wolfy. Wolfy.

I'm not much into wolf meat. Right. It's a desperation food right Is that how you would look at it If I didn't have something else I'd eat wolf But you know I got other things There's all kinds of stuff you can do with food You can

You know you can get as primitive as you want Yeah I can imagine But there's so much else going on Like for me now If you want to live that primitively off the land, that's all you do. It takes all your time. If you want to share that life with other people, like what I've been trying to do the last six years, you can't just do that. Yeah, because you don't really have the amount of time to hunt and gather like you would yeah i wouldn't even have the

ability to communicate right i wouldn't even be able to arrange to be on your show if i was out there living the way i was living you know six seven eight years ago right so I want to, like, how long did it take before you got it down where you knew what to do? Like you said, when you went out there the first time, you really had never even hunted before. Correct. So how long did it take before you had like a system down where you're like, okay, I got this. I know what I'm doing. Well, I did my homework. I did a lot of reading before I went out there. Well, I did my homework. I did a lot of reading before I went out there.

So, you know, I picked it up pretty fast. Like that first moose I killed, the biggest thing I had ever killed before that was a snowshoe hare. But I did all right. I mean, I salvaged that whole moose, and it was 600 yards from the lake. I got it all down to the lake. I got it back to the camp. I just believe in approaching problems in a measured way. Don't rush into it. It could be dangerous. You know, kids have gone out there. They want to live off the land. They've starved to death. People have died. But if you do your homework,

if you want to do something like that, not just going to live in the wilderness. If you want to do anything dangerous, do it carefully. So I studied so much before i actually started putting into practice that it came pretty fast you know within a couple years i felt like i pretty much had things together out there a couple years a long time though so for a couple years you're just kind of piecing it together well i was on a steeper learning curve the a couple years, you're just kind of piecing it together? Well, I was on a steeper learning curve the first couple years. I'm still learning. I mean, we're all learning all the time. But, yeah, like that winter that I learned that you can't count on the caribou, you know?

If you got two people out there, you better get two moose in the fall because the caribou might not show up. So would you, like when you shot a moose and you knew you had enough meat, you would stop right there? You'd say, okay, I'm good. Yeah. I mean, in the fall, normally. Normally. You know, like 14 falls I've spent out there, I've always gotten a moose in September.

Always. And normally, if I'm alone, that's all I need is one moose. That'll last six months, even if I didn't get caribou. If I'm with a woman or I got two little kids out there like I did some years, that's not going to be enough to go through the whole winter. So you would get another moose? Some years I did get two moose. What are the regulations?

The regulations? There's different regulations for subsistence hunting, right? Not really. In that particular area, there really isn't much difference at all in subsistence regulations. There are a lot of myths about that. in subsistence regulations. There are a lot of myths about that. The only difference where I was in terms of subsistence regulations was federal regulations as they applied to migratory waterfowl. So I can legally, when I'm living there, hunt ducks in the springtime. But all the other seasons are exactly the same. But the truth of it is, Joe, when I first went out there,

I couldn't even have a hunting license. The hunting license expires in December. How the hell am I going to get a new one? Right. I mean, January, February, March, April. Sometimes I'd go to town in the summer and get a new hunting license. You know, and I didn't even have a calendar. I didn't have a watch. There's times I didn't know,

you know, I figured, okay, it's around the equinox, it's late September, that's the moose hunting time. But what mattered to me was that the flies were no longer laying eggs, then I could hunt moose. It was legal because the legal season actually started even earlier than that, but I didn't care about the legal season. What I cared about was when i can preserve the meat and you know the caribou season is pretty much all winter long pretty much all year long i think they got a month or two in the summer now you can't hunt them but um the season didn't affect me too much i mean one um one difference in my life now is that i play by the rules i didn't use to play by the rules it was illegal for me to even live there when i got up to alaska i discovered that, you can't just go live out in the bush legally. I went and talked to the state.

I said, this is what I want to do. They said, that's actually illegal. Well, it's actually illegal, but things were loosely enforced 20 years ago too. I got away with it for 17 years before I had a permit to live there. So when you had to get a permit, do you have to tell them, hey, I've away with it for 17 years before I had a permit to live there. So when you had to get a permit, do you have to tell them, hey, I've been living there for 17 years? Oh no, they flew out and told me,

hey, you've been living here 17 years, you've got to start paying for a permit. Really? Actually, you can't get a permit to live there. To visit me? Oh yeah, yeah. I'd been waiting for 17 years. I built the camp,

the original tank camp in 2000. So I occupied that spot since 2000. It was a known thing. I had told people at the agencies that are managing that land that I was going to go out there and everything. But yeah, 20 years ago, it was just a little looser, I think. And also I wasn't hurting anybody. Who cared? There was nobody else out there. It wasn't like there were other people that wanted to do something with that spot or anything. So, you know, some years there would be a state trooper that would land there in a little ski plane and check on me. Ask me, hey, Glenn, you need anything? I can bring you some toilet paper next time I come by or something.

It was never a problem. But as time went on, of course, and once I got in a TV show, I mean, I thought when I got in the show, I was like, okay, I'm going to, you know. Blow your cover. Blow my cover, for sure. I remember saying, hey, can we do this show without telling people where I am? No, no, no, we can't do that. Oh, no.

So did people come to visit you? People discovered where I was the first week I was on TV. I had people writing to me Saying hey is this your camp And they had a satellite photo of it They're like we tracked you down Oh Jesus Christ, that had to feel weird That had to feel so weird I tell you, I kind of was like

I was like wow congratulations You found it, I thought it was amazing Like the skill, because we didn't say exactly Where it was on TV. These guys figured it out. Like looking at the footage on TV, the mountains, and just knowing that it was somewhere in the Chandlar area, which is a huge area.

And then they started looking at satellite photos, and they tracked me down. I was like complimenting them, like, good job. Well, I mean, 60 miles off the whole road, all they have to do is make a grid. Well, 60 miles as you walk, not as the raven flies Oh, okay We don't have any crows up there But basically, yeah, it changed things

And, you know, there was one day just a couple years ago When I was out there with Trisha, my partner now And heard a plane coming in the distance And you just don't hear planes coming in low, like going to land very often. Like maybe three, four times in 20 years I've ever had a plane come out there and land when I was out there. Well, except the state troopers landed maybe a half a dozen times. But I hear this plane coming, and I was like, they're landing here.

And I said to Tricia, I said, this could be the day I've been waiting for for 17 years. It's probably the state coming to talk to me about the situation here, and it was. You've been waiting for 17 years. Well, I mean, yeah, it had been a long time. So, I mean, I just believe in being honest about stuff, you know? It's like there's no point. I mean, I told everybody what I was doing. Right.

But just because it happened to be technically illegal, I wasn't going to give up my dream of living in the Alaska wilderness, you know? So, what's the first thing they say to you when they land? Hey, Glenn, saw you on TV. Yeah, it's like, hi, how's it going? The pilot who brought him felt real bad, you know, because he knew me. Oh. And they had hired him.

No, I didn't mind. I mean, what the hell? I was living on state land. I didn't have a permit. I needed a permit. Right. So how does that work? How much does it cost?

I paid $1,000 a year after that. I had to pay some back fees um but honestly the only you can't get a permit to live on public land you can get a permit to do certain things there i was given a permit at that time for a commercial trapping permit or trapping cabin permit they call it and then it um for the purpose of making television i paid a thousand dollars a year for that. I paid all my back dues. I paid everything off.

I'm okay. So you're clear. I'm clear. But what about hunting licenses? Well, I talk about it even if I – I'm open. I don't – I got no secrets. But there's no risk of them taking away your hunting license because you've hunted without one for a long time? I don't know what the statute of limitations is on that one,

but I play by the book now. Ever since six years ago, pretty much I got on TV, and by that time there was no problem getting a hunting license because I got a lot of planes going back and forth. I mean, I always buy my hunting license. In the early years, there were times when I literally had no way to get a hunting license when it would expire in December. When I got to town the next time I buy my hunting license. In the early years, there were times when I literally had no way to get a hunting license. Right.

When it would expire in December. When I got to town the next time I bought a hunting license, I mean, I always paid every year. Right. But, yeah, I mean, I try to do it by the book now. Did you ever eat any raven? No. I heard raven tastes good. I heard crow.

I heard crow tastes good. I heard it's very similar to like diver duck Like if you prepare it correctly You know diver ducks Yeah like a merganser More of a fishy taste to them Oh you mean like Yeah like Some of them

Yeah like a scoter Yeah But Apparently raven A crow You can eat it, it's good Oh you can eat anything It's whether or not you want to

What's the weirdest shit you've eaten? Weasels Weasels No question, that was the weirdest Yeah, it was like that hand to mouth period When ran out of moose meat, caribou didn't show up I was starving, I was literally starving And I was getting a little bit to eat every day, but I was running all over the mountains,

hunting, burning up lots of calories. And I can eat three or four pounds of meat a day. Some days all I was eating was a grouse or something. And there were a couple days when the only thing I brought home were a couple weasels. You know, I was trapping Martin. I had Martin traps out, and sometimes weasels go into them. And I've eaten weasel. And I'll tell you something about weasel. They smell like a skunk. They got a scent gland.

They're terrible. If you ever want a weasel for food, you got to skin it real carefully. You don't want to hit the scent gland. And then the other thing about a weasel is if you just fry them up real hot, they're so small, you can eat just about every bone in them. Like the legs, you just crunch, crunch, crunch. Really? Oh yeah. And weasels are probably carnivorous, right? So you probably have to cook right through them, right? They live on voles. Oh yeah. Oh, I fried them right up

until they were like black. They live on little mice, right? Yeah, well, voles are mouse-like rodents that live in the Brooks Range. We don't have real mice. Oh. So a vole's like a cousin of a mouse or something? They're related. So you just fry it until it's just everything's dead? Yeah.

Hopefully. That was not good. That was the weirdest stuff I ever ate. I hope it's never a weasel. It's not good. It depends on how good a job you do skinning them. They smell like a skunk. I mean, you know, flavors mostly smell.

Is your family eating this weasel too at the time? Sylvia at the time was out there with me. Yeah, she ate weasel. What was the look on her face when she was eating weasel? She had a good attitude about it. She was a pretty amazing woman in terms of taking to the bush. I mean, she was an opera singer in berlin before she met me what yeah she wasn't yeah really wow and and and my partner tricia that i've been living with the last five

years she was an attorney in boston what yeah wow well i get that people are always telling me like you're never gonna find a woman to live like that out there but actually it's appealing to certain people i think a lot of people that's why people watch on tv people want to be free right yeah and people want to be alive yeah and a lot of people don't feel it today it's true if you spend your whole life in an office or a courtroom and before that you were in school. You've never really. Yeah, you just feel trapped. Yeah, and that grind. The grinder just keeps showing up at the office every day,

and cases are piling up. Next thing you know, she's living with Glenn. By the side of a lake, dodging wolves. I get it, man the the appeal of it is why those shows are so successful yeah i mean that show is really six i had sue akins on the podcast before she's a really fascinating human too really really enjoyed talking to her like what a tough broad i'm not on the show anymore you know yeah i know yeah yeah um what happened with you and the show? Did you guys have a falling out? Good question.

Yeah, we had a falling out. What was the falling out about? They never told me exactly. They just got rid of you? They renewed my contract. We went out and filmed one episode and I never heard from them again. Really? Yeah.

I mean, not about working on the show anymore. Do you think they just decided you weren't a storyline that was as successful or as? I think I'm very popular with the fans. Everybody that I talk to, I mean. Yeah. The viewers. No, you were my favorite guy. I love it because people tell me that I really made a difference in their life.

Like they learned something. They got inspired. They actually made changes in their life. And I hear this all the time. yesterday traveling you know i had four different people come talk to me about it and um but i think i went about as far as i could go in this show because i was always pushing to tell stories or to share things that didn't fit into the concept they had. When you make a TV show, you got a concept before you find the people who put in it, right? And, I mean, Life Below Zero is a show about supposedly people living a subsistence lifestyle in the bush.

And that's part of my life, but there's a lot more to it. in the bush and that's part of my life but there's a lot more to it and i'm always i'm a person who's always trying to learn and grow and do new things and expand so um when they met me i fit into their show like a hand in a glove but i wanted to do more and i wanted to share more so i get bored you know i made i think i'm in 85 episodes of life blows zero i made a lot of tv um i wasn't satisfied just to show people um what it's like to search for your food and chop down a tree you know for your firewood i wanted to do more so i was always pushing to do stories that were a little bit out of the range or the scope of what they envisioned for me to do in the show. I wanted to fly on a little eight-pound paraglider off the top of the mountain to get back to my camp.

I've been dreaming about it for years. And I said, hey, I'm going to do this. I'm going to paraglide off this mountain. I got a lot of resistance from the producers about stories. You did something like that, though. I did it. I did it. And I was like, I want to film this.

And, you know, hey, if you guys don't want to film it, they didn't want to film it. I'll get somebody else to film it. I am going to film this, and I'm going to do this, because I was excited about it. They put it in the show, but I got a lot of, you know, resistance. And I wanted to teach people all the time about things, and that wasn't really maybe the best vehicle for it. I mean, I had a blast doing the show. I had an awesome time. I

learned a ton of stuff about making TV, about all kinds of things. And I made awesome friends. The cameraman I worked with, some of the best people I've ever met in my life. And overall had a great experience. But I was always pushing the limits of what they really wanted to do, I think, because I wanted to make a story, for example, about finding a site where Stone Age people had lived. That was very unpopular with the producers, but we did it.

I mean, I was just adamant. Why would that be unpopular? That's so interesting. They said, you look like you're just walking around. You look like you're just out there exploring Walking around We want to see you finding something to eat Go chop some

Can you cut some more trees for us? I was like no I've cut enough trees on camera I want to do something worthwhile You know I wanted to teach people things There's all kinds of stuff out there Nature I just wanted to climb the highest mountain

Anywhere around I'd never been up there I've been looking at it for years and years Those were the kind of stories That I had to really twist people's arms To get on the show. The fans loved them, but the producers for some reason didn't.

Now, this Stone Age site, did you find it? Yeah. Yeah? Where was it? That's amazing. It was like- Do you have photos of that? Not that we can get to right now.

It was like, we made a whole story on TV about it. It was amazing. I found the stumps. I heard about it from somebody that had been there in the 1970s. He said, there's a place where you can find stumps that were cut with a stone axe. I was like, that's totally amazing. Now, you got to understand, the stone ages in Alaska was, we're talking like what, maybe- 50 years ago?

Maybe 100, 150. Not that long ago. Really? And everything's frozen eight months of the year, so 150. Not that long ago. Really? And everything's frozen eight months of the year, so stumps last a long time. These stumps were old. They were still standing, and you could touch them, and you could knock them over. They were right on the edge. They might not be there in 10 years.

It was amazing. But yeah, this gentleman I know who grew up as a little kid out there with his dad his dad was a hunting guide and they had been all over in this area and he told me that there was this place where people had camped and they had found rings of stones where they had had their skin tents and they found these stumps that were cut with stone axes and whatnot so we actually made a show it was awesome i went with twoamen. We walked for a couple days just to get there from my camp. Wow. And then just going by this verbal description that he had given me, I was able to locate.

He told me about a game trail, and it was still there. Like the animals are still following the same route, you know. And he said, you get there, you turn this way, you're going up, and the mountain's going to be there. And off to the side, you're going to see these stumps. And sure enough, I found the stumps on camera. It was amazing. Wow. I got one of them in Fairbanks.

I brought it down with me. That's so wild that it was just off of someone's description. Yeah. From the 1970s. Yeah, Jack Recoff. He's an amazing man. He still lives in the Brooks Range in a small village called Wiseman. And he was somebody that I learned a lot from after I got to Alaska.

Wiseman was on that show as well, wasn't it? Didn't they film some stuff from that part of there? Eric Salatan. That's right. Actually, the only person on the show that I knew prior to the show. You knew him? Eric and I had known each other for 10 years. I met him not long after he came to Alaska.

He's another really interesting guy. He is Yeah Unfortunately Eric and I were friends And I kind of replaced him on the show Is what happened But

But you guys were on the show together At the same time For a little while There was a little overlap Yeah First Eric was on for a year before me Then they found me Then we overlapped for a little while

And then they got rid of Eric So they would just get rid of you if they decided they were bored with your storyline there's other people living up there like that they just find them and office politics i think was it and uh also just differences in creative vision i mean i was not satisfied to just do the standard i'm starving i'm looking for firewood or whatever stories over and over i was always trying to push it i was doing paragliding i was doing um you know just exploring showing people where stone age people lived climbing mountains just for the joy of climbing them and sit up on top and philosophize about life those are the kind of stories i like to do and that really wasn't the vision they had i think that was a lot of it but honestly they never they

didn't talk to me about it after they stopped working with me. I still haven't talked to them about it. So they just stopped. Yeah. They didn't call you up and say? They renewed my contract. Right. They had an option to renew for one more year.

We shot one episode. Radio silence. After five months, I sent them an email and said, hey, what's up? You guys planning on filming something or what's going on? And I got about two lines back from him and said, sorry, the schedule's all full. We don't have any plans to film with you. Wow. Yeah.

That must have been weird. No kidding. Seems like that's a lot of episodes to just sort of brush you off like that. Were you difficult to work with? The show producer told me a couple years ago he'd fire me if he could, but he couldn't. Really? The show runner. Why did he say that?

First of all, I didn't work with producers in the field. After the first year and a half, I said, hey, I can produce myself in the field. I don't need to work with producers anymore. And they went along with that. So I'm responsible for my own stories. As far as I'm concerned, I'm the author of my own stories. It's me and a couple of cameraman and we're out there and I'm making what I consider real TV. I'm sharing what I want to share. Nobody's feeding me lines. Nobody's telling me what I got to do. I'm producing myself. I'm working with awesome cameramen and we were got to do. I'm producing myself. I'm working with awesome cameramen,

and we were doing incredible things. I made whole episodes of LBZ in the field with just one cameraman, and then we send all the footage back to LA, and they work all their magic and edit it and everything and do what they want with it. But yeah, I've made several episodes with just me and one cameraman out there.

But that's a lot of freedom that's not normally given to people on reality TV from what I'm told. And, of course, that caused some tensions. So they wanted to control you more. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So why did he say that he would fire you if he could? Guess he didn't like the kind of stories that I was creating out there. Is that what it was?

Really? you didn't like the kind of stories that I was creating out there. Is that what it was? Really? Because I don't remember the details of that conversation, but there was just a general tension a lot of times. I got a lot of negative feedback about what I was giving them. And it was weird because people were loving it. I mean, you know.

Like people that you had contact with on social media? Man, yeah. Like I didn't even have the internet when I started this show. I didn't have a cell phone when I started this show. I just got all modern in the last years. But yeah, I got on Facebook and I got thousands of people giving me positive feedback. And when I travel anywhere or even go to Fairbanks, I was getting all this positive feedback. So it seemed to me like the viewers really liked what I was doing.

But I did get a lot of negative feedback from certain particular people making the show that that wasn't what they really wanted. They have a formula, right? And the formula is survival. It's really the formula. Like subsistence, survival, finding enough food to eat, chopping wood. It's really appealing. It's one of the more interesting things about those kind of shows.

It's like what is it that's tapping in or what what is it tapping into what what part of your ancient memory where this is like really exciting to people because i think there's a lot of folks out there like your lawyer friend or your opera friend that they just there's something about the idea of getting away from everything and just living a way more simple life. It seems like the antidote for them. So when you watch this on television and you see these people just chopping wood and living by the land and dealing with the dangers of living in the bush, it's like there's something about it.

It's like you make you tune in every week. Yeah, and I mean it is – it's beautiful stuff to share. I think it's awesome. Just for me, I don't think it's the perfect vehicle to share exactly what I want to share because I want to go a little deeper. I want more than like a four-second soundbite. And that's what I like about this show, Joe. When I discovered your show, I was like, wow,

they're people that just sit down and have a normal conversation rather than everything being chopped up and edited into little soundbites. Yeah, and you get a chance to really talk about stuff. You know, if you're sitting around just having a conversation with someone for three hours, you get to really expand on your ideas. And have you said something that you think maybe you didn't say it right? You get to say it better. Or, well, what I was saying was this, and you get to explain yourself and expand and really get a thought across. There's not a lot of places where you can do that in this world. And those reality TV shows, I mean, your situation sounded like it was pretty much you producing it,

which would give you as much reality as they left in with editing. But a lot of reality shows, you know as well as I do, they just set things up. Like, hey, you're going to pretend like you lost your keys in that lake right you know like fuck my keys where's my key you see bad acting like oh my god and i know i know how it works i've done those shows before i know that there's someone who's always trying to set up these scenarios they're scripted it's like sort of non-scripted scripted like they have a place to go to they have and you see them on these shows you can tell when people are acting there's like a weird feeling that you get yeah when you know this guy

has opened up this storage shed before and he's opening up now whoa what do we got here like come on man you're a terrible actor this is awful but there's something about these formulas that these people have created reality television is a very strange animal yeah because it's not reality you know a lot of the times at least and one of the things i think that's really exciting about those shows like life below zero and your situation in particular was that there's only so much of that you can fake i mean just the the actual undisputable reality of your existence is so fascinating you have this tiny little fucking house that you built yourself on a lake and then wolves are trying to kill you like that shit is real you know what i mean i mean and you're out there walking in the snow all you have is like a

rifle and some snowshoes and a backpack that's as real as is humanly possible and anything that they bullshit with there it's like so what because the the the scene itself is so crazy like just your your life i always feel like that yeah there's no need to bullshit yeah why do people think they need to bullshit and it's not just reality tv but in general i mean come on it's in politics and everything. Yeah. Just being straightforward and honest can get you a long ways. But a lot of people think for some reason that it's better to bullshit. Why do you think that is? Because in the short term, it can work. For some people, it even seems to work for quite a while.

I mean, come on. You're talking about the president? Yeah. That's what I was thinking about. You can go a long ways on bullshit. But I don't know. I mean, to me, how do you feel inside about yourself if you're making some false story up about yourself? Yeah.

Right. Yeah, there's something about it, too, that when someone gets caught, like that Jussesse smollett guy when he got am i saying it wrong he said it like dave did i did i did say it like david no he said juicy smollett is it just jesse smollett smollett do you know who he is no good for you i should not even tell you you don't need to know this nonsense no i'm trying to get up to date it's a guy who was an actor on the show empire he was actually in one of the alien movies too he was in um which one was he in he was in the one with uh it was a good one he was in a good one he was one of the people on the ship anyway um he was in one of the more recent alien movies what he's in the mighty ducks too apparently well there you go i didn't know that he's been in a bunch of shit anyway He was in one of the more recent alien movies. What? He was in the Mighty Ducks, too, apparently.

Well, there you go. I didn't know that. He's been in a bunch of shit. Anyway, he's an actor, and he made up a story, allegedly. Seems like he made it up, of getting beat up by these white supremacists with Trump hats on, MAGA hats on. They put a noose around his neck and he walked into the hotel with the noose still around his neck and told the whole story like he didn't even bother taking the noose off of his neck which is like everybody's like what wait what like everybody that heard

the story it's such a badly concocted story everybody that heard the story was like what the fuck and then the two guys that he uh got to rough him up he got these two guys to rough him up and then they came out and said not as bullshit this guy paid us and then the chicago uh police department is uh they're prosecuting him they're trying to get him to pay for their investigation there's lawsuits and he's still it's it's it's the most obviously fake story ever and it's coming out of a guy who is a really successful actor so it's so crazy it's this you know race racial hate this hate crime story that this guy concocted for attention apparently you know the the thought is that he wasn't happy with his role on empire or what but it was a huge national story wherever because everybody knew kind of

right away that it was fake everybody's like wait what he's got the noose around his neck and he was holding a subway sandwich he went to a subway so he still had the sandwich right somebody smacked him in the head a couple of times and and he had a noose around his neck. He's telling this crazy story, and he wants to hold press conferences. He said he was the black Tupac or the gay Tupac, he called himself. Sorry. It was just complete nonsense. And there's something about him talking, telling his story,

where you know it's bullshit, and you're like, what are you doing? Like, what is this? It's so compelling when you see someone lie like that about some crazy wacky made-up story it's so compelling it's like because you know like i when i was a little kid i would lie about shit i'd make stuff up you know every little kid will tell you a lie and i I remember thinking, this guy never stopped. He lied like when he was a little kid. Yeah.

And he just kept lying. That happens to some people. Yes. Yeah. Yes. That's the dangerous thing about lying. Oh, yeah. If you lie enough, I think some people actually start believing it.

Oh, for sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a psychosis involved, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Some people, when they lie about their past, you know, like, one of the weirder ones is, like, when guys get caught with stolen valor.

Like, they have a crazy lie made-up story about their military history and war record. That happened with somebody in reality TV that was working with Cody Lundeen. Wasn't there somebody working with him? Dual Survivor or something like that? Oh, one of his guys was a stolen Valor guy? I shouldn't say it. I don't know. I never watched the show, but if I remember right, I heard that.

He's a weird one, huh? That guy just walking around barefoot with his disgusting feet. I like to go barefoot. Yeah, but his feet, they look like the monster's feet. He would show them. It would be like a thing like a badge of courage would show these gigantic calloused feet like what because he didn't have any shoes because he everywhere he walked he worked barefoot so his the bottom of his feet was like the top of

his table like this hard crusty fucking look at that look at that guy's shoe his foot oh yeah look at that but here's the thing man mine don't get like that even when i go because he's out there in the fucking desert constantly is that that's not his foot dude that's a little kid's foot really says cody's flip-flops oh it's like a flip-flop that he made he made it for someone yeah okay yeah there's something about walking around barefoot that seems really fucking gross. Oh, I love it. In the summer, it's the first thing I want to do is get my shoes off.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, I climb up the mountains barefoot until I get to where the rocks are, you know. Really? Oh, yeah. I've walked like the 60 miles from the road to my camp, two-thirds of the way barefoot. Really? Yeah, got a blister on my foot after about 20 miles and took my shoe off. And I realized, hey, the foot without a shoe feels a lot better than one with a shoe, so I took them both off.

Went the rest of the way. Oh, yeah. I'm big into walking barefoot. But you got, like, soft pack ground up there, right? The ground's spongy. If it's damp, if it dries out, then those lichens get abrasive. Then it's hard to go barefoot. They get very abrasive.

But if they're damp, man, they're soft. You can use them for can use them for toilet paper believe me i do use lichens for toilet paper i've used all different stuff for toilet paper but lichens are one of the best if they're moist if they're dry they're good for fire starter that's about it so that lake where you live you live right off you fish in that lake a lot um there have been years i fished there um like i said there was one year when i never went out i stayed for 15 months and i fished a lot that summer you know i probably caught like 75 fish or something that summer if i remember right um but i don't eat a lot of fish i'm not a big fish eater and but you eat a weasel those desperate times i wouldn't eat one now Is that the lake right there? Hey there's my camp

Oh that's so pretty man Wow look where you live Holy shit Well I mean lived I don't live there all the time Right That's the other thing The situation's changing

With my permits You can't get a permit To live there And I can't even get a permit To make TV there now I don't have a TV show anymore Really? Yeah Why can't you get a permit to make TV there now. I don't have a TV show anymore. Really? Why can't you get a permit there anymore? I'm not making TV. So right now I'm in the process of losing my permit for commercial use.

I have a trapping cabin permit, but honestly, I'm not interested in trapping. I did some trapping when I first went out there, but it's not something that I'm going to do to sell fur and make money, and that's what that permit's for. So I'm probably going to be giving that up. So you're not allowed to even keep that cabin up there? If that's the case? I had to take it down. Really? Yeah.

I had to take that cabin down right now i have a tent up there because that cabin was illegal when they gave me my permits just last year um i had to remove the illegal cabin and then i had a permit to build a new cabin what's the difference in the new cabin and the old cabin the new cabin was going to be legal because it had a permit they can't give you a permit for an illegal cabin but they so they can't give you a permit for an illegal cabin. So they can't give you a permit for a cabin that already exists. They're bureaucrats, okay? They're bureaucrats.

Why don't you tell them, listen, come back tomorrow. I'm going to take this apart and put it back together again exactly the same way. So tomorrow when you come back, it'll be the new cabin. Exactly. This is the old cabin. It was time for an upgrade. I've got four kids now, Joe. That place is 100 square feet.

I was kind of excited about building a new cabin. Get a 200 square foot model, right? Something huge. I was thinking 400. They said I could go up to 400. Is that what they said? Yeah. How big is that?

Is that the size of this room? Right now, we live in a... What is this? This room is bigger than 400 feet? Yeah. Wow. So you're living in something smaller than this whole room? Right now, we live in a 600 square foot cabin.

Whoa. In Fairbanks. Yeah. That's huge for me. We lived in a 200 square foot one until just, well, I think it was like a year ago. So you live in the place where you built when you bought the piece of land? Yeah, except I've expanded over the years. I started off with one acre, and then as I? Yeah, except I've expanded over the years.

I started off with one acre, and then as I could afford it, I bought up my neighbors. I got six acres and three cabins now. Oh, nice. Now, do the neighbors look at you weird because you're that guy who lives in the woods on TV? Not that I know about. They didn't mention it. Maybe they do. Do they know? Yeah, they know. You tell everybody what you do? No, they know. They just know? They watch TV mention it. Maybe they do. Do they know? Yeah, they know.

You tell everybody what you do. No, they know. They just know. They watch TV a lot. I mean, Fairbanks, Alaska is dark. There's nothing to do. Right. Are they weirded out by you?

See you on TV and see you right there? I don't think so. No? No, I mean, I'm just a normal person. Yeah, but even if you're a normal person, if you're a normal person on television, you're're a normal person If you're a normal person on television You're not a normal person People get weird

They mention it They mention Hey you're on TV In the beginning I mean I've been on TV now for six years It's not like we talk about it normally Like the people in your town Like Fairbanks is a real city

It's about 40,000 people I think It's a small city But it's as big of a city as you got in northern alaska the only place bigger is anchorage and that's an eight eight hour drive away yeah and how many people's anchorage that's quite a few it's got to be what is anchorage now 300 000 maybe 400 000 almost somewhere in there i'd love like half the people in alaska live in anchorage i think really i've only been there once. Spent a couple days there. We did some gigs, me and my friend Ari Shafir, and did some salmon fishing up there.

Comedy gigs? Yeah, we did comedy up there. Oh, cool. Yeah, we just had on a whim. We said, hey, let's book a gig where we can fish during the day and then do stand-up at night. So we did that for a couple days. It was fun. Oh, yeah.

But it's just the people up there were really cool, man. Like, a really – there's something about people that live where nature is inescapable. Like, nature and the wilderness, and it's like it is impossible to not be aware of where you are. Like, where we live here in California is so alien and so non-intuitive. It's just not how human beings have evolved. And it's a really recent thing that any human beings ever lived like this.

Yeah. But there's something in your DNA that sort of cries out to the times that make sense, to the places that make sense. And that's one of the appeals of your show. That's one of the appeals of living very close to the wilderness, living very close to the woods, because these tasks that you have to do, just acquiring food and water and staying warm

and dealing with nature, all those things are enormously appealing to people that are stuck in a situation like i am oh yeah i don't say i'm stuck like i'm in some terrible place but it's great i love it probably get a little better than most of us but um the thing is um we're we're separated more and more from our origins, and it definitely has an effect. We gave up a lot for comfort. Yeah. We gave up a lot.

We gave up a lot of our vitality. I love to jump in the lake and swim every day from the time I can get in the moat next to the ice, and that water's like 32 and a half degrees. Woo! And it's so invigorating. Yeah, it's great for you. It's amazing. Ice baths. It's the's so invigorating. Yeah, it's great for you. It's amazing. Ice baths. It's the reason why athletes do them.

Yeah. And just little things, like if you don't have a toilet, which I still don't have a toilet even in Fairbanks. I mean, if you squat to poop. You don't have a toilet in Fairbanks? No, no. Why don't you build a toilet, bro? A toilet's a big thing, man.

I don't know if I can afford a toilet. You've got to have a septic system. You've got to have plumbing. I don't know if I can Afford a toilet It's You gotta have a septic system You gotta have plumbing You gotta I don't have any of that stuff But you're buying All this land If you

You're buying all this land You can't buy a toilet Land's cheap Toilets are expensive You gotta have The right kind of land To have a septic system Yeah

The land that I buy Is boggy It's spruce forest It's like You'd have to It's complicated Then you leave It's like you'd have to – it's complicated. Then you leave town. I like to be able to go to the bush for six months in the middle of winter. Your pipes freeze.

You've got to have a house sitter then. You've got to have a furnace run 21st day. All I've got is a wood stove. Right. It gets complicated, man. I like to keep it simple. Wow, really simple. I mean, maybe – I always tell people, they say, why don't you have a toilet?

I was like, I can't afford a toilet. They're like, come on, you can't afford a toilet. You got an airplane, you got this, you got that. I was like, maybe if I had, I don't know, five million, 10 million, I might think about getting a place with a toilet. I don't have that much. That's so crazy.

I'm serious. That's your number. If I had five million bucks, I'd get a toilet. Maybe. Maybe, maybe not. Five million bucks i'd get a toilet maybe maybe maybe not five million i have to think about it wow um because it's a full it's a huge change first of all i couldn't live on that land where i live really i mean i could but it'd be way too complicated and you get like i said i don't want worry about house sitters freezing pipes so what do you have outhouses you have have outhouses You know my favorite way to go

I don't like outhouses I like to squat and just poop on the ground And I'll tell you something Okay If you want to poop inside Five gallon bucket with a plastic bag in it You poop in your house in a bucket There's times

But you're in this tiny little house You're in a 600 square foot house The little one look but you're in this tiny little house look you're in a 600 square foot house big the little one 100 square feet no i don't usually poop in there but usually sometimes you gotta when it's like 30 zero i go outside when i'm in 100 square always look um people i think the the un's working against open defecation i think that's what they call they spend millions of dollars a year trying to get people to stop pooping on the ground. In the Brooks Range. All over the world.

India, Bangladesh. Yeah, but that's because there's people living next to this raw sewage. There's too many people. That's the only problem. Population density. If you have enough land, it's not an issue. In the Brooks Range, I've been pooping in the same spot for the last 20 years probably about a quarter the size of this room and you can't even

tell i've ever pooped there it goes back to nature i don't even compost i don't even do anything i just poop on the ground in the same area and it just goes back into nature the only trying to make a little mound no it, it doesn't build up Just animals or something Or rats, right? Rats eat a lot of shit Grey jays Grey jays eat it

Grey jays? What's a grey jay? They shit Wolves, I've had wolves come eat my shit Oh boy First wolf I ever trapped Set the trap right in front of my poop pile Oh god He came in for your shit and got killed

Yeah, he'd eaten shit before there. Oh, God. Let me lure him in with this tasty treat. No, but it really does. That's the thing is people are separated from nature now. And so something simple, like a simple solution to a problem, pooping on the ground. No. If you're in a rural area, if you got space, there is no problem with that, really. It goes back into the earth.

Where do you think the bears, the moose, the caribou, they all go underground. It's not a big problem. It goes back into the earth. Well, you're living in a largely uninhabited place. Yeah. That's in a largely uninhabited place. Yeah. Yeah. a largely uninhabited place. Yeah, that's in a largely uninhabited place, yeah.

Yeah, so when you dropped a log next to the trap for the wolf, you knew what you were doing? You were doing that on purpose to lure him in? Well, I always poop in the same place, the same general place, but a wolf had come and eaten the poop. You'd noticed? Yeah, I see the tracks. I go up to poop. Oh, a wolf came here last night and ate my last poop.

Oh. How'd you feel to poop. Oh, a wolf came here last night and ate my last poop. Oh. How'd you feel about that? Just normal? You feel different when you live out in the woods, Joe. You get a whole different mentality, different ethics. You don't think about, that's no big deal. There's poop everywhere. There's blood.

There's guts. There's poop. There's wolves and caribou with their legs ripped open. It's different. So were you trapping and selling the skins i usually was trapping for my own family use you know like the kids had mucklucks and mittens and and ruffs and all this stuff trapping out of wolf out of wolverine, out of martens, you know, those are the main things up there. Wolves, wolverines. There's some martens.

There's a few fox around. Have you ever eaten a marten? Yeah. I've eaten just about everything. What's a marten taste like? Like a weasel? More like a wolf. They're better.

They're better. To tell you the truth, to me, a marten's just about as good as a snowshoe hare, but I don't really like snowshoe hares. Like I said, I like to stick to ungulates. Why don't you like snowshoe hares? I don't think they're very good compared to a caribou or compared to a moose. Just taste-wise? Taste-wise, they're small, tedious.

I'm just not big on small game. Tedious in terms of like well in terms of the amount of effort the time you know to go catch them to skin them to some people they really are get into it but like for me okay i have caribou usually most years in that area i have moose always in the fall i mean i go out hunting maybe five six days i got a moose i got 500 pounds of meat. There's not very many snowshoe hares around where I am. There's not that much brush.

I'm up high in the mountains. So how many bullets are you bringing with you when you go out there for long periods of time? Oh, I'll have a few packs of ammunition. It's a funny story, though, because when Tricia came to meet me the first time, you know, we had a long distance meeting. We met over facebook over the internet after i got on the show so uh she slide into your dms did you slide into hers dms you don't know about that no i don't know keep you in the dark i'm trying to get up to speed like i said i didn't have any messages oh direct message right i do i have heard about

that what happened she sent me a friend request and you know i was i was looking for a woman I didn't get up to speed. Like I said, I didn't have the- Direct messages. Oh, direct messages. Right. I have heard about that. What happened? She sent me a friend request and I was looking for a woman. That's what, I mean, that's why I went on Facebook actually in the beginning. Really? That was one of my motives for doing the show. I remember when the producer came up there and met me, I was like, hey, you think this would help me find a new woman? I'm looking for a woman.

I mean, I just spent the whole winter by myself. Right. I get it. I'm only human. I get it. Trying to find a woman I mean I just spent The whole winter by myself Right I get it I'm only human I get it Trying to find a woman Out in the woods It isn't easy

I mean every day I get up You know fix up my hair And stuff Go out and didn't see any I mean you think It's hard hunting moose And caribou up there

Try hunting for a woman Up there Yeah I would imagine Very different Few and far between So I had to Slim pickings I had to get modern

Yeah I get it Anyway Trisha came For our first date We had one date Few and far between So I had to Slim pickings I had to get modern Yeah I get it Anyway Trisha came For our first date We had one date A four day date Before she decided To move up and live with me

Jesus Christ That woman's crazy You got a good one And she told me She wasn't adventurous She wasn't adventurous That's what she said She hangs out with you

For four days Then moves in with you She quit her job? We spent, oh yeah, she left her, you know, gave up her apartment, sold most of her stuff. Jesus Christ. But we talked every day, you know, for what, three months before the date.

Wow. We were communicating every day a little bit. Was this while you were at the shack? No, I was down at Fairbanks. At that time, I didn't even have internet up at the shack no i was down at fairbanks at that time i didn't even have internet up at the shack i do have i did get internet in 2017 eventually at the shack yeah how the hell did you do that i had to actually um get certified as a satellite internet installer yeah so you had to take a class oh yeah yeah i'm a certified satellite internet installer

maybe that'll be my next career I can, you know Wow If I can't get another gig in TV Maybe I'll take up installing satellite internet So you got certified And what are you using to power it? Solar?

No, battery and a generator I run a generator once in a while And it doesn't take much electricity I got a big battery And then you link up with the satellite It's real slow I can never post video or anything But it was cool because then I could start doing Facebook posts

And other social media I could put pictures from right there right then Rather than the next time I came to town So your upload is extremely slow right Yeah it's really slow I don't think I'm even going to maintain that system But I don't even know if I'm going to maintain my camp

But I'm going to keep going to the wilderness I'm going to keep having experiences out there And I'm going to keep having experiences out there, and I'm going to keep finding ways to share it with people, but I don't know exactly the future of that particular spot and that particular satellite. Have you had anybody visit you up there? You mean just random? Yeah, just people that knew about you from the show?

No. They always say they're going to come something yeah good luck if anybody straggled in i'd help them out but no it's it's a big project people get maybe who knows how close they've gotten before they turned around you know maybe somebody drove all the way up the hall road and chickened out after the first day walk and i got no idea yeah i guarantee you some people have thought about it. But how many bullets do I carry? How much ammunition? How many cartridges?

So Tricia comes up for a four-day date after we'd communicated for three months. Tell her to bring some bullets? She had tons of ammo in her apartment down in Boston. Really? Oh, yeah. She's a wild lady. She had guns and ammo in her apartment down in Boston. Really? Oh, yeah. She's a wild lady. She had guns and ammo and everything. But she came up to visit, and after a day or so together, I decided that I want to take her out to the camp.

I said, hey, got any plans for tomorrow? Want to go to the Brooks Range? So I wanted to fly her up there so she could see the place and know what she was getting into, right? So I wanted to fly her up there so she could see the place and know what she was getting into, right? Mm-hmm. And we were packing, and I like, I think I threw in like 10 rounds of ammo. We were just going to go for the day.

She had to be back at work. You know, she just came for a long weekend. And she was like, what? That's all you're taking, 10 rounds? I'm like, we're not even going hunting. This is just like in case, in case a bear happens to attack us i mean 10 rounds that's a lot like i go months without shooting 10 rounds of ammunition so i she convinced me to take a full box i think but um i don't carry a lot of ammunition no i think um i started carrying a

little more than I used to I think usually when I go moose hunting I'll throw in a box I'll have 20 rounds with me But I never use I mean I've never used anywhere near that much It would seem to me that you would need Do you have a tool or anything to sight in your rifle?

Just in case something goes wrong with the sight You're talking about a target? Yeah I got a target Okay you have a target Yeah But there's tools you know Where you don't have to fire off a round Oh no I don't Like to fire off a round.

Oh, no, I don't. Like a bore sighting. Yeah, it's like a bore sighting. It's like a laser, and it has it set up. Like, literally, you can have your rifle zeroed in at 100 in, like, two shots. I usually get it zeroed in, you know, three or six or something. But it never goes far out. Yeah, you don't make them long.

200 yards. I have my target at 200 yards. Right in front of my camp, I shoot across the lake there when it's dead calm. And I hardly ever have to adjust that scope. I mean, I'm so happy with that gun. That's the only rifle I have ever killed a large animal with in my life. Wow.

What's the caliber? 30 out of 6. I bought that gun for large animal with in my life. Wow. What's the caliber?.30-06. I bought that gun for $550 in 2003, and I never needed another centerfire rifle. That's a classic rifle,.30-06. Ruger. There it is. M77.

What is it called? M77 Mark 2. And what kind of sight are you using on that? It's got a 2 to 7 power scope. The difference is that's an older picture. There was nobody up there with me. I actually took that picture myself. But that was before I got my suppressor.

Oh, you got a suppressor. Oh, I'm all about suppressors. Yeah, I wish they were legal in California. They're not. No, they're not. I mean, I think they're worried that people would be sniping people or something like that. It's kind of stupid. It's ignorant.

Because for hunting purposes, like one of the biggest problems, like I have a friend of mine, my friend Cody, his ear is blown out because he was working as a guide and someone fired off a shot right near his ear. Now he has to wear hearing aids. So all it takes is one shot. If you're close to the muzzle, that's why I got a suppressor. I really think this is a very important thing. So many people are damaging their hearing without even realizing it.

Yep, yep, 100%, 100%. A lot of guys did it when they're young. A lot of my friends, they go with a suppressor. That's actually a different gun, but that one I've never killed anyone with, but that is the suppressor. The problem is when you're hunting, it's not practical to use ear protection. Right.

And if you hunt regularly, that adds up. Over time, it adds up. You shoot a rifle, that's 160 decibels. Why are they making a law that you have to damage your hearing to go hunting? Right. Why are they making a law where you have to damage your hearing To go hunting Why are they making a law where you have to cover your ears with something The reason being Is because they're worried about urban situations They're worried about people shooting at people

And you know you're not hearing anything But You do hear something though Oh no you hear a lot more than that Have you ever shot a suppressed rifle Well it depends on what you're shooting, but assuming it's hypersonic, supersonic, it's still loud. Like a.30-06 without a suppressor is about 160 decibels.

That's deafening. You put a suppressor on it, it's like 130. It knocks it down about 30 decibels, more or less. It's still very loud. Are there different levels of suppressor? I bought the best suppressor i could get if you want to make a gun shoot like in the movies just silent like a little pop you have to shoot subsonic that's not practical for hunting oh you have to you have to Now I'm questioning whether or not I've actually used a suppressor. I feel like I did at one point in time.

Someone somewhere let me shoot their rifle that had a suppressor on. But it might be a false memory now. You can put subsonic ammo in there. Yeah, I've shot subsonic.22s. I know that sound. .30-06. You can load it subsonic. You can buy.308 ammunition subsonic, and and 30 30 i say you can load it subsonic you can buy 308 ammunition subsonic

and it's very quiet but it's going so slow that it's not effective to hunt moose or caribou with right yeah but yeah they're still loud if i mean pretty loud and compare i have a muzzle break on my uh seven millimeter that's really loud. Boom. It's a cannon. Yeah. But I actually met a person once who was just about deaf. He was like stone deaf from one shotgun blast. He was in a canoe and somebody shot kind of in a position where the muzzle was right next to his ear. Yeah. Yeah.

That's how it always is. It's always someone shooting near you. Just blows your eardrums out. It's terrible. Yeah, but so in California, you cannot have suppressors. But again, I think that's what they're worried about. And I think it's just there's a lot of ignorance. It's a lot of people that just don't know enough about firearms

that are making the regulations. But I think that would be the worry, that people would be shooting and you wouldn't be able to hear it. Well, I think that there might be other ways to deal with that. For hunting, I think it's super reasonable to be able to have something where you don't have to have ear protection on all the time. And you can make it just less disturbing for all the people also that are in the mountains. If you're on public land and you're hunting deer and you hear boom like over the side of the hill it's kind of gross you know even in countries that have more regulations on firearms there are places where you can use suppressors

from what i've heard i mean i haven't researched extensively but i think in britain even people have suppressors and in new zealand australia different places yeah yeah i do 99.9 of my hunting with a bow and arrow that's awesome but it's not a i'm not doing it because i need you know it's not like a subsistence thing i don't need it absolutely it's just i love archery i love hunting archery too because you have to get close yeah you know that's where it's at that's what i love doing is getting close like some guys will brag about oh i shot this moose 600 yards away i always like to get close yeah it's just more interesting isn't it because you learn more about the animal yeah it's more intense too it's um it's also it requires more skill i feel like i mean this sounds fucked up but i feel like the animal has more of a chance.

Like if, if I'm inside, you know, 60 yards shooting at an animal, that animal has way more chance to get the fuck away from me. Way more chance for me to, to blow it, to step on a twig or it to catch my wind or it makes it more difficult.

Yeah. And it's just archery is, it's, there's nothing this like rifles for sure are the best way to gather meat for sure no doubt about it boom one shot they're down you know you hit them in the the bread basket boom it's over but archery requires way more discipline and there's so many ways it can fuck up there's so many ways it can go wrong and but there's that requirement that you have of yourself to practice and to to be to be able to execute like when the the time is now it's it's hard it's very very difficult to do

yeah and because of that it's like that from my brain that i find that very appealing i'm very i gravitate towards difficult things like that yeah you know but it's also very like people say it's not as humane listen man people wound deer and elk and and moose all the time with a rifle you know if you make a bad shot and people make a bad and i've made bad shots, people make bad shots. It's bad no matter what. But with a bow and arrow, you'd be amazed how lethal it is. Oh, I'm not surprised because you've got that big, broad, cutting edge going right through their lungs.

They hemorrhage quick. They die quick. I mean, I shot an elk at Tahone Ranch last year, and it was down in four yards it stepped one two three four boom dead just shot it in the heart you know and i've shot moose through both lungs and had them go 50 yards sometimes they're so tough incredibly tough they're so tough moose is such an enormous animal too when you when you see one down and you look at the bones on that thing you're like Lord, what an enormous animal.

Yeah. You know, just out there eating twigs and trying to stay the fuck away from wolves. What a crazy existence they have. Yeah. But there's an amazing amount of respect and appreciation you have for them, too, when they're down. When you're looking at it like, this is my food. I'm going to eat this. This is going to be a lot of food.

Yeah. You know? I feed my dog with elk. My dog mostly eats it. Yeah, most of it eats. You're allowed to do that? Yeah. That's legal?

Why wouldn't that be legal? In Alaska, you can't feed game meat to dogs. Why? Because they're trying to allot the game to people who want to eat it. There's so many dogs up there, you know? Dog teams. Right. You used to be able to There's so many dogs up there, dog teams. You used to be able to at one time in history, but you can feed the guts or something, but you can't feed meat to the dogs. But you can feed salmon to them.

People catch gigantic amounts of salmon just to feed their dogs. Because they're more fish than there are caribou and moose. Oh, I see. Well, the way I look at it, it's like he's a member of my family. Yeah. I mean, my dog is like, he's my buddy. You're not feeding a whole dog team. Well, yeah.

And also, I guess that's what it is, right? In Alaska, they have giant sled teams. There are a lot of dogs, yeah. Yeah. That's interesting, though, that it's illegal. It seems like you should be able to do whatever you want. I mean, you could feed your dog steak if you wanted to. You can go to the grocery store and buy your dog hamburger

if you really wanted to. Why couldn't you feed him game meat? If you've got a tag, you should be able to, as long as the food gets utilized. There are all sorts of rules and regulations. They discriminate against dogs. That's what it is. They discriminate against all sorts of people.

Anybody that's not there making the rule. I guess there weren't a lot of dog owners around that day. But no, I mean, think about it. Every rule we make, it's just a game now. The technology exists. If you wanted to use a guided missile, you'd kill every animal, right? Yeah. So you got to have limits on the technology.

For you, you personally prefer to on the technology for you you personally prefer to use a bow and arrow for me i use a rifle i would definitely use a rifle if i was in your situation right some percent some guys want to go hunt with a helicopter right and they've made that illegal in alaska because there aren't that many people that could afford to go home with the helicopter that's the way i look at it there's not that many people that could afford to go home with the helicopter therefore they didn't have much power in making the regulations. When you say hunt with a helicopter,

you mean hunt out of a helicopter? No, you can't even use a helicopter to transport hunters, game meat, hunting equipment, anything. Really? Right. So the idea is to make it more difficult for them to get to someplace like the Chugash

or something like that, someplace that's difficult to get to the mountains. The idea is the people that don't want to use helicopters. Are the ones that get to vote. Don't want people to use helicopters. I understand. I mean, I'm not saying I want people to be able to use helicopters. I'm just saying maybe if a lot of people wanted to use helicopters to hunt, you know, because

you've got a certain number of animals that can be taken and maintain the population. Right. So the technology to take them, it doesn't matter in terms of, the animals don't care. They don't care if they're getting shot with a machine gun. They don't care if they're getting hunted out of a helicopter. You've got a herd of so many thousand caribou.

You want to take a certain number out every year. It's going to maintain the population. But now it's all got to be regulated. So it's like some people want to hunt on foot. Maybe they would prefer that you couldn't use an airplane because the people that are flying with airplanes are then going to be competing against this person on foot, right? Yeah.

But the way it all balances out, a lot of people like to use fixed wing airplanes they're relatively economical so you can use that you cannot use a helicopter in alaska to transport hunters meat or hunting equipment what about scouting can you use on a scout helicopter i don't believe so that would be a problem if you were on the ground, if someone's flying above you in a helicopter, spooking things. I have heard people say that that's happened to them before. The regulations are getting so thick, I don't even keep up on every detail that doesn't apply to me. But I believe that now there's some regulations.

You can't even scout out of a fixed-wing airplane, at least in certain situations. I know there's places like that in the united states or in the lower 48 rather yeah because a lot of people were doing that for sheep i mean i would see that even in in such a remote area where i am there's you know a lot of guided sheep hunting right and you'd see these little super cubs flying around the mountains looking for the sheep that's the ultimate rich guy trip yeah i hear hunting in alaska yeah it's very very expensive and they they go you know deep into it's like their ultimate adventure you know and then they have the wild sheep hunting federation and all these uh guys you know they spend shit tons of money to go to these really remote areas get someone to take

them into to get a big sheep, get a big ram. And some people don't like that. But on the other hand, aren't those people that are spending $20,000 to go get a sheep or whatever, they're tapping into the same basic desire that I have or that anybody that goes hunting has. I mean, they want that experience of getting out there into the wild hunting doing something primal i think when people have an issue with anything that's really expensive that only a few people get to do you know as soon as you hear about that

and it's also it's like it becomes uh it's a sheep hunters are like a it's an interesting breed of of people you know they're they're really into sheep hunting and apparently it's a lot of the factors like the danger you know you're hiking on shale and like extremely very very like steep heights and real big drop-offs and very steep cliffs and it's like i've never done it but the people that say they're like it like, it's the ultimate. Oh, yeah, it's exciting. Really exciting. They live in these really remote places. It's hard to get to.

And once you're successful, it's so difficult to do that once you're successful, it's a huge relief. It feels very exciting and happy. The food's delicious. I've had wild sheep before. My friend Remy gave me some backstraps. Yeah, I love sheep. Yeah. What other animals were you hunting when you were up there?

Anything unusual? For big animals, the only thing around is moose. You said you shot one grizzly? Grizzly. I shot one grizzly that was becoming a problem that night. I had a moose in the camp. My wife and the little baby were there at the time too. And my daughter was only three years old. And my son was just months old and this moose was hanging there. I just killed it a week or so before. And a grizzly was coming around that night trying to get that moose

meat and i chased it away a few times and it kept coming back and you know eventually i shot right over the bear trying to scare it off because sometimes that'll work if just chasing them off doesn't work and but it's still it was walking toward me at 16 yards when i shot it oh god 16 yards they could run 16 yards so fast yeah he was just walking he wasn't thank god he wasn't running yeah he wasn't trying to get me but he was i just couldn't have that bear hanging out there trying to get that moose that i had there in the camp yeah so you shot him and ate him yeah what was that like oh the fat was unbelievably good, man. The meat, for me, bear meat, like I said, is not my first choice.

I liked it, but I'd only have a desire to eat it once every four or five days. You know, it's not like something I wanted to eat pounds of every day the way I can eat caribou and moose. It's just different. The fat was unbelievable. It stunk terrible. Like, I took all the fat out of the internal, the abdominal fat and all that stuff too. And boy, did it smell bad. Just like bear guts, you know. It just stunk.

And I remember Sylvia saying, are you going to eat that stuff? And I was like, I don't know. Try it. So I rendered it and, you know, just heated it up until it liquefied and when that cooled back down no bad flavor at all it was like almost tasteless it was the mildest fat you've ever had really yeah that cured the the bad the bad smell and i've how many people get past that though not a lot and it's not it's different it's a bear fat not a lot. And it's different. Bear fat's real soft.

It's real soft at room temperature. It's not like, you know, sheep fat's hard. Moose fat, caribou fat is slightly softer maybe than sheep fat, but it's still hard fat. Bear fat is soft and creamy. So it was nice variety that winter to have all that bear fat. It was really nice variety. But I learned learned something from that just a practical thing that for some reason i don't understand the chemistry behind it if you got some fat that's tasting funny if you heat it up really hot and

cool it back down it'll take that away i had it happen with moose fat once it was getting old so it was getting a little rancid and i tried it i heated it up until it got just about to the smoking point cooled it back down and it tasted way better. Really? Yeah. What do you think is doing that? I don't know. I never looked into it. Hmm. I think that would be something you'd want to look into. Not really. Just a little practical boy scout trick. Once you know, you know. That's it. You don't need to know the magic behind it. So you take, what did you do with the bear hide? Turned it into a blanket. Still, still have that hide.

Wow. It's a beautiful bear. It really was. Yeah. How big was it? I think it was just over six feet. It wasn't huge because the bears up there don't get as big. I mean, they don't have salmon up where I am, way up in the mountains, but it was a real light color bear. There's a picture of that one you might pull up. Yeah, that's it. There's another picture right after I shot it on the beach there. But in the photos right on the first page there, whatever they're called, those ones that you can keep. Is this Facebook?

Oh, you're just – Because of the Facebook page, I can't zoom in for some reason. So that bear was super light-colored. All its claws are white. Oh, you're just... Because of the Facebook page, I can't zoom in for some reason. So that bear was super light colored. All its claws are white. They're almost white. So it's a beautiful hide. And you keep the claws on the hide when you make the blanket?

Yeah. It was the only bear I ever dealt with. I skinned it all out like taxidermy. I left all the claws and the lips and the eyelids and everything. It took a long time. And then I tanned it myself. It was a big project. I built a big stretcher and had it all.

Now, what do you use to tan it? I use the same thing I use on wool for Wolverine, which is like a diluted battery acid, basically. Really? Yeah. What's the old way they used to do it? They used to use brains, right? Yeah, you can tan with brains, I hear, but I never got into that. Somebody showed me this battery acid tanning system way back when I first went up there and started trapping,

and it worked really well for me, so I stuck to that. How does that work? It's been a long time since I did it, but you just dilute. The battery acid is very diluted, and I forgot the exact proportions because it's been a while, but it's very, very diluted, and then you add a lot of salt also. And you want to get the proportions right, so you want to look into it before you try it, but that's all that's in it. The solution is just battery acid, water, and salt. And so you brought battery acid up there just to have on hand?

Yeah, it's so concentrated. It's like a little package. I flew it out there like one time is enough for's like a little package. I flew it out there. One time is enough for five years or something. And you flew it out there just for tanning? Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah.

And that system, then the other thing you need is baking soda. You have to neutralize it. You have to get the pH back to neutral after you're done tanning it. Here it is. Seven gallons of water, Two pounds of bran flakes. Wait a minute. That's not the one I used. Sixteen cups of plain or pickling salt. Salt's good. Okay.

But there's the battery acid. Three and a half cups battery acid from auto parts store. Two boxes baking soda. Yeah, that's pretty much it except you can skip the bran flakes. What about foot oil? What the fuck is foot oil? Neats foot oil? You ever use that stuff? Oh, yeah. Well, you got to soften the hide afterwards. You got to put the oil back into it. Is that about foot oil what the fuck is foot oil needs foot oil you ever use that stuff oh yeah that's well you got to soften the hide afterwards you got to put the oil back into it is that what foot oil is yeah needs foot oil where people's feet ah what do they make that from

sheep feet or something oh really i can't remember no i don't know it's something they call it needs foot oil but it's just a oil that you use to preserve leather oh you put it on your baseball glove needs foot is supposed to be one word. At least when I just googled it. Oh, neats foot? Yellow oil rendered from purified shin bones and feet of cattle. Oh, wow. How weird. So, go ahead.

I was just going to say, we were talking an awful lot about trapping, hunting, stuff like that, but there's so much more out there. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. It's like the whole... That was my problem in reality tv everybody when they hear that you've been attacked by wolves that's all they want to hear about oh for sure yeah for sure but there's so much more yeah it's uh you know it's a whole different experience the consciousness you get into a whole different space space is different i mean look at how confined we are now what what you think about as as space down here i mean you're riding an

airplane now you just got a few feet around you right um and out there you got space space as far as you can see you stand on the top of a mountain you look hard enough you can see the back of your head just about i mean it's yeah there's a lot those mountains stretch for 600 miles and it changes your perception. Because not only is there all that space, but it's not all chopped up into little pieces. You can basically walk anywhere you want. You can go anywhere your legs will carry you. You feel very free.

Did you ever run into another person while you were out there? One time when I was walking from the road to my camp, I met another person. Really? Headed the opposite direction. We were both traveling along a creek, of course. You follow natural routes. How weird was that? Walking the gravel bars.

How weird was that? It was very weird. And this is the thing. When you live without many people around and you spend periods of time totally in isolation, you really appreciate humans. That's one of the great benefits of it. You appreciate anything you go without. You go without food. You go without sex. You go appreciate humans. That's one of the great benefits of it. You appreciate anything you go without. You go without food.

You go without sex. You go without people. And me and this guy, we sat down. We talked for like a couple hours. Really? We just sat down. What was he doing? He was just going for a hike.

He had hired a plane to fly him to a place that was a long ways away. Like he was walking, I think, 100 miles back to that road that I had left. And we just happened to be following the same creek, just walking down the gravel bars, and we met up. Middle of nowhere. So we sat down, and we talked and talked, and then we went our separate ways. Wow. Did you exchange numbers or anything?

No. I think I still remember his name, though. But this was years and years and years ago. Long time ago. That must have been really weird. It was. All those different times you're out there by yourself, and all of a sudden you see a guy.

Yeah. Yeah, that was really – that's the only time I'd met somebody at random on the ground ever. And I've had one time when some hunters flew there and landed. And they were thinking of hunting there, but after they talked to me for a while, I convinced them to go somewhere else. But, I mean, there's plenty of space. There me for a while, I convinced them to go somewhere else. But, I mean, there's plenty of space. There's no reason for two people to be hunting in the same area. Yeah, especially out there.

But, yeah, I mean, I almost never meet anybody. So it's different. You know, you really appreciate people. And that's something that I've always noticed when I was out there a long time. If you see anybody, if it's a state trooper that stops in and you haven't seen anybody for three months, I mean, it's great. You invite them in. You talk to people. You don't just, it's not like, when you got a lot of people around, you can't communicate with everybody.

You have to ignore people. I know you liked a lot of aspects of living up there, but what's like, is there one thing that really stands out? One thing would definitely be the autonomy the independence i think is this a natural need that humans have you watch a little baby when they learn to crawl they start separating from their mother a little bit then they start to learn to stand up but they're still holding on to the wall then they start taking their first steps. And it's like, wow, I can stand on my own feet.

You know, they get all excited and start running along for very long. And I think we just need that feeling of independence, some people more than others. But it's the same basic thing for me. It's just like to be out there totally independent on my own. Nobody else is going to help me if I have a problem. If I'm up on a mountain and I don't have a satellite phone with me, I got to be able to walk back to my camp. I have to be able to. There's literally no choice.

Right. And just to have that degree of responsibility that in modern society you don't have. You can't have that degree of responsibility in modern society for yourself. You can't have that level of independence of standing on your own. Is it hard for you to come to a place like L.A.? Is it weird? What's the feeling when you're driving on the 405 from the airport headed over to the studio you had to be you have to be

like why the fuck would anybody live here no no no i find it fascinating it's it's interesting because it's a different environment i mean i'm very curious about the way people live everywhere. But I do find myself realizing why I don't live in a big city. I find it really nice, interesting. Sleep in a hotel. Have a shower. It's like, whoa, this is cool. The water comes out hot. I don't like toilets.

We have two toilets here. Did you use one yet? Yeah, I used one in a hotel. But they build them too high. I'm used to squatting. Oh, squatting. You can get a squatty potty. You know what that is? Yeah, I used one at the hotel, but they build them too high. I'm used to squatting. Oh, squatting. You can get a squatty potty. You know what that is?

No, they make them? Yeah, it's like a thing that they put underneath the toilet you put your feet on. Oh, yeah. So it sort of puts your butt in the right position. I'll ask the front desk if they get one tonight. I don't think they will say yes, but that's what you're supposed to have, right? You're supposed to be in a position where you're squatting. That's the natural position for humans to shit.

It works for me. That's another thing I like about it out there. Okay, there's the autonomy. The independence is very important. And I think a lot of people are missing that. And that's why they're attracted to learn something about that life. But also just, like I i said when you do these basic things could be taking a crap it could be taking a shower whatever in in a different way out in

nature i mean you can't a lot of people can't bathe outside if they wanted to they don't have the privacy or this um but when that's your your normal, I mean, it becomes a totally natural thing, and it's, like, very healthy. And it's beautiful. You're out there looking at mountains all around in nature, little Tweety birds flying by while you're bathing. You're not sealed off in some little fiberglass cubicle. You're connected to everything. Yeah, it's a 100% different way of living life. And your perceptions change.

Your senses change. In the modern world, there's a lot of extraneous noise and imagery that we're filtering out all the time. You can't pay attention to everything. Did you ever get injured while you were up there? Yeah, yeah. But you can't pay attention to everything i'll get to it okay you can't pay attention to everything so you're filtering stuff out all the time right right and when you're out in that environment it's very quiet you're not

getting inundated with all of this extraneous noise, and instead of filtering, you're tuning in. You're really tuning in. Like one little bird that hasn't been around the valley flies through, I'll know it. I'll hear it. Wow, hey, that was a pine grovesby. I haven't heard one of those for a while. You're paying attention to everything,

and that's really different. It changes. It changes the way you think. There's a feeling that you get when you're in the real wilderness, like particularly we did some hunting on Prince of Wales. And, you know, when you're out there, it's raining. It rains every day. And there's this feeling of beautiful isolation.

Like you're really isolated. I mean, you're really alone. There's no, you don't see anything. You don't hear anything. And there's this indifference that nature has towards you. That's really humbling. It's like it puts you in your place. Yeah.

Totally. Humans need that. They like it puts you in your place. Yeah. Totally. Humans need that. They need to be put in their place. I always say that some of the nicest people live near mountains and live near the ocean. I think the reason being is the ocean just lets you know, hey, bitch, look at that. You ain't shit. Look at that water. You can't survive there.

Knowing that there's something right there that you can't survive in. It's like it checks you a little bit. The mountains check you. The sheer beauty and the vastness. Like if you know, you're looking out at the continental divide and you see the rocky mountains. It's like, it's humbling. It's humbling. On the one hand, you feel really strong being able to do what you're doing there.

But on the other hand, you feel really small. Yeah. Really vulnerable. Really insignificant. Tell me about how you got injured um i've had problems with tendons a few times um i've had some weird medical issues at different times like things that most people wouldn't have down here. Like what? It's okay if we diverge from injury to illness. Sure, sure. Well, one time I was starving the time I ate the weasels. This was a protracted starvation.

Like I literally was having a famine for a couple months where I was always getting a little bit of food but not enough. How much weight did you lose? A lot. I didn't have a scale. of food but not enough. How much weight did you lose? A lot. I didn't have a scale. Right. But I got real skinny, real skinny. Like first I lost all my fat, then I literally lost my muscles, and I got really weak.

I was still going out looking for food every day, but I couldn't go as far. I couldn't climb up the 5,000-foot mountains anymore. I got that weak. And this is over months? Over months. Wow. Didn't have enough food for a couple of months. And you couldn't fish?

This was in the winter. Ice? The ice is very thick. Back then, the ice used to get thicker back then. It was usually about four feet of ice on the lake by late winter. Now, some winters have only had two and a half feet. But anyway, I would try fishing, but there's not that many fish there. This is a little lake a mile across isolated in the mountains. The fish that are in the lake stay there.

They're also smaller. They don't grow as fast. You can expend a lot of effort chiseling through. Remember, I don't have a power auger or anything. Chiseling through three, four feet of ice, trying to catch fish that are this long and this big around. So I was trying to be as efficient as possible. I had out a lot of snares for snowshoe hares.

There are not many snowshoe hares. There's not much small game. But I was catching a little bit every day. Like I'd get a grouse, I'd get a ptarmigan, I'd get a rabbit. But I was gradually getting weaker and thinner and weaker and thinner. weaker and thinner and weaker and thinner. So what happened to me health-wise though was that eventually when I got food, I just ate as much as I could eat.

For three or four days, all I did was eat, sleep, and shit, literally. And I got refeeding edema. Whoa. Which at the time, I didn't't recognize i didn't even know what it was but you can actually die if you refeed yourself too fast like world war ii when they were liberating concentration camps soldiers didn't notice they're giving prisoners all the food they wanted to eat and some people got this refeeding edema they get pulmonary edema and literally die whoa and you know disaster really people that go into like famine areas and whatnot they know about this now you can't give people unlimited food i didn't know about that

so i got edema and um it was weird I just thought like I was getting fat or something, but it was actually retaining fluids. And I didn't find out for months later, I was talking to a doctor about what had happened to me. He said, you got refeeding edema. So you were just living with it. Yeah.

It didn't last that long. How long did it last? But like, I don't remember exactly how long it lasted, but within two weeks of when I got food, I was like all puffy and I'm like, what the hell's going on? I couldn't put on on weight this fast but it was actually just fluid that my body was like my chest was i remember sylvia pushing on saying you're all like spongy and i was like

yeah isn't that weird because i had been like you know how'd you feel skin and bones um i just i just felt hungry still i was just for well not for two weeks but man for days all I did was eat I'd eat until my stomach just couldn't take anymore what had you gotten is that when you had gotten the caribou from the wolves I got store bought food a friend of mine flew in

the thing that had happened was we had this arrangement where somebody was supposed to come part way through the winter that we knew that was going to bring in food and, and some supplies. And I kept thinking, like, I just want to survive. I want to get through it. Like my goal is to live off the land as much as I can. And we got this arrangement anyway, Tim's going to bring us some supplies later in the winter.

I'm just going to see the best I can do, you know, and I just kept going out and getting small game. Then what happened was even when you got a plane coming, it's hard sometimes to get in up there. And also, you know, my friend was working during the week. He could only come on weekends. The weather was bad this weekend and then he couldn't come. And maybe there was some other issue with the plane or something. It just kept getting delayed and it got to be a real problem. Finally, I was like, I sent him a message on that sat phone. I was like, hey, Tim, you know, like, I'm starving up here. I've been living on muskrats and snowshoe hares and not enough of them. You got to come next weekend or make sure somebody else gets in here

because I was really worried about my health at that point. So then he did get in there, and he dropped off all this food, and I just pigged out. Wow. And I got refeeding edema. What kind of food? then he did get in there and he dropped off all this food and i just pigged out wow and uh i got refeeding edema what kind of food i i always just would get basic food i'm talking like beans and oats rice um legumes powdered milk something i used to get you know um yeah and then not long after that in february in the middle of february the caribou showed up that year and i got uh five caribou at one time out on the island on the lake and then

you know we were all set again feast of famine yeah it is it's like a hungry country but um there are a lot of animals but they just they're different places you can can fly over the Arctic all day long and not see hardly anything. Yeah, that's the weird part about it, right? You would think there's animals everywhere. No. It's almost like a desert. It is. It's like the Sahara Desert up there a lot of times.

But there are a lot of animals concentrated. The caribou are concentrated. There's herds of 100,000 caribou. 100,000? Yeah. Really? At certain times of the year when they all congregate, there can be 100,000. That's insane. Yeah. concentrated there's herds of a hundred thousand caribou but hundred thousand yeah at certain times a year when they all congregate wow there can be a hundred thousand that's insane yeah some

of the big some of the big arctic herds um i mean they don't all get in one place at one time but they're they are recognized as a herd uh they get into the hundreds of thousands. They're very cyclic. The population goes up and down. But, you know, they're in certain places. And if they're not where you are, you're in the Sahara Desert. Then when they show up, it's like the Serengeti Plain. I mean, all of a sudden, there's caribou everywhere. You step outside, you hear the antlers all over the valley.

If it's like in October when they're rutting, you hear the wolves howling, ravens croaking. It's like in october when they're rutting wow you hear the wolves howling ravens croaking it's like what the hell happened i hadn't heard anything for the last two months and all of a sudden look at that oh my god yeah we're looking at uh an enormous pack of caribou what do they call them they call them packs herd herd enormous herd of caribou look at all those yeah it's in the summer. In the summer, they're up on the north side usually. God, that's insane.

It's so big. It's delicious meat, huh? I've sat there at the cabin looking out at the lake and caribou walking across the lake, moving all the time. And I estimated at one moment I could see 800 on the lake. Wow. Yeah. A lot of caribou like the way i hunt them sometimes is to run around out there on the lake with them really yeah like um can you pull up a picture on facebook or you can't do that there's there's one of me running in a caribou herd. In your notes section? It's right on the front page there where it's like

the pictures that you can leave up all the time. What do they call them? Not in the notes section. No, it's right on the... You ran with them and that's how you were hunting them? Echo chasing the call. I told you how I used to study a lot of anthropology. I used to listen to anything that I could

hear about how people used to live in the old days, and especially the Inuit and people living up north. There was this anthropologist, Austin Balixi. He made some films back in the 1960s, the Netsilik people, the Netsilik Eskimo series it's called. It's fascinating. He went up Boia peninsula in northern canada and filmed people that still knew how to do things in very primitive ways and one thing i learned from those films was how they would hunt caribou and the way these people would hunt caribou is there'd only be you know a few hunters they'd build the little stone nooksukes they them, it's like a scarecrow make a line going down toward the lake

so it looks like people then the few hunters would move around and they would use their voice and they'd yell and they'd echo their voice around and confuse the caribou and chase them into a lake that way, they could use their voice to get them down there and then one guy in a kayak could overtake the caribou and spear him

it's amazing. But you were by yourself. Yeah, but this is something you can use by yourself. You can use this technique of using your voice to confuse caribou and herd them where you want them to go. You echo. Out on the lake, if they're caribou, it's wide open. They can see me a half a mile away

and they'll go out in the middle of the lake in the day and stand around out there. If I try walking up to them a few hundred yards away, they might just take off, yell as loud as I can yell, and project my voice over to an island or shoreline, depending on where I am, and it'll bounce back, and they'll stop,

and they'll run straight back at me. Wow. I've had them come running by me where Tricia was like, oh, my God, she thought I was going to get run over. She was filming once and I could hear her when I watched the video and she's like, oh, I think he's going to get run over. You know, she's like really weird. You see that picture there, Jamie? I can't find it. It's right on the.

I'll pop it up so you can see. Yeah, scroll up to the top. Right there, the upper leftmost picture. This? Yeah. Okay. Tricia took that picture. Wow.

Now, those caribou, those caribou, they were running away from me before this picture was taken. And I was screaming and hollering, echoing my voice off the shoreline, and they turn around and run back. And I do it many times. I had these caribou run back and forth like five, six times. I could stay within 50 yards of them a lot of times just by yelling as loud as I could. You look really close right there. Yeah. Well, Tricia thought I was going to get trampled.

And so this is how you hunted them? This is a technique I've used for hunting, but on particular day i was just demonstrating it oh now did you run into any issues where you really didn't have any vegetables other than the the vegetables in the stomachs of the animals you ate you're just eating meat did you run any health issues just living off of meat i've eaten a very high-protein, high-fat diet for long periods of time. And I think that there's a lot more to food than nutrition. The reason I was eating that way had nothing to do with me thinking that it was the best diet. The reason I was eating that way is because I just wanted to live as close to that environment as possible, and that's what was available.

Right. So I know some people are thinking, well, this is a really healthy diet. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that wasn't my motivation. Did you feel healthy when you had a good amount of it? What I felt was that if I ate too much meat, it had bad effects. What kind of bad effects? I believe my body started to feel weird. I believe that you can only handle so much protein, but you can handle a lot of fat.

What I found is I had to eat most of my calories from fat. I would eat a half a pound of solid pure fat a day when I was eating just meat and fat. I might eat two or three, even four pounds of meat a day but but like a half a pound of it was pure fat and what it was the form of it was a bear fat or where are you getting your fat from it would be moose fat it would be sheep fat some one year it was bear fat their fat is weird right because it's a different caribou fat chewy fat like a deer fat so it's not chewy but you know i'm saying it's like it's not like like it doesn't render down like a beef fat would moose fat yeah oh sure does it render you can

render it if you want i rendered a lot it's a different like the way you look at it on the animal it just seems different what's different about it is that those game animals do not put on fat within the muscle. Right. It's separate. Right. If you get a fat moose, he'll have a big fat layer on his back. And so you would render that fat? Sure.

That's how you do it? I mean, I'll eat it all the way. When I'm butchering the moose in the field, I start eating the fat right there. Really? Sure. Wow. Grab it off the kidneys and stuff and start eating it. So that was the key for you was to get enough fat?

I had to eat a lot of fat and then I would feel better. If you're just eating protein, for me, it didn't work. How did it make you feel? It made me feel like I had to drink an awful lot of water. Like you had to drink an awful lot of water? Yeah. I'd drink a lot of water or I'd feel kind of like just a weird feeling inside. I mean, I also, you know, I was working really hard physically at those times,

but I was definitely drinking more than a gallon of water a day, sometimes almost two gallons of water a day when I'd be like in real cold weather, climbing mountains and everything, eating meat and fat all the time. Yeah, I'd be drinking a lot of water. And the other thing that was really important to me like when i hear people talking about how they eat a high meat diet or ketogenic diet now and they're just eating beef i wonder you know what they're doing for variety because for me i was eating all different parts of the animal all the the different organs and things. And also, a lot of it

I'd eat raw or half dried, for example, was one of my favorite ways to eat caribou meat when I was eating this meat fat diet. Now I eat more vegetables and fruits. And I still like to eat a lot of meat, but I do eat more vegetables and fruits. Do you feel better that way? Personally, yeah. I like variety. I like a mix. I mean, I felt good when I was eating that stuff, but like I say, I would not feel good if I was just eating steaks every day. Right. If I was just eating steaks every day, I would feel strange.

But if I took a caribou backstrap and I just sliced it up thin and hung it over the wood stove and left it there for half a day or something, would get a little you know dry on the outside but it would still be raw inside that stuff was delicious that'd be like candy for me i'd just pig out i love that and what would you do with the crust eat it oh you mean you mean the crust on big pieces that have been hanging around all winter yeah that gets turned into bait that gets fed to the animals okay if it's did you ever try to eat that the only crust that um because that's where the oxidized blood is basically it turns really dark it'll get almost black um sometimes there'll be for some reason like down around the shank on on a big animal like a moose when you're cutting it up into smaller pieces, the crust looks so clean and everything down there. You can eat it like dry meat.

But most of the crust on most of the big sections of meat get black and they get – I would not consider that food. It gets – like it's not the same as dry meat that you take a fresh piece of meat and dry it for a few days. This is coming from a guy who ate the contents of animal stomachs so i trust you when you when you say it's not meat it's not food don't eat it not that not that black crust that it's just it's oxidized blood yeah blood's good but you want your blood real fresh right yeah like that's the thing with blood is like a lot of times I haven't even been able to eat the blood from an animal because I'm just too busy. But that's the thing is that you can eat the stomach. You can eat the intestine.

You can eat the colon. I've eaten the colon of a moose. You can eat the lungs even. You can eat spleen. I've eaten all this stuff. But the truth is, if you're one guy working alone butchering a moose you have a hard time getting all that stuff preserved and prepared you know yeah because it like if you want to eat the colon you want to get the shit out of it fast before it gets hard like oh boy what is the colon of a moose tastes like oh like the colon of a donkey no it's great because well

when you do it right all it is is fat it. It's like donuts. It's like fat donut. You slice it. What you do, if you want to eat the colon of moose, old guy that was married to an Eskimo told me this, and it works. You got to work fast. When you take the colon out of your next elk, try this out, Joe. Okay. Turn it inside out.

The poop all falls out. Like a sock. Turn it inside out like a sock. Okay. You got the outside. You got the inside out. It's all sock. Okay. You got the outside, you got the inside out, it's all smooth. Right.

You know how the outside of the colon or the large intestine is full of fat, like on any animal. You know, there's all this fat all over it. That's going to be on the inside. Now, you just wash that, you know, take it home and wash it good. Get the lining all nice and clean. Then you slice it like donuts and fry it up. What did it taste like delicious does anything that resembles that would resonate with people it's like good moose fat wow i mean there's all different kinds of fat i have a hard time describing exact taste i mean what does it

taste people always ask me that well you might taste like a moose colon yeah i'm saying there might be four other people that know what that tastes like. Oh, no. No. You go up in some village in northern Alaska and talk to old people. You find old people that eat stuff that have grown up, 70, 80-year-old native people. There's a lot of people today that follow a carnivore diet and that they just eat animal products and meat. But they're eating mostly domestic steak, and it's got a lot of fat in it already.

Yeah, that's true. That would be different. I haven't tried that. But I will say that I feel very different eating beef from wild animals. There's a huge difference. Huge difference. Huge. Huge.

And you just look at beef cattle. They look lethargic compared to a wild animal. They're obviously overweight. They've been pretty much just bred and fed to be fat. And you look at that, and it's somehow, it doesn't feel like that animal's going to be as healthy to me to put into my body as a caribou running around wild like those ones we're just looking at a picture of. No, it's not as healthy. It's the, I mean, gram for gram, ounce for ounce.

You take a caribou or a moose, it is much more protein. It's much more dense material, much denser meat it's uh way less fat it's just a completely different experience and it makes you feel different when you eat it there's a feeling that you get from wild game that's like a almost like a stimulant you know there's like a little bit of a woo like oh and it's it's what you did to get it. Yep, that too. It's connected to it. I mean, you get that bite. It just tastes so good after you did all that work.

Yeah, there's nothing like it. There's nothing like it. And I guess the closest you could get is to bison. If you buy store-bought bison, it's pretty close to what it would be if it was wild, if it's just grazing. As long as it has that yellow fat that they get when they're they're grazing do you know anybody who's tried that for their carnivore diet like only eating bison no get something closer to a wild animal no i only know a couple people that are doing it and they're all doing domestic ribeyes and stuff like that you

know they're just getting a lot of fatty meats i love ri ribeye steak, but to just live on that, I don't know how that would be. I never tried just living on that. Yeah, I'm watching these people waiting for the shoe to drop, waiting for them to develop health issues, waiting for this. It's weird. It's very much like vegans in a way where they're completely committed to this idea and any other idea is stupid and they they're just the ideological hardliners with meat and they think that vegetables are bad for you and you shouldn't be eating vegetables but despite all the evidence to the contrary and then the same thing with vegans vegans want to think that this is the

only way to eat the only way way to eat is with vegetables. If you eat meat, it's bad for you. Meat kills you. I'm like, all right. People have been eating meat for literally all of time. 97% of the population of the planet eats meat. It's crazy to think that meat's bad for you. Meat is one of the reasons why we're human. What's bad for you, most likely, according to basically every study they've ever done,

when they look at meat eaters versus people who are not eating meat, what they don't dissect is what are the other things these meat eaters are eating, and what kind of meat are they eating? Are they eating a sandwich from a fast food place, a cheeseburger with fries and a shake and soda with a lot of sugar in it? Is that the meat eater, or are they doing what you did? Are they eating fresh caribou? What are they eating? After spending a whole winter out there living primarily on meat and fat and very small amount

of wild plant food, gathered maybe 15, 20 gallons of berries in the fall, had some dried leaves from the spring before, willow leaves. Had a few roots, but the roots there are very small. So I'm eating 90% meat and fat, at least, of my calories. I got my cholesterol checked. Next time I came to town, I was just curious.

I hadn't had it checked for many years. And I thought, what am I doing, you know, eating all this fat? I'm eating like half a pound of fat a day. Might be really bad. And my total cholesterol level was 138. Is that good? That's really low. In fact, the doctor who checked it said 200, I think, is like high.

200 is borderline high or something. And the doctor who checked it said, that's the lowest cholesterol I've ever checked. Because I told him I'm a little bit scared. I've been eating so much fat this year, like unbelievable amounts of fat. Yeah, but you're spending so much time burning energy. The amount of energy that you must get from hiking 20 miles a day in the mountains, at elevation, wandering around the woods, stepping over logs,

all the kind of stuff you have to do, you're burning off an incredible amount of calories. It has to be. Just routine activities too. You want to get water? Yeah. You go out there and open up that hole through the ice with a chisel. You know, and you carry your water. Every day you're doing stuff. Do you have to boil that water too?

No. You don't? No. No beavers up that high? I saw one beaver in that lake in 20 years. It took a risk? There are a few beavers in the general region, but it's like the limit of their habitat.

Oh, okay. So far north and so far up in the mountains. Yeah, when we were at Prince of Wales, we drank right out of the lake. Yeah. Just dunk your cooler or your thermos into the lake and just start drinking. I was like, that's crazy.

It feels so weird. I drink out of puddles. Do you really? Up in the mountains. There's no other water. Sometimes you find a little puddle in the tundra. I never got sick from drinking water out there. It can happen.

I know two people that got Giardia, but they were both like old timers that had lived most of their life out there in the brooks range and they each had had it one time what do you want to do now now you're not you're not doing the show anymore they sort of yeah good question you know my contract just ran out two months ago and i've been thinking a lot about this because I love the wilderness. I love nature, and I absolutely love sharing it with people, and I want to find new ways to do that, and there are a lot of new ways now.

I mean, that's what inspired me seeing your show. It's like, wow. I mean, I presume that you don't have to ask anybody about what you put on here, right? No, I don't have to ask anybody about what you put on here, right? No, I don't have to ask anybody. You can do what you want. Well, that's why you're here. That's why I'm here.

I mean, I didn't have to go through a series of producers, and I would never do that. If we ever got to a point where they wanted to offer me a gigantic chunk of money to put it on a network, but they had to pick the guess, I'd be like, there's no chance. There's no chance. There's not a chance in hell the beautiful thing about the freedom that comes with this show is i can talk to people that i find interesting like i found you incredibly interesting your your story's amazing when i would watch you on the show i'd be like wow i'd love to talk to that guy really yeah man like so when you reached out i was pumped pumped. Oh, really? Yeah. Cool. Yeah, because what a crazy life. I was like, man, is Joe Rogan going to want to talk to me?

He's talking to all these big-time celebrities. Oh, I would like to talk to you probably more than a lot of the big-time celebrities. Some of the big-time, air quote, celebrities that I talk to, it's just like, okay, I'll do it. So that's my feeling on it. okay, I'll do it. So that's my feeling on it. I don't do, like, the show by itself has become popular for whatever reason. I don't know how it happened.

It just did, right? Yeah. But I never think, like, oh, if I get this guest, that'll be really popular. This will help the show grow. This will bring me to another level. I don't think that way ever. That's awesome. My my thought is always that guy would be cool to talk to like oh i'd like to talk to her she seems interesting oh that guy's got a weird life what the fuck was that like like i'm it's all a hundred percent genuine curiosity that's awesome you're doing something that most people don't get

to do which is what you really want to do you You do what you want to do. Yeah. That's the beautiful thing about it, is that I've found out a way to also do it where people enjoy it, where it actually provides a service. So folks are driving, they have a long trip, or they're on a flight, they can actually get it. It's free, and it gives you something. And there's a lot of wisdom being conveyed by some of your guests. I mean, that's what got me interested in the show is I'm hearing these people talk, and it's, you know, today. Well, you just did too. There's a lot of free education out there for people on the internet. Yeah.

And, you know, it opens up whole new possibilities. It does. And conversations like this, although, you know, they're not technically education. It opens up whole new possibilities. It does. And conversations like this, although they're not technically education, they expand your horizons. Yeah. They expand your understanding of how people are living their life. Hearing people genuinely talk, hearing people have real conversations without anybody interfering or anybody, hey, Glenn, maybe it would be interesting if you're just like a little bit more mysterious, you know? We need you.

You know what? We're going to get you an outfit. You're going to show up to the Joe Rogan show with a fur coat that you made yourself. Isn't it interesting that all the time I was on TV, and that show did really well, you know, I never came down to talk to you you but then on our own we connected. It is interesting.

It's interesting. Life's weird. The way things happen and when they happen and why they happen that way. As far as what I'm going to do next, I want to keep experiencing these things which

to me are precious and rare. I want to keep going out into the wilderness. i want to keep experiencing these things which to me are precious and rare i want to keep going out into the wilderness i want to keep experiencing it and i want to share it with people it doesn't mean anything to me if i don't share it to people anymore i have no desire to go live by myself in the woods and not talk to anybody it seems like you could have a skeleton crew of cameraman editor you yeah and put it on like youtube that's what i've thought about yeah i think that's a move man because you can make real money off of youtube now i mean obviously you see these youtube celebrities they're very wealthy and they're just doing things on youtube and you could just transfer your show over to youtube and i guarantee you people would watch i mean 100

definitely would need a camera i definitely would need a cameraman editor. Yeah, a cameraman and editor. So it's like a three-person crew. So all the stuff that you had to deal with with all these other folks that weren't even there, these producers that were saying they wanted to fire you and all that other shit, you wouldn't have to deal with that at all. And if you had an idea like, hey, I want to try this. I want to make my own bow and arrow and go shoot a caribou with it

and do it with traditional methods and use the tendons from animals to make the strings and all the stuff that the Native Americans did. You could do that. You could do whatever you want. And that's what I think would be really appealing to people because just like if you started a podcast or just like anything else where there's no one telling you what to do, you get to find out who the person really is.

And I think that would be a great way to give you all the freedom that you want where I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to get enough advertiser dollars to pay for an editor and pay for a cameraman and put it up there and start generating revenue. Yeah, some guys are really good. Like Les Stroud used to film himself a lot. Yeah. I tried that a little bit, but I can't film myself. It's like I need the interaction.

Yeah. Les is, I mean, he's the only one that really did that without any horseshit, that live in the woods for seven days and survive off of whatever scraps he could find and find some sort of a scenario that they pieced together for the show you know the the reason why bear grills happened the whole reason why that guy got a show is because they were trying to tell less to fake things oh really and he wouldn't fake anything and he's like i'm not gonna do that way so they got let's get this fucking guy so he would just go along with them bear grills just slept in a hotel he'd

pretend he's drinking his own piss all that stuff i mean less is out there really surviving that way when you would see he would do like a seven day trip and and maybe he would find no food and by the end of that seven days you could see how much weight he had lost i mean he looked terrible and then he would get rescued as per you know how he would have to go to a drop-off point or a pickup point. But now he's all Bigfoot. Les has gone crazy. Bigfoot. 100% Bigfoot.

I get more questions about Bigfoot. What is it? You live in the woods and you're supposed to be running into Bigfoot? You're supposed to be a Bigfoot authority? Two questions people are always asking about. Global warming, I'm not a scientist, and Bigfoot. Right. I mean- You're not a scientist, and Bigfoot. Right. I mean –

You're not a scientist, but you said you did notice that the ice is thinner. Yes. Yeah. Anecdotally, I can say that it's definitely warmer where I am compared to what it was 15 years ago. The winters have been warmer. How many years in a row have they been warmer? Oh, I didn't keep the data because I know there are a lot of scientists keeping it, and those are the people I'm going to defer to on global warming.

Right. And I believe in global warming. I mean, I believe in the consensus of scientific opinion. What I have seen personally is just overall the ice is thinner on my lake, and that's a sign that over the whole course of the winter, there have been milder winters. Fifteen years ago, I'd get around four feet of ice. Now, the last few winters have been times when I went out there in April, which is when it's at its thickest, and there's only two and a half feet of ice.

I'm like, wow, that's crazy. I never saw that 10 to 15 years ago. The other thing is the absolute coldest temperatures since I've been out there. Three times, it went to colder than 60 below zero. They were all the first couple of winters, the first two or three winters. I don't know if that was just coincidence or what. I'm not saying this is global warming. I'm just telling you what I've seen.

They've been recent winters where the coldest it ever got was once or twice to 45 below. One of the first winters I was out there in March for like two weeks, it never went above 40 below. I haven't seen anything like that in the last four or five winters. Since I got on the show, the coldest temperature we ever saw was one time it went down to about 50, 55 below one day for a little while. I've seen times, like I said, where it would literally not go above 40 below for two weeks in March. That was first or second year I was out there. So anecdotally, at least. Yeah, that's just, look, we've got to defer to science on this thing.

I mean, they're collecting data all over the world. You can see the Arctic oceans. There's less ice. You can measure the temperature of the ocean by sending sound waves through it. There's all different methods. So it doesn't really matter what one person sees in one place, but there's a consensus of opinion. That's what matters. Yeah, but it is interesting, your own anecdotal experience, seeing that the ice is that much thinner and the winters are warmer.

I'm sure the National Weather Service has all kinds of data on alaska sure i mean we for instance in fairbanks alaska they never used to use any salt on the roads at all the reason being that it was too cold for the salt to work salt will only melt ice if it's a certain temperature if it gets colder than that it doesn't work so they didn't even store salt there. The Department of Transportation didn't use it, which was nice. Your vehicles didn't rust out. But now there are enough times in the winter when it's warm enough that they actually are using salt in recent years on the roads of Fairbanks. And you actually see times when it gets up to freezing. There are even freezing rain events in the winter, which didn't used to happen hardly ever. And now that's not that outlandish to have it get up to freezing in the middle of the winter some days. Bigfoot. What about Bigfoot?

I just can't believe people waste their time talking about stuff like that. People waste their time talking about stuff like that. Well, for someone like you who actually lives in the wilderness, and you actually live in Alaska, which is one of the places where people supposedly spot Bigfoot. Yeah. It's because a lot of nutty people go to Alaska. They call them end of the roaders.

Yeah. You drive until you can't go any further, and then you camp out in the woods for a while and see Bigfoot. Yeah. Does Les Stroud and see Bigfoot. Yeah. Does Les Stroud really see Bigfoot? I don't think he's ever seen it. But he believes it's out there? His show's sad.

It makes me sad. Because he was like a really respected guy doing the survival thing. And I think it was a really interesting educational show, and it showed people how hard it is. But then he got hooked up with this guy and he was filming these bigfoot shows and the guy was completely full of shit there's like a fucking he's wearing a mask pretending to be bigfoot in the woods filming it high resolution it looks so fake you should see the show the fake because it's so dumb it's so dumb it hurts your feelings like you're like what you're doing this but it's real popular that's the problem if you have like a survivor show you might get x amount of people to watch it if you have a bigfoot show you might

get double the number what does that tell you about our culture not good look at this this is the video footage this is he says he said this is a close-up, high-resolution of Bigfoot. Look. Look at that thing. How fake is that? He's going to zoom in on it. It says, Todd standing Bigfoot video as seen in Survivorman Bigfoot show with Les Stroud. What's going on? People are really – are the people that are watching this stuff actually believing it, or they just find it entertaining?

There's people it's so stupid it's funny coma sitting on their couch sitting in front of tv thinking about when they're gonna go to bed what are they look how dumb that looks man look at this fucking stupid fake bigfoot face and they're they're sitting there going well they wish it was real they wish it was yeah they wish it was wanted to be real they want there to be some large primate living by itself in the forest a small number of them not that many just a small number of them i've seen some crazy stuff but it wasn't bigfoot well here's the thing if there were bigfoot why wouldn't there be thousands of them all over the place what's going to stop bigfoot

from breeding bigfoot would beat the fuck out of a bear, kill a mountain lion. Like, what would stop a Bigfoot? You're talking about an 8 to 10-foot tall gorilla? What the hell would stop that? That would be the king of the forest. And what would stop us from seeing the thing? And what would stop us from finding a body? Yeah.

What would stop us from finding- The bones. Yeah. The skeletons. I mean- How about an ancient one you know, in a site like when they find these

mastodons and saber-toothed tigers and things that existed here 10,000 years ago why don't they find a Bigfoot? I can't believe it it's amazing what people just think how productive would all be the society if people were putting their energy into something more worthwhile.

Than Bigfoot. Yeah. Well, you could say that same thing about just surfing Twitter. How many people are just reading just mindless tweets over and over, looking for something that's going to stimulate them that never comes their way. Hours a day. You ever look at, like, I looked at my phone the other day. I was embarrassed. I had four hours of screen time during the day.

Four hours. I'm like, what could I have? Some of it was answering text messages. Some of it was answering emails. But let's be honest. That might have been an hour. So, like, three hours of me just fucking off. I could have been writing jokes.

I could have been, you know, researching things. I could have been doing a million things. I could have been writing jokes. I could have been researching things. I could have been doing a million things. I could have cleaned this desk. I could have done a lot of shit. It's kind of cluttered. Oh, my God, dude. People keep bringing me things. I'll just stack them up there.

You know what? I used to really like Charlie Rose. You remember his show? Sure. It's two guys sitting around a table talking. Yes. When I discovered you, I thought, I wonder if this guy ever saw Charlie Rose, if you were inspired by him. No, I never watched his show? Sure. It's two guys sitting around a table talking. Yes. I kind of, when I discovered you, I thought, I wonder if this guy ever saw Charlie Rose, if you were inspired by

No, I never watched his show. I always thought it was really interesting because he had interesting guests. Mm-hmm. You know. I've seen clips, I'm sure. I've seen clips of him talking. I think he got into some trouble. Yeah, he liked to show his hog. He was being a little loose with the ladies.

Yeah. I think it was like women he's working with said he was harassing them. Yeah. Shocker. Yeah, it was too bad. Yeah. It was an interesting show. It was one of the few TV shows I used to like when I was younger, when I had TV. Well, there was a time where I think it was really difficult to get people to sit down and have a conversation

and so a show like his or any kind of show where people are just sitting down having a conversation particularly without an audience like a lot of these talk shows you see it's the most unnatural environment of all time you're sitting sideways facing a crowd of people that you don't know with lights and cameramen everywhere and you're supposed to act normal yeah like it's the least normal you're ever gonna act you know but those are good too like phil donahue remember him oh yeah sure did you used to watch him sure yeah yeah that was the same i you know talk about something dick cabot you ever see the old dick cabot shows is really interesting from the 60s and 70s yeah it's a little bit yeah well there's videos of i've watched almost all of them on youtube but it's uh it's cool it's a little bit before. Yeah. Well, there's videos of it. I've watched almost all of them on YouTube.

But it's cool. It's like, people like conversations because they like to know how other people are thinking. And they kind of decipher that and piece it together through listening to people talk. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, man, I hope you do your thing on YouTube or somewhere else like that where they give you control. I think that would be really the ultimate thing for you is to not have producers look if i had what you were going through at any point in this podcast i probably would have quit if i had producers telling me what to do and i had to argue with

the network about what kind of guests to have on or you know what you know like we have to review a show why did you talk like this? Why did you say that? I would have never got here. It would have never happened. The only reason why this happened was because the time I created it aligned with technology and it aligned with the ability to get things out in this way, mass scale, that just didn't exist previously. And I think that could be expanded to what you do easily especially youtube

something like that or vimeo or many many other streaming services doing something like that we just have a cameraman and you just have an editor and you and you're out there i mean be magic perfect and you can give the 100 full vision of you You know you don't have to You don't have to have anybody else's input Give the vision of what's out there Yeah and then you also have a direct line To your fans like if you put it on Facebook And like the people that like it or don't like it

Hey Glenn I'm tired of seeing you shit in the woods You know That's the amazing thing about this world Is that people can connect It's phenomenal. Yeah. It's amazing. Listen, man, it's been cool to connect with you.

I really enjoyed this. It was a lot of fun. We did like three and a half hours. Thanks for having me down. Oh, really? Yeah. I wasn't paying attention. It's almost 3.30.

It's a long show. Yeah. It was great though, man. I really enjoyed it. Cool. If people want to find you on Facebook, please tell them how. Yeah. I'm on Facebook, Glenn Villeneuve V I L L E N E U V E

Twitter YouTube Instagram I got everything but I'm most active on Facebook that's what I mean what is your Instagram under my name everything's just under everything's just your one name okay yeah thanks Glenn that was fun thanks a lot all right man bye everybody we did it man wow that is different when you